The Gatekeeper

By Donald Peters

The CIA has a problem. One of its senior members – an Assistant Deputy Director of Intelligence (ADDI) - is suspected of being involved in drug trafficking. The Assistant Inspector General of the CIA cannot use his own staff to investigate out of fear that the ADDI will be alerted. He also must keep the whole matter contained because he does not know how many other people are involved, or at what level in the intelligence and security services drug use has penetrated.

So, he gets his son Mark Taylor, with the assistance of the DEA, to follow the ADDI on a trip to Afghanistan to find the truth.

That mission proves to be deadly for some, and Mark himself becomes the target. The story involves the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service who are trying to protect a mole in the US, the British MI6 who will not commit to what they know, and the US FBI who have an agent on the case.

In the complex world of the intelligence and security services the actions of a few has a major impact on the personal lives of the major players.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris NZ
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543495843

Book preview

Prologue

Pakistan is a very complex country, as are its neighbours—Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India to the east, and China in the north-east. It became an independent home—two independent homes actually—for Muslims when the British ended their rule of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. Well, until the region of Bangladesh, the remote eastern half of what was Pakistan, itself gained independence.

The fact that in its history what is now known as Pakistan had been invaded or settled by Indo-Aryans, Persians, Greeks, Arabs, Turks, Afghans, and Mongols made the arrival of the British seem like a peaceful interlude in an otherwise violent history. When the British left in 1947, making Pakistan a Dominion in the Commonwealth of Nations, it should have heralded the arrival of a more permanent peace.

But it did not.

The division of the provinces of Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east could be best described as an ill-timed and ill-conceived plan—conceived as it was out of arrogance and ignorance of the British lawmakers thousands of miles away in Westminster. It resulted in massive riots in both India and Pakistan. One result of this was that millions of Muslims moved from India into Pakistan, and millions of Hindus and Sikhs moved from Pakistan into India. Another result was the first Kashmir war between the fledgling nations of Pakistan and India. And that war has been going on, in one form or another, ever since.

In 1956, there was another twist. Pakistan became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, and then things started to really turn pear shaped. The history of the nation since then has been characterised by periods of military rule, political instability, civilian riots, sectarian violence, various coup d’état, various assassinations, and various military scraps with India.

Pakistan is now also a nuclear armed state, which makes for political instability, the involvement of the military in politics, and major talking points in the United Nations and elsewhere.

Strangely, Pakistan has, for most of its short life, been an ally of the United States of America—except, that is, during a brief period in the 1990s when relations between the two nations soured over Pakistan’s refusal to abandon its nuclear activities. But politics being what they are, the two nuclear powers agreed to differ and to get on with what in later years became the primary job of fighting the Taliban in the neighbouring Afghanistan and to rid the world of al-Qaeda and the various groups that went on to pursue the same or similar objectives.

At least, that was the intention of the United States.

There was, however, an imminent problem—in fact, several problems. Already, many thousands of people from Afghanistan had fled their homeland to escape the Taliban and the never-ending wars and were housed in refugee camps throughout Pakistan. But most of the later problems stemmed from the fact that the initial onslaught in the United States–led Operation Freedom caused the Taliban and al-Qaeda to simply move from Afghanistan into the north-western provinces of Pakistan. Once there, they were virtually untouchable by the combined military might of Pakistan and a coalition of various US-led allies. In the case of Pakistan, this was because of corruption and divided loyalty among the Pakistani forces. In the case of the coalition countries, this was simply because of geography. These problems were known to both the US and Pakistani governments. But they had very different ways of handling them.

However, what was not known was far more insidious.

As the war in Afghanistan and the north-western border provinces of Pakistan continued, as in all wars, there are people who take advantage of the situation.

Drug dealers.

In the north-east part of Pakistan, which was somewhat remote from the struggles that were currently going on elsewhere, there was good business, especially among the younger people. And the use of drugs, mostly originating in the south of Afghanistan, had spread across the Kashmir and into India. These regions had become a fertile ground for the recruitment by all kinds of terrorist groups and potential suicide bombers. The people had nothing else to do. And were too stoned to care.

This contributed to a situation in which Pakistan was beginning to fall apart and to come under the influence of forces that had interests other than the more normal religious differences.

The Islamic Republic of Afghanistan is similarly complex. It is a landlocked country surrounded by Pakistan in the south and east, Iran in the west, China in the north-east, and the old soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan in the north. Since the late 1970s, Afghanistan has been in a continuous state of civil war. This initially included the interference of the Soviet Union in Afghani affairs, although, to be fair, it was not really the Soviet’s fault.

But that really was the start of the Afghanistan problem.

In 1979, the United States was primarily concerned in international affairs with the Cold War—the description given to the state of impasse between the then-perceived superpowers of the world, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

The Cold War could best be described as a major confrontation between the Communist and the Capitalist economic and social systems. Thankfully, this confrontation never resulted in an actual war.

Which was probably just as well, because had the protagonists gone to war, it would have turned into a nuclear conflict, and that would have been the end of life as we know it on planet Earth.

In the middle years of this Cold War, the Government of Afghanistan was pro–Soviet Union. The Government of the United States saw this as an opportunity to weaken the Soviet Union and began to covertly fund the various forces that were fighting against the Afghanistan government. The forces that they chose to fund, using the perverse logic that ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, were the Mujahideen. This group consisted of Islamic fundamentalists. Although the word Mujahideen more correctly translates into ‘Muslim fighters’ or ‘strugglers’ rather than ‘fundamentalists’. The United States was warned of the risks that they took in adopting this position. The major risk was that the Soviet Union may ultimately be forced to intervene.

The United States chose to ignore the warning.

The national security advisor in the Jimmy Carter administration at that time of this impasse was a gentleman called Zbigniew Brzezinski, and you would be forgiven for thinking that sounded improbable. He asked a relatively simple question of the detractors of the then policy of the United States in relation to international affairs, and particularly in relation to the struggle going on in Afghanistan:

What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?

The answer was—anybody’s guess really!

The Central Intelligence Agency of the United States of America (the CIA) and the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (or Committee for State Security of the Soviet Union, otherwise known as the KGB) decided to continue playing games, and their chosen playing field was Afghanistan.

In February 1979, the United States Ambassador—a gentleman by the name of Adolph Dubs, lieutenant commander (retired)—was killed after he was kidnapped in Kabul by Islamist extremists. There are many theories as to how or why he died. Afghan security forces, supported by their Russian advisors, swarmed into the Kabul hotel where the Ambassador was being held, ostensibly to secure the freedom of Dubs. But the negotiations with the kidnappers stalled. In the ensuing firefight Adolph Dubs was killed.

Years later, in documents released from Soviet archives, it was said that the Afghan government authorised the assault despite demands by the United States that they continue peaceful negotiations. The United States’ belief was that the KGB advisor at the time, who went by the name Sergei Batrukihn, may have recommended the assault as well as the summary execution of at least one of the kidnappers before the CIA could interrogate him. That obscure event, while relatively trivial in the overall international scene, did not exactly improve the relationship between the two superpowers.

In fact, the relationship turned completely on its head.

The Afghan President at that time was a gentleman by the name of Nur Muhammad Taraki, who had come to power in a bloody coup. The immediate prior President, Abdul Qadir Dagarwal, and his family, had been murdered. In addition to President Tarakis’s unconventional method of coming to power, his presidency was also somewhat controversial. He was a founding member of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (the PDPA), which was both an avowed Marxist-Leninist organisation and pro-Moscow. The alternative—pro-China—did not bear thinking about by both the United States and the Soviets. The PDPA became split into two factions, both of which were Marxist—the Khalq faction, which was more militant and somewhat independent of the Soviet Union, and the Parcham faction to which Taraki belonged and which was therefore aligned with the Soviets.

Taraki introduced some extreme communist reforms which, among other things, had two particularly disastrous effects. Firstly, there were massive uprisings throughout the barren, landlocked country. Secondly, the Afghan Army at the time suffered mass desertions. Even among those Army personnel who remained, there was a significant swap of allegiances depending on imponderables that western cultures had difficulty understanding. And so, the Afghan Army was of doubtful value.

The dichotomy was not surprising. Afghanistan was a country with a very deep Islamic religious culture, and, apart from having a long history of resistance to any form of centralised government control, the communist policies challenged the traditional Afghan values in such things as land ownership, forced marriages, sharia laws, traditional power structures, just to mention a few.

Eventually, on the way back from a visit to Communist Cuba, President Taraki stopped by Moscow and asked for Soviet ground troops to intervene in an increasingly unstable and volatile Afghanistan. At the time, the prime minister of the USSR, Alexei Nikolayevich Kosygin, made one of his more remarkable and confusing statements:

‘We believe it would be a fatal mistake to commit ground troops. If our troops went in, the situation in your country would not improve. On the contrary, it would get worse. Our troops would have to struggle not only with an external aggressor, but with a significant part of your own people.’

But Taraki did get some concessions from Kosygin. He got some armed support—helicopter gunships with Soviet pilots and maintenance crews, 700 Soviet paratroopers—disguised as technicians to defend the Kabul airport, and he got up to 500 military advisors, or KGB officers disguised as military advisors. Taraki also managed to get significant food aid out of the Soviets, which merely provided him with another means of moving his favoured friends into positions of greater influence.

In March 1979, while President Taraki was busy conducting his negotiations in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Hafizullah Amin became prime minister of Afghanistan and became Vice-President of the Supreme Defense Council. He was also a member of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan and was a prominent member of the Marxist Khalq faction.

Consequently, the relationship between Taraki and Amin was not exactly cordial, primarily because Taraki saw Amin as becoming a serious threat to his authority.

The chairman of Soviet Russia, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, advised Taraki to remove this prime minister and warned him of a possible assassination attempt. At the same time, he advised Taraki to ease up on his more drastic social reforms and to instead try to get ‘broader support’ from his people. In fact, any support would have been good.

Brezhnev again warned Taraki about the consequences of any full Soviet intervention: ‘It will only play into the hands of our enemies—both yours and ours.’

It is hard to work out whether any part of this advice was acted on by Taraki or was believed by the Soviets. It was reported in the Kabul Times on 10 October 1979 that the former leader, who had been hailed in Afghanistan as the Great Teacher, Great Genius, Great Leader, had died quietly of a serious illness which he had been suffering from for quite some time. Well, he would have died quietly. A pillow over the head, held down by the commander of the palace guard acting on instruction from Amin, would be a quiet way to depart this life.

And so Hafizullah Amin became the fourth President of Afghanistan, or the second President of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan.

Amin’s rule was notable for two things—its brutality and its brevity.

His first step was to carry out a purge of the PDPA and that probably made him more enemies than friends, at least among those who were still alive to witness the purge. And he launched a brutal military operation against a resistance group at Sayid Karam in the eastern province of Paktia and virtually obliterated sympathetic villages and villagers. One result of this was that many Afghans fled across the border into Pakistan and set up a base in Peshawar. Another result was that those who had fled formed a resistance group against the Communist regime.

At the same time, Amin tried to implement part of Brezhnev’s advice to Taraki—promising greater religious freedom, repairing mosques, and declaring that the Saur Revolution, which occurred on 27 April 1978 when the Communist PDPA took power in Afghanistan, was totally based on the principles of Islam.

Many Afghans would be forgiven for failing to see the logic of that.

But the Soviets failed to see the logic in it as well.

Finally, Soviet patience wore thin.

The Soviets invaded Afghanistan.

The first thing that the Soviets had to do was to get rid of Amin. And that act proved not particularly hard to do. The Soviets claimed that Amin was a CIA agent, improbable though that may have seemed to, among other players in the international security scene, the CIA.

The Soviet KGB succeeded in infiltrating a chef who went by the name of Mitalin Talybov, into the kitchen at Amin’s Presidential Palace, and then it was simply a matter of poisoning the food. Unfortunately, they got the wrong man, and Amin’s son-in-law got seriously ill. Amin got suspicious, and he moved the presidential offices to the Tajbeg Palace. So the Soviets decided to try a more subtle approach. Elements of the KGB Alpha Group and Spetsnaz from the Glavnoje Razvedyvatel’noje Upravlenije—the GRU military intelligence—stormed the palace and killed Hafizullah Amin.

The Soviets explained the execution of Amin as the action of the Afghan Revolutionary Central Committee—the same committee that elected Babrak Karmal as the new head of the government—while Western intelligence sources were more likely to point the finger at the Soviet colonel Alexander Poteyev. Babrak was exiled in Moscow at the time, so it could be assumed that he was not responsible for the death of Amin.

And it could also be assumed that he would be more compliant with Soviet wishes.

Babrak lasted as the head of the Afghani government for quite some time, at least by Afghan standards, until the Soviets got tired of propping him up in Kabul. Despite the presence of the Soviet military, Babrak had little control over much of the country apart from those places where there was a military—that means Soviet presence. So he was replaced by Mohammad Najibullah—a nasty piece of work who made his claims to fame running the Afghan State Information Agency (known by the acronym KHAD, for Khadamat-e Etela’at-e Dawlati). And Mohammed outlasted the Soviet occupation of his country, even though the KHAD had been under the firm control of the Soviet KGB.

Throughout the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the United States CIA had a considerable interest in the country, as did China, Saudi Arabia, and, of all places, Egypt.

But then the Soviets withdrew from the country in 1989.

Whether it was political pressure that caused them to withdraw from Afghanistan, or simply because they were fed up with going nowhere, we will probably never know. The United States, of course, claimed an ideological victory, having effectively countered Soviet influence in the region—as perceived by the West as to include most of the Middle East, which just so happened to include the oil-rich Persian Gulf.

But the problem just did not end there.

After the Soviet withdrawal, the United States and their allies turned their attention to other matters and lost all interest in the war-ravaged and remote country. The strategic importance of Afghanistan, without the Soviets to counter, was no more. And nothing was done by either of the two superpowers to try to rebuild Afghanistan despite the carnage and chaos that they left behind. Although the Soviets continued to support the Afghan President Najibullah in a variety of ways, they eventually gave up on him as well, and the country descended into anarchy.

The various Mujahideen factions that the CIA had originally supported in the conflict with the Soviets turned on each other as the so-called warlords fought for influence, or for power, or just for the hell of it.

While this was going on, there was a far more insipid development—the rise of the Taliban. Probably the very same people who had been fighting with the Mujahideen simply morphed into the Taliban with hardly a second thought.

Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, or ISI, was quite instrumental in guiding the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, and did so without any direct involvement of the CIA. By 1996, the Taliban had captured Kabul; and by the end of 2000, their forces were in control of 95 per cent of the country.

At least Afghanistan had a stable government after years of conflict. There were a few other issues, of course—women were banned from jobs, girls were forbidden from attending schools or universities, communists were hunted down and eradicated, thieves were punished by the amputation of a hand or a foot, and opium production was virtually, although not entirely, wiped out.

The other minor issue was that the Taliban provided an operating base for their friends.

Principal among those was one by the name of Osama bin Laden.

During the war with the Soviets, the CIA had quite happily funded the Mujahideen and anyone else, including Osama, who was opposed to the perceived archenemies of the free world. While there was concern about the changing nature of Afghanistan, and the development of a haven for terrorists, the United States had other more pressing issues to worry about at that time and did nothing to counter the growth of Taliban.

Then, on the other side of the world, came the event that put Afghanistan very firmly and brutally back on the map.

The terrorist attack on the United States on that fateful day.

September 11, 2001.

There was little doubt that the al-Qaeda group headed by Osama bin Laden was ultimately responsible for the attacks in the United States. Certainly, the al Qaeda group claimed, and boasted of, full responsibility for that event. The al-Qaeda group had the full support of the Taliban-led Afghanistan. And the Taliban claimed their share of responsibility for the event as well.

So the United States displayed all its pent-up anger by invading Afghanistan, under the banner Enduring Freedom, with the avowed intention of getting rid of Osama bin Laden, getting rid of the Taliban, and ensuring that the safe haven that Afghanistan had provided for terrorists was removed once and for all.

But the problem just did not end there.

The problem just spread like a cancer.

Would Afghanistan ever be at peace?

The United States sought to win the hearts and minds of these battle-weary people of Afghanistan. They built roads to open up Afghanistan and the western provinces of Pakistan and invested millions of dollars in infrastructure—rather like they did back in America when they used railroads to open the Wild West. But knocking down houses that stand in the way of such progress could be counterproductive and could give the Taliban another nail to hammer into the coffin.

The sad thing is that the Taliban as a group did not start off as your normal, everyday jihad. However, through association with their friend Osama bin Laden, and pushed out of power in Afghanistan after the 9/11 debacle, and under threat from the United States and their coalition partners, they took a different view.

Sure, some of their recruits were now a little surprised when they became aware of the new political agenda. Not only did they become involved in almost-daily terrorist activity, they also got involved in such activity against some of their own people. The Taliban took advantage of anything that they could, such as distributing videos of the beheadings of policemen or their families to discourage people from joining a group that could bring some stability to fragile communities, training and indoctrinating their recruits to become suicide bombers, blowing up their own people to make some political point—basically to do what terrorists do: strike fear into everyone. And do it all while hiding among the general population, including women and children.

While the initial strike of Enduring Freedom by the US forces did have a positive effect—the influence of the Taliban was significantly reduced, and Osama bin Laden was driven into hiding—things gradually turned against the United States and their coalition partners. Like many others before them in the long and brutal history of the region, the United States-led coalition was beginning to accept a strategic situation that was becoming a stalemate.

It was a war that no one could win.

This was the hellhole that Mark Taylor and his small team were to enter, and to do what?

Follow a man who was a high-ranking official in the CIA and who was suspected of being involved in drug trafficking.

It seemed somewhat illogical, and at the same time terrifying.

But someone had to do it.

Chapter 1

Afghanistan

The young boys were playing football. There was no defined pitch. There were no lines to mark the limits on where they were or where they could go. There were no defined goalposts. And there was no referee to oversee their game.

Not that having a referee really mattered. Boys tend to get on with their games, and interruptions by some official would tend to hinder them rather than assist them, no matter where they were or what the circumstances were. They rarely hit the ball in the direction of the wall that stretched for close to a mile down one side of their playing area. If they did, and the ball bounced over it, they were unlikely to ever see it again.

In the arid heat, under a clear blue sky, the dust rose beneath their bare feet as they battled with each other. It created a temporary haze across the open ground. That haze settled against the rough stone wall, where it ended its brief life. It was as though it had never existed. Very much like life and death. One minute we are here; the next minute we are gone.

Like everywhere else in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, life was fragile. The scenery in this part of Afghanistan was a little more pleasant than in much of the rest of this war-torn land. Helmand was to the north of an area where at least things could grow, and to the immediate south of a vast area of this country where there was very little to distinguish it from the surface of the moon.

Yet even in this oasis, there was evidence that war was never far away.

The battles that had been raging in this land for many years were brutal and savage. They seemed to have no end. They affected everyone. Their effects was indiscriminate and occurred without any warning.

At this time of the year, the temperatures around the middle of the day were relatively warm and pleasant. At night it would turn bitterly cold, and it could be very unpleasant. At any time of the year, life was hard, either as a result of the weather, or because of man’s efforts to pursue their personal goals or to better themselves, at the expense of others.

On the other side of the stone wall was the enclosure, or compound, that was the local headquarters of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the United States Allied forces that had come to protect the local population from the Taliban. At least that was the stated mission of the foreigners who were the latest non-believers to occupy this land.

The boys who were playing football were too young to appreciate the extent to which they needed any protection, and they were a little suspicious of the people who came out of the fortress and usually, but not always, came back.

The area surrounding the compound was flat and clear of any obstructions. This was an area which, in military terms, was known as the killing field—an area where the armed defenders had an unrestricted sight of anyone approaching from any direction, and where their guns would be trained. The term dated back to the Killing Fields in Cambodia in the 1970s, where huge numbers of innocent people were killed and buried by the infamous Khmer Rouge immediately after the end of the Vietnam War. That was another war that the United States of America had become involved in with the very best of intentions. Another war that had turned to chaos. And now they were involved in yet another war in which the United States would eventually and inevitably be declared the loser.

The fact that the boys were using the area outside the compound as a football field left unanswered the question of what would happen if it returned to its true purpose—a killing field—which was a situation that could arise swiftly and with little or no warning.

The boys were too young to understand the state of war, or to understand the embarrassment felt by their elders at having to have the foreigners come to defend them against some of their own people. Their own people were chameleons—fighting a war yet hiding in plain sight. This war had no rules, and no one to judge what was right or what was wrong, what was allowed or what was not allowed, who would live or who would die.

The steady noise from the blade slap of an approaching American helicopter brought a brief halt to the game of football. The boys stared up at the huge machine as it lumbered over the wall, causing yet more dust to scatter around, and they briefly dreamed the dreams that only boys of their age could.

Where had the killing machine been? Who was on board? What adventures had it been involved in? How many men had been wounded? How many innocent bystanders had suffered? How many men, women, and children had died? And for what purpose?

Sitting on a rock observing all the activity around the entrance of the compound was another boy whose age could not have exceeded fourteen years. Yet his features indicated a young life that had seen more than its fair share of sadness and hurt. Apart from that, he looked like any other boy in this godforsaken place—thin from the rigors of the constant struggle to stay alive and from an inadequate diet; dark lined skin from the rigors of the weather; sad, almost-lifeless eyes from what they had witnessed during their short but brutal time on this earth. He was wearing baggy, featureless clothes and headgear, all of which were hand-me-downs from some other long-past generation.

He did not play football with the other boys. His crude crutches tended to get in the way. He was, or more correctly had been, right footed. And he was quite philosophical about the loss of his right leg. He had lost it courtesy of a roadside bomb, hidden there no doubt by some of his own countrymen. But despite the incapacity, he had a job to do. He felt himself very lucky to even have the job. And he was very good at that job.

Being oppressively poor, and a cripple, did not mean that the boy was not intelligent, or that he did not have an excellent memory. What the people who paid him at the rate of one Afghani per day to pass on the seemingly pointless information hoped to gain from his work, he had no idea. All he did know was that he would save his money, and build a better life for himself, his sisters, and his mother. He was the sole provider, so what choice did he have? His father had departed this earth courtesy of yet another insane and seemingly pointless act in the never-ending battle between ill-defined sides fighting for equally ill-defined principles.

It would take Naeem Sediqyar a fair while to reach his goal, given that the exchange rate between the Afghani and the United States dollar was about fifty to one; but of such things dreams are made.

They were in the town of Marjah situated in the Helmand province in the south of Afghanistan. Well, Marjah was not so much a town as a district in Nad Ali just to the south-west of the city of Lashkar Gah. Estimates of the population ranged from a reputed 85,000 up to 125,000 people who lived in the area, but no one could ever be sure. The coalition troops claimed to have rid the area of the Taliban, an action that should have reduced the population somewhat. But the population remained about the same. Consequently, it was anyone’s guess as to what the actual resident population was, or what the coalition forces had in fact achieved.

The people in this town were chameleons. One day they were fighting a ruthless and bloody war, dressed in ill-defined uniforms and with weapons that were at best unreliable. The next day, they were simple village folk struggling through life, fighting against the harshness of this country that some called home, with primitive tools, with little or no hope of ever improving their lot.

How many of the grand coalition claims were made for the consumption of their own people, in their own countries, sitting in their cosy living rooms, flicking through TV channels looking for entertainment, far removed from the drudgery of this war?

There were several wars—well, wars within wars—raging in this part of the world, and the district of Marjah seemed to be right in the middle of all of them.

The coalition of NATO, the United States, and other allied troops claimed that they were trying to get rid of the Taliban. The Taliban, on the other hand, were anxious to remain. Some Afghanis did not want either the coalition troops or the Taliban to remain. Some Afghanis had to protect their livelihoods, albeit, at least in this part of the country, mostly in the drug trade. The so-called local warlords were forever bickering with each other, with the residents, with the central government, and with the foreigners. There was a constant battle being waged between the various factions seeking to gain control. On the one hand, they just wanted peace. Then there were others who just wanted power at any price. And then there were others who just wanted money.

The mixture of these diverse objectives was probably an almost-insurmountable problem.

A conflict of religious, political, and commercial objectives did not mix now, as it had not done for countless years, in countless places. That applied at the national and international level. It also applied at the individual level.

One problem for Naeem was that he did not really know which of the various groups who were embroiled in these conflicts he was passing his information on to. That was probably because no one else seemed to know which side they were on—at least with any degree of consistency. It was a fair assumption that drugs were the major contributor to this dilemma. While Naeem was a bright boy, he could not be expected to understand what went on in the minds of the elders in his community. But he could understand inconsistency.

His instructions were provided by a man named Nurul Hadi. This man looked as though he was not long for this world and gave his instructions in the tired voice of someone who had no interest in either the message that he was conveying or whether the instructions would be carried out. But Naeem knew better than to do anything other than to carry out Nurul’s instructions. Naeem had seen a few, and heard of many more, who had perished by failing to follow instructions. Like Naeem, Nurul was simply in it for the money. So as instructed, Naeem watched and reported, received snippets of information, and passed that information on to people who knew what to do with it. Or so he assumed.

Naeem was convinced that Nurul was on the payroll of the Taliban. The fact that he was wrong did not matter. There was more to fear in this land than just the Taliban.

Nurul Hadi was working under instructions which came from someone in Kandahar, the spiritual home of the Taliban, but also the home of some of the more ruthless crooks in a land of many.

Even had Naeem known this, it would not have explained the other riddle. Why did the instructions require him to pass information on to Jacob? And who in the name of Allah was Jacob? That is, apart from the few facts which were known to the boy. He knew that Jacob was a white American, and that Jacob resided in the fortress on the other side of the compound wall. This suggested to Naeem that there was some conflict going on, the implications of which made him fearful. This was a land in conflict with the world, in conflict with itself.

There was a long history of conflict in this part of the world. In more recent years, the Soviets had fought a war in Afghanistan trying to maintain their influence in the areas bordering the Persian Gulf. The Soviet conflict, which lasted over nine years and ended in an embarrassing withdrawal by the Soviets in 1989, was only partly due to the fact that the Afghanis are religious—in fact, at least 99 per cent of them are Muslims.

And that was only the start of the current trouble.

The Soviets were involved in military operations against the Afghani Mujahideen, and for no other reason than that the Mujahideen were anti-Communist, and therefore anti-Soviet, they had support from the CIA, as well as other allied countries like the United Kingdom, some not so allied like China and Egypt, and probably many others, including Israel. Add to this, many Afghanis have their origins in Iran—of both Sunni and Shi’a sects—and are split into various ethnic groups of mostly Pashtun or Tajik origin, but there were many others. Consequently, you have the seeds of many conflicts in Afghanistan even without the involvement, or interference, from the world powers.

Amid all this, there was also Osama bin Laden. He was a Saudi, and he had not been a major player in the war against the Soviets; he merely provided training, arms, and funding to the Mujahideen. Consequently, he also had the support of the United States CIA and their fellow travellers, which naturally included the government of his native Saudi Arabia. The fact that the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad and the Government of Israel supported the Mujahideen but would not support Osama bin Laden was simply another irony that besotted the complex politics of the time.

But then came the event that reshaped the world and redefined political agendas, probably forever. As far as the Afghanis were concerned, it happened on the other side of the world and was hardly any concern of theirs. But in modern-day politics, that hardly mattered.

September 11, 2001—9/11.

The people of Afghanistan must have wondered what they had done wrong, moving from one conflict to another without a pause for breath. Their country had already become one of the most populated—that is, saturated—with land mines on the planet while the Soviet occupation ran its course. Now, with the Soviets gone, there were still more mines. But the problem was more a result of who was doing the mining than anything else, because the who kept changing sides, usually for monetary considerations under the guise of ethnic, religious, tribal, or any one of several other transient reasons. Add to this the fact that Afghanistan is one of the most corrupt nations in the world, second only to Somalia, and the chances of anyone getting control of the country, at least with any degree of consistency and anytime soon, were remote.

As far as anyone could tell, NATO and the United States forces were unlikely to be adding to the land mines that were already scattered around. That is, if you did not count the aerial bombardments carried out mostly by the United States, which often left a variety of unexploded ordnance just lying around, waiting for a trigger. There were so many haphazard groupings of people and objectives in Afghanistan that there was just no reliable map of what went on and who was doing what and where. Therefore, it was crucial that the many and varied organisations in the country that were fighting on one side or another, and moving around on covertly, and some not so covert, operations, had good intelligence.

But the collection of that intelligence was often crude, and often of doubtful reliability. And who was getting what intelligence? And at the end of another miserable day, did it really matter?

Suddenly, the game of football back at the killing field was violently interrupted. The first thing that Naeem saw was one of the players. He crumpled to the ground to the accompaniment of the rattle of gunfire. The boy was probably dead before his body had completed its fall.

The M1117 Armoured Security Vehicle, which, along with various other US vehicles, had been making a leisurely approach to the gates of the compound, was suddenly under fire. A couple of jeeps came out of the left side of the field—one seeking to engage the Americans in a firefight, the other heading straight for the gates, which had begun opening to let the small convoy in. The M1117 swung around to engage the first jeep but was soon under fire also from a group of Taliban insurgents who had appeared as if from nowhere. Everyone else scattered. It was a brutal and hopeless contest.

The M1117 used only its secondary armament—an M240H machine gun—to mow down four of the insurgents as the rest dived to the ground and then crawled crablike away from the withering fire. Then it fired a grenade from its Mark 19 launcher that brought the Jeep to a sudden and fatal end. Meanwhile, the second Jeep had almost made it to the gates, but it did not get much farther. About a dozen heavily armed marines rushed out of the compound, and one of them was carrying a shoulder-mounted grenade launcher. The training of the marines was too much for the attacking band.

The second Jeep rolled over and over as it was hit by a grenade, and eventually ended life in a crumpled heap of vehicle and body parts at the base of the compound wall. The marines methodically and rapidly made their way out across the killing field, spraying anything that was moving with withering fire. They succeeded in capturing two of the insurgents, who they just dragged back into the compound to the accompaniment of their screams from their injuries. The rest of those few who remained alive fled and vanished into the muddle of shacks that surrounded the base. And then the M1117, the accompanying vehicles, and the marines rapidly all withdrew back into the compound. The gates were slammed shut, leaving the five dead bodies lying out on the ground, along with the four who had occupied the two Jeeps. The remains of the two Jeeps and the bodies the only evidence that there had been a fight. The Jeep that had crashed into the wall burned on, fuelled by little more than the seats that had recently been occupied by human beings. The bodies of the two occupants lay in crumbled heaps where they had been flung from the vehicle, barely recognisable. The other Jeep sat at the far side of the field, the driver still sitting in his seat, the gunman still hanging on to the pedestal. Their clothes were shredded and barely covering what remained of their owners. Both men were most certainly dead and just remained as a silent testimony to the futility of this brief, and one-sided, fight

Yet slowly, the grounds returned to their previous state. The score from this interlude? The US troops’ 8 kills to the Taliban’s 0.

But what of the other one? He was only a boy! An innocent bystander.

A lady emerged from the shacks and hesitantly made her way to where the boy lay, ignoring the other bodies apart from frightened glances, suspicious that they may inexplicably be resurrected. She first tried vainly to get the boy to respond, until she finally realised that she was dealing with a corpse. Then the tears started to flow, and the wailing started. The distraught lady finally crumpled to the ground in her despair, rocking back and forth, muttering prayers, the total grief etched on an already care-worn face. Another life lost. One that would appear on no scoreboard.

Naeem, who had dropped flat to the ground when the firing started, staggered back to the rock that he had been sitting on. The boys who had been playing football slowly emerged from their hiding places. The ball was retrieved. The game started again.

It was as though nothing had happened.

Nothing had really changed.

A man came out of the compound, and for a while, he just leant against the wall, watching the boys at play. At the same time, the man was very much aware of everything around him. He looked quite at home. Dressed in casual clothes, but with a hat on his head to protect him from the sun, he would have been at home anywhere. Except that he was a Westerner, and this was Afghanistan.

Seemingly satisfied that all was now relatively peaceful, that there were no Taliban in the vicinity, that this was not one of those days when some mindless person would seek to blow himself and many innocent bystanders into the next world, he strolled across to where Naeem was sitting.

He looked at the boy, and just for a moment, there was a look of pity and concern on his face.

It was a harsh world. People did what they had to do just to survive. Some were able to get into a position of influence such that they could take advantage of whatever they were privy to, to the disadvantage of others. Some people would never be in such a position. Some like Naeem. But life had to go on, and you had to accept the roles that everyone played in the grand scheme of things.

Wars had to be fought—some won, some lost, some we would never know about.

Drugs had to be shipped; some got to their ultimate destination, some didn’t, some just vanished.

The man sat down on a rock close by Naeem, still watching the game, still watching for the slightest hint that he had been observed, still watching to see who else was watching. Nothing escaped his attention.

‘Is everything set?’ he eventually asked the boy.

‘Yes’ was the simple reply from Naeem.

The man nodded his head, then rose to his feet, patted Naeem on the shoulder, and wandered back toward the compound gates.

Once back inside, Jacob would send an innocuous e-mail to his masters in the secure, air-conditioned peace and quiet of the CIA headquarters at Langley Virginia.

The CIA had always appeared paranoid about its communications systems. And justly so, for you could never know if, or when, the Russians, or whoever, was wanting to break the latest encryption. The fact that the algorithms used in the encryption were worked out by some of the best mathematicians that money could buy did not mean that others could not do the same thing, but in reverse. Modern encryption system used 256-bit or even 512-bit logic so that meant that anyone wanting to break the code would need serious computer power. Gone were the days when you merely looked for patterns, or where people stumbled upon the key. Although it was improbable, it was still possible—hence the paranoia.

Consequently, any messages sent between CIA offices were phrased on the assumption that some unauthorised person may read the message. In fact, every message, whether to confirm that they were about to launch World War III on an unsuspecting enemy or merely wanted to order a new toilet roll, was encrypted. And so Jacob’s message, duly encrypted, would drive anyone who read it stark raving mad—first trying to read it, and then trying to understand what it could possibly mean.

Everything is set.

Naeem had no idea how important this simple message was.

Jacob Dutton had just played one more small part in this never-ending game, the repercussions of which would affect many.

Nothing else mattered.

Nothing ever changed.

Chapter 2

CIA Headquarters

– Marjah

The CIA office in Marjah was stifling. The building was a converted house, consisting of four barren rooms, only two of which had any windows. The rooms were connected via a simple passageway that led to the only door to the outside world. The fans, which some procurement system had insisted on supplying, were broken. But that did not matter. There was no electrical power to drive them anyway. The supply of utilities, things that you took for granted in the more civilised western world, rarely happened in Afghanistan with any degree of consistency, whether or not there was a war going on.

The three people who shared this office did not really speak to each other. It was not as though there was nothing to talk about. There were plenty of things happening in their area of jurisdiction, and most of what was happening was chaotic and scary. It was just that the three people had long since exhausted personal issues, and there was nothing left to talk about other than their work. And much of the latter could hardly be described as positive.

There would be much more happening in a positive way if only the politicians and government officials in Kabul and back in Washington DC could make some decisions. But they didn’t. If the primary group of bureaucrats in Washington DC could convey some decisions to the secondary group of bureaucrats in Kabul—and hopefully do so without too much distortion—that would be good. The difference between the two groups was that one was safely nestled in the relative peace and tranquillity of Washington, and the other one was in this hellhole called Afghanistan. So there was little hope for the three people in this third, and much lower group, in an even worse place called Marjah. But at least this, the operational side of the organisation, would have been charged with something to do, and to report back through ‘channels’, albeit that ‘something’ was probably ill-conceived and probably doomed to failure.

Initiative and bureaucracy do not mix too well. And with the primary bureaucracy being in completely different time zones did not help. Neither did having instructions filtered through other people in their ‘in-country’ headquarters in the relatively stable city of Kabul. And then there is the mission to consider. A mission statement looks good only on paper, and to the people who write it. When filtered down the ranks, the statement loses most of its clarity. The underlings charged with its implementation have far more important things to worry about.

The problems of getting a clear mission statement out of their masters in Washington, however, was not the only reason why the three people in Marjah were not talking to each other.

Communications among the three people who shared the sparsely furnished and ill-equipped office appeared to have broken down long before the lack of decisions from the bureaucrats back in Washington led to the inevitable delusions that filtered down through such structures the world over.

The organisation that they worked for, the CIA, was large by any standards, but was nonetheless lost in the quagmire of the United States intelligence services. Security of information was only one of the issues faced by the CIA and others in the security business. The number of people, and the many and varied organisations that they worked for, made a farce out of trying to keep anything secret, at least for long. It is a simple fact that a secret is no longer a secret if more than one person knows it. Passing information, or sharing information between organisations, makes it even more difficult to maintain some semblance of secrecy. But then someone else, other than the favoured one or two, who is not privy to the workings of this bureaucratic jungle may need to know the secret in order to stay alive.

A related problem is that the so-called operational staff of the CIA was numerically exceeded by the so-called administrative staff by some ridiculous figure. And wrestling information out of such an organisational structure can be a nightmare. All three of the people in the Marjah office were, at least technically speaking, operational field intelligence officers. The extent to which this translated into experienced field intelligence officers was a moot point. Being in a job for any length of time was experience of a kind. But what kind?

In any case, they continued to feed what information they gathered into the monolithic structure. And got nothing back.

Against this background, the problem was that the three people charged with intelligence and security in this part of the world were no longer sure who they could trust.

It had long been known that someone in, or associated in some way with, Afghanistan, was passing CIA intelligence information on to the Taliban. That had to be the case; otherwise, how did the Taliban appear to know almost everything that went on? The United States, which boasted of having the greatest fighting machine that the world had ever seen, was rendered impotent by someone passing information on to the enemy!

Of course, there was always the possibility that the Taliban were simply getting their information from the same sources—that just went with the territory. But it was plain that the Taliban were getting much more. Information, or intelligence, was one thing. Analysis of that information was something very different. The Taliban were generally not credited with having much in the way of analytical skills. Therefore, it had to be assumed that there was a leak somewhere in the monolithic organisation, such that fully analysed information was being shared. But where was the leak?

From the point of view of the intelligence services, whether it was one of the three agents in Marjah, or someone in Kabul, or someone in Washington, no one could be sure. From the point of view of the whole US operation, it could have been leaked by the recipients of the intelligence information.

It could have been all three of the people in the Marjah office.

It could, of course, have been all four of the aforesaid organisations.

In which case the entire mission was stuffed from the start.

The existence of the small CIA field office, located in the military compound in the outskirts of the so-called city of Marjah, had its origins in the arrogance of the United States security and intelligence service.

Many millions—in fact, billions—of dollars were spent on training and outfitting probably the most efficient, at least technically, and meanest fighting machine that the world had ever seen. Yet this elite force still required to be accompanied by CIA field operatives. The CIA operatives’ job was to gather intelligence from the front line (which may or may not be in the field, and which may or may not have been from the front line), analyse that intelligence, and then pass the relevant parts of that intelligence on to the people they were there to support. That is, provided the people they passed in on to were, in the CIA’s view, cleared to receive it.

The CIA had originally set up an office in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, but had since expanded to have various cells in many other parts of the country. And that expansion had all the problems usually associated with the spread of a bureaucracy—the timely analysis, coordination, and dissemination of information, and then the timely communication of that information to the people who needed to have it.

The senior CIA agent in the Marjah cell was Glen Weiner, a veteran of the Somali and Iraq conflicts. Well, at least he had been there, mostly sitting in an office—first in Mogadishu in Somalia and then in Bagdad in Iraq—too scared to go outside the protective shield that the troops provided. But this minor irritation had been overlooked by the Human Resources Department at CIA headquarters in Langley. So he was now in yet another hellhole, this time in a remote province in the south of Afghanistan.

Glen was not known as the best communicator in the service. He was divorced, in his late forties, measuring just under six feet, weighing in at about forty pounds overweight, and heading for a heart attack. Every day he came to the office dressed in an immaculate suit, clean white shirt, and a tie. Every day he left jacket-less, tie-less, a shirt soaked in dust and sweat. Completely disgruntled with his lot, his only aim now was to get the hell out of Afghanistan. But he still had another five months to go on his present ‘rotation.’ And there was the possibility of another tour of duty if no resolution was reached in the conflict. Or if some asshole in Washington decreed that his skills, aptitude, and experience were still essential in Afghanistan in the pursuit of some vague goal that neither the assigner nor the assignee was aware of. Glen’s greatest fear was that there was little chance of the conflict reaching any sort of resolution in the foreseeable future, and he could not imagine anyone standing in a queue anxiously waiting to take his place.

But Glen had a few serious problems that he had to deal with. In his discussions with the military commanders, he was constantly reminded of the effect that leaked information was having on their role in the field. And, because the information had all the appearances of having been sourced from good intelligence, the assumption was that the person doing the leaking was on the CIA payroll. Now, it was not within Glen’s purview to point out that the information could just as easily have come from either military intelligence sources or military personnel to whom said information had been provided. However, the problem was worse than that. Glen had a strong suspicion that there was a mole somewhere in the upper echelons of the US security and intelligence network, which made the leaks relatively insignificant. Whether that was part of the same problem he could not know, but it did make his task more difficult. Like, how could he report on the subject to his masters, who may or may not be the source of the problem? To add to that was the rumour that someone was facilitating the export of drugs from Afghanistan to the United States. Since the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had very little representation in southern Afghanistan, it was left to the CIA to follow up on this. While the area around Marjah had its fair share of poppies, Glen had neither the resources nor the inclination to put much effort into the subject. What he did know was that the two staff members who were working with him were most unlikely to be involved in any of these issues. One of his staff he could not personally stand, but that was the price you paid for working in so remote a region. The other was just too naïve, inexperienced, and did not have the aptitude to be involved in such silly games. And, like him, they would be just pleased to go home.

Of the other two agents who shared this excuse for an office, the younger of them was a lady who was fresh from spy school and who therefore appeared to treat every single snippet of information as hot, and the gospel truth. It was very unusual for the CIA to even contemplate posting a female officer to the Afghanistan provinces, given the sensibilities of the locals and the attitudes of the US military. The locals, and more so the Taliban, had a total lack of respect for people of the female variety. And in the military, the gender bias, which had dogged the US forces for generations, was very much alive and well. However, somehow or another, she had got the posting. And now her senior officer, Glen, had to deal with that as well as all his other problems.

Cindy Johnston was a stunning lady—five feet six, auburn hair, perfect milky-white skin, a figure that Ellie Mc Pherson would have been jealous about, and a smile that would melt the hearts of most grown men. And she was deeply religious. This latter attribute, to the members of the opposite sex— lonely and so far from the normal comforts of home—cancelled out all her other attributes. She had absolutely no field experience, which she tried to make up for with her enthusiasm. And by asking so many inane questions of the other officers that they stopped answering her.

The third field officer was far from enamoured with his other two colleagues, and that had nothing to do with the Taliban, or the CIA. He was experienced, and he had learnt how to survive in this festering place. He had little respect for Glen because he regarded him as a wimp. And he had little time for Cindy because she was a threat. She was not interested in anything other than work, and her incessant questions unsettled him. On a personal level, he was relatively young and horny. About six feet tall, he was somewhat overweight, mostly brought about by his affinity to the bottle and his liking of recreational drugs. He was attractive, and single; but unlike many of the young men who had been dragged away from the comforts of home, he had another and more urgent agenda. On a business level, he was hell-bent on doing his work to the very best of his ability for the CIA and his country. On a more personnel level, his main purpose in being in this hellhole was to gain access to the local produce.

Opium.

His name was Jacob Dutton.

The intelligence that the three agents had been able to gather so far did not reveal, on first evaluation, any more than the CIA already knew. The Afghanis were displeased with their foreign visitors and therefore made it difficult for the CIA to use their normal methods of obtaining information. In fact, there was little point in the CIA trying to deploy deep undercover agents from within the local population. The odds were not good that those local agents would remain loyal to the CIA for long enough to be of much use. Worst case,