GHOST WARS - STEVEN COLL

AVAILABLE

You might have noticed by now that I’m on a bit of a CIA kick. I’ve got a few more, at least, in the pipeline so haven’t moved on yet so perhaps it’s a bit early to assess this book’s place in that grander pantheon but I will say it is easily the most “normie” book on the CIA I’ve read yet and still, the CIA comes off very, very badly. I’ll get back to the reception of this book and the meta-narratives it feeds into later, but first I’ll sketch out what this book is about. It begins with the 1987 storming of the embassy in Islamabad and ends on September 11th with an afterword written in 2004, after the 9/11 report is released. There’s a bit about the hijackers but it mostly focuses on the events in central Asia. The book is basically a long list of terrible crimes. The CIA is in Afghanistan before the Soviet invasion and helps foment the war then works tirelessly to make sure the war goes on as long and is as bloody as possible. Afterwards, it puts weight behind the Taliban, mostly on behalf of a company called Unocal that wants to build a pipeline and they need someone, and they truly do not care who, who can make sure it’s at least stable enough to pump natural gas through. We also fund people opposed to the Taliban in a half-hearted (more on this later) attempt to “arrest” OSB. Afghanistan has been at war before I was born until exactly this minute. That part is indisputable but infuriating to see laid out so clearly. The more interesting and spooked-out threads center around the various intelligence agencies and Bin Laden. The million dollar question is how long did the organizations like the CIA, GID, ISI and other support Bin Laden. This book is much to middle of the road to really suggest that the CIA is lying about when they stopped supporting Bin Laden, though it is very interesting how many times some part of the government wants to kill Bin Laden and the CIA or George Tenet talks them out of it. Once, in ’96, it was because members of the UAE royal family were hunting with him. And yet they didn’t get invaded, in fact, they are currently waging a war with USA weapons. Strange. We, of course, get the stories about how the CIA failed to pass on the names of eventual 9/11 hijackers to the FBI despite the fact that they knew they were in the USA and some of them had met Bin Laden and were dedicated to attacking the US. A pentagon analyst quits at one point, complaining that their warnings about Al Qaeda are being ignored. There’s also an interesting through line about the larger engagement with Bin Laden has expanded the CIA’s power and what tools are at their disposal. For instance, they begin working on developing a drone as early as the 80’s (well, actually the CIA basically uses bureaucratic jiu jitsu to con the Air Force into paying for all the drone development but they (the CIA) are the main users. There’s a whole sub, sub thread about how the CIA has a reputation for cheapness) and use it first in Bosnia (where future Al Qaeda fighters were present) but armed it in the search for Bin Laden. They also got Clinton to sign off on the idea of renditions in 1995 for the same reason. They’d actually been doing renditions since, at least, the 50’s, but still, you can see a pattern. It was interesting to learn the original plot, as pitched by KSM, involved 10 planes hitting targets across the country, including, “the tallest buildings in California and Washington State.” 

Like I said, the other way to look at this book is as a post-9/11 artifact, since it was written 3 years after 9/11 and we’re coming up on the 20 year anniversary this fall. I think it could fairly be called an “official” account. Even in here, the CIA seems so irresponsibly bad at their jobs, by arming groups that say they’ll kill Americans then losing control of them, it seems hard to believe that any of them would be allowed to keep their jobs and it would be reasonable to discussion prison for negligence for some of them. The stuff we’ve learned since this book was published makes this official account seem even more lacking.  For instance, we now know that Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan, in a city with an enormous military college no less, which seems to invalidate all the stuff the ISI is saying about their inability to influence, find, capture or otherwise control Bin Laden. Likewise, we now know that GID agent Omar al-Bayoumi met with at least a few of the hijackers and seems to have given them material support. Likewise with the Saudi embassy in DC. Most recently, the Houthis in Yemen have released a 2000 tape of George Tenet pressuring the then-president of Yemen to release Anwar al-Awlaki, who is also involved in the attack, from jail. Who the fuck knows? I hope this anniversary inspires people to look back into the event, less from a “there were no planes, it was missiles surrounded by holograms” or “The towers were brought down with thermite” angle and more from a “which elements from which countries, including our own, seem to have supported this” position. The real takeaway is that the USA puppetmasterd decades of war and devastation in Afghanistan that is both ongoing and among the evilest acts in a rather competitive field of US war crimes. 911 mysterious sources of Saudi money.