The Main Enemy by Milton Bearden (epub e reader txt) 📕

the meetings with Zia. Piekney was told Pillsbury lacked the appropriate clearances for the meetings concerning the CIA’s Afghan covert action program. Before Hatch’s delegation arrived, Piekney called back to CIA headquarters and asked Near East Division Chief Bert Dunn to reaffirm the order.

“Let me make sure I have this straight. I should tell Hatch that he can’t bring Pillsbury in, right, Bert?”

“That’s right.”

After greeting the congressional delegation, Piekney found himself standing with Hatch, and the senator soon asked Piekney the question he had been dreading. Was it all right if Pillsbury sat in on the meetings with Zia? Cautiously, Piekney told Hatch that, actually, he had received orders to keep Pillsbury out.

“Well, do you mind if I call Bill Casey and talk to him about it?” Hatch asked.

“Of course not,” Piekney said.

Hatch was escorted to a telephone, where he placed a call directly to Casey back at CIA headquarters.

After some persuading from Hatch, Casey backed down and agreed to let Pillsbury attend the meetings. But Piekney later heard from a colleague who was in the room with Casey that as soon as he hung up, he became angry with himself for caving in to the senator’s demands. That evening the Americans, with Pillsbury in attendance and various other members of Hatch’s delegation, all crowded into Zia’s private office. And it was there that Piekney heard Zia suddenly, and without warning, change six years of Pakistani policy in an instant.

Hatch’s meeting with Zia turned out to be a watershed event in American support for the Afghan rebels. With Zia’s approval, opposition within the Reagan administration to the direct infusion of American arms collapsed. The United States would be turning up the heat on the Soviet 40th Army in Afghanistan, and Bill Piekney could only shake his head as he thought about how rapidly the political ground had shifted in both the United States and Pakistan.

Langley, July 12, 1986

Back in Washington, I began to close up shop and prepare for my transfer to Islamabad in early August. It was a standing tradition for a DO chief on his way to the field to have a private talk with the DCI before heading out, and my checkout talk with Casey took place three weeks before my departure. Any ambiguities in the job description that may have plagued Piekney had all but evaporated by the time I received my marching orders from Bill Casey.

I’d known Casey since he took his first trip abroad as DCI in 1981 when I was chief in Lagos, Nigeria. I had been on the ground in the oil-rich, rough-and-tumble West African country for about six months when I found myself standing on the steaming tarmac of Murtala Muhammad Airport, waiting for the arrival of a USAF C-141 carrying Ronald Reagan’s new DCI, the old OSS man and Wall Street operator who had already begun to breathe new life into an agency adrift for the last half dozen years. As soon as the black Starlifter pulled to a whining halt, two of Casey’s bodyguards whisked their charge down the short ladder from the paratroop jump door. Within moments I was in the back of a limousine with the white-haired DCI and caught up in one of Lagos’s infamous “go-slows,” the unique Nigerian version of gridlock.

We were traveling in a tight, three-car convoy, and at one point when we were at a dead standstill, an unsuspecting Nigerian motorist broke into our motorcade, briefly separating us from the lead car. A Nigerian security officer riding shotgun with us calmly stepped out of the car and shouted through the closed window to the offending driver. The man ignored him until the officer took his heavy, handheld Motorola, smashed out the side window, and repeated his demand. The man quickly pulled to the side of the road.

Casey, taking all this in, seemed about to comment when there was an insistent knock at his window. Looking over, I saw a Nigerian youth about twelve years old holding up a twenty-five-foot green garden hose, still in factory packaging, and gesturing animatedly to Casey.

“What’s he want?” Casey mumbled, bemused by the frantic Lagos scene.

“Wants to sell you a garden hose,” I answered. “It’s a hot item on the black market. Pirates take the stuff off the ships backed up in port. This week it’s garden hoses.”

Casey flashed his toothy smile for the first time. “Not really an impulse buy, is it?”

“Welcome to Nigeria, Mr. Director.” We both laughed, and over the next two days the beginnings of a personal friendship with Casey developed, one that would last until his death. He stayed two days as my houseguest in Lagos. Under the watchful eye of his personal physician, who traveled with him, I poured Casey’s rum and tonics in the evening—he’d quip that he liked tonic water, but the taste was so bad that he could drink it only with a shot of rum in it. And in the morning I fried his bacon and scrambled his eggs. From that point on, he took a personal interest in where my career was heading and was eager for me to move across the continent to Khartoum two years later, another spot he had visited in his first foray to Africa in 1981.

So here we were five years later about to set off on what was becoming Casey’s endgame vision for the Soviet Union. The DCI tilted back in his recliner and peered over his glasses at me as I took one of the wingback chairs in front of his desk. With his soup-stained tie, Casey looked his usual disheveled self. I glanced at the stack of books on the corner of his desk to see if I could make out the titles for his weekend reading.

“Headin’ out?” Casey asked before I could get a good look.

“Early next month, but this is the only hole you had in your schedule for another guy on his way to the field. They’re stacking up outside your door.”

“Everybody’s turning over this