Directorate S by Steve Coll

Author:Steve Coll [Coll, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2018-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

THE END OF ILLUSION,

2010–2014

TWENTY-THREE

The One-man C.I.A.

During the first week of August 2009, while on vacation in the south of France, Barnett “Barney” Rubin took a call from a Saudi lawyer he had met. His contact occasionally did odd jobs for Saudi intelligence. The Saudi said that Rubin should travel to Dubai. Rubin was a political scientist with a doctoral degree from the University of Chicago who specialized in Afghanistan as well as conflict prevention and resolution. He now worked at the State Department as a senior adviser to Richard Holbrooke. Rubin called Holbrooke and asked what he should do. By all means go, Holbrooke said. Just don’t tell anyone what you are doing.

Rubin drove to Nice and flew to Dubai, arriving in the early hours of August 9. He took a cab to a comfortable hotel. His contact received him in his rooms a few hours before dawn. Rubin, then fifty-nine, was a stout man with thinning white hair and a bushy white beard. He had an “alarming physical resemblance to Leon Trotsky,” Holbrooke once noted, which was “not a big asset” at the Pentagon or the C.I.A. Holbrooke valued him because he offered “a level of intellectual quality you almost never see in the U.S. government.” Rubin had been traveling through Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf States for many years, while going in and out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The leading South Asia specialists in the U.S. intelligence community generally acknowledged that Rubin was the premier scholarly American expert on Afghan politics. He spoke Dari haltingly as well as Hindi and Urdu, and had studied literary Arabic. As an undergraduate at Yale, he had majored in history and joined the Students for a Democratic Society, a leftist youth movement involved in the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War. During the 1980s, as an assistant professor at Yale, he had been drawn to human rights issues in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation. This led him to write an influential book, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan, about Afghan elites and the modern Afghan state. He was a liberal with a strong interest in peacemaking, an outlook that was in the mainstream on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he lived.1

He had gotten to know his Saudi friend recently, while trying to probe for Holbrooke the possibilities for dialogue between the United States and the Taliban. His contact had fought in the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980s as a volunteer, aligned at the time with Saudi and American policy. He had known Osama Bin Laden. Later he gave up war and became a professional in the kingdom. Because of his credibility with Islamists, Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz, the head of Saudi intelligence since 2005, had asked him to play a liaison role between Saudi Arabia and the Taliban.

In his hotel rooms, as the multicolored lights of Dubai blinked outside, the Saudi revealed that in recent days, he had received a letter and two telephone calls from well-known Taliban representatives who said they were in direct contact with Mullah Mohammad Omar.

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