Word: mujahedin
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...recent, and perhaps the most daring, success of the CIA's operation to assist the embattled guerrillas. Like most of the world, the U.S. was outraged when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and proceeded to transform it into a puppet state. That shock, together with widespread sympathy for the mujahedin, has not abated as Moscow has tried to consolidate its tenuous control over the nation by resorting to carpet bombing, chemical warfare and outright massacre of civilians...
...existence of a CIA pipeline to the mujahedin has long been an open secret. President Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, publicly took credit for setting up the arms flow to the Afghan rebels in 1979. Shortly before his death in 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat acknowledged that the U.S. was using Egypt to ship weapons to Afghanistan. During a visit to Pakistan last year, Secretary of State George Shultz went so far as to tell several thousand Afghan refugees, "You fight valiantly, and your spirit inspires the world. I want you to know that...
...these goods arrive every few days, sometimes in the arms of messengers, but most often on caravans that travel on moonless nights to evade the powerful searchlights of low-flying Soviet helicopters. As a senior Western military attache told TIME, "Getting the material they need in to the mujahedin must be one of the most hazardous and difficult supply tasks ever undertaken in modern military history...
...time in ordering his station chiefs in Europe to look for Afghan exiles who might make good recruits. The CIA men began by poring over lists of students and teachers, compiling dossiers on likely candidates and placing them under surveillance. Those who seemed thoroughly reliable and unquestionably pro-mujahedin received casual invitations to lunch from a visiting American professor, or a priest, perhaps, or even a Saudi businessman. All were undercover CIA agents. While the CIA was recruiting some 50 such Afghans in Europe, it was also, with help from the FBI, gathering a similar group in the U.S. Though...
From there the mines were trans ported by ship to Pakistan's Makran coast. The CIA Afghans met the arms there and drove them to a rendezvous with the mujahedin in a desolate area near the Afghan border. The guerrillas took the arms away in a Soviet-made truck; when that vehicle broke down, they switched to camels. Upon arrival at the outskirts of Kabul, the mujahedin opened the boxes and carefully packed each mine in a mixture of camel dung, mud and straw-the mate rials that local peasants use to build walls. Finally, more than two weeks...