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Ex-SAS soldier pens vivid account of life under Soviet fire
ANJALI MODY
London, Aug 15: A former British SAS soldier, who worked as a secret agent in Afghanistan in the early 1980s, has revealed that two Western countries, the UK and the US, apart from "training Muslim volunteers in urban terrorism" also "tolerated" a vast opium smuggling network which sustained the Mujahideen.
Tom Carew, whose book Jihad is being published next month, says that he was the agent of Sir William Lindsay-Hogg, the British co-cordinator of operation Faraday, the secret Anglo-American operation that began against the Soviets in summer 1980. The operation he says left a dubious legacy of international drug smuggling and terrorism that is far harder to fight.
Carew says that his job was to "look for areas where Western agents could train the Mujahideen and to bring back items of secret Soviet equipment." First sent into Afghanistan, via Pakistan, dressed "like Gunga Din", Carew found himself in the midst of a war and increasingly alarmed by the nature of his job, particularly "the opium smuggling.. which my masters did not want to talk about and the training of Muslim volunteers in urban terrorism." Carew, who accompanied at least one large consignment of opium also discovered that the "Pakistanis were involved at a high level" and ISI officers ensured that there were no problems with the frontier police.
The role the US and Britain played in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979 has long ceased to be a secret. In the last 10 years, several British SAS soldiers who trained Mujahideen fighters opposed to the Soviet-backed government in Kabul have spoken of Britain's involvement in Afghanistan. Even Pakistan's former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, acknowledged the West's military and financial support for the Afghan rebels, now part of the Taliban, at a public lecture in London a few years ago.
However, Carew's vivid first person account of life under Soviet fire, surreal meetings with his British and American bosses and a failed attempt to field-test a British missile are the stuff of a John Le Carre novel. In a pre-publication extract from his forthcoming book which appeared in the Sunday Times, Carew recounts a journey under fire and the slowly dawning discovery that he was accompanying a cargo of narcotics. Carew travelled with a convoy of 50 fighters and 14 mules "most carrying what must have been millions of dollars worth of narcotics". At the Pakistan border, "ISI officers were waiting to escort us... the mules were taken to a Hizb-i-Islami compound".
Carew told officials at a Pentagon debriefing that he had seen over 1,000 kilograms of opium taken from Afghanistan to Parachinar in Pakistan. He told them that the opium was escorted by the Pakistani military to a special section of the Mujahideen camp which was under Pakistani military control. Carew concluded that "the Mujahideen are using opium to fund their operations and obtain co-operation from Pakistan, and that the Pakistani military -- or somebody in it -- is taking a significant cut." The following day two officials from the meeting approached him to talk about the opium. The told him: "We at the, er, agency, would appreciate it if you were not to mention this again. In fact if you do see anything connected with opium again, just ignore it completely."
Carew reveals that it was not possible to supply US or British weapons to the Mujahideen, because any attempt to buy them legally would have blown the cover of the still 'ery secret' operation. Instead, Operation Faraday relied on the illegal trade in arms to meet its needs. In the line of duty Carew, in the style of 007, hijacked a consignment of Bulgarian-made Soviet SA-7 Grail hand-held missiles intended for Libya, with the assistance of the Vienna based arms-dealer. And when ordered by London to procure a sample Soviet AK-74 rifle for the Chinese Embassy in Islamabad, he discovered that the Americans and the British were "buying a lot of Chinese-made weapons to supply to the Mujahideen". Carew got the AK-74 from Gulbudin Hekmatyar, whose compound he said was "an Aladdin's cave of weapons and ammunition."
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
