Anthrax, Mujaheddin and the CIA

As I write, I am trying to hold my breath. My office is across the street from the Senate Hart Office Building. Through yellowing leaves, I can see the corner of the building that was closed after a letter containing anthrax spores was opened by a staffer for Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle. From the roof of Hart, bright white puffs of steam pop out of vents, and in a reverie of paranoia I envision hardy anthrax bacteria lofting over Capitol Hill and bouncing against my window.

A former director of the Soviet bioweapons program told the Financial Times that he invented a variation of anthrax that could travel several miles. Yet experts quoted in the New York Times say that if the spores were expelled by the building's exhaust system, the concentration of the bacteria would be too low to cause infection. Which Times should I heed?

Let's go with New York. But who wants to work a football field away from anthrax? And why has the index finger of my left hand been itching since yesterday?

At this point, law enforcement authorities cannot say whether the anthrax attacks are the work of the Sept. 11 plotters. Perhaps the mayhem of that day inspired and unleashed others. I find it convenient to believe it is Osama bin Laden or his associates who are going postal, for of late I've been wondering how the politicians, policy advocates and intelligence personnel who championed and supported the fundamentalist-dominated Afghanistan resistance in the 1980s are reacting to the recent turmoil and horror. Do they have reason to experience dark, nagging stabs of regrets?

As many of us know by now, bin Laden received his start in the destroy-a-superpower game by raising funds and recruiting volunteers for the mujaheedin, the faction-ridden force that waged a guerilla war in Afghanistan against Soviet invaders. The CIA poured hundreds of millions of dollars into this effort, as did Saudi Arabia, and the Pakistani intelligence service disseminated the weapons and money supplied by Uncle Sam.

So do the American godmothers of the mujaheedin now lose sleep over having bolstered the resistance in which bin Laden first developed a following and in which some of his present crew learned their chops?

A few weeks back, I was at a conference on terrorism, and in the hallway I spotted Charles Cogan, a former senior CIA official who oversaw the Afghanistan project. What do you say, I asked him, to the criticism that the CIA helped create the bin Laden monster? Very curtly, he replied, "We had nothing to do with him, we never had any direct contact with him. It's a canard." Before I could query him further, Cogan uneasily shuffled away.

That is the CIA line these days. Osama bin Laden? He was never one of ours. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Milton Bearden, CIA station chief in Pakistan in the 1980s, says the same: "Despite what has been often written, the CIA never recruited, trained or otherwise used the Arab volunteers who arrived in Pakistan ... As fundraisers, however, Arabs from the Persian Gulf played a positive, often critical role in the background of the war ... Among the more prominent of these Arab fundraisers was one Osama bin Laden." (Bearden acknowledged that in 1987 bin Laden did participate in key battles and "the military legend of Osama bin Laden was born.")

Michael Pillsbury, a congressional aide in the 1980s, was one of the fiercest champions of the mujaheedin. Largely because of his efforts, the Reagan administration decided to send Stinger surface-to-air missiles to the resistance. He now says, "I think it is factually false that the U.S. in any way backed Osama and his group of Arabs. I was there. I know who we backed. No reliable official source has ever confirmed that the U.S. program included Osama and his Arabs. They were quite distinct, and at a separate location from the Afghan fundamentalists ... It has been sad for me to see this falsehood spread on several TV magazine shows."