By Michael Moran
MSNBC

NEW YORK, Aug. 24, 1998   At the CIA, it happens often enough to have
a code name: Blowback. Simply defined, this is the term that describes an
agent, an operative or an operation that has turned on its creators. Osama
bin Laden, our new public enemy Number 1, is the personification of
blowback. And the fact that he is viewed as a hero by millions in the
Islamic world proves again the old adage: Reap what you sow.

    BEFORE YOU CLICK on my face and call me naive, let me concede some
points. Yes, the West needed Josef Stalin to defeat Hitler. Yes, there were
times during the Cold War when supporting one villain (Cambodia's Lon Nol,
for instance) would have been better than the alternative (Pol Pot). So yes,
there are times when any nation must hold its nose and shake hands with the
devil for the long-term good of the planet.

     But just as surely, there are times when the United States, faced with such moral
dilemmas, should have resisted the temptation to act. Arming a multi-national coalition
of Islamic extremists in Afghanistan during the 1980s - well after the destruction of the
Marine barracks in Beirut or the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 - was one of those times.

     BIN LADEN'S BEGINNINGS

       As anyone who has bothered to read this far certainly knows by now, bin Laden is
the heir to Saudi construction fortune who, at least since the early 1990s, has used that
money to finance countless attacks on U.S. interests and those of its Arab allies around the world.
 
Osama bin Laden's network

     As his unclassified CIA biography states, bin Laden left Saudi Arabia to fight the Soviet army
in Afghanistan after Moscow's invasion in 1979. By 1984, he was running a front organization
known as Maktab al-Khidamar - the MAK - which funneled money, arms and fighters from the
outside world into the Afghan war.

     What the CIA bio conveniently fails to specify (in its unclassified form, at least) is that the MAK
was nurtured by Pakistan's state security services, the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI,
the CIA's primary conduit for conducting the covert war against Moscow's occupation.

     By no means was Osama bin Laden the leader of Afghanistan's mujahedeen. His money gave
him undue prominence in the Afghan struggle, but the vast majority of those who fought and died
for Afghanistan's freedom - like the Taliban regime that now holds sway over most of that tortured
nation - were Afghan nationals.

     Yet the CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling,
found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to"read" than the rivalry-ridden natives.
While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were
one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from
Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the
"reliable" partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.
 
     Though he has come to represent all that went wrong with the CIA's reckless strategy there, by the
end of the Afghan war in 1989, bin Laden was still viewed by the agency as something of a dilettante
- a rich Saudi boy gone to war and welcomed home by the Saudi monarchy he so hated as something of a hero.

America strikes back

     In fact, while he returned to his family's construction business, bin Laden had split from the relatively
conventional MAK in 1988 and established a new group, al-Qaida, that included many of the more
extreme MAK members he had met in Afghanistan.

        Most of these Afghan vets, or Afghanis, as the Arabs who fought there became known, turned up
later behind violent Islamic movements around the world. Among them: the GIA in Algeria, thought
responsible for the massacres of tens of thousands of civilians; Egypt's Gamat Ismalia, which has
massacred western tourists repeatedly in recent years; Saudi Arabia Shiite militants, responsible for
the Khobar Towers and Riyadh bombings of 1996.

     Indeed, to this day, those involved in the decision to give the Afghan rebels access to a fortune in
covert funding and top-level combat weaponry continue to defend that move in the context of the
Cold War. Sen. Orrin Hatch, a senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee making
those decisions, told my colleague Robert Windrem that he would make the same call again today
even knowing what bin Laden would do subsequently. "It was worth it," he said.

     "Those were very important, pivotal matters that played an important
role in the downfall of the Soviet Union," he said.

     HINDSIGHT OR TUNNEL VISION

     It should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Laden's connection to these activities is mostly
classified, though its hard to imagine the CIA rushing to take credit for a Frankenstein's monster like this.

     It is also worth acknowledging that it is easier now to oppose the CIA's Afghan adventures than it was
when Hatch and company made them in the mid-1980s. After all, in 1998 we now know that far larger
elements than Afghanistan were corroding the communist party's grip on power in Moscow.

     Even Hatch can't be blamed completely. The CIA, ever mindful of the need to justify its "mission,"
had conclusive evidence by the mid-1980s of the deepening crisis of infrastructure within the Soviet Union.
The CIA, as its deputy director William Gates acknowledged under congressional questioning in 1992,
had decided to keep that evidence from President Reagan and his top advisors and instead continued to
grossly exaggerate Soviet military and technological capabilities in its annual "Soviet Military Power"
report right up to 1990.

     Given that context, a decision was made to provide America's potential enemies
with the arms, money - and most importantly - the knowledge of how to run a war
of attrition violent and well-organized enough to humble a superpower.

That decision is coming home to roost.