Operation Cyclone

From 1979 the CIA ran a covert programme to arm and fund Afghan insurgents fighting the Soviet occupation. It began small under Carter and grew enormously under Reagan, with Congressman Charlie Wilson driving appropriations. Saudi Arabia matched US spending roughly dollar for dollar. By the late 1980s the combined annual figure ran into the high hundreds of millions, and the programme included the 1986 decision to supply shoulder-fired Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

Nothing about the programme is a claim: it was reported at the time, examined by Congress, and later documented in declassified cables, in the Church and subsequent oversight records, and in accounts by the officials who ran it. The contested part is what it implies. Zbigniew Brzezinski told Le Nouvel Observateur in 1998 that support began before the Soviet invasion and that drawing Moscow into an Afghan war had been the point - a quotation that has since been stretched far past what it says.

The record shows US money and weapons flowed to Afghan and allied factions, but almost entirely through Pakistan's ISI, which chose the recipients and favoured Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e-Islami. The CIA had no direct control over distribution and, by the accounts of the officers involved, no relationship with the Arab volunteer network that Osama bin Laden was building in parallel with Saudi and private Gulf money. Both halves are true: the programme armed forces that later turned on the United States, and it was not the programme that built al-Qaeda.