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Operation Cyclone: The Weapons America Sent — and Left Behind
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Operation Cyclone was the largest covert program in CIA history — but arming the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets planted seeds that would haunt America for decades. This episode traces the pipeline: Charlie Wilson, the Stinger missile debate, and the ISI distribution network that shaped the modern world.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
There's a question that haunts the Afghan war, and it doesn't get asked often enough. What if the weapons America sent to defeat the Soviets in the nineteen eighties were the same weapons turned against American soldiers two decades later?
To understand what the CIA built, you have to understand what it was responding to. In December of nineteen seventy-nine, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
Charlie Wilson was not the obvious architect of a covert war. He was a Democrat from Lufkin, Texas, known more for parties and personal controversy than foreign policy gravitas.
The debate over the Stinger missile is one of the hinge points of the whole operation. The Stinger was an American-made man-portable surface-to-air missile.
The logistics of getting weapons into Afghanistan were as complex as any in CIA history. The agency couldn't ship weapons directly from the United States to Afghan fighters.
The Reagan administration's support for the mujahideen was driven by a clear strategic logic. The Soviets had invaded a sovereign country.
By nineteen eighty-eight, the Soviets were looking for a way out. The war had cost them enormously.
The pattern here is one this series has returned to before. The short-term operational success.
Operation Cyclone remains the clearest example in CIA history of an operation that succeeded on its own terms and still generated consequences that changed the world in ways its architects never intended. The Soviet Union fell.
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