How the CIA Defeated the Soviets in Afghanistan | Milton Bearden (Part 1)

Milton Bearden was the CIA officer tasked by Director William Casey in 1986 with using $1 billion and Stinger missiles to help drive Soviet forces out of Afghanistan, one of the most consequential covert operations of the Cold War.

In this first part of a remarkable conversation, Bearden takes us inside the secret machinery of Operation Cyclone. He recounts how Washington shifted from simply "bleeding" the Soviets to pursuing outright victory, how the covert war was run through Pakistan's ISI, and how weapons and money were distributed among the fractious Mujahideen factions, none of them, by his own admission, above reproach.

He describes training fighters in makeshift conditions in Rawalpindi: a white sheet, an infrared light, and a $200 room that outperformed the US Army's billion-dollar facility at Fort Bliss. He recounts the September 1986 Stinger strike outside Jalalabad that changed the course of the war overnight, and speaks candidly about his dealings with General Akhtar, a tense face-to-face with Hekmatyar, and the direct back-channel contacts with commanders that bypassed ISI oversight entirely.

Bearden also reflects on corruption among commanders, the deliberate exclusion of the Hazaras, the Saudi dollar-for-dollar funding match that doubled the war chest, and why he believes the only measure that ever truly mattered was whether the Soviets left.

They did. On February 15, 1989, General Boris Gromov crossed the Friendship Bridge and the war was won.

A rare, unfiltered account from the man who helped run one of the most consequential covert operations of the Cold War.

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