<i>60 Minutes II:</i> Fighting The Taliban

Long before most Americans were even thinking about Afghanistan, Joe and James Ritchie, brothers from Chicago, were hard at work on a plan to run the Taliban out of power.

Born in America and raised as Christians, they came to love this Muslim country where they spent part of their childhood. The Taliban, they believed, was destroying the Afghanistan they remembered.

Two years ago, using part of their fortune, these options traders embarked on a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar mission to save Afghanistan.

The Ritchies made overthrowing the Taliban their main objective. To do that, they set up a private intelligence operation - their own personal CIA.

They used their money to help organize anti-Taliban forces, and distributed satellite phones equipped with global positioning systems to report on what the Taliban was doing. They forged an alliance with a freedom fighter named Abdul Haq who in turn recruited tribal chiefs and elders in southern and eastern Afghanistan. They even opened lines of communication with commanders of the Northern Alliance.

At the heart of the network were the 50 satellite phones the Ritchies bought and passed out to what they call “the good guys.”

“We’ve got lots of telephones in that country,” Joe Ritchie says. “I mean, we worked lots of satellite phones into the system before Sept. 11. They are paying off. So they are sitting in places all around Afghanistan where at any point a bit of intelligence could come out.”

Though they’re just private citizens, they’ve got some big time help: they hired Robert “Bud” McFarlane, Ronald Reagan’s national security sdvisor, to be their paid consultant.

Joe, the eldest, was the CEO of the operation; James worked on the ground with frequent trips to Afghanistan.

Two weeks ago, Correspondent Carol Marin, and a 60 Minutes II camera crew caught up with James Ritchie as he made his most recent trip into Afghanistan.

He took then across the Khyber Pass, the ancient road carved into the mountains where armies since Alexander the Great have traveled. Crossing the border from Pakistan they were met by security for this trip, men armed with Kalishnakov rifles.

Says James, “I don’t think that it’s the safest of situations. It’s difficult to really know sometimes.”

Two weeks earlier, Ritchie was told, he was the potential target of an assassination

Now, he was headed down the bleak and bumpy road to Jalalabad, one of the adopted homes of Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network and his training camps.

“ The problem is,” Ritchie says, “that the people that I’m speaking with here are also in danger.”

On this morning, some Taliban members in southern Afghanistan were trying to turn themselves in, news that James has passed on to Joe and that Joe Ritchie passed on to the military and the CIA.

The Ritchies most important connection on the ground was Abdul Haq, who made his name fighting the Soviets back in the 1980s.

In October, just as the U.S. began bombing, Haq believed he had Taliban ready to defect. The Ritchies say that information was passed on to the CIA.

Soon after, Haq prepared to leave his compound in Peshawar, Pakistan, and cross into Afghanistan with a small security force, several satellite phones and James Ritchie.

“I just felt like we were in it together and that—I’d be willing to assume the risks,” says James. “And I also thought that I was gonna succeed.”

But Haq slipped away early, leaving Ritchie behind. Not far inside the border, he was ambushed.

“We didn’t really know he was in serious trouble ‘til we got a call that night and he was—he’d been ambushed,” recalls James. “They had run into a group of Taliban. They knew there were Taliban coming on their trail from behind and the Taliban opened fire on them. So I called Bud McFarlane because I thought he might be the only person that would be able to get some help.”

James got plugged directly into the CIA operations desk and the agency sent some aircraft which Joe says “were not in the position to help” Haq.

Abdul Haq was taken to Kabul where he was executed.

“What we know,” says Joe, “is that, that they captured him, and he was tried and killed the next morning. And I assume that—that he was probably tortured, just knowing how they play.”

Even after Haq’s death James Ritchie kept coming back to Afghanistan. On a night plagued by persistent power failures, he tells Marin why.

“Say you have a good friend, “ he says. “Abdul Haq was a good friend. He was a good friend. And he put his life into something and he lost his life for something. So what do you do, just run off to where it’s safe and green and pretty.”

The Ritchie’s history with Afghanistan goes back more than 40 years. Joe was 10, James just a baby when their father, a civil engineer, and their mother, a teacher, moved to Kabul on a four-year humanitarian mission.

Over the years, the whole family kept coming back. Their father, after he retired, helped build a hospital there. When he died in 1978, he was buried outside Kabul.

“My folks have just always felt this - this draw to Afghanistan,” says Joe. “And they, they feel about the people the same way we do. That’s why my mom still teaches English to Afghan refugees. They’re just crazy about the people.”

For three years, the Ritchies say they tried to get people in Washington to focus on Afghanistan and the potential for overthrowing the Taliban.

“At the time we were making the argument,” Joe says, “it was a problem of lack of interest. And on Sept. 11, then it became almost a problem of too much interest.”

On that dae, Joe and McFarlane were standing in front of the State Department.

“Bud and I were waiting for a meeting to lay out plans for knocking off the Taliban whenn I looked over and saw the smoke coming up from the Pentagon,” says Joe.

“They evacuated the building promptly and we went over and watched the Pentagon burn.”

Why did the Ritchies embark on this campaign? “ In the U.S. of A.,” says Joe, “I think a part of the deal is that private citizens are supposed to speak up when you think that’s something’s is getting missed and that’s what we did.”

It’s the kind of thinking Milt Bearden has seen before. In the 1980s, he ran the CIA’s operation helping the Afghans defeat the Soviets.

“It’s a place that enchants and captures your imagination,” says Bearden. “I think it also captures your better judgment from time to time.”

Now a CBS News consultant, Bearden says that’s what happened to the Ritchie brothers.

“I don’t think that you can run a foreign policy with your heart,” “Bearden says. “I mean, imagine the involvements, the entanglements we’d get into around the world if we let our heart get into it. I wouldn’t fault them for what they did. Did they do anything that had a long-lasting effect? We don’t know yet.”

We do know the Ritchie’s were able to use their satellite phones to supply information to the U.S. military.

“You know these tidbits flow out when you have people running around the satellite phones and all of a sudden they know where a bad guy is hiding,” says Joe.

He claims not to know where bin Laden is, but says “one of our phones, we believe, wound up in the hands of one of his insiders and we had a shot.”

They had a shot because the phone was equipped with a global positioning system. Yet no one knows what happened with that insider or to the phone.

As for the $25 million bounty on bin Laden’s head, James says, “I think the people that count would want him gone regardless. They’d give up the information regardless…. absolutely free of charge.”

In the new Afghanistan, the Ritchies hope to help the tribal leaders reclaim their voice in any new government, something they haven’t had in 20 years.

They also want to help women learn to support themselves and have set up a non-profit foundation that teaches skills like sewing.

And now that the Taliban is out of power, young girls can finally go back to school. Once again, those satellite phones could make a difference. Hooked up to modem, the Ritchies believe the world of the Internet can open up for classrooms across this country.

Their work, they say, is just beginning. Afghanistan, after all, can cast a great spell.

Asked if he thinks he may have gotten too close to the country, James ruminates on life back home, watchinthis unfold on TV.

“There’s definitely problems with being too close,” he says. “But I don’t think they compare with being too far away.”

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