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Frank Anderson, Former Spy Who Supplied Afghan Insurgents, Dies at 78 He supervised operations in and the Middle East and oversaw a top-secret link with a high official of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

By Sam Roberts

Feb. 19, 2020

Frank Anderson, an American spymaster who oversaw the Central Intelligence Agency’s covert mission to funnel weapons and other support to Afghan insurgents fighting their Soviet occupiers in the 1980s, died on Jan. 27 in Sarasota, Fla. He was 78.

The cause was a stroke, his wife, Donna Eby Anderson, said. Mr. Anderson lived in Sarasota and had been in hospice care.

During his nearly 27 years with the C.I.A., Mr. Anderson became the ranking American clandestine officer in the Arab world. He served as Beirut station chief; was promoted to chief of the Near East and South Asia division of the agency’s Directorate of Operations, its covert branch; and directed the agency’s technical services division, a role similar to that of James Bond’s “Q.”

Among his missions was, as head of the C.I.A.’s Afghan task force in the late 1980s, to supply weapons to the mujahedeen, the anti- Communist Muslim fighters who resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

The Soviets invaded in December 1979, setting off a nine-year proxy struggle that left as many as a million Afghan civilians and tens of thousands of troops and insurgents dead. It ended with the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, the year the collapsed.

The withdrawal left a vacuum and ignited a civil war with the , the Islamic fundamentalist political movement, that has raged for decades.

“The one lie that they could continue telling themselves was that all this was somehow worth it, because at least the military structure was intact and they were defending the socialist motherland,” Mr. Anderson said of the Soviet Union in an interview with the National Security Archive for CNN in 1997.

“What happened in Afghanistan was that that lie was exposed,” Mr. Anderson continued, and “the real strategic issue there was that by inflicting that defeat on the Red Army, we really did hasten the fall of an evil empire.”

Mr. Anderson also served three tours as station chief in Middle East countries, where his responsibilities included the oversight of a high- level informant within the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Around 1970, Robert Ames, a C.I.A. agent, had opened a back channel to the informant, Ali Hassan Salameh, who headed the personal security force and counterintelligence unit under Yasir Arafat, the P.L.O. chairman. Their covert contact was politically sensitive, to say the least: The P.L.O. was classified as a violent guerrilla group, and Mr. Salameh was a self-proclaimed terrorist.

“Anderson believed the C.I.A., through its careful cultivation of clandestine sources, had created the opportunity for the Oslo Accords,” Kai Bird wrote in “The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames” (2014), and had “brought the Palestinians in from the cold.”

The Oslo agreement called for an interim Palestinian government in Gaza and Jericho in the West Bank and eventual Israeli withdrawal. But the process collapsed after terror attacks against Israel resumed and Israelis continued to establish settlements in the West Bank.

After Mr. Salameh was killed in 1979 by Israeli intelligence, Mr. Anderson wrote to Mr. Salameh’s eldest son: “At your age, I lost my father. Today, I lost a friend whom I respected more than other men. From the memory of my past loss, and from the pain of today, I share your pain. I promise to honor your father’s memory — and to stand ready to be your friend.”

The condolence note was signed, “A friend.”

In 1993, as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel and Mr. Arafat were signing a peace accord at the White House, Mr. Anderson discreetly staged his own ceremony.

He commandeered a bus at C.I.A. headquarters and took dozens of newly minted officers and analysts to Arlington National Cemetery to pay homage to Mr. Ames, who had been killed in a truck bomb attack on the Embassy in Beirut in 1983.

Another Ames, Aldrich (no relation), later led to Mr. Anderson’s demotion and departure from the agency. was arrested in 1994 as an agency mole for Moscow. That October, R. James Woolsey, the director of central intelligence, severely reprimanded Mr. Ames’s supervisor, Milton Bearden, for serious failures during two stints in that role.

The next day, Mr. Anderson and John MacGaffin, who was second in command of covert operators, bestowed an official award on Mr. Bearden for outstanding work on the Afghan operation in the 1980s, when he was the station chief in neighboring .

Mr. Woolsey was furious. Mr. Anderson and Mr. MacGaffin were ordered reassigned, a penalty more severe than any meted out to the officials who supervised Mr. Ames. They retired rather than accept their reassignments.

The award was viewed by some as defiance of Mr. Woolsey, who otherwise, Steve Coll wrote in “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden” (2005), “liked and admired Anderson and relied on him heavily for analysis about Afghanistan and the Arab world.”

Mr. Bearden said in an email that Mr. Anderson never regretted the gesture of support that led to his rebuke. “Frank was one of the more thoughtful officers in the Directorate of Operations,” he said, “an extremely fair and honest man” with unfailingly good judgment.

Frank Ray Anderson was born on Feb. 1, 1942, in Chicago. His father, also named Frank, owned a bar and died when his son was 14. His mother, Dorothy (Ray) Anderson, worked for a radio manufacturer.

After serving in the Army domestically and in South Korea from 1959 to 1962, Mr. Anderson earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in Chicago and graduated from the Foreign Service Institute’s School of Arab Language and Middle East Area Studies in Beirut.

His first two marriages, to Dorothy Kaehn and Barbara Virginia Krieps, ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, Donna (Eby) Anderson; two sons from his first marriage, Frank Jr. and Mark; a daughter from his second marriage, Amy Anderson; a son, John, from his marriage to Ms. Eby; 13 grandchildren; and 15 great-grandchildren.

After leaving the C.I.A., Mr. Anderson was president of the Middle East Policy Council, whose mission is to educate the American public on issues in the region. He was an outspoken critic of the use of torture to extract information.

“As an operations officer and leader, I learned that good guys have bad days, and that fear, anger and ambition degrade, rather than enhance, judgment and decision making,” he wrote in The Miami Herald in 2014.

“Worse,” he added, “false ʻinformation’ that came from men who told their interrogators what they wanted to hear in order to stop the pain inflicted on them contributed to serious policy errors.”

“Mistreating detainees, even detainees who clearly deserve mistreatment,” he continued, “is ineffective, counterproductive, illegal and morally repugnant.”

As an agent, Mr. Anderson was methodical and old-school.

“Frank Anderson was one of the last of a generation of C.I.A. station chiefs who were more influential than the American ambassadors in the nations where they served,” Tim Weiner, a former New York Times reporter and the author of “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA” (2008), said in an email. “He saw himself as much as a diplomat as a spy. He would shake the hands of Arab leaders while picking their pockets with his free hand, but the handshake would seem warm and genuine.”

Mr. Anderson also preferred to rely on information from human sources, but usually with a measure of skepticism. Mr. Bird, in an interview, recalled that when he was researching his book, Mr. Anderson gave him this advice:

“Continue to exercise caution with stories that can only be corroborated by dead guys. Fabricated stories are almost never made up out of whole cloth, but are made by stitching together generally known facts with bits of uncheckable fantasy.”