OPERATION CYCLONE

The covert operation that broke the Soviet Union also armed the men who would become al-Qaeda. The full story has never been told-until now.

In 1979, the CIA launched the largest covert action in its history. Code-named Operation Cyclone, its mission was to fund, arm, and train Afghan guerrillas to fight the Red Army. It worked. The Soviet Union bled out in the mountains of the Hindu Kush and collapsed less than a decade later.

But the weapons did not disappear. The radicalized fighters did not go home. And the networks built by the CIA, Pakistan's ISI, and Saudi Arabia's intelligence service did not dissolve. They metastasized.

Drawing on over two decades of research, declassified archives, Soviet-era documents, and firsthand testimonies from mujahideen commanders, CIA officers, and Afghan civilians, historian Michael I. Bryce delivers the definitive, unflinching account of the secret war that reshaped the modern world. Operation Cyclone traces the full, forty-year arc of the conflict: from the smoke-filled rooms of the Carter White House to the Stinger missile kills over Jalalabad; from Charlie Wilson's backroom deals to Osama bin Laden's mountain fortress; from the Soviet retreat across the Friendship Bridge to the American retreat from Kabul in 2021.

For anyone seeking to understand why 9/11 happened, why the War on Terror was fought, and why Afghanistan remains the graveyard of empires, Operation Cyclone is essential, revelatory, and impossible to put down.