IT was something I wasn't meant to see.

I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

That place was the remote Pakistan town of Parachinar that straddles the frontier with Afghanistan, and the time was back in the late 1980s as the CIA upped its support for the Afghan mujahideen guerrillas fighting the Soviet Red Army.

What I stumbled across that day while travelling with my Afghan hosts, who made me swear to secrecy, was a consignment of CIA-supplied weapons that were part of a covert operation known as Cyclone.

In this instance they were crates containing the shoulder- held surface-to-air missile system known as Stinger that went on to wreak havoc against Russian helicopters and changed the course of that war.

I mention this in light of the latest leaks about CIA officers operating covertly in southern Turkey, steering arms consignments to Syrian rebels currently fighting the regime of President Bashar al Assad.

The pressure now on Assad is intense. Yesterday's defection to the rebel opposition of Nawaf al Fares, Syria's ambassador to Iraq, was just the latest body blow to Syria's beleaguered Ba'athist regime.

Already there have been suggestions that leaking the CIA's role in guiding arms supplies and vetting an ever growing number of rebel recipients was deliberately orchestrated in an attempt to further intensify the pressure on a Syrian leader so far unwilling to give way diplomatically.

Whatever the reasoning, there now seems little doubt that since March of this year the CIA has been working closely with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to help channel assault rifles, rocket- propelled grenades, ammunition and some anti-tank weapons through a shadowy network in southern Turkey to Syrian opposition fighters.

This of course begs the question: which fighters?

Perhaps conscious of the problems they encountered in the wake of their 1980s Operation Cyclone in Afghanistan, when many of the weapons the CIA supplied subsequently found their way into the hands of Islamic extremists, America's spooks are doing their damnedest to ensure the same doesn't happen in Syria.

This, of course, is easier said than done. In the chaotic many- headed battle against Assad there are a myriad players and motives.

On Syria's frontlines there are now about 100 rebel formations, up from roughly 70 just a few months ago. These range in size from a handful of combatants to groups of hundreds of fighters. Given such a mix just who, exactly, gets what in the way of CIA weapons handouts is fraught with danger and the possibility of creating "blowback", as intelligence community parlance calls the unintended consequences of any covert operation.

Think of the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan or the monstrous anti-Sandinista Contra rebels along the Honduran-Nicaraguan frontier that received CIA guns and support and you will understand what I'm getting at.

Among the dangers too is how things will play out among Syria's rebels once the common enemy, the Assad regime, falls.

According to one arms distributor based in the Turkish city of Istanbul and quoted in a recent Time magazine interview, the question of controlling the weapons after the regime's demise has been something of a priority in the decision making of the current arms supply jamboree.

The distributor said: "We know the men on the street. We know that this man will return to his work, surrender his weapons to the new command, and that another will not. We know who we are giving weapons to."

But just how can he or others like him be so sure? Arms once distributed are notoriously difficult to retrieve. What's more, the political affiliations and religious leanings of those who comprise Syria's rebel groups are part of the criteria on which the arms supply is based.

Put another way, the CIA is only one of numerous overseers of arms to Syria's rebels, among whose ranks there are also foreign fighters, Libyans, Tunisians, Iraqis, Lebanese, units solely made up of Salafis and al Qaeda affiliates such as Jabhat al Nusra.

As former Middle East CIA field officer Robert Baer recently pointed out: "All of the Syrian opposition groups and rebels are already spoken for in one way or another. Turkey has its favourites, as does Jordan, and the most militant Islamic factions are supported by Qatar, where Syria's Muslim Brotherhood long ago set up shop."

With consignments of powerful new weapons flowing into both the Syrian regime courtesy of Russia, and to the opposition from Gulf States and the CIA, Syria's civil war is sure to intensify in the coming months. A conflict which cries out for a diplomatic settlement perpetuates itself with the wrong kind of outside help, for outside interests.

The veteran writer on Middle East affairs, Charles Glass, recently summed it up perfectly: "Syria is a house on fire, and the US, Russia and others have turned up with flamethrowers."