88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary (34 page)

It was around this time that Dave approached me. With all of us working eighteen-hour days, none of us could afford to expend unnecessary effort. Why was I wasting my time with Jalil? I took some umbrage at that, but it was a reasonable question, and it caused me to reflect. Sure, the chances of our getting anything really useful from this contact were undoubtedly remote. But in my estimation, the potential long odds opportunity to sow dissension among the Taliban leadership, unique as it was, made it worth the investment in time. And in all honesty, there was something else, too: I was drawn to this sort of contact like a moth to a flame. In the Clandestine Service, closing with the enemy—talking to terrorists, if you like—is what we do. I’m not sure I could have passed up the chance to spar with Mullah Jalil, even if, on some level, I’d wanted to.

And there was yet another reason to maintain contact with Jalil, one more devious. In mid-October, Jalil asked if I could ensure that his ministry’s guesthouse located on the eastern outskirts of Kandahar along the Kandahar-Kabul highway would not be bombed. With that assurance, he would be able to stay there, and use the location as a safe place to meet with his Taliban colleagues, and thus develop information that would benefit us both. I readily agreed, and informed headquarters that this location should be carefully watched via aerial reconnaissance. If, as I suspected, Jalil eventually took advantage of this “no-fire” zone to host a significant meeting, it might provide us with an excellent opportunity to kill multiple members of the Taliban leadership at a stroke.

On November 16, with the Taliban in the throes of near panic over the recent fall of Kabul, Jalil reported that some of the senior leaders were discussing the possibility of surrender. That evening, we received a highly reliable report from a vetted source that Omar and other members of the
Shura
were meeting at the Foreign Office Guesthouse. This was what we’d been waiting for. The report had come to us late, though—well after the scheduled start of the meeting. We reported it immediately, in hopes there would still be time to strike. The presence or absence of vehicles in the area would tell us whether the opportunity were still live. Hours passed, with no indication of a reaction from the military. Once again, a rare chance had been missed.

I was awakened in my bedroom about two o’clock in the morning by a call from an old friend. “Dan,” an experienced ops officer, was now the senior military targeting officer for CTC. It seemed that half the agency was being drawn into CTC one way or another.

“The Air Force wants to bomb the Foreign Office Guesthouse.” Referring to Jalil by his code name, he inquired whether we considered him an asset. An “asset,” in CIA parlance, is a recruited source, someone to whom we owe loyalty and protection. Mullah Jalil was certainly not that.

“Why do they want to bomb it now?” I asked. “It’s too late. The meeting’s over. [Jalil] is no asset, and I have no problem bombing his location, provided there’s a target there. But killing [Jalil] by himself makes no sense: he’s not a commander, he doesn’t control any guns, and he’s no threat to us. Since now the Taliban has used the place successfully for a high-level meeting, they’re likely to use it again. We should wait, and bomb it then.”

After we rang off, I had the suspicion that Dan had only heard a small part of what I’d said. He’d called with a simple question from the Air Force—“Was this a no-strike location?”—and I had given him his answer: “No.” I had a sinking feeling I’d just signed the mullah’s death warrant. I shook my head at the stupidity of it all.

As the next morning’s phone call made clear, I had in fact done almost exactly what I’d feared. After Jalil calmed down a bit, we spoke about the situation, and whether the collapse of their position in the
north might induce the Taliban leadership to explore terms of surrender. As we prepared to ring off, I again expressed concern about his plight, and the loss of his house.

“Where will you go?” I asked. The words were hardly out of my mouth when I realized my mistake: at this point, I was the last person in the world to whom he would reveal his whereabouts, ever. There was a long pause, followed by a dry, mirthless laugh. He hung up without another word. Dave must have noticed something odd about my expression as I walked through the outer office. He looked up at me quizzically from behind his desk.

“I’m becoming a very bad man,” I said.

Mullah Jalil called me again on November 18. The leaders in Kandahar were discussing whether they should explore possible peace terms, and were seeking to establish channels to Karzai through Haji Bashir Noorzai, the drug lord, and Mullah Naqib, yet another
jihad
-era commander who was the master of Arghandab, just north of Kandahar. They didn’t feel they could reach any decisions, though, until they could consult with some of the senior Taliban commanders fleeing from the north. Even if the commanders couldn’t reach Kandahar, he said, Omar might be able to consult with some of them via radio if they could get as far south as Zabol Province. Apparently becoming impatient with his colleagues’ reflexive indirection, Jalil himself was trying to get in touch with Karzai, he said. Two days later, he would succeed.

NOVEMBER 19, 2001

T
HE HELICOPTER SWOOPED IN
low, dipping quickly between the high ridges on either side of the valley. No sooner had it landed than Gul Agha broke for it at a dead run. His speed was surprising for such a big man. His family members and senior commanders, who had been standing with him as they tracked the helo’s progress, trailed after him as best they could in the darkness. Suddenly, he pitched forward, face-first, and fell heavily to the ground, as though poleaxed. The others coming up from behind stopped well short of him, appalled, and busied themselves in embarassed silence, studying the ground or the sky as their chieftain gathered himself, grunting, and slapped the dust from his clothes. As soon as he was upright and reoriented, Gul Agha resumed his sprint, this time not stopping until he had wrapped Mark in a smothering embrace.

The reasons for Gul Agha’s enthusiasm were not entirely sentimental. Three days before, on November 16, one of his reconnoitering patrols came across the Taliban “lost convoy” we had been tracking the night of the 14th, now dug in a short distance from the western entry to the Shin Naray Valley. Quick requests for an airstrike made from Islamabad were denied, for the familiar reason: no U.S. eyes-on to verify the target. With a Special Forces ODA present, including a forward air controller, the Taliban vehicles might have been attacked from the sky in a matter of minutes. Instead, they remained at large, liable to strike
at any moment. From what we knew, it appeared Gul Agha had done all we could expect, but had received little support in return. We were tempting fate; we needed to get a team in with him as soon as possible.

“Duane,” a paramilitary specialist sent forward by CTC, had joined the station a few days before. He’d been told by CTC/SO that once an initial team had deployed with Karzai, he would lead the next one dispatched in the south. That wasn’t going to happen: Dave pulled him into his office for a private chat. Mark was a veteran station officer, Duane was told, and a highly competent one; he had deep knowledge of Afghanistan and of Afghan politics; and most important, he had established an excellent relationship with Gul Agha. Mark would be the one to lead the team.

“I don’t trust this guy,” Dave muttered to me after he and Duane emerged.

“Duane will be fine,” I said. “He can’t help what he was told. He doesn’t care who’s in charge; he just wants to get into the fight.” I was right. Duane did an excellent job for us, and never caused a bit of trouble.

We sent out an immediate cable, proposing that Mark and Duane link up with ODA 583, which had been designated by Fifth Group to join Gul Agha and was assembling at Jacobabad. Two other specially trained enlisted men from the military’s “Gray Fox” program were also available at Jacobabad to add to the team. I had worked with operators like them before. In addition to their military skills and specialized intelligence training, and their access to military communications, they had the benefit of being formally under our control, and so could be assigned as we saw fit, without Pentagon permission.

The following day brought good news. Several truckloads of Pak Army weapons arranged by General Jafar and turned over to Gul Agha’s men at Quetta rolled into Shin Naray; these were augmented later the same day by several more weapons bundles, courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.

The morning of the 18th brought less welcome news. Gul Agha’s people reported that while the Pak-supplied RPG-7s were fine, the AK-47s were old and heavily used, and many were essentially unserviceable.
When I relayed this to Jafar at an emergency meeting at ISI Headquarters, the general didn’t want to believe it.

“Afghans are reporting this to you?” When the word “Afghan” crossed the lips of this Punjabi tank commander, it sounded like a curse. I wouldn’t be able to verify the report until my officers were on the ground and, given the number and varied provenance of Gul Agha’s weapons, probably not completely even then, but I asked that Jafar look into what might have happened in the meantime anyway.

Shortly after I returned, Dave walked into my office. I could always tell from his expression when he was bearing bad news. We had developed a sort of joking protocol for such times. “Wait,” I’d say, raising my hand. Walking out from behind my desk, I would lie down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling as though in a psychiatrist’s office. “Okay. Let me have it.”

But I could see that this was no time for jokes. The cable he handed me stated that the ODA at Jacobabad could
not
deploy to Afghanistan. Instead, a “pilot team” comprised of two CIA case officers—Mark and Duane—along with the two Gray Fox operators should join Gul Agha in Shin Naray alone. The military members of the team should remain at Jacobabad and would only be allowed to deploy if reporting from the CIA-only advance force justified the additional personnel. I was incredulous.

I was nearly as disbelieving when Hank himself picked up immediately on the other end of the secure line to headquarters. After the briefest of greetings, I got straight to the point.

“Hank, we’ve received a headquarters cable stating that only CIA personnel can deploy with Gul Agha, and that the ODA has to remain behind.”

“That’s right.”

“Look, the Taliban has forces in the area, and they could attack Gul Agha’s people at any time. We don’t know for sure how many fighters he has, and we don’t know whether they’ll stand and fight. We need to have the military with us.”

“Our people will be armed. They can defend themselves.”

“No, if we’re going to have to rely on ourselves, we need to have a
minimum number of guns to maintain a defensive position until the team can be extracted. Besides, the most important thing for us is to be able to direct CAS [close-air support]. We need the ODA for that.”

“The Gray Fox operators have been trained to direct CAS.”

“Fine if they’ve had some training, but we need people who do this for a living.”

“Well, it may sound harsh,” he said mildly, as if in sorrow, “but if people are going to die, it’s better we limit the number of casualties.”

This was insane. The full team we proposed to send was already extremely small—sixteen people, at a maximum. If we sent in a much smaller number, with no organic link to the military and without any adequate means to defend themselves, then all surely
would
die if anything went wrong. As I began to protest yet again, Hank raised his voice in anger.

“Look, CIA has always gone in first. That’s the model we’ve used all over the country.”

Ah, so that was it: one-upping the military. In fact, what he was saying was not true. CIA officers may have deployed in advance of the military in the north, but it was different in the south, where we were operating behind enemy lines, and he knew it. When Team Echo had deployed with Karzai just three days before, CIA and the military had gone in together. But Hank had moved on. “. . . And another thing. What were you doing discussing a joint interrogation center with the Pakistanis? You had no authorization. . . .”

A few days before, in anticipation that the Pakistanis would soon be capturing Arab fighters and members of al-Qa’ida escaping across the Afghan border, I had raised with General Jafar the idea of establishing a joint interrogation center under U.S. supervision, in which we could invite friendly Arab intelligence services to participate as well. The idea would be to leverage our extensive intelligence and the Arabs’ local knowledge and linguistic capability in one location, where information could be instantly shared among all of us, and where there would be continual CIA monitoring to ensure that no human rights abuses occurred. Jafar had responded enthusiastically, and was willing to take the idea to President Musharraf, but when I raised it formally with headquarters, CTC had quashed it.

Once again, I was being slow on the uptake. Here I’d thought this was a discussion. It was nothing of the sort. Hank might have been speaking still, but I could no longer hear him; his voice had been drowned out by a roaring sound in my ears. There was no point in continuing.

“Nice speaking with you, as always,” I said. I held the receiver over the cradle for a moment, and then dropped it.

I sent an immediate message to Mark in Jacobabad, explaining the situation. We both knew that he had the option to back out, given the unnecessary risks he and the others were suddenly being asked to assume. I didn’t mention it, though, and neither did he: it was his duty to go forward, and we both knew that, too. This was his operation, and he was the case officer for it. Mark was the doting father of five children.

Among the many dozens of officers rotating on temporary assignment into and out of the station during that time were a large number of annuitants, some long retired and quite senior in their day, including five former deputy chiefs of the Near East Division—three of whom were present at that moment. That night, the unofficial doyen among the annuitants, Dan Webster, wrote a long e-mail to Hank’s deputy John Massie, with whom he had worked in the past. He recounted the history of CTC’s “obstructionism,” of which the current withholding of the ODA was but the most recent, and most egregious, example.