Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (19 page)

Schroen flew into Afghanistan in a Russian-made helicopter, carrying a war chest of $3 million to encourage leaders of the Northern Alliance to join the hunt for bin Laden. It required energetic diplomacy. Three weeks later, the first joint CIA/SF operations in Afghanistan got off to a mixed start. In the early hours of 20 October 2001, a Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha Team—codenamed 555 and therefore nicknamed “Triple Nickel,” led by Chief Warrant Officer David Diaz—landed somewhere in the Panshir Valley. Two helicopters carried the eleven-man group and a heavy load of equipment including laser designators to direct missiles onto targets. Each designator weighed around 90 pounds. Though Schroen’s people had carefully marked the landing zone with lights that should have been identifiable even without the aid of night-vision goggles, placed at coordinates known to the pilots, both helicopters landed in the wrong place. The Alpha team, burdened with up to 300 pounds of equipment per man, exited the choppers and went to ground.

Diaz, spotting flashlights moving toward their impromptu landing zone, moved forward alone, machine gun ready. As the
Washington Post
’s Dana Priest later recounted,
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Diaz told his men: “I’m going to try to talk to these guys. If I hit the ground I expect you guys to start shooting.” The leader of the group coming toward them was “a monster of a man.” He stretched out a welcoming hand to Diaz and his unquestionably American voice boomed: “Hi! I’m Hal. Damn glad to meet you!” Hal was also known as Murray. A former SEAL, he was now a freelance working on contract for the CIA, having resigned from it earlier in his career. In another context, Diaz might have joked, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” The encounter in Afghanistan marked the symbiosis of CIA and Special Forces as a new warfighting organism that nevertheless shared some common features with the MAC/SOG (Military Assistance Command Special Operations Group) of Vietnam days.

After a slow start due to political maneuvers in Washington and Islamabad to hobble the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, the first twelve of a Green Beret “Alpha” team, having landed by helicopter, had to ride on horseback for eight hours to link up with General Abdul Rashid Dostum. With them went two operators from the U.S. Air Force’s own commandos, the Special Tactics team. Only two of the party had ridden a horse prior to their introduction to Afghanistan. The combined CIA/SF teams called in U.S. airstrikes against closely packed formations of Taliban tanks and artillery. They also secured helicopter landing grounds for Green Beret Special Forces and acted as guides to the newcomers, “who arrived with their arsenal of laser target designators to enable U.S. aircraft to strike [more accurately] Taliban positions.”
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During the following forty-nine days, a mere 316 SF soldiers with three CIA teams, and a handful of Air Force air controllers with godlike powers to call down fires from heaven, turned the tide in Afghanistan. Taliban forces retreated from their last redoubt, the southern city of Kandahar, before the Northern Alliance on 6 December.

Behind this dramatic victory, a massive logistical exercise had taken place controlled by General Tommy Franks at U.S. Central Command and closely monitored by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It involved 40,000 men and women, 393 aircraft, and thirty-two ships co-ordinated with the help of thirty-one nations. Alongside attacks on suspected al Qaeda bases with Tomahawk cruise missiles, 200 men from 75th Ranger Regiment parachuted onto a high-altitude drop zone to secure it for a force of incoming Marines.

But as U.S. policy became obsessed by Iraq—by its mirage of weapons of mass destruction, the refined cruelty of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and the lure of cheap oil—the early victory in Afghanistan was foregone. America’s mistake in walking away from the Afghanistan power vacuum after the Soviet withdrawal in 1991 was repeated in 2003. Little by little, like the ragged-trousered army of the Vietcong, the Taliban returned. It also mutated from a vulnerable force equipped with tanks and artillery into a world-class guerrilla army.

The initial U.S. operations, successful as they were militarily, converted CIA paramilitaries into de facto fighting soldiers, at times embedded with regular army formations in the Global War on Terror. Colonel Kathryn Stone concluded: “The full spectrum dominance bought with this CIA-SOF integration of warfighting capabilities has produced a new, successful battlefield synergy. Improving the
ways
of warfighting by integrating all
means
has not only succeeded, but that has transformed the traditional view on the prosecution of armed conflict.”
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But, as a judge advocate who believes that the rule of law and defense of America are synonymous, she offered a warning that the synergy of plausibly-deniable CIA methods and more lawfully accountable Army strategies could go badly wrong if the process were not handled carefully. She had a point. CIA operators, if taken prisoner, are deniable by their government and pay the price. Special Forces soldiers enjoy at least the fig-leaf of the Geneva Conventions. The problem with this impeccable logic, however, is that special operations, usually beyond the front line, are often unstable and not easily resolved by reference to the classic risk-versus-gain equation of intelligence-gathering theory. Luck, for which there is no legal remedy or reward, often plays a major part in the outcome. The death of the CIA field officer Mike Spann on 25 November 2001, less than a month after the first U.S. fighting unit went into action, illustrates the point.

Dostum had corralled hundreds of Taliban prisoners in the courtyard of a 19th century fort north of Mazar-I-Sharif. The prisoners had not been searched and Dostum’s men in control of the fort were apparently unaware that the cellars, accessible to the prisoners, concealed an armory of thousands of automatic rifles. Spann and Tyson had heard that the prisoners included an exotic individual who spoke excellent English. Armed with Kalashnikov rifles and pistols, they went into the courtyard to find the foreigner. The man was a bearded Caucasian with black shoulder-length hair. He resembled the mass murderer Charles Manson. His local name, a nom de guerre, was Abdul Hamid. Spann noted that the suspect was wearing a British army sweater. In this part of the world, the garment might just have been worn, at some time, by a British Special Forces operator. In the fort that day, it was a sinister souvenir.

Spann repeatedly asked the man: “Where are you from? Who brought you here?” “Hamid” blanked him. Spann snapped his fingers in front of the prisoner’s face. “Hey! Wake up!” Still the man said nothing. The CIA men conferred, then explained their deal to the prisoner, who was subsequently identified as a twenty-year-old Californian. Ironically, having espoused a faith that rejects alcohol, the prisoner shared his original, American name with that of a well known brand of Scotch whisky. Once upon a time, “Hamid” had been “Johnny Walker.” His second surname was Lindh.

“I explained to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is,” Spann told his comrade Tyson in a stage whisper directed at the prisoner’s ears. “He’s got to decide if he wants to live or die and die here…. He’s going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life. It’s his decision, man.”
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Still Hamid/Walker Lindh said nothing. A necessarily short, tactical interrogation ended there. Walker rejoined the other prisoners. A very short time after that, a burst of automatic fire inside the compound triggered a gun battle that was to last three days. One of the first to die was Spann.

Tyson shot his way out of the compound and summoned reinforcements. Soon, the courtyard became an abattoir as a C-130 gunship arrived and rained down lead. On the ground, reinforcements included a team of six British Special Boat Service commandos. They joined other guards on the high wall surrounding the courtyard and blazed away with machine guns. Someone called for close air support. A guided bomb exploded on the position from which the call was made, killing several of Dostum’s men. It was not the first, or last, own-goal of this sort in Afghanistan. As the battle drew to its end, a handful of Taliban fighters retreated to the cellars. Dostum flooded the place to flush them out. Around eighty recaptured prisoners included John Walker Lindh. Later, he entered a plea bargain in the U.S. and received a twenty-year prison sentence.

The victory lost through neglect was not foreseen when the new, combined CIA/Green Beret units—initially seventy-eight men operating from Bagram airfield—repeatedly directed deadly air strikes on Taliban positions. Victory-into-defeat might have been anticipated had successive U.S. administrations identified the source of its troubles as a philosophy—Islamist fundamentalism—rather than its messenger, Osama bin Laden. Yet the CIA had itself used the idea of Islam (or a version of it) as a psychological weapon. In the mid-1980s the Agency, in alliance with Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Directorate (ISI), had stoked the theocratic fires in Afghanistan and neighboring Soviet republics such as Uzbekistan. The CIA translated the Koran into local languages and printed thousands of copies that were smuggled into the region as part of the ongoing Cold War.
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British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, on a high-profile visit to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, was also on-message. She reminded Afghan refugees: “You left your country because you refused to live under a godless Communist system which is trying to destroy your religion and your independence.”

Soon after the prisoners’ revolt in the fort compound at Mazar-I-Sharif, there was a second catastrophe involving a guided bomb known as JDAM (for “Joint Direct Attack Munition”). The victims were a 14-strong Green Beret team escorting the prime minister, Hamid Karzai, on his advance into Kandahar as the Taliban retreated. They identified a cave complex in which Taliban guerrillas were thought to be hiding. They called down an air strike. Flying high overhead, a B-52 crewman pressed the button to release the 2,000-pound bomb onto its target. There was a problem. This was that the target identified by the guidance system was the position occupied by the Green Berets calling the strike. Two of them were killed outright. Others lost limbs or suffered multiple injuries. Karzai was knocked unconscious and suffered a number of cuts. Three of his fighters, sitting on a wall a few yards away, were vaporized. How could this have happened? The most plausible theory is that at some point, a battery in the GPS receiver, from which target coordinates were sent, was replaced. The system would then go into default mode to display the only coordinates it recognized: its own. If this went uncorrected, then the team inadvertently targeted itself.

The first U.S. soldier to be killed by enemy fire was Nathan Ross Chapman, aged 31, of Georgetown, Texas. A Green Beret communications expert, he was working alongside a CIA agent on a high-risk contact assignment with tribal leaders near Khost, on the border with Pakistan. Making contacts and gathering intelligence are central to the role of Special Forces in a guerrilla war. The British have lost a number of their most talented people on just such assignments, among them Sarah Bryant, aged 26, a Pashtu-speaking corporal in the Intelligence Corps. On 4 January 2002, as Nathan Chapman and his CIA companion left their meeting, they were ambushed. The Agency’s man, though wounded, survived.

In 2002, after the Taliban were temporarily expelled from most of Afghanistan, the new CIA/SF synthesis did not always produce the right result. There were growing pains and mutual recriminations. The heat was on Osama bin Laden. It had been since at least 1996 when a team within the Agency’s Counterterrorist Center, codenamed Alec Station, had dedicated itself obsessively to the sole objective of nailing him. As a result of the 1998 bomb attacks on two U.S. embassies in Africa, President Clinton wanted bin Laden, alive or dead. After 9/11, that sentiment was shared by Clinton’s successor, George W. Bush. Repeated efforts were made to assassinate fundamentalist Islam’s prophet of doom. But like those earlier targets Castro and Gaddafi, he was not around when the moment came to strike. He had the same sense of impending danger as T. S. Eliot’s mystery cat Macavity (“He’s called the hidden paw….” Whenever retribution was imminent, “Macavity’s not there.”) The U.S. Navy, relying on CIA intelligence, struck bin Laden’s main training camp in Afghanistan with 75 Tomahawk cruise missiles. Bin Laden, tipped off—perhaps by allies in Pakistan—was not present.

Arguments continue about the failure of the world’s most sophisticated intelligence and military machine to assassinate bin Laden. He had been in their sights many times. At the top of the military pyramid, clearance to proceed was never given until 9/11 happened. Some commentators believe that the bruising experience of Somalia and the spectacle of American bodies being desecrated there in 1993 had infected the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a risk-averse culture during the Clinton years. Special Forces, with their gung-ho testosterone energy were perceived as “‘cowboys’ whose operations would only get senior officers into trouble and damage their careers.”
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Risk avoidance was not part of President George W. Bush’s agenda after 9/11. His finding directed the CIA to use all necessary means to destroy Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Yet, as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would conclude in November 2009, serious efforts to nail bin Laden before he escaped from entrapment in the rabbit warren of Tora Bora, near the Pakistan frontier, mean putting American lives on the line. The committee’s report,
Tora Bora Revisted
…, notes: “The injection of more U.S. troops and the resulting casualties would have contradicted the risk-averse ‘light-footprint’ model formulated by Rumsfeld and Franks. But commanders on the scene and elsewhere in Afghanistan argued that the risks were worth the reward.”