Not a Good Day to Die (7 page)

Task Force 11 had only one goal: to kill or capture so-called “high-value targets” (HVTs), the phrase the U.S. military used to describe senior Al Qaida and Taliban leaders.

Task Force Sword had included 2,200 to 2,500 personnel, making it one of the biggest agglomerations of “black” special operators ever assembled. (“Black” special operations forces, such as Delta and SEAL Team 6, also known as “special mission units,” are those whose existence the Pentagon refuses to formally acknowledge.) Inside Sword were several component task forces, but from October until early January its principal muscle had been provided by a 100-strong squadron of Delta Force operators and support troops, code-named Task Force Green. These were the men at the very core of Task Force Sword, the direct action force trained to kick in doors, overwhelm a numerically superior force, and kill or capture America’s most dangerous enemies.

Established in 1977 at Fort Bragg as the United States’ premier counterterrorist unit, Delta had grown from a few dozen soldiers to a force of almost 1,000. Only about 250 were “operators,” super-fit commandos who executed direct action missions. They were divided into three squadrons—A, B, and C—of about seventy-five to eighty-five soldiers each. Within each squadron were three troops (not three soldiers, but three company-equivalent formations). Two were assault troops specializing in direct action. After completing Delta’s six-month operator training course, newcomers were assigned to an assault troop. A few handpicked veterans would graduate to the squadron’s reconnaissance and surveillance, or “recce,” troop. Smaller than the other troops, the recce troop’s missions included penetrating enemy lines unseen, watching enemy positions, and sniping. (The use of the British abbreviation
recce,
rather than the more American
recon,
reflected Delta’s roots as an organization modeled along the lines of the British Special Air Service, or SAS, by its founder, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who had served with the SAS as an exchange officer.) For reasons of operational security and practicality, Delta, now known also by its cover name of Combat Applications Group, was a very self-contained organization. The rest of the unit consisted of superbly trained and equipped mechanics, communications specialists, intelligence analysts, and other support troops, plus a headquarters staff. In addition, Delta had an aviation squadron based elsewhere on the East Coast, which also flew missions for the CIA.

The first Delta squadron to deploy as TF Green for the war in Afghanistan was B Squadron. It came home in December. A Squadron took its place, but only for a few weeks. By January 1 A Squadron had been replaced by another commando element. But these operators were from SEAL Team 6 and went by the name Task Force Blue.

Formed in 1980, SEAL Team 6 recruited its personnel from the rest of the Navy’s SEAL teams. The unit’s job was to conduct the same sort of antiterrorist direct action missions in which Delta specialized, but in a maritime environment. In other words, if terrorists threatened a cruise ship or an oil rig, Team 6 would likely get the call to take care of the situation. But the unit got off to a rocky start.

Richard Marcinko, the unit’s charismatic and hard-drinking founder and first commanding officer, was a legendary SEAL. But his flamboyant—some would say cowboylike—personality proved divisive within the team and the wider SEAL community. He changed command in 1983, but the damage to the team’s reputation did not pass so easily. Marcinko’s abrasive personality and the freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude he imprinted on the new organization ensured that for the rest of the decade many Delta soldiers viewed their Navy counterparts with suspicion verging on scorn. In 1990, Marcinko was sentenced to twenty-one months in jail after being convicted of several charges in connection with a scheme to use his former Team 6 colleagues to bilk the U.S. Treasury of over $100,000. His conviction further tarnished the reputation of the organization he had built from the ground up.

It took a few years, but after Marcinko’s departure, Team 6 slowly gained a measure of professionalism and respect. It also expanded, but, lacking Delta’s extensive support structure, it never grew to more than about a third of the size of its Army counterpart. Like Delta, the team acquired a cover name—Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DevGru—and matured so that by the early 1990s even some Army special operators felt its professionalism matched Delta’s. But as Team 6 became more proficient, the scorn Delta felt toward it evolved into antagonism as the Navy operators began to encroach on Delta’s turf, taking on land-based direct action missions that had been Delta’s exclusive preserve. Some of the bitterness—which was mutual—could be attributed to the fierce rivalry that had always existed between the respective special operations communities of the Army and Navy, from which both units recruited most of their men. One Navy officer who worked closely with both Army and Navy special ops forces described their relationship as “at best analogous to a sibling rivalry, and at worst, to a marriage coming apart.”

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the higher headquarters for both units, instituted a joint training regimen in the early 1990s that required both organizations to train with each other every three months. After a few years of this routine, the leaders in each organization had grown up beside each other. A mutual respect ensued. By the mid-1990s the friction had become a healthy rivalry rather than outright animosity. Strong friendships developed between operators in each organization.

Nevertheless, JSOC commander Major General Dell Dailey’s insertion of TF Blue into Afghanistan irked Army special operators, and Delta men in particular, who worried that their Navy counterparts’ limited land warfare training did not adequately prepare them for the extraordinarily demanding missions presented by operations in Afghanistan. They noted, disapprovingly, that while Delta would never seek to conduct a direct action mission at sea, Team 6 had no inhibitions about taking on missions that required a deep understanding of land warfare. “A lot of the SEALs are just boat guys, and you can’t shake and bake an infantry guy,” an Army operator in Afghanistan said. In the eyes of the Delta operators, much of the blame lay with Joint Special Operations Command, which seemed determined to treat Delta and Team 6 as interchangeable, despite their vastly different areas of expertise. The decision to withdraw Delta’s A Squadron early and put Team 6’s squadrons into the TF 11 rotation before all three Delta squadrons had seen action seemed nonsensical to Army types. The operators in Delta’s C squadron “were borderline suicidal that they weren’t in the fight yet,” according to an Army special ops source.

But Dailey, an Army special operations helicopter pilot who had also served in the Rangers, had little sympathy for the Delta operators. His decision to use the SEALs reflected his view that the “war on terror” had to be viewed in the same context as the Cold War: a long, drawn-out marathon, not a short sprint to victory. He expected the new war to last forty years and was determined to ensure JSOC could prosecute the fight with intensity over the long haul. Therefore he decided to give Delta a rest. Committing the unit to Afghanistan indefinitely, he believed, would burn Delta out within nine months. He knew Delta was superior to Team 6 in land operations, but he thought each unit easily surpassed the standard required for success.

Dailey applied the same thought process to the leadership of TF 11. In October Sword’s joint operations center moved from JSOC headquarters at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina to Masirah Island, off the coast of Oman in the Indian Ocean. Dailey went along as Sword’s commander. But in a move that roughly coincided with the change from Sword to 11, he put his entire operation in Masirah and Afghanistan, including his position as the task force commander, on a ninety-day rotation cycle. So in January he and his principal staff returned to Pope. His replacement was his deputy, Air Force Brigadier General Gregory Trebon. Curiously, although Task Force 11’s raison d’être was reconnaissance and direct action against high-value targets, Trebon had no background in those fields. A vastly experienced pilot who had logged over 7,000 flight hours in fifty-five different military and civilian airframes, Trebon was also a free-fall–qualified parachutist. He had spent most of his career in special operations and enjoyed a reputation for being a solid professional. But Trebon’s special ops assignments had been spent in aircraft units or coordinating the special operations air component on larger Air Force or joint staffs. His specialty was piloting C-141 transports specially configured for landing on dirt airstrips or dropping Rangers on low-level parachute missions. An expert at integrating Air Force special ops into commando operations, he had had no opportunity to learn the tactics, techniques, and procedures involved in hunting down and killing enemies on the ground.

Some JSOC personnel thought Dailey should have placed Delta’s commander, Colonel Jim Schwitters, or Captain Joe Kernan, the Team 6 commander, in charge of TF 11, depending on whether it was the turn of TF Green or TF Blue to take the lead in the task force. Dailey knew Trebon lacked boots-on-the-ground experience, but he believed he had an obligation to develop his deputy by giving Trebon responsibility. Dailey also knew that Tommy Franks preferred to work through generals whenever possible, and that Trebon was the protégé of Air Force General Charlie Holland, who as commander of U.S. Special Operations Command was Dailey’s boss.

In contrast with Trebon, there was one general in Bagram who knew all about how to chase down and kill “bad guys,” as the U.S. military liked to refer to its enemies. That was Brigadier General Gary Harrell. A barrel-chested man with a viselike handshake his aides felt compelled to warn visitors about, Harrell was a legendary special operator. He had spent all but eighteen months between December 1985 and July 2000 in a variety of jobs in Delta and JSOC, rising to command Delta between 1998 and 2000. Harrell was no stranger to manhunts. As Delta’s C Squadron commander, he had tracked drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in Colombia and warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia. Later, in the 1990s, he helped locate and capture war criminals in the Balkans.

Despite his background, Harrell was not in charge of any “door-kickers” in Afghanistan. Since July 2000 he had headed CENTCOM’s Joint Security Directorate, which oversaw the protection of U.S. forces across CENTCOM’s slice of the globe. But in November 2001 Franks ordered him to Afghanistan to command an intelligence “fusion cell” that would take all the intelligence being produced by U.S. assets in—or over—Afghanistan and fuse it together to be “stovepiped” back to Franks. The CENTCOM commander placed a lot of faith in Harrell, whom he referred to as his “quarterback,” and sent him to Afghanistan to bring more focus to the intel collection process. The burly one-star showed up in Bagram on November 25. Staffed with personnel from the military, the CIA, and other agencies, his fusion cell’s task was to sift through the reams of information the United States was gathering on the movements of high-value targets and decide what constituted “actionable” intelligence. The cell started off small, but after Harrell arrived it expanded to a force of fifty or sixty people. Like TF 11, Harrell’s new organization, which he named Task Force Bowie, worked directly for Franks, with no requirement to report to Mikolashek. Unlike TF 11, however, Bowie was located in Bagram, which was fast becoming the dominant military headquarters in Afghanistan. Harrell was also in charge of Bagram’s detention facility, a large multistory gray building where Taliban and Al Qaida prisoners were held and interrogated by U.S. intelligence personnel. In the opinion of special operators in Afghanistan, Harrell’s location gave him a substantial advantage over anyone back in Masirah.

Those on the ground in Bagram realized Harrell was more than an intelligence conduit. He was Franks’s personal representative at Bagram. “He [Franks] wanted his guy on the ground to make sure that things were going the right way,” said an officer who worked close to Harrell. Harrell not only brought a general’s star to bear, but also an intimidating weight of experience that few, if any, at Bagram, could match.

Nested inside Bowie, but reporting to TF 11, was a small organization that would soon have a major impact on the war. Called Advance Force Operations, or AFO, its mission was to conduct high-risk reconnaissance missions deep into enemy territory. AFO was not a standing organization back in the States, but rather a concept coordinated by a JSOC headquarters cell that could draw personnel from any special operations unit to meet a particular mission’s requirements. Troops attached to AFO were equally at home conducting deep tactical reconnaissance on a conventional battlefield or infiltrating a foreign capital wearing suits and carrying false passports in order to rent vehicles and office space in preparation for a direct action mission. AFO could also conduct terminal guidance (spotting targets for aircraft to strike), sniper missions, and direct action, if necessary. “The intent is to tailor the force for the situation, so it’s never quite the same, but it’s always small, it’s always cross-functional, and it’s always the best of the best working in it,” said an officer familiar with AFO.

Although AFO was small, relative to a typical Delta squadron, its mission—challenging even when compared to the Herculean tasks often required of Delta—was reflected in the seniority of its personnel. The AFO commander was usually a senior lieutenant colonel who had already commanded a Delta squadron, and almost all the NCOs were master sergeants or sergeants major—seasoned operators who could each draw on fifteen to twenty-five years of experience. “The ability to do that stuff required a degree of self-control and just being cool that almost went beyond what you would expect of anybody in the squadrons,” said an officer who worked on the JSOC staff in the 1990s.

The man JSOC chose to run AFO in Afghanistan was Pete Blaber.

Prior to taking charge of AFO early January, Blaber had been Delta’s operations officer, having already commanded B Squadron. As the operations officer, he had deployed to Masirah and then Afghanistan with TF Green before returning to the States in December. Now he was back to run what was arguably the most challenging mission in TF 11, the on-the-ground reconnaissance efforts in the search for the most senior enemy leaders. To cover Afghanistan’s 647,500 square kilometers Blaber had a tiny force of about forty-five operators, intel analysts, and commo guys. The bulk of these troops were divided into six teams—half in southern Afghanistan, led by a major, and half in northeastern Afghanistan, also commanded by a major. The small headquarters element Blaber would head up was based at Bagram with TF Bowie.

But all was not well in Bagram. The several hundred special ops troops gathering in khaki tents and ramshackle buildings at the base were some of the planet’s finest warriors, backed by a world-class intelligence capability. In briefings and planning sessions they exuded a calm, professional aura so polished it positively shone. But beneath the surface, tensions were pulling at the unity of the operation at Bagram. Some operators felt that the force gathering there was neither organized nor led in the most effective, logical manner; that it was not, in military-speak, “optimized for mission success.” Many were concerned at Trebon’s appointment as TF 11 commander and JSOC commander Dailey’s decision to replace Delta’s experienced land warriors with Team 6’s “boat guys.” To Army special ops types at Bagram, these steps smacked, at the very least, of a misplaced commitment to the U.S. military principle of “jointness”—the notion that combat effectiveness is always enhanced by the closest possible integration of the four military services. “The Green position was ‘We should do this, give it to us. We don’t need anybody replacing us, we’ll just do this ourselves,’” recalled a JSOC officer.

Dailey was a divisive figure in the special operations community. A former head of the 160
^th
Special Operations Aviation Regiment, his appointment as JSOC commander made him the latest in a string of Army and Air Force pilots to be given senior positions in U.S. Special Operations Command and JSOC. This trend upset many of JSOC’s ground warriors, who viewed their direct action missions as JSOC’s raison d’être and couldn’t see why aviators were placed in charge of such operations. “Guys who come from aviation units know how to manage money, but they don’t know how to tactically employ their ground elements,” said a Delta NCO. Among these men, Dailey had a reputation for parochialism and risk aversion. An officer who worked for him said Dailey nurtured “a long-held gripe” against ground special ops units. Other operators agreed that Dailey’s experiences in the 160
^th
, whose pilots are often referred to as “taxi drivers” or “bus drivers” by the operators they ferry into combat, had left him with a big chip on his shoulder. In after-action reviews of training exercises and combat missions, 160
^th
officers often were sharply criticized by their Delta, Ranger, and Special Forces peers if the helicopter portion of an operation was less than perfect. It was easy to see how such experiences might have left Dailey bearing a grudge that came to the fore when he took command of JSOC, they said. “Now the guy who was head of the fleet of taxi cabs is running the show,” noted a special operations source in Bagram. Dailey also believed, according to an Army officer, that a general, simply by virtue of his rank, was automatically qualified to command and control ground operations, even if he had no real ground experience.

But other officers, particularly those who knew Dailey through service in the 160
^th
, had a far more positive view of the general. “He always seemed to me to be a fair-minded, pretty smart tactical leader,” said a field grade officer who had worked for Dailey in the 160
^th
. “He was very popular as commander of the 160
^th
—very charismatic.” These officers were skeptical of the view that Dailey was biased against ground-pounders. As a junior officer he had served in the Rangers, they said, noting that near his Master Aviator Badge he still wore the Expert Infantryman Badge, an award given only to infantrymen who pass an exacting series of field tests.

In theory, Dailey was not in Trebon’s chain of command, which ran straight to Franks, who had operational control of TF 11. But in reality, as the deputy JSOC commander, Trebon frequently answered to Dailey, who from his North Carolina headquarters continued to exert control over how his forces were used in Afghanistan.

Dailey’s performance during video-teleconferences with TF 11’s staff did little to alter his reputation as a micromanager—some JSOC staffers referred to him as “the 6,000-mile screwdriver”—and a black special ops elitist averse to having JSOC forces work with white special ops forces, let alone the conventional troops now deploying into Afghanistan. Given these circumstances, it was almost inevitable that tensions would arise between Trebon, the Air Force officer in charge of a manhunt, and Harrell, whose résumé seemed to make him more qualified to do Trebon’s job than Trebon himself.

Edwards, the deputy CFLCC commander watching events unfold from Kuwait, could see Harrell pushing the envelope of the authority Franks had given him. The CENTCOM commander placed great trust in Harrell, Edwards noted, “but he gave Gary no operational responsibilities when he put him over there.” Harrell strained against these restrictions. “Gary’s a good officer,” Edwards said. “And good, intelligent, aggressive officers tend to fill vacuums.” In this case, the vacuum was the lack of strong, experienced leadership being applied by Trebon, and both Harrell and Dailey were trying to fill it. “There was clearly friction between what Gary Harrell was doing or thought he was doing, and what Dell Dailey was doing or thought he was doing,” Edwards said. “Now, I say that very cautiously, because probably never in the United States’ history was there as much cooperation as was shown there, but that didn’t eliminate all of the tensions over who was actually going to control black SOF [special operations forces] in country, and exactly what Gary and his little Task Force Bowie was to do as an intelligence fusion operation, and who had operational control.”

Some in TF 11 were also unhappy with Dailey’s and Trebon’s concept for how the task force was to operate, which was to keep the direct action force—first Green, and then Blue—based intact at Bagram, waiting for intelligence from Bowie to pinpoint a high-value target, at which point the door-kickers would launch on a raid to kill or capture the target. The hours required to fly from Bagram to the eastern provinces where bin Laden and the other senior enemy figures were probably hiding made some think it would have been better to divide the direct action force into smaller elements and push them out to safe houses in those provinces. “It became an unwieldy process,” an operator said. “Most of the guys knew it wasn’t the best way of operating…. You cannot fly in a helicopter in real time to a target from Bagram and have a high likelihood of killing or capturing someone. You have to be deployed forward.”