by Dalton Fury
TGO meant “terminal guidance operations.” They essentially were to establish a static observation post from which they could control aircraft and drop bombs. That constraint did not sit well with a bunch of warriors and specialists like the Green Berets.
Mulholland also required his men to follow a strict interpretation of the law of land warfare by wearing U.S. military uniforms, ostensibly to prevent friendly-fire incidents. As often happens when unrealistic demands are placed on independent-minded soldiers by a commander who is well removed from the skirmish lines, obedience becomes largely selective. The men from 5th Group determined that they could meet the intent of their commander’s orders by wearing U.S. desert tan uniform pants, but everything else came straight out of an Afghan wardrobe. They had to blend in to have any hope of success.
Manny reported that intelligence was saying that bin Laden’s second-incommand, the Egyptian doctor Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been killed in a bombing raid in the mountains. A similar report came from British intelligence sources, which added an interesting interpretation.
Mohammed Atef, bin Laden’s military commander and numberthree man, was killed in Kabul several weeks earlier. Now with the number two, Dr. Zawahiri, also reportedly eliminated, the Brits assessed that the weakness in leadership would make bin Laden remain in the mountains and slug it out to the finish.
However, the CIA followed that British report with sharply contrasting news that Pakistan forces had detained an unknown number of al Qaeda foot soldiers who had fled the mountains and attempted to cross the border.
Interesting. So which was it? Why were some of the bin Laden fighters running for Pakistan if bin Laden himself was planning to stay in Tora Bora? Was he planning to make a valiant stand and fight to the finish against the invading Westerners, something reminiscent of how Muhammad, the seventh-century messenger of Allah, would have acted? Or were the reported foot soldiers captured crossing the border just scouting a possible escape route for the boss, so bin Laden could also attempt to flee, and live and fight another day?
We had no answer, but it indicated that we needed to move, and fast. We were growing anxious to get to the battlefield. . .but first we needed some sleep.
Our new accommodations were reminiscent of a college frat house, sans the smell of alcohol, the pounding of loud music, and the sharp crack of colliding pool balls. Besides the Green Berets, the current guests ranged from local Afghan fighters to cooks and housekeepers to your standard mix of commando types. Before we bedded down for a few hours, Manny gave us a morning departure time of 0700 hours.
I powered up the mini laptop to check messages from the boss, Colonel Ashley. The in-box contained a lengthy message of great importance, and declared that General Ali must agree to three requirements before Dailey would commit additional Delta operators. Last-minute demands are always irritating, but it seems that it is never too late for additional guidance, especially if it serves to constrain or limit flexibility or freethinking on the battlefield.
These articles had to be articulated during our very first meeting with Ali.
First, we needed a promise that he would integrate our teams with his fighters as we moved into the mountains. Second, as we pushed our reconnaissance teams farther forward and higher to positions of greater tactical advantage, we needed local guides to help ensure that we didn’t shoot the wrong folks. And third, because the closest American QRF was not even in Afghanistan yet, but several hours away by helicopter, we needed to borrow Ali’s.
It was rather embarrassing to have to ask for any of these things. Moreover, as our education in the ambiguities of tribal warfare and the peculiarity of the Muslim culture improved, the more unrealistic and comical the “three requirements” became.
But very little specific advice was offered on what I should actually say to General Ali when we met. Most senior officials apparently were busy with other preparations, briefing higher headquarters, or still, amazingly to me, even going home. It was my responsibility to make it work, build rapport as fast as possible, and win Ali over from the start. Sure, we were told the CIA would make the introductions and put everybody at ease, but then all eyes would be on me.
As the old cliché goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and this had to be my personal finest hour. The senior CIA folks that I needed to talk to before the meeting were not even in Jalalabad, for they were, after all, the busiest Westerners around. I would just have to wing it.
I decided to put out my own message first, a decision that only served to fill my head with a dozen concerns. Would Ali oblige me without interruptions, particularly since a Pashto interpreter was a must? Would he take to us, or shun us? What needed to be said? Whatever I said had to have the powerful backing of the USA, needed to be direct and to the point, and had to be recognized as genuine by the Afghan general. Most important, any fancy rhetoric had to be backed up with action. Talk is cheap on the battlefield, and Ali knew that better than most. One thing was for certain in my mind: Screw this up, Dalton, and the Black Chinook will be coming in at nightfall.
The fabled Black Chinook is a slang legend inside the special ops community. If an operator makes an extraordinarily egregious error in judgment or physical performance, then regardless of who he is or where he is at the time of the infraction, a mysterious black helicopter will arrive to sweep that person away. When the Black Chinook shows up, the Special Ops community no longer requires the individual’s services. It was a nightmare every officer had worried about at some time or another. Tonight, I could almost hear those ominous blades whipping the air over my head.
I tried to catch some rack time, but the double dose of speed that I had popped during the long drive was still screwing with my system. Anticipating the meeting with Ali led to further restlessness, along with a bit of anxiety. As the others tossed and turned in a shallow slumber on the cold floor, I pulled out my small green notebook and a flashlight and scribbled a few more sentences. I wanted to get the words right, bottom line up front, get the point across, portray confidence, and have my act together. I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of the CIA and General Ali on our very first meeting.
Just another CAPEX, I told myself, and I had to be as comfortable in front of Ali as I would be in briefing some minor VIP making a routine visit to the Unit back home.
I wrote, rehearsed the words in my head, erased, crossed out, scribbled some more, and rehearsed again. I had to take care not to make “perfect” the enemy of “good enough.” I committed the final version to memory, typed it up on the laptop, and e-mailed it back to the Bagram Air Base. The message read something like this.
Sir, this is the basic approach for my opening discussions with Ali this morning.
I’m Lieutenant Colonel Dalton Fury, commander of an American commando unit sent here by my country to help you fight al Qaeda forces and Usama bin Laden. We are here to fight next to you as a team with a common goal, to stand alongside you and share the same hardships, and face the same danger as your brave fighters. I was also sent here to help you and your people obtain a large amount of reward money from my country once the mission is accomplished. My mission is clear and simple, to kill or capture bin Laden. I cannot and will not accept any conditional surrender by bin Laden or surrender with special circumstances. One hundred percent nonnegotiable unconditional surrender. In the event bin Laden is killed, I must provide proof of his death to my country in the form of a photograph, fingerprints, or ensuring the remains are properly escorted to a higher authority. Failure to allow us access to the remains may delay any additional payment to you. Again, we are a team in this endeavor. My men and I do not seek glory, credit, or money—we just seek bin Laden. My men are ready now but before I can bring them forward to the front lines, I must have your complete assurances on three things. First, you must agree to embed my force within yours and provide mutual protection. Second, in order to ensure our forces do not inadvertently shoot each other, I need the assista
nce of five of your brave fighters to accompany us as we hunt down bin Laden in the Tora Bora Mountains. We will provide for their food and warm clothing while they are with us. I see these men as critical to our success and they will undoubtedly make you very proud. Finally, I must have your absolute word that if my men should come under attack while forward of your lines, you will do everything in your power to immediately dispatch a force to come to our aid.
END
FURY
Shortly after clicking the send button, I heard the local Afghans stirring in the kitchen area, preparing the morning meal. I had yet to fall asleep. Not a good start.
* Both warlords, Haji Zaman Ghamshareek and General Hazret Ali, were identified in Philip Smucker’s book, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape, and later inside USSOCOM’s 20th Anniversary History edition on page 93.
* Gary Berntsen discusses the reluctance of Colonel Mulholland to commit Green Berets to Tora Bora in his book Jawbreaker. USSOCOM’s 20th Anniversary History also discusses this on page 94.
6
Green Eyes
You Americans cannot survive in these mountains against al Qaeda, just like the Soviets could not survive against us.
—GENERAL HAZRET ALI, DECEMBER 7, 2001
On any battlefield the CIA visits, which is, arguably at least, as many fields as the U.S. military has walked, their operatives bring along large black duffel bags filled with freshly printed hundred-dollar bills, neatly wrapped in cellophane. One of the things the Agency does best is buy friends.
In late November 2001, a week or so before we first arrived at Tora Bora, the CIA had decided to become pals with Hazret Ali, the influential Afghan warlord in the area, and a self-proclaimed general. To secure the friendship, George, the forward director of the small CIA Jawbreaker Juliet team in Jalalabad, brought along millions of U.S. dollars, conveniently packaged in $250,000 bundles.
General Ali, a proud leader in the region, had told George that to muster enough fighters to pursue bin Laden into the Tora Bora Mountains it would cost, oh, say about $250,000.
George looked over at one of his deputies sitting in on the meeting at Ali’s safe house and motioned for him to retrieve the duffel bag. Within a minute, the CIA operative was back and placed a brick of hundred-dollar bills about the size of a small microwave oven on the couch beside the general.
General Ali remained silent and stoic and never touched the money. He ended the meeting moments later and excused himself from his American guests. As soon as he moved out of sight, one of his subordinates entered and retrieved the cube-shaped package, cradling it like a newborn baby, and carried it downstairs to the first floor.
Another Afghan waited there, seated behind a single aged and wooden table with a notepad, a pencil, and a Dollar Store calculator. On his left was a large and faded stack of Pakistani rupees. The courier placed the quartermillion-dollar package on the right side of the table and delicately removed the plastic wrapping, and the moneychanger swapped the American dollars into local currency at a rate that was probably quite favorable to the general. The United States had just bought the services of another warlord.
On the morning of December 7, General Ali sent word over to the safe house to have our Delta party brought to his headquarters. We stood around on the green grass inside the walled compound for an hour or so as Ali’s men prepared the route so the convoy would not have any unpleasant surprises, as had happened with our entry into Jalalabad last night.
As we waited, Manny filled us in on the complex muhj areas of control, both politically and militarily. Picking his brain was time well spent. Word came midmorning for us to head south for the meeting. Empty of the heavy AK-47 crates, our two pickups easily slid into the middle of a muhj escort convoy and the three-hour drive was uneventful. Any doubt that Ali and his men were the law in this town was dispelled.
The sun was high in the sky, with very few clouds, providing a comfortably warm day for the trip, although a chilly wind with a sharp edge blew out of the north. It was impossible not to notice the majestic mountains and the deep, long, and dark shadows of dozens of steep ridgelines and spurs. The breathtaking view of the legendary Hindu Kush seemed endless.
Dark brown contour lines on our U.S.-issued 1:100,000 scale maps showed the steep elevations of the long and wide mountain range that stretched east to west. The eastern end was marked by the Khyber Pass, which had seen an eternity of invading foreign soldiers, from Alexander’s faithful legions and Genghis Khan’s fanatic followers to the red-coated British and the camouflaged Soviets.
The Hindu Kush then extends west into the central part of Afghanistan, and provides natural protection for the frontier with Pakistan. A north-south-running boulder-laden dry streambed snakes to the east, and another deep valley runs north to south before it cuts hard off to the west, nearly clean through our area of interest.
These were centuries-old routes that provided relatively easy access for black marketers, drug smugglers, gun traders, Bedouins, refugees, and fighters wishing to cross back and forth into the Northwest Frontier Province in western Pakistan.
The area visible to my naked eye that day is formally known as the Spin Ghar Mountains, literally “white dust,” most likely named because of the snow that blankets the high peaks throughout the year.
We would be more interested in the Towr Ghar Mountains, the “black dust” altitudes that were fortified and stockpiled in the 1980s and were now occupied by al Qaeda fighters.
Strategically, they sat along the forward military crest, roughly halfway between the Spin Ghar peaks and the light brown foothills to the north. From those positions, defenders had significant operational and tactical advantages, including a view all the way to the outskirts of Jalalabad.
Fir trees and sharp, jagged quartz boulders insulated the ridgelines down to the valley floors and connected draws that were filled with large masses of limestone and feldspar. Centuries of rainwater and melted snow had created large cracks and crags in the mountains’ skin and provided numerous tuck-away areas for the fighters. Any student of military tactics would instantly recognize the stronghold’s seemingly insurmountable and impregnable nature. It was becoming easier to understand Mulholland’s meat-grinder analogy.
Should someone want to reach neighboring Pakistan, he would need to climb uphill to clear the 14,000-foot mountain peaks straddling the border. Should he choose to take one of the long, winding valleys, he still would have to negotiate the 9,000-foot passes. I looked at the puffy and snow-filled clouds hiding the highest peaks and had a foreboding feeling about things to come. Visitors beware.
Tora Bora and bin Laden have a long relationship. This place served as bin Laden’s base of operations during the Soviet jihad, where he was on the defending end of numerous attacks. Legend has it the most massive attack involved an estimated two thousand Russians backed by another two thousand Afghan Communists, supported by fifty attack helicopters and MIG fighter jets. They attacked up the mountains for the better part of a week, and bin Laden, then considered only an average guerrilla leader, and his fellow mujahideen were never defeated in the mountains. They never ran.
The local Afghans knew Usama bin Laden well. Indeed, he enjoyed star status within the tribes and clans in the area, for since moving back in after leaving the Sudan in the late 1990s, bin Laden had distributed money to practically every family in Nangarhar Province. For years many an Afghan family named their sons Usama.
After the Soviet withdrawal and the establishment of al Qaeda as a living, breathing, and thinking terrorist organization, a meeting of epic proportions took place among the tall spires. The year was 1996, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed visited the leader of al Qaeda inside one of the hundreds of caves that had been engineered into the ridgelines and mountains of Tora Bora. It was there that Khalid first laid out the ambitious plan to train terrorist pilots to hijack and crash planes into buildings inside the United States.
Now, in December 2001, the backlash of that meeting was becomin
g apparent. Only a blind man could miss the white parallel contrails of the engine exhausts of American bombers streaking across the blue sky like long fat chalk marks on a lesson board. They were so far up that the engine roar could not be heard, but only a deaf man could miss the thunder of bombs hitting bin Laden’s positions.
The loud drum of war was again banging in Tora Bora.
At midafternoon, we reached General Ali’s makeshift headquarters, located among rolling hills in the beige desert and inside the fork of two deep wadis that ran north and south. We could hear and see the bombs pounding around the peaks only a few miles away.
It once had been a school, and although it had seen better days, the building was modern in comparison to the ancient, mud-walled compounds that pimpled the surrounding area. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had funded the construction years earlier, and the horseshoe-shaped tan, gray, and light blue slate single-story structure was built on a solid foundation, with nine rooms exiting to the middle of the horseshoe, with a small poured concrete porch that spanned the entire center. It had once been a beacon of learning, but any hope of education for local children was shattered when the Taliban came to power.
Windowpanes that had been carved by hand were splintered, and held little glass. The former classrooms were empty save for the trash and dirt the wind had blown into the corners. Some chalkboards still showed fragments of old lessons in Pashto and Arabic. Outside, the yard was quiet and deserted, like any Western schoolyard in the summertime, but there were no kids.
Oddly, there also were no signs of armed guards for General Ali.
Manny and Adam Khan returned with a large, tall man in an olive green multipocketed vest over a plum-colored, button-down shirt with long sleeves. It was George, the CIA counterpart for whom we had been looking, and we knew from the very first that everything would be okay. He stood roughly two inches over six feet, likely was in his late forties, and his long hair and beard were a combination of brown and gray hair. George carried a natural friendly demeanor, had a great sense of humor, and spoke with a slight Wild West cowboy accent.