by Eric Blehm
The Freedom of Information Act request offices in the U.S. military are faced daily with daunting numbers of requests for official documents. In my case, most of these documents were elusive at best. For your Herculean efforts, thank you: Doreen Agard, U.S. Special Operations Command; Mary Bowling, U.S. Army Special Operations Command; Maj. George Burnett, Assistant Staff Judge Advocate, CENTCOM.
To gain both historical and political insights into Afghanistan—before, during, and after the brief window of time portrayed in this book—I am indebted to the Office of the President of Afghanistan, the Embassy of Afghanistan, Washington, D.C., and the Center for Afghanistan Studies, University of Nebraska, Omaha. Thank you: Director Thomas Gouttierre, Sher Jan Ahmadzai, and Abdul Yaseer.
I am also thankful for the interviews provided to me by: James Dobbins; Nick Mills, author of Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan; Michele Mitchell, one of the last journalists to interview Abdul Haq before his death; and Ronald Neumann, U.S. ambassador of Afghanistan, 2005–2007.
A grateful thank you to my family, friends, critical readers, and others who supported my telling of this story: Matt and Sara Baglio, Linda and Raul Balderas, Kevin Blakeborough, Clayton Blehm, Andy and Kelly Blumberg, Jon Boyer, Bill Butterworth, Tracy Bychowski, Mike Carder, Carol Cepregi, Melissa Chinchillo, Debbie and John Cloud, Stephen Coonts, Navy Cmdr. Paul Costello, Scott Coutts, Lee Crane, Craig and Kathy Cupp, Erika and Jason Daniels, Steve Duff, Rachel Elinsky, Aaron Feldman, Mark Fleishman, Bill Forstchen, Dan Green, Kate Hamill, Lori and Rick Hennessy, Shannon Hennessy, Bob Holt, Robin Ingraham, Marilyn Johnson, Jana and Roger Keating, Andrea and Bob Kelly, Mark Kleckner, Jill LaMar, Beth and Brad Lenahan, Anne Loder, Scooter Leonard, Pat Macha, Swanna MacNair, Adam Makos, Garry and Rae Martin, Marcelle and Pete McAfee, Billy McDonald, Ewan Morrison, Tomaya Nakatsugawa, Alden Nash, Mike O’Brien, Eric Parker, Stephanie Pearson, Norman Peck, Marilyn and Paul Phillips, Brian Riley, Kimberly Tilton-Riley, Gregory Saladino, Angela Sampogna, Giovana Savassa, Kate Scherler, Scott Schwarte, Hampton Sides, Navy Cmdr. Jeff Smith, Kathy Spiteri, Brett Stoffel, Kimball Taylor, Wehtahnah Tucker, Madison Tybroski, Mitch Tybroski, Amber Warner, Fred and Judy Warner, Heidi and Jeff Warner, Billy Waugh, Janet Wendle, Charlie Wilson, Natalie Young, Dean and Tyler Zack.
Special thanks to Jonathan Burnham, my publisher at HarperCollins, and David Hirshey, my editor—both of whom saw this as an important story that needed to be told, and got behind the project during a time when book sales on the war in Afghanistan were waning. Assistant editor George Quraishi, my point person at HarperCollins, labored tirelessly on the manuscript, making sure every ambiguity was clarified and spending a great deal of his own time helping me work through many of the most difficult parts of the story. My agent, Christy Fletcher, invoked my confidence as a journalist and a storyteller, reminding me that both can be achieved without forsaking either as long as I stay true to the story. Michael Davis introduced me to the story of ODA 574 and continued to provide encouragement throughout the process. Michael “Scoop” Hennessy allowed his deft research skills to be called upon at the oddest of hours. Dave Merrill created maps and illustrations that are worth a thousand words. Rick Bychowski’s and Evan Warner’s computer savvy solved many urgent problems, and Evan designed the cutting-edge websites that further the telling of this story. Rita Samols provided meticulous on-call editing, research, and fact-checking from the earliest drafts forward to the project’s completion and transcribed more than half—nearly one hundred hours—of the recorded interviews. MX and MJ made sure I took breaks from my computer and always put a smile on my face when I needed it most. And finally, I thank Lorien—my confidante and PIC. I could never thank you enough, but in summary you make me, and my words, look good. Beyond that, you are the glue that holds every other part of my life together.
Selected Bibliography
BOOKS
Allard, Colonel Kenneth. Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2006.
Ashe, Waller. Personal Record of the Kandahar Campaign by Officers Engaged Therein. Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Adamant Media, 2005.
Aurelius, Marcus. Meditations. Trans. G. Hays. New York: Modern Library, 2003.
Berntsen, Gary, and Ralph Pezzullo. Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda; A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. New York: Crown, 2005.
Briscoe, Charles H., Richard L. Kiper, James A. Schroder, and Kalev I. Sepp. Weapon of Choice: U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan. Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: Combat Studies Institute, 2003.
Call, Steve. Danger Close: Tactical Air Controllers in Afghanistan and Iraq. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2007.
Cervantes (Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra). Don Quixote. Trans. J. Rutherford. New York: Penguin, 2003.
Chayes, Sarah. The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan after the Taliban. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Coll, Steve. Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Couch, Dick. Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior. New York: Crown, 2007.
DeYoung, Karen. Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell. New York: Vintage, 2007.
Dobbins, James F. After the Taliban: Nation-Building in Afghanistan. Washington, D.C.: Potomac, 2008.
Franks, Tommy. American Soldier. New York: ReganBooks, 2004.
Halberstadt, Hans. War Stories of the Green Berets. Minneapolis: Zenith, 2004.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner, 2003.
Irwin, Will. The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944. New York: PublicAffairs, 2005.
Jalali, Ali Ahmad, and Lester W. Grau. Afghan Guerilla Warfare. St. Paul, Minn.: MBI, 2001.
Lamb, Christina. The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004.
Lawrence, T. E. Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph. New York: Anchor, 1991.
Macrory, Patrick. Retreat from Kabul: The Incredible Story of How a Savage Afghan Force Massacred the World’s Most Powerful Army. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons, 2002.
Mills, Nick B. Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007.
Musharraf, Pervez. In The Line of Fire: A Memoir. New York: Free Press, 2006.
Priest, Dana. The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America’s Military. New York: Norton, 2004.
Rashid, Ahmed. Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. New York: Penguin, 2008.
———. Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001.
Robinson, Linda. Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004.
Scarborough, Rowan. Rumsfeld’s War: The Untold Story of America’s Anti-Terrorist Commander. Washington, D.C.: Regnery, 2004.
Schroen, Gary C. First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan. New York: Ballantine, 2005.
Schumacher, Gerald. To Be a U.S. Army Green Beret. St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith, 2005.
Sinno, Abdulkader H. Organizations at War in Afghanistan and Beyond. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2008.
Stewart, Rory. The Places in Between. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2004.
Tanner, Stephen. Afghanistan: A Military History from Alexander the Great to the Fall of the Taliban. New York: Da Capo, 2003.
Tenet, George, with Bill Harlow. At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
Weiner, Tim. Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. New York: Doubleday, 2007.
Woodward, Bob. Bush at War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003.
REPORTS, ACADEMIC PAPERS, ETC.
Center for Law and Military Operat
ions, The Judge Advocate General’s Legal Center & School, United States Army. Legal Lessons Learned from Afghanistan and Iraq, Vol. I, Major Combat Operations (11 September 2001–1 May 2003). Charlottesville, Va., 2004
Forrest, Marion L., Ph.D. “Building USAF ‘Expeditionary Bases’ for Operation Enduring Freedom—Afghanistan, 2001–2002.” Air & Space Power Journal, 2005
Headquarters, United States Central Command Air Forces. Report of Investigation: 5 December 2001 JDAM Incident Near Sayd Alim Kalay, Afghanistan. Redacted/unclassified version. 2003.
Kelley, Major Robert E. “U.S. Army Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Doctrine: Engine of Change or Relic of the Past?” Naval War College, 2000.
Lambeth, Benjamin S. “Air Power Against Terror: America’s Conduct of Operation Enduring Freedom.” RAND National Defense Research Institute.
Neske, Chaplain (Major) Robert N. “The Assumption of Adequacy: Operation Safe Haven, A Chaplain’s View.” U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 1999.
Ramirez, Armando J. “Thesis: From Bosnia to Baghdad; The Evolution of U.S. Army Special Forces from 1995–2004.” Naval Postgraduate School, 2004.
Rubin, Barnett R. “Afghanistan’s Uncertain Transition from Turmoil to Normalcy.” Center for Preventive Action, Council on Foreign Relations, 2006.
Shienle, Major Duke C. Liberator or Occupier: Indigenous Allies Make the Difference: A Monograph. School of Advanced Military Studies, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, 2003–2004.
Theisen, Lt. Col. Eric E. Ground-Aided Precision Strike: Heavy Bomber Activity in Operation Enduring Freedom. Maxwell A.F.B., Ala.: Air University Press, 2003
Wardak, Ali. “Jirga: A Traditional Mechanism of Conflict Resolution in Afghanistan.” University of Glamorgan.
Notes
Unless noted in this section, all the information in this book is from eyewitness accounts.
Mike McElhiney was one of the first members of ODA 574 I interviewed, and he began, as many of the men did, by asking me what kind of story I wanted to tell. I was ready for the question because I’d already discussed this issue with Dan Petithory’s father, Lou. I told Mike, “This story won’t be pro-war, it won’t be anti-war; it’s going to be just the story. I’ll tell it the way it happened: how Fifth Group got into the war, how your team got the mission with Karzai, what you guys did on the ground, and what happened on December 5, 2001.”
Mike’s response: “Sure, I’ll talk to you as long as you promise to listen, take good notes, record the conversations, and honor Dan and JD by telling the story the way it happened—because nobody else has gotten it right. If you’ve read any other books or articles, throw them away. There’s so much bullshit out there from reporters who ‘quoted’ guys on the team who never even talked to them, people who had us firing off rounds when we weren’t, blood spattering when it wasn’t. Don’t make it anything it wasn’t—just stick to the ground truth and we’ll be good.”
You’ll notice that there are very few citations in this book. I did not use secondhand reporting—previously published articles or books that covered ODA 574’s mission with Karzai—or “hearsay” to describe any of the team’s actions and experiences. What you read came directly from the men involved. Conversations and thoughts were based on the notes, letters, and recollections of these individuals.
I did occasionally rely upon quotes and conversations reported by other journalists purely to provide context for the events affecting ODA 574, including quotes by President Bush, CIA Director George Tenet, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. For those instances I provide source material below.
I also read the work of various authors and journalists for my personal understanding of Afghanistan (see Selected Bibliography).
All events reported in this book were described to me by eyewitnesses in exclusive personal interviews conducted over the course of two years: almost 200 hours of conversations (more than 150 hours recorded) with members of 5th Special Forces Group, Air Force Special Operations Command, Special Operations Command Central, Central Command, and family members. The majority of these interviews were with most of the surviving members of ODA 574.
In addition, I relied upon various official reports, including after-action reports and the investigation of the JDAM incident on December 5, 2001.
Lastly, a few of the notes below expand upon some of the more technical events in the story, as well as potentially controversial ones.
PROLOGUE
1. “Of these, only four served out their ‘terms’ and died a natural death. The others were dethroned, assassinated, imprisoned, deposed and killed, deposed and exiled, deposed and hanged, beaten to death, and so forth.” Editorial by Cheryl Benard, Los Angeles Times, February 23, 2009, p. 17.
CHAPTER 1: A MOST DANGEROUS MISSION
1. There are many accounts of the Jedburgh teams available. See especially Will Irwin, The Jedburghs: The Secret History of the Allied Special Forces, France 1944 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005).
2. CIA teams are often referred to by the military as OGAs (other government agency). This account references them as CIA or spooks in order to alleviate confusion between ODA and OGA. All CIA and Delta operators in this book have been given pseudonyms.
3. Built for the Vietnam War, Pave Lows have been continuously modified and upgraded ever since. They are the most technologically advanced heavy-lift helicopters in the Air Force arsenal, but that technology is stacked on top of an ancient airframe. The result is that the Pave Lows rarely flew in Afghanistan without some pending maintenance issue.
CHAPTER 2: THE QUIET PROFESSIONALS
1. All sections in the book quoting or describing Colonel Mulholland were reported to me by eyewitnesses to events, not by Mulholland himself—including Major Chris Miller and various members of ODA 574. I also found useful the PBS Frontline interview with Mulholland conducted in April 2002.
2. In order to reconstruct Hamid Karzai’s background I relied upon various source materials as well as a fact-check of pertinent sections of this book by the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska, Omaha, coordinated by Sher Jan Ahmadzai. Also especially useful are Christina Lamb, The Sewing Circles of Herat: A Personal Voyage Through Afghanistan (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), and Nick Mills, Karzai: The Failing American Intervention and the Struggle for Afghanistan (Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2007).
3. While the rise of the Taliban is well documented, there are variations. I followed most closely the story that ODA 574 learned during their isolation period, from Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
4. In addition to personal interviews with Major Bob Kelley, the chief of plans for Special Operations Command Central at the time of 9/11, information for this section regarding unconventional warfare was gleaned from a paper written by him in January 2000 for the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, titled “U.S. Army Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Doctrine: Engine of Change or Relic of the Past.” The abstract for the paper reads: “As a mission and as a concept, unconventional warfare (UW) is the heart and soul of the United States Army’s Special Forces (SF). Since SF was created in 1952, UW operations have been the ‘touchstone’ for all developments in the organization. Special Forces are the primary force within United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) for UW.
“Doctrine for Joint Special Operations correctly defines a relevant UW mission for U.S. Special Operations Forces. But Army Special Forces doctrine for UW operations focuses on only one aspect of UW—guerrilla warfare. This was appropriate in 1952 for the purpose of organizing partisans in Eastern Europe to oppose the Warsaw Pact. Today, however, guerrilla warfare is the least likely type of unconventional warfare operation to occur. Therefore, SF should now begin to focus on the indirect activities of unconventional warfare: subversion, sabotage and intelligence activities. Special Forces UW doctrine must also be updated to leverage new technologic
al capabilities.”
5. The sections in the book when Major Chris Miller volunteers Colonel Mulholland as the JSOTF (Task Force Dagger) commander, and all sections where Miller is at the SOCCENT bunker trying to get 5th Special Forces Group into the fight, are based on interviews with Miller himself. Conversations between Miller and Major Kelley were reported by both individuals.
6. “By the mid-1990s the Air Force had collapsed as a professional military establishment, and remaining aviation assets changed hands over the course of the civil war. Most of the surviving aircraft, amounting to about 40 combat aircraft and various transport planes and helicopters, were under Taliban control. About half the combat planes were Su-20 and Su-22 export versions of the Su-17 fighter-bomber, with the other half including MiG-21 interceptors and ground attack fighters. The Taliban also converted a few ll-39 trainer aircraft to bombers. The Military Balance, 2000/2001 estimated that the Taliban might have had about 20 MiG-21 and Su-22, and 5 L-39, while the Northern Alliance might have had about 30 Su-17/22, 30 MiG-21 and 10 L-39. Most of the planes were elderly, and many were unsafe to fly. Improvisation and cannibalization provided a few combat aircraft (six or eight) for limited operations.” See http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/afghanistan/airforce.htm.
CHAPTER 3: TO WAR
1. Taken from interview for the Combat Studies Institute, Operational Leadership Experiences Project Combat Studies Institute, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
2. From the U.S. Special Operations Command Official History 1987 to 2007, pp. 87–90, Global War on Terrorism section.
3. Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
4. PBS Frontline interview with Robert McFarlane, transcript for Campaign Against Terror.
5. Arthur Keller, “Caution: Taliban Crossing,” op-ed, New York Times, November 11, 2007.
6. Ahmed Rashid, Descent Into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 88.