The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan

by Hastings, Michael

  I didn’t want to fall off the wagon (again) on national television. I figured I would have ended up vomiting if I took a whiskey shot cold, which would have made a disastrous, if amusing, YouTube video.

  The media attention on the story was dying down. After a week of flood-the-zone coverage on McChrystal, most of it supporting our story, the national agenda shifted back to the BP oil spill and other news. There was more blowback to come, however. A few of my colleagues in the media eventually got around to attacking Rolling Stone. At the time, it didn’t really sink in as to why. That would become clearer over the next few months.

  It started with a story in The Washington Post. The story, citing anonymous sources, claimed that I had violated ground rules. This wasn’t true, and the quotes about me that the anonymous sources gave the Post were total fabrications, imagining a scene where some unnamed person had told me to leave the bar the night in Paris. I’d worked for The Washington Post before, filling in at their Baghdad bureau a few months earlier. The editors had been happy with my work at the time, and one of my stories made the front page. The Post had mentioned my work for them in their earlier McChrystal coverage, but failed to point out that they’d recently employed me in the story criticizing my reporting.

  McChrystal’s defenders would launch another round of pushback in the press, claiming that my quotes came only from “junior staff,” men who “make tea, keep the principal on time, and carry bags,” as another unnamed official put it. This wasn’t true, either: McChrystal had got the Biden insults rolling, made fun of Holbrooke’s email, and told me Eikenberry had betrayed him. Jake and Duncan were McChrystal’s top civilian advisors; Charlie Flynn was his executive officer; and it would be a stretch to call Lt. Commander Dave Silverman a junior staffer. The anonymous officials quoted in the critical stories, I would learn, were under investigation for insubordination. The stories didn’t mention that. Ironically, I was also criticized for my use of unnamed sources—in articles citing unnamed sources. It was the beginning of a whisper campaign from McChrystal and his allies that would continue throughout the next year.

  I returned to Vermont in July to finish my piece on the Kiowa helicopter pilots for Men’s Journal.

  On July 13, I received an e-mail from the Army inspector general’s office. The e-mail informed me that the Army had launched an investigation “to determine the facts and circumstances related to the article” published in Rolling Stone. Two days later, the inspector general’s office sent a list of questions for me to answer, noting “under the provisions of 10 USC 3583 the Army takes matters of insubordination very seriously and accordingly have interviewed all personnel we have been able to identify based on Mr. Hastings’ article.” The questions included: “Do you believe your article accurately portrays the culture/atmosphere/thinking of the commander’s staff members?” and “Would you say that there’s a general climate of insubordination?” The e-mail claimed to have “identified the personnel who made the derogatory comments about high ranking officials.”

  There was no way I would cooperate with an investigation, particularly if I was being asked to name sources. (Even though I wouldn’t be breaking any agreement with them by naming them, I felt it was a bad precedent to set.)

  Rolling Stone agreed with me. It was better to risk getting threatened with a subpoena than to roll over for the government. On a more fundamental level, I didn’t think it was my job to assist the Pentagon in its investigation—the story, I believed, spoke for itself.

  Two weeks later, I was asked to give a talk in New York to a group of magazine editors. At one point, a media blogger in the audience asked me how my relationship was with the military. I told him it was good, at least so I thought. I had another embed lined up to go on in the fall, I said.

  The media blogger reported that the next day on his blog. Within twenty-four hours of the blog post, I received a letter from ISAF headquarters. They hadn’t realized that I had another embed already approved until I said it publicly. In a one-page letter from Colonel Wayne Shanks, chief of public affairs, I was informed that I no longer had an embed. Among other reasons, the letter said this was due to the “political fallout” of the story about McChrystal. The letter stated that if I wanted to return for an embed, I would need to provide sworn statements from commanders on the ground, as well as a sworn statement of my own attesting to “the scope and intent of your proposed coverage.” It was an unprecedented restriction to put on a reporter, and effectively banned me from embedding in the future.

  The ban was in clear violation of ISAF’s own policy—to not punish reporters for publishing “embarrassing” information. It was strange. Other journalists, including Geraldo Rivera, had been kicked off embeds for revealing troop movements, a serious violation that put lives at risk. Yet they’d never gotten permanently banned. It was clearly retribution. Failing to find factual fault in my story about General McChrystal and my follow-up story on Kiowa helicopters, the ISAF command decided to get their revenge by not allowing me to embed.

  The Department of Defense wasn’t satisfied with the Army’s investigation, either. The Army investigation had pointed the finger at the individuals they believed made insubordinate comments. Not coincidentally, the Army investigation concluded that no one in the Army was at fault. The Army’s investigation blamed the Navy (Dave Silverman) and the civilian advisors surrounding McChrystal. In September, the Pentagon decided to launch a second investigation. They would spend eight months looking for answers, when all they really had to do was reread the story.

  To me, both the investigations seemed absurd. My story had never claimed McChrystal and his staff violated any laws, yet the press coverage of the investigation made it appear as if the men were all being exonerated. Exonerated from what? From looking like jerks? For being illegally, rather than casually, insubordinate? The stories missed the bigger picture: the name calling—and the later attempts by the Pentagon investigators to rewrite history—represented an unapologetic contempt toward the White House. Pentagon officials would privately tell journalists that the intent of the investigation wasn’t even to find wrongdoing; it was to “damage” my credibility.

  43 THE MEDIA-MILITARY-

  INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

  OCTOBER TO NOVEMBER 2010, WASHINGTON, DC

  I walked into Café Milano in Georgetown to meet a few friends. It was a DC restaurant known for its power-dining scene. Darkly lit, loud, patrons trying for stylish. It was cool for DC, meaning it wasn’t cool at all. Congressional staffers and lobbyists and State Department officials and other bureaucrats gathered around the bar, knocking back drinks, swapping the latest gossip.

  In October, I’d moved down to Washington for the year, renting a fully furnished studio in Foggy Bottom, the neighborhood where the State Department was located. I hated Washington. I hated it the last time I had lived there during the 2008 election campaign, and I hated it this time around, too. There’s a saying: Washington is Hollywood for ugly people. That’s being unfair to Hollywood. In Hollywood, at least they’re making a product that people actually want.

  Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was sitting at a table in the back. He was finishing up dinner with a movie producer, a White House official, and a well-known billionaire.

  He came up to the bar. A friend introduced us. He nodded. He said he liked my story and the criticisms about him didn’t bother him.

  I apologized for what I was wearing: a hoodie and jeans. I told him if I knew he was going to be there, I would have worn a much nicer hoodie. He stepped in next to me and pulled me aside.

  “You can fuck with a general,” he said. “But you do not fuck with my team.”

  I nodded. Pretty hilarious, I thought.

  That was Washington for me. I’d run into politicians and government officials and they’d all tell me they liked my reporting. Maybe they were lying, or trying to bullshit me, I didn’t know. While living in Vermont, I hadn’t understood the exact nature of the official Washington freak-out
. But once I arrived in DC and started going to the cocktail parties and hitting the bars, I saw how the political and media class had completely misinterpreted my piece. The story had terrified them, striking deep-seated fears in the Washington psyche. It demonstrated just how tenuous one’s own position could be—careers could flame out overnight. And the political and media class saw the story as a threat to their schmoozy relationship—their very existence and social life. If you can’t get wasted with a journalist who’s writing a profile of you and piss all over the president who appointed you, what’s the world coming to?

  A number of famous journalists would say they heard these kinds of things all the time, but never reported them. It didn’t matter to them that I was on assignment to write a profile—I didn’t go to France and Kandahar on a social engagement. It didn’t seem to make a difference that I hadn’t violated any agreement with McChrystal. The unwritten rule I’d broken was a simple one: You really weren’t supposed to write honestly about people in power. Especially those the media deemed untouchable. Trash Sarah Palin all you want, but tread carefully when writing about the sacred cows like McChrystal and Petraeus. You’re supposed to keep the myths going. I’d fucked up—I wasn’t to be trusted because I tried to tell the truth. At one event, a prominent Republican senator pulled me aside and said, “You know, your story was a good thing. Got everybody focused back on Afghanistan.”

  Strangely, as I continued to report on the politics behind the scenes of the war, I ended up on pretty good terms with a number of military officials, White House officials, and State Department officials. It was the other journalists who covered the military and politics that I clashed with most often. A number of reporters had paid side gigs at defense-industry-funded think tanks, essentially getting financial support from the very same people they were supposed to be covering. They seemed to take my criticism of the military-industrial complex personally. It might as well be called, I thought, the media-military-industrial complex.

  I could understand why the government officials would be pissed; I was telling them their whole strategy was a waste of time. But the reaction from a number of journalists on the national security beat seemed pretty twisted. Thankfully, I didn’t have to endure Washington much longer. In December, I returned to Afghanistan to find out what General David Petraeus had been up to.

  44 I’D RATHER BE EATING

  A BURGER

  AUGUST TO DECEMBER 2010, ARLINGTON AND WEST POINT

  It’s a late summer morning in Washington, and Bob Gates is outside his office in the hallway of the Pentagon. A military aide is standing in the doorway, poking his head outside, keeping an eye on him. Gates is due over at the White House, and the military aide’s job is to make sure he gets there on time. Lately, Gates has been silently resisting, dragging his feet at these visits. Gates, the aide says, has a tendency for passive resistance—to get a haircut, or to pick up a burger at Burger King, anything to delay crossing the Potomac to have another frustrating tête-à-tête.

  Publicly, the president and the secretary of defense regularly express admiration for each other—and journalists ponder the strange historical circumstance of how a sixty-seven-year-old white Republican dude and a forty-nine-year-old African-American Democrat have been joined at the hip to oversee two American wars. Privately, though, as Washington has a way of doing, the initial luster of their relationship has been worn down by eighteen months’ worth of policy battles that left the president feeling, at times, duped and betrayed by the Pentagon.

  Gates is tired, too. Tired of Washington, mainly. He took the secretary of defense job in 2006, appointed by President Bush to take the place of Rumsfeld. He planned to leave after Bush left office, carrying a small little clock in his briefcase, counting down the days, hours, and seconds to January 20, 2009, Obama’s inauguration. But Obama asks him to stay—it gives him cover on national security, and he likes the guy.

  No one in Washington has a bad word to say about Bob Gates—nowadays, at least.

  It’s been a brutal four years. In that time, he gets credit for reversing the tide of the war in Iraq and oversees the drawdown from a hundred and fifty thousand troops to the approximately fifty thousand left there now. He tamps down on reckless calls for a war in Iran. He gives the impression of reluctantly endorsing a tripling of the scope of the war in Afghanistan, leftover skepticism from his experience watching the Soviets falter there during the eighties. Over twenty-eight hundred American servicemen and -women will die on his watch, a toll that his friends say he’s taken personally.

  He’s living alone in Washington, in a military-supplied house. His wife hates DC and has stayed at their house in Washington State. According to one magazine profile, Gates does his own laundry, cooks for himself, and waters his own flowers. He spends his nights writing personal letters to the families of soldiers who’ve been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He relaxes drinking Belvedere martinis and smoking cigars, watching fun action flicks like Wolverine and Transformers, avoiding the usual Beltway bullshit cocktail parties. He is a former Eagle Scout, joins the CIA in 1966 as an analyst, and climbs the ranks to run the company in 1991—the only entry-level employee to do so. He’s got his scars—he was dinged in the Iran-Contra affair. He learns his lesson and tones down his rhetoric, arriving at the Department of Defense fifteen years later with a persona of humility and self-deprecating humor. (His humor: The jokes are sometimes so bad, his speechwriters complain. Corny as hell, and they can cut too close to home. His joke about DC: The first six months in Washington, you wonder how you got here; the next six months, you wonder how everyone else got here; the next six months you spend trying to get out of here.)

  The buttoned-up Gates is, at times, strangely subversive. He marches in a protest against Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia in 1970, during his first years at the CIA—Bob Gates in an antiwar rally! In his memoir, he reprints a flyer he’s found on a college campus, calling him a war criminal: WANTED: ROBERT GATES, FOR VIOLATION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW NND HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS. He likes to take digs at the general officers who flaunt around the Pentagon with bloated staffs—“brass creep,” he calls it. He tells folks that if you want to really know what he’s thinking, do what he did as a Soviet analyst: dissect his speeches. He is seriously, or at least as seriously as possible for a secretary of defense, going after the military’s own trillion-dollar-a-year defense budget—rare in Washington for someone to actually say, hey, we have too much power, take it away.

  The White House, though, is sending signals—they’ve felt burned by the Pentagon. They are turning inward. Tom Donilon, a friend of Vice President Biden’s, is taking over as the national security advisor, a choice that Gates told Woodward would be a “disaster.” (Gates is the man Woodward talks to last, says a Pentagon official, which just shows how much power Gates truly has.) It’s a sign, subtly, of the feelings that Obama’s team has been burned by relying on outsiders, and by hiring Donilon they show they aren’t planning on making the same mistake again.

  The McChrystal thing—that burns Gates up. In the days following McChrystal’s firing, he has to make calls to allied defense ministers, making nice, explaining no harm meant. He tells one NATO minister, “A journalist did in one day what the Taliban had failed to do.” It’s not a fair assessment, of course, but another sign of his frustration. Gates fires people all the time, for infractions of varying scale. He tosses McKiernan without a word of remorse. And at McChrystal’s retirement ceremony in July, Gates will bemoan the fact that Americans have lost a hero, someone whose record of service is unmatched. (Forget Tillman, forget Camp Nama, forget the negative command climate…)

  Gates will later say that he defended McChrystal so strongly because he thought doing otherwise would interrupt the flow of the mission—“the lightbulb went on—yes, [Petraeus] will work.” But more important, and what stings, is that McChrystal was his and Mullen’s recommendation to the president, and though he won’t say it publicly, on some level, it made him l
ook bad. (The behavior in the story made Mullen “nearly sick,” the admiral will admit.)

  Gates’s reservations about the war are privately surfacing—he’s focusing in on how to get out. Those qualms he had when looking at Afghanistan a year earlier—from the perspective of an analyst who followed the jihadists’ secret war against the Soviets there in the eighties—bubble up. That summer, the Defense Department commissions a report from U.S. military officials and diplomatic advisors to look at “end states”—in short, what the country will look like when we leave. A U.S. official who was asked for input on the document says it was “an attempt to get the withdrawal strategies.” But despite its “stay the course” rhetoric, even the Pentagon fears the war isn’t going well. One paper in the report provided to me describes a plan to split Afghanistan into seven regions, each centered around a major city, and to include both “insurgents” and “local strongmen” in the new regional governments. “This is not to sanction warlordism,” the paper explains, “but an acknowledgement that local strongmen have a part to play in the initial stage of rebalancing the state.”At a meeting in October, Gates is presented with the paper, according to Pentagon sources—they say that he reacts “positively” to the plan.

  He keeps saying he’s leaving the office, but the date keeps getting pushed back. He’s finishing up his DoD bucket list. In December, he visits Afghanistan, flying around with General Petraeus. He hands out three silver stars. He consoles a unit that has just lost six men—maybe it doesn’t make a difference, maybe it does, just for the men to know that someone somewhere out there gives a shit. He hears an assessment from a commander in the east: The fighting is heavy. Thirty-eight hundred insurgents killed or captured. Eight hundred and fifty bombs dropped. “Every single day in this valley, we are either dropping bombs or shooting Hellfire missiles, because this is a very, very kinetic fight,” a commander there tells him. He gives a speech to the soldiers: “I’m actually the guy that signs the orders and sends you over here, and I consider my highest priority to get you what you need to do the job, to complete your mission, and to come home safely,” he says. “I feel a personal responsibility for each and every one of you since I sent you here. I feel the sacrifice and hardship and losses more than you will ever imagine.” He’ll return home on the flight with soldiers finishing up their tours, something he’d been wanting to do before leaving office. He says what he’s seen has convinced him that the strategy “is working” and making “progress.”