by Doug Stanton
There was no way to tell up from down, left from right. Your inner ear would communicate with your brain that you were turning, but your eyes saw nothing, except more whiteness out front—the whiteness literally flowed at you over the windscreen. You had the sense you were moving and not moving at all. It was like being weightless in a globe filled with odorless smoke.
McGee finally broke out of the clouds at 100 feet. He roared past rock pillars and over cold ground beaten hard as a drumhead by ten thousand years of scorching afternoons. The helicopter was zipping just feet above the earth, lifting a rope of dust that snapped taut in its wake and then dropped to the desert floor. McGee came around a bend in the mountains, straightened the craft, and raced for the landing zone.
Mike Spann heard the clatter of the approaching craft. He studied the infrared strobe placed on the edge of the landing zone. Through his night vision goggles he could see the brilliant pulse of its light; with the naked eye, the tiny, rectangle-shaped beacon was invisible. The helicopter pilot would see the strobe and know that the zone was safe to land on.
At thirty-two, Mike Spann was an intense young man at the pinnacle of his life’s goal: deployment in a war. He wanted the Taliban’s collective head on a stick. Along with Dave Olson and J.J., he was a member of the CIA’s Special Activities Division (SAD), which was a covert unit within its National Clandestine Service. The CIA called men like Mike, Dave, and J.J. “paramilitary officers.” They were the heirs of the former Special Operations Group (SOG), developed during the Vietnam War. SOG itself was an outgrowth of the OSS, whose spies operated behind enemy lines in Europe during World War II, fighting with underground resistance groups. Mike’s work was a national secret, strictly classified. Americans back home did not even know his job existed. His neighbors in his suburban neighborhood in Manassas, Virginia, would occasionally see a banner above Mike’s front door reading, WELCOME HOME, DADDY! and think he’d been away on a regular business trip. Because they operated covertly, SAD officers dressed like civilians, preferring jeans and flannel shirts and tennis shoes or hiking boots. They carried non-American weapons, Russian-made AK-47s and Browning 9mm automatic pistols, and toted briefcase-sized satellite phones, a GPS, and a compass. They filed hundreds of intelligence reports from the field, typing with their laptops propped open on their knees in godforsaken caves, cafés, or hotels around the world. Mike was trained to kill or capture terrorists based on information gleaned by the Agency. If he was captured or found dead, nothing about his dress or person would immediately lead back to his being part of a United States force, and certainly not to the CIA.
For his trouble, Mike was paid about $50,000 a year. Back at Langley, there were seventy-eight stars on the CIA’s memorial wall at its headquarters—half of these were in honor of paramilitary officers killed in the line of duty.
The CIA’s paramilitary officers had been involved in the overthrow of Iran in 1953, placing the Shah on the throne. In 1954, a CIA coup overthrew the government of Guatemala. The 1,400 Cuban exiles who took part in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba had been trained by the CIA. In 1981, SOG had given support to the Nicaraguan contras fighting the Sandinista government. Since the 1970s, they’d worked in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Libya, Latin America, the Balkans, and Somalia. They were capable of good or evil. They went where the politicians aimed them.
After well-publicized congressional hearings in 1975, held largely in response to human rights violations by SOG officers against Vietnamese citizens, President Gerald Ford created new oversight of these kinds of CIA operations, and the reach of its militarized spies was put on a short leash. The CIA began focusing more on a white-collar brand of espionage, relying mainly on case officers, posing as diplomats, aid workers, and government factotums, to gather communications intercepts, called “signal intelligence.” Their job would be to convince citizens of foreign countries to spy for the United States. The heyday of the covert gun-slinging spy was over.
That is, until 9/11. CIA director George Tenet had actually begun beefing up the paramilitary division in 1997, as its officers tracked and hunted (to no avail) the Bosnian Serb leader and war criminal Radovan Karadzic. Mike was part of a group of secret warriors who now numbered several hundred men, made up of former Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, Marines, and Army Special Forces soldiers. (By 2002, the CIA’s counterterrorism unit would grow substantially, to approximately 900 officers. “We are doing things I never believed we would do—and I mean killing people,” one intelligence officer would remark.)
Mike had a new mission in a new CIA.
Since the age of sixteen, all he’d ever wanted to do was jump out of airplanes and chase bad guys (he earned his pilot’s license when he was seventeen). Growing up, there wasn’t much to do in Winfield, Alabama, on a Saturday night, except hang out at BJ’s, a video-game parlor on Main Street, playing Donkey Kong, or you could drive out to the edge of town and swat baseballs at the batting cage, the field lights swarming with moths while bats swooped through the humid air. The towns on the nearby horizon had names like Pull Tight, Rock City, Yampertown, and Gu-Win. Three generations of Mike’s family had lived in Winfield (Mike’s grandfather had worked in the nearby cotton mills), and about the biggest local attraction was Winfield’s annual Mule Days Festival, featuring a cake auction, turkey shoot, and mule-judging contest (“all shapes and sizes of mules are welcome”). One day Mike was hanging out with the football team watching Top Gun and announced to everybody in the room, “I’m going to be doing that someday.”
He graduated from Winfield High School in 1987, studied law enforcement and earned a criminal justice degree at Auburn. He then joined the Marines. His fellow classmates found him highly disciplined, a man apart. “I don’t know if I ever saw him drink,” said one. “I always thought he was raised by a preacher.” He was part nerd, part jock (he was a ferocious reader of encyclopedias and had been a star running back his senior year in high school), and he hoped he’d get to see battle. After eight years in the Marines and reaching the rank of captain, he was still disappointed. He was thirty years old, married to a hometown girl named Katherine Webb, his high school sweetheart, and the father of two daughters. He felt he was coming up on the short string in his life. He decided he wanted to be part of the CIA.
On his application essay, Mike poured his heart out for several thousand words about the reasons he should be let into this secret society of warriors. “I describe myself as an ordinary person,” he wrote, “with a few God-given talents and ample self-confidence. I am a dreamer with lofty goals. I am an action person who feels personally responsible for making any changes in this world that are in my power. Because if I don’t, no one else will.”
Upon acceptance, he moved Katherine and the girls to Virginia and started training at Camp Peary, aka “the Farm.” It was the summer of 1999.
The CIA’s premier training facility, the Farm, is a wooded compound outside Williamsburg, Virginia, 9,000 sprawling acres ringed by electrified barbed wire. The training was grueling, eighteen months of work in demolition, shooting, driving, and street-fighting techniques. He was learning to be a case officer, whose job it would be to convince citizens of foreign countries to spy for the United States. After graduation, Mike would be accepted for service in the Special Activities Division. But within six months after starting the training, just as his career was taking off, Mike’s home life began to unravel.
Now, as he waited for the helicopter to arrive at the landing zone, he knew, like any obedient officer, that he had to put such distracting thoughts out of his mind.
Alex McGee looked up from the controls and saw dead ahead the helicopter landing zone (HLZ), a bare patch of earth showing up in the night vision goggles as a gray circle of dirt. Thirty minutes had passed since they’d broken out of the fog and vertigo of the Black Stratus, and they were skimming just fifty feet above the river, banking along the serpentine course with valley walls rising abruptly on either side. The chop-chop-chop of the helo’s
double rotors, bounding off the rock, made a terrific racket inside the cabin. Awakened by the noise, Nelson roused himself from a freezing nap and sat up.
Up ahead, he could see through the night vision goggles that the HLZ was about as big as a baseball field. Every several seconds, at its far edge, a bright light went off, a stabbing ray in the pitch dark. This was the infrared beacon that Mike Spann had set out earlier in the dirt.
McGee aimed for the light.
“One minute out,” he announced.
Nelson, who had been listening in on the headphones, turned and relayed this down the line, holding up one finger. And then something caught his eye: the oats and corn in the opened tops of the horse feed bags, positioned in the middle of the deck, seemed to be moving. Nelson yelled over to Spencer. “Hey, take a look at this!” Spencer reached in and scooped up a handful.
The oats and corn were crawling with worms. “That’s great!” yelled Spencer above the helo’s roar. “Just what every warlord needs! Fucking worms!”
They looked at each other, laughed, and hoped that the reportedly violent Afghan general had a sense of humor.
They stood and shouldered their rucks, each load weighing over 100 pounds. They pulled their black watch caps down over their ears and checked and rechecked their weapons. And then they stood stonily in the dark as the airframe bucked beneath them.
“Thirty seconds,” said the pilot.
Up ahead, McGee could see that the HLZ was hemmed on three sides by tall cliffs.
There was one approach—straight on. They were going in.
Out of sight, shivering, famished, and eagerly awaiting the arrival of the helicopter, General Mohaqeq and about a dozen Northern Alliance soldiers were hiding behind a small berm at the landing zone.
Some of the men among them had been unable to sleep, so anxious were they for the Americans to arrive. Hiding near General Mohaqeq were the Americans he called Baba David, Baba Mike, and Baba J.J.
Baba J.J., with his gray beard and fierce gaze, was the CIA’s team leader. With the Americans’ help, Mohaqeq had been eagerly preparing the safe house for the soldiers’ arrival.
The Afghans worried that Taliban scouts could be positioned in the surrounding hills, ready to call in tank and artillery fire. It was impossible to tell. In fact, they wouldn’t know until the helicopter approached the landing zone and started to land.
Whatever the case, it would be very bad indeed should the Americans be killed as they landed. America would forget Afghanistan and its fight against the Taliban. They would leave and never come back.
Mohaqeq couldn’t bear the thought of their leaving after such a long wait for their arrival.
As far back as 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, bent on owning the mercantile gateway between Europe and the East, Afghans like Mohaqeq had been forced to face the prospect of their own annihilation.
The Soviet invaders wanted to crush Mohaqeq’s Hazaras, Massoud’s Tajiks, Dostum’s Uzbeks, Hekmatyar’s Pashtuns (Hekmatyar being another warlord who had variously fought with and against Dostum). The Soviets had wanted to own the country. But the Afghan, it turned out, would not be beaten. He could live in the hills and strike in lightning raids. He was a spook, a ghost who could step into a beam of sunlight and out of the field of fire. The Soviets attacked with an army of a half-million men and lost 50,000 soldiers in fighting that ground on for ten years. A million Afghan citizens were dead, and 5 million more had fled in exile to Iran, Pakistan, and Russia. When the fighting was over, the Hazaras, the Tajiks, the Uzbeks, and the Pashtuns started attacking each other.
Massoud’s Tajiks rocketed Kabul alongside Hekmatyar’s Pashtuns and killed thousands of men, women, and children. Dostum’s Uzbeks reportedly raped, tortured, and robbed as they battled. The Hazaras, the lowest caste, fought with them all. Allegiances swirled like smoke. By 1994, the central fact of daily life was primordial terror. The bubbling fountains and fecund gardens of Kandahar, the ancient almond groves of Kabul, the air-conditioned movie palaces on Chicken Street, the late night restaurants sparked by the laughter of boisterous travelers heading back to Paris at dawn—all this lay in ruins, wind whistling through the ragged filligree of a million bullet holes in a thousand different empty rooms across the land.
Bandits roamed the bomb-cratered highways, hijackers, child molesters, psychopaths, violent men for whom, after seventeen years of war, the idea of country, state, home had been cauterized from the very center of their being. In its place, the dead emptiness of outer space, quiet as winter. A truck carrying carpets from Kandahar would leave for Pakistan on the national road and within hours every carpet would be stolen, a makeshift “toll booth” sprouting each few miles in the blazing, cracked asphalt. At each checkpoint, grinning armed men demanded goods, money, and sometimes more, as on one day in 1994, when a roving band of militia kidnapped two thirteen-year-old girls and raped them. They left them to die by the side of the road. It was from this chaos, this skyline of smashed buildings and broken bones, electrified by gunfire and dagger slash, that the Taliban had stepped into the international limelight. They had managed to still the entropic universe. Order, peace, silence. Inshallah—God willing.
When the residents of a nearby village, outside Kandahar, heard of the girls’ rape, they resolved to fight back. They wanted someone to address this injustice. They wanted the highways open again so men could make a living.
They approached a reclusive one-eyed mullah in Kandahar named Mohammed Omar, who had banded together his own fledgling army of former anti-Soviet fighters. These men were Pashtuns, the putative rulers of Afghanistan for the past several hundred years—stern men who, after the Soviets’ defeat, dreamed of making Afghanistan a purely Islamic state guided by the laws of the Koran. For them, Mohaqeq, Dostum, Massoud, and Atta Mohammed Noor were secular wretches, infidels deserving either conversion or death. Dostum especially galled them with his large infantry and a reported wagon train of whores who traveled from town to town servicing the militia.
Omar dispatched thirty of his fighters, and they tracked down the bandits who had raped the girls on the highway. When they caught the two men, justice was swift: they were hung from the barrel of an old Soviet tank. Their bodies were later cut down and left as food for marauding dogs.
Over that summer, Omar’s stature grew, as did the perceived benevolence of the Taliban. Omar announced that he had posted 1,000 of his men on the Pakistan road, and that they were keeping peace. The workaday Afghan citizens, exhausted and terrified after five years of civil war, couldn’t have been happier to be under the watchful eye of the Taliban. They welcomed them with open arms. By the following spring, Omar’s army had grown to 25,000 men.
The fighters had poured in from madrassahs in Pakistan, a form of Islamic schooling that dated back to the Middle Ages. In stifling one-room schools, teenage boys and young men whose fathers had been blown up, maimed, and killed by the Soviets, parentless children further galvanized by seemingly endless civil war, were chained to crude desks as they memorized all 6,666 sentences of the true word of God, the Koran. After three years of this, the young men could become mullahs back in their villages, due now all the respect of a religious constable, adjudicating civil disputes and performing marriages and funerals. They were paid in cash or bartered their services for gifts in kind—cattle, sheep, food. They began calling themselves Taliban—“seekers of knowledge.”
Theirs was the perfect world. Since taking control of Kabul in 1996, the Taliban had banned music, kite-flying, photography, movies, and even perfume. Husbands were ordered to paint their house windows black so no one could see the women inside, and the women themselves were forbidden to leave their homes unaccompanied by a male relative. Women were to be as pliant as cattle, silent as stone. As many as 100,000 girls were ordered not to attend school. Literacy rates among the total population dropped as low as 5 percent. Denied proper obstetrical care, one out of three mothers died in childbirth. The life expectancy for
men dropped to forty-two years. Suicide rates among women soared as they were driven mad by privation.
For not wearing a burkha in public, they could be lashed with a rubber hose. For committing adultery, they could be stoned. The Taliban carted women jouncing like livestock in the backs of pickups into crowded soccer stadiums and, before the games began, made them kneel, gasping within the oven of their blue burkhas as heavy footsteps approached behind them.
The women kneeled there, shaking, and then the man attached to the footsteps raised his rifle and fired point-blank at the clothed domes of quaking heads.
As a finale, they cut off the hands of thieves, tied the pale index fingers with a ribbon of scrap cloth, and hoisted the hands aloft, the way you would lift for inspection a pair of enormous candles still twinned by their wicks. The hands were pale; the stumps were red.
After this, the soccer games began. Those had been terrible times. Terrible. Mohaqeq remembered them all.
Now, as he and his men huddled at the berm, they looked skyward, and then at last they heard it—the thwock-thwock of the helicopter.
Mohaqeq prayed the Americans would land safely.