During the first week of the bombing campaign, Gen. Tommy Franks followed our recommendation regarding the gradual application of force but began to feel the heat for being so closely aligned with CIA. The new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force general Dick Myers, felt the bombing campaign wasn’t working, and that CIA’s plan was flawed. Tommy and I were both frustrated, and he certainly understood that CIA did not want to micromanage the campaign. But he and I were close enough to be able to talk candidly. It would soon be winter in Afghanistan, and we both knew it was time to act.
On October 17, U.S. Special Forces arrived on the ground. By late October, with CIA officers providing targeting intelligence, military Special Forces troops courageously closing in on Taliban and al-Qa’ida units to provide laser target designation, and fixed-wing aircraft dropping precision weapons, the pace of the air war soon stepped up, and made the critical difference in overwhelming the foe.
There was a lot of bureaucratic tension. In early October, I was taking part in a secure teleconference with the vice president, the secretary of defense, and others when Don Rumsfeld questioned who was in charge on the ground in Afghanistan. CIA and the Defense Department operated under different authorities. I understood Don’s sense of order and desire for clarity of command, but this was a different kind of war. It was opportunistic, and required flexibility. CIA and Special Forces personnel on the ground melded together immediately. They did not worry about who was in charge. It was essential to give teams on the ground the tactical autonomy they needed. Our job in Washington was to provide support and guidance, but basically to get the hell out of the way. We understood that, in the end, CIA would support Tommy Franks’s efforts and take his lead. But in the beginning, CIA’s knowledge of tribal relationships had primacy. I remember not saying much, and Rumsfeld not letting go of the issue until the vice president intervened by saying, “Don, just let the CIA do their job.”
He did, for the moment, but that wasn’t the last we would hear of the matter. A few weeks later Franks paid me a visit at CIA headquarters.
“I want you to subordinate your officers in Afghanistan to me,” he said. That’s military talk for “you guys need to work for me.”
“It ain’t gonna happen, Tommy,” I told him.
I have tremendous respect for the military and for Franks in particular, but in this case I knew that if we fell under Pentagon control, the big bureaucracy would stifle our initiative and prevent us from doing the job we were best equipped to do. Tommy was just carrying water for the folks at the Pentagon. He and his staff had long had a great working relationship with the Agency, and we weren’t about to screw that up. He and I agreed that CIA would enter into some sort of “Memorandum of Understanding” with CENTCOM on relations between our two organizations. I gave the task of writing the memorandum to Lt. Gen. John “Soup” Campbell. I made it clear that the memo should be written in a manner that did not compromise CIA’s prerogatives. Soup had taught me a few things, most notably a great military expression for when you really do not want to get sucked into something: “Go dumb early.” And that is exactly what we did with the MOU: drafted it, coordinated it with CENTCOM, and put it on the shelf.
With the Northern Alliance yet to be fully unleashed and bombing in the north still to take its toll on Taliban front lines, some pessimism began to creep in as to whether our strategy would succeed before the onset of winter. On October 25, Rumsfeld sent around a paper that had been produced for him by the Defense Intelligence Agency. He passed out copies of the document at a meeting in the Situation Room. I read it quickly and shot a look at Hank Crumpton, who was sitting behind me. Among DIA’s key points was the bold assertion that “Northern Alliance forces are incapable of overcoming Taliban resistance in northern Afghanistan, particularly the strategic city of Mazar-I Sharif, given current conditions.” The paper also flatly stated that “The Northern Alliance will not capture the capital of Kabul before winter arrives, nor does it possess sufficient forces to encircle and isolate the city.” DIA was equally glum about prospects in the south, saying that “No viable Pashtun alternative exists to [the] Taliban.” In its summary, the DIA said, “Barring widespread defections, the Northern Alliance will not secure any major gains before winter.”
Pessimism wasn’t limited to official sources. On October 31, New York Times correspondent R. W. “Johnny” Apple wrote that, “Like an unwelcome specter from an unhappy past, the ominous word ‘quagmire’ has begun to haunt conversations among government officials and students of foreign policy, both here and abroad. Could Afghanistan become another Vietnam?”
Contrary to what the Pentagon and Johnny Apple were saying, we were closing in on our objectives, but we still had a hard time convincing our own national security team that the plan was working. But we had honed our plan down to four main objectives: capturing Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, pushing south to Khandahar (Mullah Omar’s headquarters), unifying the east and west areas of Northern Alliance control, and finally taking Kabul. Throughout it all, the president never wavered.
On the morning of Friday, November 9, Pentagon officials again briefed the White House that things were not going well in Mazar-i-Sharif. Hank Crumpton, whom I had brought along to the session, disagreed. “Mazar will fall in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours,” he boldly stated. Not everyone in the room agreed with Hank’s analysis.
Hank proved right; Mazar fell the next day, and Taliban resistance quickly began to dissipate elsewhere in the country. Suddenly, the concern in Washington shifted from things moving too slowly to things moving too fast. The worry now was that the Northern Alliance was getting ahead of the nascent resistance in southern Afghanistan, and that if they took the capital of Kabul too quickly, intertribal fighting and score-settling would break out and chaos would reign.
Granted, that danger existed, but I told Condi Rice and other NSC officials that it would be impossible to tell the Northern Alliance, after years of resistance to the Taliban, that they should stand down and not retake their country’s capital when it lay before them. What’s more, I said, we had teams inserted with all the major warlords and could monitor events closely; and indeed, when the Northern Alliance did roll into Kabul on November 14, they demonstrated remarkable restraint in their actions.
As successful as the northern campaign was, the southern one limped along in search of tribal support and, most important, a charismatic Afghan to rally the tribes there against the Taliban. As always, we were getting lots of advice, sometimes from odd precincts. Former national security advisor Bud McFarlane and two wealthy Chicago brothers all weighed in, urging us to support someone by the name of Abdul Haq. Haq had gained prominence and lost a leg fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the late eighties.
We dutifully sent officers to meet with him in Pakistan to assess his capabilities. It turned out they were minimal. Haq had only a handful of supporters. CIA officials urged him not to enter Afghanistan until he could muster more forces. We offered him a satellite phone with which he could communicate with us, but he turned it down, apparently, as we later learned, because he feared we would use the phone to track his whereabouts. Tragically, Haq ignored our advice and entered Afghanistan on the back of a mule. Reportedly, by then he had with him nineteen men sharing four rifles. Before long we were receiving frantic calls from Haq’s American admirers, telling us that he was besieged by the Taliban and demanding that we save him. Unfortunately, there were no American assets anywhere in the vicinity of his uncoordinated entry. CIA did have an armed Predator UAV close by, and we sent it looking for Haq. When we found him surrounded, Agency officers remotely fired the Predator’s Hellfire missile, hoping to divert Haq’s attackers, but a single missile was insufficient to the task. Haq was captured and executed on October 25. (Later, in March of 2002, our Predator went to the rescue of U.S. Rangers in a downed helicopter on Roberts Ridge in Shaikot. We were able to alert the Rangers about enemy forces surrounding them. The Predator marked enemy force
s for a successful French Mirage attack, and circled overhead until the Rangers were safely extracted.)
Happily, other Afghan leaders in the south showed greater promise. Chief among them was Hamid Karzai, the leader of the Popalzai tribe, which was traditionally based in the Tarin Kowt region of Afghanistan. Although Karzai’s following was small, it was loyal, and he was widely respected among the various Afghan factions. He also had incentive: his father had been assassinated by the Taliban in 1999.
On October 9, Karzai entered Afghanistan from Pakistan, where he had been in exile, on the back of a motorcycle and joined up with about 350 of his supporters. Four days later, they seized the town of Tarin Kowt, the dusty capital of Oruzgan province and the area from which Karzai’s tribe originated. Taliban forces came down from Khandahar and counterattacked Karzai’s lightly armed troops. Unlike Abdul Haq, however, Karzai had accepted our offer of a satellite phone and used it to tell us he was in trouble and to request a resupply of arms and ammo.
We couldn’t comply right away—CIA officers in the south had to compete with other urgent requests for matériel support to Afghan units in the north—but finally, on October 30, Karzai received his much-needed airdrop. Still, the situation around Tarin Kowt was desperate. On November 3, Karzai called his CIA contact, someone I can identify only as “Greg V.,” and asked to be extracted by helicopter. Greg quickly contacted CIA headquarters and made the case that Karzai represented the only credible opposition leader identified in the south. His survival, Greg said, was critical to maintaining the momentum for the southern uprising.
Greg got the go-ahead to fly in to Tarin Kowt along with a U.S. Special Forces unit to airlift Karzai and seven of his senior tribal leaders to safety in Pakistan on the night of November 4–5. Karzai made it clear to us that his withdrawal was just a temporary one and that he planned to reenter Afghanistan within days. He hoped that news of his tactical retreat would not be disclosed for fear that it might demoralize some of his supporters. Unfortunately, Don Rumsfeld happened to be in Pakistan at the time and told a press contingent about the evacuation before we could get word to him of Karzai’s desire for secrecy.
Karzai’s plan was to return to Afghanistan as soon as possible. We agreed, but we also wanted to send a small, joint CIA-DOD team back in with him. On November 14, Karzai and his tribal elders, accompanied by a six-man CIA team, a twelve-man Special Forces unit, and a three-man Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) unit, made a dangerous nighttime insertion into the Tarin Kowt area. By the next day, Taliban forces had fled Tarin Kowt and about two thousand Pashtun tribal fighters loyal to Karzai awaited his arrival in the town. For the next several days Karzai went from village to village rallying support against the Taliban. As his support grew, U.S. airdrops of machine guns, recoilless rifles, mortars, and communications gear increased as well. Unfortunately, he also attracted the enemy’s attention.
On November 16, we received reports of a large force of Taliban fighters moving toward the area. The next day a major battle erupted, and some of Karzai’s newly recruited supporters turned and ran. Greg V. took command of the situation, sprinting from one defensive position to another, telling the Afghans that this was their chance to prove their worth and make history. “If necessary, die like men!” he shouted. Backbones stiffened; Karzai’s forces repulsed the Taliban attack. For the Afghan war, it was a seminal moment. Had Karzai’s position been overrun, as appeared likely for much of November 17, the entire future of the Pashtun rebellion in the south could have ended.
Dramatic events were happening all over Afghanistan. CIA’s NALT Team Delta accompanied tribal warlord Abdul Karim Khalili on a tour of the recently liberated town of Bamiyan, his ancestral home. The town is famous for two huge statues of Buddha carved into an overlooking mountainside. The Taliban had blasted these third-century relics with dynamite and artillery fire in March 2001, saying that proper Muslims should not look upon idols. Khalili sadly noted that “Bamiyan is not Bamiyan without the statues of Buddha.” Together he and Delta team drove around the town square, which sits atop the several-hundred-foot plateau where the statues were carved. As daylight faded, they looked out on the snowcapped peaks in the distance. Khalili asked our officer to pass along his heartfelt thanks to the CIA and the U.S. government for allowing him the bittersweet opportunity to see Bamiyan at sunset again.
As the situation in the south solidified around Hamid Karzai, conditions in large parts of the north remained fluid and chaotic. After the city of Konduz fell on November 24, Northern Alliance forces incarcerated many hundreds of prisoners in a nineteenth-century fortress called Qala-i-Jangi, on the outskirts of Mazar-i-Sharif. Many of the Taliban POWs were foreigners, including at least fifty Arabs from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Iraq, and elsewhere. Also in the mix were Russians, Chinese, and a few Africans. More than just Taliban supporters, many of these people were hardcore al-Qa’ida members. We later learned that the prisoners also included one American, John Walker Lindh.
It was a volatile combination in a volatile place, and the explosion wasn’t long in coming. I vividly remember receiving an operational cable that described the incident in detail. On Sunday, November 25, two CIA officers from Team Alpha—Johnny Michael Spann and another man I’ll call “Dave”—were dispatched to the fortress to gather intelligence from the prisoners. They set about questioning the detainees in an open prison yard guarded by a few Northern Alliance soldiers. As we later learned, the guards were not only too few in number; they had also done a very poor job of searching the detainees to ensure they had no weapons.
About two hours into the interviewing, Dave heard several explosions and automatic gunfire. He looked over and saw Mike Spann being tackled by several prisoners. Running toward him, Dave drew his nine-millimeter pistol and shot four, including one who was attempting to grab Spann’s AK-47 rifle. At least three of the prisoners fell on top of Mike as Dave wrested the rifle away from the fourth.
Looking up, Dave saw another prisoner running toward him and firing a pistol from fewer than ten yards away. Dave shot him and then saw a large group, many still bound with rope, rushing toward him. Dave opened up with Spann’s AK-47 while backpedaling. He later estimated that he shot at least fifteen before running out of ammunition and having to replace the empty magazine.
While running for cover, Dave stumbled over the bodies of several dead and wounded Uzbek guards. Eventually, he was able to reach temporary shelter in one of the buildings on the perimeter of the compound. There he ran into five foreign journalists, who asked his assistance in getting out of Qala-i-Jangi. Using one of the journalist’s satellite phones, Dave called in reinforcements and air support. The small group holed up in various locations in the building for over five hours while a battle raged outside. During this period Dave was unsure about the status of his partner. One of the journalists said that he had seen Mike escape. As it started to get dark, Dave, the journalists, and several others managed to descend the north wall of the fortress and eventually reach safety.
It was a Sunday afternoon when I got word that we potentially had an officer down. I came into headquarters immediately to monitor developments. Shortly after 9/11, Cofer Black had told me that CIA might lose thirty to forty officers in carrying out our attack strategy. For a relatively small force such as ours, that was a stunning number. But even with such grim expectations—expectations that thankfully never were met—hearing that the first CIA officer was down struck us hard. I went to Hank Crumpton’s small office in the CIA headquarters, where we waited in agony for hours, desperately trying to get information from the scene.
Despite the journalist’s optimistic account of Mike Spann’s escape, we feared the worst for him. Two painful days would pass before U.S. and Afghan allied forces could put down the rebellion, get inside the fortress, and determine for certain that Mike was dead. Word of the riot and the possible death of a U.S. official did not wait for confirmation. Reports of the clash were soon airing around the world, and Pentagon s
pokesmen were quick to tell the media that no U.S. military personnel were unaccounted for. That led reporters to leap quickly and accurately to the conclusion that a CIA officer was the victim.
Mike Spann was a thirty-two-year-old former Marine who had been with CIA for only a short period. His wife, Shannon, was also a member of the CIA’s clandestine service and was on the West Coast with her infant son, visiting family, at the time of the attack. Shannon was out driving when she heard a radio report about the possibility of a CIA officer missing. Immediately, she pulled her car over to the side of the road and called headquarters to find out what she could. I dispatched some officers to California to be with her, and others to Alabama to assist Mike’s parents, even before we were able to verify his status.
Once Mike’s body was recovered and his family informed, we made the decision to confirm his death to the media. Such confirmation is routine for the military but not always so for CIA. In this case, however, the fact of Mike’s Agency background had already leaked. His family wanted to acknowledge who he was and express their pride in his service. There was no way to keep the Agency connection secret and little reason to try. Yet we were quickly criticized by pundits, who accused us of seeking publicity over the first American to die in combat in Afghanistan.
As it turned out, I had to take a trip to Pakistan shortly after Mike was killed to meet with President Musharraf over urgent intelligence we had received regarding possible follow-up al-Qa’ida attacks against the United States. On the way back to the United States, I had my plane divert to Germany, where Mike’s body had been taken. On December 2, we brought him on his final trip home. I’ve never made a more somber journey.
At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA Page 24