by Dalton Fury
The second mission was to rescue Shelter Now International hostages being held somewhere in Kabul, Afghanistan, which was under Taliban control.
We went to work studying photos from the intelligence shop and reviewing Predator footage of the major hardball and hard-packed dirt roads. Some photos taken by the unmanned aerial vehicle also had been sent via satellite from some of our guys on the ground with the CIA north of Kabul, and near Kandahar in the south. [8] All routes in and out of the capital city were controlled by sporadic and intermittent Taliban checkpoints.
We decided our only way to reach the hostages, short of fighting our way in, was to look like a bunch of ragtag Taliban or al Qaeda fighters ourselves.
Only small groups of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters enjoyed freedom of movement inside Kabul after nightfall, and for that the Taliban favored imported Toyota pickup trucks. There you have it: We would become terrorists for an evening.
The unit acquired a dozen Toyota 4×4 pickup trucks and while our mechanics modified them to fit a dozen specific mission parameters, we gathered Taliban-like turbans, mujahideen wool pakool hats and other Arab and Afghan clothing.
Higher headquarters needed some prodding to appreciate the tactic we were setting up. One afternoon, troop sergeant major Jim and I sat around brainstorming how we might garner more support for our plan to hide in plain sight.
We pulled a recent photo of some Taliban fighters in a pickup truck near Kabul. We then outfitted one of our assault teams with similar clothing, RPGs, and AK-47s, loaded them in a similar pickup, and took their picture.
The two photos were almost identical and we packaged them in a short PowerPoint presentation. To the slide with the two photos juxtaposed, we added the caption, “At less than 10 percent illumination, what does the enemy actually see?” The unit operations officer was convinced and he took it over to higher headquarters. A few hours later, we had approval.
The options for a successful rescue inside Kabul were still limited. Sure, the 160th SOAR pilots could deposit us wherever we wanted, but that was only half the performance. The idea was not just to get out with the hostages; it was to bring them home alive.
The basic idea was to pass ourselves off as an al Qaeda convoy moving through the city at night, taking advantage of bombing that would be going on north of the capital. We had no illusions of being able to pass any close inspection or talk ourselves past a sentry, but all we needed was just to avoid being recognized at a distance by the brief look of a sentry.
If our ploy worked, we would continue to roll toward the hostage location. If not, we would eliminate the guards with our suppressed weapons to keep things quiet from neighborhood ears. We did not want a Mogadishulike confrontation.
Then we had some very good intelligence from the CIA about the hostage building, right down to which rooms they were in. Unit engineers constructed a mock-up of the building so we could rehearse the assault dozens of times.
The cover-for-action theory looked good to us, and maybe the rescue of the hostages in Kabul might have worked, but it all became moot because the Taliban collapsed so fast. When Kabul toppled on November 10, the Taliban ran for their lives, and some sympathetic Afghans spirited the hostages out of the city to a point where they were safely picked up by helicopters.
In late November 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited the Delta compound and my troop was tapped to demonstrate the Unit’s unique skills.
These capability exercises, or CAPEXs, occurred every other month or so for various VIPs, and most were just a pain in the ass, since they took away valuable training days in preparation. [9]
However, times were different now; we wanted to show this wartime secretary of defense more than we would unveil to an average visiting ambassador, congressman, or even a general officer. Since my troop was putting on the demonstration, the responsibility for most of the briefing fell to me. We wanted to impress the hell out of Rumsfeld, for our goal was to hear him tell us that we were going to Afghanistan.
The day of the CAPEX, a teammate approached me roughly thirty minutes before the secretary’s arrival. Cos had been wounded in action in Somalia in 1993 and again was wounded during the October 19, 2001, raid on the home of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Cos was now back in the United States, nursing his latest wounds, and asked if I minded introducing him to Secretary Rumsfeld.
Here was an operator who had spilled blood fighting for our country, and I thought the request totally reasonable. Cos had earned an introduction, but that didn’t mean I should not pull his chain a bit. “Well, Cos, I don’t know. That’s not part of the approved itinerary,” I wisecracked. “Hmmm, I wonder how high the approval authority would be for a last-minute request.”
He knew that I was kidding, but I quickly changed gears. “Absolutely, Cos, I’d be honored to do it. Be outside standing in the background. As soon as the secretary is turned over to me from the Unit commander, I’ll break the script and call you over.”
“I’ll be there. I owe you one, Dalton,” Cos replied.
“Easy day, Cos. Easy day.”
It was an unusually warm day in North Carolina and Sergeant Major Ironhead and I squinted into the sun as the VIPs approached through the Delta garden.
Flanked by several dozen uniformed officers from various higher headquarters, the secretary and his party made their way toward the bus. I recognized Steven Cambone, the special assistant to the secretary, and Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke, who was walking with a cast on her foot.
After shaking Rumsfeld’s hand and asking about the weather in Washington, I motioned Cos to come forward. The looks on the faces of some of the senior officers present was incredulous. Who does this major think he is breaking the rehearsed itinerary for this type of shenanigans? Sergeant Major Ironhead shot me a smirk.
Rumsfeld was clearly enthralled as I described Cos’s dedication and explained his convalescent status. He was genuinely appreciative of the operator’s sacrifice and commitment. The whole episode lasted less than a minute and was more than worth the slight change in schedule. A few days later, Cos was back in Afghanistan. Two days after that, he was wounded while fighting in Kandahar. Again he recovered. Again he went back, and in November, 2003, he was wounded for the fourth time, in Baghdad. Who would not shake up a VIP schedule for that kind of operator?
Further into the CAPEX, Rumsfeld listened to Pope, a Delta sniper team sergeant, describe the dozen or so modifications to the Toyota trucks that our guys had made. It was more of a diversion, and while it was going on, another Toyota pickup slowly made its way up behind the visiting party. Four operators armed with AK-47s and RPGs, adorned with healthy beards and dressed in Afghan rags, were propped menacingly in the bed of the truck as it rolled to a silent stop roughly forty meters away.
Pope asked Secretary Rumsfeld to turn around and take a look at how we planned to use these new vehicles that had been bought out of his budget. A wide smile lit Rumsfeld’s face and he marveled about how authentic the boys looked.
After an hour or so of discussion and demonstrations that included a show by special helicopters and a free-fall parachute demonstration by Navy SEALs, I climbed aboard an old school bus with the secretary and a bevy of generals from the Special Ops community and senior Delta officers to move to still another demonstration site.
Rumsfeld had a slight look of angst, and he said to me, “What we really need is small groups of folks, say two to four people, that can go anywhere in the world and execute discreet missions against these people [al Qaeda].”
I was shocked! Did the secretary of defense, a month and a half after 9/11, still have no idea what Delta offered our nation? Was Delta’s operational security so tight that not even the secretary understood the Unit’s capabilities?
I didn’t have to worry about answering because various generals and senior Special Ops officers nervously showered him with answers, buzz words, and reassurances that the capability he had just
described was exactly Delta’s job! Those unique abilities he described had already existed for many years.
Throughout the exercise, we emphasized that we were capable of operating alongside Afghan warlords, infiltrating hostile areas, conducting long-range helicopter assaults in extremely cold weather, and fighting in dangerously unforgiving mountain passes.
As the CAPEX came to a close, we had shown Don Rumsfeld, the cleanup hitter for the world’s only remaining superpower, that Delta Force, the most versatile, lethal, and trustworthy tool that he had, was ready to be pulled out of the toolbox and put to work.
In fact, our sister squadron was already operating secretly inside Afghanistan. Delta was the United States’ premier counterterrorism force, and it was high time that someone treated us that way, and gave the taxpayers their money’s worth.
Little did we know at the time of Rumsfeld’s visit, but our squadron’s fate was being determined some 7,000 miles away in northwest Afghanistan.
On a sunny but cold day at Bagram Air Base, about thirty-seven miles north of the capital city of Kabul, four men were gathered around the hood of a Humvee outside the headquarters of Task Force Dagger, home of in-country Special Forces operations at the time. Gary Berntsen, the lead guy on the ground for the Central Intelligence Agency, was paying yet another visit to barrel-chested colonel John Mulholland, the commander of Dagger, to lay out fresh intelligence sources on the whereabouts of Usama bin Laden.
It was not the first time the CIA had approached Mulholland on the issue, and the first request had been unequivocally rejected. To increase his chances this time around, the CIA man had brought along more firepower, in the persons of Lt. Col. Mark Sutter of Delta Force, and a Special Forces officer we will call Lieutenant Colonel Al, who was attached to the CIA.
The three visitors felt so strongly about the new intelligence that they would not discuss it by phone, even over secure lines. But to do anything with the vital information, they needed more than just to share it; they needed an army. Short of that, they would settle for a Special Forces A Team or two from Mulholland.
To Gary Berntsen the new details were hot enough to be “actionable intelligence,” by definition something that could be acted upon. In the past week, credible sources had placed bin Laden in the historic city of Jalalabad, close to the Pakistan border and the entranceway to the Khyber Pass. Locals had reported scores of vehicles loaded with al Qaeda fighters and supplies moving south, toward bin Laden’s old fortress, the caves and secure positions nestled high in the Tora Bora Mountains.
There already were numerous Special Forces A Teams working in the western part of Afghanistan, and that put these highly skilled soldiers at the top of the CIA wish list for assistance. Mulholland voiced his concern that bin Laden held well-prepared defensive positions up in those mountains, as well as a significant terrain advantage.
But there was something else going on, too, for the colonel’s Special Forces teams had been burned already by Afghan warlords who had personal vendettas and agendas that were counter to the United States objectives. The warlord the CIA was now backing to hunt down bin Laden was a relative unknown, and had not yet been vetted to Mulholland’s satisfaction.
Gary Berntsen continued his hard pitch, placing the Green Beret commander in a dilemma. For a few uncomfortable moments, it looked like a stalemate.
Then Lieutenant Colonel Al, who had been friends with Mulholland for a long time, looked the colonel in the eye and promised that any Green Berets that Mulholland could spare would be used only under Al’s personal guidance and within their capabilities. He promised to watch over them like they were his own.
Mulholland wanted bin Laden dead as bad as the next guy, probably even more so if the death of the terrorist might get him out of godforsaken Afghanistan a little earlier. He reluctantly agreed to commit some Green Berets, but not before leveling a few veiled threats at his friend Lieutenant Colonel Al: Don’t get my guys killed in some harebrained reenactment of Custer’s last stand.
Once they had Mulholland’s blessing, Lieutenant Colonels Sutter and Al, along with the operations officer of the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, went to work developing a plan that would pass muster by the various decision makers back at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, and at Fort Bragg. A gentlemen’s agreement made over the hood of a Humvee in a country that was one big battlefield is quite different from appeasing the senior leaders managing the war from the United States.
In a rare display of unity, during that single afternoon, the three planners cast aside all politically correct barriers, or the stovepiping of information, embraced a united front, and developed a viable interagency plan. All parties involved had to wipe the snot from their noses and sing from the same sheet of music. It was a bonding not often achieved among senior levels of the intelligence and the military communities.
That agreement was nice, but whether this hunt for bin Laden would turn out to be a great success or a complete goat screw was yet to be seen.
Based upon that meeting at Bagram, our squadron’s luck changed, and a day or two later we received deployment orders to Afghanistan.
We spent a couple of days tying up loose ends, spent time with our families, and studied the available intelligence reports on potential targets. Then we walked out of the Delta building in North Carolina and loaded the buses for our long journey to war.
We were going off one man light. Former Ranger and Delta assaulter Scott had wanted to go to Afghanistan as much as the rest of us, but a civilian job had been aggressively recruiting him. He stalled as long as possible and even pushed back his end-of-service date, hoping for the deployment orders to come through before he had to make the final decision. The timing was all wrong, and he had dropped the paperwork that ended his military career just before we got the word to move out.
It was a disappointment for everyone, including Scott, but he came out to meet us at the bus, in civilian clothes with his long hair blowing in the wind, to shake hands and wish the squadron luck.
Acouple of C-17 Globemasters hauled us across the Atlantic Ocean, long and tiring flights to the ISB, our intermediate staging base near the Arabian Sea. The change from the chill of North Carolina to the searing heat of the Middle East hit us hard. We stowed our gear, dressed down into brown T-shirts and black running shorts, and got down to preparing to enter Afghanistan.
Intelligence remained painfully scarce, since very few friendly forces were inside Afghanistan at that early date. The whereabouts of bin Laden and his stubborn and faithful Afghan host, Mullah Omar, were unknown. Anyone’s guess.
Then we were slammed by a silly deception plan that had been dreamed up by parties unknown. The majority of the Rangers and our Delta teammates were being sent home! Somebody had decided to try and fool Usama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban into thinking that the Joint Special Operations Task Force had left the theater of operations, so the bad guys would let down their guard. The naïveté of that idea still boggles my mind today.
“Aren’t we at war?” we asked. Why were we not pouring all available assets into Afghanistan, rather than withdrawing our strength? What about helping the 5th Group Green Berets deliver the coup de grâce to the Taliban? Moreover, what about the deadly and dangerous business of hunting and killing terrorists in their rugged mountain redoubts and desert lairs? Why were we drawing down just as we were about to embark on what was arguably the most important mission ever given to our organization?
Fortunately, a couple of hundred Rangers would be arriving at Bagram eventually and could form a potential quickreaction force should we get into big trouble. None were yet in the country, however, so the key word remained only a “potential” QRF, not a real one. Still, it was a bright spot in a sea of ambiguity. No helicopters or air assets were yet based in the country, but some of those stationed within flying distance also were being sent home. Crazy stuff.
Ours not to reason why. Our sister squadron was at the ISB for another few d
ays, heading back to the States after a busy month and a half, and we picked their brains for lessons learned. During their brief stint, they had raided Mullah Omar’s house in Kandahar on October 19, conducted mounted reconnaissance missions south of that city, and executed in-and-out missions that destroyed fleeing Taliban convoys. Their most striking mission involved the first nighttime combat HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachute jump since the Vietnam War.
Another friendly face at the ISB was that of Gus Murdock, who had been our squadron commander until just a few months before 9/11, when he had been corralled to head a new organization. Gus was now in charge of a mix of sister-service operators, support personnel, fixed- and rotarywing aircraft planners, and some top military and civilian intelligence geniuses, and they would fight deep in the shadows and along the seams of the war on terror.
Within a day or so, a small advance party from our squadron flew ahead to Bagram, dubbed FOB Yukon. They were to determine whether Yukon could be suitable as a staging base for us, and what they found was not exactly a fixer-upper.
Built by the Soviets during their own Afghan war, Yukon had plenty of real estate, buildings, and a runway, but was in terrible shape. Derelict Soviet jets and rusted airplane parts littered the area, and years of bombardment had left the old runway severely cratered. Most windows were shattered in the gutted buildings and there was no running water or electricity. Hundreds of unmarked land mines were hidden beneath an inch or so of fine brown dust.
Still, Yukon could be made workable, and our unit engineers assumed the monumental task of turning it into a long-term station that could support combat operations for an indefinite period. They worked miracles.
In his book Against All Enemies, former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke recounted a tabletop exercise by intelligence officials and analysts conducted in 2000. The participants were divided into two groups, one playing the role of al Qaeda and secretly developing weapons of mass destruction to be used against the United States. That group also was asked to determine where in the world al Qaeda might likely hide the weapon. The second group countered the first and began with the assumption al Qaeda had already developed a weapon.