Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Once settled into their new home, the safe house residents set about doing their respective jobs. For the CIA, that meant putting out feelers to try to develop sources of human intelligence in Gardez, talking with locals in order to get harder information about the whereabouts of Al Qaida forces. The SF soldiers got down to the business of instructing their Afghan force, which included Hazaras and Tajiks from central and northern Afghanistan who were distinctly unwelcome in the Pushtun heartland, but who Texas 14 felt they needed to protect the safe house and provide added muscle during forays into the countryside. Training their polyglot Afghan force in basic infantry tactics was no small task for, oddly enough, given the mission the Americans would ask them to perform a few weeks later, one field in which Zia and his small band of peasant warriors—only half the size of a U.S. infantry company when he joined forces with Texas 14—had almost no experience was combat.

  7.

  THE bulky, powerful C-17 Globemaster III taxied slowly along the Bagram runway before coming to a standstill. As the giant turbofan engines wound down with a high-pitched whine, the crew lowered the back ramp, revealing the Afghan night sky inch by gray-black inch. It was the first week of January, and bitterly cold air flooded the transport’s cabin. Rising from his nylon seat, Pete Blaber shouldered his ruck and braced himself against the midnight chill before striding down the back ramp and climbing into a waiting SUV. Sitting behind the wheel in civilian clothes was a paunchy reserve officer named Scott. In civilian life Scott was a cop, but here in Bagram he was the deputy commander of a top-secret intelligence outfit. It was only a two-minute drive to the broken-down building where Scott was taking Blaber to spend the night, but that was all the time the Delta officer needed to take in the bleak, moonlit landscape. Perhaps Scott’s civilian background was not as incongruous as it might first appear, because this place looked like it needed a new sheriff.

  Located thirty miles north of Kabul on a high, broad plain at the southern edge of the Hindu Kush, the base was built in the late 1950s as part of a Soviet aid package for Afghanistan’s left-leaning government. The Soviets were not acting out of generosity. They knew they might find it useful to have a few good air bases in Afghanistan someday. Sure enough, the first wave of the Soviet force that invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 flew into Bagram. The base served as the hub of Soviet air operations during the 1980s and was frequently attacked by guerrillas. Peaks as high as 15,000 feet dominated the approaches to the airfield on three sides, and the huge Soviet transport planes would land and take off in tight corkscrew patterns to avoid flying over the mountains and becoming targets for mujahideen armed with shoulder-held antiaircraft missiles. After the Soviets left, the base was on the frontlines of the various Afghan civil wars. Like the Ariana hotel, it bore the scars.

  The first American troops into Bagram belonged to ODA 555 (the “Triple Nickel”), who arrived with the Northern Alliance on October 21. The Special Forces soldiers found the base in terrible condition. Bullets had pockmarked the low-quality concrete every building was made of. Here and there a larger hole had been punched through a wall by a tank main gun round, or the corner of a roof ripped off by a rocket-propelled grenade. There was no electricity or running water. All that remained of the Afghan air force was a jumbled pile of broken and rusting MiGs beside the runway.

  A few of the Americans at the base were conventional soldiers conducting support operations. But the vast majority looked a little different from the denizens of most American military camps. Few complete uniforms were in evidence. These troops wore jeans, T-shirts, and photojournalist vests, plus fleece jackets to shield themselves from the harsh Afghan winter. Their hair hung lank around their ears. All had thick, bushy beards. But appearances can be deceiving, and in this case were intended to be so. These scruffy men were among the most skilled warriors and covert operatives in the world. America had sent the best it had to Afghanistan in the wake of September 11. Now many of them had set up shop in Bagram’s dilapidated hangars and barracks.

  They belonged to a variety of organizations, some of which were well known to the American public. But others had names that rarely if ever appeared in print. By late January they had been assigned a series of exotic code names: Bowie, Dagger, and K-Bar. In fact, many troops at Bagram in January belonged to a top-secret unit that had already changed its name since deploying to Afghanistan. It started the war as Task Force Sword, but by January had been renamed Task Force 11.

  Task Force 11 had only one goal: to kill or capture so-called “high-value targets” (HVTs), the phrase the U.S. military used to describe senior Al Qaida and Taliban leaders.

  Task Force Sword had included 2,200 to 2,500 personnel, making it one of the biggest agglomerations of “black” special operators ever assembled. (“Black” special operations forces, such as Delta and SEAL Team 6, also known as “special mission units,” are those whose existence the Pentagon refuses to formally acknowledge.) Inside Sword were several component task forces, but from October until early January its principal muscle had been provided by a 100-strong squadron of Delta Force operators and support troops, code-named Task Force Green. These were the men at the very core of Task Force Sword, the direct action force trained to kick in doors, overwhelm a numerically superior force, and kill or capture America’s most dangerous enemies.

  Established in 1977 at Fort Bragg as the United States’ premier counterterrorist unit, Delta had grown from a few dozen soldiers to a force of almost 1,000. Only about 250 were “operators,” super-fit commandos who executed direct action missions. They were divided into three squadrons—A, B, and C—of about seventy-five to eighty-five soldiers each. Within each squadron were three troops (not three soldiers, but three company-equivalent formations). Two were assault troops specializing in direct action. After completing Delta’s six-month operator training course, newcomers were assigned to an assault troop. A few handpicked veterans would graduate to the squadron’s reconnaissance and surveillance, or “recce,” troop. Smaller than the other troops, the recce troop’s missions included penetrating enemy lines unseen, watching enemy positions, and sniping. (The use of the British abbreviation recce, rather than the more American recon, reflected Delta’s roots as an organization modeled along the lines of the British Special Air Service, or SAS, by its founder, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who had served with the SAS as an exchange officer.) For reasons of operational security and practicality, Delta, now known also by its cover name of Combat Applications Group, was a very self-contained organization. The rest of the unit consisted of superbly trained and equipped mechanics, communications specialists, intelligence analysts, and other support troops, plus a headquarters staff. In addition, Delta had an aviation squadron based elsewhere on the East Coast, which also flew missions for the CIA.

  The first Delta squadron to deploy as TF Green for the war in Afghanistan was B Squadron. It came home in December. A Squadron took its place, but only for a few weeks. By January 1 A Squadron had been replaced by another commando element. But these operators were from SEAL Team 6 and went by the name Task Force Blue.

  Formed in 1980, SEAL Team 6 recruited its personnel from the rest of the Navy’s SEAL teams. The unit’s job was to conduct the same sort of antiterrorist direct action missions in which Delta specialized, but in a maritime environment. In other words, if terrorists threatened a cruise ship or an oil rig, Team 6 would likely get the call to take care of the situation. But the unit got off to a rocky start.

  Richard Marcinko, the unit’s charismatic and hard-drinking founder and first commanding officer, was a legendary SEAL. But his flamboyant—some would say cowboylike—personality proved divisive within the team and the wider SEAL community. He changed command in 1983, but the damage to the team’s reputation did not pass so easily. Marcinko’s abrasive personality and the freewheeling, devil-may-care attitude he imprinted on the new organization ensured that for the rest of the decade many Delta soldiers viewed their Navy counterparts with suspicion verg
ing on scorn. In 1990, Marcinko was sentenced to twenty-one months in jail after being convicted of several charges in connection with a scheme to use his former Team 6 colleagues to bilk the U.S. Treasury of over $100,000. His conviction further tarnished the reputation of the organization he had built from the ground up.

  It took a few years, but after Marcinko’s departure, Team 6 slowly gained a measure of professionalism and respect. It also expanded, but, lacking Delta’s extensive support structure, it never grew to more than about a third of the size of its Army counterpart. Like Delta, the team acquired a cover name—Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DevGru—and matured so that by the early 1990s even some Army special operators felt its professionalism matched Delta’s. But as Team 6 became more proficient, the scorn Delta felt toward it evolved into antagonism as the Navy operators began to encroach on Delta’s turf, taking on land-based direct action missions that had been Delta’s exclusive preserve. Some of the bitterness—which was mutual—could be attributed to the fierce rivalry that had always existed between the respective special operations communities of the Army and Navy, from which both units recruited most of their men. One Navy officer who worked closely with both Army and Navy special ops forces described their relationship as “at best analogous to a sibling rivalry, and at worst, to a marriage coming apart.”

  Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the higher headquarters for both units, instituted a joint training regimen in the early 1990s that required both organizations to train with each other every three months. After a few years of this routine, the leaders in each organization had grown up beside each other. A mutual respect ensued. By the mid-1990s the friction had become a healthy rivalry rather than outright animosity. Strong friendships developed between operators in each organization.

  Nevertheless, JSOC commander Major General Dell Dailey’s insertion of TF Blue into Afghanistan irked Army special operators, and Delta men in particular, who worried that their Navy counterparts’ limited land warfare training did not adequately prepare them for the extraordinarily demanding missions presented by operations in Afghanistan. They noted, disapprovingly, that while Delta would never seek to conduct a direct action mission at sea, Team 6 had no inhibitions about taking on missions that required a deep understanding of land warfare. “A lot of the SEALs are just boat guys, and you can’t shake and bake an infantry guy,” an Army operator in Afghanistan said. In the eyes of the Delta operators, much of the blame lay with Joint Special Operations Command, which seemed determined to treat Delta and Team 6 as interchangeable, despite their vastly different areas of expertise. The decision to withdraw Delta’s A Squadron early and put Team 6’s squadrons into the TF 11 rotation before all three Delta squadrons had seen action seemed nonsensical to Army types. The operators in Delta’s C squadron “were borderline suicidal that they weren’t in the fight yet,” according to an Army special ops source.

  But Dailey, an Army special operations helicopter pilot who had also served in the Rangers, had little sympathy for the Delta operators. His decision to use the SEALs reflected his view that the “war on terror” had to be viewed in the same context as the Cold War: a long, drawn-out marathon, not a short sprint to victory. He expected the new war to last forty years and was determined to ensure JSOC could prosecute the fight with intensity over the long haul. Therefore he decided to give Delta a rest. Committing the unit to Afghanistan indefinitely, he believed, would burn Delta out within nine months. He knew Delta was superior to Team 6 in land operations, but he thought each unit easily surpassed the standard required for success.

  Dailey applied the same thought process to the leadership of TF 11. In October Sword’s joint operations center moved from JSOC headquarters at Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina to Masirah Island, off the coast of Oman in the Indian Ocean. Dailey went along as Sword’s commander. But in a move that roughly coincided with the change from Sword to 11, he put his entire operation in Masirah and Afghanistan, including his position as the task force commander, on a ninety-day rotation cycle. So in January he and his principal staff returned to Pope. His replacement was his deputy, Air Force Brigadier General Gregory Trebon. Curiously, although Task Force 11’s raison d’être was reconnaissance and direct action against high-value targets, Trebon had no background in those fields. A vastly experienced pilot who had logged over 7,000 flight hours in fifty-five different military and civilian airframes, Trebon was also a free-fall–qualified parachutist. He had spent most of his career in special operations and enjoyed a reputation for being a solid professional. But Trebon’s special ops assignments had been spent in aircraft units or coordinating the special operations air component on larger Air Force or joint staffs. His specialty was piloting C-141 transports specially configured for landing on dirt airstrips or dropping Rangers on low-level parachute missions. An expert at integrating Air Force special ops into commando operations, he had had no opportunity to learn the tactics, techniques, and procedures involved in hunting down and killing enemies on the ground.

  Some JSOC personnel thought Dailey should have placed Delta’s commander, Colonel Jim Schwitters, or Captain Joe Kernan, the Team 6 commander, in charge of TF 11, depending on whether it was the turn of TF Green or TF Blue to take the lead in the task force. Dailey knew Trebon lacked boots-on-the-ground experience, but he believed he had an obligation to develop his deputy by giving Trebon responsibility. Dailey also knew that Tommy Franks preferred to work through generals whenever possible, and that Trebon was the protégé of Air Force General Charlie Holland, who as commander of U.S. Special Operations Command was Dailey’s boss.

  In contrast with Trebon, there was one general in Bagram who knew all about how to chase down and kill “bad guys,” as the U.S. military liked to refer to its enemies. That was Brigadier General Gary Harrell. A barrel-chested man with a viselike handshake his aides felt compelled to warn visitors about, Harrell was a legendary special operator. He had spent all but eighteen months between December 1985 and July 2000 in a variety of jobs in Delta and JSOC, rising to command Delta between 1998 and 2000. Harrell was no stranger to manhunts. As Delta’s C Squadron commander, he had tracked drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in Colombia and warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia. Later, in the 1990s, he helped locate and capture war criminals in the Balkans.

  Despite his background, Harrell was not in charge of any “door-kickers” in Afghanistan. Since July 2000 he had headed CENTCOM’s Joint Security Directorate, which oversaw the protection of U.S. forces across CENTCOM’s slice of the globe. But in November 2001 Franks ordered him to Afghanistan to command an intelligence “fusion cell” that would take all the intelligence being produced by U.S. assets in—or over—Afghanistan and fuse it together to be “stovepiped” back to Franks. The CENTCOM commander placed a lot of faith in Harrell, whom he referred to as his “quarterback,” and sent him to Afghanistan to bring more focus to the intel collection process. The burly one-star showed up in Bagram on November 25. Staffed with personnel from the military, the CIA, and other agencies, his fusion cell’s task was to sift through the reams of information the United States was gathering on the movements of high-value targets and decide what constituted “actionable” intelligence. The cell started off small, but after Harrell arrived it expanded to a force of fifty or sixty people. Like TF 11, Harrell’s new organization, which he named Task Force Bowie, worked directly for Franks, with no requirement to report to Mikolashek. Unlike TF 11, however, Bowie was located in Bagram, which was fast becoming the dominant military headquarters in Afghanistan. Harrell was also in charge of Bagram’s detention facility, a large multistory gray building where Taliban and Al Qaida prisoners were held and interrogated by U.S. intelligence personnel. In the opinion of special operators in Afghanistan, Harrell’s location gave him a substantial advantage over anyone back in Masirah.

  Those on the ground in Bagram realized Harrell was more than an intelligence conduit. He was Franks’s personal representative at Bagram. “He [Fr
anks] wanted his guy on the ground to make sure that things were going the right way,” said an officer who worked close to Harrell. Harrell not only brought a general’s star to bear, but also an intimidating weight of experience that few, if any, at Bagram, could match.

  Nested inside Bowie, but reporting to TF 11, was a small organization that would soon have a major impact on the war. Called Advance Force Operations, or AFO, its mission was to conduct high-risk reconnaissance missions deep into enemy territory. AFO was not a standing organization back in the States, but rather a concept coordinated by a JSOC headquarters cell that could draw personnel from any special operations unit to meet a particular mission’s requirements. Troops attached to AFO were equally at home conducting deep tactical reconnaissance on a conventional battlefield or infiltrating a foreign capital wearing suits and carrying false passports in order to rent vehicles and office space in preparation for a direct action mission. AFO could also conduct terminal guidance (spotting targets for aircraft to strike), sniper missions, and direct action, if necessary. “The intent is to tailor the force for the situation, so it’s never quite the same, but it’s always small, it’s always cross-functional, and it’s always the best of the best working in it,” said an officer familiar with AFO.

  Although AFO was small, relative to a typical Delta squadron, its mission—challenging even when compared to the Herculean tasks often required of Delta—was reflected in the seniority of its personnel. The AFO commander was usually a senior lieutenant colonel who had already commanded a Delta squadron, and almost all the NCOs were master sergeants or sergeants major—seasoned operators who could each draw on fifteen to twenty-five years of experience. “The ability to do that stuff required a degree of self-control and just being cool that almost went beyond what you would expect of anybody in the squadrons,” said an officer who worked on the JSOC staff in the 1990s.