by Sean Naylor
The man JSOC chose to run AFO in Afghanistan was Pete Blaber.
Prior to taking charge of AFO early January, Blaber had been Delta’s operations officer, having already commanded B Squadron. As the operations officer, he had deployed to Masirah and then Afghanistan with TF Green before returning to the States in December. Now he was back to run what was arguably the most challenging mission in TF 11, the on-the-ground reconnaissance efforts in the search for the most senior enemy leaders. To cover Afghanistan’s 647,500 square kilometers Blaber had a tiny force of about forty-five operators, intel analysts, and commo guys. The bulk of these troops were divided into six teams—half in southern Afghanistan, led by a major, and half in northeastern Afghanistan, also commanded by a major. The small headquarters element Blaber would head up was based at Bagram with TF Bowie.
But all was not well in Bagram. The several hundred special ops troops gathering in khaki tents and ramshackle buildings at the base were some of the planet’s finest warriors, backed by a world-class intelligence capability. In briefings and planning sessions they exuded a calm, professional aura so polished it positively shone. But beneath the surface, tensions were pulling at the unity of the operation at Bagram. Some operators felt that the force gathering there was neither organized nor led in the most effective, logical manner; that it was not, in military-speak, “optimized for mission success.” Many were concerned at Trebon’s appointment as TF 11 commander and JSOC commander Dailey’s decision to replace Delta’s experienced land warriors with Team 6’s “boat guys.” To Army special ops types at Bagram, these steps smacked, at the very least, of a misplaced commitment to the U.S. military principle of “jointness”—the notion that combat effectiveness is always enhanced by the closest possible integration of the four military services. “The Green position was ‘We should do this, give it to us. We don’t need anybody replacing us, we’ll just do this ourselves,’” recalled a JSOC officer.
Dailey was a divisive figure in the special operations community. A former head of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, his appointment as JSOC commander made him the latest in a string of Army and Air Force pilots to be given senior positions in U.S. Special Operations Command and JSOC. This trend upset many of JSOC’s ground warriors, who viewed their direct action missions as JSOC’s raison d’être and couldn’t see why aviators were placed in charge of such operations. “Guys who come from aviation units know how to manage money, but they don’t know how to tactically employ their ground elements,” said a Delta NCO. Among these men, Dailey had a reputation for parochialism and risk aversion. An officer who worked for him said Dailey nurtured “a long-held gripe” against ground special ops units. Other operators agreed that Dailey’s experiences in the 160th, whose pilots are often referred to as “taxi drivers” or “bus drivers” by the operators they ferry into combat, had left him with a big chip on his shoulder. In after-action reviews of training exercises and combat missions, 160th officers often were sharply criticized by their Delta, Ranger, and Special Forces peers if the helicopter portion of an operation was less than perfect. It was easy to see how such experiences might have left Dailey bearing a grudge that came to the fore when he took command of JSOC, they said. “Now the guy who was head of the fleet of taxi cabs is running the show,” noted a special operations source in Bagram. Dailey also believed, according to an Army officer, that a general, simply by virtue of his rank, was automatically qualified to command and control ground operations, even if he had no real ground experience.
But other officers, particularly those who knew Dailey through service in the 160th, had a far more positive view of the general. “He always seemed to me to be a fair-minded, pretty smart tactical leader,” said a field grade officer who had worked for Dailey in the 160th. “He was very popular as commander of the 160th—very charismatic.” These officers were skeptical of the view that Dailey was biased against ground-pounders. As a junior officer he had served in the Rangers, they said, noting that near his Master Aviator Badge he still wore the Expert Infantryman Badge, an award given only to infantrymen who pass an exacting series of field tests.
In theory, Dailey was not in Trebon’s chain of command, which ran straight to Franks, who had operational control of TF 11. But in reality, as the deputy JSOC commander, Trebon frequently answered to Dailey, who from his North Carolina headquarters continued to exert control over how his forces were used in Afghanistan.
Dailey’s performance during video-teleconferences with TF 11’s staff did little to alter his reputation as a micromanager—some JSOC staffers referred to him as “the 6,000-mile screwdriver”—and a black special ops elitist averse to having JSOC forces work with white special ops forces, let alone the conventional troops now deploying into Afghanistan. Given these circumstances, it was almost inevitable that tensions would arise between Trebon, the Air Force officer in charge of a manhunt, and Harrell, whose résumé seemed to make him more qualified to do Trebon’s job than Trebon himself.
Edwards, the deputy CFLCC commander watching events unfold from Kuwait, could see Harrell pushing the envelope of the authority Franks had given him. The CENTCOM commander placed great trust in Harrell, Edwards noted, “but he gave Gary no operational responsibilities when he put him over there.” Harrell strained against these restrictions. “Gary’s a good officer,” Edwards said. “And good, intelligent, aggressive officers tend to fill vacuums.” In this case, the vacuum was the lack of strong, experienced leadership being applied by Trebon, and both Harrell and Dailey were trying to fill it. “There was clearly friction between what Gary Harrell was doing or thought he was doing, and what Dell Dailey was doing or thought he was doing,” Edwards said. “Now, I say that very cautiously, because probably never in the United States’ history was there as much cooperation as was shown there, but that didn’t eliminate all of the tensions over who was actually going to control black SOF [special operations forces] in country, and exactly what Gary and his little Task Force Bowie was to do as an intelligence fusion operation, and who had operational control.”
Some in TF 11 were also unhappy with Dailey’s and Trebon’s concept for how the task force was to operate, which was to keep the direct action force—first Green, and then Blue—based intact at Bagram, waiting for intelligence from Bowie to pinpoint a high-value target, at which point the door-kickers would launch on a raid to kill or capture the target. The hours required to fly from Bagram to the eastern provinces where bin Laden and the other senior enemy figures were probably hiding made some think it would have been better to divide the direct action force into smaller elements and push them out to safe houses in those provinces. “It became an unwieldy process,” an operator said. “Most of the guys knew it wasn’t the best way of operating…. You cannot fly in a helicopter in real time to a target from Bagram and have a high likelihood of killing or capturing someone. You have to be deployed forward.”
But in Masirah, Trebon and his staff were juggling competing missions. CENTCOM had ordered them to have commandos on standby at Bagram twenty-four hours a day for what were called “time-sensitive targeting” missions. This assignment came after it took four days to get U.S. troops to a snowbound site in the mountains where the Americans had conducted an airstrike on a man they hoped might be one of the “big three”—bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Mullah Omar. After that fiasco CENTCOM ordered TF 11 to handle such missions. “So they added that to our rucksack, which meant all the guys had to sit strip alert, basically,” a TF 11 officer said. In addition, Dailey knew that if he pushed TF Blue out from Bagram to safe houses in the hinterland, he’d need to deploy more Rangers to guard them, and he was desperately trying to control the size of his force in Afghanistan. (Rangers provided a supporting direct action element, named Task Force Red, to act in concert with Green or Blue.) To some, TF Blue was complicit in this arrangement. Eager for action, but lacking a thorough grounding in reconnaissance, the SEALs were reluctant to go searching for high-value
targets. “They weren’t proactive,” a special ops source said. “They wanted the HVT to come to them with a fucking ribbon on him.”
Not surprisingly, the Rangers were perhaps the most frustrated troops at the base. Their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Tony Thomas, was one of the most seasoned special ops officers in Afghanistan. One of the few soldiers of any rank with two combat jumps to his credit, he had parachuted into Grenada as a Ranger platoon leader in 1983 and into Panama in 1989 as a Ranger company commander. He spent most of the 1990s in Delta, participating in major operations in the Balkans and rising to command B Squadron. Now he was back in another combat zone, but this time forced to work under officers with far less experience of such circumstances. “He was as good of a guy as we had,” said a special operator with extensive Afghanistan experience.
TF Red had been sharply reduced at the end of the year. The original TF Red, consisting of the 3rd Ranger Battalion, was replaced by Thomas’s task force, which included only a reinforced company (a rifle company plus mortars, snipers, and scouts), and a large battalion headquarters from Thomas’s 1st Ranger Battalion. Like all Rangers, Thomas’s troops specialized in direct action and prided themselves on their ability to conduct detailed mission planning. TF Red had a large staff trained in planning dangerous missions in a way that left as little as possible to chance. The size of Thomas’s staff allowed him to put his operations center at Kandahar while keeping his operations officer and a rump staff at Bagram. TF Blue’s SEALs, by contrast, were not renowned for their planning skills, and often asked the Rangers for help in planning missions in Afghanistan. Thomas and his men found it incredible that they were acting as glorified gate guards for a unit that didn’t have the wherewithal to plan its own missions. The 1st Battalion commander stewed in frustration as he watched the SEALs “fooling around,” a special ops source said. “He had to bite his tongue to keep from just fucking killing somebody.”
“Red knew they should have been the lead unit working missions, but they were standing guard and task organized under the [SEALs],” commented another observer at Bagram. “What a waste.”
This was the situation that confronted Blaber when he walked off the C-17 that first week in January. Blaber was by now an old hand at parachuting (sometimes literally) into a situation and having to take it all in at a glance. A former enlisted man and Ranger who gained his commission via the Army’s Officer Candidate School, he had joined Delta in 1991 and was a combat veteran who had seen action all over the globe, including Panama, Somalia, and the Balkans. It didn’t take him long to get the lay of the land in Bagram.
Blaber had long believed in “the power of combinations,” putting together cross-functional teams from black and white SOF, conventional forces, and the CIA in order to maximize the potential of each. At this stage in the war the other key players on the ground in Afghanistan were Dagger and the CIA. It was they who were out in the hinterlands, conducting UW with Afghan militias and keeping an ear to the ground for useful information about the location of Al Qaida troops and HVTs. Blaber’s first act after arriving was to ensure that his AFO teams were joined at the hip in what were called “pilot teams” with the Dagger and CIA personnel operating out of the safe houses in Gardez, Khowst, and other provincial towns. But for these teams to be truly effective, they needed greater on-site communications bandwidth and intelligence analysis capability. So Blaber flattened his organization, taking almost all his intel analysts and commo guys out of Bagram and pushing them down to empower the pilot teams in the safe houses. That joined the information users (the operators) with the information gatekeepers (the intel analysts), allowing data to flow from one to the other smoothly and efficiently, without being contaminated by layers of staff in between. Blaber decided that Bagram held no appeal for him. He joined his northern AFO command element in the CIA “station annex” in the Ariana, taking a commo guy and an intel analyst. In the Ariana he was plugged into the heart of the CIA’s operation in Afghanistan and was just two blocks from Dagger’s Kabul safe house. Both Dagger and the Agency had more to offer Blaber in the way of useful intelligence than had anyone at Bagram.
He left two analysts at Bagram, plus an air operations officer and a major called Jimmy, who was his deputy commander. Another former Ranger, Jimmy was in his late thirties, six feet tall, and weighed about 180 pounds. He had the lean, athletic physique typical of Delta operators. He wore his black hair long, slicked back, with a full black beard. Dark brown eyes and perfect white teeth only added to his movie-star good looks. A 10th Mountain officer said Jimmy resembled Al Pacino in the lead role of the movie Serpico. Indeed, in some quarters Jimmy had the reputation for being “a Hollywood-type Delta guy.” But others who knew him well said that was unfair, and that those who made that criticism were just jealous of Jimmy’s professionalism. “If you’re going to go into a combat operation, he’s one of the guys you want on your team,” said an operator who served with Jimmy. Blaber and Jimmy went back a long way. They had first met when Jimmy was a Ranger lieutenant and Blaber was a major in Delta. They had worked closely together when Jimmy was the operations officer in Delta’s A Squadron, and Blaber held the same job for the entire unit. This was the first time they had served together on a combat op, but Blaber had complete trust in Jimmy. He knew he would need a liaison officer and go-to guy in Bagram upon whom he could depend. He had no hesitation in making Jimmy that guy.
In the space of a few days Blaber had dramatically reshaped his organization to take full advantage of its capabilities, as well as those of Dagger and the CIA. Now the pieces were in place. The AFO troops were ready to take on whatever challenges lay in store. They would not have long to wait.
8.
FOR a week after moving to Kabul in the first few days of the year, Blaber met daily at the Ariana with John, the CIA’s deputy station chief, and TF Dagger’s Lieutenant Colonel Chris Haas, the highly respected commander of 5th Special Forces Group’s 1st Battalion. Then, on January 16, John mentioned for the first time that intelligence indicated the presence of a significant enemy force in the Shahikot area.
The meeting marked a turning point in the war. Since mid-December, the station chief—a tall, quiet, intelligent, and very self-assured CIA officer named Rich—had been telling the military that U.S. forces needed to focus their search for Al Qaida on the Gardez-Khowst area. Rich was a man whose counsel the military leaders had learned to heed. A case officer in Algeria during the Islamist rebellion of the early 1990s, he had been appointed chief of the CIA’s “bin Laden unit” in 1999. In that job he had visited the strip of Afghanistan held by Ahmad Shah Massoud. He probably knew more about the country than any other U.S. offical in Afghanistan in early 2002. When Edwards, the deputy CFLCC commander, visited that month, Rich told him he expected “the last battle” of the war to be fought in the Gardez-Khowst region. Now, a few weeks later, the CIA had sharpened its focus from “Gardez-Khowst” to “Shahikot.” From the moment that John first uttered the word in the meeting at the Ariana, the CIA and AFO made building the intelligence picture of the Shahikot region their highest priority.
In Rich and John the CIA had two of the smartest Americans in Afghanistan. All the military folks who dealt with either of the Agency’s top two in Kabul came away impressed. “In no conversation that I’ve ever had with [Rich] has he turned out to be wrong,” Edwards said. “He had a much better feel for Afghanistan than most of the people I talked to. Most of the people thought they knew a lot more than they really did.”
AFTER receiving intelligence tips that Al Qaida and Taliban forces were moving into the town of Zermat, eighteen kilometers southwest of Gardez, Texas 14 drove into Zermat on January 16 with about 300 Afghans. The Afghan forces included 170 troops under two commanders named Kabir and Ziabdullah who had accompanied Texas 14 from Logar, Zia’s thirty men as the Americans’ personal security detail, and 100 men provided by the Gardez shura, which was essentially a town council made up of the tribal elders. The Americans inclu
ded Thomas’s men and several CIA operatives. But when they reached Zermat, it was clear any enemy force had been forewarned and made itself scarce. Instead the U.S. troops were greeted by curious crowds. At the Islamic school, or madrassa, which they thought was an enemy base, they instead found the town elders waiting for them with a lunch laid out. If anything this experience made the Americans even more suspicious about Zermat and its environs. The next day they headed down the same road again, and Zia’s men spotted a Russian-made Kamaz truck a couple of kilometers away heading east toward the Shahikot (which no one had told Texas 14 was an area of interest, despite the attention the valley was receiving at higher headquarters). Zia’s men gave chase but couldn’t catch the vehicle. However, en route they captured another Kamaz truck and a taxi. A search of the truck turned up a bag full of bomb-making documents, plus food and clothing that Zia’s men said were definitely Arabian.
The incident drew Glenn Thomas’s attention to the Shahikot. He took immediate action. The next day another convoy departed the safe house, bound for the Shahikot. Most of the force consisted of 100 Afghan militiamen, including thirty from Zia plus a large Gardez shura contingent. The U.S. element included Texas 14, several CIA men, a signals intelligence team, and a couple of Team 6 SEALs attached to the AFO element now resident in the Gardez safe house. The Americans’ intent was to drive down the Zermat road, turn off toward the Shahikot, and split their force as they approached the huge humpback mountain that marked the valley’s western edge. One half of the force would set up a blocking position just south of the mountain while the rest of the force would enter the valley from the north.
As they moved toward the valley, the signals intelligence team picked up several transmissions in Arabic from Zermat describing the convoy and trying to figure out where it was going. Then the plan fell apart. The Gardez shura troops drove off and made a beeline for the valley, leaving the Americans in their dust. When Thomas’s men caught up with them at the valley’s southern entrance (not the northern one the shura troops were supposed to head toward), they told the Americans some of their vehicles had already entered the valley and one of their men had been captured. Then the “captured” man suddenly reappeared, still with his weapon. The U.S. troops grew suspicious. Thomas sent some Gardez shura fighters into the nearest village to find out what was going on. They were gone for hours. Before they returned, the Americans saw a woman in a burkha leave one of the villages and climb into the mountains. Then a small boy in tears passed them leading a camel loaded with household goods out of the valley. When asked why he was crying he replied that the men in his village had told him to leave because there was going to be a big fight. Zia’s men, who the Americans trusted more than any other Afghans, were visibly nervous and repeatedly told Thomas that they should leave before the sun set. Meanwhile a white van could be seen driving back and forth between the villages in the middle of the valley and the mountainous ridgeline that formed the Shahikot’s eastern wall.