Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  MEANWHILE, Bishop and Nocks remained at Bagram as Mikolashek’s representatives as the plan for the Shahikot developed. One evening a couple of days after the big meeting in the Kabul safe house, the two officers were sitting in the Bowie headquarters, talking about whether the operation in the Shahikot deserved a name of its own, and if so, what that name should be. They knew giving the operation its own name might be courting controversy. So far the guidance they had received was that “there was only one name for any and all operations—Operation Enduring Freedom,” which was the name the U.S. government had given to the entire war against Al Qaida and the Taliban since September 11. But the operation in the Shahikot was shaping up to be the largest set-piece battle of the war. It seemed like it deserved a monicker of its own, so they decided to stick a name on the latest version of the plan and see if it stuck through the next round of briefings. The name Nocks had been using was Operation Shwack, a comic-book–style reference to the idea of suddenly bringing an overwhelming force down on the enemy. Amused, Larsen pointed out that if this operation came off, it would be on front pages all over the world, so it would probably need a “sexier” name than “Shwack.” Nocks and Bishop went back to the drawing board.

  Other elements were being added to the plan. In addition to the battle of envelopment conceived by Rosengard, in which Zia’s force would attack from the west while the Rakkasans sealed the escape routes in the east, there was talk of using other G-chiefs and A-teams to create a wider perimeter around the Shahikot, in order to capture or kill any enemy fighters who slipped the noose being drawn by the Rakkasans and Zia’s troops. Task Force K-Bar teams would be inserted to watch the passes that led toward Pakistan. The concentric circles of pressure around the enemy in the Shahikot reminded Nocks and Bishop of a snake crushing its prey in its coils. Each would later—politely—claim credit for the suggestion that followed, but what is beyond reasonable doubt is that by the end of the conversation they had decided on a name they thought fit the operation perfectly: Anaconda.

  14.

  THINGS were getting crowded—and sometimes a bit tense—at the Gardez safe house. Thomas and his Texas 14 team were scheduled to return home, but with the Shahikot operation just weeks away, they were told to stay put. Meanwhile, their replacements, ODA 372, a team from 3rd Special Forces Group led by Captain Matthew McHale, had arrived. With two A-teams and burgeoning CIA and AFO recon contingents, there was little space left in the house itself, so Thomas put the new team up in a tent in the yard. Initially neither A-team was comfortable with the new arrangement. Special Forces teams prefer—indeed are trained—to operate on their own, not with other teams. “It’s like moving in with your brother,” McHale said.

  CONDITIONS were primitive. “It was wintertime, and it saps you. It snowed and rained almost every day,” said an inhabitant. “The place was mud.” At each of the compound’s four corners was a guard tower that contained a room reached by ladders from the ground. The AFO operators used these as sleeping areas. There were two spacious rooms in the front wall, divided by the gate into the compound. The Dagger and AFO men worked in one of these rooms, the CIA in the other. Spread over a wall of the Dagger/AFO operations center were maps and overhead imagery of the Shahikot, including a 1:100,000 map of the area from the valley all the way back to Gardez and another map of the Shahikot on which all the past signals intelligence “hits” had been marked. The upstairs was divided into bedrooms. There was no plumbing. “We were shitting in one hole,” said a resident. Food and water were air-dropped regularly by MC-130s. The Americans fixed sheets of clear plastic across the window spaces in the mud walls. At night they used candles. They had a generator, but the need to conserve fuel meant it was used only to power the radios. (Candles also had the advantage of not silhouetting the men through the windows.)

  DESPITE the spartan living arrangements, the Dagger soldiers felt they were making good progress in their primary mission: organizing and training the Afghan troops. Texas 14 had laid the groundwork with Zia. The team hadn’t seen any combat with Zia, but they had forged tight bonds with him and his men. The G-chief was physically brave and, an operator said, “smart in a crafty kind of political way.” Zia’s second-in-command was his cousin, a fighter in his thirties named Rasul. Almost six feet tall, of slender build and dressed in a brown leather jacket he never took off, Rasul was a reserved man with an almost effeminate demeanor. But the U.S. soldiers soon realized he was also “super smart” and that they would do well to mark his words.

  With Texas 14 having bonded so well with Zia’s troops, it might have been difficult for McHale’s team to make an impression with the Afghans. But an incident shortly before they arrived in Gardez led to a solution. The background to the episode was a power struggle between Pacha Khan Zadran, a local strongman, and the Gardez shura. The two sides fought a battle in which the safe house was caught in the crossfire. After Texas 14 sent some of Zia’s troops to warn each side to stop, the Gardez shura decided to contribute some better troops to work with the Americans. So a new company of Pushtun fighters under a commander named Hoskheyar joined up with Texas 14 a few days prior to McHale’s arrival. The U.S. officers settled on a logical division of labor: Thomas’s team would continue working with Zia and Rasul, while McHale’s team focused on organizing and training Hoskheyar’s force.

  Zia was now the equivalent of a battalion commander with two companies—Rasul’s and Hoskheyar’s—underneath him. (A third company was also organized under Ziabdullah, the Pushtun from Logar who had accompanied Texas 14 to Gardez. But the Americans considered Ziabdullah and his men less reliable than the others, and minimized their involvement in the assault on the Shahikot.) The A-teams organized each company into platoons and squads along U.S. lines, then held a ceremony to award the squad and platoon leaders and company commanders their rank. The rank insignia were no more than little silver-colored buttons that the Americans had bought locally.

  Practices such as this were at the heart of the unconventional warfare approach Special Forces soldiers used to win over local militia forces. “You think it’s a trivial thing, but they wore that on every single outfit,” said a Dagger soldier. “If they took their coat off, they would take the pin off and put it back on their next outer garment. It means a lot to them. They were proud about their ranks. Just a little button on a safety pin. That gave them their status in that structure.”

  Of course, while silver buttons and mutual respect went a long way toward winning the Afghan fighters’ hearts and minds, the cash the CIA doled out also helped. Although Special Forces were considered the United States’ foremost unconventional warfare specialists, they were prohibited by law from actually passing out money or “lethal aid”—weapons and ammunition—to the forces they organized and trained. Only the CIA had that right. In Gardez, that meant that every few days a Soviet-built Mi-17 helicopter—one of a small fleet flown by a combination of U.S. military pilots and contracted foreigners—would land on the road beside the safe house and the CIA team’s “money guy”—his entire job seemed to be to fetch and distribute cash—would run out of the compound and jump aboard. He would return with several holdalls full of U.S. currency, which he gave to Zia and the other Afghan commanders.

  Like most men raised in the Afghan countryside, Zia’s fighters took naturally to guerrilla warfare and were comfortable with firearms. Veterans of the war with the Soviets were sprinkled throughout the force. But they lacked the discipline and understanding necessary to combine mortar and machine gun fire with infantry maneuver. They would need these skills in the upcoming operation, and the Dagger troops had only a few short weeks to teach them. Hoskheyar’s men appeared to be particularly raw recruits. The A-team members had to walk a fine line, avoiding the appearance of being too bossy and ordering Zia and his men about as if the Afghans knew nothing on the one hand, but not patronizing them on the other. In short, it required the U.S. soldiers to treat the Afghans with respect. A Dagger soldier said it helped t
o view the Zia’s troops as the Afghan equivalent of the Minutemen of the American Revolution. “They’re fighting for their country, and you’re gonna organize them, treat them like soldiers, give them respect, to the point where, in the tents at night, when you start talking about how to fight, we do as much listening as we do talking,” he said. “We don’t tell them, ‘You’re gonna fight exactly this way,’ it’s ‘Let’s draw pictures in the dirt,’ and ‘How would you do this?’”

  Despite the emphasis on developing mutual trust, however, the Dagger troops didn’t breathe a word to the Afghans of the plan to attack the Al Qaida positions in the Shahikot. But the Afghans could tell something was up. The Americans weren’t giving them brand-new weapons and clothing for the hell of it. The Special Forces operators told their Afghan partners that this was all in preparation for some training “up north.” But whenever the conversation between the Dagger troops and the Afghans turned to Al Qaida, the Afghans would reply simply, “Shahikot.”

  THE CIA presence in Gardez grew to about fifteen or twenty personnel by the end of February, of whom maybe seven or eight were “shooters,” with analysts and technicians making up the remainder. They were led by a six-foot-tall, fit, affable man with blondish hair and a thick beard. He was in his mid-forties and was one of the Special Activities Division’s most experienced operatives. Unlike many other operatives in the division, he did not have a military special ops background, as far as the soldiers in Gardez knew, but he was a veteran of numerous covert operations, including those in Somalia and the Balkans, and had frequently worked with Delta. “He was brought in because they knew that they needed their best ground leader,” said another safe house resident. Appropriately for someone with an outsize reputation for visionary combat leadership, this covert warrior went by not one but two noms de guerre: To some, he was “The Wolf,” but most knew him only as “Spider.”

  Spider led a handpicked team whose level of expertise reflected the high priority that Rich, the Kabul chief of station, placed on the Shahikot. “They went with their first team,” Haas said. “They pulled in their heavy hitters, their most experienced, trusted, successful paramilitary guys.”

  15.

  WHILE the Special Forces soldiers put the Afghans through basic combat drills in the dirt outside the safe house, the CIA and AFO men were heavily engaged in what the military calls “IPB”—intelligence preparation of the battlefield, the business of building as accurate a picture as possible of the enemy’s locations, force size, order of battle, intentions, and likely courses of action if attacked.

  Blaber’s decision to push his intel analysts and commo guys down to the safe house paid off in spades. Working closely with their CIA counterparts, and led by Glenn P. (described by a source as “the best of the best” of Delta’s intel analysts), they collected all the available intelligence on activity in the mountains south of Gardez. Attempts to mine the U.S. intelligence community’s databases came up dry. Before deploying to Afghanistan, Blaber had asked for any U.S. government information on Afghanistan based on debriefs of CIA operatives who had spent time with the mujahideen in the 1980s, but the search turned up little useful intelligence. And after ordering a lot of satellite imagery of the Shahikot, the Americans in Gardez were disappointed but not surprised to find that it revealed nothing. Any Al Qaida forces there were too lightly equipped and too adept at camouflage to stand out. This wasn’t like looking for a Soviet—or even an Iraqi—tank brigade. The agency operatives and AFO troops realized they would have to rely primarily on human sources (HUMINT) and intercepted signals (SIGINT) to gain an understanding of what was going on in the valley.

  The CIA controlled HUMINT collection in and around Gardez, a process that ranged from quizzing locals who approached the safe house looking to trade information for cash to hiring more traditional spies among the Gardez population. In general, the Americans treated the information gained from “walk-ups” as the least reliable. Because the locals thought the Americans wouldn’t pay for vague tips, their reports often contained details they could not substantiate. But sometimes these reports seemed to pan out. On one occasion a local walk-in reported Arabs with vehicles in the Shahikot. Thomas sent a couple of Zia’s men together with the walk-in toward the Shahikot in a vehicle to check out the story. Upon their return they told the Americans they had run into men manning machine-gun positions who blocked their path with a “semiplausible” tale about wanting to protect their herd’s pasture.

  In mid-February the CIA recruited a local doctor to drive toward the Shahikot and see what happened. The doctor, about forty to fifty years old, coaxed his beat-up sedan along the track that led east from the main Gardez to Zermat road, only to encounter Al Qaida roadblocks and surface-laid mines. He made it as far as the final turn around the southern end of the Whale before Al Qaida fighters dragged him from his car, beat him up, and stole his medical supplies before letting him go. His report gave the Americans at the safe house another vital piece of the puzzle they were assembling about the route the doctor had taken and what lay beyond it.

  For signals intelligence, the team in Gardez could call on a six-man cell from the National Security Agency (NSA), the vast and secretive body that monitors the world’s telephone and e-mail conversations. Led by Major Fred Egerer, a stocky Marine intelligence officer, the cell was the medium through which commanders in Bagram gained access to the U.S. government’s vast panoply of signals intelligence technologies. Whenever a commander—particularly Harrell—was interested in enemy activity in a particular location, he would buttonhole Egerer and ask him, “What do you have on this?” Egerer would then check if any U.S. assets—satellites, airborne listening posts, or the U.S. military’s ground-based voice intercept teams—were listening to transmissions from that part of Afghanistan. If nothing was focused on that patch of terrain, Egerer had authority to direct any element of the United States’ signals intelligence apparatus to orient on the target area.

  In Afghanistan, the communications systems used by America’s enemies as well as by the general public ranged “from crappy walkie-talkies to the most advanced communications systems out there,” a TF 11 source said. Ironically, the introduction of U.S. forces into Afghanistan so cluttered the ether that the NSA found it harder to collect signals intelligence once the Americans had arrived. Even when a signal was detected, that didn’t equate to instant intelligence. “There’s a false sense out there that if someone turns on their cell phone, we’ve got their name, just like that,” said a special operator, clicking his fingers. “It takes hours for that stuff to be analyzed, and one of the things we worked on over there was getting the quickest ‘flash to bang.’”

  When U.S. forces began paying attention to the Shahikot, efforts to intercept enemy transmissions from the valley produced few results. This was partly due to good communications security practices on Al Qaida’s part. “They used a lot of codes,” said Lieutenant Colonel Jasey Briley, Hagenbeck’s senior intelligence officer. “They would use code words like wedding. Normally that meant a meeting or something.” But the dearth of SIGINT also resulted from the fact that there just weren’t many radios, satellite phones, and other transmitters in the Shahikot at the turn of the year. Human intelligence thus played the key role in focusing U.S. attention on the Shahikot. But in January or early February, Blaber gave Egerer the Shahikot’s coordinates and told him: “Crunch on this.” This directive, along with the communications technology the enemy was bringing into the Shahikot as their forces built up, resulted in a stream of valuable intelligence. By the second week of February, the NSA was picking up enemy transmissions from the valley, as well as discussions between other individuals in Afghanistan and elsewhere about the forces gathering in the Shahikot.

  This information was fed immediately to the pilot team in Gardez, who marked the spot where the SIGINT hit had been detected on the map of the Shahikot in their operations center. A few feet away, Glenn P. sat trawling classified intelligence databases for a
ny mention of the Shahikot. “The intel databases now are just like the Internet,” said a special operator. “You type in the name and out spit 400 technology reports, after action reports, anything that mentions the name, including overhead imagery [and] SIGINT hits that include the word Shahikot.” Meanwhile, Spider worked to gain access to every CIA report that might shed light on what Al Qaida was up to in the valley.

  As they gathered information, the Dagger and AFO troops in the safe house took time to digest it. Blaber wanted his men immersed in the history and topography of the area. If they had to conduct missions in the valley, he wanted them to know and understand the terrain as well as any Al Qaida guerrilla. In the evenings drinking coffee, tea, and cocoa and seated on wooden crates and MRE boxes around the small potbellied stoves they had brought with them, the operators read everything they could get their hands on that dealt with warfare in Afghanistan in general, and the Shahikot in particular. Before deploying from Bragg, the AFO guys had assembled a database of every known engagement of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The safe house residents now pored over this, as well as both of Les Grau’s books on the conflict. They learned that the mujahideen always sought to take and hold the high ground, and hid their artillery in creek beds. By knowing where the mujahideen had fought and how they had positioned themselves in the past, the operators hoped to figure out where the Taliban and Al Qaida would be most likely to set up ambushes now.

  Around this time an old friendship bore fruit for Blaber. He had asked an intelligence analyst who had worked with Delta previously to look out for documents that could prove useful to AFO in Afghanistan. Back in the States, the analyst kept his eyes and ears open and came across a fascinating document that he forwarded to Blaber. It was the product of an interrogation of Ali Mohamed, an Egyptian-born Al Qaida operative arrested by U.S. authorities in September 1998, for his role in the bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7 of that year. But his association with Al Qaida stretched back to the late 1980s.