Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  Ali Abdelsoud Mohamed was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1952, and entered the Egyptian military, rising to become a special forces major. Along the way he became enchanted with radical Islam, secretly joining the Islamic Jihad organization that assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981. After his religious extremism led to his being forced out of the armed forces in 1984, Mohamed obtained a U.S. visa and traveled to the United States. Settling in California, he became a U.S. citizen after marrying an American woman he had met on the flight over. Bizarrely, Mohamed then joined the U.S. Army and became a supply sergeant at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, where he also lectured on Middle Eastern culture. Since his arrest, there had been published speculation that Mohamed was more than just a supply sergeant and was acting as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan mujahideen.

  Mohamed left the Army in 1989 and became even more deeply embedded in radical Islam. In the early 1990s he accompanied Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who would later become bin Laden’s second-in-command, on a fund-raising trip—ostensibly for the Kuwaiti Red Crescent—to California. He also helped bin Laden set up shop in Sudan and Afghanistan. One of his duties was to train bin Laden’s bodyguards. Mohamed also became a sometime informant to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in 1993 giving American authorities their first insider’s account of Al Qaida that has been publicized. Then he moved to east Africa to join the Al Qaida cell that would eventually bomb the embassies.

  After the August 1998 bombings, Mohamed was one of five Al Qaida members arrested on charges related to the incidents. The U.S. government kept his arrest secret for eight months while it tried to negotiate a deal with him. Those efforts seemed to have foundered in May 1999 when he was publicly indicted. However, Mohamed’s commitment to Al Qaida’s cause apparently wavered when he was confronted with the prospect of spending the rest of his life behind bars. He cut a deal and pled guilty to five counts of conspiracy to kill American nationals and U.S. government employees on account of their official duties, to murder and kidnap, and to destroy U.S. property. The details of Mohamed’s plea agreement were kept secret. But he divulged enough in his plea to suggest he had a very close understanding of Al Qaida’s organizational structure, training, and operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. No doubt some of the United States’ best interrogators went to work to find out how much more he knew. The fruits of their labors now found their way into laptops in the Gardez safe house.

  Mohamed told his interrogators that for hunting Al Qaida in Afghanistan, the best sources of human intelligence would be shopkeepers, shepherds, taxi drivers, and money changers. Shopkeepers, because the Arabs needed special spices for their food; shepherds, because the Arabs had to buy goats for their milk and lambs to eat; taxi drivers, because the Arabs didn’t have their own cars and always hired Afghans to take them from town to town; and money changers, because the Arabs usually arrived with Pakistani rupees that they need to exchange for Afghanis. Mohamed also told the Americans that if he were searching for bin Laden, he would focus on the towns in and around Paktia—Khowst, Gardez, Jalalabad, Shkin, and Zermat—as well as in the mountains south of Gardez, in a valley called Shahikot. To the folks in the safe house, this was invaluable intelligence, even though they had heard nothing to suggest bin Laden himself was in the Shahikot.

  Another document that found its way to the safe house was a debriefing of a Soviet officer who had fought the mujahideen around Gardez. This report mentioned Shahikot by name (although, curiously, the Soviet officer thought it was a village only seven kilometers south of Gardez), as well as several other villages in the area. The safe house residents paid special attention to what the officer said about how the mujahideen had used the terrain to their advantage, particularly in the Zhawar Ghar mountain range just east of the Shahikot. “Mujahideen retreating from Shahikot passed through the Zhawar Ghar mountain range, which was fairly easy to traverse, using a complex network of dry river and creek beds,” the report stated. The description might have been taken straight from Sweeney’s briefing. Clearly, the Arabs, Uzbeks, and Afghans fighting in Paktia had forgotten none of the lessons from their predecessors in the 1980s.

  DURING this period Blaber was shuttling between Gardez, Khowst, and Kabul, where he met regularly with Rich and John. The more he and Spider read and heard, the more convinced they were that a sizable enemy force was coalescing in the Shahikot, and the more eager they became to mount more ambitious reconnaissance and intelligence gathering operations in that direction. It was increasingly clear to those in Gardez that getting full situational awareness of the Shahikot would require putting “eyes on the target,” or at least getting much closer to the valley than any of the U.S. elements—CIA, AFO, or Dagger—had managed since Texas 14’s aborted venture January 18. (Inexplicably, Blaber was unaware of Texas 14’s foray into the Shahikot. Thomas later expressed surprise at this, and said he thought Blaber knew all about it.) The challenge the men in the safe house wrestled with was how to get close to the Shahikot without compromising the larger operation. Any heli-borne insertion of reconnaissance teams ran a high risk of being seen by the valley’s defenders. Even if the teams escaped, their very presence would tip the enemy off that something bigger was coming, with the likely result that many of them would disperse. Blaber was unwilling to countenance this risk. He announced there would be no helicopter infiltrations (“infils,” in reconnaissance lingo) of AFO teams anywhere near the valley. If the AFO recce specialists were going to get close to the Shahikot, they would have to do it the hard way: walking through the mountains with everything they needed on their back, and without being seen.

  Blaber began to talk to the others in Gardez about conducting a trial run by putting teams into the mountains to perform a “risk analysis.” He wanted to see how far they could travel per night, how deep the snow was, and whether it was feasible to infiltrate the Shahikot unseen. In AFO this sort of trial run is called an environmental recon. But before he could begin to plan such a mission, Blaber had to overcome significant resistance from his chain of command related to two specific issues.

  The first of these was what a special operator termed “the weird stigma” that senior U.S. commanders, including Blaber’s bosses in Joint Special Operations Command, attached to winter operations in Afghanistan. February was still midwinter in Afghanistan, with deep snow clogging the mountain passes and temperatures well below freezing. Senior U.S. officers had read about campaigns in Afghanistan coming to a grinding halt during the Soviet war in the 1980s and the civil war in the 1990s, and were skeptical about the prospects of any operation in the mountains launched before spring. Most thought the mountains were impassable in summer, and wouldn’t even consider attempting to traverse them in the winter.

  The previous summer, while still in command of Delta’s B Squadron, Blaber had taken thirty operators on an excursion to Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness area. Inhabited by large numbers of gray wolves and grizzly bears, the “Bob” consisted of about 1.5 million acres of wilderness, with mountain ranges that rose over 9,300 feet. Blaber wanted to figure out “the art of the possible” in case Delta ever had to operate in such terrain. Split into teams of five, the operators walked cross-country over five mountain ranges to a pickup point almost 100 miles from where they’d set out five days earlier. They lived off what they carried in their rucksacks and what they caught in the streams. It was tough. The thin air at such altitudes magnified the effects of even the slightest exertion, leaving the extraordinarily fit men gasping for breath after the shortest movements. But they learned valuable lessons: They could walk over at least one mountain—and sometimes two—every day. With the right conditioning, a reasonable load, and by taking advantage of natural sources of water, the operators realized that a mountain was no longer the insurmountable obstacle it had appeared on a map, or when viewed from a distance. It was just another terrain feature.

  At the time many in Delta had mo
cked the B Troop excursion. “What a boondoggle!” they had said. “That’s a waste of time. You should be shooting.” But eight months later Blaber’s Montana adventure seemed prescient. Of course, Afghanistan in midwinter is colder than Montana in the summer, but the operators figured that one reason the Afghans, and, to a lesser extent, the Soviets, did so little winter fighting in the mountains was because they were ill equipped for it. For instance, Afghan fighters typically wore sandals or light shoes, even in winter—not the best choice of footwear for operating in the snow. By comparison, the special operators thought, U.S. troops were the best trained and best equipped in the world, and should be able to overcome whatever challenges they might face in the mountains. As one said, “That’s why they give us $5,000 worth of winter clothing and boots—to actually use them.”

  Blaber also told the others in Gardez that his lifelong passion for backpacking and climbing had taught him that movement in the mountains would be easier in the winter than during the warmer months. In winter, streams that can impede progress are frozen over and at high altitudes the snow develops a thick crust that actually makes for a more level surface across which to walk than the undulating terrain underneath. The chances of a reconnaissance mission in the mountains running into an enemy patrol in midwinter were low, Blaber told them. Neither the Taliban nor their Al Qaida guests were nearly as well equipped as AFO to survive in the mountains. Unlike previous guerrillas the U.S. military had fought, these adversaries were not adept at living off the land. Even poor Afghans subsisted on flour, goat milk, and lamb, not wild animals and grubs. This was doubly true in the case of the Arabs and Uzbeks congregating around the Shahikot, who relied on a logistics umbilical cord to Gardez and Zermat to keep them supplied. “They’re not hunting wild boar and digging up roots to survive” was Blaber’s message to his troops. “It’s not like fighting the Viet Cong.”

  As he argued the case for aggressive reconnaissance missions in the mountains south of Gardez, Blaber realized he needed more troops. In his opinion, three teams of four or five men were required to conduct those missions. But when he made the request in a Febrary 12 video-teleconference that linked him, sitting in the TF Blue headquarters at Bagram, with Trebon and his senior staff in Masirah and Dailey, who still appeared to be trying to micromanage the TF 11/AFO operations in Afghanistan from North Carolina, the JSOC commander again expressed skepticism about AFO’s approach.

  In fairness to Dailey, he was skeptical that any of the “big three” high value targets were in the Shahikot. Nevertheless, with the support of Kernan, the TF Blue commander in Bagram and Colonel Frank Kearney, JSOC’s operations officer at Pope, Blaber got most of what he asked for. But Dailey’s acrimonious reaction was indicative of how little trust the higher headquarters of both Spider and Blaber had in their assessments that a large enemy force was gathering in the Shahikot. It also reflected the strained relationship the introspective and inflexible Dailey had with the more open and engaging Blaber. “Their personalities are oil and water—they don’t mix,” said a JSOC officer who knew both men. “There’s not a lot of love there.” (A senior Army officer disagreed, claiming that Dailey considered Blaber “creative” and “innovative.”)

  Dailey thought Blaber and his AFO troops in Gardez were exceeding their authority with their ambitious plans for the Shahikot and their close coordination with the CIA and, when they arrived, the conventional forces. The JSOC commander found this frustrating. According to a JSOC officer, Dailey’s frustration was compounded by his lack of confidence in either Trebon or Commander Ed Winters, the SEAL officer serving as TF 11’s operations officer in Masirah. “You’ve got the CG [commanding general] not really comfortable with Ed, not really comfortable with General Trebon, and the perception is that Pete Blaber is running the show and running amok,” the JSOC officer said. “I think that he [Dailey] was upset that they [AFO] were not following his instruction, which was to stay focused on the target and not do whatever the CIA wanted them to do,” the officer said. “Pete was out doing things that General Dailey had pretty clearly told General Trebon and the teams not to do, which was to be strategic reconnaissance for the conventional guys.” From the perspective of those in Gardez, AFO’s actions clearly supported the mission to find the HVTs. They had followed a trail of facts and deductive logic that led to the Shahikot Valley as a likely location of a large body of enemy fighters. Wherever there were a lot of Al Qaida troops, there was a good chance they would be protecting at least one senior enemy leader, Blaber thought. This was particularly true when the enemy gathered in an almost inaccessible mountain re-doubt close to the Pakistani border. Blaber put his thoughts in a daily report titled “AFO Commander’s Comments” that went to the TF 11 headquarters and from there to CENTCOM and JSOC. But these reports failed to resonate with Dailey.

  Either way, the perspective of those in Gardez was that neither Blaber’s reports nor similar ones written by CIA officers in Afghanistan were being taken seriously at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in the Pentagon or, particularly, on Masirah Island and at JSOC headquarters at Pope Air Force Base. “There were a lot of skeptics [at Pope and Langley] saying, ‘Why would they be concentrated? You’re not going to find a pocket,’” said a Gardez source.

  But from the point of view of those in Gardez, it was better to be ignored than to be micromanaged. They realized that only the safe house’s sheer isolation prevented the generals in Masirah and Pope from interfering with the AFO element in Gardez. As it was, officers at TF 11’s desert island headquarters mocked the independent role that Blaber had carved out by calling him “Peter the Great” and “Colonel Kurtz,” a reference to the U.S. officer in the Vietnam War movie Apocalypse Now who cut all ties with his chain of command and went native. But to Chris Haas, the Dagger lieutenant colonel, the AFO commander’s approach reflected his “bold and audacious” personality. “His concept was, we’re gonna find that actionable intelligence, we’re not gonna wait for actionable intelligence to come to us,” Haas said.

  Part of the reason for the skepticism at higher levels was the Shahikot’s proximity to Gardez and Zermat. The valley seemed too far from Pakistan and too close to the towns, which on some maps resembled sprawling cities. (In fact, both towns were very concentrated, with just scattered compounds on their outskirts.) But to those in the safe house, the enemy’s decision to base himself in the Shahikot was “simple genius.” The valley was close to an urban area, giving the guerrillas access to food and other supplies, and was within a day’s travel of Pakistan. But, crucially, the Shahikot represented all but inaccessible terrain. A force that held the high ground around the valley enjoyed commanding views of all likely approaches. “Once you got up there and you saw this, you realize what a perfect spot this is for a base camp,” said an American in Gardez.

  16.

  THE dark gray shape of the Combat Talon descended steeply, a 100-foot-long piece of the night sky falling suddenly to earth, each of its four turboprop engines churning out the power of 4,910 horses as the plane’s undercarriage landed with a short squeal of rubber on the blacked-out Bagram runway. The aircraft taxied to a halt, and an officer with an unusually long—for an infantryman—shock of brown hair that flopped across his forehead rose to his feet. In the luminescent green cabin “slime lights” it was just possible to make out two khaki stars on the desert camouflage fabric covering his helmet. The plane’s ramp swung down, and the officer took his first deep breath of Afghan air. Finally he was here. The months of frustration in K2 melted away. Looking across the tarmac to the headquarters of the various task forces, he could see a few chinks of light escaping through window frames and tent flaps. Inside tumbledown buildings and GP Medium tents, bleary-eyed staff officers and NCOs on the night shift were typing on laptops, staring at map boards, and punching numbers into calculators, honing plans for Operation Anaconda (Nocks and Bishop’s name for the operation had stuck). And the moment the general’s feet touched the ground, he became the senior of
ficer. Not just in Bagram, but in all of Afghanistan. It was 4 a.m. on February 17, and “Buster” Hagenbeck had got his war.

  After finally securing Franks’s approval, Mikolashek had notified Hagenbeck February 11 that the Mountain headquarters would be moving to Bagram to assume command of all U.S. conventional ground forces in Afghanistan, plus Task Forces Dagger and K-Bar. The only American military outfit in Afghanistan to remain outside Hagenbeck’s command was Task Force 11, over which Franks retained direct command and control. Mikolashek directed Hagenbeck to change the name of his headquarters from CFLCC (Forward) to Coalition Task Force Afghanistan, once he had established himself at Bagram. Mikolashek made it clear to Hagenbeck that although his task force’s lifespan was open-ended, its first order of business—and the catalyst for its deployment to Afghanistan—was to oversee the planning and execution of Operation Anaconda. However, he delayed issuing the order that granted Hagenbeck formal command authority over the other elements. (Mikolashek later said this delay was not deliberate.) While the rest of his staff began breaking down the headquarters at K2 in preparation for the move to Bagram, Hagenbeck sent several key members of his staff ahead in order to quickly gain some kind of control over the planning process that was already progressing apace. Among the first to arrive, in the early hours of February 13, were Lieutenant Colonels David Gray and Chris Bentley. Gray, a lean, youthful fair-haired officer, was the division’s director of operations. Bentley, Hagenbeck’s deputy fire support coordinator, was the man responsible for ensuring the command had all the “fires”—artillery and close air support—it needed to support its operations. Following hard on their heels later that day were Wille and Ziemba, the two officers whose brainstorming had first alerted the division’s higher-ups to the potential for an operation in the Shahikot. Over the next several days the rest of Hagenbeck’s headquarters loaded onto C-130 and C-17 aircraft and moved to Bagram. The 10th Mountain Division was going to war again.