Relentless Strike : The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command (9781466876224) (24 page)

The task force took no fatal casualties, but at least one B Squadron operation took a nasty turn when an MH-6 bringing a team of operators back to the desert landing strip browned out and rolled over. “A guy got his leg caught underneath the skid, it was kind of ugly,” said the staff officer. “Nobody died but there were some pretty serious injuries.” It could have been even worse, but for a stroke of luck. The pilot in command of the MH-6 was a maintenance test pilot and for no good reason at all had his maintenance test pilot checklist—“which is pretty thick,” as another Little Bird pilot put it—on the helicopter. “In the crash sequence, somehow that checklist became dislodged from the cockpit and actually ended up on the ground, between the ground and the skid, which prevented the skid from taking the guy's leg off,” the Little Bird pilot said.
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Those mid-November missions represented the only action the Little Birds would see in Afghanistan for many years. The men who flew them would participate in hundreds of other perilous missions in Iraq during the coming decade of war, and some would pay a high price for the privilege of doing so, but they considered those first missions unique because of the autonomy the crews enjoyed, and the knowledge that they were very much alone above the Afghan desert.
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Comparing the Little Bird actions in November to later operations, Rainier described them simply as “the most dangerous mission that we did.”

 

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Precious Cargo

Operation Relentless Strike was over, and so was Sword's campaign in southern Afghanistan. Supported by Special Forces and the CIA, the Northern Alliance had taken Kabul without a fight November 14. But the war was far from finished. The Taliban retreated southwest to Kandahar as Al Qaeda's leaders and thousands of troops headed south and east toward mountain redoubts. “The south was still wide open,” said a JSOC staffer.

That was the situation when, on November 17, with Sword's desert landing strip operations in full swing, Dailey gathered his senior commanders and staff in Masirah in his Spartan living quarters to make a major announcement. “We are not leaving Afghanistan,” he said. Instead, he told them, TF Sword had a new mission: hunting bin Laden and Mullah Omar. More than two months since September 11, JSOC finally had the strategic mission for which the operators had been hankering. Thus began the man-hunting campaigns that would define JSOC for the decade to come. At a minimum, this would require an expansion of the advance force operations presence in Afghanistan, he said. But it would also spell the end for Sword's campaign around Kandahar. The JSOC commander then outlined three potential courses of action for tailoring the force that would deploy to Afghanistan.

The light option would be two AFO elements—designated North and South—plus a small direct action force made up of nothing larger than troop-size elements. The medium option would involve squadron-size assault task forces as well as a special operations command and control element to liaise with conventional U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan. (The light and medium options would also need a TF Brown contribution.) The heavy option would add a Ranger company, the Sword headquarters, and a larger TF Brown contingent. Dailey made it clear he opposed the heavy option, as he was concerned that it would lead to “mission creep.” To nobody's great surprise, he opted for the middle course. Although Sword would now establish a presence at Bagram, as others had been urging for weeks, Dailey told his audience he had no intention of moving the JOC to Afghanistan anytime soon, and planned to run JSOC's war in Afghanistan from Masirah for months to come. He also stressed the need to maintain the command's readiness system, called the Joint Operations Readiness and Training System (JORTS), in which units were on a cycle of individual training, unit training, alert, deployment, and reconstitution. “They didn't want to mess up the JORTS cycle,” said a source who attended the meeting.
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This led some in the task force to conclude that Dailey was prioritizing a peacetime training cycle over wartime requirements.

War in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where Pashtuns were the dominant ethnic group, presented the United States with different challenges than those it confronted in the north, where the Northern Alliance represented a ready-made military partner. Northern Alliance leaders had little stomach for a war in the Pashtun heartland, whence the Taliban drew their strength. The Alliance warlords were more concerned with establishing themselves in Kabul. To defeat the Taliban on their home ground, the United States would need Pashtun allies.

As in the north, the CIA took the lead in deciding which figures to work with and promote in the Pashtun regions. In the case of one Pashtun leader in particular, the Agency's decisions were to have far-reaching ramifications for Afghanistan, the U.S. war effort, and JSOC.

In early November, Agency officials came to Jim Reese, JSOC's representative at Langley, with an urgent request. An important Agency source was in trouble in Afghanistan and needed to be pulled out fast. “Can you support us with helicopters?” they asked. After JSOC's air planners on Masirah told Reese no aircraft were available, he went over their heads to Dailey. “This is an opportunity for us, right here, to establish who we are, how fast we can move, how agile we are, and support the CIA in what they see as a critical task,” Reese told the JSOC commander. “We have to bring our elements of critical national power at JSOC to bear to help them. Right now that's Task Force 160.” Dailey needed no more convincing. “Jim, roger that, execute, and I'll put the execute order out,” he said.
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When Reese told Cofer Black, the Counterterrorist Center director beamed.
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An hour later, Black informed George Tenet at the CIA director's daily 5
P.M
. staff meeting. “It was almost like the first string quarterback had run [back onto the field] out of the locker room after being hurt, because they were struggling how to figure this out,” said a source in the meeting. “I remember Cofer telling Tenet, ‘JSOC is going to bring our guys [out] and they're going to support us.' You could see everyone just going, ‘Yes!'”

JSOC's willingness to fly to the rescue of the CIA source “was a big deal,” Crumpton said, adding that the Agency's Mi-17 helicopters (“all two of them”) were not available for the mission. “It was absolutely a big deal.”

On November 3
4
two Black Hawks
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carrying heavily armed Team 6 operators and a bearded case officer
6
nicknamed “Spider” from the Ground Branch of the CIA's Special Activities Division
7
slipped into Afghan airspace, flying fast from the
Kitty Hawk
straight for the central province of Uruzgan. There, anxiously awaiting them, were Spider's Afghan source and a small group of supporters. Since October 8, when the source and three companions had crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan on two motorbikes, they had been trying to rally Pashtun tribesmen against the Taliban. It was a dangerous mission.
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The Taliban had captured and executed renowned Pashtun mujahideen commander Abdul Haq that month for doing the same thing.
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In fact CIA officials deemed the quartet's project so risky they decided not to send their own people in with the Afghans. Instead they gave their source what Crumpton described as “a sack of money” and a satellite phone so he could at least keep in touch with Spider. Four weeks later the source used that phone to call for help as the Taliban who'd been hounding his tiny band through southern Afghanistan finally cornered them in the mountains of Uruzgan.
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Overwatched by two direct action penetrators and an ISR aircraft beaming pictures back to Masirah, the helicopters neared the valley where the source was holed up. Spotting the prearranged signal of four fires marking the corners of their landing zone, the Chinooks landed and the Afghans climbed aboard, led by a distinguished-looking forty-three-year-old man with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and a prematurely bald scalp under his turban.
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The Night Stalker pilots took off again heading for Pakistan, where they landed at Jacobabad, now partially occupied by U.S. forces.
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There would be other close calls for the source, but for now he was safe. The CIA breathed a collective sigh of relief, for the Afghan with the regal features in the back of the helicopter was no run-of-the-mill source, nor was he another power-hungry warlord. No, Spider's source was the CIA's best hope for the future of Afghanistan. His name was Hamid Karzai.

When asked how long the CIA had had Karzai on its payroll, Crumpton demurred. “I can't address that,” he said. “I can confirm that we gave him money when he infiltrated back into Afghanistan on the motorbike.”

But Karzai had been a known quantity to the Agency and other Afghanistan watchers going back to the 1980s, when he was an idealistic aide to Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, leader of a moderate Afghan resistance group in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar.
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In the intervening years, his stature had grown. Crumpton recalled meeting with “some of our Afghan allies … including Massoud” in 2000. “Say the Taliban was gone,” Crumpton asked the battle-hardened Northern Alliance leaders, “who could be a leader of Afghanistan?” Their answer was unanimous. “They all said ‘Karzai,'” Crumpton said. “There really was not much discussion of anybody else. So we knew early on that he was really the only—imperfect though he may have been—really the only choice for attempting to unify the Afghan tribes and the Afghan ethnic [groups].”

In this context it's easy to see why the CIA considered Karzai's rescue so crucial, and why the United States was determined to take Karzai back into Afghanistan, this time with more support. Again, the Agency turned to JSOC to make it happen.

On November 14, the same day the Northern Alliance entered Kabul in force, TF Brown Black Hawks flew Karzai and Spider back into Afghanistan.
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The two men were a study in contrasts. In his mid-forties with fair hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, the skinny, fit Spider was an affable former Marine officer and one of Ground Branch's most seasoned operatives. He was well known to JSOC operators from time spent together in Somalia and the Balkans.
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At forty-three, the mild-mannered Karzai was of a similar age, but despite his association with the more royalist mujahideen elements during the Soviet war of the 1980s, he had no background as a warrior. The two had been working together for less than six months,
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but Spider had already succeeded in forging a bond with the Afghan. It was Spider, according to CIA director George Tenet, whom Karzai had called when things looked grim in Uruzgan and who immediately contacted CIA headquarters to argue that “Karzai represented the only credible opposition leader identified in the south” and his “survival … was critical to maintaining the momentum for the southern uprising.”
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“Even then, he was the guy Karzai totally trusted,” said a Delta source. “The whole Karzai thing was about a personal relationship between those two that then went on for many, many years afterwards. But he wouldn't have done any of that if it weren't for Spider.”

(A Special Forces source on the Karzai mission disputed this version of events. To this source, it appeared Spider was not keen on going into Afghanistan with Karzai, and the sole reason the Agency staked its claim with Karzai was he was their only Pashtun option after Abdul Haq's death.)

Also on the flight of five Black Hawks escorted by two DAPs were nine members of a Special Forces A-team, about seven CIA operatives and three TF Sword personnel—two Delta operators and an Air Force combat controller. The Sword trio had a vague mission and were a controversial last-minute addition to the passenger list. Spider told Captain Jason Amerine, the A-team leader, that they were there at Task Force Sword's insistence to spot “emerging” Al Qaeda targets. “Sword isn't going to let us fly without them,” Spider said. But one of the operators told Amerine that their inclusion had been Spider's idea. Either way, the helicopters were already maxed out for weight, so the Delta operators' sudden arrival meant Amerine had to tell two of his men they were being left behind for now, with Spider leaving one of his team. The rejiggered group climbed aboard two Air Force special operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopters at Jacobabad for a late afternoon flight to a small desert airstrip that Sword had taken over close to the Afghan border. There, with Rangers guarding the perimeter, they waited until sundown, when the telltale beat of rotor blades told them the Night Stalkers were approaching. After loading their gear onto the Black Hawks, the motley group flew off, protected by jets high in the sky as well as by the 160th's constant ally—the all-enveloping darkness.
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*   *   *

As the combined CIA and special ops contingent escorted Karzai into southern Afghanistan, another drama that had demanded much of Sword's attention was finally drawing to a conclusion.

On August 3, the Taliban had arrested two American women—Dayna Curry, thirty, and Heather Mercer, twenty-four—working in Kabul for Shelter Now International, a Christian aid organization. Within a couple of days, the Taliban had taken six other Westerners on the organization's Kabul staff into custody. The Taliban put all eight in a Kabul prison and threatened to try them for proselytizing. They faced possible death sentences if convicted. International efforts to negotiate their release came to naught.

After September 11, as it became clear the United States was going to war in Afghanistan, concern for the prisoners mounted.
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The first CIA team into Afghanistan worked closely with the Northern Alliance intelligence arm to ascertain the details of their imprisonment. The Agency hoped to bribe Taliban officials into releasing them. One plan involved paying a senior Taliban official $4 million to spirit the eight Westerners out of Kabul and up to the Northern Alliance. Another would have the Agency pay eight prison guards $1 million each and move their families to the Panjshir Valley prior to the operation, in which the guards would move the prisoners to a prearranged helicopter pickup zone near Kabul. To Gary Schroen, the senior CIA man on the ground in Afghanistan, neither plan seemed realistic.
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It was starting to look like U.S. forces would have to mount a unilateral rescue operation.