Authors: Sean Naylor
As the military's go-to force for hostage rescue, JSOCâand Delta in particularâwas monitoring events closely. Just after midnight on October 26, three Delta operators arrived by helicopter in northern Afghanistan to work with the CIA on putting a rescue plan together.
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Schroen was underwhelmed by his first encounter with the operators: “They were all younger than the other teams' Special Forces soldiers we had met so far, and none of them had any real idea of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.”
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(Schroen's assessment of their ages seems a little off. One of the operators was Major Jim Reese, the experienced officer on a week's break from duty at Langley. Another was Sergeant Major Manny Pardal, described by a JSOC staff officer as “a very, very sharp guy,” who had enlisted in the Army in 1984, so must have been at least in his mid-thirties. He was assigned to Delta's Operational Support Troop.)
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After being thoroughly briefed by the CIA, the trio visited the front lines to gauge the challenges they would face smuggling the prisonersânow viewed as hostages by the Americansâto safety.
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As the three operators considered their options, they were in frequent communication with A Squadron, which, having assumed the Aztec role from B Squadron, was still at Bragg, ready to be brought forward if needed for a rescue mission. The operators in Afghanistan sent back Predator imagery of the routes to and from the prison. The Taliban controlled all roads with mobile checkpoints. Noting that the only forces to enjoy freedom of movement after dark in Kabul were small Taliban and Al Qaeda elements in Toyota pickup trucks, Delta planners decided to emulate their foes and bought a dozen Toyota pickups. The unit's mechanics set to work modifying the vehicles to fit a dozen specific mission parameters while others in Delta acquired turbans and other Afghan and Arab clothing items with which operators might disguise themselves.
To convince the powers-that-be in Delta and JSOC that the mission was viable, A Squadron operators found a photo of Taliban fighters in a pickup, then juxtaposed it on a PowerPoint slide with a photo of a Delta assault team in one of the new Toyotas wearing similar clothes and carrying AK-series assault rifles and RPGs. They added a caption that read, “At less than 10 percent illumination, what does the enemy actually see?” and sent the slide to Blaber, the Delta operations officer, in Masirah. He liked the concept and took it to JSOC headquarters. “A few hours later we had approval,” wrote Greer, whose troop, A1, was at the heart of the planning.
The rest of the rescue mission task force comprised Delta's A3 troop and Team 6's Gold Team, which had the Trident role at the time. Together these elements included about fifty to sixty operators. They planned to infiltrate Kabul at night by pretending to be an Al Qaeda convoy. “We had no illusions of being able to pass any close inspection or talk ourselves past a sentry, but all we needed was just to avoid being recognized at a distance,” wrote Greer. “If our ploy worked, we would continue to roll toward the hostage location. If not, we would eliminate the guards with our suppressed weapons to keep things quiet from neighborhood ears. We did not want a Mogadishu-like confrontation.”
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Schroen's CIA team had meanwhile interviewed the father and uncle of a young male Afghan Shelter Now employee whom the Taliban had incarcerated at the same prison as the Westerners. The Taliban allowed the two men weekly visits to meet their relatives. The men were able to provide the Agency with detailed descriptions of the jail's interior and exterior layouts.
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Armed with this information, Delta's engineers built a mock-up of the prison at Bragg, where the rescue force conducted dozens of assault rehearsals using both nonlethal training ammunition and live rounds.
Greer was guardedly optimistic about Delta's chances of success.
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But Schroen was distinctly unimpressed when briefed by the operators at his headquarters. According to Schroen's account, the plan involved a Delta convoy driving from Northern Alliance lines to Kabul, “fighting their way through Taliban defensive positions and checkpoints” to the prison, freeing the hostages, and then driving back out of the city to be picked up by “military helicopters.” But a Delta source familiar with the plan said Schroen did not describe it accurately. Rather than risk the complicated passage of lines necessary if they drove down from the north, the operators would fly with their civilian pickup trucks on about six Combat Talons into a remote landing strip to the south of the capital at night. Then, under the cover of darkness, they'd drive to Kabul that same night and free the hostages, putting them on MH-6 Little Birds that would fly them north to safety. Delta often rehearsed hostage rescues with Little Birds. Standard practice was to jam the hostage in the tight space behind the pilots' seats with at least one operator sitting on each pod for protection.
Also unmentioned by Schroen, the plan called for most of the assault force to remain behind in Kabul, incognito. The Delta operators who had designed and rehearsed the mission thought the plan was more elegant than Schroen did. They were confident it would work. The only reason they never got the green light to execute the plan was because the Taliban moved the hostages, one said. But Schroen insisted that the operators attached to his team were not proud of the plan. “I think even they realized the plan was both impossible and lame,” he wrote. “We never heard any more from the three Delta operators on rescue plans.”
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Nonetheless, the trio stuck around while the CIA team, now working under Gary Berntsen, who had replaced Schroen as the senior Agency representative in-country November 4, continued refining its own plan to free the Shelter Now prisoners. “We were trying to basically suborn the prison commander to get them out,” Crumpton said. “That didn't work.” Sword personnel in Masirah and on the
Kitty Hawk
took over the military side of planning a rescue, with the Team 6 element on the carrier as the main ground force. They named it Angry Talon. But a hesitant chain of command held them back. The task force had figured out the hostages' new location, “but nobody wanted to fly into Kabul with three Chinooks, in the middle of a city that's an unknown threat,” said a Sword planner. “We knew they were there and we had a plan to go in there, but no one [said] âLet's go to the prison,' because we didn't think we had quite the right assets to go after it with helicopters.” After drawing up the plan in late October, the staff on the
Kitty Hawk
put it aside, waiting for even better actionable intelligence. Working through various Northern Alliance and Taliban intermediaries, the Americans were still able to keep close tabs on the location of the hostages, who were being moved between two different prisons in Kabul. But the Taliban's sudden evacuation of Kabul beginning November 12 rendered any plan centered on the city moot.
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That evening, the Taliban bundled the eight prisoners into a truck and drove them west out of Kabul as Northern Alliance advance elements entered the city. Their captors forced the hostages to spend the night in a frigid shipping container before driving them on to a small jail in Ghazni, seventy-five miles southwest of the capital.
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All the way, the CIA had a source on their tail, using a mobile phone to update his Agency handlers.
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That source was in Ghazni on November 13 when the hostages' nightmare finally came to an end with a furious pounding on the door of the room where they were being held. It burst open and there stood “a scruffy, beardless man in ragtag clothing” with a rifle in his hand and ammunition belts across his chest. “Aaazaad! Aaazaad!” he shouted. “You're free! You're free!” The Taliban had fled.
Anti-Taliban locals cared for the hostages over the next twenty-four hours, while their leader, Georg Taubman, found a satellite phone and contacted the U.S. embassy in Islamabad,
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setting the wheels in motion in Masirah and on the
Kitty Hawk.
Task Force Sword prepared to execute Operation Angry Talon. The actionable intelligence for which they had been waiting was now coming in. On the morning of November 14 on Masirah and the
Kitty Hawk,
staffs and operators who, in keeping with Sword's reverse cycle, had gone to sleep just a couple of hours earlier, were awoken and sprang into action. But the mission would stretch the task force. With the Karzai infil also slated for that evening, Sword would be conducting two national-level missions into Afghanistan using Team 6 and Brown assets during the same period of darkness.
In mid-afternoon, three Chinooks took off from the
Kitty Hawk,
headed for Pakistan. They were starting on one of the farthest helicopter missions ever flown. The lengthy high-altitude flight ahead limited each helicopter to 5,000 pounds of cargo, or fifteen combat-loaded SEALs. Because one aircraft was “the flying spare,” included in case one of the others was shot down or suffered a mechanical emergency, that meant a total of thirty Team 6 operators for the mission. Although the immediate threat to the hostages had lessened, the SEALs were flying into an anarchic situation with very little understanding of what was happening on the ground. They needed to be ready for anything.
After a three-hour flight the Chinooks landed at Jacobabad, where a smoky haze covered the airfield. Shortly thereafter, two MC-130s from Masirah landed and married up with the Chinooks. They were the refueling aircraft for the mission and had also brought along Schiller. As Angry Talon's air mission commander (Mangum was performing the same role for the Karzai infiltration) he jumped aboard the Chinook piloted by blond, barrel-chested CW3 Dean “Beef” Brown, flight lead for the mission.
After coordinating with the Air Force combat search and rescue crews at Jacobabad, the Chinooks and the MC-130s took off as darkness fell, a five-hour flight ahead of them. Ghazni lay about 360 miles due north of Jacobabad, but in order to minimize time in Afghan airspace, Beef Brown plotted a route that had the helicopters fly northeast, parallel to the Indus River, before doing an aerial refuel and turning north-northwest through the Sulaiman Mountains, steadily climbing to an altitude above 11,000 feet. It would be one of the longest helicopter missions ever flown. An icy draft blew through the helicopters, the doors of which were fitted with miniguns and therefore always open. As the temperature plummeted to near freezing, air crewmen shivered, wishing they'd brought warmer clothes than their flight suits, jackets, and glovesâgear that had seemed excessive when boarding the aircraft in the 90-degree-plus heat of the Masirah midday sun. The radios were silent but for the trailing Chinook's calls every five minutes letting Brown know the flight was still intact.
Flying west-northwest, the Chinooks traversed the Pakistani tribal areas and crossed into Afghanistan. Soon they began losing altitude as they identified the wide valley in which Ghazni sat. The JOC in Masirah called to let the crews know the plan for the linkup with the hostages and their benefactors was still on track. Locating the hostages promised to be the biggest challenge. The aircrews had no way of communicating directly with the hostages or the CIA source with them. Everything had to be passed through Masirah. Prior to departure, Schiller had arranged with the CIA representative in the JOC to have the hostages wait on a main road close to a soccer field on the town's southern edge. They were to light a fire as a means of signaling their location to the helicopters. Now the JOC was telling him the fire would be lit fifteen minutes before the helicopters were due to touch down. A few minutes later the JOC called back to say the CIA source with the hostages had been in touch: he was driving south with them in his vehicle and would be ready for pickup in twenty minutes.
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But this gave the rescue force a misleading impression that the plan was going smoothly, when in fact the situation on the ground was chaotic. The hostages were under extraordinary stress as Taubman coordinated the rescue with the Islamabad embassy while negotiating with obstinate local commanders to take the Shelter Now personnel to the pickup zone. For a while it seemed the locals would not allow the hostages to leave the compound in which they'd been held. But at the eleventh hour, with the embassy insisting the helicopters were already en route and it was imperative the mission take place that night, the local leaders relented and escorted the eight foreigners to the pickup zone (PZ).
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A Predator was buzzing over Ghazni, relaying images back to Masirah. The helicopters had no access to its transmissions, so staffers passed directions to them based on what they were seeing on the screen in the JOC. But the Predator feed to Masirah suffered from a lengthy delay. Added to the satellite radio delay of the staffer in the JOC describing what he was seeing to the aircrews, the information being passed to the pilotsâ“Turn left now!” “You're right above the PZ!”âwas about thirty seconds late and therefore useless. After several passes 200 feet over the pickup zone with no sign of a fire surrounded by nine or more people, the frustrated flight lead crew turned the satellite radio off. There was still no sight of the hostages. Tension was building on the helicopters. Their fuel levels allowed only thirty minutes to locate the hostages, pick them up, and take off. Then they faced an hour-long flight in order to make an urgent midair appointment with an MC-130 just east of the Pakistan border. With Taliban still marauding through Ghazni, the risk to the helicopters grew with every passing minute. Brown ordered his trail aircraft to fly an orbit a couple of miles to the west, which reduced the Chinooks' signature over the town and put a helicopter in an overwatch position with a wider field of view.
The tactic appeared to have worked when Chalk 2's pilot, CW3 Frank Mancuso, spoke up. “I have a vehicle moving south on the main road, twelve o'clock, one mile,” he announced. “It appears to have about ten people in the back of the truckâthat must be our group.” Ordering Mancuso to stay overhead, Brown landed ahead of the moving vehicle. The SEALs stormed off and set up a roadblock. When the truck came to a stop, there was disappointment and knife-edge tension: it contained only armed Afghan men. They claimed to be anti-Taliban fighters when questioned by Commander Mitch Bradley, Team 6's Blue Team commander, adding “We love America!” repeatedly for good measure. The SEALs assumed they were lying and were actually Taliban fighters, but let them go and quickly reboarded the helicopter.