Langley, Virginia
Summer and Fall 2000
In one of Langley’s many long corridors, a casual friend approached. Suit and tie, polished shoes, hair clipped short. Tall, handsome, fit. He was a guy with a plaque in his office that read Death Before Dishonor with a skull and grenade on it.
He greeted me warmly and said, “Heard you’re going out to Shangri-La. Is that true?”
“Yes, it is,” I answered.
He smiled and shook his head. “Well, I’d love to be out there with you. But you know … I have kids.”
So did I. And he knew it.
I wanted to say, What makes you think you’d make the cut for my team, pencil dick? We were going into the worst terrorist shithole on the planet. The only guys I wanted with me were the ones who wanted—needed—to be out there scrapping with those murderous sons of bitches.
Instead of de-balling him, I held my tongue. Long ago, I learned to pick my battles. A posturing ride-along was not worth the words. I smiled and wished him well. He did the same.
Even within the ranks of the CIA, some people are born for the fray, and some people aren’t. It isn’t a bad thing; we each have our strengths and weaknesses. But when you pretend to be a meat eater, yet have never served in the military, never been a case officer, and never spent much time overseas, the poseur factor gets you little respect in our world.
The CIA was always made up of a wide range of personalities: action-oriented operators, cerebral analysts at home in a world of intel puzzle pieces, leaders, managers, and support types. There was space in the Agency for nearly every temperament and personality because the range of what we did required that level of broad diversity.
At times, we clashed more than we meshed, and the tension between the headquarters types and the field operators created bruising bureaucratic battles. Through the dynamics and evolutions of our leadership, the level of risk we took as an Agency waxed and waned. The same happened on an individual level. The longer into our careers, the more risk-averse some of us became.
In 2000, we’d survived eight years of declining national willingness to take risks overseas. The Cold War was over. We were supposed to be enjoying the peace dividend. To some, it seemed our deadliest adversaries were long gone, toppled by the weight of their systems’ own ineptitudes. The KGB was once ruthless and cunning and sometimes outmaneuvered us. They played by rules that repelled most Americans. They won their share of battles in the shadow world. We still won the war.
For those of us who loved the field and found meaning in the streets of far-off cities, an ocean away from the safe routine that we Americans considered the norm, there would always be a place for us in the Agency. Those of us who need the juice found ways to get to the pointy end of the spear no matter our rank or place in the bureaucracy.
In 1998, we aimed those spears in three main directions: at North Korea, Iran, and Islamic terrorism. North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, massive conventional army, and bizarre cult of leadership presented an existential threat of war that could potentially result in hundreds of thousands of casualties. To this day, North Korea remains one of the most destabilizing threats to peace in the world. In 2000, they were a more regional threat than they are today now that they have had two more decades to develop their long-range, nuclear-tipped missile program, not to mention their capable, and profitable, cyber capabilities.
The CIA’s other spear pointed directly at the other emerging threat at the time. Radical Islamic terrorism at the turn of the century morphed into a deadly new enemy, one capable of inflicting death and destruction on thousands of people in a single attack. Osama bin Laden demonstrated that in 1998 when his minions orchestrated the simultaneous truck bombings of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya that murdered more than two hundred people and wounded at least another four thousand.
There were those in the Agency like Scheuer who saw this new iteration of radical Islamic terrorism as the biggest and most dangerous enemy facing America. After the embassy bombings, he reportedly got into a shouting match with George Tenet, the director of the CIA at the time. That row was the culmination of a series that ultimately derailed Mike’s promising career. Richard B. took over the Bin Laden unit and brought it back into the building, where it shared space with the CTC.
Tenet also brought in a new leader to run the CTC. Cofer Black, who’d been Chief of Station in Khartoum in the mid-’90s just before the founding of Alec Station, received the job. He was a hardened, aggressive officer whose firsthand knowledge of Bin Laden and al-Qaeda made him a perfect fit for the position. He was the last COS to have successfully surveilled the Saudi terrorist and even avoided an attempted al-Qaeda hit on him in late 1995 shortly before he left Sudan.
Rounding out the team, besides Cofer Black and Hank Crumpton, was Ben Bonk and Ed W. One Chief (Cofer), three Deputies: primary (Ben), one for law enforcement (Ed), and one for ops (Hank).
Ben was Cofer’s deputy and arguably the smartest man I ever met. He was also the nicest man and one of the few in our building about whom I never heard anyone speak anything but praise for his character, intellect, and leadership. He was also an atypical analyst. He drove a vintage 1963 Corvette convertible, carried and could shoot his Colt 1911 A-1. His sports passion, like mine, was Formula 1 racing, a hobby we shared by attending the U.S. Grand Prix in Indianapolis. Unfortunately, we lost Ben to cancer a few years later.
From almost the beginning, the CTC always included a senior FBI agent as part of our front office. They were all top-notch: George A., Chuck F. (who also spent lots of time at the UBL), and, of course, Ed. Ed was a handsome, charismatic, cigar-smoking gent. He was also one of the most aggressive defenders of the CTC and often took sides against his Bureau when turf battles were fought.
The change in leadership was part of Tenet’s plan to take a more aggressive posture against radical Islamic terrorism. His plan included returning to Afghanistan to recruit new allies and reconnect with old ones from the Soviet-Afghan war era to develop intelligence, surveillance, and operations against Bin Laden’s organization there.
I had missed all of these changes. After our family’s medical situation stabilized, I’d returned to the Korea account to work again with King Ralph. We scored some of our best successes during the second tour, and it was one of my most rewarding times in the Agency.
Yet the pull of counterterror never left me. So when Hank, then Cofer Black’s Chief of Operations, called me one day in mid-2000 and asked me if I’d be interested in taking over the CTC’s International Terrorism Group, I jumped at the chance. The ITG covered every terror organization on the planet outside of al-Qaeda and Bin Laden. It focused on everything from Islamic jihad to the remnants of the Palestinian Black September movement to the Greek Marxist/terror guerrilla group known as 17 November.
The offer was even sweeter. Hank wanted to bring me back to the CTC for a year, then have me take his job when he moved out. If I did well, I’d go from running the ITG to being the CTC’s Chief of Operations. It was an incredible offer, made even better because I’d be working for two of our most aggressive leaders in Cofer and Hank. Both men were direct, aggressive, and had little tolerance for red tape. They also were bureaucratic black belts, so when the red tape fouled the way, they knew the best ways to cut through it.
Hank was a Southern gentleman who came up through the ranks in the waning years of the Cold War. He was the youngest officer to ever graduate from the Farm, and he spent much of his career in the field, including a particularly difficult assignment investigating al-Qaeda’s 1998 African embassy bombings. Fit and health conscious, I never saw him drink alcohol. To this day, he often grabs his sat phone, a rifle, and a fishing rod and vanishes into the wilderness for weeks at a time, hunting, tracking, and fishing his way through areas few humans ventured. He was my kind of guy, a man devoted to his country and walking his own path of destiny.
Cofer was a man who never lost an argument. He could verbally spar with anyone and outmaneuver them with his cerebral intellect and lightning-quick wit. That made him one of the most formidable bureaucratic black belts in the building. His nickname was “the Hulkster,” and his frame matched the moniker. He had the heart and soul of a lion, and his profound intelligence made him a double threat. While I’d only met him once years back when I was working the South American accounts, everyone in the Agency knew his sterling reputation.
I would be part of an exceptional, once-in-a-lifetime team. I wanted this job badly. But first, I had to break the news to King Ralph.
When I talked to him about it, he was totally supportive, even though I’d be leaving the Koreas a year earlier than planned. He knew Hank’s offer not only was a career opportunity but that it played to my strengths.
It was all I hoped for and more. Cofer, Hank, and I worked well together from the outset. Their loyalty and trust formed the bedrock of the relationship we built, and Cofer proved to be one of the finest leaders I’d ever met. After a few weeks on the job, I’d have gone to hell and back for Cofer.
As things shook out, I got that chance.
I rejoined the CTC in the summer of 2000, right as it started to take the front-row seat in our national defense. Tenet’s focus on terrorism following the embassy bombings freed up resources and gave opportunities to develop new capabilities. This included getting back to where the terrorists hung out—Afghanistan, for one. “Shangri-La” for another.
For security reasons, I still can’t share Shangri-La’s real name, but it was a city in Africa in a nation ruled by Islamic radicals who had long since allowed terrorists to live openly in their country—provided they pay a bit of protection money to the government.
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At a crucial time in this new war, the CIA went blind. No surveillance, no operations. No intel XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX on the jihad network. This was a major weakness that Tenet, Cofer Black, and Hank wanted fixed.
Just before I joined the team, Cofer sent a small contingent into Shangri-La to reopen the station and get it operational again. Right after I arrived and took over the ITG, Shangri-La’s new Chief of Station returned to Langley to brief Cofer on what he’d done over the past few months in country. Hank and I attended the brief. The COS’s report did not sit well with Cofer at all. In fact, the COS’s situational briefing on Shangri-La contradicted everything else we were getting from SIGINT and sources outside of Shangri-La. XXXXXXXXXXX
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That brief was one of the few times I saw Cofer lose his temper.
After the COS left the meeting, Cofer took me aside and said, “We need to replace him. Find somebody for the job.”
Cofer outlined what he had in mind. Usually, this would have been a position for a GS-15, but he wanted somebody with more horsepower in the role. He tasked me with finding a senior officer willing to assemble a team that could go in and establish our presence, develop assets, and get eyes on what these religious fanatics were doing.
I set about doing that. For several weeks, I worked to find an SIS-level operations officer who wanted this difficult assignment. I’d like to say a swarm of hard chargers applied for the position, but nobody did. To be fair, most senior officers already had commensurate positions to their rank. And it was a hardship post—no wives and families, with few recreational opportunities and even fewer cultural experiences to be had beyond lots of ugly, enduring poverty. The only thing it offered was danger and the chance to go toe-to-toe with the miscreant assholes who would do our country harm.
That said, after my tenure in Shangri-La, we had no problem getting several type-A ops officers to follow suit. For years after us, they continued to build on each other’s successes.
That September, Carmen and I went running together. We had made this part of our routine since the family’s medical crisis. It gave us a chance to talk, spend some time together without the kids, and get some good exercise.
I explained the situation. Important slot overseas. Nobody volunteered for it. I detailed the reasons, then told Carmen why I wanted it for myself. I may have been a senior officer by then, but my heart always lay in the field. I knew I still had enough in the tank to do this job, and do it well. But leaving the family for six to eight months would put a heavy burden on Carmen, and I didn’t want to do that to her so soon after what we’d been through together.
After I finished, she stopped and turned to me. “Ric, I know you. This is who you are. You need it. Go do it.”
There is nothing like having this kind of support at home, and I knew how blessed I was to have it. Life in the CIA is difficult for families. Divorces are common. Somehow, Carmen and I weathered every storm together. She was one of the rarest women I’ve ever known—a person who knew that my sense of service to our country formed the bedrock of my identity. Instead of resenting it and the time it took away from the family, she embraced it. It was who she’d married, the man who ran to danger. She once even told a friend that, through me, she lived the life she wished she could. Notice she did not tell me that!
Without any hesitation, she let me go do this one last crazy tour. Looking back now, while Shangri-La proved all I’d hoped and more, I regret leaving the family for as long as I did. My absence created hardships back home we hadn’t anticipated, and Carmen paid the price. Still, Shangri-La was central to the fight against the jihadists, and that’s where I needed to be in the moment—especially when nobody else wanted the job.
The next day, I went to see Cofer. “Hey, boss,” I said, “I’ve found somebody for the Shangri-La job.”
“Oh yeah? Who?” he asked.
“Me.”
He looked at me in silence for a long moment. Finally, he said, “Ric, are you really sure you want to do that?”
“Hell yes.”
“Then let’s pull a team together and get your training.”
“Hooyah, sir.”
In about a week, we assembled an eight-person team: five operations officers, my deputy, a logistics specialist, and our analyst. Two of our ops officers arrived freshly minted from the Farm. They may have been rookies, but they were moon-baying hard chargers of the finest order. Ranger was a young officer who could have been Daniel Craig’s doppelgänger. Same haircut, same facial shape and structure. He walked with a jaunty, almost cocky hitch to his stride that telegraphed he took zero shit from anyone.
No wonder, before he joined the Agency, he served in the U.S. Army, became a Ranger, and fought in Somalia. He was a captain during the Bloody Sunday Black Hawk Down battle in Mogadishu in 1993. He came to us as a combat-hardened veteran. Wiry but whip-strong, he could run like a Tomahawk missile—I swear he had jets on his feet.
Ranger served as our team’s paramilitary officer.
We paired him with Hunter, an experienced and brilliant officer in whom King Ralph saw tremendous potential. Yet he was troubled and came with some baggage. He’d yet to be promoted to GS-13, and he was the last in his class at the Farm to reach that grade. Personal demons probably hindered his advancement. Quick to anger, he was a glass-half-empty kind of guy. Somebody once said Hunter could be alone in a closet and get in an argument with himself. Nevertheless, I saw the same potential King Ralph saw, so we pulled him into the team, and I made him a project. Meanwhile, Hunter would serve as Ranger’s mentor and coach—a role he filled quite well.
John, our other rookie, never served in the military. He joined the Agency as a civilian, went through the Farm, and emerged eager and willing to do whatever was asked, including going to a shithole for his first tour. I assigned our DCOS to mentor John, and he did not disappoint. He scored some major operational successes (recruitments) in the months ahead.
I had told my officers that if I ever saw any of them in a Yellow state of mind, I would send their asses home in an “atrial flutter” (less than half a heartbeat in paramedic terms). John was a young lion, and he was hungry! There was no way he was going to be benched.
I remember once I was working out on the heavy bag we’d installed on a balcony that overlooked the compound. Undetected, I watched as John prowled the expanse between our residence compound and XXXXXX building. His head on a swivel, forward-leaning stance and with a growl tattooed on his face. He made Doc Holliday look like a sissy. I could not have been prouder of John if he was my son.
Our analyst, Jeff, came to us with little to no operational experience. Given the level of threat we faced in Shangri-La, I made it a point to train Jeff as if he were one of our operations officers. In the weeks ahead, he went through XXXXXX every range day and every tactical scenario thrown our way. Years later, I found out that during his retirement ceremony, he thanked me for allowing him to do some of the most exciting things he experienced during his CIA career. Hearing that meant a great deal to me. Jeff may have been an analyst, but he sure as hell fit in well with the ops team. In tough situations, we found him to be solid.
Before we headed to Shangri-La, the team deployed to XXXXXX for thirty days of intensive training. This would be one of the hardest assignments in the Agency at the time, and we needed our skills honed to a razor’s edge. We were sequestered in what amounted to a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX compound XXXXXX here we stayed in barracks, had our own chow hall and dayroom where we could hang out after our day’s work. It was a perfect place to focus on the intensive level of training I knew we needed; plus, it gave us an opportunity to gel and bond as a team.
Going into this monthlong mini deployment, we crafted a general plan for what we wanted to focus on and develop. Then we handed our plan off to our two training instructors—Jimmy, who was another Black Hawk Down veteran of Delta Force, and my best friend, Frog, a steely-eyed veteran of Naval Special Warfare’s SEAL teams. Steve B., a retired SEALs’ Force Master Chief, was the senior-most NCOIC in the teams. These two exceptional characters designed one of the toughest training programs I’d ever seen during my time in the Agency.
Our days started with PT—usually a long run. From there, we spent hours on the range getting intensive trigger time. We all developed calluses on our index fingers, and collectively we must have fired tens of thousands of rounds by the end of our month.
In our final shooting competition, we were comparing our targets and scores. Ranger grew upset. I asked him what was wrong.
“I’m supposed to be your PM guy, and you outshot me!”
I did, but barely.
I loved that kind of butthurt. It signaled a hard-charging competitor all the way. I laughed and said, “Yeah, but you forget I came out of PM.”
That mollified him, but from then on, our friendly rivalry on the range pushed us hard to become better and better with our weapons.
When not on the range, we went through total immersion in real-world tactical scenarios complete with role players, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXX We learned the latest vehicular evasion techniques. We practiced shoving cars out of our way, learning that the best way to bash through that sort of roadblock was to aim for the rear axles.
I made a point of going through every scenario and iteration first. Leaders lead, they set the example. The mentors I’d had over the years drilled that into me. Now, I shared it with my own team. Going first also allowed me to understand the scenario and watch how my own guys handled it. I got to know their reactions, their thought processes, and how cool they were in tense situations.
Jimmy and Frog threw a lot of things at us. To simulate surprise, they put us in vehicles with welders’ masks over our faces. The little glass viewing port would be taped over. We’d head over to the driving range like this, then at the right moment, they’d pull the masks off us and see how quickly we responded to the situation we found ourselves in.
In one of those scenarios, Jimmy and Frog set Hunter up for a particularly dangerous real-world situation. When they pulled the welder’s mask off Hunter, he discovered a car sideways blocking the road ahead, while a second team blocked his rear in a huge truck. This is the best way to neutralize a target in a car—by setting up a mousetrap for the target vehicle between two other vehicles.
The move here would have been to barrel straight for the car’s rear axle, T-bone it, and push it around to clear a path. Instead, Hunter suddenly reversed and went straight at the huge truck, bouncing into it, with no effect, time and time again. I was sitting in the back seat and stopped the exercise. Hunter was going to be buying us a lot of beers that night.
Hunter’s outside-the-box thinking could sometimes be a double-edged sword. I noticed this during a couple of these scenarios, and I began to worry that we’d have to watch him closely when we got to Shangri-La. Still, his brainpower was sufficient to justify his participation, and his shooting was well above average.
One afternoon, I went through a vehicular scenario where I had a driver and I rode shotgun in a sedan. We rolled up on a checkpoint manned by some simulated militia types. This is a common feature in the developing world, and talking your way past these things required a little diplomacy. Delta Jimmy role-played one of the militia guys, Frog the other. And it was Jimmy who strode up to the driver’s-side door. Now, you never have your window rolled down in these sorts of real-world situations, but for the training reasons, we were supposed to have it cracked in order to facilitate better communication.
My driver didn’t do that. He was a cheeky bastard who always looked for an angle and advantage in these training scenarios, so he kept the window firmly rolled up.
Jimmy tapped on the window, gun in hand but not pointed at us, and said something I couldn’t hear. The next thing I knew, my driver shouted, “Contact left!”
In a flash, I threw open the passenger door, bailed out of the car, rolled, and came up over the roof of the vehicle, weapon drawn. I put two Sim rounds right onto Jimmy’s face mask at nose level, spun, and put another one into his backup man. Both down, the scenario ENDEXED (ended). We gathered with the role players for the after-action critique.
“How’d we do?” I asked, smiling at the splotch of paint my Simms rounds had left on Jimmy’s face mask.
“Um. Well, your solution worked,” Jimmy said hesitantly. “And after all, you are the boss; it was your decision to engage, and engage you did,” he added, holding up his face mask.
“Was that not what you wanted from us?” I asked.
“Well, sir, we just wanted some money. We weren’t looking for a fight.”
My jaw dropped. It was not uncommon to be forcibly panhandled at gunpoint in the developing world. Long experience with these sorts of things had proven the best response was to avoid a fight and hand over a wad of cash. A firefight is always a risky proposition, especially if the checkpoint is in the middle of some lawless, Wild West kind of third-world city. That could quickly get out of hand.
We should have just given them the money.
“Well, you won anyway,” Jimmy said.
“Yeah,” I replied, anger growing, “but I just got us into a gun battle in the middle of town.”
Jimmy nodded. “Yep. That’s the lesson learned here.”
I chewed my driver a new asshole for that one. Those were the kind of mistakes that, if made in the real world, get people killed and cause international incidents. There would be none of that on my watch.
We worked for thirty days straight, seven days a week, twelve- to fifteen-hour days. We loved every minute of it. When we’d get back to our team area, we’d grab some chow and sit around marveling at the fact that we got paid to do this stuff. Anyone with a pulse and a need for action would have been in heaven. I saw every day on the faces of our guys that we had the right team in place. They loved this stuff. Especially Jeff.
In our few hours of downtime, we simulated the atmospherics we’d face in Shangri-La. No TV. No satellite. If we wanted to relax, we’d have to do it with VHS movies. We brought a few goofy comedies with us XXXXXXXX, but the one flick we returned to time and again, first in our thirty-day workup cycle, then later in Shangri-La, was the 1993 epic Tombstone.
We watched that film so many times we memorized the lines. The screenplay is simply brilliant, salted with Old West slang we absolutely loved. “I’m your Huckleberry” and “Well, Johnny Ringo, you look like somebody just walked over your grave” became part of our team’s internal lexicon. There were plenty of times in the weeks ahead we just needed to unwind with something stupid and funny like Van Wilder, which starred Ryan Reynolds and was definitely not PC! Yet it wouldn’t be more than a few days, a week tops, before we busted out Tombstone again. Part of it I suppose was that we knew we’d be going into a modern-day version of that Wild West town—a lawless area filled with bad guys bent on our destruction. The rules in Shangri-La mirrored those in Tombstone. There was no rule of law, only men exerting their will with the barrel of a rifle.
We emerged XXXXXXXX a cohesive, disciplined team. We were our own kind of Band of Brothers, bonded over our many shared experiences and hardships Jimmy and Frog threw our way. It was the best training I’d ever been through in the Agency.
In November 2000, a few weeks after al-Qaeda nearly sank the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Cole in Yemen with a suicide bombing attack, we boarded our flight for Shangri-La. The war in the shadow world was heating up, and we were flying into the middle of it to rebuild our Agency’s capabilities in hostile territory. I knew we were ready.