Not long after dawn on December 9, 2001, a convoy of ten white Toyota pickup trucks was bouncing over a rutted dirt road heading south from the city of Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. A casual observer might have remarked on the relative newness of the vehicles, but otherwise would have seen nothing unusual about a convoy of trucks carrying several dozen scruffy, bearded fighters, long hair flopping from under their traditional Afghan pakool caps.1 In this part of the world, most men had guns, and those of substance traveled with a well-armed entourage. For the last several years Taliban convoys had become commonplace in Nangarhar, as had those of Al Qaeda fighters, whose leader had something akin to a country estate in the mountains up ahead.
But if a passerby had the opportunity to take a closer look, he’d have noticed that the trucks’ interiors were a little unusual. They had been stripped for action, with the backseats and anything else superfluous ripped out to lighten the vehicles and create more room. The pickups were now small enough to squeeze onto a Chinook and light enough to fly on small fixed wing aircraft. Delta’s engineers had even made them sturdy enough to be airdropped from a Combat Talon.2
As for the passengers, some were indeed local Afghan militiamen, but many others were assaulters and snipers from Delta’s A1 and A3 troops, respectively. The weapons the operators gripped under their blankets were not the AK-series assault rifles ubiquitous in these parts, but SR-25 sniper rifles and M4s spray-painted in camouflage patterns and tricked out with laser designators and holographic sights. Other cutting-edge technology was stowed in their rucksacks or the many pockets of their customized gear.
The convoy was nearing the end of what an operator described as a “hellacious” thirteen-hour drive from Bagram, broken only by a couple of hours’ break at a Jalalabad safe house. Now, with the mountains looming ahead, the trucks suddenly pulled over and stopped. The operators dismounted and turned their gaze south, focusing on a small dot in the azure sky far ahead of and above them, a Combat Talon flying through a patch of the heavens that until then had been the domain of B-52s and fighter-bombers. As they watched, an even smaller speck tumbled from the plane, floating toward the mountains under a parachute barely visible from the road. Most of the operators watching realized that up close, that speck was the size of a car and contained 12,600 pounds of explosive. One of the largest conventional bombs in the world, the BLU-82 daisy cutter had been designed to clear landing zones in the Vietnamese jungle. Now the United States was employing it to seal caves in the Afghan mountains. For several seconds the watchers held their breath. When the bomb detonated, the effect was underwhelming. The ground did not shake as expected, nor did the sound of a massive explosion reach the operators’ ears. What one described as a “nice mushroom cloud” rising over the snowcapped peaks was the only indication that a major blast had just shaken the mountains several miles ahead.
The troops got back on the trucks and continued south. The sleep-deprived operators were exhausted but impatient to get to their destination. They represented the most elite troops the United States had to offer, but the most important battle of the war had started without them, at a place called Tora Bora.3
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More than twelve weeks after September 11, JSOC was finally on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. The command had developed a certain man-hunting expertise through its pursuits of Noriega, Escobar, Aideed, and the Balkan war criminals. But until Dailey’s November 17 change-of-mission video-teleconference, finding the Al Qaeda leader was considered strictly the CIA’s job. “No one tasked JSOC” to go after bin Laden in the weeks after September 11, a retired special operations officer said. “The CIA thought that was their mission and they didn’t need any goddamn help doing it.” To an extent, this was a repeat of the Balkans, where the CIA did much of the work locating the targets, with JSOC elements deploying to execute the culminating raids.
In time, JSOC would gain a reputation as the nation’s premier man-hunting organization, but in late 2001 it lacked the intelligence infrastructure required for such missions. “JSOC was a reactive, ‘you’ve got the intelligence for me, I will execute this hard target’ organization,’” the retired special ops officer said. “Intelligence wasn’t JSOC’s strong point.”
As it turned out, the CIA was doing its job reasonably well, and by late November had received multiple reports that bin Laden had retreated to his mountain base in Nangarhar.4 That base’s name was destined to become a catchphrase, in the United States, at least, for missed opportunity: Tora Bora.
Bin Laden’s presence there should have come as no surprise to the U.S. forces on his trail. The Al Qaeda leader’s historic association with Tora Bora was no secret. He knew the area intimately and felt secure there. It is a truism regarding hunted individuals that they tend to go to ground where they feel most at home. Bin Laden was no exception.
In the first weeks after September 11, Al Qaeda’s leader had mostly divided his time between Kabul and his headquarters outside Kandahar, opting for Kabul once the bombs started falling. But when the Taliban fled the capital in mid-November, he withdrew to the region he knew best: the Jalalabad area. Nestled in a broad valley that terminated at the fabled Khyber Pass into Pakistan, the city had been bin Laden’s home after he moved his headquarters to Afghanistan from Sudan in 1996. About thirty miles to the south, on the northern slopes of the Spin Ghar Mountains, lay Tora Bora, which functioned as both a beloved vacation home and a military redoubt for the Al Qaeda leader. The mountains’ southern slopes were in Pakistan, the border of which jutted into Afghanistan in a twenty-mile-wide protuberance known as the Parachinar salient. Bin Laden had first gotten to know the area—and the Pashtun warlords, tribal chiefs, and village elders who ran society there—during the 1980s war with the Soviets and their Afghan communist allies. He had gained combat experience near there in 1987’s battle of Jaji. He had also financed and built a rudimentary road from Jalalabad to Tora Bora and on to the Pakistan border. After constructing what amounted to a settlement above the snow line at Tora Bora, he would take his sons on regular seven-to-fourteen-hour hikes into Pakistan, telling them: “We never know when war will strike. We must know our way out of the mountains.”
Now bin Laden’s multinational force, composed mostly of Arab and Central Asian fighters, was retreating to Tora Bora from battlefields the newly enabled Northern Alliance had forced them to abandon. Soon they were at work digging trenches and stockpiling food at the base, which was organized around modest bunkers and smallish caves, rather than the Bond-villain subterranean lair imagined by some in the West. Sometime in the week prior to November 25, bin Laden and Zawahiri left Jalalabad in a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles that took three hours to ascend the Spin Ghar foothills and reach Tora Bora. It was there that bin Laden planned to make his final stand in Afghanistan.5
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As November gave way to December, Delta’s A Squadron (minus A2 Troop, which was already in Afghanistan) boarded two C-17s at Pope Air Force Base and flew to Masirah. The newly arrived operators stayed on the desert island just a few days, getting brought up to speed by their outgoing B Squadron counterparts and receiving Dailey’s guidance before flying on to Bagram on December 5. The dilapidated and heavily mined air base had spent much of the past decade on the front lines of the various Afghan civil wars, changing hands several times, and its cratered runway, pockmarked buildings, and junked aircraft symbolized the backward steps Afghanistan had taken in that time. Few structures had complete roofs and none had running water or electricity, but Delta’s engineers went to work to create conditions that could support operations.6 The Afghan winter had just begun to bite.
A lead element under A1 troop commander Major Tom Greer drove down to Tora Bora December 6. The newly arrived Delta operators were keen to get started, but the reality was they were already two weeks late to the fight. Two weeks previously, as soon as Berntsen had received what he viewed as actionable intelligence placing bin Laden in Nangarhar, the CIA team chief and Erwin had gone to Bagram to discuss their options with Colonel John Mulholland, the 5th Special Forces Group commander, and another Special Forces officer assigned to the CIA. Scrutinizing a map of eastern Afghanistan spread over the hood of a Humvee, they wrestled with the operational dilemma before them.7 Their nation’s number one enemy was likely ensconced in the Spin Ghar Mountains, defended by an estimated 1,500 to 3,0008 fanatically loyal fighters. Rooting him out would ordinarily require a large infantry force. But the special operations officers had no large U.S. infantry force at their disposal. (There were 10th Mountain Division troops in Uzbekistan and Marine forces in Kandahar, however.) The United States had two major paratroop infantry units: the Ranger Regiment and the 82nd Airborne Division. Each maintained a battalion ready to deploy at short notice, either of which could have been dropped into or near Tora Bora within a couple of days. (Indeed, there had been a plan to drop an entire 82nd brigade to seize Kabul’s airport, had the Northern Alliance advance ground to a halt outside the capital.)9 But CENTCOM never seriously considered using large U.S. infantry formations to seal Tora Bora. Up and down the military chain of command, generals and their civilian bosses had become prisoners of their recently formulated conventional wisdom, which was that the introduction of large military formations into Afghanistan would automatically engender fierce hostility and outright resistance from the local population, and that the Afghan mountains posed impossible logistical and tactical challenges for U.S. troops. The speed with which the Northern Alliance had been able to roll back the Taliban once the United States had applied the vital formula of CIA money, Special Forces know-how, and airpower had also seduced the decision makers into believing they could destroy Al Qaeda and the Taliban without the deployment of thousands of infantrymen.
But the Northern Alliance leaders were busy helping themselves to the fruits of power in Kabul and had no interest in helping the Americans fight the Taliban on their own turf: the Pashtun provinces of eastern and southern Afghanistan. Most Pashtun warlords were loyal to the Taliban, so in an effort to rent an army with which the United States could assault bin Laden’s mountain fastness, the CIA was forced to ally with three less well known and barely vetted militia chiefs in the Nangarhar region, spending several million dollars of U.S. taxpayer money in the process.10
Berntsen was about to move a small element to Nangarhar to work with the militias and develop the situation. He asked Mulholland, whose Special Forces teams had done so much to help the Northern Alliance, to support the plan, such as it was, with a single A-team. (A fully manned A-team, officially known as an operational detachment-alpha, has twelve soldiers.) But the 5th Group commander, who had yet to lose a soldier in Afghanistan, was extremely reluctant to commit his forces into the relative unknown of Nangarhar. He agreed to send the team in a week, if Berntsen’s men had survived that long. The next day, November 18, Berntsen sent eight men, including three JSOC personnel, to Jalalabad.11
After linking up with Hazrat Ali, a militia boss the CIA was paying, the Agency team spent a week north of Jalalabad before moving south on November 25 as intelligence increasingly indicated that bin Laden was at Tora Bora. They established a base in an abandoned schoolhouse at the foot of the Spin Ghar Mountains. Once they’d familiarized themselves somewhat with the environment and their new allies, and with no other U.S. forces in the area, on December 4 Berntsen and Erwin sent four Americans into Tora Bora: a Delta operator, a 24th STS combat controller, a former Delta operator now working as a CIA contractor, and a former Special Forces soldier with the CIA’s Special Activities Division. After hiking for the better part of two days with their local guides, they found an ideal observation post and called in air strikes on Al Qaeda positions for fifty-six hours straight.12
Once A Squadron’s main body arrived at the schoolhouse, the U.S. forces at Tora Bora included the CIA team, a Special Forces A-team Mulholland had finally provided, a few combat controllers from 24th Special Tactics Squadron, and a small Army of Northern Virginia signals intelligence element. But the Delta operators from A1 and A3 Troops comprised the main U.S. combat force. There were also about a dozen operators from the British Special Boat Service, the rough equivalent of SEAL Team 6. A3 lacked a commissioned officer, and was led instead by the troop sergeant major, Bryan “Butt Monkey” Morgan, so Greer became the overall ground force commander. The senior enlisted man and most experienced operator present was A Squadron’s command sergeant major, Greg “Ironhead” Birch. Squadron commander Lieutenant Colonel John Alexander remained in Bagram.13
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From the outset, the CIA men on the ground in Nangarhar did not think that the formula that had worked thus far would succeed at Tora Bora. They had no faith in their putative Afghan “allies.” To stand a good chance of killing or capturing bin Laden, they knew they would need a more tactically proficient and reliable force, an assessment they relayed repeatedly—with growing alarm each time—to Washington.14 As a result of these warnings, at the end of November Hank Crumpton found himself in the Oval Office briefing Bush and Cheney, a map of Tora Bora and the surrounding area spread out on the floor. Realizing the military chain of command had not conveyed the CIA’s concerns to Bush, Crumpton got to the point. “We’re going to lose our prey if we’re not careful,” he told the president, before urging the immediate deployment of U.S. forces to Tora Bora. Bush appeared surprised. The Pakistanis had promised him they would seal the border. The president asked if the Afghan militias at Tora Bora were “up to the job.” “Definitely not, Mr. President,” Crumpton replied. “Definitely not.”15
On December 3, “Dusty,” a member of Berntsen’s team who was a retired Ranger and Delta operator, recommended inserting a Ranger battalion—about 800 men—to seal the south side of the mountains. Legendary CIA operative and former Special Forces soldier Billy Waugh, also on Berntsen’s team, echoed Dusty’s counsel. Berntsen endorsed the request and relayed it to Crumpton at Langley.16 Another team member called Crumpton directly from the base of Tora Bora to repeat the request. The next morning Crumpton called Franks and passed on the message. Franks was noncommittal, concerned that no planning had been done for deploying any substantial infantry force.17 (Given that, according to Franks himself, Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had told him a month previously that bin Laden might already be at Tora Bora,18 it’s hard to know who Franks had to blame but himself for the failure to plan for that eventuality.)
Franks was obsessed with not repeating the Soviets’ mistake of deploying large conventional formations into Afghanistan. Like President Bush, Franks also had a misplaced faith in the willingness and ability of Pakistani military—the Taliban’s patrons—to seal the border. “Our friends in Islamabad wanted the terrorists dead or captured just as much as we did,” he later wrote.19 For his part, Rumsfeld never received a request for more forces from either Franks or Tenet, according to the defense secretary’s autobiography.20
The attitudes of Dailey, Mulholland, and, to a lesser extent, John Alexander, reflected Franks’s caution. The Delta officer ruled out any Delta teams infiltrating Tora Bora by helicopter, at least on the Afghan side of the border. A Mogadishu veteran, Alexander was leery of using helicopters in a role that put them at risk of being shot down. The Al Qaeda forces in Tora Bora were equipped with 14.5mm antiaircraft guns, 12.7mm heavy machine guns, and RPG-7 rocket-propelled grenades, any of which could turn a multimillion-dollar TF Brown Chinook into a smoldering heap of wire and metal. Instead, Alexander proposed a helicopter insertion of several Delta sniper teams onto the Spin Ghar range’s southern slopes via Pakistan. This view found support with Greer and his men. “Having Delta guarding the far side of the mountain passes, closing the ring, would have made a huge difference,” Greer wrote. A higher echelon of command “way, way above us” denied the plan, he added. (Alexander also wanted to drop CBU-89 cluster bombs to mine the passes, but this option too was denied, likely at the four-star level or higher, in part because some international partners threatened to withdraw their forces if the United States used such munitions.) However, like his bosses, Alexander was an advocate of letting the Afghans take the lead, something with which his troops on the ground strongly disagreed.21
Mulholland’s orders to the members of the one A-team he allowed to venture onto the Tora Bora battlefield were that they were authorized only to engage in “terminal guidance operations”—i.e., calling in air strikes. On no account were they to maneuver against the Al Qaeda forces in front of them.22 Dailey was equally cautious, repeatedly ordering the Delta operators to let the Afghans take the lead. In the December 2 meeting with A Squadron on Masirah, the JSOC commander conveyed “an impression of hesitancy” to Greer. “Somehow I got the impression the general was not too keen on Delta venturing up into the mountains,” the Delta officer wrote. To Greer’s disappointment, Dailey ruled out the use of Rangers as a quick reaction force, preferring to leave even that role to the local hires. Greer thought the idea that an untrained Afghan militia could compensate for the Rangers’ absence “was a complete pipe dream.”23
There were no easy options available to the generals. Air-dropping or air-assaulting troops to encircle the Al Qaeda forces would have stretched U.S. air-to-air refueling resources and would have required repeated and dangerous resupply missions. The landscape of snowy gorges and steep-sided 14,000-foot mountains was extraordinarily tough—“the most formidable terrain that we fought in,” according to Lieutenant Colonel Mark Rosengard,24 Mulholland’s operations officer—and well defended by hard-core fighters who were using every additional day granted them by the U.S. generals’ inaction to improve their fortifications. But the United States military, especially JSOC’s superbly trained and equipped forces, had a variety of means of infiltration at its disposal and access to the best cold-weather gear in the world, not to mention the ability to call on an almost limitless supply of smart bombs from the jets overhead. It’s hard to believe that had those forces been committed to the fight in the mountains, they would not have prevailed against militants drawn in large part from the desert nations of Arabia.
Left to fend for themselves, the JSOC operators and CIA operatives performed heroically. They first took over two observation posts the Special Forces team had been manning, then braved heavy machine gun and mortar fire to push farther into the heart of the Al Qaeda positions. As the CIA men had warned, the Afghans displayed little appetite for the fight, retreating every night from ground taken during the day.25 (It didn’t help that the entire operation was occurring during Ramadan, during which pious Muslims do not eat or drink between sunup and sundown. This left the Afghans weak and dehydrated during the day and even less eager than usual to stay on the battlefield overnight.)26 Greer and his men found it hard to contain their frustration. “It was just over two months since 9/11, and for the most important mission to date in the global war on terror, our nation was relying on a fractious bunch of AK-47-toting lawless bandits and tribal thugs,” he wrote.27 This was where Mulholland’s refusal to commit any forces to work with the Afghans cost the United States. Unlike Special Forces soldiers, each of whom was specially trained to work with indigenous allies, Delta operators received little or no such training. Greer had received none.28
Day after day, night after night in early December, the operators ground their way forward, always relying on the aircraft overhead and fickle Afghan allies for their protection. No Delta operator used his rifle to kill any Al Qaeda fighters during the battle.29 Having had several weeks to array themselves, bin Laden’s troops held the high ground and were dug into well-defended positions of tactical advantage. They even had a small armor force.30
But Greer’s men also had what he described as a “secret weapon”—the Army of Northern Virginia signals collectors, who included at least one Pashto speaker and who were “regularly” picking up and, where possible, triangulating, bin Laden’s radio calls.31 Getting the Delta operators into a position to profit from that information was proving difficult, however, given the orders to do no more than support the Afghans. In the unlikely event that this approach gave them an opportunity to confront bin Laden, Dailey’s guidance to the operators was direct. “It was made crystal clear to us that capturing the terrorist was not the preferred outcome,” Greer wrote.32 Meanwhile, Berntsen continued to urge the deployment of more JSOC forces, telling Langley at the end of the first week of December, “We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!”33 As usual, his pleas fell on deaf ears at CENTCOM.
On December 10, Army of Northern Virginia personnel intercepted a radio transmission that stated “Father [i.e., bin Laden] is trying to break through the siege line.” Promising as that was, later that day another intercept gave the U.S. force an eight-digit grid reference point for bin Laden’s position, the most detailed information the United States had had on his location since the late 1990s, according to Greer. The Delta officer led a thirty-three-man, nine-vehicle team into the mountains to try to capitalize on it. But any hopes the operators had that Hazrat Ali’s forces had surrounded bin Laden’s position were dashed when the “allies” abandoned the battlefield to break their fast.34 At the same time, a three-man JSOC team called Jackal was in extreme danger, having ventured far behind Al Qaeda lines to call in a series of devastating air strikes before being spotted and taken under machine gun fire. All but five of their Afghan militiamen fled. Jackal’s combat controller, nicknamed “the Admiral,” passed the code word for a team escaping and evading: “Warpath. Warpath. Warpath.”35
With night closing in, bin Laden “fading like a ghost,” and Jackal’s whereabouts unknown (the team was out of radio contact), Greer faced a dilemma: pursue bin Laden or search for his missing team. He chose the latter, figuring “we’ll have another shot at bin Laden.” Jackal finally made it to safety under their own steam that night, but the opportunity to kill bin Laden, if it had ever existed, was gone.36 The battle stalled. To the Americans’ disgust, on December 12 one of the Afghan militia leaders took it upon himself to arrange a twenty-four-hour cease-fire to allow Al Qaeda to surrender. Of course, as the Americans soon surmised, the surrender was a hoax, but it gave whatever Al Qaeda remnants had yet to flee across the border to Pakistan vital breathing space before the bombing resumed.37
By December 14, Delta had pushed several thousand meters into Tora Bora over the course of seventy hours.38 Berntsen made another impassioned request to Dailey for more U.S. ground troops during a December 14 meeting in Kabul. The JSOC commander again refused, for fear of alienating the Afghan forces whose dubious allegiance the CIA was renting. Dailey’s caution did not sit well with the CIA officer. “I don’t give a damn about offending our allies!” he yelled at the general. “I only care about eliminating Al Qaeda and delivering bin Laden’s head in a box!”39 With bad weather interfering with air support, Greer asked Dailey to send the Ranger mortar teams at Bagram to Tora Bora, so the U.S. forces would at least have some fire support available, but Dailey turned even that request down. (Meanwhile, Mulholland refused to let the A-team he’d sent down reenter the battlefield after they’d come out to refit, and then relieved the team leader into the bargain.)40
Sporadic fighting continued for another couple of days, but the battle for Tora Bora was essentially over. The international coalition opposing the Taliban had dropped more than 1,100 precision-guided munitions (otherwise known as “smart bombs”) and more than 500 “dumb” gravity bombs, managing to kill at least 220 Al Qaeda fighters and capture a further fifty-two in the process. (U.S. and British forces suffered no casualties.) Greer claimed the real numbers of enemy dead were “much higher,” but admitted “several hundred others probably managed to run from the field.” The bottom line, as he acknowledged, was that bin Laden, Zawahiri, and hundreds of their best fighters had gotten away.41
The U.S. military chain of command’s extraordinary reluctance to commit the forces necessary for victory was a major factor in bin Laden’s escape. The Al Qaeda chief’s resourcefulness and knowledge of the mountains was doubtless another. But a couple of eyewitness reports offer the intriguing suggestion that bin Laden may have had outside help. At least one Delta operator observed Mi-17 helicopters—a model flown by Pakistan’s armed forces—flying very close to the border at the Agam Valley pass, the single egress point from Tora Bora to Pakistan that didn’t involve climbing to 14,000 feet. The helicopters appeared to be making a quick trip into Afghanistan. “They were in, they were out,” the operator said, adding that he suspected they were flying bin Laden to safety in Pakistan, but he had no way of proving that. However, Greer wrote that an Afghan fighter told a different Delta operator that he’d seen a helicopter he took to be Pakistani flying in fast and low to land in the Wazir Valley several days earlier. Both operators were sure the helicopters in question were not American.42
When A Squadron came out of Tora Bora, some operators were crowing about how many enemy fighters the air strikes they’d called in had killed up in the mountains, until Greg “Ironhead” Birch reminded them they hadn’t killed the one man they’d been sent in to kill. Their mission, therefore, was a failure, he told them. The senior Delta officer on the battlefield agreed. Tora Bora “must be viewed as a military failure,” according to Greer. Nonetheless, he wrote, Dailey “relayed the necessity that we paint a picture of victory.”43
The failure prompted bitter recriminations from the operators. One said that relying on the Afghans as the main force at Tora Bora and on the Pakistanis to seal the border were “100 percent” mistakes. The “gutless” U.S. commanders’ failure to seal the border was inexplicable to the operators, for whom preventing enemy “leakers” from an objective was standard operating procedure. “Not one American life could be risked to gain anything,” said an operator. “Not one guy could be hurt. They didn’t want us going forward on the front line with the Afghan army. They wouldn’t give us reinforcements.… Every day we were calling for people.… We should have dropped the entire 82nd to seal the border. Think about what that would have done to change the war.”
Another operator, who did not take part in the battle but was familiar with the area, said Greer’s decision making was not above reproach and that the on-scene Delta commander should have established positions above the Agam Valley pass. “Anyone who looked at the map was like, ‘Get to this pass right here and we could be armed with Hostess Ho Hos and just fucking drop ’em from the rocks above and they can’t get through that pass,” he said.
“The truth is [that] a little bit of risk will get you success,” said the first Delta operator. “No risk, no reward, and those guys chose the ‘no reward’ route.”
The squandering of the opportunity to destroy Al Qaeda at Tora Bora was a strategic catastrophe for the U.S. military, one it would compound three months later.