15 August 2008
Bagram Airfield
AT BAGRAM AIRFIELD, the sun slid low, casting the mountains in a glow like dying embers. Since learning that two Dog Company soldiers had been killed in action, SPC Allan Moser hadn’t been able to think of anything else. He sat brooding in the transient tent, names from the company roster tripping through his mind. Finally, LT Ward broke the news: It was 3rd Platoon that had been hit. The KIAs were Donnie Carwile and Paul Conlon.
Sorrow flooded Moser’s brain: LT Carwile? He was such a great L.T., not a tight ass like some. He had two little girls… how could he be gone? And Conlon? He was only twenty-one. He hadn’t even been in the Army for a year.
Then anger rocketed in. Moser found himself wondering, Did they get the motherfuckers who did this?
All three of the wounded—Joseph Coe, Todd Parsons, and Al LeMaire—had been MedEvaced to Bagram, and the Jolly Rogers had trooped over to the hospital to see them. LeMaire was sequestered in intensive care.
Hours later, the platoon learned that Carwile’s and Conlon’s bodies had arrived at Bagram. They would be flown home on a C-17, an Air Force transport plane. There was to be a “ramp ceremony,” the solemn rite of loading the men on their final flight. Asked if they wanted to be the ones to bear Carwile’s and Conlon’s caskets, the Jolly Rogers responded, “There’s no ‘if’ we want to. We are.”
Late that evening, the platoon formed up at the airfield under a glittering midnight sky. Nearby, a cavernous cargo plane hulked on the tarmac. An Army chaplain was there, along with about a hundred other soldiers, arrayed in silent ranks. Meanwhile, along Bagram’s main thoroughfare, Disney Drive, soldiers, sailors, Marines, airmen, and civilians streamed out from their work spaces and lined the street.
Hundreds came. Military from every service. Men and women. Soldiers and airmen from other nations. Some had just come off double-digit shifts, gone back to their barracks, put on their cleanest uniforms, and returned. Few, if any, knew Carwile or Conlon. They were there out of respect. Athletes and movie stars often touched down at Bagram to boost troop morale, but none of them drew as large a crowd as a single soldier going home in a coffin.5
On the airfield, Moser and the Jolly Rogers waited in formation. SGT Brandon Vega, one of Carwile’s 3rd Platoon soldiers, had been at Bagram for an appointment when the IED hit. A Jolly Roger gave up his spot in the ceremony so that Vega could help carry his platoon leader on his journey home.
Near midnight, a procession crawled down Disney Drive, including a pair of A2 series Humvees configured with beds like pickup trucks. Each cradled a casket draped with an American flag. Along the street, those in uniform saluted as the trucks rolled past.
The procession turned onto the tarmac, rolled slowly to the waiting plane, and stopped. Moser listened as the chaplain intoned a brief sermon under a chapel of a billion stars. On signal, a bagpipe sounded, and the plaintive notes of “Amazing Grace” floated across the night. Beneath the strains, Moser could hear men crying.
The men of 2nd Platoon marched to the Humvees, eight to a truck, and lifted their fallen brothers down. As they marched slowly toward the C-17, the weight of Donnie Carwile’s body rested on Moser’s shoulder like the sands of all the ages. Grief swelled up in his chest, broke up through his throat. As he trudged up the aircraft ramp, the first tears spilled from his eyes. The men set the caskets down and slid them home.
All sixteen men marched down the ramp. As the plane’s massive cargo door closed, a bugle note cut the clear night like a blade, and “Taps” began to play. Those who knew the century-old lyrics recited them inwardly:
From the lakes, from the hills, from the sky
All is well, safely rest
God is nigh.
Fading light dims the sight
And a star gems the sky, gleaming bright
From afar, drawing near
Falls the night.
Thanks and praise for our days
Neath the sun, neath the stars, neath the sky
As we go, this we know
God is nigh.
16 August 2008
In war, death leaves no room for rest. The day after the IED claimed Carwile and Conlon, CPT Roger Hill had to make time for an in-brief with Dave, the counterintelligence agent. The two men settled at the long table in the TOC conference room.
Dave launched into his brief Army-style, bottom line up front: “Sir, you’re looking at one or more insider threats.”
At first, Hill was taken aback. One or more threats from inside his own organization? Then he felt the click of resolution in his mind, like a puzzle piece sliding into place. Hill picked up his pen. “Go on.”
“I work in the Division counterintel shop at Bagram. A few months back, I noticed a trend in the intel reports.”
There had been a repeated pattern, Dave explained. It ranged from low-level Afghan workers selling scraps of data to the Taliban to actual attacks—on both Coalition bases and personnel—perpetrated by people thought to be allies. With his commander’s blessing, Dave had spent a couple of months visiting small, exposed bases. His tour revealed a startling discovery: U.S. forces had somehow missed flourishing networks of infiltrators.
“I asked myself, ‘How had that happened?’” Dave said as Hill scribbled notes. “Were Coalition forces not reporting what they saw? Or were they reporting it, and counterintel simply wasn’t seeing it?”
He ran down the answers, which were yes and yes. The reporting was available, but not easily accessible. And there weren’t enough counterintel personnel in-theater to circulate the battlefield on a regular basis. Plus, with literally thousands of intel reports streaming in from 130 bases in RC East alone, the twenty-five CI personnel at Bagram had a workload akin to drinking from a fire hose. Insider threat reports were easily lost in the shuffle.
Still, Dave knew the problem had to be wrestled down, and his OIC (officer in charge) agreed. “I spent a month combing through a twelve-month pile of intel reports,” Dave said.
What funneled out at the end was daunting: four hundred reports of infiltrators and spies working on Coalition bases in eastern Afghanistan alone.
Hill was stunned. “Four hundred?”
Dave nodded. Some reports included Afghan allies on U.S. bases working specifically to get American and Coalition forces killed. In January in Waygul, they might have succeeded: An Afghan National Army soldier had leapt from a bunker, shot and killed 1SG Matthew Kahler, twenty-nine, and run. Investigators called it an accident, but Kahler’s soldiers witnessed the shooting and swore the Afghan killed Kahler intentionally.
Dave’s OIC authorized small, ad hoc teams to visit RC East bases to try to get out in front of what appeared to be a rampant problem. At one base, Dave and his guys busted a particularly nasty crew of local national infiltrators. The base commander was livid and fired them all. Soon afterward, the base received accurate indirect fire—rockets and mortars—for the first time in months. The attack became a briefing point for future commanders dealing with insider threats: If you let spies go, expect a retaliatory attack.
Months passed. While his OIC focused on gathering resources to scrub the data gathered thus far, Dave zeroed in on learning more about advanced-threat areas like Khost, Logar, Paktika—and Wardak.
Hill’s pen froze. He could hear the rumble of Humvees outside, rolling on and off the FOB as the glimmer of a red flag waved in his mind. It was beginning to sound like Divison intel had been tracking a threat on his base for some time.
Dave didn’t skip a beat. He ticked off questions he’d been running down for weeks: How were enemy infiltrators getting on base? What systemic issues allowed them to elude U.S. screening protocols and gain employment? And who were the bad guys working off base and directing the bad guys working on base?
Hill thought of the local national workers on Airborne. Each man, from the bulldozer operator to his own interpreter, had undergone a vetting process ultimately overseen by ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, NATO’s arm in Afghanistan. Hill’s mission in Wardak fell under ISAF, an authority with its own set of rules.
Dave continued. “Just like any army, terrorist networks rely on logistics, recruitment, training, financing, and intel, as well as communication between commanders and foot soldiers,” he said. “When I started dissecting the main networks, I immediately saw trends.”
For example, main Coalition logistics lines weren’t being attacked by local criminals, as a recent national-level assessment had concluded, but by organized insurgent support structures. This had not been a popular discovery, but Dave backed it up with data from thousands of intel reports stretching back several years. Then, at a morning briefing in Bagram, he learned of suspect signals emanating from FOB Airborne, Dog Company’s base in Wardak. After a series of briefs up the task force intel chain of command, the commanding general made a decision: bust the insider threat so that it didn’t compromise Operation Nomad.
“And now,” Dave said, “here I am.”
Hill sat back in his chair, astonished. How could Division know about, or even suspect, an enemy on his base—inside his wire—and he, the base commander, not be privy to that information? By Hill’s accounting, counterintel assets at Bagram had been tracking the threat for at least six weeks.
If Hill had known, maybe Donnie and Paul…?
But his mind couldn’t go down that road.
Dave slid Hill the FRAGO, or fragmentary order, that had brought him and his team to Airborne. Hill scanned the document. It was dated 12 August 2008 and came straight from the Division commander. According to the order, the CI team’s sole purpose at Airborne was to protect the operational security of Nomad, the clearing operation in Jalrez, the Taliban stronghold that lay in view of the FOB. Dave’s team was to provide counterintel support to units executing the op, and thereby prevent the operation from being compromised by intel leaks.
But there was a twist, and for Hill it was a big one: Because of the combination of units involved in the operation, Nomad was to be conducted under Operating Enduring Freedom (OEF) rules of engagement, not ISAF rules. For Hill and Dog Company, this was a huge advantage. ISAF’s rules of engagement were highly restrictive, particularly its rules on taking and holding prisoners.
Under ISAF, all prisoners enjoyed something called the 96-Hour Rule. Under the rule, every prisoner captured had to be transferred either to Afghan custody, or to the next-higher level of U.S. detention, within ninety-six hours—or they were set free. And not only set free, but given a few bucks to see them on their way.
In Dog Company’s case, the next echelon of detention meant Battalion headquarters at FOB Ghazni, where Hill’s boss, LTC DeMartino, was in command. But for six months, the problem had been this: Every time Dog Company sent captured enemy fighters to Ghazni, Battalion let them go. Without exception.
This had been true whether the fighter was caught with bomb-making materials or in the act of firing on American soldiers. Hill and his men found the pattern bizarre, as though they were engaged in some kind of catch-and-release trophy-fishing contest instead of locked in lethal combat with Osama bin Laden’s deadly acolytes.
Now, Hill stared at the FRAGO as if it held a miracle: Operation Enduring Freedom rules of engagement did not include arbitrary detention time lines. If there were spies on his base, capturing them under OEF rules meant D Co might actually get them off the battlefield. No threat of the ISAF revolving door. It meant Hill would be able to make his men safer. In the long run, Operation Nomad might weaken the enemy’s intel apparatus in the province, possibly even lead to the dismantling of the warlord Razak’s entire Jalrez cell.
This wasn’t the first time Hill had had to purge his base of an insider threat. In April, D Co had busted a dirty interpreter, or “terp.” They also caught a local national worker “walking in” rounds—providing azimuth and range information to enemy fighters firing rockets and mortars into the FOB. After Dog Company rolled those guys up, a Brigade-sourced counterintel team was requested and sent to screen all local nationals working on Airborne. They pronounced the base clean.
Still, Taliban attacks had grown increasingly accurate, cutting into Hill’s unit by attrition as the number of wounded mounted. In view of Dave’s brief, he was beginning to understand why.
An incident earlier that summer now seemed darkly comic. To shore up D Co’s manning shortage, the Army had sent thirty-two privately contracted Afghan security guards to help protect the FOB. When they showed up without uniforms, weapons, bullets, or food, and asked that their families be housed on base, 1SG Scott smelled a rat. He decided to run the contract guards’ names through the XXXXXXXXXX. Twelve of the thirty-two popped up with ties to the Taliban, including eight so hot they were to be detained on sight.
Hill called the procurement officer on Bagram who had approved the Afghan guards. How was it that the Army could send Taliban-linked contractors to staff his base, he wanted to know?
The procurement officer told Hill that only one of the thirty-two men who presented themselves at Airborne had been personally interviewed. “It’s standard protocol,” he said, no apology in his tone.
Standard protocol to send arrest-on-sight Afghans to pull security on an American base?
Hill blew a gasket, dialed Battalion at Ghazni, and unloaded over the phone. How could they sign off on a system that carried so much potential for harm? And when he asked what to do with the detain-on-sight prisoners, he was told: Let them go.
Now Hill laid the FRAGO on the conference table and looked at Dave. “Okay. What’s your plan?”
“Well, XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX indicates one or more threats on your FOB. My team will conduct a comprehensive screening of every one of your Afghan workers. How many do you have?”
“About fifty.”
“Okay. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX” Also, the CI team planned to employ the XXXXX, Dave said. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“Sounds good,” Hill said. “I’ll have First Sergeant Scott and the FOB mayor help you with the LNs.” Local nationals.
Hill’s tone was even and confident, but it masked a new urgency. Dave’s brief had switched on in him a ticking clock. It hadn’t been proven yet, but it was very likely that the spy or spies conspiring on Hill’s base had cost Carwile and Conlon their lives. His platoons were still operating outside the wire, running missions every day. How long would it be until the insider threat struck again?