JUST BEFORE THANKSGIVING, the puddle outside my tent is frozen in the morning. During the day, the weather is fine, but at night it gets cold. On Sunday afternoon I sit outside my tent in a T-shirt and shorts and sunglasses, enjoying a good book and a decent cigar. There is no breeze, and dust as thick as mashed potatoes is kicked up by the relentless flow of trucks, humvees, gators, and the scuffling of soldiers’ boots. It hangs in the air and then settles on everything that stands still long enough.
I am still a little surprised to be in Afghanistan. Five months ago I was in Rwanda. When I left there, my orders were to go to Washington, learn to speak Serbo-Croatian, and go to Sarajevo as a political officer at the embassy. But one Saturday afternoon, I pulled an envelope out of the mailbox that changed all that. I had been mobilized to active duty for a year under Operation Enduring Freedom. Two months later I am in Afghanistan, a soldier again, sent to augment a regular Army unit that is short a field grade officer—I’m a major about to be promoted to lieutenant colonel—in my specialty.
My military occupation specialty code is 35F, Area Intelligence Officer. Officers with this specialty are called Case Officers, trained to conduct sensitive human intelligence (humint) operations—some people think of us as spies.
But I’m not conducting operations myself. My job in Afghanistan is to direct the actions of all the other human intelligence operators. I am called the CJ2X—the Director of Human and Counterintelligence Operations—for Coalition Joint Task Force 180, the U.S. military command in Afghanistan.
I have a hundred or so people working for me in specialties ranging from counterintelligence agent to interrogator, from explosive ordnance disposal technician to computer systems exploitation experts. Some of us live and work on the base with the XVIII Airborne Corps headquarters at Bagram, but my teams are spread around the country, and even across a few borders, so we travel some, too. A couple of weeks into the tour, I go outside the wire for the first time. Nothing too serious, just a trip up to Kabul to meet with our European counterparts to set up a combined operation we are planning to undertake about a month later. Just before we leave we brief the route with a map and talk about what we should do if we’re attacked.
“Your first instinct in an ambush is to take your foot off of the accelerator—Don’t!” My sergeant says. He continues, “Drive through the ambush, return fire, and speed through the kill zone.”
In the back of my mind I am thinking, I’ll stay in the boat while Jim wrestles the giant anaconda. Kabul is about one and a half hours away by land cruiser. It’s been there for centuries and will certainly be there when there are no longer any ambushes. I can wait. But we don’t.
We check the phone cards in our Thuraya phones—mobiles that connect to a satellite when there’s no network available—and throw a case of water in the back. We load up in Toyota pick-ups with all our body armor and Kevlar helmets—battle rattle, so-called because it’s hard to move quietly in this gear—and head out the gate.
The town of Bagram sits just outside the gate of the airbase. It’s a funny thing, but it looks just like the area outside the smaller bases in Korea, where the US have been for fifty years. There are lots of small shops selling blankets and lanterns and cigarettes. A couple of teahouses (in Korea these would have been bars), and some bicycle repair shops. About a hundred meters down the first alley on the left, a shop still stands in disrepair several weeks after a UN land cruiser had hit a mine buried in the street in front of it. The kids in the street wave, then turn their hands palm up in the universal gesture of entreaty, which has changed, I’m told, in the few months since the Americans have been there in force. Previously, a UN worker with lots of time on the ground there said, the kids only waved. But, by 2002, they started to implore passing troops to give them something, anything. It’s the same gesture the kids in Rwanda use, and the kids in Kosovo.
In minutes, even with us crawling through the snarl of Land Cruisers, Humvees, four-door pickups, and donkeys, Bagram dissolves and the countryside opens up. Scattered arbitrarily about the plains, lie the flotsam and jetsam of past wars—wars with the Soviets, between warlords, between the Northern Alliance and the Taliban: armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, trucks, and tanks twisted and long-stripped of their tracks and weapons, rusted in place where they’ve died, or were killed in battle.
A couple of Soviet howitzers mark the entrance to the compound of the local warlord, Baba Jan. Just past his compound, the call comes over the radio: “lock and load.” We each load a round into the firing chambers of our weapons. We then become much more alert. But things stay calm.
About half an hour out of Bagram, we see a group of de-miners clearing a field. All along the stretch of plains the edge of the road is marked with rocks painted red and white, indicating that one side of the area—the one on the red side of the rocks—has not yet been cleared of mines. In the field, ten meters from the road, stretch lines of hundreds of neat rows of painted, cantaloupe-sized rocks, unrolling beyond sight. For ten kilometers, we roll past this script from a previous war, its font a deadly, coded cipher to the uninitiated. The de-miners don’t look up as we pass. They swing their detectors in arcs in front of them and concentrate on the tones in their headsets—beep beep beep means boom boom boom.
Just beyond the minefields, trenches are carved into the land. I try to visualize what they might look like from the air. Are they cut into lizard shapes or—for the Soviets—a giant bear? Do they form bizarre geometric patterns like crop circles, or just indecipherable scars on the land like a child’s crayon scrawl on a wall? At random but strategic points along the trench lines, steel sheds were transformed into bunkers during the fighting. Most of these were attached to the backs of Soviet trucks. But gutted and windowless, the ones near the road have now become shelters for the Afghan Army troops manning checkpoints. In their mixed outfits—usually either a camouflage uniform top or pants mixed with civilian clothes—they wave as we roll past them towards Kabul.
The land is flat, rolling for kilometers out to the foothills of the Hindu Kush. Snow covers the high ridges, and as fall encroaches, we watch the snow line creep down the mountains. With each passing day the grey-brown of the mountains is covered a little more with snow, marking the inevitable arrival of winter. The land in the valleys is sand-colored: dusty, rocky and dry. It is as though Mother Nature had ordered up a second helping of Southern Arizona—hold the javelinas and the saguaro cactus.
There are no trees on the plains. Scrub bushes dot the landscape; they look hardy, but not nearly big enough to build with. Houses are made from mud bricks. Across the plains we can see dozens of collapsed and disintegrating houses. Roofs gone, walls crumbling. I can’t determine if they were years or centuries old. Nearby, new compounds are under construction. A new war means new money for houses, undoubtedly. Mud bricks dry in the sun outside the walls of fortresses along the edge of the road and well into the valleys beyond.
Fortresses. Eureka! I’ve cracked the code on Afghanistan: they fight because it is a part of their lifestyle—they live in fortresses. They live in fortresses because they have been at war for centuries, and they’ve been at war for centuries because they live in fortresses. It’s a self-licking ice-cream cone. I gradually regain my perspective and remember I don’t know anything about this place or the people. I’ve had about two hours of conversation with Afghans and that was in the Bagram Collection Point with senior Taliban leaders we’re holding before transfer to Guantanamo.
Soon, Kabul looms in the distance. Well, actually, there isn’t much looming, nothing above three or four stories tall. Much of the architecture is a Soviet-inspired, socialist, concrete farce. I wonder how uninspired the architects must have been by their work as we pass blocks of Bloc-inspired buildings. Small shops line the streets and traffic circles. Auto parts stores, tea stands, video rentals, cassette tapes and CDs for sale, music blaring, street food: we could be anywhere in the third world, but this is Afghanistan, home to the Taliban.
Just a few months before, there would have been no music. All the men would have been wearing long beards, and no women would have been visible unless escorted by a male member of their family. Today, a few women are on the streets. Many are still clad in the burkha—the head-to-toe drape of blue commanded by the Taliban. Some appear with only the headscarf. On the way into town we count the number of women without the burkha—seven that day, up from the previous week, I am told. Almost everyone on the streets is male. Many wear short beards; all have their heads covered. Traffic is chaotic, but nowhere near the level of a central African city.
We approach the walled compound of the American Embassy. Marines man the gates. A donkey cart has stopped in front of one of the gates just as a pod of embassy up-armored Suburbans roars up. Two Marines come out to try to get the cart driver to move. The recalcitrant donkey sits as the driver shouts and throws up his hands.
We pass through the traffic circle where the former president, Najibullah, was castrated and hanged. There are apparently no rules about right of way or human rights in the circle. When the guys in the vehicle ahead of us use their turn signal it is the only one, perhaps in the entire country, in use.
We arrive at our objective, the compound of the International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF). A football match is in play on the small pitch that serves as the helicopter landing-pad: the Italians vs. the Turks. We jump out of our trucks and meet our ISAF counterparts. A Danish major pulls me by the hand a few hundred yards further into the compound to the Italian canteen.
There, sitting on the counter is the largest espresso machine I have ever seen. It’s beautiful not only for all its chrome and baked enamel and moving parts, but for what it represents: western culture and civilization in the midst of a deadly Asian war. I want to put my arms around it. We enjoy a lovely cappuccino and then tour the base. No one is wearing battle rattle or headgear. There is no saluting, only smiles and waves between the Italians, Danes, Swedes, and Turks. My international counterpart, a Turkish major, offers me a beer and some lunch. I wish I could accept the beer, but we are subject to General Order Number One: no alcohol in theater, among other strictures. And early on in my tour, I’m still following that rule.
We pass the laundry. Cappuccino, beer, international cuisine, a laundry… I’m envious of the small U.S. contingent working at the ISAF compound. I learn too that ISAF also has flush toilets.
We get down to business, exchange target data and set a time frame for the operation we want to conduct. Running intelligence operations—or any operation for that matter—with international counterparts is always harder than it needs to be. They generally don’t share our obsession with secrecy and technically aren’t allowed to be privy to any intelligence that could be of value. (The U.S. tends to over-classify its information in comparison to our allies.) But we find ways to operate together.
Because it is such a primitive environment, Afghanistan is a particularly humint-intensive theater. The Army is organized, in theory at least, to go anywhere the war is, and be effective. But theory and reality often collide. The military’s intelligence assets are structured so that we can listen or watch almost anything or anyone, anywhere. The big guns in the intelligence community are signals intelligence (sigint) and imagery (imint). These two services are tasked to collect about ninety-five percent of the information required in order for commanders to makes decisions. Humint is supposed to gather the last five percent, the last bit that you simply can’t get from a satellite or a drone, from listening to a phone or intercepting an email.
If we were operating against Saddam’s forces, or against another Soviet-styled and structured force this would be perfect. But Afghanistan isn’t like that. The Taliban and the other insurgent groups aren’t fighting that kind of war. Human intelligence, going to talk to people face-to-face, recruiting agents when necessary, that’s how we are going to come to understand what was happening. Doing just that is my job.
The work is slow. It requires a great deal of planning, trial and error, and patience. This last bit is what makes commanders itchy. And an itchy commander can make life hell for a J2X and all the humint collectors in the theater.
My boss understands that these operations take time to set up and to produce. He’ll take the heat for me when his boss—the three-star general running U.S. and coalition operations in Afghanistan—gets itchy. But nonetheless, it’s a tough job. My predecessor was hospitalized twice for exhaustion during his tour.
I have a lot to learn and must do it under conditions akin to building an airplane while flying it. I actually tried to get out of the job at one point early on. I told the boss I wasn’t up to it. “I’m just a reservist,” I said. “I’m a good operator, but I’ve never done staff work, especially at this level.” The colonel, a tall skinny guy from Kentucky, looked down at me and smiled. “You’re what I’ve got. Come to me if you have problems and I’ll try to help, but there just ain’t anyone else.” So I got to work.
One of the first things I do is simply get to know all of the teams under my control. The biggest and most visible to the leadership is the Bagram Collection Point (BCP), the place where captured Al Qaida or Taliban fighters, or insurgents allied with one of the other uncooperative groups like the Hezb e Islami-Gulbuddin (under the control of Gulbudin Hekmatyar), are taken and interrogated before either being released or sent to Guantanamo.
There are two teams at the BCP: the military police, who run the downstairs detention cells, and the military intelligence team, who run the interrogations and debriefings upstairs. The interrogators ostensibly report to me, but only in a dotted-line sort of way: I can, and am, supposed to direct their work in order to gain the most intelligence out of the interrogations they run. But, the fact is, I know so little about their work that, after a couple of weeks, the colonel I work for—who oversees all intelligence operations in theater—instructs his deputy to oversee the day-to-day intelligence operations at the BCP (I suspect he’s taking a few things off my plate to make my work easier). I am happy to cede the task to my colleague.
I have a team of EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) techs whose job it is to buy up weapons. Technically, we are paying for information that will lead to the capture of weapons, but if someone shows up with a truckful, we’re happy to pay for them. The program is so successful that we run out of funds in about three months and have to ask for more from Central Command (CENTCOM). This is the most fun part of the job. We are always finding some wild-assed piece of hardware that I can bring in to the staff meeting for show-and-tell.
There are teams of counterintelligence agents in pockets around the country collecting information about the enemy forces, but also working very hard to protect the force. The leaders of these teams are generally super-competent, young, non-commissioned officers. I love working with these guys. On one trip we went into a small village up in the mountains. I don’t think any outsiders had been there for a very long time. One of the old men in the village came up and started speaking Russian to one of my guys. It turned out that agent was a Russian linguist and translated for us: the old guy thought the Russians had come back. He didn’t know much about what was happening beyond the ridge line.
I also have a team of Case Officers working on pretty cool operations around the country, a team of linguists reading and translating captured documents, a handful of guys taking captured phones and computers apart, and a small staff of analysts I share with another lieutenant colonel.
About three weeks after I arrive, I go over to the office, which is in a big tent we call the Circus Tent, and learn that one of the detainees at the BCP—an Afghan named Habibullah—has died overnight.
The BCP was a former machine shop for the airfield built by the Soviets. It’s been converted to a detention facility by adding some big cages inside, a few wooden walls, and a modicum of creature comforts like heat.
That morning, anyone with any connection to the BCP runs down there to try to help figure out what happened. There’s an investigation, but before it’s even really in full swing, another detainee—Dilawar—is dead. Two Afghans dead in U.S. custody within a week. Both men’s deaths are judged to be homicides. (In 2004, over a year after I left Afghanistan, charges were brought against twenty-eight soldiers, both military intelligence and military police, in the two cases.)
This is my first month on the job. Things start to go downhill from here.