CHAPTER 2
Edge of the Empire
“I have no fucking idea who we are fighting.”
—TASK FORCE 11 MEMBER
Somewhere on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, a thunderous whup, whup, whup provides the soundtrack for a graceful, intertwining aerial ballet above my head. It’s a cold December morning, and two Huey helicopters are circling a hilltop five hundred yards to the east. They zoom in close enough to my perch that I can smell their turbine exhaust and clearly make out a bug-helmeted door gunner gripping his minigun. The flat, deep sound echoes off the mountains as one Huey prepares to land, feeling for the ground as if hesitant to touch down in this hostile place. The other helicopter dives and swoops behind the hills like an angry hawk, looking for attackers.
From my own redoubt atop a steep cliff, I overlook a wide valley across the barrel of a battered antiaircraft gun aimed at Pakistan. Since the end of the active combat phase of the war in Afghanistan, private security contractors have been combing this area with CIA and military operators involved in the hunt for bin Laden. I am sitting on the ramparts of an unnamed American firebase, unmarked on any official map, and manned by what look like Special Operations troops and Afghan mercenaries. Its loaded weapons are pointed toward the border of an ally nation, and its vehicles are left packed for a hasty departure. Similar outposts of hastily constructed Hescoes—five-foot-tall gray cardboard and wire mesh containers filled with gravel—crown a few of the surrounding hilltops. On top of the Hescoes, sloppily stacked sandbags, a clutter of ammunition tins, and silver loops of concertina wire add a touch of paranoid sparkle. At a distance, these makeshift citadels have the look of medieval crusader castles, but up close they appear haphazardly stacked protection against attacks.
As I scan the area through my binoculars, I can see rolling foothills, steep valleys, and widely spaced pine trees. Far below us on the dusty road, colorful and overloaded “jinga” trucks clank and groan as they bring goods from Pakistan into Afghanistan. Off to the left, in the direction of Pakistan, my Afghan hosts point out a mountain from where they say the frequent incoming rocket attacks are launched. Officially, the Pakistani Tribal Police has jurisdiction over the tribal areas on their side of the mountains, while the U.S. military handles things on the Afghan side. Unless my GPS is wrong, however, this American outpost, armed by Afghans, is technically about five miles inside Pakistan.
“Your Americans!” shouts the smiling Afghan soldier manning the “tower” alongside me, pointing to the arriving choppers. Outfitted in U.S. Army–style fatigues and mirrored blue wraparound sunglasses, he is one of about forty hired guns—or “campaigns” as the U.S. military terms them—guarding this firebase, each of whom makes a healthy $150 a month. They live simply in an ancient-looking mud fort slightly down the hill—their only decoration Pakistani advertising calendars, their only furniture ammunition cases and cheap plastic lawn chairs. But this is their home, and they are doing their best to make me welcome.
According to the U.S. military, the main bases in Khost, Gardez, Oruzgan, and Asadabad are the frontlines in the War on Terror. However, the CIA and the U.S. military jointly operate a number of smaller, more remote bases like this one. This base must remain nameless, but from the look of the Afghan guard, it wouldn’t last long, anyway. Most media attention in this region focuses on the disturbingly Russian-sounding town of Shkin to the south; this isn’t surprising since the picturesque mud fort has just played host to one of the biggest processions of journo junkets in Afghanistan. The tours come with premade clichés and cinematic blurbs to spare. “The most evil place,” the military press officers chirp happily back at Bagram. “Something out of Mad Max,” the base commander tells visiting TV talking heads with a straight face. Even the three hundred or so rank-and-file soldiers at Shkin will trot out “Fort Apache” or “the Alamo” to eager journo junkets. Some journos will tell you privately that the soldiers at Shkin have been ordered in writing by their commander not to mention the cross-border operations or the amount of U.S. artillery, smart bombs, or bullets that are fired toward and into Pakistan. The U.S. military has done the ultimate hat trick: running a covert operation right under the noses of visiting journalists.
Despite the official statistic that nine out of ten U.S. casualties occur here, the mud fort at Shkin may be one of the safer spots along the border with Pakistan. Most of the attacks that have killed or wounded the Americans in the area have been ambushes outside the base. The Americans insist that they are drawing the fire of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, but it may be the other way around. Remote detonated mines wound one soldier, and the easily downed helicopters called for rescue become targets. Forcing Americans to patrol vulnerable routes, and short-burst contacts designed to lure out larger patrols into bigger ambushes, are all textbook examples of eighties-era mujahideen tactics. Though extensively documented and studied in war colleges, the muj strategy seems to have been forgotten by fresh-faced recruits fighting out on the fringes.
The outpost I have arrived at overlooks a well-known mountain pass between the Pakistani city of Miram Shah and its Afghan neighbor, Khost. Miram Shah was a famous supply and R & R base for mujahideen rebels who fought against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s, and it remains a major smuggling center. The U.S. military, the Pakistan government, and others believe Osama bin Laden remains secreted in the mountainous Pashtun tribal areas somewhere between Khost and the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar. Bin Laden worked and fought here with the muj in the eighties, and eventually moved back to the area after leaving the Sudan in the late 1990s. Coordinated attacks against Afghan and American forces not surprisingly continue at their highest rates in this region.
I am back in Afghanistan almost exactly two years after the start of the war in late 2001. At the time of my current visit, the U.S. military has just kicked off Operation Avalanche, which will send some two thousand troops and hundreds of helicopter sorties into the border area around Khost in a futile attempt to eliminate remnants of the Taliban and the al-Qaeda network. A classic low-level insurgency has persisted since the end of major combat operations, with significant swaths of support for the Taliban, smuggling groups, and regional warlords making stability a particularly fleeting prospect in this part of the country. With the post-9/11 focus on bin Laden, current events have superseded the historical memory of nearly unceasing warfare in Afghanistan. This was the edge of the empire for Alexander, for the British, and then the Russians. Like a moving wave that eventually sinks into the sand and disappears, grand ideas and great campaigns have met the reality of resilience in the people, place, and idea of Afghanistan. Now Americans find themselves on the ragged edge looking east, on the opposite side of the Durand Line from where they began peddling money and influence to fight the Russians almost two decades ago.
During the Soviet war against Afghanistan, the Pakistani ISI, or Inter-Services Intelligence bureau, specifically endorsed secretly supporting the Afghan side with money, arms, ammunition, training, operational advice, and safe haven, while maintaining a policy of plausible deniability. A war by proxy or even “a thousand cuts” was the preferred form of aggression. Direct attacks by the Pakistanis, the Americans, or others would have provoked worldwide outrage and possible Soviet retribution, but blaming violence on locally based jihadi groups bolstered the idea that a grassroots movement was fighting back against injustice or persecution.
The Pakistanis created a paramilitary army under a variety of religious-sounding names, supported seven political groups in Peshawar, and laid the tracks for the CIA and Saudi funding train to turn Afghanistan into one of the most expensive covert proxy wars in America’s history. The Americans and Saudis funneled an estimated $6 billion in weapons and aid to the jihadi groups in their efforts to bleed the Soviets in Afghanistan. To do this, the ISI created an internal Afghan bureau charged with setting up secret training camps, moving weapons and supplies through Pakistan to the border, and making sure the thousands of volunteers were fed, housed, clothed, trained, and bundled off to jihad with nary a ripple in the pond of international relations.
The Islamic world sent their angry and idealistic young men, who quickly absorbed the cultlike desire to find purpose through martyrdom and self-sacrifice. Paramount in the cult of jihad was not only the concept of death as the ultimate sacrifice, but also the idea that great princes would serve alongside simple peasants. If one could not actually fight, then supporting these almost saintly men was considered a sufficient fulfillment of doctrinally required jihad. Saudi Arabia had pledged to match U.S. contributions to the anti-Soviet Afghan jihad dollar for dollar, and numerous private Gulf businessmen independently supported the efforts of well-traveled and convincing middle men like Abdullah Azzam and his eager young cohort, Osama bin Laden.
Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian-born radical Islamist firebrand, worked tirelessly to encourage Muslims to travel from around the world to fight jihad in Afghanistan. Bin Laden, Azzam’s protégé and former student from Saudi Arabia’s King Abdul Aziz University, came to Peshawar to assist in managing the Arab-speaking volunteers and funneling Saudi money toward radical groups. Together they established the “Services Bureau,” Maktab al-Khadamat, to coordinate the recruitment and training of the non-Afghan fighters for jihad against the Soviets, an organization viewed as the forerunner to al-Qaeda. During this period, bin Laden made the contacts and won the supporters he uses today as sanctuary and support.
Bin Laden was reputed to be a pious, intelligent, and generous man who supported the Wahhabist, or more orthodox, groups by arranging funding, transport, and training for thousands of Saudis and Arab-speaking volunteers. Bin Laden had no association with, nor did he have any need of, the CIA to run his organization out of its little guesthouse in Peshawar. Azzam and bin Laden had ample funding from Muslim individuals and charities, so they had no use of income tainted by the infidels’ touch.
In order to keep track of the hundreds of fighters who came to train and fight, and in order to notify relatives of their martyrdom, the group kept a close accounting of the volunteer jihadis who came and went. This bookkeeping, with its copious list of dedicated Islamist fighters from around the world, soon became a great resource for what is now referred to as al-Qaeda—an old-boys network that has disturbing echoes of the lists used by the CIA to recruit former Special Forces as contractors.
The ISI military strategy against the Soviets relied on the assumption that they planned to create and defend a series of major military bases or strategic towns and the routes between them. As expected, the Soviets stayed out of the countryside, keeping their central redoubt at Bagram, north of Kabul. They set up fortified firebases and sent out patrols to choke off supplies and interdict fighters entering from Pakistan. Surveilling the base and estimating troop strength, patrols, resupplies, and time for emergency air support, the muj would regularly besiege and overrun these garrisons. The mujahideen were careful to never expose themselves to traditional battles in which they might lose, only striking long enough for a deadly surprising initial blow, and then disappearing in a safe retreat. They used the lessons of General Giap in French Indochina as their model—the same tactics that defeated the Americans in Vietnam simply by embroiling them in a bloody and expensive guerrilla war. No one battle defeated the Russians, but it was the long, costly, unpopular war that ultimately forced a Soviet retreat.
The mujahideen used these tactics against the Russians as they now use them against the Americans. In this war, the few modern developments on the ground are the Thuraya satellite phone and the remote-control detonator (usually a car key remote or radio transmitter). The funding of the anti-Soviet jihad created much of the system, the funding conduits, the training, the players, and the tactics that are being used to repel and harass the U.S. troops today. The parallels are striking: today, U.S. policy supports a friendly government and trains an indigenous army (like the Russians), and shies away from intensive ground involvement (as did the Russians), preferring to fly from central bases and to stay in fortified compounds (as the Russians did). The major differences currently are the massive number of NGOs operating with Western agendas, the lack of attention to the educational system, the use of security contractors, the absence of an immense influx of covert funds to support the foreign “invader” of Afghanistan, and the deliberate lack of names for the groups that attack Westerners and their proxies. The Americans view their mere presence in Afghanistan as a victory. The insurgents, however, see tying down the Americans and bleeding their resources as winning. After all, every Afghan will tell you, How long did it take for us to defeat the British? How long did it take us to send the Russians packing? Similarly, the war against the perceived American occupation of Afghanistan could become one of generations and timeless revenge.
The basic propaganda elements of jihad were fixed during the war against the Soviet Union. The mujahideen viewed America, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia as allies but claim full credit for the power of religion and conviction in defeating the Russians and their puppet government. To the Afghans, the war provided one more example of how their country acts as a graveyard for foreign aggressors, even though foreign aggressors supplied the money and weapons to defeat another foreign aggressor. Most Afghan men between thirty and sixty can relate dramatic tales of dead Russians, crashed helicopters, burning convoys, and violent counterattacks. Every Afghan speaks of the jihad with pride, and the experience has provided a wellspring of nationalism. They conveniently forget that in the mid-1990s, after the Russians had left, the same holy warriors destroyed Kabul and massacred its people. Many of these fundamentalist factions provide sustenance for the jihad against the Americans today in Afghanistan, and few locals have forgotten bin Laden’s contributions as a mujahideen during the war.
The “Parrot’s Beak,” or the area of Pakistan that juts into Afghanistan below Tora Bora and above Khost, continues to be the weak spot for American operations. Khost, with its mountain fortresses of Zhawar Khili, has been the traditional center for resistance; Miram Shah, directly across the border in Pakistan, has always been the staging and retreat point for attacks. In the 1980s, Miram Shah was the gateway for 20 percent of the muj’s arms needs. Today it offers the fastest route into Kabul and the easiest place from which to launch an attack against Americans and to slip safely back over the border. A number of border posts have been attacked and overrun south of Khost—not once, but multiple times. The Pakistani towns of Wana and Angoor Ada are the main southern staging points for these attacks against the American base at Shkin, farther to the south in Paktika Province.
As a Westerner, to travel to the Pakistani border from inside Afghanistan is easy. To travel to the Afghan border from inside Pakistan seems nearly impossible. Tall, skinny Pakistani soldiers wearing brown sweaters and cheap shoes enforce the famous NO FOREIGNERS ALLOWED signs in the tribal areas. In the eyes of the world community, Pakistani borders geographically contain the tribal areas. However, cartographers deliberately mislead. The tribal areas do not wholly accede to the idea of Pakistan but consider themselves the center of an independent nation called Pashtunistan, an entity falsely divided down the middle by the colonial-era Durand Line.
The Durand Line runs along mountainous ridge tops, a wandering artificial border originally designed to separate India from Afghanistan. A British colonial officer named Sir Mortimer Durand created the 1,519-mile-long border between India and Afghanistan as part of a November 12, 1893, agreement with Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. At the time, area Pashtuns violently opposed its imposition, and this rarely marked or defended border has been ignored as much as possible ever since.
The central government in Pakistan always had trouble developing support in the tribal area, and Pakistani leaders have long recognized that they face a potentially explosive scenario there. Pashtuns make up only 12 percent of the population but control 40 percent of the territory of Pakistan. If these tribally linked Pakistani Pashtuns were to align themselves with Afghan Pashtuns (approaching half of Afghanistan’s population) to form a separate entity, Pakistan would become a tiny, mostly Punjabi-populated country—a ripe target for Indian aggression. So Pakistan takes the affairs of Afghanistan, and their influence in them, very seriously. The jihad against the Russians provided an ideal opportunity to promote universal religious ideals while repressing more traditional Pashtun tribalism. Today, the Pakistanis proceed cautiously by using troops recruited from the local tribes and only interfering in local affairs with the direct permission of tribal leaders.
Despite insistent pleas by the governors of both Gardez and Khost to avoid the border area, I set out from Khost for a day trip with the relative of an elder warlord of the border region acting as guide. I want to see for myself how the hunt for bin Laden is going and to seek out the elusive American contractors I have heard to be participating in the area’s operations. The “dangerous” trip to the border turns out to be a bit of a disappointment when I am greeted not with suspicion, but with hospitality. As we approach the last Afghan checkpoint, the border guards do not check for passports, they do not inspect our car, but they do insist we stop for tea. Why do they not suspect us? Their answer surprises me: “If someone wanted to sneak in, they would use any of the numerous other unmanned entry points.” I quickly discover that the concept of the border is as illusory as the American concept of controlling it.
At the actual border, no markers or signs differentiate Afghanistan from Pakistan; there literally is no recognizable border. Where my GPS tells me there should be a border, I see only a flat expanse ringed by low scrub-covered hills. There are tea shops, tiny wooden boxes that pass as convenience stores, and clusters of Afghans sitting around on their haunches in typical fashion. Taxi drivers wait for customers, friends wait for friends, and relatives pass the time chatting and laughing.
Toward the eastern side of the valley, I see a group of tall Pakistanis in sweaters and salwar kameez, and behind them a random collection of white minivans and cars. I am told that people are not allowed to drive into Pakistan but must walk across to take a Pakistani-licensed taxi. Vans pull up from both the north and south trailing white clouds of dust; families unload and walk toward us unmolested or even watched by the Pakistani soldiers. Curious as to the complete lack of interest in people crossing both to and from Afghanistan, I walk down to the gaggle of tall Pakistani soldiers to inquire.
I assume the one with the striped stick must be in charge, and I am right. I ask him if Taliban and foreigners are coming across the border and attacking Americans in Afghanistan. “That not true,” he says convincingly. “The Afghans are lying.” Around me, about seventy Afghans squat while waiting for taxis or just watching the constant flow of people back and forth. Up on a hill on the Pakistani side of the valley is a fortification with a radio tower. The Pakistanis see me videotaping and demand that no pictures be taken, so I step back a few feet across a low gully into what I assume is Afghanistan and keep filming.
I film van after van letting out passengers and groups of men going into Pakistan unchallenged and even unquestioned. It does not even appear that anyone is asked for identity papers by the Pakistani border guards. It makes me wonder how certain the Pakistani with the striped stick could be about his assertion that fighters are not crossing this border to attack Americans on the Afghan side. Later when I have tea with the Afghans sitting around below, they tell me that Arabs and Pakistanis from one or two hills over walk weapons in at night loaded on the backs of donkeys. The Pakistani guards appear to be symbolic and are here simply to bolster their meager wages. They’re ultimately beholden to tribal bosses back in the border towns—not to Musharraf’s central government—and the need to move or not move people across the border is decided well beyond their level of authority.
The next day back in Khost, I walk up to a young Afghan with a Thuraya and say I want to meet the Americans. When I had asked him about visiting the border a few days before, he had told me not to go there because of the danger. Now he tells me to go there if I want to see my American friends. The difference was a cash incentive. So much for the secrecy of American-supported firebases, since I’ve now discovered the secret to locating them—just ask any young English-speaking local with an $800 satellite phone. A short cab ride later, poorly disguised as an Afghan, I arrive at the shabby hilltop firebase overlooking the pass leading from Miram Shah toward Khost.
Coming up the hill toward the base are two armored tan Humvees, a beige camouflage pickup with an orange marker panel on top, and a brown-and-green-camouflage Land Rover, all followed by a convoy of Toyota pickup trucks overflowing with Afghan troops who wave to show off their heavy weapons and their new shooting gloves and sunglasses. So here I am watching this seven-truck convoy driving past on its way toward the nearby hilltop landing area, and I’m wondering exactly how I make contact. I jump down the sandbagged stairs to talk to the bearded commander, Shah Alam. In bad Pashto, I point to the gray helos circling around the hilltops and say “friends.” Alam squeezes me into a former Talib Toyota truck, and the Afghans and I make the convoluted journey from the hilltop fort to the landing pad on the next hill. In between these hills, I see Afghan “campaigns” filling sandbags and building yet another fortification farther into Pakistan. As expected, the main Hesco barriers were being built facing the Pakistani side. It appears painfully obvious that the enemy, like Ahmed Shah Massoud told me many times, is Pakistan.
As we make it to the landing area, the two Hueys depart, leaving behind a group of silver-haired officers, each wearing a bulletproof vest and carrying a pistol. Their fresh haircuts, spotless armor and helmets, and neatly pressed uniforms are a little too crisp and clean in contrast to the dirty, unshaven look of their Special Forces bodyguards. They load into the convoy, which turns around and heads back over to the hilltop firebase.
Those left guarding the landing pad look like a task force—one of several elite groups composed of U.S. Army Special Forces, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, CIA paramilitaries, and military contractors who hunt for high-value targets (HVTs). This group appears to be comprised of a sergeant from the U.S. Army’s 20th Special Forces Group, a unit of army reservists shipped in from Alabama, a young air force close air support controller, and an unshaven American in civilian clothes—khakis, photographer’s vest, hiking boots. He wears Oakley shades and keeps a finger-forward grip on a battered AK-47—an unusual weapon for an American, even in this neck of the woods, and the mark of a contractor. In later conversations, the Contractor will confirm my suspicion—that I have encountered the elusive Task Force 11—but for the moment, he turns and walks away as I approach the group.
According to the U.S. government, what I am looking at doesn’t exist. There are not only no operations inside Pakistan, Task Force 11 has been dissolved, as have Task Force 5 and Task Force 20. In July of 2003, U.S. Central Command said they had disbanded Task Force 11, described as “an elite group of Delta Force and Navy SEAL commandos who hunted high-value Taliban and al-Qaeda operators in and around Afghanistan” and created Task Force 20, which was moved to the Iraq theater to hunt down Saddam Hussein and former high-ranking Baathists. In November of 2003, General John P. Abizaid disbanded Task Force 5 and Task Force 20, operating in Afghanistan and Iraq, respectively, and created Task Force 121. As the U.S. military describes it, the new global task force was designed to react with greater speed on tips on HVTs (high value targets) and was not to be “contained within the borders where American conventional forces are operating.” It is now one of the Pentagon’s most highly classified and urgent operations. An air force brigadier general commands Task Force 121. All operations and information remain classified, and the Pentagon refuses to discuss any activities related to the task force—specifically the rules of engagement and whether this force needs permission of a foreign government to operate within its territory.
According to official descriptions, these task forces are made up “primarily” of Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs, supported by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and are tasked with finding and destroying high-value Taliban and al-Qaeda elements “in and around” Afghanistan. The word “primarily” masks the other task force members who go by the acronym “OGA” or “other government agencies,” and “around” Afghanistan implies they could be operating across the border with official approval under “hot pursuit” or “Amcit under fire” rules. When asked in a press conference who now hunts for Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, a military officer answered, “Other folks are doing that.” The real truth lies somewhere deep in the belly of the American security machine.
After the helicopters take off and the convoy has ferried the older gentlemen over to the base for their meeting, I am left talking to “the other folks.” Even the army oddly says it is not actively looking for Osama bin Laden, though here standing in front of me is the army looking for Osama bin Laden. The secrecy of this task force and their direct supervision and direction by the CIA requires the army to disavow their activities. So officially the people I am looking at don’t exist.
I walk over, trying hard to act nonchalant as I begin talking to the technically nonexistent American soldiers guarding the landing area. The dark, bearded leader of the Special Forces team listens to my compressed bio, looks me up and down, and says, “Yeah, we’ll talk to you…. Just wait for these REMFs [Rear-Echelon Mother Fuckers] to go home and we’ll come and get you.” His message seems to be to make myself scarce until the heat is gone, so I go back and sit on the side of the hill with two other team members to wait out the older officers’ visit to the remote base.
“Welcome to the war America forgot,” says a Special Forces sergeant in a cynical greeting. He is a big burly man wearing one large earphone and tan camo. Unlike the rest of the team, he doesn’t have a beard and seems eager to talk immediately. He was in Iraq for nine months and then was sent directly to Afghanistan for a six-month assignment. “Fuck this one weekend a month shit!” he snorts. He is reserves, part of the 20th Special Forces group from Alabama. He doesn’t feel too out of place: “The countryside around here reminds me of southern Utah.”
What I quickly learn from him is that in the borderland, the enemy has returned in force. The Americans and Afghans have been attacked and ambushed on a regular basis. The United States had already abandoned one of its four outposts, a firebase in nearby Lawhra. The others have come under increasingly frequent attack and occasionally change hands between the Afghans, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Pakistanis, and the Americans. The attacks come from the Pakistani side and almost always happen at night, beginning with rockets, then rocket-propelled grenades, and then three-wave assaults: one waiting to advance, one lying down to fire, and one advancing to repeat the process. Often, the mystery attackers take the base from the Afghan regulars for a few hours, only to be chased out by arriving American air support.
The sergeant seems a little rattled by the recent attacks in the area. “We got hit pretty bad two weeks ago,” he tells me, adjusting his dirty Jack Daniel’s cap. “Six guys in our unit got Purple Hearts. They were waiting for us—knew exactly where we were…. The Pakistanis watched the whole thing and did nothing.”
He points to a spot a little over a mile away. “They fire rockets right from that hill on the Pak side. We meet with the Pak officials every month right on the border…. They smile. We smile. They bullshit us and we bullshit them. Then they watch us get attacked without lifting a finger. This place is fucked.” I ask him if the men who attacked him were Taliban, Pakistanis, or Arabs. He looks up at me, squints in the sun, and spits again for effect, admitting, “I have no fucking idea who we are fighting.”
After cooling my heels for a couple of hours at the landing area, waiting for the officers to depart, I once again bump into the American with the AK-47—the Contractor. He starts off not with a greeting, but with a warning: “They’re not gonna let you cross into Pakistan…. And don’t be surprised when the head Afghan kicks you out.”
I ask him who “they” are.
“TF,” is his curt reply—task force.
Apparently, some videotaping I had done earlier had not gone over well. “You’ve filmed their base and vehicles. If the bad guys catch you across the border, they will use it to hit this place.”
He seems most curious to know how I got here without getting attacked. “Did you see those antennas on all four corners of that pickup truck? Those are jammers. People around here bury antitank mines and then detonate them with cell phones or car-alarm-detonated triggers. They hire kids to sit at the side of the road and wait for Americans. They tried to kill Musharraf yesterday, and his jamming system was the only thing that saved him. Delta can’t figure how you got here in one piece. I am sure they are looking you up right now.” He smiles, then walks off.
I head down to the main firebase. The once-friendly Afghan commander, Shah Alam, quickly approaches me with a tone of near-panic in his voice. “You came here to take pictures,” he says. “You have enough pictures, now please go.” He obviously has orders to get me off this hill and going in the opposite direction of Miram Shah. In a typical Afghan gesture, he then asks me to join them for lunch before leaving.
The Contractor reappears as I am packing up to leave and inquires about my destination. I tell him I have been staying near Gardez with a man I call Haji, whom I had met a week earlier at a gathering of tribal elders. Haji is well known from his days as a mujahideen commander, and before that, a cross-border trucking czar, a former drug smuggler, and a supporter of the Taliban, back when they were better known for crushing warlords than supporting al-Qaeda. He has now retired but remains a man who can be called upon to resolve critical problems and defend the weak. Without hesitation, he had invited me to stay at his home for a week, on the condition that I not reveal its exact location or his full name. With no fear of overextending the elder’s endless hospitality, I invite the Contractor to join me at Haji’s.
The opportunity to go through Taliban territory with a stranger obviously intrigues him. He is supposed to be heading back to Khost for some R & R, so the idea of taking a taxi instead of going in an OGA convoy has a bizarre appeal. He gets his battered mountaineering backpack and tosses it into the ancient white-and-yellow taxi. We start out on the drive, but first I insist we stop at a small market a few miles from the base. Sixty dollars turns my new American friend into a rough facsimile of a bearded farmer, complete with wool hat, waistcoats, and light blue salwar kameez tunic. Satisfied we both look like idiots—but Afghan-looking idiots—we take off.
Despite his initial bluster, he is not used to being so exposed, so out in the open. As we come up on checkpoints, he drills me on how to evacuate the car from the same side, how to keep a pistol under my leg, and how the windshield will deflect rounds. As we head into the series of switchbacks that mark the start of the mountains, the Contractor starts to loosen up. We have a long time to talk on the ride, bouncing and rattling down the potholed dirt roads. He agrees to answer some questions about his work on the condition that I not reveal anything that might harm his mission and that neither he nor his home base be identified. I agree. His story fascinates me as I type it into my pocket computer.
“What you were looking at was part of TF-11—‘JAYSOTUF,’ or Joint Special Operations Task Force [JSOTF]. There were some REMFs in there on a dog and pony, but the team also has a couple of shooters, usually three or four Delta, a vanilla twelve-man SF team, an Air Force CAST, a case officer, an OGA element, and about thirty or forty Afghans for weight. They are the tip of the spear out here—the hunter-killers in this part of the woods.
“I am a contractor. The CIA has been using civilian contractors for decades—guys who are neither officially military, government, or intel. They started in Vietnam. They needed a deniable operator—someone that if he is caught they can say was not part of the U.S. government. These days the CIA has plenty of money, so it’s easier just to hire us than train new people. There are the soldier-of-fortune, beer-bellied, raucous, ring-wearing guys you see in town, and then there are us—guys into fitness, in their late twenties to late forties. They have inside and outside guys. Inside are guys who never admit they work for the CIA; outside guys are the ones who for some reason got outed. One guy was outed because the CIA sent him a W-2 with ‘CIA’ in the space under ‘employer.’”
Most of the operators are “sheep dipped,” he says, serving in some official capacity to provide a plausible military or civilian cover but actually working “black ops,” top-secret CIA operations that are never revealed in their military CV. He tells me, “Most of the paramilitaries come from Delta Force, and I only met one SEAL…. They typically are recruited from the serving military and then seamlessly join the Agency as contractors. They get out and are directly flipped. They get recruited with enough time to do the background process early enough so they can go straight in. Guys in the military usually have a clean record, no financial problems, no gaps, no legal problems. By watching them and flowing them into the Agency, there is no explanation time in between. There is no shortage of volunteers…. People make fun of the Agency, but all the SF guys are trying to work there. You get whatever you need, you don’t get dicked with, you have your own chain of command, and you don’t answer to the local military commander. You are not in the federal system, or in the military system.
“Working in Afghanistan is pretty easy,” he continues. “You sign up, train up, and fly in. Most of the operators go into Tashkent [in neighboring Uzbekistan] via commercial and then to Kabul on a military flight. You land there, and they pick you up in a truck and check you in at the hotel. Nobody asks any questions…. You check in, get a couple days in town, and then talk to the chief of base. You get your walking papers and fly out to Khost, Ghazni, Kandahar, or wherever you’re going.” The going wage, he says, is $1,000 to $1,250 a day for a contractor with security clearance, slightly better than in Iraq. Three months is the usual tour of duty. “People get freaky if you leave them out here more than ninety days.”
Our driver and my translator, Doc, stare straight ahead, looking for freshly disturbed potholes, a place the Taliban like to hide remote-detonated mines. I’ve told them that the Contractor is my cameraman, and he is enjoying his undercover role as sidekick. He uses his GPS to mark checkpoints and track the road as we travel up into higher altitudes. The checkpoints, manned by Taliban and warlords’ foot soldiers, are simply speed bumps guarded by armed men who stare into the front of the taxi. My driver boldly waves them off and keeps going. I try to look as Pashtun as a blue-eyed feringhi, or foreigner, can. With his heavy beard, the Contractor looks more like an Afghan than I ever will. I tuck my glasses in my pocket, pull my dirty brown blanket tightly around my face, and stare impassively out the front window as we go through the checkpoints. We somehow easily pass through four more where both trucks and passenger vehicles are being stopped and emptied.
The first base the Contractor was assigned to, he tells me, was set up in the most remote area that could be resupplied by helicopter. “They flew us in after dark on a nighttime resupply mission on a CIA Russian helo—a bird that wouldn’t say ‘Here come the Americans.’” A four-truck convoy came out to meet them. The new crew hopped off, the old crew hopped on, and the helicopter took off.
“When I first saw the terrain through the NVGs [night-vision goggles], all I could think of was the surface of the moon—talcum-powder dust, rocks, dirt, and low barren foothills rolling into mountains on each side, all in green. There was nothing but stars, rocks, and a medieval mud fort in the distance. Inside there is this big bearded guy with a Western hat warming himself over a diesel fire in a fifty-gallon drum. He sees us, laughs this crazy laugh with his face lit by the fire, and yells out, ‘Gentlemen, welcome to the edge of the empire!’ Man, I got the crazies when I heard that.
“The outpost used to be someone’s compound. You’ve seen this place in a hundred movies. Star Wars, Mad Max, Beau Geste, and a dozen Westerns. It’s that last outpost of civilization before you hit the savages…. The CIA rented it because it was on a busy infil route for the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Pakistan. I got my first clue when I saw a map in the deputy minister of security’s office marked ‘Top Secret.’ It had little green circles clearly marking where the bad guys were. The problem is that the circles were all in Pakistan in places like Miram Shah and Wana.
“When I got here, they sent two of us to meet with the Pakistani border guards. It was a three- or four-mile drive. Seems like they hadn’t seen armed plainclothes Americans before. They swiveled the big gun on us as we were driving up. They were damn hostile to us. They said their head intelligence guy would come to meet us there tomorrow, so the next day we all meet in a little hut with the Waziristan Scouts. We did the initial scout and then the two of us went back to pick up the chief of base, the young case officer, and a translator. The translator told them what we are doing here, why we are here, and what we want to cooperate on—‘Can we give you a phone?’ ‘We might have to chase someone across the border,’ et cetera. They said it’s not a problem as long as we didn’t go too far inside the border. They didn’t really say what would have happened if we had hit the town. It was another three miles to the town.”
The hunt for bin Laden, he says, is not like the hunt for Saddam, with thousands of troops looking under every carpet and behind every tree. Even the Pakistanis can’t operate in the tribal areas without serious backlash.
“Our job is to shake the apple tree,” the Contractor says. “We aren’t hunting bin Laden from the top. Our strategy is to focus on the little guys—just like how they do drug busts in the States. Put the heat on the runners and little guys until they get nervous and start contacting higher-ups. Then we intercept their calls and the hunt begins. We are just hired killers. Guns with legs. We were there to provide security to the case officer, roll guys up, or do hits. The fort was run by the chief of base, a CIA bureaucrat that wouldn’t give us the time of day.”
The Taliban, he says, aren’t a priority. “Mullah Omar is not an issue. We are looking for al-Qaeda…. We hunt al-Qaeda. We are not trying to develop intelligence inside the religious schools. We are looking for people connected to bin Laden.
“We ask simple questions like, where do they sleep at night? Once we can find where they sleep, we can monitor them. When we find the house, we can pick up any electronic communications and send them directly to Langley, [MI5 headquarters in] Cheltenham, or Washington…. Once you find their base, you don’t want to hit ’em; you let ’em talk and use that intel to roll up the lower-level people. We can do voice-print on them and even know who they are talking to if that person is in the database. If they set up a meeting or give us a GPS location, somebody might get hit the next day. If they still don’t contact higher-ups, then you snatch another guy or make him disappear. You do that a couple of times and they will get nervous.”
Doc, I notice, has been listening intently. The Contractor adjusts his rust-colored wool hat and admires his Afghan look in the mirror before continuing.
“The trouble is that we are doing this inside Pakistan,” he says. “That’s why you need a contractor. Our government can say that ‘we’ are not going into Pakistan. But you can be damn sure that white boys are going into Pakistan and shooting bad guys.
“The chief of base runs the show. The case officers are buried on the base. I had been there a month before the case officer went outside. The base is an Agency operation with enough troops on the outside to make it look like a military base. The Agency is leasing the property the base is on. The army runs their own operations, but they tell the chief of base what they are doing. The CIA is still compartmentalized by country. If you go inside Pakistan, you have to call the chief of station in Islamabad and he can’t poach the project.”
Most of the contractors at his base spend their downtime working out, running sprints between the helicopter pad and back, and doing triceps presses with big rocks.
“We like to stay in shape. When you’re in combat, you want to make sure you’re using everything you got. You want to make sure you take a few guys with you, even if you only have your bare hands. Most of us are into steroids big time. D-balls [Dianabol] to bulk you up and Sustanon to help you maintain what you gained. The doctors turn a blind eye to it. We get the stuff across the border in Pakistan. When you see guys bulked up, you know what they are on. We keep control of it, though.”
He looks at the arid terrain and high adobe forts around us. He shifts his AK, then smiles. “These days the Agency is looking for Mormons and born-agains. People with a lot of patriotism and the need to do good. At least we start that way…. I don’t drink, smoke, or eat crap,” he says, smiling. “My only weaknesses? Pepsi and women.”
As we wind down the backside of the Taliban-controlled mountains, I see the familiar tabletop range that marks the location of Haji’s compound. The Contractor seems pleased that he has loaded the road and all of its checkpoints into his GPS. Haji lives in one of the largest compounds in the Gardez area, a good indicator of his importance. Each of its four outer walls stretches over nine hundred feet long and thirty feet high. His compound sits on a barren plain outside of town in front of the dramatic backdrop of Taliban-controlled mountains, just past the U.S. base in Gardez. In the mountains to the south lies the deadly Shah-i-Kot Valley, location of Operation Anaconda in March 2002, and beyond that the mountain redoubt of Zhawar Khili, the massive cave system built by bin Laden to provide shelter against Soviet air bombardment. Extensive poppy fields stretch to the north and east. Inside the compound, Haji has a separate guesthouse and two more walled areas, one for his family and the other for his crops. Designed for maximum defensibility, large square guard towers cap each corner of the compound, and each section has its own full stock of weapons and ammunition. Even the outside toilet, a long walk up a rickety ladder, has three gun ports. Each corner tower used to have an antiaircraft gun, but Haji said he removed them out of fear of being bombed by the Americans. From the early morning until late into the night, the sky above Haji’s compound is filled with Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks, B-1B bombers, and jet fighters.
Haji welcomes me with the bear hug and double buss of a prodigal son. He immediately senses that my friend is much more than a cameraman. In addition to carrying an AK and wearing Oakleys, the Contractor has the disconcerting habit of pacing twenty yards back and forth as if doing a security sweep, and scanning every room he enters for hostile elements. But since the Contractor is my friend, he is welcomed without question.
Since I had first arrived at Haji’s compound a few days prior, we had by now established a pattern of three daily long meals served on the floor, followed by endless cups of tea, and hours of conversation through a translator. It was really all we had been doing since I had arrived. Though it had taken Haji some time to grow comfortable with me, he eventually had opened up about his opinions of the current situation in Afghanistan.
The first night we had engaged in small talk, his stance was neutral. Yes, he supported the Americans, even though he still seemed angry over something they had done in 2001. Yes, he thought the Taliban was finished. The second night we discussed more specific concerns. There is violence here, no government, only one school but no teachers. By the third night, as the remains of dinner were picked up and green tea was poured, Haji had finally become more forthright. I had asked him if the reports of the Taliban’s return to the area were true.
“Yes, they come here… usually at night. They ask for food or shelter. They do not stay long, and we do not ask them where they are going. In some cases they intimidate people, and in other cases they pay. But they seem to know who to talk to. In every group of twenty or so Taliban, there are about four or five Arabs. They need to be with the Afghans because they do not know the way, and they do not speak the language.”
Haji has enough stature to speak his mind about the Taliban, but even he sees the need to be cautious when discussing the Arabs, what Americans call al-Qaeda. “People do not like the Arabs here because they are arrogant and act superior to the Afghans.” He laughs. “We like to say they are more interested in taking videos than fighting.”
It is clear that al-Qaeda is still here and still intimidates. Back at the tribal meeting before Haji invited me to stay with him, I had asked to stay with another elder who controlled a border region. The long-bearded man had replied, “You are welcome to stay, but the Arabs will leave a letter at my door that unless you leave the next day, they will kill me and my family.” I had thanked him for his offer and accepted Haji’s invitation instead.
“During the jihad against the Russians, there were people in every village who would cook food and help us,” Haji tells me. “No one ever worried about being betrayed or discovered. No one even posted sentries. Now these same people are scared when they see the Talibs or the Arabs. The Arabs have to use sat phones to communicate and sneak into villages at three A.M., usually leaving before light the next day.”
Haji first met bin Laden in the 1980s, when bin Laden was a wealthy young Saudi helping the mujahideen in their battle against the Soviets. The Pakistani ISI had given Haji three truckloads of rockets but no way to transport them back to Afghanistan. “What was I going to do with three truckloads of rockets? The ISI told us that Osama had an office near the University of Peshawar and to go and ask him for help…. We went to his office and filled out an application so that he would pay for the camels and mules. They wanted to know things like how much the rockets weighed. I didn’t know how much the rockets weighed.” Since Haji wasn’t with one of the Saudi-backed mujahideen commanders, bin Laden said he couldn’t help them.
Haji only knew bin Laden as a man helpful to the mujahideen and never expected he would become what he has, but he doesn’t think bin Laden will ultimately succeed in Afghanistan because “the Afghans are tired of migrating and fighting.” Haji says he thinks bin Laden has taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border, in a valley town called Chitral. “That is where people traditionally hide from those who seek them. There is little movement there in the winter. The airplanes don’t work well [for surveillance] that high up, and you will know when people are coming. Bin Laden knows the tribal areas very well, and the tribes know him very well.” His answer makes sense but doesn’t quite ring true somehow. Newspapers in Pakistan have been reporting that bin Laden has visited the tribal areas between Gardez and Khost. I would guess that Haji probably has a pretty good idea of bin Laden’s location, but knows that it would be dangerous for an Afghan to possess such information. A close friend of his was sent to Guantanamo Bay for knowing the same people whom Haji knows.
When asked about Mullah Omar, he responds promptly, “Mullah Omar was in Miram Shah during Ramadan and has now moved to Quetta for the winter.” This time his tone is matter-of-fact. He won’t say how he knows this, but his guess coincides with both Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s and Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s statements about Omar and other senior Taliban being spotted at prayers in Quetta.
Despite having worked with the Taliban, Haji has mixed feelings about their reign in Afghanistan. “I met many times with Mullah Omar and all the other Taliban commanders. They were not educated men. They were not even good Muslims. The Taliban took all the prostitutes to Kandahar, and the Arabs were all screwing around. In time, they considered themselves separate from the people. A foot soldier was more trustworthy than a tribal elder.” Now, he explains, “there are two categories of Taliban: the jihadis, who want martyrdom, and the people who fight for money.
“The Taliban are not Pashtun. We have dancing. We sing. We make decisions in jirgas [a democratic-style group of representatives].” The Taliban, Haji tells me, has ignored its Pashtun culture by becoming entranced by Wahhabism, Saudi-backed religious extremism. “Afghans do not like Wahhabis. The Taliban relied on other people and lost touch with the Afghan people. That is why, in the end, the Taliban could never be governors, only occupiers.”
Haji has an equally bleak forecast for the Americans: “I can guarantee you the Americans will not succeed. They rely on people they pay money to. Now they are surrounded by people who want money. They have turned away from the tribal elders and made bad friends.”
He does not show a preference for either contingency, responding in disgust, “I try not to involve myself with these things.” Though he may hold unspoken preferences, clearly neither has earned his full support, perhaps because both seem to view his role as a tribal elder as irrelevant under the new system.
I grow to like Haji, and he treats me like a son. He insists that I sit on his right-hand side and urges me to eat the best part of the sheep, not clearing the vinyl mat until I have eaten to his satisfaction. He makes sure I sit on the warmest part of the floor. He pesters me to grow my beard out and tugs at it every day as if that will speed the process. It was Haji’s generosity that had made me want to invite the Contractor to join me for a visit at the compound, though the Contractor’s awkwardness ends up trying Haji’s hospitality.
At dinner the night we arrive, Haji wants to hear all about my trip. He pushes food directly in front of the Contractor: choice cuts of greasy mutton with fresh bread and a dish—specially prepared by Haji’s wife for the guests—of what appears to be curdled milk with oil poured into it. The new guest keeps his arms folded and mumbles, “Gotta get to ten percent body fat.” Haji makes several attempts before giving up, staring hard at the Contractor, then looking at me with hurt confusion. “Just pretend to eat something and compliment the food,” I tell the Contractor. The Contractor frequently stands up in the middle of the hours-long meal, making excuses about having to shoot some video. When he leaves the room for good, Haji turns to me and asks through the interpreter, “What’s wrong with your friend?”
The same scene repeats at each breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days. Two of Haji’s sons and an ever-changing parade of locals who come to ask favors from the elder usually join us. Haji’s brother visits with his three-year-old grandson and asks me to come by to try to fix his satellite phone—a phone that still makes free calls courtesy of the CIA. The Contractor mostly stays silent. He seems genuinely interested in the conversations but doesn’t seem to know how to interact with Afghans who aren’t informers. The Contractor continues to refuse to eat even a grain of rice, and I come to dread Haji’s stone-faced looks in my direction. Haji even tries shopping for us himself, apologizing for not having eggs at one breakfast because it is too cold for the chickens to lay. The Contractor, meanwhile, gets by on Atkins Bars and sips of bottled water pulled from his pack at daybreak and before bedtime.
Haji had welcomed the Contractor, but the feeling was different than when I had been staying there alone. It was an official sort of hospitality now, one designed to discharge Haji’s responsibilities in order to communicate something to someone most Afghans in the area would consider the enemy. Haji adamantly wanted his opinion of a recent bombing to reach someone at a level of authority inside the American forts. So finally, on the third day with the Contractor, he breaks out of Pashtun protocol, speaking frankly to tell his mysterious American guest about the increasing frustration that the tribal elders have with the Americans. He has received word that a family of eight has been killed in the nearby town of Seyyed Karam. He doesn’t explain how he knows the details of their deaths so soon.
“A local thug lived there for eighteen years and has been threatening to rocket the meeting in Kabul,” he tells us. “An informer called the Americans, but by the time the air attack took place, the man was long gone. Instead another man and his family were hiding out in the house because the man had killed someone in a property dispute. He, his wife, and his six children were found buried under a wall.”
Haji explains that the people in town are upset. Not about the fugitive, since this was perceived as an odd form of justice, but for the man’s innocent wife and children who had no quarrel with the Americans or townspeople.
“This man could have been arrested with a minimum of violence, but the Americans chose to attack the house with aircraft and weapons designed to destroy tanks.”
What’s going on is clear to Haji. “The informers are making money from both sides.” The Contractor says he understands, and the meal ends in silence.
After breakfast, I thank Haji for his hospitality. He talks to me like a clucking mother hen, pushing me to get a move on and to stop messing around with my camera. Once we get out in the daylight, he rushes us to get in the car and drive away, lest we are spotted outside of his compound. He trusts the discretion of the locals who have come by to visit over the past few days, but if word had gotten around that he had some unidentified Americans staying with him, unfriendlies could be watching the compound. Across the horizon, the rotors of Blackhawks slice through the crisp morning air.
On our way back toward the border, the Contractor wants to stop in at another base and talk to someone from OGA (other government agencies), a euphemistic term used to describe high-level clandestine operators who don’t fit into the traditional military structure. He seems eager to pass along Haji’s complaints about the Americans’ use of excessive force and reliance on paid snitches. I stay outside.
After just a few minutes, he emerges, shaking his head. “Seems like the OGA guy wouldn’t even get off his cot to say hi. He just sent his local peon to say he already had the intel.”
The Contractor holds up a stack of dirty Pakistani rupees. “The puke said thanks and here are some rupees for the cab ride.” He shakes his head. “Company policy is to always give something to someone bringing intel.”
Looking at the pile of grubby notes, he shakes his head again. “That’s fucked, man,” he says, getting back into the car. What better reason for someone to feed the Americans a bunch of lies than to get a handful of money out of it.
To be fair, the idea that an armed American civilian would just stroll into a military base with relevant information might give any official pause, since the military only works with established intelligence sources. Walk-ups are considered the most unreliable form of intelligence, but being on the other end of a wad of dirty rupees clearly pisses off the Contractor.
Reliance on bad intel and the lack of good relations with the local population has compounded the security problems, he says. “When you do a madrassah hit”—that is, a raid on an Islamic school—“the locals get pissed. You don’t always find bad guys, but everyone gets slammed to the ground, zip-tied, bagged, and tagged. You forget to give them a hundred bucks at the door and they’ll swear to get you. They will, too. The next time the Americans are on patrol in their Dumbvees, they are set up.”
This reminds me of a traditional Pashtun saying Haji told me days before: “If you take your revenge in a hundred years, you are rushing things.”
Despite the treatment he just received from OGA, the Contractor insists the folks he works directly with are beginning to catch on and improve their methods of collection. “Now we want to get inside the heads of the people we are dealing with. We want a softer, more personal relationship, instead of basing the transaction on money.
“A while back, Rumsfeld said we might be creating more enemies than we are killing…. Duh… But things are changing. We don’t work with local Afghan commanders so much. We also don’t give a shit about what the Paks say, so we are allowed to slide and glide a little more inside Pakistan…. For some reason Pakistan is still like the Catholic Church, where it is sanctuary,” the Contractor tells me. “The bad guys are inside Pakistan using Pakistani protection to attack Americans inside Afghanistan and then running back knowing they won’t be chased. Hopefully, things will change.”
For now, though, covert operations continue and task force looks for excuses to cross the border, the Contractor says. An American civilian operating inside Pakistan could need help, which gives the U.S. military a reason to cross the border in support, hot pursuit, or just to call in mortar and air fire on nebulous “bad guys.” But until they do, the shadow war depends on men, like the Contractor, willing to work and fight in a no-man’s land just beyond the reach of U.S. power. I ask him if there’s an extraction plan if a mission in Pakistan gets messy. “The extraction plan is that once you are across the border, you are on your own. There is no uplift. You are screwed if things go wrong.” But that vulnerability is essential to the role of a contractor. “You are not in the federal system or in the military system,” he says. “You are deniable, disposable, and deletable.”
That independence—and the secrecy that goes with it—is part of the Contractor’s code. And, as far as he is concerned, it should remain inviolate even in death. “When we get killed, it’s usually because we fucked up,” he says. “We lost two guys, set up and ambushed. We lost a case officer in a training accident. That, along with [Johnny Micheal] Spann getting killed in the middle of an interrogation, adds up to four CIA operators killed in this war.” Traditionally, the CIA does not disclose an operative’s identity, even if he is killed. But in Spann’s case, the Agency decided that his anonymous star would be going on the Wall of Honor at a time when the Agency desperately needed a publicly identifiable hero. “That’s a decision that has been made since September 11 to polish up the CIA’s image. You can’t shit on a dead hero, so I think the number-two guy at the Agency has decided to grab some glory to counteract all the Agency fuckups since the Bay of Pigs…. Tenet got hammered because of 9/11 and wanted to show that we are still working, to show that we are putting out an effort. The problem is that fucks the rest of the guys and their families because this leaves the wives and families dangling in the wind, and you have more tradecraft exposed…. I don’t know why we have to be the poster boys to fix the CIA’s reputation.”
Revealing Spann’s name made him a hero, but it also exposed his wife, which blew her cover and publicly identified his children as the offspring of two covert officers. When I thought about it later, I understood that the Contractor saw this public celebration of his private tradecraft as a violation of his own tribe’s code. The Contractor’s willingness to talk to me seemed to be driven by his anger over seeing that code of secrecy begin to crumble. The independent contractors he works with in the covert world of OGA assignments signed on for the job because they could be assured their exploits and identities would be kept under the radar, if for no other reason than for the protection of their families. But now it seems the CIA is willing to sacrifice that commitment to its operators in order to grab a little glory.
The Contractor asked me to leave him off a short distance from his base. He didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing driving around in Taliban territory. I said good-bye to the Contractor near his little mud fort at the edge of the empire and carried on in my little yellow-and-white taxi.