Operation Relentless Strike was over, and so was Sword’s campaign in southern Afghanistan. Supported by Special Forces and the CIA, the Northern Alliance had taken Kabul without a fight November 14. But the war was far from finished. The Taliban retreated southwest to Kandahar as Al Qaeda’s leaders and thousands of troops headed south and east toward mountain redoubts. “The south was still wide open,” said a JSOC staffer.
That was the situation when, on November 17, with Sword’s desert landing strip operations in full swing, Dailey gathered his senior commanders and staff in Masirah in his Spartan living quarters to make a major announcement. “We are not leaving Afghanistan,” he said. Instead, he told them, TF Sword had a new mission: hunting bin Laden and Mullah Omar. More than two months since September 11, JSOC finally had the strategic mission for which the operators had been hankering. Thus began the man-hunting campaigns that would define JSOC for the decade to come. At a minimum, this would require an expansion of the advance force operations presence in Afghanistan, he said. But it would also spell the end for Sword’s campaign around Kandahar. The JSOC commander then outlined three potential courses of action for tailoring the force that would deploy to Afghanistan.
The light option would be two AFO elements—designated North and South—plus a small direct action force made up of nothing larger than troop-size elements. The medium option would involve squadron-size assault task forces as well as a special operations command and control element to liaise with conventional U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan. (The light and medium options would also need a TF Brown contribution.) The heavy option would add a Ranger company, the Sword headquarters, and a larger TF Brown contingent. Dailey made it clear he opposed the heavy option, as he was concerned that it would lead to “mission creep.” To nobody’s great surprise, he opted for the middle course. Although Sword would now establish a presence at Bagram, as others had been urging for weeks, Dailey told his audience he had no intention of moving the JOC to Afghanistan anytime soon, and planned to run JSOC’s war in Afghanistan from Masirah for months to come. He also stressed the need to maintain the command’s readiness system, called the Joint Operations Readiness and Training System (JORTS), in which units were on a cycle of individual training, unit training, alert, deployment, and reconstitution. “They didn’t want to mess up the JORTS cycle,” said a source who attended the meeting.1 This led some in the task force to conclude that Dailey was prioritizing a peacetime training cycle over wartime requirements.
War in southern and eastern Afghanistan, where Pashtuns were the dominant ethnic group, presented the United States with different challenges than those it confronted in the north, where the Northern Alliance represented a ready-made military partner. Northern Alliance leaders had little stomach for a war in the Pashtun heartland, whence the Taliban drew their strength. The Alliance warlords were more concerned with establishing themselves in Kabul. To defeat the Taliban on their home ground, the United States would need Pashtun allies.
As in the north, the CIA took the lead in deciding which figures to work with and promote in the Pashtun regions. In the case of one Pashtun leader in particular, the Agency’s decisions were to have far-reaching ramifications for Afghanistan, the U.S. war effort, and JSOC.
In early November, Agency officials came to Jim Reese, JSOC’s representative at Langley, with an urgent request. An important Agency source was in trouble in Afghanistan and needed to be pulled out fast. “Can you support us with helicopters?” they asked. After JSOC’s air planners on Masirah told Reese no aircraft were available, he went over their heads to Dailey. “This is an opportunity for us, right here, to establish who we are, how fast we can move, how agile we are, and support the CIA in what they see as a critical task,” Reese told the JSOC commander. “We have to bring our elements of critical national power at JSOC to bear to help them. Right now that’s Task Force 160.” Dailey needed no more convincing. “Jim, roger that, execute, and I’ll put the execute order out,” he said.2
When Reese told Cofer Black, the Counterterrorist Center director beamed.3 An hour later, Black informed George Tenet at the CIA director’s daily 5 P.M. staff meeting. “It was almost like the first string quarterback had run [back onto the field] out of the locker room after being hurt, because they were struggling how to figure this out,” said a source in the meeting. “I remember Cofer telling Tenet, ‘JSOC is going to bring our guys [out] and they’re going to support us.’ You could see everyone just going, ‘Yes!’”
JSOC’s willingness to fly to the rescue of the CIA source “was a big deal,” Crumpton said, adding that the Agency’s Mi-17 helicopters (“all two of them”) were not available for the mission. “It was absolutely a big deal.”
On November 34 two Black Hawks5 carrying heavily armed Team 6 operators and a bearded case officer6 nicknamed “Spider” from the Ground Branch of the CIA’s Special Activities Division7 slipped into Afghan airspace, flying fast from the Kitty Hawk straight for the central province of Uruzgan. There, anxiously awaiting them, were Spider’s Afghan source and a small group of supporters. Since October 8, when the source and three companions had crossed from Pakistan into Afghanistan on two motorbikes, they had been trying to rally Pashtun tribesmen against the Taliban. It was a dangerous mission.8 The Taliban had captured and executed renowned Pashtun mujahideen commander Abdul Haq that month for doing the same thing.9 In fact CIA officials deemed the quartet’s project so risky they decided not to send their own people in with the Afghans. Instead they gave their source what Crumpton described as “a sack of money” and a satellite phone so he could at least keep in touch with Spider. Four weeks later the source used that phone to call for help as the Taliban who’d been hounding his tiny band through southern Afghanistan finally cornered them in the mountains of Uruzgan.10
Overwatched by two direct action penetrators and an ISR aircraft beaming pictures back to Masirah, the helicopters neared the valley where the source was holed up. Spotting the prearranged signal of four fires marking the corners of their landing zone, the Chinooks landed and the Afghans climbed aboard, led by a distinguished-looking forty-three-year-old man with a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and a prematurely bald scalp under his turban.11 The Night Stalker pilots took off again heading for Pakistan, where they landed at Jacobabad, now partially occupied by U.S. forces.12 There would be other close calls for the source, but for now he was safe. The CIA breathed a collective sigh of relief, for the Afghan with the regal features in the back of the helicopter was no run-of-the-mill source, nor was he another power-hungry warlord. No, Spider’s source was the CIA’s best hope for the future of Afghanistan. His name was Hamid Karzai.
When asked how long the CIA had had Karzai on its payroll, Crumpton demurred. “I can’t address that,” he said. “I can confirm that we gave him money when he infiltrated back into Afghanistan on the motorbike.”
But Karzai had been a known quantity to the Agency and other Afghanistan watchers going back to the 1980s, when he was an idealistic aide to Sibghatullah Mojaddedi, leader of a moderate Afghan resistance group in the Pakistani frontier city of Peshawar.13 In the intervening years, his stature had grown. Crumpton recalled meeting with “some of our Afghan allies … including Massoud” in 2000. “Say the Taliban was gone,” Crumpton asked the battle-hardened Northern Alliance leaders, “who could be a leader of Afghanistan?” Their answer was unanimous. “They all said ‘Karzai,’” Crumpton said. “There really was not much discussion of anybody else. So we knew early on that he was really the only—imperfect though he may have been—really the only choice for attempting to unify the Afghan tribes and the Afghan ethnic [groups].”
In this context it’s easy to see why the CIA considered Karzai’s rescue so crucial, and why the United States was determined to take Karzai back into Afghanistan, this time with more support. Again, the Agency turned to JSOC to make it happen.
On November 14, the same day the Northern Alliance entered Kabul in force, TF Brown Black Hawks flew Karzai and Spider back into Afghanistan.14 The two men were a study in contrasts. In his mid-forties with fair hair and a Fu Manchu mustache, the skinny, fit Spider was an affable former Marine officer and one of Ground Branch’s most seasoned operatives. He was well known to JSOC operators from time spent together in Somalia and the Balkans.15 At forty-three, the mild-mannered Karzai was of a similar age, but despite his association with the more royalist mujahideen elements during the Soviet war of the 1980s, he had no background as a warrior. The two had been working together for less than six months,16 but Spider had already succeeded in forging a bond with the Afghan. It was Spider, according to CIA director George Tenet, whom Karzai had called when things looked grim in Uruzgan and who immediately contacted CIA headquarters to argue that “Karzai represented the only credible opposition leader identified in the south” and his “survival … was critical to maintaining the momentum for the southern uprising.”17 “Even then, he was the guy Karzai totally trusted,” said a Delta source. “The whole Karzai thing was about a personal relationship between those two that then went on for many, many years afterwards. But he wouldn’t have done any of that if it weren’t for Spider.”
(A Special Forces source on the Karzai mission disputed this version of events. To this source, it appeared Spider was not keen on going into Afghanistan with Karzai, and the sole reason the Agency staked its claim with Karzai was he was their only Pashtun option after Abdul Haq’s death.)
Also on the flight of five Black Hawks escorted by two DAPs were nine members of a Special Forces A-team, about seven CIA operatives and three TF Sword personnel—two Delta operators and an Air Force combat controller. The Sword trio had a vague mission and were a controversial last-minute addition to the passenger list. Spider told Captain Jason Amerine, the A-team leader, that they were there at Task Force Sword’s insistence to spot “emerging” Al Qaeda targets. “Sword isn’t going to let us fly without them,” Spider said. But one of the operators told Amerine that their inclusion had been Spider’s idea. Either way, the helicopters were already maxed out for weight, so the Delta operators’ sudden arrival meant Amerine had to tell two of his men they were being left behind for now, with Spider leaving one of his team. The rejiggered group climbed aboard two Air Force special operations MH-53 Pave Low helicopters at Jacobabad for a late afternoon flight to a small desert airstrip that Sword had taken over close to the Afghan border. There, with Rangers guarding the perimeter, they waited until sundown, when the telltale beat of rotor blades told them the Night Stalkers were approaching. After loading their gear onto the Black Hawks, the motley group flew off, protected by jets high in the sky as well as by the 160th’s constant ally—the all-enveloping darkness.18
* * *
As the combined CIA and special ops contingent escorted Karzai into southern Afghanistan, another drama that had demanded much of Sword’s attention was finally drawing to a conclusion.
On August 3, the Taliban had arrested two American women—Dayna Curry, thirty, and Heather Mercer, twenty-four—working in Kabul for Shelter Now International, a Christian aid organization. Within a couple of days, the Taliban had taken six other Westerners on the organization’s Kabul staff into custody. The Taliban put all eight in a Kabul prison and threatened to try them for proselytizing. They faced possible death sentences if convicted. International efforts to negotiate their release came to naught.
After September 11, as it became clear the United States was going to war in Afghanistan, concern for the prisoners mounted.19 The first CIA team into Afghanistan worked closely with the Northern Alliance intelligence arm to ascertain the details of their imprisonment. The Agency hoped to bribe Taliban officials into releasing them. One plan involved paying a senior Taliban official $4 million to spirit the eight Westerners out of Kabul and up to the Northern Alliance. Another would have the Agency pay eight prison guards $1 million each and move their families to the Panjshir Valley prior to the operation, in which the guards would move the prisoners to a prearranged helicopter pickup zone near Kabul. To Gary Schroen, the senior CIA man on the ground in Afghanistan, neither plan seemed realistic.20 It was starting to look like U.S. forces would have to mount a unilateral rescue operation.
As the military’s go-to force for hostage rescue, JSOC—and Delta in particular—was monitoring events closely. Just after midnight on October 26, three Delta operators arrived by helicopter in northern Afghanistan to work with the CIA on putting a rescue plan together.21 Schroen was underwhelmed by his first encounter with the operators: “They were all younger than the other teams’ Special Forces soldiers we had met so far, and none of them had any real idea of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan.”22 (Schroen’s assessment of their ages seems a little off. One of the operators was Major Jim Reese, the experienced officer on a week’s break from duty at Langley. Another was Sergeant Major Manny Pardal, described by a JSOC staff officer as “a very, very sharp guy,” who had enlisted in the Army in 1984, so must have been at least in his mid-thirties. He was assigned to Delta’s Operational Support Troop.)23 After being thoroughly briefed by the CIA, the trio visited the front lines to gauge the challenges they would face smuggling the prisoners—now viewed as hostages by the Americans—to safety.24
As the three operators considered their options, they were in frequent communication with A Squadron, which, having assumed the Aztec role from B Squadron, was still at Bragg, ready to be brought forward if needed for a rescue mission. The operators in Afghanistan sent back Predator imagery of the routes to and from the prison. The Taliban controlled all roads with mobile checkpoints. Noting that the only forces to enjoy freedom of movement after dark in Kabul were small Taliban and Al Qaeda elements in Toyota pickup trucks, Delta planners decided to emulate their foes and bought a dozen Toyota pickups. The unit’s mechanics set to work modifying the vehicles to fit a dozen specific mission parameters while others in Delta acquired turbans and other Afghan and Arab clothing items with which operators might disguise themselves.
To convince the powers-that-be in Delta and JSOC that the mission was viable, A Squadron operators found a photo of Taliban fighters in a pickup, then juxtaposed it on a PowerPoint slide with a photo of a Delta assault team in one of the new Toyotas wearing similar clothes and carrying AK-series assault rifles and RPGs. They added a caption that read, “At less than 10 percent illumination, what does the enemy actually see?” and sent the slide to Blaber, the Delta operations officer, in Masirah. He liked the concept and took it to JSOC headquarters. “A few hours later we had approval,” wrote Greer, whose troop, A1, was at the heart of the planning.
The rest of the rescue mission task force comprised Delta’s A3 troop and Team 6’s Gold Team, which had the Trident role at the time. Together these elements included about fifty to sixty operators. They planned to infiltrate Kabul at night by pretending to be an Al Qaeda convoy. “We had no illusions of being able to pass any close inspection or talk ourselves past a sentry, but all we needed was just to avoid being recognized at a distance,” wrote Greer. “If our ploy worked, we would continue to roll toward the hostage location. If not, we would eliminate the guards with our suppressed weapons to keep things quiet from neighborhood ears. We did not want a Mogadishu-like confrontation.”25
Schroen’s CIA team had meanwhile interviewed the father and uncle of a young male Afghan Shelter Now employee whom the Taliban had incarcerated at the same prison as the Westerners. The Taliban allowed the two men weekly visits to meet their relatives. The men were able to provide the Agency with detailed descriptions of the jail’s interior and exterior layouts.26 Armed with this information, Delta’s engineers built a mock-up of the prison at Bragg, where the rescue force conducted dozens of assault rehearsals using both nonlethal training ammunition and live rounds.
Greer was guardedly optimistic about Delta’s chances of success.27 But Schroen was distinctly unimpressed when briefed by the operators at his headquarters. According to Schroen’s account, the plan involved a Delta convoy driving from Northern Alliance lines to Kabul, “fighting their way through Taliban defensive positions and checkpoints” to the prison, freeing the hostages, and then driving back out of the city to be picked up by “military helicopters.” But a Delta source familiar with the plan said Schroen did not describe it accurately. Rather than risk the complicated passage of lines necessary if they drove down from the north, the operators would fly with their civilian pickup trucks on about six Combat Talons into a remote landing strip to the south of the capital at night. Then, under the cover of darkness, they’d drive to Kabul that same night and free the hostages, putting them on MH-6 Little Birds that would fly them north to safety. Delta often rehearsed hostage rescues with Little Birds. Standard practice was to jam the hostage in the tight space behind the pilots’ seats with at least one operator sitting on each pod for protection.
Also unmentioned by Schroen, the plan called for most of the assault force to remain behind in Kabul, incognito. The Delta operators who had designed and rehearsed the mission thought the plan was more elegant than Schroen did. They were confident it would work. The only reason they never got the green light to execute the plan was because the Taliban moved the hostages, one said. But Schroen insisted that the operators attached to his team were not proud of the plan. “I think even they realized the plan was both impossible and lame,” he wrote. “We never heard any more from the three Delta operators on rescue plans.”28
Nonetheless, the trio stuck around while the CIA team, now working under Gary Berntsen, who had replaced Schroen as the senior Agency representative in-country November 4, continued refining its own plan to free the Shelter Now prisoners. “We were trying to basically suborn the prison commander to get them out,” Crumpton said. “That didn’t work.” Sword personnel in Masirah and on the Kitty Hawk took over the military side of planning a rescue, with the Team 6 element on the carrier as the main ground force. They named it Angry Talon. But a hesitant chain of command held them back. The task force had figured out the hostages’ new location, “but nobody wanted to fly into Kabul with three Chinooks, in the middle of a city that’s an unknown threat,” said a Sword planner. “We knew they were there and we had a plan to go in there, but no one [said] ‘Let’s go to the prison,’ because we didn’t think we had quite the right assets to go after it with helicopters.” After drawing up the plan in late October, the staff on the Kitty Hawk put it aside, waiting for even better actionable intelligence. Working through various Northern Alliance and Taliban intermediaries, the Americans were still able to keep close tabs on the location of the hostages, who were being moved between two different prisons in Kabul. But the Taliban’s sudden evacuation of Kabul beginning November 12 rendered any plan centered on the city moot.29
That evening, the Taliban bundled the eight prisoners into a truck and drove them west out of Kabul as Northern Alliance advance elements entered the city. Their captors forced the hostages to spend the night in a frigid shipping container before driving them on to a small jail in Ghazni, seventy-five miles southwest of the capital.30 All the way, the CIA had a source on their tail, using a mobile phone to update his Agency handlers.31 That source was in Ghazni on November 13 when the hostages’ nightmare finally came to an end with a furious pounding on the door of the room where they were being held. It burst open and there stood “a scruffy, beardless man in ragtag clothing” with a rifle in his hand and ammunition belts across his chest. “Aaazaad! Aaazaad!” he shouted. “You’re free! You’re free!” The Taliban had fled.
Anti-Taliban locals cared for the hostages over the next twenty-four hours, while their leader, Georg Taubman, found a satellite phone and contacted the U.S. embassy in Islamabad,32 setting the wheels in motion in Masirah and on the Kitty Hawk. Task Force Sword prepared to execute Operation Angry Talon. The actionable intelligence for which they had been waiting was now coming in. On the morning of November 14 on Masirah and the Kitty Hawk, staffs and operators who, in keeping with Sword’s reverse cycle, had gone to sleep just a couple of hours earlier, were awoken and sprang into action. But the mission would stretch the task force. With the Karzai infil also slated for that evening, Sword would be conducting two national-level missions into Afghanistan using Team 6 and Brown assets during the same period of darkness.
In mid-afternoon, three Chinooks took off from the Kitty Hawk, headed for Pakistan. They were starting on one of the farthest helicopter missions ever flown. The lengthy high-altitude flight ahead limited each helicopter to 5,000 pounds of cargo, or fifteen combat-loaded SEALs. Because one aircraft was “the flying spare,” included in case one of the others was shot down or suffered a mechanical emergency, that meant a total of thirty Team 6 operators for the mission. Although the immediate threat to the hostages had lessened, the SEALs were flying into an anarchic situation with very little understanding of what was happening on the ground. They needed to be ready for anything.
After a three-hour flight the Chinooks landed at Jacobabad, where a smoky haze covered the airfield. Shortly thereafter, two MC-130s from Masirah landed and married up with the Chinooks. They were the refueling aircraft for the mission and had also brought along Schiller. As Angry Talon’s air mission commander (Mangum was performing the same role for the Karzai infiltration) he jumped aboard the Chinook piloted by blond, barrel-chested CW3 Dean “Beef” Brown, flight lead for the mission.
After coordinating with the Air Force combat search and rescue crews at Jacobabad, the Chinooks and the MC-130s took off as darkness fell, a five-hour flight ahead of them. Ghazni lay about 360 miles due north of Jacobabad, but in order to minimize time in Afghan airspace, Beef Brown plotted a route that had the helicopters fly northeast, parallel to the Indus River, before doing an aerial refuel and turning north-northwest through the Sulaiman Mountains, steadily climbing to an altitude above 11,000 feet. It would be one of the longest helicopter missions ever flown. An icy draft blew through the helicopters, the doors of which were fitted with miniguns and therefore always open. As the temperature plummeted to near freezing, air crewmen shivered, wishing they’d brought warmer clothes than their flight suits, jackets, and gloves—gear that had seemed excessive when boarding the aircraft in the 90-degree-plus heat of the Masirah midday sun. The radios were silent but for the trailing Chinook’s calls every five minutes letting Brown know the flight was still intact.
Flying west-northwest, the Chinooks traversed the Pakistani tribal areas and crossed into Afghanistan. Soon they began losing altitude as they identified the wide valley in which Ghazni sat. The JOC in Masirah called to let the crews know the plan for the linkup with the hostages and their benefactors was still on track. Locating the hostages promised to be the biggest challenge. The aircrews had no way of communicating directly with the hostages or the CIA source with them. Everything had to be passed through Masirah. Prior to departure, Schiller had arranged with the CIA representative in the JOC to have the hostages wait on a main road close to a soccer field on the town’s southern edge. They were to light a fire as a means of signaling their location to the helicopters. Now the JOC was telling him the fire would be lit fifteen minutes before the helicopters were due to touch down. A few minutes later the JOC called back to say the CIA source with the hostages had been in touch: he was driving south with them in his vehicle and would be ready for pickup in twenty minutes.33
But this gave the rescue force a misleading impression that the plan was going smoothly, when in fact the situation on the ground was chaotic. The hostages were under extraordinary stress as Taubman coordinated the rescue with the Islamabad embassy while negotiating with obstinate local commanders to take the Shelter Now personnel to the pickup zone. For a while it seemed the locals would not allow the hostages to leave the compound in which they’d been held. But at the eleventh hour, with the embassy insisting the helicopters were already en route and it was imperative the mission take place that night, the local leaders relented and escorted the eight foreigners to the pickup zone (PZ).34
A Predator was buzzing over Ghazni, relaying images back to Masirah. The helicopters had no access to its transmissions, so staffers passed directions to them based on what they were seeing on the screen in the JOC. But the Predator feed to Masirah suffered from a lengthy delay. Added to the satellite radio delay of the staffer in the JOC describing what he was seeing to the aircrews, the information being passed to the pilots—“Turn left now!” “You’re right above the PZ!”—was about thirty seconds late and therefore useless. After several passes 200 feet over the pickup zone with no sign of a fire surrounded by nine or more people, the frustrated flight lead crew turned the satellite radio off. There was still no sight of the hostages. Tension was building on the helicopters. Their fuel levels allowed only thirty minutes to locate the hostages, pick them up, and take off. Then they faced an hour-long flight in order to make an urgent midair appointment with an MC-130 just east of the Pakistan border. With Taliban still marauding through Ghazni, the risk to the helicopters grew with every passing minute. Brown ordered his trail aircraft to fly an orbit a couple of miles to the west, which reduced the Chinooks’ signature over the town and put a helicopter in an overwatch position with a wider field of view.
The tactic appeared to have worked when Chalk 2’s pilot, CW3 Frank Mancuso, spoke up. “I have a vehicle moving south on the main road, twelve o’clock, one mile,” he announced. “It appears to have about ten people in the back of the truck—that must be our group.” Ordering Mancuso to stay overhead, Brown landed ahead of the moving vehicle. The SEALs stormed off and set up a roadblock. When the truck came to a stop, there was disappointment and knife-edge tension: it contained only armed Afghan men. They claimed to be anti-Taliban fighters when questioned by Commander Mitch Bradley, Team 6’s Blue Team commander, adding “We love America!” repeatedly for good measure. The SEALs assumed they were lying and were actually Taliban fighters, but let them go and quickly reboarded the helicopter.
The Chinook took off. The helicopters now had less than ten minutes before they would have to leave in order to make their refueling rendezvous. Wracking their brains trying to figure out how to locate their “precious cargo,” the Night Stalkers scanned the ground for the fire that was supposed to serve as a beacon. But the planners had not accounted for the fact that on a cold night in Afghanistan many fires would be visible, lit by locals for light and warmth. Telling one from the others seemed an impossible task.35
The hostages had lit none of those fires, however. Somehow the word to build one never reached them. “We knew the helicopters were not looking for a fire,” Curry and Mercer said somewhat incongruously in their written account of the episode. Instead, they were sitting on the PZ straining their ears for the sound of helicopters and getting increasingly desperate. After what seemed an eternity but was actually about fifteen minutes, the hulking shapes of two twin-rotor aircraft appeared overhead, circling the PZ and twice making a low-level sweep directly over them before flying off a little. Frantic, the women serendipitously took it upon themselves to light a fire using their headscarves as fuel, hoping to draw the aircrews’ attention to themselves, apparently ignorant that this was the plan all along. The Afghans with them threw planks onto the blaze. The detainees were on the verge of giving up when the helicopters returned, hovering directly overhead, before maddeningly flying away again.36
As Brown flew over the town’s mud houses, investigating as many of the fires as possible in the hope of some form of recognition, Mancuso came up on the net. “I have a fire on the main road down the street from the soccer field,” he said. “They appear to have about ten people huddled around it. Two appear to have burkas as well.” Brown landed in the soccer “field,” which was nothing but dirt, causing a massive brownout that briefly disoriented the SEALs as they left the helicopter. An aviator who had noted the hostages’ location jumped off the bird and grabbed the SEAL commander by the shoulder. “Follow me!” he yelled, and led the SEALs to the corner of a wall and pointed down the street to the group gathered around the fire. The lead SEAL gave him a thumbs-up, then quickly briefed his men before they advanced toward the anxious figures.37
Twenty agonizing minutes after the helicopters had initially flown away, several dark shapes appeared out of the darkness and approached the hostages. “Covered in gear, they looked like Martians,” recalled Heather Mercer. “Are you the detainees?” yelled a SEAL. “Listen and do exactly what we say!”38
The aircrew sat and waited. Even hostage rescues in which no bullets are fired can be time-consuming affairs. It wasn’t just a case of grabbing the people to be rescued and throwing them on the aircraft. “That only happens in the movies,” said a JSOC source. The SEALs needed to positively identify the detainees by comparing them to photographs and to search them (in case their captors had hidden explosives on them). Already at “bingo” fuel—the point at which it was essential to depart in order to make the refueling rendezvous in Pakistan—Beef Brown called the MC-130 pilot and persuaded him to move the refueling point into Afghan airspace, reducing the time the Chinooks would need to fly there. That move was technically against orders, so nobody coordinated it with the JOC, in case someone on the Sword staff tried to overrule it.
In less than fifteen minutes, the SEALs returned with all eight hostages. They lifted off, and the three helicopters made a beeline south, “running on fumes,” as a TF Sword source put it, as the MC-130 flew as fast as it could toward them. The rendezvous came off perfectly and the Chinooks made the three-hour flight to Jacobabad, where they landed at dawn, pulling up to the back of another MC-130 with a medical team on board in case any hostage needed immediate medical care.39 For the Shelter Now personnel there followed reunions with their families and, in the case of Curry and Mercer, a phone call from President Bush.40 For Task Force Sword, it was mission complete.
It could be argued that as far as hostage rescues go, Angry Talon was almost a nonevent. There was no shooting and by the time the rescue occurred, the Shelter Now personnel weren’t even prisoners. That didn’t stop Dailey transmitting a “Congrats to the Blue shooters” message across the command, which provoked scorn among some Delta operators.41 “There was no rescue,” said one. “It was more like picking up a downed pilot in the middle of nowhere.” Of course, it could also be argued that a rescue mission in which no bullets were fired represented the most elegant solution to the crisis. The onset of war had done little to diminish the rivalry between Team 6 and Delta, which would reassert itself—at times with venom—over the years ahead.
* * *
At this early stage of what President Bush was already calling the “war on terror,” JSOC had not fully come to terms with the fact that its world had changed permanently. The command was “designed to do in-and-out operations, not sustained combat,” and the Sword JOC was therefore structured and manned for sprints, rather than marathons, said a retired special operations officer. On reverse cycle since early October, the staff on Masirah was under tremendous strain. “We worked for eighteen hours, nineteen hours a day and then crashed when daylight hit,” he said.
Dailey wanted to rest his troops. The arrival off Pakistan of the Marines’ Task Force 58 offered him a chance to do so. “By the end of the month, the level of lunar illumination would exceed the special operations forces’ comfort zone, presenting an opportunity for an operational pause between 20 November and 8 December,” according to an official Marine history. On November 25, five weeks after the Rangers seized Objective Rhino, Task Force 58 flew in to the airstrip intending to continue the fight in southern Afghanistan as, in the Marine history’s words, “Task Force Sword prepared to withdraw from the battlefield.”42 But a source in Masirah said the pause had more to do with Sword’s new orders to hunt for bin Laden and Mullah Omar than it did with the lunar cycle. Nonetheless, the decision to curtail Sword’s campaign in the south deeply frustrated the operators creating havoc in the deserts and hills surrounding Kandahar. “Just as we were learning everything and getting more and more confident/brazen in our ability to go right up into Kandahar, we pulled the plug on it,” said a Delta source. “We were like, ‘operational pause’? Why would we pause right now? It’s not like this is so complex we need a break so we can wrap our heads around it.”
Three Sword operators who weren’t withdrawing from the battlefield were the trio who had accompanied Karzai, Spider, Amerine, and their men into Uruzgan the night of November 14. They included two seasoned OST operators: Sergeants Major Morgan Darwin and Mike “Flash” Johnston. While many of their Delta colleagues had yet to hear a shot fired in anger since September 11, these three had seen more than their fair share of action during their first few days in-country. Barely forty-eight hours after arriving, the tiny band of U.S. fighters—supported by a withering aerial barrage—had destroyed a Taliban convoy racing to retake Tarin Kowt, Uruzgan’s small capital.43 (Having come down with a nasty case of dysentery, Darwin rode in the convoy to Tarin Kowt “kitted out for combat while hooked to an IV,” according to one account.)44 From there the Americans and Karzai’s band of fewer than 200 lightly armed and even more lightly trained Pashtun irregulars drove south to Shawali Kowt, ten miles from the center of Kandahar city on the north bank of the Arghandab River. There, the combined force of U.S. special operators, CIA operatives, and Karzai’s Pashtuns fought a back-and-forth battle with the Taliban for control of the only bridge across the river for miles in either direction.45 To the surprise of Amerine’s team, who had now been joined by a battalion headquarters element, in the middle of the fight, on the night of December 4–5, TF Sword delivered Delta’s A2 Troop and three Pinzgauers via MH-47 to give the Karzai force more firepower and mobility.46
Later that day, the Delta operators were lucky to survive a tragedy that almost changed Afghanistan’s history. An airman attached to the Special Forces battalion headquarters mistakenly called in a bomb on his own position. Three SF soldiers and at least twenty Afghans died in the accident, with many others seriously injured. In the aftermath of the attack, the Delta operators—all of whom had extensive medical training—were invaluable in tending to the wounded and securing the site’s perimeter. Karzai was in a building 100 meters from the blast and emerged with only a small cut on his face from flying glass. (Spider had dived on him to shield him when the bomb hit.) About fifteen minutes after the explosion, Karzai received a call on his satellite phone from a BBC reporter telling him a conference of Afghan factions in Bonn arranged by the United States had named him head of the interim Afghan government.
Despite the setback, the Taliban resistance at Shawali Kowt evaporated. Two days later, Karzai, whose reputation among Pashtuns had been growing rapidly since the Tarin Kowt battle, entered Kandahar in triumph.47 The last major city in Afghanistan—and the one that was the Taliban’s power base—had fallen. Unnoticed by the news media, Delta’s A2 troop had remained with their Pinzgauers in southern Afghanistan. When Mattis’s Marines arrived at Kandahar airfield on December 14,48 the Delta operators “met them, turned the key over, and took off,” said a JSOC staff officer.
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Up in Kabul, things had also been moving fast. After the successful Shelter Now hostage rescue removed their original raison d’être in Afghanistan, two of the original three Delta operators who arrived October 26 to work with the CIA had been attached to an Agency team that Berntsen sent to Jalalabad in pursuit of Al Qaeda forces fleeing east. In their place, Berntsen wrote, Central Command deployed another small “JSOC advance team” to work with Berntsen and “to prepare the ground for a large JSOC contingent to follow”49—a classic AFO mission.
The new team’s leader was Lieutenant Colonel Mark Erwin, the wiry, brown-haired commander of Delta’s Operational Support Troop.50 Erwin had been a star NCAA Division I soccer player for his alma mater, Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, leading the nation in scoring in 1983. After entering the Army in 1984 as an infantry officer,51 Erwin had been selected for Delta. But after commanding a B Squadron troop his career had stalled, at least temporarily. He had been passed over for squadron command by the special mission unit board, while the regular Army had not selected him to command a maneuver battalion. Instead the Army had selected Erwin for a less prestigious basic training battalion command at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, said two Delta sources. Rather than lose Erwin from Delta, unit commander Jim Schwitters and his deputy, Colonel Ron Russell, gave him command of the Operational Support Troop in order to evaluate him and then, based on his performance, put him back in front of the special mission unit board, the source said. That job found him seated beside Berntsen on the evening of November 20, driving the forty miles north from Kabul to Bagram air base in a new blue Ford pickup flown in for Erwin and his three-man team. (The ruined base, fought over for years by the Taliban and the Northern Alliance, had been in American hands since October 21.) As they motored carefully past the rusted hulks of Soviet tanks, Erwin told his Agency counterpart about his soccer background. Berntsen was suitably impressed by Erwin, past and present: “He was now in his late thirties and hard as nails.”52
There had been a few bumps in the road, but JSOC and the CIA were demonstrating an ability to work well together downrange. Sources in both organizations said the Karzai missions exemplified the benefits to be gained from a close—some would say symbiotic—relationship between the Agency and the military’s most elite special operations units. At the core were personal links forged in the Balkans. “The real bond between the CIA and Delta started in Bosnia … face-to-face, working a real-world mission, getting to know each other, realizing once again that neither organization can do what they want to do without the other,” said a Delta source. “That’s the genesis of the whole relationship. That thing with Karzai was an extension of it.”
Crumpton found JSOC’s cooperative attitude a refreshing change from the Agency’s recent experience butting heads with Rumsfeld in the Pentagon. “It was all driven by mission, and the further you got away from Washington, the easier it was,” he said. “I can’t say enough good things about Dell Dailey.… I can’t say that about DoD, but I can say that about JSOC.” There would be further tensions between the two organizations as they shouldered the bulk of the responsibility for the secret wars across the globe, wars the U.S. government was only now beginning to contemplate. But things were off to a reasonable start.
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Erwin and Berntsen were driving to Bagram to meet Franks, whose C-17 landed shortly after the pair had arrived at the base, and the two moved up to the runway to await the general. Berntsen’s account hints at the importance Franks attached to JSOC’s AFO effort: “With the engines still running, the back hatch opened and a dozen U.S. soldiers with helmets, weapons, and night vision goggles spilled out. One of them crossed the fifty meters of apron to shake the Lt. Colonel’s hand, then escort him back to the C-17.” Only after conferring with Erwin for a couple of minutes did Franks, with the JSOC officer by his side, stroll over to greet Berntsen, the senior CIA officer in-country.53
As Franks was meeting with JSOC’s advance force leader in Bagram, Dailey was planning the next phase of JSOC’s war in Afghanistan. Kabul had fallen and the Taliban were retreating in disarray to Kandahar, but the United States’ top three high-value targets—bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Taliban leader Mullah Omar—were still at large. In addition, thousands of Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters remained in the field, massing in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan. The opportunity presented itself to destroy Al Qaeda’s leadership and crush its fielded forces. But rather than consolidate his own forces in an effort to finish the campaign in short order, the JSOC commander opted for a more conservative approach.
Dailey thought that by withdrawing some of his force, he could deceive Al Qaeda into believing all U.S. special ops forces had departed the battlefield. He pulled the Rangers’ 3rd Battalion, Delta’s B Squadron, and most of TF Brown back to the States, replacing them with 1st Battalion, the rest of A Squadron, and a small AFO element, who deployed to Afghanistan.54 After flying its JSOC contingent to Masirah December 6 and 7, the Kitty Hawk returned to Japan.55 The move confused the Sword staff and was poorly received in Delta, where operators were openly skeptical that “the bad guys would let down their guard,” as Greer put it. “The naivete of that idea still boggles my mind today,” he wrote more than six years later. “‘Aren’t we at war?’ we asked. Why were we not pouring all available assets into Afghanistan, rather than withdrawing our strength?”56
But as he prepared to deploy to Afghanistan from Bragg in late November 2001, Greer had little time to dwell on the vagaries of his higher command. The mission of a lifetime awaited him in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan.