The helicopter carrying the Team 6 operators was gaining on the small convoy heading toward the Pakistan border. It was early March 2002, a few days after the bitter, bloody mountaintop battle of Takur Ghar during Operation Anaconda, and some of the same operators who’d fought in that snowy hell and lost their friends there were now being offered what seemed to be a chance at ultimate retribution. Overhead imagery had captured what appeared to be a tall man in a white robe and turban surrounded by other men getting into the vehicles, at least one of which was a late model sport-utility vehicle, at a compound that U.S. intelligence associated with Al Qaeda.
Now, a Predator was following the vehicles as they sped east. In the crowded operations center at the main U.S. military headquarters in Bagram, Major General Franklin “Buster” Hagenbeck, the senior U.S. commander in Afghanistan, was getting impatient as he watched the Predator feed on a flat screen. “Where’s the dad-gum air? Push the air!” he shouted. “Sir, we’ve got two F-16s and a B-1B [bomber] on station and we are getting them in,” his deputy chief of operations replied.
The vehicles pulled over and the passengers got out. Hagenbeck announced to the operations center that “all restrictions have been lifted.” They were free to hit the vehicles with an air strike. In the helicopter, the Team 6 operators pleaded with Bagram not to bomb the vehicles, but rather to let the SEALs land and get eyes on the targets first. But Hagenbeck and his staff were determined not to miss what might be a fleeting opportunity to kill the man they were fervently hoping was Osama bin Laden. (As a conventional Army general, Hagenbeck would not usually be in a position to order JSOC forces around on the battlefield, but after Takur Ghar, he had asked for and received that authority from General Tommy Franks, the head of Central Command, for the remainder of Operation Anaconda, which was still under way.) “Bombs away!” shouted someone in the operations center. “Go get ’em!” yelled Hagenbeck.
The first F-16 missed the target. Its 500-pound bomb exploded harmlessly near the vehicle. The second F-16 made no mistake. Then, the larger B-1B dropped a dozen 2,000-pound bombs to make sure nobody got away. The operators’ mission then changed from a possible ambush to sensitive site exploitation—finding the body of the tall man in white robes and collecting DNA to see if it was bin Laden. The Air Force had used cluster munitions—small bomblets that the SEALs believed had a 50 percent dud rate—against the convoy, heightening the danger to the operators. “We were pissed,” said a SEAL.
The operators knew that they would be landing beside a scene of carnage, given the ordnance the Air Force had just dropped. But they were not prepared for what they encountered. Instead of more than a dozen hardened Al Qaeda fighters lying dead by the side of the road, “it was a family,” said the SEAL. “It was just, ‘Oh my God!’”
The height disparity between the man in white and the others had not been because the white-robed figure was very tall, it had been “because he’s an adult and they’re kids,” the SEAL said. “ISR is a very dangerous thing sometimes,” said another operator. “It really allows you to confirm your biases. I think it was seventeen women and children were killed on that target.” The SEALs did their best to bury the victims in accordance with Islamic law. “One kid survived,” said the first SEAL. “We patched him up and put him on a plane.”1
JSOC’s post–Tora Bora hunt for bin Laden was off to what could charitably be called a bad start.
* * *
A few weeks later Pete Blaber, on orders from Tommy Franks, and Spider from the CIA’s Ground Branch, flew into Pakistan’s capital city of Islamabad and met with Robert Grenier, the CIA’s station chief. “There’s no Al Qaeda here,” Grenier told them. Amused by Grenier’s refusal to acknowledge what was obvious, the pair later met with Pakistan’s senior military leaders, who “literally belly-laughed” at their contention that Al Qaeda was regrouping in the tribal areas, according to a source familiar with the conversation. “The trail of tears goes right back into Pakistan,” Blaber told the Pakistani flag officers. “We followed it. That’s where they are.”
With Pakistan’s permission, Blaber and Spider stayed. Together with a few U.S. communications and intelligence personnel, they established two advance force operations cells: one in Miram Shah, the all-but-lawless capital of the North Waziristan tribal agency a few miles from the Afghan border; and the other in Wana, about fifty-five miles to the southwest, in South Waziristan. JSOC chose the locations for a reason. The command thought that bin Laden might be hiding out in Waziristan.
By mid-2003, the AFO team in the tribal areas had grown to two Delta operators, a 24th Special Tactics Squadron combat controller, a Team 6 officer, two Orange operatives (one of whom was an Urdu-speaking signals intelligence guy), plus Spider. The intent was to work closely with Pakistan’s most elite special operations unit, the Special Services Group, hunting Al Qaeda’s leadership throughout the tribal areas.
The Pakistani unit appeared supportive of at least some of the Americans’ efforts, according to one AFO operator. Typical missions would begin with JSOC elements in Afghanistan generating intelligence on targets in the tribal areas, which they would transmit via secure satellite communications to the AFO team. The team members and their Pakistani counterparts would jump in their trucks, the Americans would use Global Positioning System devices to locate the targets, and then point and tell the Pakistani troops to search a particular compound. The team operated in Razmak, Miram Shah, Wana, and Parachinar—all towns in the tribal areas—and visited every border crossing. The AFO operators were always in Pakistani uniforms—sometimes dressed as members of the Special Services Group, at other times as border guards.
But the Pakistanis imposed such tight constraints on the team that it was sometimes like being “in jail,” the AFO operator acknowledged. The Pakistanis never let the operators go anywhere without their Special Services Group and Inter-Services Intelligence minders. The AFO personnel referred to their Miram Shah outpost as “Miram Shawshank,” in reference to the movie The Shawshank Redemption, which is set in a state prison. If an American tried to leave the base alone, a Pakistani guard would stop him at gunpoint. The U.S. operators thus became little more than “hostages,” said a retired special operations officer, who blamed the Pakistanis. “They talked a good story, but they never would allow us to do anything,” he said. “But that was an investment in the future. We knew if we left, we’d never get back in.” The arrangement lasted at least several years.
Like others in the U.S. government, JSOC had entertained high hopes of routing Al Qaeda from the tribal areas with the help of their Pakistani “allies.” Eventually, however, reality sank in. “It became very apparent that the Pakistanis weren’t going to do anything,” the retired officer said. But it wasn’t just the Pakistani security services blocking JSOC’s hunt for bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders in the tribal areas. The command also faced opposition from the CIA. “Pakistan was completely an Agency area, and they weren’t going to let anybody [from JSOC] come in and do anything,” the retired officer said. “It was the Agency’s turf.… The Agency hired a whole bunch of former [special operations] and Marine guys to go out and do humint collection for them.”2
* * *
Meanwhile, having become the lead special mission unit in Afghanistan almost by default, given Delta’s commitment to Iraq, Team 6 set about preparing for any cross-border mission that the National Command Authority might order it to conduct. The first thing the SEALs had to figure out was what mode of transport they might use to cross the border, beyond the obvious helicopter solution. One option was to ride in undercover on specially outfitted “jingle trucks,” the ubiquitous brightly painted vehicles that ply the roads of South and Central Asia, so-called because of the little chains that jangle as they move. To a casual observer, the SEALs’ trucks looked full of lumber. But each had a hidden passenger compartment that could hold “a couple of assault teams”—between eight and ten operators—according to a special operations source familiar with the vehicle. “This was a Trojan horse kind of deal,” he said. In early 2004, Team 6’s Afghan agents drove the trucks across the border successfully, but without any operators in the back. “If you’re going to blow somebody’s cover, you don’t want it to be yours,” he said.
But the cross-border infiltration method to which Team 6 devoted the most time and money was the use of high-altitude, high-opening (HAHO) freefall parachute techniques. The unit considered HAHO parachuting its forte, so much so that it trained extensively to use the method to get the biggest prize of all: Osama bin Laden. Each Team 6 squadron that deployed to Afghanistan assigned one of its two assault troops the mission to be ready on short notice to conduct a HAHO jump into Pakistan to kill the Al Qaeda leader, if the United States got actionable intelligence on his location. The basic idea would be to load the troop (about fifteen to twenty operators) onto a Combat Talon at Bagram, where the operators would put on oxygen masks at least two hours before jumping, to clear all the carbon dioxide from their systems; fly along—but not over—the Pakistan border, have the SEALs jump at high altitude (probably about 25,000 feet), open their specialized chutes quickly, and then steer themselves on the wind into Pakistan, using handheld Global Positioning System devices. An operator from the squadron’s 3 Troop, which at the time was the reconnaissance troop, would usually be the lead jumper, guiding the rest in and then getting them to the target. When done perfectly, a HAHO jump resulted in twenty operators landing close to each other, ready to fight, up to thirty miles from where they’d jumped, with the enemy being none the wiser. But such perfection was difficult to attain. It required hundreds of practice jumps and the use of unreliable computer programs to help a unit determine its “release point”—the exact right time and place at which to jump. While all freefall missions were challenging and dangerous, the operators considered HAHO a much tougher skill to master than HALO. “It’s just a difficult process,” said a Team 6 SEAL. “There’s so many little things that can just go wrong with it.”
Training for the HAHO mission consumed three to four weeks of the pre-deployment workup for the troop that had the mission. Much of this training was done in Arizona, home of U.S. Special Operations Command’s Parachute Testing and Training Facility at Pinal Airpark northwest of Tucson, but at least one Gold Squadron troop spent part of winter 2003–2004 in Colorado, training for HAHO jumps in the mountains. Upon arriving at Bagram at the start of a rotation, the designated HAHO troop would immediately link up with the Combat Talon crews also on alert for the bin Laden mission and go over what was expected if they got the call. The troop would conduct “fly-away” rehearsals, in which the operators would load onto the plane and fly off, but in order to preserve the secrecy surrounding the HAHO capability, they never jumped.3 “We did not want to really tip our hand,” said a Team 6 source.
In early 2004, intelligence suggested that the SEALs might have an opportunity to put the training to use. A JSOC spy had reported a possibility that bin Laden was in a compound in Miram Shah. “There’s a house where we thought bin Laden was at,” said a special operations source. “We had a spy that was going in there and saying [it].” The evidence was mostly circumstantial—“movement patterns and vehicles,” the source said. There was a tall man living in the compound who always traveled in convoys of multiple vehicles surrounded by numerous people who seemed to act deferentially toward him. “That’s what we were looking at: somebody important is in this compound and it appeared to be bin Laden—tall fellow, and it looked like he had four or five security guys with him. That’s what this Mohawk was telling us, and so we had planned on this target, got a little overhead stuff, and it was around a thirty-kilometer infiltration, so we were putting together the intel to be able to hit this target, but we were never able to confirm that it was him.”
Nonetheless, the Joint Interagency Task Force at Bagram, part of whose mission it was to track Al Qaeda’s network in Pakistan, briefed McChrystal on the possibility that bin Laden had been found. McChrystal asked the briefer to put a percentage on the likelihood that it was bin Laden. “I don’t know,” the briefer replied. “He’s either there or he’s not.” “No, I need at least an 80 percent surety that he’s there,” the general said. The briefer told him that he couldn’t give McChrystal 80 percent surety. “Well then, I’m not going to ask the SecDef for approval to hit this target,” McChrystal said. “The threshold for being able to get execution to launch an operation [across the border] was kind of high,” said a special operations source familiar with the episode.
A year later, a similar sequence of events took place when a Pakistani source for the CIA reported that Al Qaeda’s second- and third-ranking leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Faraj al-Libi, were due to attend a meeting of Al Qaeda’s senior leaders in the Bajaur tribal agency. JSOC hastily put together a plan for a Team 6 parachute assault onto the meeting, where they were to capture as many people as possible and take them to a pickup zone from which helicopters would take them back to Afghanistan. McChrystal and CIA director Porter Goss (who had succeeded George Tenet in 2004) were in favor of the plan, but Rumsfeld and his undersecretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen Cambone, thought it too risky. Rumsfeld ordered that more Rangers be added to the plan. The CIA’s Islamabad station chief also opposed the plan. The Team 6 operators sat on a Combat Talon for hours before Rumsfeld canceled the mission.4 “In the end we still believe that who we thought was in that target was there,” said a senior Team 6 officer.
But Team 6 kept up its HAHO training, ready for a similar mission, especially if bin Laden—or UBL, as JSOC personnel often referred to him—was spotted in the tribal areas. “We were always training for it,” said a senior Team 6 source. “We had a package always on alert to go get UBL with a jump option. If we found him, guys would parachute in—launch in a Talon from Bagram, get their gear on, HAHO, go to altitude, fly across border, twenty-five or thirty kilometers in, land and do the strike, and the rest of the squadron would come in via [helicopters] after it was over. Lots of planning for those.”
The troop designated for the HAHO mission was kept on a very short string at Bagram during the first few years. “Then we, the operators, realized, ‘Hey, this is futile—why don’t we go out and do some other stuff?’” recalled a Team 6 SEAL. So the string gradually loosened to allow the troop to conduct other missions, so long as it could be back at Bagram ready to go within twenty-four hours. No matter where the troop was in Afghanistan when bin Laden was spotted, the mission would launch from Bagram, because that was where the troop kept its freefall gear.
To hide the fact that the unit had this capability available, Team 6 continued to avoid conducting freefall missions in Afghanistan whenever possible. There were some notable exceptions, however. In 2005 the task force got solid intelligence on the location of what a senior Team 6 source described as several “mid- to-upper-level” Al Qaeda figures in eastern Afghanistan. The mission fell to Red Squadron’s designated HAHO troop, led by Lieutenant Commander Francis “Frank” Franky. The troop opted to jump in. “It was a big deal for us to use that package because that package was supposed be only for UBL,” said another Team 6 operator. The mission was a big success. The troop jumped in and conducted “an extremely arduous long patrol” before catching the Al Qaeda personnel asleep, said the senior Team 6 source. “They nailed it,” he said. “That was a big AQ windfall for us. We found all kinds of intel and we captured about seven dudes.”
Another HAHO mission later that year did not turn out as well. On August 31 the Taliban abducted David Addison, a former British soldier working as a security adviser for a road-building project in western Afghanistan. JSOC soon had located Addison and his captors in a cave in Farah province, but time appeared to be running out. “We had some sort of report that they were going to kill him,” said the senior Team 6 source. The task force quickly put together a rescue plan dubbed Operation Big Ben. The plan, which required a night jump into very rugged mountainous terrain, did not meet with universal acclaim, even from Commander Mike Goshgarian, the Blue Squadron commander, whose operators would be jumping. “Gosh was really against it,” said a Team 6 officer. But Bill McRaven, JSOC’s deputy commander for operations and the senior JSOC official in Afghanistan, was “really jazzed on it,” so the mission was a go, he said.
While ISR aircraft kept the cave under observation, the HAHO troop flew on a Combat Talon from Bagram on September 3 and jumped into the night. Another troop’s worth of special operators flew to a military airfield in Herat, from where the plan would have them fly to the objective on Chinooks, arriving almost simultaneously with the HAHO troop.
When the operators landed, “it was like the dark side of the moon,” the officer said. “Boulders everywhere, big boulders, and they came down between the boulders.” No jumper was seriously hurt—“We were very, very, lucky,” he said—but when the operators reached the objective, all they found was Addison’s body in the cave with his throat slit. The failure was a reminder that even as JSOC’s ability to conduct other types of direct action raids and to hunt high-value targets was steadily improving, hostage rescue—the command’s original raison d’être—remained a desperately difficult, unforgiving mission profile.
Team 6 continued to hone its freefall expertise. Its operators considered themselves the best exponents of HALO and HAHO missions in the U.S. military. But the capability did not come without a cost. On February 13, 2008, Senior Chief Petty Officer Tom Valentine, the troop chief for Blue Squadron’s 1 Troop, died in a HAHO training accident in Arizona during the troop’s workup prior to deploying to Afghanistan as the bin Laden “package.”5 An investigation determined that Valentine’s parachute lines became so entangled he was unable to cut away his main chute and deploy the reserve. Three weeks later, Chief Petty Officer Lance Vaccaro, a SEAL going through Team 6’s selection and training course, also died during freefall training in Arizona when his main chute failed to open and he did not deploy his backup chute in time.6
But for all the resources expended on training for such high-risk missions, during the first few years after the fall of the Taliban, JSOC’s cross-border operations existed only in the operators’ minds. The only people JSOC was sending into Pakistan were sources recruited from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s border regions, said a source who served in the Bagram operations center. “We weren’t really sending any of our guys over the border,” he added.
That isn’t to say that no JSOC personnel were in Pakistan after the AFO missions in the tribal areas finally ended. There were, but they were based in the Islamabad embassy. The command installed a team of about half a dozen personnel at the embassy working for a senior Orange officer, who reported directly to McChrystal. “He was working with our intel agencies and [the Pakistani military] trying to figure out where high-level Al Qaeda guys were in the Northwest Frontier Province,” said a source familiar with the mission. While some JSOC personnel in Islamabad functioned mostly as liaisons, Orange also had multiple signals intelligence teams working out of Islamabad with the Pakistani military. “Orange definitely flew [their planes] in Pakistan and they had certain collection capabilities,” said a senior Team 6 source. In addition to the collection packages on the aircraft, Orange also used “a handheld collection capability … to help the Paks,” he said. However, Pakistan continued to keep a tight rein on JSOC’s operations, so none of this activity was “unilateral”—i.e., done without Pakistan’s consent. “There was nothing that Orange could do without the Pak permission,” the Team 6 source said. “It was always with the Paks.”
“You can’t do anything unilateral in that country,” said another special mission unit member. However, the same source declined to say whether Orange had ever placed personnel in Pakistan under nonofficial cover.
In late spring of 2004, there was an embarrassing incident involving a Delta sergeant major who was working as the JSOC team leader’s senior enlisted adviser in Pakistan. Security guards at the Islamabad Sheraton Hotel where the sergeant major was staying searched his car and found hand grenades. “He had just come from the Northwest Frontier Province and I think he’d been driving around, so instead of dropping this stuff off at the embassy [as] he should have done, he drove straight to the hotel,” said a source familiar with the episode. The team leader fired the sergeant major.
To get around Pakistan’s constraints, as the decade wore on, Orange also flew Beechcraft civilian-style propeller planes based in Afghanistan along, but not over, the Pakistan border. The planes contained a “Typhoon Box” into which dozens of phone numbers of interest to JSOC had been entered. The box would register whenever one of them was in use, and then locate the phone.7
* * *
In the fall of 2005 Team 6 finally got the chance to cross the border, albeit on foot rather than via parachute. A Gold Squadron troop walked about ten kilometers across the border toward a compound they had named Objective Cottonmouth near the village of Dandi Sedgai in North Waziristan. The targets were Al Qaeda facilitators that intelligence suggested would be meeting at the compound.
The raid turned into a significant firefight. The SEALs killed “about six or eight” militants, said a senior Team 6 officer. One operator was shot in the calf. The wound forced him to medically retire. Another operator was shot in the head. His helmet deflected the round, but the force of impact flipped him over, injuring his ankle. “Cottonmouth was a good shootout,” said a senior Team 6 operator. The SEALs captured four men and loaded them onto the Task Force Brown Chinooks that landed to take the operators back to Afghanistan. At first the SEALs didn’t think their captives were valuable. “We used to call them dirt farmers,” said the senior Team 6 officer. “We thought they were useless. The longer we held them, the more we got on AQ.”
Within a few weeks, the “dirt farmers” had given up intelligence that allowed the United States to target Al Qaeda’s third in command (which was fast becoming the most dangerous job in the organization), Abu Hamza Rabia. On December 1, 2005, a CIA drone killed Rabia and at least one other militant in the village of Asoray, near Miram Shah.
In a curious attempt to conceal the true nature of the attack, the United States gave the Pakistani military advance notice of the operation so that the Pakistanis could hit the same target with Cobra attack helicopters immediately following the drone strike.8 Bizarrely, the Pakistani military then concocted a second cover story blaming the deaths on the premature detonation of a bomb it said the militants were building. The deception worked briefly. National Public Radio carried an interview with BBC correspondent Zaffar Abbas in which Abbas reported:
“The Pakistani authorities say there was an explosion inside a house which later on they said was a hideout of al-Qaeda operators in the region. And the suggestion has been that probably they were making some kind of a bomb or explosive device over there which went off. But the local tribesmen over there say that it was part of the Pakistani military’s operation in which a number of helicopter gunships were used and rockets were fired at this place. And five people died, two of them believe[d] to be foreign militants, and one of them was Hamza Rabia.”9
But within a couple of days news organizations had figured out the truth.10
Six weeks later, JSOC was involved in another strike in the tribal areas, this time a rare foray over the border by U.S. Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle attack jets. The target was a dinner that intelligence suggested would be attended by Zawahiri and other senior Al Qaeda leaders. “We thought it was [Al Qaeda’s] two through five,” said a JSOC source. The F-15Es were controlled by JSOC, but as they crossed the border they were placed under Title 50 of the U.S. Code, which governs covert operations, so technically they were flying for the CIA.
The pilots’ aim was perfect. The intelligence said the dinner was going to occur in a corner room of the compound. “I watched that corner room disappear and nothing else in that building was impacted,” said the JSOC source. “It was brilliant precision targeting.” There was only one problem. The dinner had already ended and the guests had departed. “They’d all left just before that,” the source said. Reputable news organizations such as The Washington Post reported that the strike “killed more than a dozen people,” none of them members of Al Qaeda. (However, those same news organizations also described the incident as a drone strike.)11 The JSOC source was skeptical of such accounts. “Some of those killed were complicit as hell,” he said.
In the summer of 2007, U.S. intelligence had what it considered its best lead on bin Laden since the Al Qaeda leader’s escape in 2001. The intelligence suggested that bin Laden would be attending a meeting in Tora Bora. JSOC put together Operation Valiant Pursuit. The 160th increased the number of helicopters in Afghanistan from five to eleven. The rest of the plan dwarfed that contingent. Five B-2 Spirit stealth bombers carrying eighty bombs apiece were to pummel Tora Bora. The Team 6 operators who had trained to capture or kill bin Laden were relegated to bit part players in what one senior military officer derided as a “carpet bombing” operation. In the end the expected mass gathering of Al Qaeda leaders never occurred and the mission did not launch. But for years afterward there was grumbling in some quarters that the time it took to gather such a large force together had let an opportunity slip.12
* * *
After taking command of JSOC in June 2008, Bill McRaven wanted to reenergize the hunt for senior Al Qaeda targets thought to be in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The intelligence that supported the search had gone stagnant and the JSOC commander wanted to “shake it up” by taking actions that resulted in phone chatter or other actions on the part of Al Qaeda personnel that would give the United States more targets. “We determined we needed to do a campaign plan,” with the goal of launching a series of raids into the tribal areas, said a JSOC source. In effect, JSOC was trying to re-create the success of its man-hunting campaign in Iraq, which was predicated on the idea that when intelligence was in short supply, it was better to raid possible targets in an effort to “pressure the network” than it was to sit back and wait for perfect intelligence to appear. The task force came up with about eight locations that represented JSOC’s best guess as to the whereabouts of Al Qaeda “associates” in Pakistan, the JSOC source said. A debate ensued over whether it would be better to hit the least important target first, or to start at the top of the chain and work down. Team 6 leaders argued for hitting the highest-ranking target first, on the grounds that the political reaction in Pakistan to news of U.S. ground forces conducting a combat operation on Pakistani soil might mean that one mission was all the task force would be allowed. McRaven disagreed. He wanted to hit the lowest priority target first, to desensitize the Pakistanis to the strikes and demonstrate how well JSOC could execute them. McRaven was the boss, so his view prevailed.
At the same time, Bush administration officials were debating the potential value of a JSOC raiding campaign. Prompted by a “mountain of [intelligence] reporting” that tied the highest levels of the Pakistani government to the support Inter-Services Intelligence was continuing to provide the Taliban, the administration was more willing to risk a Pakistani reaction in order to hit the terrorists that had found a haven in its tribal areas. “The White House let it be known that nobody wanted to be blamed for the next 9/11,” said a Bush administration national security official. Nonetheless, getting the president to sign off on just one raid was a significant achievement for those advocating such a policy shift. “It was a big deal,” said the official. “There were a number of meetings getting the president to approve it.” The first strike would be McRaven’s preferred option: the lowest-ranking target JSOC had, a minor Al Qaeda facilitator. “It was basically for a nobody,” a Team 6 operator said.
Blue Squadron’s 1 Troop—about two dozen operators—conducted the mission on September 3, flying as close as possible to the Pakistan border and then walking over the border at last light. A quick reaction force on Chinooks was also on standby. The target, named Objective Ax, was in the village of Angoor Adda near Wana in South Waziristan. Although it was a troop-level mission, the political sensitivity meant the Blue Squadron commander came along. Someone high up the chain of command had stipulated “that that level of rank was going to control it on the ground,” the operator said. The SEALs arrived at the objective unseen, having walked virtually under the noses of a Pakistani military checkpoint. Operators scaled the compound walls, dropping down into the courtyard and opening the gate for the rest of the troop to enter. Then a door opened. A resident fired a shotgun blast at the SEALs. The next couple of minutes were chaos. “There were women on the target who started tackling our guys, and there were guys having to disarm these women, including throwing them on the floor,” said a senior Team 6 source. “Nobody shot any women. They shot a few guys. But all these women started coming at them.… Guys were getting away, guys were fleeing.” In the midst of the confusion, an aircraft nearby reported that Pakistani forces were moving toward the SEALs. That was all the squadron commander needed to hear. He called in the Task Force Brown helicopters—two MH-60 Black Hawks—and the troop departed at about 3 or 4 A.M., taking a few detainees with them and having suffered one minor wound from a shotgun pellet.
As the Team 6 leaders had predicted, Pakistan’s government reacted strongly to the raid. Officials there claimed twenty locals had died. Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Sadiq called it “a grave provocation.” U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson was also angry with JSOC, telling task force leaders that they had put her in a very awkward position with the Pakistanis. “There was a lot of damage control and really it got pretty ugly,” said a JSOC source. In light of the Pakistani reaction, President Bush forbade further raids. “The value gained from that op,” said a senior Team 6 officer, “was zippo.”13