“Fairly Ponderous and Enormously Heavy”
With U.S. airspace closed to international commercial flights for several days after 9/11, it had taken the better part of a week for the hundreds of JSOC personnel spread across Europe to find their way home from Jackal Cave. The travel difficulties served to remind them that their world had just changed, permanently. As if to reinforce that message and motivate them for the challenges ahead, the pilots of a C-5 taking 160th personnel back to Fort Campbell flew directly over Manhattan, so the aviators could gaze down at what one described as the “smoking hole” that had been the World Trade Center. Along with the absence of any other aircraft in the sky, the sight “really drove home the reality” of the attacks, he said.1
The Delta and JSOC compounds to which many of the JRX participants returned were abuzz with anticipation. “Everybody was running around,” said a JSOC staffer. “Everyone was amped.” However, he added, “there was a lot of uncertainty of what we were going to do, where we were going, who was in charge.”
For Delta, there was a near-term requirement to be ready to respond if terrorists hijacked more commercial airliners. “That kind of occupied a lot of the initial thought process,” said an operator. “But … for us, that was, ‘Okay, all you’ve got to do is give us the scenario. We’re trained, we’ve got all our equipment, the Aztec squadron is prepped and waiting.’”
For a few hours, it seemed as if Delta would get that chance. Shortly after the government allowed normal commercial flights to resume on September 14, rumors flew that another jet had been hijacked and was sitting on the tarmac at Dulles Airport outside Washington, D.C.2 Hijackings in the United States were usually the purview of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, but after September 11 there was a sense at Bragg that the old rules might no longer apply.3 “We flexed on that and got ready to deploy the aircraft takedown team up there,” before the truth that there was no hijacking reached Bragg, said the Delta source.
Meanwhile, Delta’s operators brainstormed. To deter future hijackings, they suggested that the government, in conjunction with the FBI and the airlines, “leak out that there are Delta operators on board almost every flight and then do a fake takedown” using role players “in a first-class compartment that’s all stooges” on an otherwise regular commercial flight, said the Delta source. A “terrorist” would attempt a hijacking before operators in plainclothes took him down “with hand-to-hand or something,” the source said. “Get that out [via the media]. Get inside their heads.” The aim was to “at least make [Al Qaeda] think twice and begin to think, ‘Hey, they’re on to us, there’s special mission unit guys on every airplane.’”
But with Delta commander Colonel Jim Schwitters offering only lukewarm support for the proposal, Dailey vetoed the idea.4 This typified the relationship between the JSOC commander and Delta, which was marked by a mutual distrust. “Dailey already had ideas on things and was unwilling to accept ideas that were starting to percolate up,” the Delta source said.
Responsibility for fleshing out Dailey’s ideas fell to a planning cell the general established within a few days of returning to Pope. Dailey staffed the cell with about twenty to thirty personnel from JSOC and its component units, but rather than keep it at Pope, he put it in some drab offices in the Ranger Regiment’s gray cinder block headquarters at Fort Benning. By now it was clear Al Qaeda was responsible for the September 11 attacks. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was pressuring the military for retaliation options. The cell’s job was to identify targets that JSOC could strike as soon as possible, and then plan missions against those targets.5 But that was easier said than done.
Based in landlocked Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was sheltered by that country’s Taliban regime. A harshly Islamist group that had seized power in 1996, the Taliban had been nurtured by Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency as a hedge against Indian influence in Afghanistan. Drawn almost exclusively from the Pashtun ethnic group that dominated the country’s southern and eastern provinces, by September 2001 the Taliban controlled all Afghanistan, save for the northeastern corner. There, the Northern Alliance, which drew its support from Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, fought a bitter defensive struggle. But on September 9 Al Qaeda had dealt the Alliance a crushing blow, assassinating its legendary military leader Ahmad Shah Massoud.
As it became increasingly clear that the Taliban would not turn over bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders to the United States, as demanded by President George W. Bush in a September 20 address to Congress,6 it became equally apparent the United States was going to go to war in Afghanistan. The only questions were when and how.
The Taliban’s ragtag armed forces—officially Afghanistan’s military, but in reality little more than a collection of Pashtun militias—offered few major targets for the vast, high-tech military machine now focusing its attention on the impoverished Central Asian country. There was a small antique air force that the United States and her allies would soon put out of action, but no major early warning radar systems, armored divisions, or naval shipyards against which to deliver devastating attacks. The same was true, on a smaller scale, of Al Qaeda, a terrorist organization whose strength lay in its members’ dedication, not in any particular piece of hardware. Other than its key leaders, whose location the U.S. intelligence community was frantically trying to divine, Al Qaeda possessed little worth bombing or raiding.
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was quickly becoming frustrated by the shortage of options that the military was presenting him.7 “We were being pressured enormously by Rumsfeld to do things and come up with ideas,” said a senior member of the Joint Staff (a headquarters staff in the Pentagon that supports the Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).
That pressure soon cascaded down to Tommy Franks, the bluff Army general who ran Central Command, or CENTCOM, which encompassed the Middle East, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and to JSOC, its component units and the planning cell. “All the organizations were told: Try and find targets,” said Mike Hall, Dailey’s senior enlisted adviser. The warrant and senior noncommissioned officers who labored in the intelligence “shops” at JSOC and its special mission units scoured maps, imagery, and intelligence reports for anything that might be of value to the Taliban or Al Qaeda that JSOC could strike.8 They passed what they found to the planning cell, but the fact was there weren’t many good targets to be had in Afghanistan, for JSOC or anyone else. This would soon lead to a clash between Dailey’s preference for the sort of elaborate, set-piece operations to which the joint readiness schedule of the 1990s had accustomed the command, and the desire of others in JSOC, particularly in Delta, for less visible, more patient work to hunt down Al Qaeda’s leadership.
For the planning cell, eighteen- to twenty-hour workdays in overcrowded offices cluttered with papers, maps, laptops, and printers were the norm. “Dailey would come in, give a little bit of guidance, a little bit of focus, and then he’d leave,” said a planner. The mood was “100 percent mission focus and figuring out how we could best meet Dailey’s intent, right or wrong,” the planner said. “You woke up and that’s all you did and you just quit when you were too tired.”
The limited menu of targets from which to choose was not the only constraint under which the planners worked. They also were hostage to the twin tyrannies of time and distance. In keeping with JSOC’s modus operandi at the time, the missions had to begin and end during the course of a single night, or, in JSOC-speak, one “period of darkness.”9 JSOC’s operational approach, honed over dozens of JRXs, was to establish an intermediate staging base, or ISB, close enough to the target that the mission could be launched directly from the ISB, but secure enough to host the joint operations center. The most obvious location would have been one of the numerous military airfields along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. But Pakistan would only allow support flights—such as combat search and rescue missions or quick reaction forces—to be staged out of its territory. Direct action missions were out of the question.
That left the three Central Asian republics that bordered Afghanistan to the north: Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. The planners considered using Termez, an Uzbek town near the border, but eventually decided to assume JSOC would stage out of Kharsi-Khanabad, another Uzbek air base. Any targets would therefore have to be in northern Afghanistan.
By Monday, September 17, relying on work done in the years prior to 9/11, JSOC’s intelligence analysts had produced a list of six potential targets.10 All but one were petroleum facilities or airfields within forty-five miles of the border. The exception was a fertilizer plant in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan’s fourth largest city, about forty miles south of the Uzbek border.11 It was that target to which Dailey took a particular shine and on which he told his planners to focus.12
* * *
While his planners wrestled with the challenges of mounting a series of assaults on a landlocked country on the other side of the world, Dailey was summoned to Washington to brief the president on the missions JSOC was proposing. Bush had originally been scheduled to visit JSOC, but that trip was canceled out of concern it would give away the nature of the planning under way. Instead, Dailey would brief Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon on September 17.13 (The White House and the Defense Department kept the reason for the president’s visit under wraps, instead telling the public that Bush and Cheney were at the Pentagon to get briefed on the call-up of 35,000 military reservists. The visit would be remembered mainly for Bush’s comment to reporters that bin Laden was “wanted—dead or alive.”)14
Rumsfeld’s office faxed a copy of Dailey’s PowerPoint slides to the White House less than an hour before the briefing was set to start. The National Security Council staff had only a few minutes to review the presentation before the presidential motorcade pulled out of the driveway. Frank Miller, a special assistant to Bush and NSC senior director for defense policy, grabbed the slides and glanced through them. He was immediately troubled by a line on a slide that listed options for action in Afghanistan: “Thinking Outside the Box—Poisoning Food Supply.”15
“That struck me as wrong,” Miller said. “Poisoning food supplies would harm innocent civilians and we just weren’t going down that road.” It also could be interpreted as implying the possible use of biological weapons, which the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention banned the United States from possessing. Miller quickly checked with a colleague who knew more than he did about the convention. “We agreed that this was not a good thing,” Miller said. When the motorcade reached the Pentagon he grabbed his boss, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, who’d been in another vehicle but was also due to attend Dailey’s briefing. “I showed her the slide,” Miller said. “I said, ‘This is completely wrong—I don’t know what they’re talking about, it could potentially get into the areas of the BWC. We don’t do this.’” Rice agreed strongly, but the start of the briefing was only minutes away.
“We walked upstairs to the secretary’s office and she put the slide in front of Rumsfeld and said, ‘You’re not going to show this slide to the president of the United States,’” Miller said. “And he looked at her and took it and walked away without saying a word. And in fact the slide did not get shown in the briefing.”
Off-the-wall ideas such as poisoning the Afghan food supply flourished because JSOC was having tremendous difficulty finding viable targets. A senior member of the Joint Staff attributed this, in part, to a tension between the “culture of JSOC at the time, which was fairly ponderous and enormously heavy in its orientation,” and “the melodramatic reaction of people like Rumsfeld after 9/11 to just ‘do something.’
“The conflict between the two and the pressure … probably produced some fairly bizarre notions,” he said. Indeed, Dailey repeatedly complained to subordinates that “we’ve got no targets,” said a Delta source. “So he goes up [to Washington], yanks that out of his ass—poison the fucking food supply.”
Among the possible missions Dailey did brief in the Pentagon was a Ranger raid on an airstrip attached to a hunting camp southwest of Kandahar owned by a United Arab Emirates military official, but the JSOC commander’s priority was an attack on the fertilizer factory, which the planners had named Objective Goat. “This fertilizer factory had gained some legs, and it was obviously gaining legs because Dailey wanted it to,” said a planning cell member. After Dailey delivered the last slide, the room fell quiet. “It was sort of dead because the president’s there and all the generals, they’re waiting for him to say something,” said Mike Hall, Dailey’s top NCO, who was the only enlisted service member there. Bush locked eyes with Hall. “Sergeant Major, some people are going to get hurt,” the president said. “Is it worth it?” Although he had reservations about the initial targets, Hall thought the president was asking about the wider military operation in Afghanistan, so he answered that he thought it was.
The focus on the fertilizer factory was hugely controversial within JSOC. Dailey’s rationale was that Al Qaeda might be using it to produce chemical weapons. CIA human intelligence suggested the production of urea and ammonia, both used in the manufacture of such weapons. Imagery indicated the site was surrounded by seven guard towers and other fighting positions. Intelligence analysts said the towers were manned by a security force of fifty personnel working in shifts. That was enough for Dailey.16 Tommy Franks was likewise persuaded.17
But the planning cell dismissed this notion. “None of us had a lot of confidence in that target,” said a cell member. The notion that Al Qaeda was producing chemical weapons was a “giant leap” from the available intelligence, he said. “I just remember us going through the motions, going, ‘It’s got to get better than this.’”
Several senior figures on the JSOC staff and in Delta, the unit slated to lead the assault, shared the planners’ disdain for the target and couldn’t believe Dailey was allowing it to consume JSOC’s time and energy while strategic targets like bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders were still at large in Afghanistan. “We were like, ‘We’ve got to think outside the box here, guys,’” said a Delta source. “‘Let’s get away from this … JSOC mentality of setting up another massive JRX, and let’s do things that matter.’” Instead, he said, “We spent all our time planning this massive raid on that empty target.” The critics thought JSOC should focus on hunting bin Laden and working with the CIA to insert teams with the Northern Alliance. Coherent change detection, a technique that measures the differences in images of the same location captured by satellite-mounted synthetic aperture radar, supported their skepticism of the fertilizer plant.18 “The coherent change detection sensors were all focused on this thing,” the Delta source said. “So after four days, this thing that was being briefed to the president as, ‘Yes, there are guards there, we believe the guard force is small but highly trained, they patrol the perimeter and that part is going to require some combat power’—well, coherent change detection detected no movement … no vehicles, nothing.”
One of the loudest voices arguing against the Mazar target was that of Lieutenant Colonel Pete Blaber, a tall, lean former Ranger who’d joined Delta a decade earlier and had a reputation for speaking his mind. The personality conflict between Dailey, who, not unusually for a career special operations aviator, favored a process-oriented approach,19 and Blaber, a supremely self-confident climbing and hiking enthusiast who viewed the military decision-making process as something close to a waste of time,20 would reverberate through the next two years of JSOC’s history. But for now Dailey held the whip hand as JSOC’s two-star commander while the naysayers wore the oak leaves and eagles of majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels, so the plan to attack the fertilizer factory moved inexorably forward.
* * *
It was late evening in the cramped, windowless space that served as the planning cell’s main briefing room. The utilitarian furniture was strewn with empty coffee cups, full spit cups, and open laptops bearing red stickers warning that classified information was contained therein. Maps covered the walls. About fifteen sleep-deprived men sat in the harsh electric light listening to a tall, dark-haired colleague in his mid-thirties.
Seated were the operations officers from most of JSOC’s units, a few staffers from the command, as well as Colonel Joe Votel, commander of the Ranger Regiment, and Dell Dailey. Briefing was Major Tom DiTomasso, Delta’s B Squadron operations officer and the planning cell’s senior Delta representative. As a lieutenant, DiTomasso had led a Ranger platoon in Mogadishu, the last high-profile JSOC battle. Now he was proposing how to fight the next one.
The target was the fertilizer plant. Under pressure to find a target JSOC could hit soon, Dailey had selected the target but told the planners he was open to ideas about how to strike it. DiTomasso’s plan was classic Delta: stealthy, elegant, and lethal: a small number of operators would freefall parachute into the area, hit the factory hard and fast in specific locations, and then have TF Brown pick them up with the mission complete. “It was very low-vis,” said an officer who was there. “They’d never have known what hit them and from where.”
The plan impressed several of those listening, but not Dailey, who wanted a much bigger extravaganza as JSOC’s first mission of the war. “What in the hell kind of bullshit is that?” yelled the JSOC commander. “We ain’t doing that.”
“Dailey absolutely like a laser blew Tom out of the water,” said the officer. “Essentially stripped him in front of God and everybody about what a dumb idea that was.” Those present got the message. Despite his professed openness to out-of-the-box thinking, Dailey wasn’t interested in tactical solutions that weren’t big, JRX-style operations. “He eviscerated Tom right then and there for a plan that most people thought could have worked,” said the officer. The planners went back to work, under the strong impression that for JSOC’s first combat operation of the twenty-first century, stealth and secrecy were not only not required, they were to be avoided.21
* * *
On September 19, Dailey visited Benning, where the planning cell and other key individuals were holding a series of scaled-down rehearsals (called “rock drills”) of the raid on Objective Goat and other proposed missions. The plan had morphed to one in which thirty-six hours of air strikes would precede a nighttime air assault on Kunduz Airfield in northeast Afghanistan (deemed a psychological operations target) and near-simultaneous strikes by fixed wing and helicopter gunships against a petroleum plant. On the third night, Delta and the Rangers would stage out of Kharsi-Khanabad, raid the fertilizer factory, take chemical samples, and then depart via one or more MC-130s that would land close by, before the Air Force dropped a BLU-82 “daisy cutter” bomb to destroy the complex. The mission was due to take place as soon as September 26.22
The strike against the factory was a key element of the plans Franks and Dailey briefed to Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon September 20. But serious doubts persisted.23 The two generals were due to brief Bush the next day.24 Deeply dissatisfied with what he’d heard, Rumsfeld had Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith draft a memo to set the stage for the president. The memo made clear not only the priority now attached to the fertilizer plant target, but the shaky foundations upon which the plan rested. “We may come up empty-handed,” it said. “Can’t count on finding proof of chemical weapons production in the fertilizer factory that is our prime target.”25
Early the next afternoon, Franks and Dailey traveled to the White House to brief the president. Also present were Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Henry “Hugh” Shelton, and Air Force General Richard Myers, the Joint Chiefs vice chairman who would succeed Shelton when the latter retired in October. “The secret JSOC part of the operation” was “a big part of the plan,” according to Shelton. But the briefing was also notable for a shift in emphasis since Shelton presented options to Bush and the National Security Council at Camp David September 15. That brief had focused on possible conventional military attacks—mostly cruise missile and air strikes—and left the president and his advisers underwhelmed. But now Franks proposed inserting Special Forces teams into Afghanistan to advise and assist the Northern Alliance in their war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.26 Such a mission would be a classic example of “unconventional warfare,” which means using guerrilla forces to overthrow a hostile government and is a doctrinal Special Forces mission. While Dailey and his staff had been focused on the fertilizer factory, plans were under way to make their “white” special ops counterparts the centerpiece of the war in Afghanistan.
But no matter how thin the evidence that anything nefarious was occurring at the fertilizer factory, JSOC not only kept planning to assault it, but that plan became increasingly elaborate. Under Dailey’s direction, JSOC was reverting to what it knew best: a massive JRX-style operation involving as many of its component units as possible.
Some argued for missions that went beyond this restrictive template. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Schiller, TF Brown’s operations officer, proposed using a small force to seize Bagram air base, about forty miles north of Kabul. A former commander of the 160th’s Little Bird gunship company, Schiller wanted to stage Little Bird raids and other missions from Bagram into northeastern Afghanistan, where bin Laden was presumed (correctly) to be hiding. But Dailey had no interest in taking the air base early on, let alone launching Little Bird missions from it. A former Black Hawk pilot, the general was skeptical that Little Birds, with their limited range and power, had much to offer in a vast country consisting largely of deserts and mountains.27
Although the planning cell’s Delta and Team 6 representatives had thus far taken the lead in proposing operational concepts, Dailey’s putdown of DiTomasso had a predictable effect. “Tom essentially after that, I don’t want to say shut down, but [his attitude was], ‘Okay, why don’t you just tell me what you want and that’s what we’ll do,’” said a planning cell member. “And kind of from that point forward, Dailey did end up driving that train on the target sets.”
Several factors drove Dailey’s preference for big, highly synchronized operations. One was that the command had been moving in that direction for many years. With Dailey, “that’s what you’re going to get, because that’s the way JSOC had been through the ’90s,” said the planning cell member. “And to be fair to JSOC, if you train to these big, complex ones, it makes the smaller ones easier to do.”
Another was Dailey’s aviation background. Military aviation culture is “to mitigate risk on every level, because any aircraft accident is a significant emotional event,” said a TF Brown officer. “Most of us that are aviators are pretty process-oriented, because that’s the way you get to success: through some very significant level of detailed planning, not double-checked but triple-checked,” said another TF Brown officer who knew Dailey well. “That’s kind of beat into you from the time you start in the 160th.”
Dailey’s perceived risk aversion would only have been exacerbated by a third factor: the JSOC intelligence analysts’ wildly exaggerated estimates of the enemy threat in Afghanistan. Again and again in the weeks after 9/11, intelligence briefings focused on implausible worst-case scenarios, rather than what some of the best troops in the world might reasonably expect to face from a poorly equipped rabble.28
But the fourth factor behind Dailey’s insistence on making JSOC’s first missions such elaborate affairs was perhaps the most important: pressure from Franks, Rumsfeld, and Bush for a mission that would send a message not only to the Taliban and Al Qaeda but also to the American public that the United States could reach out and put troops anywhere it wanted in Afghanistan. This appealed to Dailey, who was particularly fond of influence, deception, and psychological operations. Together such missions fell under the rubric of information operations, or IO.29
Planning continued even after a September 22 brief by the Ranger Regiment’s intelligence officer that Goat might be empty and the plant might close. But as the plan became ever more complex and other targets presented themselves, the date for the raid kept slipping to the right. It was now slated for October 12. (Another factor behind the frequent postponements was a desire to conduct the air assault on as dark a night as possible. By shifting the date closer to mid-October, the planners were ensuring JSOC’s first mission in Afghanistan would take place under a cloak of darkness.)
The Ranger intelligence briefing was part of another rock drill Dailey attended that gave an indication of the difference in scale between DiTomasso’s original proposal and the sort of plan the JSOC commander preferred. The latest version of the plan to assault a target most observers thought was empty would require a minimum of about 160 ground troops and twenty-four aircraft.30
But the clock was ticking for the fertilizer factory mission. During a video-teleconference the previous evening, Dailey told the planners to think about possible targets in southern Afghanistan. Three days later, the planners learned Central Command was considering five targets for JSOC. While the factory remained first on the list, three of the others were in southern Afghanistan. JSOC’s focus was shifting south. Another September 24 announcement explained why: the command no longer planned to locate its intermediate staging base in Central Asia. The requirement for missions to be completed during the course of a single night remained, but two new staging options meant the assault forces would be coming from the south, not the north.31
* * *
With the United States still negotiating with Afghanistan’s Central Asian neighbors for use of their air bases, Pakistan unlikely to allow large numbers of U.S. troops into its restive tribal areas adjacent to Afghanistan, and Rumsfeld impatient to put boots on the ground in Afghanistan, Tommy Franks had been working on other options. “We needed to stage SOF [special operations forces], particularly the elite SMU troopers of the Joint Special Operations Command, close enough to strike al Qaeda in their mountain redoubt in southeast Afghanistan,” he wrote in his autobiography. “And we needed to stage them soon.”32
The solution came to Franks as he studied a map of the region projected onto a screen in his headquarters’ “war room.” He returned to his office and called Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark on a secure line. “Vern, we’re going to need an aircraft carrier for some unusual duty,” he told the Navy officer.33 On September 27 the Kitty Hawk, a Yokosuka, Japan–based carrier, was conducting sea trials and exercises in the Philippine Sea when it was alerted for Operation River City—its role in JSOC’s war in Afghanistan. After dispensing with most of its aircraft in order to clear space for JSOC forces, the carrier sailed for the northern Arabian Sea.34 Positioning the Kitty Hawk there would allow JSOC to get to and from targets in southern Afghanistan within one night by crossing over the deserts of southwestern Pakistan and southern Afghanistan, thereby avoiding the risky flights over 10,000-foot mountains that an attack on the Taliban heartland from Central Asia would have necessitated.35
Operating from a carrier was nothing new for JSOC, which had used the America during 1994’s operation to remove Haiti’s military junta. More recently, about six months before September 11 during a JRX centered in Qatar, JSOC had put forces on a flattop that then sailed up the Persian Gulf before launching a helicopter attack on a target in Kuwait. Flying off carriers was standard operational procedure for TF Brown, which trained for such missions about once a year. JSOC called a carrier used thus an afloat forward staging base.36
But not even a carrier could accommodate the massive operations center JSOC hauled around the world, nor could a flight deck handle all the fixed and rotary wing aircraft the command was preparing to deploy. For those, Franks had another location in mind, one that was 700 miles from Afghanistan, but which had a special resonance for JSOC: Masirah Island off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea.
It was from Masirah that on April 24, 1980, a Delta assault force launched on three Combat Talons en route to the landing site in Iran named Desert One. That mission had ended in fiery disaster. But anguished memories aside, Masirah retained the advantages that had made it an attractive base for Operation Eagle Claw: a runway capable of handling large Air Force transport aircraft, relative proximity to the combat zone, and total seclusion.
Following September 11, Central Command, which, like U.S. Special Operations Command, was located at MacDill, had worked to gain access to Masirah for the war in Afghanistan.37 By September 20, Oman’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos bin Sa’id, had given permission to stage special operations troops and aircraft there, including AC-130 gunships.38
Word that JSOC might have both Masirah and a carrier available from which to launch attacks had reached the planners September 18, but with no confirmation they had continued to assume any missions would originate in Central Asia.39 News that the attacks would be launched from the south spelled the beginning of the end for the plan to assault Objective Goat. Years later, nobody could remember exactly when JSOC stopped planning to hit the factory; they were just glad that it did. “As people asked questions, it just didn’t pass scrutiny,” said Hall. “Of course, it turned out to be a fertilizer factory.”
* * *
During this period a potential mission arose that in retrospect seems bizarre but which JSOC took very seriously. U.S. intelligence sources reported that bin Laden had left Afghanistan and made his way to Southern Africa. The intelligence was specific enough that Delta’s A Squadron spent several days planning an operation based upon it, before being told to stand down when the intelligence didn’t pan out.40 “That sidetracked us briefly,” said a Delta source.
* * *
A couple of days after returning from Budapest, Jim Reese, the AFO operations officer, left JSOC headquarters for a run. He returned to find Dailey and Holland, who was visiting from MacDill, waiting for him. Dailey told him to go home, pack some civilian suits, and fly up to Washington. There he was to visit the Pentagon to receive guidance before driving to Langley, Virginia, and reporting to Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet. Reese was to be JSOC’s point man at the CIA.41
Reese was perfect for the job. “He brings people together,” said a Delta operator who’d worked with him for years. Delta officers nicknamed him “Serpico” due to his resemblance to the Al Pacino character in the movie of the same name, while NCOs called him “Hollywood,” often shortened to “The ’Wood,” on account of his good looks and gregariousness. But he was also operationally savvy and possessed infectious self-confidence.42
Reese flew up early the week of Monday, September 17, and went straight to the Pentagon, where he met with Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz. “Are you the Delta guy?” Wolfowitz asked. “Yes sir,” Reese replied. “Go report to George Tenet,” Wolfowitz said. “Bridge the gap between DoD and the CIA.”
A Defense Department driver took Reese to CIA headquarters, where he arrived late in the afternoon still carrying his suitcases. Security guards then took him straight to a crowded conference room on the seventh floor, where Tenet’s daily 5 P.M. meeting with his senior staff was just starting. A man in his mid-sixties with steel-colored hair and an engaging smile sitting near the head of the table noticed Reese standing in the doorway looking lost. “Are you the Delta guy?” he said. “Yes sir, I am,” Reese replied. “Come up here, sit next to George,” said the man, pointing to a chair next to Tenet. The person welcoming Reese to the CIA was A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, the Agency’s number three, whose son was a SEAL officer.
Reese sat quietly as analysts briefed Tenet. His job was to facilitate the CIA’s coordination and cooperation with special operations forces, as well as to help the Agency plan its campaign in Afghanistan. To help him, Reese immediately asked for and received Sam Stanley, his radio operator from the AFO cell, while the Army assigned him a military intelligence officer named Captain Kara Soules. The CIA put his tiny team in the Counterterrorist Center, or CTC, where they worked closely with the center’s director, Cofer Black; Hank Crumpton, who Black had picked to run the war in Afghanistan; and Jose Rodriguez, the CTC chief of staff. All welcomed the military trio warmly, making sure they had full access to everything the Agency was doing.43
The easy cooperation between Reese’s team and the CTC personnel at Langley was at variance with the frustration Rumsfeld was expressing in the Pentagon over the military’s need to wait for the CIA to blaze a trail with the Northern Alliance before sending in Special Forces teams. The defense secretary “later declared it inexcusable that the Defense Department couldn’t use its numerous and costly forces until the CIA shook some hands,” according to Feith.44 In his autobiography, Rumsfeld is careful to say his relations with Tenet were good,45 but others said that warmth did not extend to the secretary’s views of the CIA at large. Rumsfeld displayed “incredible impatience and disgust with the CIA,” said a senior member of the Joint Staff.
It irked Rumsfeld when Franks told him as late as October 15 that Special Forces teams were waiting for the CIA’s okay to enter Afghanistan.46 But the delays were actually down to the military chain of command. The CIA was more than ready to welcome the participation of JSOC and other special ops forces in the Afghanistan operation. As late as October 4, Gary Schroen, who led the first CIA team into Afghanistan, complained to Crumpton that he had “begged and pleaded with each of the commands—Delta, Special Forces, SEALs, Gray Fox—to send a team to join us,” to no avail.47 (Gray Fox was the latest code name for the Army of Northern Virginia.)
JSOC’s operators were likewise champing at the bit. While still in Budapest, Blaber had called “Phil,” who headed the CIA’s Special Activities Division. Would Delta be able to send a couple of operators in with the Agency teams preparing to infil into Afghanistan, Phil asked. “Of course,” replied Blaber. “Count us in.”48 (Blaber was no stranger to the challenges of planning for missions in Afghanistan. In 1998, as OST commander, he helped plan Delta’s bin Laden capture mission.)49
But at all levels of command above the operators, from Delta through JSOC, SOCOM, and CENTCOM, there was hesitation about whether and how to commit the military’s most elite forces. “They were totally against us sending guys in with Schroen and crew [on the grounds it was] too risky,” said a Delta source involved in the discussions. To the operators’ intense frustration, neither Central Command nor JSOC were keen to deploy forces into Afghanistan until combat search and rescue, or CSAR (“see-sar”), helicopters could be positioned close enough to come to their aid. “CENTCOM and JSOC were against anything without CSAR,” the Delta source said. “Meanwhile the CIA is sending into Afghanistan guys with an average age in their forties, most of whom with little to no military experience.”
Loath to put his people under another organization’s command, Dailey was therefore opposed to attaching JSOC personnel to the Agency teams going into Afghanistan. Schwitters, the Delta commander, was of like mind. “And if ‘the Unit’ commander’s against it, how is a guy like Dailey ever going to be for something?” the Delta source said. (Not all Delta operators shared this view of Schwitters, an Eagle Claw veteran. One experienced unit member noted that Schwitters was nicknamed “Flatliner” due to his even-keeled temperament, which some could mistake for a lack of enthusiasm. Schwitters “was all about getting us involved,” but wanted to ensure Delta’s unique skill sets would be used for legitimate missions, rather than hollow shows of force, he said.)
Some in Delta argued for deploying an entire squadron into the Panjshir Valley, the fastness in northeastern Afghanistan still held by the Northern Alliance. The CIA’s Schroen, already in the Panjshir, supported the plan, saying Delta could “use the valley as a staging area for raids on Al Qaeda leaders behind enemy lines.”50 But this initiative also foundered on the rocks of Dailey’s skepticism.
In the minds of some operators, Dailey was anxious to avoid Delta taking the lead, particularly without a JSOC headquarters in close proximity. Prior to becoming an aviator Dailey had been an infantry officer in the Rangers, and some JSOC personnel perceived a favoritism toward the Rangers and the 160th on the part of their commander. Hall acknowledged a widespread belief in the special mission units, Delta in particular, and that Dailey was biased against them, but said this was a misperception on the operators’ part. “He had a very deep respect [for the operators],” Hall said. “Sometimes he wasn’t very good at expressing it, unfortunately. Because he didn’t speak the language, he wasn’t one of them.”
One of the strongest advocates for putting a squadron into the Panjshir, Blaber continued to mount an insurgency against what he considered Dailey’s intransigence and lack of imagination. He was not alone. A couple of other operators as well as Phil and one or two others at the CIA kept lines of communication open, working every angle to try to get Delta into the fight. At first, Blaber called Phil on Delta’s red classified phones, but after JSOC banned its people from talking to their CIA contacts without going through the Agency’s liaison officer at JSOC headquarters, he was forced to call Phil from outside the Delta compound on an untraceable calling card.51 Eventually the CIA operatives got tired of waiting. “They just got sick of it,” said a Delta source. “They were like, ‘Forget it, man, I’ll see you over there.’”
Meanwhile, at JSOC headquarters there was similar frustration with Central Command. Relations between Dailey and Franks were cordial, but the same could not be said for their staffs. The need to go to war in Afghanistan had caught CENTCOM cold and the four-star command was struggling to respond. “They didn’t seem to be a heck of a lot of help to us, and [were] almost a hindrance,” Hall said. Only part of that could be put down to “the JSOC arrogance” rubbing CENTCOM staffers the wrong way, he said. “I’m not sure anybody at CENTCOM thought this was really, really serious other than General Franks.… We thought he was pretty much switched on [about] what had to happen, but you certainly didn’t have that level of confidence from his staff.”
Indeed, some at JSOC still doubted that they’d be called into action, despite the scale of the September 11 attacks and all the feverish activity since. Memories of being “spun up many, many times before,” only to be dialed back down, were too fresh and too strong, said Hall. Opinion “was probably evenly split” over whether they would be sent into battle, he said. “A lot of us old guys … really wondered if there would be the national will to do that, quite frankly.…
“It was Schoomaker that always talked about the Ferrari that was kept in the garage,” Hall said, referring to the former JSOC commander’s comments in Richard Schulz’s “Showstoppers” article. “Most of us had grown up in that environment. We figured the Ferrari’s still going to be in the garage.” But this time the skeptics were wrong. The garage doors were opening and the Ferrari was about to be taken for a drive. A very long drive.