OCTOBER 3, 2001
HE WAS NOT THE prototype of your typical CIA officer. “James” wore his long hair tied back in a ponytail. I had known one or two young officers in the recent past whose dress and body ornamentation hinted at an extracurricular lifestyle confined to weekends and carefully shielded from colleagues, but James was quite unabashed. Had he been a case officer, his eccentricities would probably have been written off as a somewhat unusual manifestation of a common psychological profile among his peers: extreme independence, inner-directedness, and a confident self-regard bordering on narcissism. But James was a reports officer. Gentle and mild-mannered, one would hardly have branded him an egotist; still, an independent spirit and a benign indifference to social expectations were doubtless assets for a young, first-tour male breaking into a field long dominated by women.
I sank to one knee by his chair, so that we could speak without disturbing the others, clacking away at their keyboards in the reports officers’ bullpen.
“I want you to take the lead on this debriefing. From now on, you’re the SNI Referent. You’re to follow all the traffic, and I’m going to direct anyone with information on the detainees to make sure it gets to you: maps, locations, diagrams, everything. This is yours.” It was a heavy responsibility to place on the shoulders of a young man with a few months’ experience. Lives, including those of two Americans, might depend on him as a result, but he was smart, thorough, and I knew I could rely on him. He had absorbed too much of the agency’s understated professional ethos to show it, but I could tell he was pleased and excited.
In early August 2001, eight members of the German-based humanitarian NGO Shelter Now International (SNI) had been taken into custody by the Taliban in Kabul on suspicion of Christian proselytizing. Among them were two young American women in their twenties, Dayna Curry and Heather Mercer. There were very few Americans in Afghanistan, and the plight of these two, suddenly subject to the medieval brutality of the Taliban penal system, quickly gained the attention of high-level American officials in both Islamabad and Washington.
This was no ordinary consular case. Apostasy is considered a crime throughout the Muslim world, and for the Taliban, it was a crime punishable by death. Woe betide any Afghan even suspected of having been converted to Christianity. The likely sanction to be meted out to those non-Muslims alleged to be the agents of such waywardness was less clear, but certainly something one would wish to avoid.
At first, I strongly doubted their guilt. Given the obvious dangers involved in spreading Christian faith in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, I thought it most unlikely that the SNI arrestees would have been so naive as to attempt it. Other religiously based NGOs active in the Muslim world are careful to confine their activities to humanitarian relief. No, it seemed to me far more likely that the arrests were the product of rumors, Taliban paranoia, and a general Afghan distrust of foreigners. Surely the charges against them would not withstand serious scrutiny.
David Donohue, the consul general in Islambad, was a tall, angular man in his forties, a mild-mannered and rather patrician New Englander. He and I had a constructive professional relationship, though our duties seldom brought us into contact. Paula and I got to know him and his wife socially through a local hiking club. Though he was always unfailingly friendly and polite, I still sensed a slight wariness in his dealings with me. I had the distinct impression that he was not entirely comfortable with the CIA. Imagined or otherwise, such diffidence on the part of State Department colleagues was neither uncommon nor, given our secretiveness, difficult to understand; I certainly didn’t take it personally.
David moved quickly to engage Atif Ali Khan, a competent, Pashtu-speaking Pakistani lawyer with knowledge of sharia—Islamic law—and experience in Afganistan. Ali hadn’t been on the case in Afghanistan very long before the evidence against his clients was revealed to him: to our chagrin, materials on the SNI detainees’ computers made it clear that they were, indeed, seeking to convert Afghan Muslims to Christianity. This was going to make their situation infinitely more difficult. It is always easier to plead innocence of an alleged infraction than to contest the justness or validity of the law in question, and arguing for religious tolerance with the Taliban was a losing proposition. At that point, official efforts shifted further in favor of politically inspired pleas for clemency, rather than legal defense.
In August and early September, some form of clemency seemed a good bet. The Taliban were not entirely unmindful of their international reputation, even if they frequently acted as though they were. Already heavily sanctioned through the United Nations for harboring Osama bin Laden, their global stock had reached an all-time low as a result of their destruction of the so-called “Bamian Buddhas”—two monumental statues, the larger of which some 150 feet high, carved in the sixth century into a sheer rock cliff in the Bamian Valley, and officially listed as a World Heritage Site. The Taliban dynamited the statues as pagan idols in March 2001, claiming it a religious necessity to do so, despite protests from around the world and contrary religious rulings from some of the globe’s most eminent Islamic scholars. A wave of international revulsion followed. If there were a time when the Taliban might be induced to make concessions to world opinion, this appeared to be it. As of September 4, our intelligence indicated that Mullah Omar was leaning in favor of trying the SNI detainees in court to establish their guilt (and thus justify their arrest), and then releasing them as a humanitarian gesture. On September 6, Francesc Vendrell, the UN secretary general’s personal representative for Afghanistan, met with Mullah Jalil on the matter. Jalil gave clear indications that he was trying to work out some arrangement that would provide a public relations boost to the Taliban.
All that changed following the events of September 11. With the United States threatening to go to war, it was clear that U.S. policy regarding bin Laden and al-Qa’ida was not going to change in deference to the SNI detainees; and with the Americans set to attack no matter what the Taliban did about the detainees, it was unlikely the Taliban would release them. In his State of the Union speech of September 20, in an obvious reference to the detainees, President Bush included in his list of demands of the Taliban that they “Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens you have unjustly imprisoned. . . .” But that exaction would not come into play unless and until the Taliban first turned over bin Laden and the rest of the al-Qa’ida leadership. When General Mahmud’s September 28 plea to Omar for the detainees’ release elicited no response, the ISI chief held a separate meeting with Mullah Jalil to press for action. Jalil gave his best spin, suggesting there would soon be a two- or three-day trial, followed by the detainees’ expulsion. His optimism was unconvincing. By the time the American bombing started, it was clear to us that the only way the detainees were going to be freed was if someone bought them out—or forcibly took them.
The eight—four Germans (three women and a man) and two Australians (one woman, one man), in addition to the two American women—began their incarceration at the Dar ul Tudib Reform School, but by late September they were moved to a prison controlled by the Taliban’s General Intelligence Directorate located near the Iranian Embassy and the office of the UN High Commission for Refugees. We hoped against hope that they would stay in one location long enough for us to gather the intelligence necessary to support a rescue effort.
In early October, we got two big breaks. First, one of my case officers made a terrific recruitment of an Afghan source with regular access to the General Intelligence prison. Thanks to “Isfandiar,” now we could be sure of the detainees’ location and monitor their condition, while incrementally building a detailed picture of the facility where they were being kept. The second break came from an unexpected quarter. A friend at the British High Commission called to say that one of their nationals, a female journalist, had recently been incarcerated and then quickly freed by the Taliban, and was available at the British High Commission in Islamabad. She had had direct contact with the female detainees, and had briefly shared their spaces at the General Intelligence prison. This was the opportunity for which I mobilized James, telling him to work in tandem with “Marco,” the senior JSOC liaison officer assigned to work with us. Marco understood precisely what a hostage rescue team would need to know, and so could guide our intelligence-gathering efforts.
We would soon learn just how exacting JSOC’s planning process was. If a target facility has a staircase from the ground to the second floor, JSOC will want to know how wide the opening is, and whether a trooper with full gear will fit through. They will want to know how many stairs there are, and the height of the risers, so they will know how many stairs to take at a stride as they enter. If there is a door at the top, they will want to know whether it opens to the left or to the right, the position of the latch, and whether it is likely to be locked.
Marco and James found the British journalist to be quite remarkable: She had an absolutely photographic memory. By the time they finished, they had extraordinary detail on the entire facility, including the physical layout, the external security posture and procedures, the numbers of guards posted during the day and at night, where they stood, where they slept, and where they kept their weapons. Everything that we could corroborate with satellite photography and through Isfandiar checked out. Marco came to me.
“When we train, we never give ourselves this much information,” he said. “This is more than we would ever have a right to expect.” Now JSOC could begin to put together a serious rescue plan. A mock-up of the prison would soon be constructed in North Carolina, and a commando team designated to train on it.