(1) Early years in the spy game. With Paula and our son Doug, then nine months old, in Nuremberg, Germany, November 1988.
(1) Early years in the spy game. With Paula and our son Doug, then nine months old, in Nuremberg, Germany, November 1988.
(2) Being inducted into the Senior Intelligence Service by CIA’s then deputy director, George Tenet, in 1996.
(3) Matchbook advertising a $5 million reward for Osama bin Laden for distribution in Afghanistan, in 1999. The small Arabic print at the bottom of the cover reads: “Danger—Close cover before starting fire.”
(4) Our residence in Islamabad, Pakistan, from 1999 to 2002. It provided a wonderful view of the Margalla Hills to the north of the city.
(5) Pre-9/11 Pakistan. Hiking with Paula and Doug in the mountains of northern Pakistan near Chitral in the fall of 2000. The peaks of the Hindu Kush rise behind us.
(6) Director Tenet meeting in his Langley office with Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, chief of Pakistan’s storied—some would say infamous—intelligence service, the ISI, in March 2000. We would fail to gain his cooperation against bin Laden.
(7) My half of two Pakistani rupee notes torn by Mullah Akhtar Mohammed Osmani, the number two figure in the Taliban, at our meeting in Quetta on October 2, 2001. His portions of the bills were to serve as bona fides for any emissaries he might send me. They were never used.
(8) With Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in my station office after our meeting on November 4, 2001. To the left are Under Secretary of Defense Doug Feith and Michele Sison, the deputy chief of mission in Islamabad.
(9) With Hamid Karzai—third from the right—and five of the six tribal elders who were part of his initial guerrilla force. We met on November 5, 2001, a day after CIA arranged for their evacuation by U.S. military helicopter from Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, to a Pakistani airbase in Jacobabad. Fourth from the left is “Jeff,” my senior reports officer.
(10) A portion of Afghan tribal leader Gul Agha Shirzai’s anti-Taliban force immediately after crossing the Pakistan border into the Shin Naray Valley, Afghanistan, on November 14, 2001. Just over three weeks later, they would enter Kandahar City.
(11) At the Peiwar Kotal Pass on the Pak-Afghan border on November 28, 2001. With me are Maj. Gen. “Jafar Amin” of the ISI, fifth from the right; his aide, second from the right; and an escort from the Kurram Militia. Behind us are the Safed Koh Mountains, through which we anticipated bin Laden and his followers would flee the American bombing of Tora Bora.
(12) Fragment of a U.S. bomb which mistakenly fell on the Pakistani border post at Peiwar Kotal. It was given to me on November 28, 2001, as a souvenir by the khassadar—tribal policeman—who was nearly killed by it.
(13) “Dave,” my deputy, and me getting chummy with Senators John Warner and Carl Levin (on the phone), after providing a briefing on the progress of the war in December 2001. Moments later, Senator Levin would be complaining loudly after tearing his shirt on a weapons crate in the hallway.
(14) View of Kandahar City from the roof of the Governor’s Palace, early January 2002. Days before, CIA bomb experts had defused a parting gift from the fleeing Taliban, buried in that earthen roof: twenty land mines wired together and set to fire downward.
(15) Another view from the Governor’s Palace in Kandahar. The blue dome of the mausoleum of Ahmed Shah Durrani, father of modern Afghanistan, can be seen through the dust haze; next door is the shrine of Kerqa Sharif, where a cloak said to belong to the Prophet Muhammad (pbuh) is kept.
(16) The outer wall of Mullah Omar’s house, surprisingly intact after General Tommy Franks’s promise to turn it into a “smoking hole.” Second from right, facing the camera, is Haji Gulalai, Gul Agha’s security chief, who would later become infamous for his harsh methods. At the far right is Ahmed Wali Karzai, Hamid Karzai’s half brother, later to become the “strongman” of Kandahar; he would be assassinated in July 2011.
(18) Watching as the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit is replaced by elements of the 101st Airborne Division at Kandahar Airport, early January 2002. Brig. Gen. James Mattis, the Marine commander, took me to observe the al-Qa’ida militants captured by the Pakistanis just south of Tora Bora, who were then being held at Kandahar.
(19) Looking back from the co-pilot’s seat of the station aircraft on a stopover at Kabul, early January 2002.
(20) Gen. Tommy Franks, Commander CENTCOM, during a briefing at ISI Headquarters, January 2002. In the right foreground is an appreciative Lt. Gen. Ehsan ul-Haq, director-general of the ISI. I’m dressed in mufti, about to depart for North Waziristan in the Tribal Areas.
(21) With General “Jafar,” far left, and the commander of the Tochi Scouts at the Ghulam Khan border observation post in North Waziristan, January 2002.
(22) General “Jafar” and me with officers of the Thal Scouts in southern Kurram Agency, January 2002. Behind us is the Kurram River Valley.
(23) The Safed Koh, or White Mountains, seen from Parachinar in northern Kurram, in January 2002. Al-Qa’ida militants, fleeing from Tora Bora, had come through the snowy passes a few weeks before. Some 130 of them were captured by Pakistani security forces.
(24) A graveyard at Arawali, in northern Kurram Agency, where a number of escaped al-Qa’ida detainees were killed by Pakistani lashgars, or tribal militias. Women from the local tribes decorated their graves with prayer flags to honor them as shouhada—martyrs.
(25) The British-era officers’ guest quarters at Miram Shah Fort, home of the Tochi Scouts, in North Waziristan Agency, April 2002.
(26) Inspecting the Saidgi border crossing in North Waziristan in April 2002. In the aftermath of U.S. Operation Anaconda at Shahi Kot, Afghanistan, American concern over al-Qa’ida fighters fleeing into Pakistan was at its height.
(27) My Frontier Corps escort on a visit to the headquarters of the South Waziristan Scouts at Wana, South Waziristan Agency, in April 2002. I was responding to reports of “thousands” of al-Qa’ida militants in the area.
(28) The defile at Shahur Tangi, South Waziristan, site of the famous ambush of a British-Indian Army convoy by the Mehsud Tribe, in 1937. Little has changed since.
(29) A parting memento from our ISI colleagues at the “Clubhouse,” presented to me in June 2002. ISI was responsible for apprehending many dozens of al-Qa’ida militants, and would capture many more—contributing a substantial part of the detainee population at Guantánamo.
(30) Front and back views of the medal I had struck to present to all visiting temporary staff who aided our efforts during my tenure in Pakistan. The medal was loosely modeled after the Afghanistan Campaign Medal of the Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–80.
(31) With Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, and deputy national security advisor Robert Blackwill at a meeting with Petraeus’s brigade commanders in Mosul, Iraq, late November 2003. Blackwill and I were assessing the rising insurgency, and what could be done about it.
