Mullah Mohammad Omar spent his boyhood in Afghanistan’s destitute Uruzgan Province, raised by an uncle who was an itinerant religious teacher. (His father died when he was very young and his mother married the father’s brother.) He belonged to the Hotak tribe, a marginalized clan with little purchase on southern Afghanistan’s power or resources. The farthest Omar ever traveled was Pakistan. Apart from Koranic studies, he had no formal education. He possessed a “rural mind,” as one of his more widely traveled Taliban colleagues put it, “cut off, religiously and politically.” After the Soviet invasion, as a teenager, he joined a group of insurgents he knew from Kandahar’s madrassas and preaching networks. They fought in the irrigated desert west of Kandahar city, around Maiwand District. One day on the battlefield, the Russians pushed forward and Omar and his comrade Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef could see them from their trenches. The area was covered with corpses. The Russians lobbed in shells. Shrapnel struck Omar in the face and wounded his right eye.
That night, the Afghan comrades held “a marvelous party,” in Zaeef’s description, and Omar, his face bandaged, sang a ghazal, or traditional poem:
My illness is untreatable, oh, my flower-like friend
My life is difficult without you, my flower-like friend 1
Omar never regained the use of his eye. After the war he retired to a home without electricity near a mud-walled mosque in Sangesar, close to the battlefield where he had been wounded. He took four wives, raised many children, preached, and studied Islam. As Afghanistan collapsed into civil war after the Soviet withdrawal, criminals, predators, and warlords ruled Kandahar, extorting citizens and truckers at a maze of checkpoints, or kidnapping boys into sexual slavery. Omar’s wartime comrades decided to challenge the abusers. They required a leader; a committee arrived one evening at his home. The members explained to him they had picked him. Zaeef watched as Omar hesitated, seeming to think before saying anything. It was one of his habits. Finally, Omar said that he agreed with what the committee proposed. Something needed to be done.2
As he created the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with support from the I.S.I. and Saudi Arabia, Omar surrounded himself with religious advisers and military commanders almost uniformly educated in rural Pashtun villages and madrassas. Searching for a purity of life partly drawn from village norms, and following religious instruction to imagine life as it prevailed in the seventh century, during the Prophet’s lifetime, they evolved or invented a public Islam whose specific rules had an otherworldly character. An official Taliban gazette published a week before the September 11 attacks clarified the following list of items formally banned in the Islamic Emirate: “The pig itself; pork; pig fat; objects made of human hair; natural human hair; dish antennas; sets for cinematography and sound recording projectors; sets for microphotography, in case it is used in the cinema; all instruments which themselves produce music, such as the piano, the harmonium, the flute, the tabla, the tanbour, the sarangi; billiard tables and their accessories; chess boards; carom boards; playing cards; masks; any alcoholic beverage; all audio cassettes, video cassettes, computers and television which include sex and music; centipedes; lobsters (a kind of sea animal); nail polish; firecrackers; fireworks (for children); all kinds of cinematographic films, even though they may be sent abroad; all statues of animate beings in general; all sewing catalogues which have photos of animate beings; published tableaus (photos); Christmas cards; greeting cards bearing images of living things; neckties; bows (the thing which strengthens the necktie); necktie pins.”3
Omar was an unusually tall man. He could be reticent and refused to meet most non-Muslim visitors. He sometimes cited his dreams in explaining his decisions. He saw his earthly life as a fate he did not control fully and he referred continually to God’s will. Bashir Noorzai, an opium smuggler from Mullah Mohammad Omar’s home district who supplied money and arms to the Taliban during the Islamic Emirate, believed that his leader “had one characteristic: He was very stubborn. . . . His attitude was that he knew better than anyone else. Now, power also makes one ‘knowledgeable.’” He was an ardent Islamic rule enforcer yet he was not an ascetic zealot. He listened to Pashto folk songs on cassette tape. Apart from his exceptional height and his commitment to wars of resistance against non-Muslim invaders, Omar had little in common with Osama Bin Laden, who had grown up privileged and exposed to cosmopolitanism in booming Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Omar was a few years younger than Bin Laden. He had not invited the Saudi to Afghanistan. Bin Laden initially entered Afghan territory not controlled by the Taliban in a chartered jet, carrying cash and a following of fighters. Mullah Mohammad Omar received him in Kandahar and gradually forged an alliance. The Taliban needed Al Qaeda’s shock troops against the Northern Alliance. Omar also accepted Bin Laden’s financial largesse to improve Kandahar. Yet there were tensions between them, over Bin Laden’s provocative media interviews and the terrorist attacks Al Qaeda carried out abroad, which brought the Taliban under tightening diplomatic, economic, and travel sanctions.4
No Taliban or other Afghans participated in the September 11 attacks. The hijackers were Saudis and other Arabs. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the plot’s mastermind, was a Pakistani who had lived for many years in Kuwait and attended college in North Carolina. It is not clear whether Mullah Mohammad Omar knew of the conspiracy in advance. Two European scholars who interviewed Taliban leaders extensively judged it “doubtful” that he did, but could not reach a firm conclusion. Hank Crumpton at the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center had come to believe that “Al Qaeda, if anything, had co-opted the Taliban leadership and had taken advantage of their stunning ignorance of world affairs.” Still, under the emerging Bush Doctrine, Omar’s refusal to cooperate in Bin Laden’s arrest condemned the Taliban to mass slaughter and indefinite imprisonment as enemy combatants. And the Taliban leader declined to yield. An edict issued in Mullah Mohammad Omar’s name eight days after the attacks on Washington and New York required all offices of the Islamic Emirate, “in addition to being ready for sacrifices,” to begin holding “Koran reading sessions in their mosques and ask great God for humiliation, embarrassment and defeat of the infidel powers.”5
Mullah Zaeef had served Mullah Omar loyally as a minister and then as ambassador to Pakistan, the Taliban’s most important diplomatic post. After the September 11 attacks, he traveled to Kandahar. Omar told him that he had summoned Bin Laden and asked him about the attacks on New York and Washington.
“He swore that he didn’t do it,” Omar explained. “I couldn’t pressure him beyond that. If you have proof of his involvement, then show it to me. But I haven’t seen any proof. . . .” In Omar’s mind, “There was less than a 10 percent chance that America would resort to anything beyond threats,” Zaeef concluded.
The Taliban leader clung to his position that Bin Laden had not been proven guilty: “Where is the evidence?” And, “If there was a crime, we are not supporting the criminal,” so there was no reason for the United States to target the Taliban.
Zaeef predicted, “America would definitely attack.”
Other Taliban leaders advised that even if Mullah Mohammad Omar produced Bin Laden, the Americans would still strike. The demand for Bin Laden, they argued, was “just an excuse” to overthrow the Taliban’s Islamic State. A Taliban editorial published on September 23 posited that “Osama is a good pretext” for the United States, which had “colonizing objectives” and was “interested in establishing a military base in Pakistan at any cost in order to control this region.”
In Mullah Mohammad Omar’s advisory circle, “They believed that power had been given to them by Allah and that at any time Allah could take it away,” said a former Taliban Foreign Ministry official then in Kabul. “They were thinking, ‘If Allah is not with us, then we will lose power.’ Conversely, ‘If He is with us, we can defy the world.’”6
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The air war opened on the night of October 7 in Afghanistan, the afternoon in Washington. At the C.I.A., the center of action was the Global Response Center, the Counterterrorist Center’s twenty-four-hour operations room on the sixth floor of Old Headquarters. Video screens hung on the center’s walls. Officers and analysts—many from the agency, but some on assignment from the military—sat before classified computers and secure telephones. The atmosphere was alert but quiet; the operators mainly communicated by typing messages in a secure chat system.
George Tenet arrived at the center for the war’s opening. Charles Allen, the C.I.A.’s assistant director for collection, who had helped develop the Predator drone program, turned up as well. As C.T.C. director, Cofer Black was the commanding officer in charge of the C.I.A.’s drone operations, which had recently acquired lethal capability. Predators and similar drones had been providing low-altitude aerial surveillance for the C.I.A. and the military for a number of years. The C.I.A. had been operating Predators on surveillance missions over Afghanistan out of an air base in Uzbekistan since the summer of 2000. The classified program was experimental. The ability of drones to hover over terrorist camps in otherwise remote and inaccessible territory gave rise to the idea that they might be equipped with weapons. A C.I.A.–Air Force team known most recently as the Summer Project had modified the drone’s capabilities rapidly. The latest innovation, perfected over the summer, had been to equip Predators with Hellfire air-to-ground missiles that could strike buildings or vehicles. On September 17, President Bush had signed a Memorandum of Notification authorizing C.I.A. covert action against Al Qaeda and its allies, including targeted killing. Bush delegated the trigger-pulling decision to Tenet, who delegated it to the C.I.A. directorate of operations, which delegated it to Black. Under the Counterterrorist Center’s command, pilots had been flying Predators armed with Hellfires over Afghanistan for several weeks, but the C.I.A. had refrained from shooting at any targets because doing so might risk exposing Uzbekistan’s secret cooperation. Now, under the cover of a wider air war carried out by conventional American bombers, starting this night, the agency could fire when ready. Yet Black did not have authority to order Air Force or Navy bombers into action. That decision belonged ultimately to General Tommy Franks, the four-star general and career artillery officer who ran Central Command.
That afternoon in Langley, the Global Response Center screens showed infrared imagery of Mullah Mohammad Omar’s home on Kandahar’s outskirts. A C.I.A.-controlled drone transmitted the live video feed. It was a dark night in Kandahar. The drone sending the pictures was one of a small number the C.I.A. had put in the air over Afghanistan after September 11. The pilot and sensor operator controlling the flight sat in a metal container elsewhere on the C.I.A. campus, near a parking lot. Scott Swanson, a former Special Operations helicopter pilot, had the stick. The sensor operator was Jeff A. “Gunny” Guay, an Air Force imagery analyst.7
Omar’s Kandahar compound was a well-known surveillance target. C.I.A.-directed pilots had been flying over the home regularly since 2000. The house was one of the few “obvious targets” known in Afghanistan, as a senior officer involved put it. The C.I.A. had placed the emir’s compound on a list of targets for Central Command to bomb after September 11, but it was up to Tommy Franks to decide what to strike first this night. Osama Bin Laden and many of his Al Qaeda lieutenants had already fled to the White Mountains, along the border with Pakistan, according to the C.I.A.’s reporting. Yet Mullah Mohammad Omar had stayed put at his comfortable home in Kandahar, which had been built and decorated by Bin Laden, as a gift.
Some officers in the C.I.A.’s leadership hoped Central Command would bomb the compound in the very first strikes of the war, to eliminate Omar and his lieutenants. Instead, following more conventional doctrine, Franks approved initial bombing on October 7 of an airfield in Kandahar. Air Force doctrine typically sought to eliminate the enemy’s air defenses in the initial strikes so that U.S. and allied planes could fly and bomb at will after that. The Taliban’s air defenses were rudimentary, but Franks took the standard approach.8
The problem was, the initial bombing of the Kandahar Airfield effectively announced that the American air war had begun. As the C.I.A. Predator watched overhead, several turbaned men soon emerged from Mullah Mohammad Omar’s house. The Taliban climbed into a pair of vehicles and drove away. The C.I.A. Counterterrorist Center’s analysts judged that Mullah Omar was in the group. The intelligence case was “multiple stream, authoritative, comprehensive,” in the assessment of a senior officer involved. The C.I.A.-directed Predator followed the small convoy. The vehicles drove initially to a home in downtown Kandahar that the C.I.A. had previously identified as the residence of Omar’s mother. The men entered, stayed a brief time, and then left. This time, they departed Kandahar and drove about forty kilometers to the west of the city. They arrived at a compound that contained two one-story flat-roofed buildings separated by a rectangular open area about one hundred yards long and fifty yards across. One building appeared to be a madrassa, or Islamic school. The smaller building across the yard appeared to be a mosque.9
The presumed Taliban, possibly including Mullah Omar, went inside the school. There were other armed men and vehicles present. Later, participants would retain diverse memories of the number of presumed Taliban gathered, from a relatively small number to several hundred.
During the next several hours, the decision making about whether to attempt to kill Mullah Omar or, more precisely, the group of men that had emerged from his house and was judged to include him, became badly confused. The Predator’s infrared cameras showed glowing images of distinct individuals but could not provide photographic clarity. This was a novel interagency operation in which a top secret C.I.A. drone program was attempting to coordinate its action with Air Force decision makers who sometimes didn’t even know that the C.I.A. had a live camera on the target. Air Force imagery analysis was at its best when tasked with identifying enemy tanks in open areas on a conventional battlefield. Collaborative analysis with the C.I.A. about men out of uniform hanging around on the outskirts of Kandahar challenged the Air Force’s standards of risk management.
The twenty-pound Hellfire missile the C.I.A. Predator carried had been developed for Apache attack helicopters, to penetrate tanks and kill their occupants. Its relatively light explosive payload would be ineffective against a large roofed building like the school the presumed Taliban had just entered. The alternative was to drop conventional bombs—each with massive, destructive explosive force, compared with a Hellfire missile. Air Force and Navy fighter-bombers were now circling outside Kandahar on standby. They carried such ordnance.
The C.I.A.’s Global Response Center had an open line to Central Command’s joint intelligence operations center in Florida. C.I.A. officers talked with Brigadier General Jeff Kimmons, the director of intelligence or J-2 at Central Command. Kimmons was sitting inches from General Franks in a small secure room on the second floor, watching the same infrared Predator footage as the C.I.A.’s leaders. There were eight to ten intelligence officers, operations officers, and analysts in the Central Command operations room, as well as a Navy captain who was a military lawyer or judge advocate general. She was there to advise Franks about targeting rules. In larger adjoining rooms sat dozens of other Central Command officers and targeting analysts.
The C.I.A. requested a conventional bombing of the madrassa where it appeared Mullah Mohammad Omar had entered. A Central Command intelligence officer present said years later that he did not recall that request, but even if the C.I.A. had asked for such a strike, he would have advised Franks against dropping bombs on the target. The reason: “When someone enters a building you don’t just strike and kill everybody under the assumption that they’re all Taliban.” Bombing the presumed school with so many unidentified people inside would have been irresponsible. Also, Central Command’s on-site lawyer, the J.A.G., concluded that the nearby mosque would be damaged unacceptably. The scene required “tactical patience,” as the military intelligence officer put it. “We were not eager to do something foolish and kill lots of innocent people. That mattered a lot to Franks. . . . The military was not out to kill [Mullah Mohammad Omar] at all costs. We were intent on killing him at a time and place where we could do so surgically.”10
Moreover, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Tommy Franks had orders from President Bush to minimize collateral damage and civilian deaths during the air war, to avoid inflaming Afghan and international opinion. In his final conversation with President Bush, Bush had told Franks that the war was “not about religion. If you see Bin Laden go into a mosque, wait until he comes out to kill him.”
Now, as he watched the compound, Franks thought, “Wait till they come out.”11
Franks relayed to the C.I.A. that he had decided not to bomb the school. An Air Force officer monitoring the events made notes of his reaction to this decision: “CINC [commander in chief of CENTCOM, i.e., Franks] not hitting building because of collateral damage. Amazing. We could get Omar but the CINC’s worried about collateral damage.”12 The C.I.A. initiated an appeal, according to several officers involved, to ask Rumsfeld and ultimately President Bush to overrule Franks. But it would take an hour or so for that request to play out.
Black and the C.I.A. team running the Predator operation inside the Global Response Center still had an opportunity to fire a Hellfire missile, even if the missile was not potent enough to take out the school and kill all the men inside. Nobody had ever fired a missile from a remotely operated drone on a battlefield. They would make military and intelligence history if they did. An officer watching the Predator feed at Langley figured there “would be a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking” about whatever the C.I.A. did now. The feeling in the Global Response Center was “Have to be correct. . . . Don’t mess it up.”13
Cofer Black could have fired legally on his own authority. Yet Central Command’s senior intelligence officer had just announced that there was an unacceptable risk of collateral damage. Officers watching the C.I.A. feed recalled that the Global Response Center asked for permission to shoot at a pickup truck parked outside the assembly building. “The purpose was psychological,” according to an officer involved. They would stun the Taliban.14
In Florida, Franks thought that maybe a Hellfire shot “will persuade the people to leave the mosque and give us a shot at the principals.” The Air Force officer keeping notes recorded Franks’s logic: “Perhaps use Hellfires to scare them out to go to another hold site and then hit them.”
Black gave the order. In the container on the C.I.A. campus, Swanson now counted down. “Weapon away,” he said. The Hellfire missile fired off its rail. A truck exploded in a flash of light.
The Taliban in the flat-roofed building did indeed rush out. They took up positions in a standard 360-degree infantry defense. The glowing infrared figures “were all adult males, some carrying weapons. There wasn’t another target like that for the rest of the war,” in the judgment of an officer watching.15
The men drove off. They did not all go in the same direction, however. Swanson and Guay directed their Predator above one vehicle that they believed held Omar. There are two credible accounts of what happened next, drawn from the memories of participants. In one account, Central Command ordered the C.I.A. to return to watching the original school compound. In the other, the Predator followed the vehicles to a new compound with a mosque.
It is clear that at some point Franks spoke with Rumsfeld about whether to risk collateral damage by striking a mosque, given the possibility that they would kill Omar. According to a memo Rumsfeld composed two weeks later, the secretary of defense instructed Franks to wait a few minutes. Then Rumsfeld called President Bush to inform him. Bush concurred that the risk of innocent deaths or destroyed mosques was worth bearing if Mullah Mohammad Omar was in their sights. Rumsfeld relayed his own approval to Franks, without telling him that he had spoken to the president.16
Finally, on Franks’s order, American fighter-bombers deposited two bombs on the mosque under C.I.A. surveillance. In any event, Mullah Omar was not there. The C.I.A. later assessed that after he departed the school west of Kandahar, he made his way to Gardez, in eastern Afghanistan. So far as is known, no other significant Taliban leaders died in the bombing on the first night of the war, either.17
Mullah Mohammad Omar’s death on October 7 might have influenced the Taliban’s evolution, given the divided opinions within the movement’s leadership about how to manage their relationship with Al Qaeda after the shock of September 11. That alternative history might have turned out no better than what actually unfolded, but as the coming decade’s failures and suffering unfolded, the lost opportunity of October 7 gnawed at several of the military and intelligence officers involved that night. They wondered from time to time what might have been.
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The hunt for Mullah Omar went on, but it seemed to be cursed. In one instance, recalled Robert Grenier, then the C.I.A. station chief in Islamabad, “our best human source in Kandahar” provided a precise account of Omar’s movement in a small convoy, but when Islamabad Station “put the target information out within minutes of our receiving it,” the station “got no response” from headquarters.
The C.I.A. and I.S.I. also apparently tried to track Mullah Zaeef in the hope the Taliban ambassador would lead them to Omar. As the air war intensified, Zaeef traveled to Kandahar in a Land Cruiser to discuss with Omar an offer Qatar had made to mediate an end of the fighting. He was “followed all the way by Pakistani intelligence.” He made his way to a makeshift Taliban headquarters in Kandahar and asked for Mullah Omar, but he was not there. Zaeef left. One hour later, a U.S. Air Force strike destroyed the building.18
The Taliban emir had trusted his fate to Allah. It would be obvious to him how to interpret the outcome: His role on this Earth was incomplete. He told Taliban colleagues, according to one of them, “It is very strange that I am not greedy, for I know my power; my position; my wealth; and my family are in danger. . . . However I am ready to sacrifice myself and I do not want to become a friend of non-Muslims, for non-Muslims are against all my beliefs and my religion.” He said he was “ready to leave everything and believe only in Islam and in my Afghan bravery.”19
“We are living in decisive days that will give rise to a manifest victory for Islam and its people, if Allah wills,” he prophesied in a letter he wrote that autumn. “We will not submit nor become lenient. . . . The full moon of victory has appeared on the horizon.”20
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That fall, the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center grew chaotically, to about 2,000 full-time personnel. Its Office of Terrorism Analysis alone ballooned from 25 to 300. The office annexed entire groups of regional and subject matter experts from the mainstream Directorate of Intelligence. You were following Polish politics yesterday? Today you are analyzing terrorism issues in Central Asia. For a few weeks, Cofer Black slept on a blow-up mattress in his office and some of his deputies slept on cots. Conference rooms became group offices with analysts and reports officers shoulder to shoulder. Computer wires spread like kudzu. Tenet ordered any Directorate of Operations personnel whose skills were tangentially related to terrorism—narcotics teams, illicit finance units—to be folded under Cofer Black’s authority. Tenet thought Black was an enormously talented leader and trusted him. In some sections of the agency, Black’s language and manner rubbed people the wrong way. The Directorate of Operations was a professional shark tank. “You have big personalities and everybody wants to drive the car,” as one senior official put it.21
Black was trampling all over the C.I.A.’s organization chart that autumn, grabbing and dispatching talent, upending careers and prerogatives, not asking permission to have his officers travel across other divisions’ turf. The traditional area chiefs—Senior Intelligence Service officers in charge of Latin America, Europe, or Asia—resisted surrendering their personnel to C.T.C., at least not without some kind of bureaucratic due process. The feeling among Black and his colleagues down at C.T.C. was, essentially: Is it not obvious that we should put all hands on deck to prevent a second-wave Al Qaeda attack on American soil? Are you really going to waste our time on these personnel issues? Black worked to control himself and not fight, “only because fighting was unproductive.” Yet fights went on just about every day. At one meeting that became legendary at C.T.C., an area division manager asked whether the new terrorism-centric order at C.I.A. would affect flextime, a program that allowed employees to work at home some days.22
The prevailing assumption inside the Counterterrorist Center was that Bin Laden probably had additional attackers already in place. Threat reporting about possible follow-on Al Qaeda operations was off the charts. Partly this was a distortion caused by the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency increasing the fidelity on their collection. Both agencies suddenly solicited and listened for every scrap of information about Al Qaeda that might be obtained worldwide. At C.T.C.’s urging, allied intelligence services from Jordan to Egypt to France to Malaysia detained Islamist suspects on whatever pretense was available and interrogated them for clues about Al Qaeda’s next plot. Black, Ben Bonk, and other C.T.C. leaders flew to Libya, Pakistan, Jordan, Russia, Britain, and elsewhere to ask counterparts for every scrap of relevant information they might possess. They heard scary reports—some vetted, some not. But nobody wanted to be blindsided again, and the C.I.A.’s leadership feared that the agency’s very existence would be at stake if they missed a big attack a second time. They were thoroughly convinced that there would be another attack inside the United States soon and that it would be even more spectacular than September 11.23
The panic gripping Washington that autumn had some basis in hard evidence. On September 18, the first of a series of mysterious envelopes containing lethal anthrax spores were mailed to two Democratic senators on Capitol Hill and to the National Enquirer in Florida. The anthrax attack spread to the three major broadcasting networks, ultimately killing five people who inhaled the spores. Nobody knew where the envelopes had originated. The C.I.A. had also learned within weeks after the attacks on New York and Washington that a retired Pakistani nuclear scientist, Sultan Bashirrudin Mahmood, and a retired nuclear engineer, Chaudiri Majeed, had met with Bin Laden in Afghanistan. They had discussed sharing materials for weapons of mass destruction. It appeared that these contacts “with the Taliban and Al Qaeda may have been supported, if not facilitated, by elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence establishment,” as Tenet put it. The C.I.A.’s analysts judged that Al Qaeda wanted chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons “not as a deterrent but to cause mass casualties in the United States.” I.S.I. detained Mahmood and allowed the C.I.A. to interrogate and polygraph him. When the scientist discussed his time in Afghanistan, the polygraph operator reported that Mahmood’s answers showed “deception indicated.”24
The Counterterrorist Center was thrust into an unusual position within the American national security state. It was a locus of government expertise about a poorly understood enemy. It was also the only institution in town that possessed the outline of a war plan to enter into Afghanistan quickly. At the Pentagon, there were no plans on the shelf that had been previously vetted by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Afghanistan was not well understood by the Pentagon’s high command. The relationship between Al Qaeda and the Taliban was a mystery. The feeling among the chiefs of the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines, as a general involved put it, was “Where is Afghanistan? Where are the maps?” “The fact was that there was no existing war plan for Afghanistan,” Rumsfeld admitted. “In some cases our analysts were working with decades-old British maps.”25
The C.I.A. was in a better position to influence the White House. Four days after the Al Qaeda attacks, Tenet presented a slide deck entitled “Going to War” to President Bush and his national security cabinet. Rich Blee and Ben Bonk at C.T.C. had prepared the slides. They were adapted from memos composed months earlier in response to periodic requests from Richard Clarke at the White House for “Blue Sky” thinking about what C.I.A. would do to attack Al Qaeda if the agency could spend more money and felt no political constraints. The earlier memos had not been acted upon but they covered substantial ground, such as how to arm and support Massoud’s guerrilla forces and how to identify more aggressive anti-Taliban allies in southern Afghanistan. The slide deck contemplated a light-footprint campaign in Afghanistan that would start quickly with Massoud’s forces in the Panjshir and spread to include other anti-Taliban groups led by Afghan mujaheddin known to the C.I.A. from the 1980s. These warlords included the ethnic Uzbek commander Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former Communist general who had spent years in exile in Turkey; Atta Mohammad Noor, an ethnic Tajik commander allied with Ahmad Shah Massoud; and Ismail Khan, a former C.I.A. client who had been expelled by the Taliban from his stronghold in the western city of Herat. These were the most powerful men under arms who were implacably opposed to the Taliban. They had regional followings and could be used to stabilize and even rule Afghanistan after the Taliban were expelled from office.26
The plan embedded in the “Going to War” slides offered speed to Bush and his cabinet. A second attraction was that a light mobile force of guerrilla advisers with laser targeting equipment could bring to bear America’s precision airpower while minimizing U.S. casualties. Operation Enduring Freedom, the ensuing Afghan campaign by small Special Forces teams, aided by C.I.A. paramilitaries and case officers, some riding on horseback, would later be well chronicled in books, memoirs, and military “lessons learned” reports. The C.I.A. started out in the leading role and transitioned slowly to a more familiar mission of collecting target intelligence, chasing Al Qaeda fugitives, and running off-the-books militia operations.
The C.I.A.’s first Northern Afghanistan Liaison Team, led by Gary Schroen, landed by helicopter in the Panjshir Valley on September 26. Schroen was a Dari speaker in his early sixties, the equivalent within the C.I.A.’s ranks of a three-star general. He had served several tours in Pakistan and had worked with Ahmad Shah Massoud and his aides for more than a decade. It would take weeks for Pentagon Special Forces units to join the fight. On October 17, Rumsfeld wrote a biting memo to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Richard Myers. (General Hugh Shelton had already been scheduled to retire when September 11 took place.) “Given the nature of our world, isn’t it conceivable that the Department ought not to be in a position of near total dependence on C.I.A. in situations such as this?” Rumsfeld asked. Black put Hank Crumpton in charge of the Counterterrorist Center’s part of the war. Crumpton had been C.T.C. operations chief until the summer of 2001, when he rotated to become chief of station in Canberra, Australia. He returned to New Headquarters to work out of a “windowless room filled with maps, photos, books and stacks of paper. It looked like the office of an associate professor at a small, poorly funded liberal arts school.” Once Crumpton arrived, Blee and his operations officer took charge of Al Qaeda missions outside Afghanistan. Their work was folded under a massive covert action program, perhaps the largest in C.I.A. history, under the code name of Greystone. As new officers poured into C.T.C., they organized two new units to track Al Qaeda’s finances and experiments with chemical, biological, and nuclear materials.27
Cofer Black traveled abroad frequently, but when he was at Langley, he tried to buck up his workforce. Many case officers and retirees felt fired by an attitude of war-fighting volunteerism. (Black sent Billy Waugh, a legendary street operative he had worked with in Sudan, forward to Afghanistan, where Waugh celebrated his seventy-third birthday.) Yet some of the Counterterrorist Center’s analysts—desk bound and responsible for finding terrorist needles in overnight cable haystacks—also felt pressured. Some felt guilt and embarrassment and heard even agency colleagues say that September 11 was their fault. “We were all angry, of course,” as an officer then at C.T.C. put it. At the same time, “a kind of guilt feeling comes across. You feel like maybe you let people down, maybe you let the country down because you couldn’t prevent it from happening. You’re at the pointy end of the spear in the Counterterrorist Center. You would like to have thought you could prevent something like this from happening.”
It was inevitable that C.T.C. would take arrows, Black told colleagues: “When the hearings and the retribution and the finger-pointing comes, we are going to get hammered.” They should do what they could, without self-pity, in the time available, before their careers ended, his most ingloriously of all, he said.28
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In the Panjshir Valley, to support the Northern Alliance’s drive on Kabul and the search for Al Qaeda leaders, Gary Schroen’s team set up a joint intelligence cell with Amrullah Saleh and Engineer Arif. With Massoud dead and the C.I.A. on the scene, the two Northern Alliance intelligence leaders moved into critical positions, supporting the C.I.A. officers but also trying to keep track of what they were doing. Schroen’s men had carried in $10 million in boxed cash. They handed out bundles like candy on Halloween. Schroen had recruited onto his team Chris Wood, the Dari-speaking case officer who had worked the Taliban account out of Islamabad. Wood ran the day-to-day intelligence reporting at the joint cell, collecting and synthesizing field radio reports about Taliban and Al Qaeda positions and movements.
Fahim Khan, Massoud’s military chief, commanded the Panjshiris’ war. His deputy on the front line was Bismillah Khan, whose men controlled the mouth of the Panjshir, facing the Shomali Plains. Beyond those plains lay Kabul. To the east, the Northern Alliance line was manned by about two thousand fighters loyal to Abdul Rasoul Sayyaf, a conservative mujaheddin leader from the anti-Soviet war who had once been close to Bin Laden. Schroen visited Sayyaf early on and gave him $100,000 in cash.
Sayyaf’s men showed the C.I.A. team the shadow of an old airstrip near their section of the front line. Vacationing German trout fishermen had used the strip before the Second World War, some locals explained. Others said the owners of a German brewery had used it. Reading a history of Britain’s wars in Afghanistan, one of Schroen’s team eventually discovered that the German military had constructed the field around the time of the First World War. Now it consisted of barely visible ruts.
Schroen suggested to Chris Wood that they hire local men to dig out the field and make it operational. Wood became foreman. Every few days he rolled over to the construction site to check on progress and distribute a cash payroll. He by now sported a full blond beard. Whenever he got out of his S.U.V., his Panjshiri security detail followed him, toting assault rifles.
One mid-October afternoon, a C.I.A. colleague at their main Panjshir base interrupted Schroen. The colleague was on the secure phone to Langley. “This is the mission manager for Predator flights,” the officer explained. “He wants to know if we have any information about a newly constructed airfield on the Shomali Plains near a village named Gul Bahar.”
Schroen took the phone. “Sir, we have a Predator loitering above what appears to be a newly constructed Taliban airfield,” the voice on the other end reported. “C.I.A. confirms this is a new Taliban facility, under construction for the past ten days or so. The Predator is looking at an S.U.V. parked on the dirt landing strip, and there are two men, dressed in Western-style clothing. . . . We think they may be Al Qaeda.”
Schroen assured the caller he was wrong—they were tilting their Hellfire at two C.I.A. officers, including Chris Wood.
The caller asked if he was “sure” and Schroen assured him that he was “positive.” He had forwarded reports on the airstrip’s construction to C.I.A. headquarters, including geocoordinates, several times. Schroen was incredulous. He could understand how the U.S. military might not know about his clandestine airstrip project, but how could the C.I.A. not know about it? Had the officer on duty not thought to call the Panjshir base to check, the Predator might have killed his colleagues. In years to come, Wood would rise in the Senior Intelligence Service to become one of the C.I.A.’s most influential officers in the long Afghan war, serving multiple tours as station chief in Kabul and as an intelligence liaison to the Obama administration’s National Security Council during a critical period of war planning. Wood later led the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorism Center, as it would be renamed in 2004, where he commanded the agency’s worldwide drone operations. (The C.I.A.’s center was an internal unit, distinct from the interagency National Counterterrorism Center, which was created as part of a 2004 intelligence reorganization.) Wood had more reason than most to understand that not every tall bearded man surrounded by bodyguards was what he seemed to be.29
Back at Langley, operations that would come to change the character of global air war—lethal drone flights conducted by remote control from far away—evolved from the confusion of October 7 toward a steady tempo. In the Global Response Center, civilian intelligence officers who lived in tract homes and town houses and had never killed anyone followed and watched presumed militants on their screens. They heard the targets’ deaths ordered by a colleague in a suit and tie. They watched the victims be consumed in balls of fire. It was hard to ignore the strangeness of this kind of warfare, the way it severed death and experience.
One day, an armed Predator tracked three Hilux trucks carrying fighters as they moved through Jalalabad. The C.I.A. officers on duty noted that, to avoid civilian deaths, they would have to wait for the trucks to clear out of the city and move into open territory before they took a Hellfire shot. As the officers watched the trucks, they spotted a large dog in the back of one of them. They talked disconcertedly about the possibility that they might have to kill the dog while attacking the guerrillas. Then the trucks stopped briefly and the dog decided he had better things to do and jumped out. Cheers erupted in the C.I.A.’s Global Response Center. After the wave of emotion subsided, at least one officer in the room thought to himself: That was weird. The C.I.A. officers named the dog “Lucky.” It turned out to be not an unusual nickname for other Afghan and Pakistani dogs at the sites of drone-launched Hellfire strikes. The animals’ hearing was so acute that they sometimes seemed to detect Predators overhead or picked up the whine of missile launches when humans could not, and then got out of the way.30
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In Virginia, one weekend afternoon, while watching one of his kids’ football games, Ric Prado took out a yellow legal pad and sketched out a plan for a roving clandestine team that would hop around the world and photograph and document Al Qaeda network members, much as Counterterrorist Center contractors already did. Prado was the most dangerous-looking senior officer working in the C.T.C. that fall. He served as one of Black’s key deputies. He was a Cuban-born fourth-degree black belt in martial arts who had run paramilitary operations with the Contras in Honduras during the 1980s. He was a trained expert in parachuting, knife fighting, evasive driving, and extreme motorcycle tactics. He was about five feet seven inches tall, then in his early fifties, with a tattoo on one of his biceps. Prado’s field experience in Honduras, Costa Rica, Peru, ALEC Station, and Sudan had included close photographic surveillance operations against diverse targets. (In Sudan, Prado wore elaborate masks that made him look like a black African and drove around Khartoum in a battered car, watching Al Qaeda and other targets.) Prado had come to believe, he told Black, that there was little point in concentrating counterterrorism operations on low-level Al Qaeda shooters and street operatives. Those foot soldiers would always be replaced. Targeting Al Qaeda leaders was obviously the highest priority, but the leaders would always be hard to locate. The plan Prado now proposed would aim at upper-middle “facilitators,” as they were called in government jargon, meaning money traders, weapons suppliers, imams offering safe transit, forgers, bomb makers, counterfeiters, and the like.
After conducting close surveillance and building a case file, Prado’s team would develop options for taking the targeted individuals off the street. One option would be to turn the file over to local police, if it seemed likely they would make an arrest. Another option might be nonlethal C.I.A. dirty tricks, such as planting bomb-making material in a target’s trunk and then tipping off the local police anonymously. Prado also recommended that they develop the capacity to assassinate the target. Black approved Prado’s plan, withholding final judgment about what to do if a target was fully documented and involved in violence. That fall, Prado and Jose Rodriguez, an old colleague from the Latin America division, who had recently joined C.T.C. as “chief operating officer,” briefed the concept in the White House Situation Room. Rodriguez had no prior experience with Al Qaeda but he was a well-known figure in the Senior Intelligence Service, a hard-liner willing to back risky operations. The C.I.A. officers flashed photos of two potential targets, Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian in Germany who the C.I.A. believed was culpable for planning September 11, and Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program. Vice President Cheney approved the program, which Prado would lead until 2004. (It took some effort for Prado to persuade Black to let him back on the streets; he was now in the Senior Intelligence Service, the equivalent of ambassador or general. He had started as a GS-7, at a pay scale comparable to a truck driver’s.) Most of the targets Prado’s unit watched and documented were suspected Al Qaeda types, but C.T.C.’s Hezbollah unit also nominated a few candidates for investigation. In the end, the C.I.A.’s leadership declined to order any targets killed, but what other actions might have been taken remains unclear. This was a need-to-know campaign. Only the more seasoned among them reflected at the time that immunity from public scrutiny would not last long.31
George W. Bush “knew the war would bring death and sorrow,” but he took comfort from his conviction that “we were acting out of necessity and self-defense, not revenge.” On the front lines, inevitably, there was blood in the mouth. C.I.A. officers had not fought on such a violent battlefield as Afghanistan’s since the 1980s. The agency had not planned assassinations since the early 1970s. Hank Crumpton, the agency’s war commander, worked from day to day that fall “in a barely bounded rage.” He felt “a burning need for retribution rooted in a sense of shameful violation.”32