John SOON REJOINED US at the Governor’s Palace and reported he found the destroyed convoy Mullah Omar was suspected of riding in, but there were no bodies at the site. Local residents had already collected them and brought them into their small village. Mullah Omar was known to be missing an eye he had lost in the war against the Soviets, so with this in mind, John had the grisly chore of checking to see if any of the bodies had this identifying characteristic. It wasn’t CSI but it was John’s field expedient way to determine that Mullah Omar was in fact not among the dead.
Immediately we began to search the Governor’s Palace compound for booby traps and anything of intelligence value. Al-Qa’ida and the Taliban had occupied this place until very recently, and we assumed they had probably left a surprise or two for us. In the courtyard, a young Afghan fighter was digging through a pile of discarded items when there was a muted “pop” and he let out a scream. His thumb was a bloody mess. We suspected he had picked up a detonator cap and somehow set it off, but we really didn’t know what had caused the small blast. A medic from the ODA tended to his wound and was able to save the thumb.
Surprisingly, we did not find any other explosive material, hidden or otherwise. We did find numerous boxes of what appeared to be receipts and other miscellaneous forms and papers. Additionally, an Afghan volunteer brought in some boxes of documents he claimed to have taken at gunpoint from an al-Qa’ida member who he caught leaving the rubble of a bombed-out al-Qa’ida safe house. We paid him for his efforts, and Mark secured all the material and began to sort through it on a systematized basis.
Because there was so much of it, Mark performed a triage of sorts with priority going to anything that might be threat-related. The boxes of Taliban receipts were put aside, and he focused on the remaining material. Using an isolated room in the Governor’s compound, the material was spread out into different piles on a large Afghan rug. Literally sitting on the floor among the documents, he began the tedious review. This was complicated by the fact that the material was not in English. Despite these challenges it wasn’t long before he found something of extreme importance—a plan to carry out an attack in Singapore against the U.S. aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its crew while they were on shore leave. Other targets such as embassies and U.S.-affiliated businesses were identified as well.
The plan was complete with sketches, a video casing, and accompanying surveillance reports. The icing on the cake was a list of cellphone numbers for the members of a Southeast Asia-based al-Qa’ida-affiliated terrorist cell, which was to carry out the attack. Based on this information, Mark drafted up an intelligence report that Foxtrot sent out under immediate precedence. The captured material was considered to be of such importance that within a few days Mark would hand-carry the material to Islamabad for handover to an FBI representative, thus ending Mark’s service as a Foxtrot team member on a very high note.
Collecting intelligence that could be used to pre-empt a terrorist attack, particularly one on the scale of the attack planned against the U.S.S. Carl Vinson, was the highest goal of an intelligence officer, and it was precisely the reason we were in Kandahar. To my mind, that one intelligence report alone paid Foxtrot’s freight to get there.
Another interesting, but much less important, find was a black 4-door armored BMW sedan that belonged to the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Omar. Parked under some trees, no doubt to keep it from being seen from the air, it was completely covered in a thick coating of bird shit. The prodigious amount of excrement baffled me as I hadn’t seen a single bird since I had entered Afghanistan. I suspected there was a metaphor hidden in this mystery, but I didn’t bother to figure it out.
The BMW obviously had not been driven in quite some time, and after it was checked for explosives we tried to get it started, without success. The Brits saw this as a challenge and continued to try to diagnose the problem but to no avail. The car refused to start.
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Although it took some weeks, the intelligence contained in Mark’s report would be used to track down and arrest a large al-Qa’ida-affiliated cell in Southeast Asia, thereby neutralizing the threat against the Carl Vinson and perhaps other targets as well. According to a 12 January 2002 Washington Post article, Singaporean authorities gave credit for the prevention of the attack to intelligence collected in Afghanistan by “coalition forces” in December 2001. This was believed to be the first instance where intelligence collected in Afghanistan was used to prevent a terrorist attack outside the country.
Though we did not know it at the time, also among the captured documents was a filled-in al-Qa’ida membership application form by Jose Padilla, who would be dubbed the “dirty bomber” in press reporting. Mark would one day testify in disguise at Padilla’s trial regarding the chain of custody of the application form. The form proved to be a crucial piece of evidence in linking Padilla to al-Qa’ida, and in leading to his conviction on terrorism charges. The successful conviction of Padilla was not an insignificant success in the war on terror, and Foxtrot team’s contribution to it represented yet another payment of bills incurred in getting to Kandahar.