Within A COUPLE OF days, Echo team had moved to another compound on the opposite side of the city from Mullah Omar’s, and the SF Command and Control Element joined us at the Governor’s Palace. A couple more SF A teams also arrived and set up with us as well. With the addition of the new personnel, the American presence in the compound swelled to around 75 people.
One of the first orders of business was to arrange the handover of Kandahar Airport from Shirzai’s fighters to the Marines moving up from Forward Operating Base-Rhino in southern Helmand province. The goal was to do this while drawing as little attention as possible to the fact that U.S. Marines were in the Kandahar area. To achieve this, an SF element met the Marines in the middle of the night and escorted them around the outskirts of Kandahar to the airport where the handover took place. Just so the Marines did not forget who was there first, the ODA had already painted its radio call sign “Texas 17” high up on the airport’s water tower.
Within a day or two I traveled out to the airport to meet up with Charlie, the CIA liaison officer attached to the Marine Expeditionary Unit. Charlie was a friend of mine whom I had known since my first days at the Agency, and as a former Marine, he was one of the paramilitary instructors when I went through some of my early training. Charlie had been in Islamabad when I had passed through there before joining Echo team. He was looking to get on a team going to Afghanistan and had jumped at the chance to join up with the Marines.
It was good to see him there in the Afghan desert. He seemed in good spirits, although he told me the last few weeks had been frustrating for him and the Marines. According to Charlie, while at Rhino Base in Helmand Province, the MEU had been kept on a pretty tight leash and had been limited to mostly defensive operations. Staying on the defense was not part of the Marines make-up, but as the only conventional U.S force in the country, it was what was required to keep the American military profile low.
Charlie walked me around parts of the airfield and pointed out where the Marines had constructed some basic POW holding facilities made of concertina wire. For the moment the cages were empty, at least the ones I saw, but the hope was that surrendering Taliban and al-Qa’ida would soon be filling them up.
Our next stop was to meet the MEU commander, a one-star general named James Mattis, about whom Charlie had nothing but praise. Mattis invited us into his office. A big coffee cup already in his hand, he had an orderly bring us some as well. Down to earth and unassuming, he provided us with a short, informal briefing about the MEU and the situation at the airport. Myself and another member of Foxtrot team who had accompanied me reciprocated, explaining who we were and our current understanding of the situation in Kandahar. The entire meeting lasted no more than 15 minutes.
After the meeting, as we were walking out to our pickups, Charlie asked me for a favor. He had no long gun and was armed only with his Glock-19. He asked if I could get him an Agency rifle. He said the Marines had at times loaned him an M-4, but he needed his own rifle. I knew Echo team had been supplied with M-4’s at some point and I told him I would pass the request on to them, which I did. I never saw Charlie in Afghanistan again and I don’t know if he ever got his rifle.
Another priority task was to carry out raids against locations in Kandahar that CIA Headquarters believed were al-Qa’ida safe houses. We suspected they would have been abandoned, but we really didn’t know for sure until we checked. Regardless, we were hopeful that we could still find materials of intelligence value.
Even prior to arriving in Kandahar, Foxtrot team had been working with Shirzai to create a special counterterrorism unit of 50 better-than-average fighters for carrying out these raids. The night before we were to begin the raids, Khalil came to me and complained that the recently arrived Army lieutenant colonel in charge of the SF CCE had told him that the Afghan counterterrorism unit was now under the colonel’s command. This was news to me. I found the colonel and explained that we had been putting this force together for some time for the express purpose of carrying out the safe house raids when we reached Kandahar, and that if he needed fighters, Shirzai had plenty of others from which to choose. The colonel responded that, no, he wanted this group as they were better trained. He went on to say that, as the senior U.S. military commander on the ground, he was in charge of all allied armed forces, and therefore the CT unit was under his command.
On the surface, the colonel seemed to have a valid point. Unquestionably he was the senior U.S. military officer, and depending on the terms of joint-agreements made with the Afghans, his rank could put him in charge of allied forces. It was a concept with which I was familiar. The colonel’s rationale was specious, however, as Shirzai’s forces were not, in fact, “allied forces.” Shirzai had not signed any alliance agreement with the U.S. military. Rather, he and his forces were operating as counterterrorism assets, managed and supported by the CIA as authorized under Title 50, the legal authority under which the war was being fought at the time. The truth was, both as a practical and legal matter, it was only through the CIA’s auspices that the SF ODA’s were working with Shirzai’s fighters, and that work was in an advise and support role, not a command role.
Still, I had no interest in getting into a legal debate or turf battle over who controlled Shirzai’s forces. In the interest of maintaining a good relationship I held my fire, avoiding what I believed would have been a contentious, unproductive, and ultimately, destructive debate. I was glad I did so. The next day an understanding was reached that CIA officers and ODA members would conduct joint raids supported by the special Afghan CT unit.
As we suspected, all the houses we raided were abandoned by al-Qa’ida, but we did find some material of interest at some of the targeted locations. In one house there were a lot of newspapers, magazines, and other printed material. Keeping an eye out for booby-traps, I rummaged through it and came upon an English language technical magazine. On the cover it highlighted an article that rated the best flight training simulators on the market. In the same house we found the carton in which a flight simulator had been packaged. As I examined the carton, images of the hijacked aircraft crashing into the World Trade Center Towers flashed through my mind. Had the terrorists used this flight simulator as part of their preparation for their mission on 9/11? Was this the house where they once stayed? Odds were the answer was yes.
On another day, some of us traveled out to Tarnak Farms south of Kandahar, where al-Qa’ida had maintained its premier training facility. It had been one of the first targets of the bombing campaign. All that remained of the place was rubble. We spent a few hours poking around the shattered remnants of the buildings looking for anything of intelligence value.
During this search we discovered a small underground room broken open by bombs and fully exposed to daylight. In the room were numerous metal footlockers filled with dark blue semi-precious Lapis Lazuli stones which al-Qa’ida used for trading purposes. Before loading them up for transport back to Kandahar, we each stuck one of the blue uncut rocks in our pocket. The souvenir-taking reminded me of the scene in the book “Slaughterhouse-Five” when the character Rosewater, commenting on Billy Pilgrim’s wedding diamond taken as war booty, says, “That is the attractive thing about war. Everybody gets a little something.”
There were other attractive things, too. Pieces of women’s lingerie were found scattered around in the rubble. I could not say what brand it was, but it was as sexy as the Victoria Secrets line, and it gave rise to jokes about what kind of training had been going on at Tarnak Farms.
That evening after my return to the Governor’s Palace I was invited to watch a movie being shown by one of Hank’s ODA members. I had not seen a movie since I had left home and readily accepted the invitation. The film was a relatively recent fictional drama about a high-altitude climbing expedition. It was shown on a computer in a little room with some of the ODA members crowded in close to the small screen. I found a seat on the floor and was quickly caught up in the story. Although a drama with moments of life and death tension, I felt relaxed and comforted in watching it, and in being entertained and completely absorbed by something different than the life I had been living.
After the movie ended, I realized just how much of a mental escape it had been for me. I also realized that I felt guilty about it. Somehow my forgetting about where I was and what I was doing just felt wrong to me. It almost felt like it was a risky thing for me to have done—that I needed to stay fully engaged in the reality I was living and not allow myself any escape from that reality until it was time for me to leave Afghanistan.