ABU ZUBAYDAH WAS captured on March 28, 2002; at that point, I had been in Pakistan less than three months. Our operations were directed at al-Qaeda, but other American organizations were in the country as well, with other potential targets in mind. Indeed, by the time I got to Pakistan in late January 2002, counterterrorism officers of other government agencies in the United States, including some state and local types, had already begun to arrive. One of them was Tom McHale, a longtime detective with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Tom was a cop’s cop, a highly decorated guy who was in the parking garage of the World Trade Center in 1993 when the bomb went off in the first attempt to take down those buildings. He survived but spent weeks in the hospital and two years in rehabilitation; to this day, his lungs have not fully recovered from the toxic gas emitted by the bomb. On September 11, 2001, he was at the World Trade Center again; this time, thirty-seven of his colleagues died.
When McHale was tapped for an assignment in Pakistan, on loan to the FBI, he took it personally. The widow of Port Authority police officer Donald McIntyre, killed in the attacks, lent McHale Donnie’s handcuffs. Tom used them anytime he captured a bad guy. “This is for September eleventh,” he’d say to his prisoner, and he meant it. Tom had a great attitude, all positive, all can-do. In fact, once he got approval for an operation, he ran it with the kind of skill and professionalism that should make all Americans proud.
It began, as I understand from others who participated in the operation, one day in late February or early March 2002. Tom and a couple of colleagues were in Peshawar when they saw a run-down, small office building and one of them said: “You know, that’s the Taliban embassy.” It was there, rather than in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, probably because Peshawar is on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border and because it would be less conspicuous. During the Taliban reign, only three countries recognized Afghanistan—Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. “Every day they go and open that embassy,” Tom told his buddies. “I feel like those bastards are rubbing our noses in it.” But McHale wasn’t just grousing. He and his colleagues came up with a hell of an idea: “You know what we ought to do? We ought to go in there some night and we ought to steal everything they have.”
Tom got approval, and then began the detailed operational planning necessary to bring something like this to a successful outcome.
Like the rest of the Americans in the country at that time, Tom had to get the approval of the Pakistani government before he could proceed. The Paks reminded him that it wasn’t much of an embassy—really, just a guard and one guy who served as combination diplomat and press officer. Apparently, these two men opened up every day at 9 a.m., sat around, did nothing, then locked up at 5 p.m. and went home. The Paks had no problem with the plan to raid the embassy some night so long as they tagged along as security and, oh yes, so long as their American friends made copies of everything for them.
McHale’s boss, the FBI legal attaché, requisitioned several vans from the U.S. Embassy motor pool, and his team set out one night for the two-hour-plus drive from Islamabad to Peshawar. The operation lasted from around 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. The team just drove up, broke down the door, and walked in; there was no alarm. The place was loaded with stuff, and they took absolutely everything—computers, files, cell phones, weapons, everything that wasn’t bolted to the floor or the walls.
It really made the day for one person in particular. This old-timer had bum knees, made worse by one hundred pounds of excess weight and bad enough so that he slept on his office floor one night when they gave out on him. He was an inside man, not an operative, but he had always wanted at least one raid on the résumé in his mind. When he heard about plans for the raid, he pleaded for a chance to go. McHale was a pro; he also was a great guy with a soft spot for toilers. The Taliban embassy operation could have gone wrong, perhaps wildly so, but the odds of it, given what McHale and his teammates knew, seemed very long, especially since the Paks would be there to provide protection. Sure, Tom told his overweight colleague, you can be a part of this one. Needless to say, it made the guy’s tour.
After it was over, Tom told his bosses that the operation had been a success—no problems, no issues, all players present and accounted for. The bosses, of course, extended their congratulations and wanted McHale to send up a flare if he and his guys found anything particularly interesting in the pilfered stash. They didn’t expect much; neither did Tom. At that point, the Taliban government was history, with its leader, Mullah Omar, and his camp followers in hiding somewhere along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. But the computer exploitation experts went to work on the hard drives, making copies for the Pakistanis as promised and for certain U.S. government agencies. The originals of everything went to the FBI because September 11 was still an open criminal investigation.
McHale himself found something interesting and provocative. A file of telephone bills from the Taliban embassy revealed dozens of calls to the United States—to Kansas City and suburban D.C., to New York and Ohio and California, to Michigan and Texas, all over the country. For ten days leading up to September 11, 2001, the Taliban made 168 calls to America. Then the calls stopped. The file, amazingly, was in English. And here’s the thing: The calls ended on September 10, 2001, and started up again six days later, on September 16.
This certainly was a matter for the FBI, or so McHale felt. The FBI team in Pakistan was alerted and got copies of the phone bills; all the originals went to FBI headquarters in Washington. Again, the calls were from a hostile embassy to U.S. destinations; McHale expected the FBI to be all over these phone bills and the addresses in the United States that had received calls from the Taliban.
By midyear, McHale was back in the States, resuming his duties with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. One day, he asked around to see if anything had turned up from the raid on the Taliban embassy; he was particularly interested to know whether the FBI had got anywhere tracking down the recipients of those Taliban phone calls. All he learned was that the originals had arrived at FBI headquarters, per instructions.
Flash forward to spring 2004. The 2002 Taliban caper was still gnawing at McHale—a bit of unfinished business that he wanted tied up for his own peace of mind. This time, having probed here and asked questions there, he had it on good authority that the FBI’s people had never even opened the boxes of materials gathered up at the Taliban embassy. That, of course, meant that they had never examined the phone logs. Later, ABC News reporter Rich Esposito wrote about the story. Apparently, the FBI never opened the boxes because they figured they didn’t have the language capabilities to translate them from Pashto, Dari, Urdu, and the other languages of Afghanistan. Still later, Esposito reported, the message from the FBI was that the information was too old to mean much.
How’s that? Too old to mean much? A file in English of calls made prior to September 11, 2001, to the United States? Resumed on September 16? From the embassy of the government that treated Osama bin Laden as an honored guest? Maybe they were worthless, but McHale, for one, seriously doubted it. In any event, how could the FBI know that without reading them? Especially the file in English.
One postscript: After the raid that night, the Paks had asked the Americans what they wanted to do with the press guy cum diplomat. McHale and his people had no further interest in him, and neither did anyone else. For their part, the Pakistanis couldn’t have cared less. But they thought they’d have some fun and shake up the Taliban guy a bit—arrest him, then release him later. So they showed up when the guy opened up at 9 a.m. He was openmouthed when he saw what McHale’s marauders had done to his office. The Paks moved in, cuffed him, and told him he was under arrest. As they were leading him away, he turned and shouted back at the guard: “Tell my wife to sell the car!”
Another postscript: In 2007 I ran into an FBI friend of mine at a shopping mall in suburban Virginia. We had served together in Pakistan and had stayed only in sporadic touch, but I still thought the world of the guy. “Whatever happened to those boxes of Taliban documents?” I asked him. He replied that it was like a scene out of that Indiana Jones movie. The files were still in those boxes, in an FBI storage facility in Maryland. Human eyes would probably never see them again, he said. What a waste.