Calamities are of two kinds: misfortune to ourselves, and good fortune to others.
– THE DEVIL ’S DICTIONARY , AMBROSE BIERCE
It would have been an understatement before the Twin Towers fell to say that senior American government and military officials were hesitant to send Delta to far-off places to resolve sensitive problems. “Too risky,” they said. “Not your mission,” they said. “It’s a police action and does not require your unit’s unique skills.”
Delta operators are well known inside the Special Ops community as being excellent decision makers in action, but first you have to get to the target. The decision to deploy the Unit seemed to be controlled by folks who were echelons above the Almighty himself, and the political will prior to 9/11 to do anything more than peacekeeping efforts simply was not there. [6]
Strategically, the recommendation to deploy American troops, particularly Delta Force, is made by a very small crowd in Washington, with the final decision being made by the president. If the commander in chief’s key advisors consistently tell him Delta’s services are not required or necessary, then Delta stays home. These key advisors take their cues from various general officers located both inside and outside of the Washington Beltway.
One former Special Operations commander likened the Clinton administration’s hesitancy to use Delta to never putting a Super Bowl-caliber team into the game. The former operator added that our nation’s leaders were risk averse, with former secretary of state Madeleine Albright being the most aggressive.
Delta apparently was only to be used for fine carpentry work. That did not change until nearly three thousand innocent citizens died on 9/11.
Back in Europe, before the World Trade Center dust had time to settle, we could feel the hands of fate reaching down and tearing the shackles of timidity loose from our nation’s decision makers. The aversion to risk displayed up our chain of command, particularly since the Mogadishu misadventure eight years earlier, was a character flaw that the American people would no longer accept. This new challenge was so much bigger, so much more important.
President George W. Bush’s aggressive response to 9/11 seemed like a relief to us, but it did not mean we were finally in the game.
Unfortunately, Bush’s offensive mind-set didn’t trickle down through the ranks of the military’s general officers with the speed one might expect. Even though President Bill Clinton left office in January, 2001, our nation was still hamstrung in September by the same timid senior military officers he had confirmed.
Over the next year in Afghanistan, my men and I were continuously shocked to see the national security apparatus still sluggishly displaying the same reluctance to take risks that existed before 9/11.
The operational kid gloves did not come off until the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
Delta operators had stopped shaving after 9/11, knowing that sooner or later, we likely would be working among men with long beards. Our squadron returned home and was bustling with anticipation and activity, but one of our sister squadrons was already on standby and well into the planning phase. It would lead the Unit, and the nation, into Afghanistan to begin to right the colossal wrong.
Waiting for our number to be called was tough. For those serving in an elite military unit, the idea of being left behind when a fight looms is utterly devastating. We clung to the belief, however, that our country was on the verge of a total war with terrorists, so if our sister squadron was served the main course in Afghanistan, then we would be happy with the global leftovers.
We spent our days developing new or reviewing the shelved courses of action for numerous unique and politically sensitive target sets. In fact, while our senior military commanders on Capitol Hill were desperately searching for answers and appropriate response methods, Delta already had a playbook for this very eventuality. Over the years, Delta intelligence analysts had amassed a priceless encyclopedia of who’s who in terrorism, and it was filled with information about what makes them tick, and was updated daily according to the twist and turns of their evil minds.
Only a month after the attack, down at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, the home of SOCOM, talented covert operatives, intelligence officials, and Special Forces commanders gathered to author the nation’s way ahead to destroy terrorists and their infrastructure around the world. [7] The men and women in Florida were also to figure out what could be done to kick off the campaign of vengeance and to give the president viable and realistic options.
Among this galaxy of professional and experienced commandos was our Delta squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jake Ashley. A tall and lean man, Ashley had a vocabulary the equal of an Ivy League law professor’s, and I often thought he would be more comfortable as a congressman than as a commando.
Although a little short on personality and pleasantries, his ability to package data and collective insight before smoothly presenting the goods was extraordinary. When it came to briefing and putting the decision makers at ease, he had few peers.
Our frustration at not yet riding into the fray was compounded by what we were seeing on television. Every major network was spotlighting politicians and self-advertised military experts, few of whom had any idea about what role Delta would take. One of the silliest suggestions was that we should be put aboard civilian airliners as federal air marshals. Granted, a Delta operator could do that job, and just prior to 9/11, several recently retired Delta warriors had been hired as primary instructors in the air marshal training program. But this was not how the nation needed to use the sharpest knives in the drawer.
There were lengthy discussions of the harebrained idea on the news, during which government officials who should have clearly understood the importance of operational security were freely tossing about our Unit designation, which remains classified to this day.
As our sister squadron moved into the final days of rehearsals before leading the charge in Afghanistan, our squadron was handed two interesting and challenging missions. The first cannot be discussed in this book because it remains strictly compartmentalized. In fact, some of my men likely still don’t know that sensitive target location or the person targeted. That short-notice mission, however, kept some of us planning around the clock for several days before the intelligence dried up.
It only increased our frustration. We were used to scrapped missions after being put on short standby, but this latest word to stand down reminded us of pre-9/11 days. We were hungry. Hell, where were all the terrorists?
The second mission was to rescue Shelter Now International hostages being held somewhere in Kabul, Afghanistan, which was under Taliban control.
We went to work studying photos from the intelligence shop and reviewing Predator footage of the major hardball and hard-packed dirt roads. Some photos taken by the unmanned aerial vehicle also had been sent via satellite from some of our guys on the ground with the CIA north of Kabul, and near Kandahar in the south. [8] All routes in and out of the capital city were controlled by sporadic and intermittent Taliban checkpoints.
We decided our only way to reach the hostages, short of fighting our way in, was to look like a bunch of ragtag Taliban or al Qaeda fighters ourselves.
Only small groups of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters enjoyed freedom of movement inside Kabul after nightfall, and for that the Taliban favored imported Toyota pickup trucks. There you have it: We would become terrorists for an evening.
The unit acquired a dozen Toyota 4×4 pickup trucks and while our mechanics modified them to fit a dozen specific mission parameters, we gathered Taliban-like turbans, mujahideen wool pakool hats and other Arab and Afghan clothing.
Higher headquarters needed some prodding to appreciate the tactic we were setting up. One afternoon, troop sergeant major Jim and I sat around brainstorming how we might garner more support for our plan to hide in plain sight.
We pulled a recent photo of some Taliban fighters in a pickup truck near Kabul. We then outfitted one of our assault teams with similar clothing, RPGs, and AK-47s, loaded them in a similar pickup, and took their picture.
The two photos were almost identical and we packaged them in a short PowerPoint presentation. To the slide with the two photos juxtaposed, we added the caption, “At less than 10 percent illumination, what does the enemy actually see?” The unit operations officer was convinced and he took it over to higher headquarters. A few hours later, we had approval.
The options for a successful rescue inside Kabul were still limited. Sure, the 160th SOAR pilots could deposit us wherever we wanted, but that was only half the performance. The idea was not just to get out with the hostages; it was to bring them home alive.
The basic idea was to pass ourselves off as an al Qaeda convoy moving through the city at night, taking advantage of bombing that would be going on north of the capital. We had no illusions of being able to pass any close inspection or talk ourselves past a sentry, but all we needed was just to avoid being recognized at a distance by the brief look of a sentry.
If our ploy worked, we would continue to roll toward the hostage location. If not, we would eliminate the guards with our suppressed weapons to keep things quiet from neighborhood ears. We did not want a Mogadishulike confrontation.
Then we had some very good intelligence from the CIA about the hostage building, right down to which rooms they were in. Unit engineers constructed a mock-up of the building so we could rehearse the assault dozens of times.
The cover-for-action theory looked good to us, and maybe the rescue of the hostages in Kabul might have worked, but it all became moot because the Taliban collapsed so fast. When Kabul toppled on November 10, the Taliban ran for their lives, and some sympathetic Afghans spirited the hostages out of the city to a point where they were safely picked up by helicopters.
In late November 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited the Delta compound and my troop was tapped to demonstrate the Unit’s unique skills.
These capability exercises, or CAPEXs, occurred every other month or so for various VIPs, and most were just a pain in the ass, since they took away valuable training days in preparation. [9]
However, times were different now; we wanted to show this wartime secretary of defense more than we would unveil to an average visiting ambassador, congressman, or even a general officer. Since my troop was putting on the demonstration, the responsibility for most of the briefing fell to me. We wanted to impress the hell out of Rumsfeld, for our goal was to hear him tell us that we were going to Afghanistan.
The day of the CAPEX, a teammate approached me roughly thirty minutes before the secretary’s arrival. Cos had been wounded in action in Somalia in 1993 and again was wounded during the October 19, 2001, raid on the home of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Cos was now back in the United States, nursing his latest wounds, and asked if I minded introducing him to Secretary Rumsfeld.
Here was an operator who had spilled blood fighting for our country, and I thought the request totally reasonable. Cos had earned an introduction, but that didn’t mean I should not pull his chain a bit. “Well, Cos, I don’t know. That’s not part of the approved itinerary,” I wisecracked. “Hmmm, I wonder how high the approval authority would be for a last-minute request.”
He knew that I was kidding, but I quickly changed gears. “Absolutely, Cos, I’d be honored to do it. Be outside standing in the background. As soon as the secretary is turned over to me from the Unit commander, I’ll break the script and call you over.”
“I’ll be there. I owe you one, Dalton,” Cos replied.
“Easy day, Cos. Easy day.”
It was an unusually warm day in North Carolina and Sergeant Major Ironhead and I squinted into the sun as the VIPs approached through the Delta garden.
Flanked by several dozen uniformed officers from various higher headquarters, the secretary and his party made their way toward the bus. I recognized Steven Cambone, the special assistant to the secretary, and Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke, who was walking with a cast on her foot.
After shaking Rumsfeld’s hand and asking about the weather in Washington, I motioned Cos to come forward. The looks on the faces of some of the senior officers present was incredulous. Who does this major think he is breaking the rehearsed itinerary for this type of shenanigans? Sergeant Major Ironhead shot me a smirk.
Rumsfeld was clearly enthralled as I described Cos’s dedication and explained his convalescent status. He was genuinely appreciative of the operator’s sacrifice and commitment. The whole episode lasted less than a minute and was more than worth the slight change in schedule. A few days later, Cos was back in Afghanistan. Two days after that, he was wounded while fighting in Kandahar. Again he recovered. Again he went back, and in November, 2003, he was wounded for the fourth time, in Baghdad. Who would not shake up a VIP schedule for that kind of operator?
Further into the CAPEX, Rumsfeld listened to Pope, a Delta sniper team sergeant, describe the dozen or so modifications to the Toyota trucks that our guys had made. It was more of a diversion, and while it was going on, another Toyota pickup slowly made its way up behind the visiting party. Four operators armed with AK-47s and RPGs, adorned with healthy beards and dressed in Afghan rags, were propped menacingly in the bed of the truck as it rolled to a silent stop roughly forty meters away.
Pope asked Secretary Rumsfeld to turn around and take a look at how we planned to use these new vehicles that had been bought out of his budget. A wide smile lit Rumsfeld’s face and he marveled about how authentic the boys looked.
After an hour or so of discussion and demonstrations that included a show by special helicopters and a free-fall parachute demonstration by Navy SEALs, I climbed aboard an old school bus with the secretary and a bevy of generals from the Special Ops community and senior Delta officers to move to still another demonstration site.
Rumsfeld had a slight look of angst, and he said to me, “What we really need is small groups of folks, say two to four people, that can go anywhere in the world and execute discreet missions against these people [al Qaeda].”
I was shocked! Did the secretary of defense, a month and a half after 9/11, still have no idea what Delta offered our nation? Was Delta’s operational security so tight that not even the secretary understood the Unit’s capabilities?
I didn’t have to worry about answering because various generals and senior Special Ops officers nervously showered him with answers, buzz words, and reassurances that the capability he had just described was exactly Delta’s job! Those unique abilities he described had already existed for many years.
Throughout the exercise, we emphasized that we were capable of operating alongside Afghan warlords, infiltrating hostile areas, conducting long-range helicopter assaults in extremely cold weather, and fighting in dangerously unforgiving mountain passes.
As the CAPEX came to a close, we had shown Don Rumsfeld, the cleanup hitter for the world’s only remaining superpower, that Delta Force, the most versatile, lethal, and trustworthy tool that he had, was ready to be pulled out of the toolbox and put to work.
In fact, our sister squadron was already operating secretly inside Afghanistan. Delta was the United States’ premier counterterrorism force, and it was high time that someone treated us that way, and gave the taxpayers their money’s worth.
Little did we know at the time of Rumsfeld’s visit, but our squadron’s fate was being determined some 7,000 miles away in northwest Afghanistan.
On a sunny but cold day at Bagram Air Base, about thirty-seven miles north of the capital city of Kabul, four men were gathered around the hood of a Humvee outside the headquarters of Task Force Dagger, home of in-country Special Forces operations at the time. Gary Berntsen, the lead guy on the ground for the Central Intelligence Agency, was paying yet another visit to barrel-chested colonel John Mulholland, the commander of Dagger, to lay out fresh intelligence sources on the whereabouts of Usama bin Laden.
It was not the first time the CIA had approached Mulholland on the issue, and the first request had been unequivocally rejected. To increase his chances this time around, the CIA man had brought along more firepower, in the persons of Lt. Col. Mark Sutter of Delta Force, and a Special Forces officer we will call Lieutenant Colonel Al, who was attached to the CIA.
The three visitors felt so strongly about the new intelligence that they would not discuss it by phone, even over secure lines. But to do anything with the vital information, they needed more than just to share it; they needed an army. Short of that, they would settle for a Special Forces A Team or two from Mulholland.
To Gary Berntsen the new details were hot enough to be “actionable intelligence,” by definition something that could be acted upon. In the past week, credible sources had placed bin Laden in the historic city of Jalalabad, close to the Pakistan border and the entranceway to the Khyber Pass. Locals had reported scores of vehicles loaded with al Qaeda fighters and supplies moving south, toward bin Laden’s old fortress, the caves and secure positions nestled high in the Tora Bora Mountains.
There already were numerous Special Forces A Teams working in the western part of Afghanistan, and that put these highly skilled soldiers at the top of the CIA wish list for assistance. Mulholland voiced his concern that bin Laden held well-prepared defensive positions up in those mountains, as well as a significant terrain advantage.
But there was something else going on, too, for the colonel’s Special Forces teams had been burned already by Afghan warlords who had personal vendettas and agendas that were counter to the United States objectives. The warlord the CIA was now backing to hunt down bin Laden was a relative unknown, and had not yet been vetted to Mulholland’s satisfaction.
Gary Berntsen continued his hard pitch, placing the Green Beret commander in a dilemma. For a few uncomfortable moments, it looked like a stalemate.
Then Lieutenant Colonel Al, who had been friends with Mulholland for a long time, looked the colonel in the eye and promised that any Green Berets that Mulholland could spare would be used only under Al’s personal guidance and within their capabilities. He promised to watch over them like they were his own.
Mulholland wanted bin Laden dead as bad as the next guy, probably even more so if the death of the terrorist might get him out of godforsaken Afghanistan a little earlier. He reluctantly agreed to commit some Green Berets, but not before leveling a few veiled threats at his friend Lieutenant Colonel Al: Don’t get my guys killed in some harebrained reenactment of Custer’s last stand.
Once they had Mulholland’s blessing, Lieutenant Colonels Sutter and Al, along with the operations officer of the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, went to work developing a plan that would pass muster by the various decision makers back at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, and at Fort Bragg. A gentlemen’s agreement made over the hood of a Humvee in a country that was one big battlefield is quite different from appeasing the senior leaders managing the war from the United States.
In a rare display of unity, during that single afternoon, the three planners cast aside all politically correct barriers, or the stovepiping of information, embraced a united front, and developed a viable interagency plan. All parties involved had to wipe the snot from their noses and sing from the same sheet of music. It was a bonding not often achieved among senior levels of the intelligence and the military communities.
That agreement was nice, but whether this hunt for bin Laden would turn out to be a great success or a complete goat screw was yet to be seen.
Based upon that meeting at Bagram, our squadron’s luck changed, and a day or two later we received deployment orders to Afghanistan.
We spent a couple of days tying up loose ends, spent time with our families, and studied the available intelligence reports on potential targets. Then we walked out of the Delta building in North Carolina and loaded the buses for our long journey to war.
We were going off one man light. Former Ranger and Delta assaulter Scott had wanted to go to Afghanistan as much as the rest of us, but a civilian job had been aggressively recruiting him. He stalled as long as possible and even pushed back his end-of-service date, hoping for the deployment orders to come through before he had to make the final decision. The timing was all wrong, and he had dropped the paperwork that ended his military career just before we got the word to move out.
It was a disappointment for everyone, including Scott, but he came out to meet us at the bus, in civilian clothes with his long hair blowing in the wind, to shake hands and wish the squadron luck.
Acouple of C-17 Globemasters hauled us across the Atlantic Ocean, long and tiring flights to the ISB, our intermediate staging base near the Arabian Sea. The change from the chill of North Carolina to the searing heat of the Middle East hit us hard. We stowed our gear, dressed down into brown T-shirts and black running shorts, and got down to preparing to enter Afghanistan.
Intelligence remained painfully scarce, since very few friendly forces were inside Afghanistan at that early date. The whereabouts of bin Laden and his stubborn and faithful Afghan host, Mullah Omar, were unknown. Anyone’s guess.
Then we were slammed by a silly deception plan that had been dreamed up by parties unknown. The majority of the Rangers and our Delta teammates were being sent home! Somebody had decided to try and fool Usama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban into thinking that the Joint Special Operations Task Force had left the theater of operations, so the bad guys would let down their guard. The naïveté of that idea still boggles my mind today.
“Aren’t we at war?” we asked. Why were we not pouring all available assets into Afghanistan, rather than withdrawing our strength? What about helping the 5th Group Green Berets deliver the coup de grâce to the Taliban? Moreover, what about the deadly and dangerous business of hunting and killing terrorists in their rugged mountain redoubts and desert lairs? Why were we drawing down just as we were about to embark on what was arguably the most important mission ever given to our organization?
Fortunately, a couple of hundred Rangers would be arriving at Bagram eventually and could form a potential quickreaction force should we get into big trouble. None were yet in the country, however, so the key word remained only a “potential” QRF, not a real one. Still, it was a bright spot in a sea of ambiguity. No helicopters or air assets were yet based in the country, but some of those stationed within flying distance also were being sent home. Crazy stuff.
Ours not to reason why. Our sister squadron was at the ISB for another few days, heading back to the States after a busy month and a half, and we picked their brains for lessons learned. During their brief stint, they had raided Mullah Omar’s house in Kandahar on October 19, conducted mounted reconnaissance missions south of that city, and executed in-and-out missions that destroyed fleeing Taliban convoys. Their most striking mission involved the first nighttime combat HALO (high altitude, low opening) parachute jump since the Vietnam War.
Another friendly face at the ISB was that of Gus Murdock, who had been our squadron commander until just a few months before 9/11, when he had been corralled to head a new organization. Gus was now in charge of a mix of sister-service operators, support personnel, fixed- and rotarywing aircraft planners, and some top military and civilian intelligence geniuses, and they would fight deep in the shadows and along the seams of the war on terror.
Within a day or so, a small advance party from our squadron flew ahead to Bagram, dubbed FOB Yukon. They were to determine whether Yukon could be suitable as a staging base for us, and what they found was not exactly a fixer-upper.
Built by the Soviets during their own Afghan war, Yukon had plenty of real estate, buildings, and a runway, but was in terrible shape. Derelict Soviet jets and rusted airplane parts littered the area, and years of bombardment had left the old runway severely cratered. Most windows were shattered in the gutted buildings and there was no running water or electricity. Hundreds of unmarked land mines were hidden beneath an inch or so of fine brown dust.
Still, Yukon could be made workable, and our unit engineers assumed the monumental task of turning it into a long-term station that could support combat operations for an indefinite period. They worked miracles.
In his book Against All Enemies, former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke recounted a tabletop exercise by intelligence officials and analysts conducted in 2000. The participants were divided into two groups, one playing the role of al Qaeda and secretly developing weapons of mass destruction to be used against the United States. That group also was asked to determine where in the world al Qaeda might likely hide the weapon. The second group countered the first and began with the assumption al Qaeda had already developed a weapon.
It didn’t take long for the al Qaeda role players to determine an excellent place to hide their nefarious activities. From studying satellite imagery, topography, and safe havens, the choice was obvious. Clarke referred to the place as a “valley in Afghanistan called Tora Bora” and it was such a logical place for terrorists that U.S. assets began to photograph it from the air continuously and map the numerous cave entrances.
I can assure you that Tora Bora is much more than a single valley. Indeed, it is a vertical no-man’s land, a hellish place of massive, rocky, jagged, unforgiving snow-covered ridgelines and high peaks separated by deep ravines and valleys studded with mines.
What Clarke’s experts were not tasked with determining, nor were they even capable of doing so at the time, was how this mountainous redoubt might look if bin Laden had prepared it for an assault by foreign troops.
However, any student of mujahideen tactics in the Soviet-Afghan war could make a pretty good assumption that it might have become impregnable, both from the air and ground. During the twelve years since the Soviet withdrawal, the defenses in the Tora Bora Mountains had matured and expanded significantly.
The hardworking guys in the intelligence shop didn’t get much sleep and didn’t have as much to work with as did those tabletop teams Clarke described. Where were the satellite photos? Where were those maps of cave entrances? I don’t know, but they weren’t with the men who needed them most. Our intel people were reinventing the wheel by having to study the forbidding Tora Bora area from scratch. Things looked pretty bleak.
The fortress was densely pocked with well-built bunkers that were cloaked from ground and air observation by remarkable camouflage. Al Qaeda used a defense-in-depth concept to impede an attacking force at various points while allowing defenders to reposition farther back in other prepared and well-stocked positions.
An attacking force had two basic approaches from which to choose. They could stick to the low ground in the valleys and ascend steadily while moving deeper into the mountains. Or they could take the well-worn footpaths used by drug smugglers, goat herders, and generations of mujahideen and outside warriors dating back to Alexander the Great.
But modern enemy weapons now overlooked those ancient foot routes-DShK-38 12.7mm heavy machine guns and 82mm mortar tubes, SVD 7.62mm Dragunov rifles, RPGs, AK-47s, and PKM machine guns. Any force attacking uphill, already tired from the climb and with limited lateral space in which to maneuver, would certainly face an unfriendly welcome. Once committed to a particular avenue of approach, the decision to continue or turn around would require great caution.
The helicopter option was quickly ruled out for Tora Bora. At least two camouflaged ZPU-1 14.5mm AAA guns and several dozen SA-7 SAM rockets were waiting down there, and the low-flying birds would be fat and easy targets. The last thing we wanted was another Mogadishu, with a helicopter shot down. Such a tragedy always seemed to shift the mission away from its original objective and into recovering friendly forces.
Lieutenant Colonel Ashley, our squadron commander, knew the muhj had been very successful in shooting down Soviet helicopters with shoulderfired rockets in the 1980s, and he also was a veteran of Somalia and vividly remembered that disaster.
The restrictions that would limit helicopters in such terrible mountain battlefield conditions further dampened hopes of getting any quick reaction force to a trouble spot in a hurry.
The more we studied how to tackle those mountains, the more the situation started to display many of the trappings of a modern siege.
Centuries ago, a commander typically could surround the stronghold, sit tight, and wait for the defenders to starve themselves into capitulation. Sieges of castles or towns usually began in the spring or summer, when the attackers could retain some level of personal comfort, and dry weather supported the use of fire and heavy siege engines.
Or the ancient commander could choose to attack the fortified position, which was obviously more hazardous. So far, everything we had seen about Tora Bora tilted us toward the latter and riskier method.
In the modern year of 2001, our snipers would serve as archers and our bullets as fire-tipped arrows. Our pickup trucks would be the war chariots, and rusty but usable Afghan tanks and black-market mortars would stand in as ballistas and bombards. Our fighters and bombers could rain down JDAMs and BLU-82s like ancient Greek fire.
There was another intriguing option, and we liked it enough to plan it out. What about going in the back door, across the 14,000-foot mountains on the Afghan-Pakistan border? What if several teams could insert safely by helicopter into Pakistan, on the far side of the highest Tora Bora peaks. They would have bottled oxygen and acclimate themselves as they ascended even higher, and once they crested the peaks and found any signs of al Qaeda, they would be in business.
The commandos would own the high ground and could accurately target bunkers or cave openings with lasers for U.S. warplanes to strike them with relative impunity.
A tactical plan drawn up by the Delta experts is rarely denied, and in fact I cannot remember anyone ever saying no once Delta determined what it needed to do to accomplish its assigned mission. This one worked its way up through our various commanders, but somewhere way, way above us, it was denied. We would not be allowed to infiltrate through Pakistan.
Any plan has negatives, including this one. Just resupplying such recon teams with water, ammunition, and radio batteries would have been a tall order. That did not mean, however, that we should not do it. We were Delta and we could overcome such things. Having Delta guarding the far side of the mountain passes, closing the ring, would have made a huge difference. But our plan was shot down.
Over the years, it has come to be believed that Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf refused permission for us to have the staging access we needed for a cross-border infiltration and that Central Command decided the issue was too sensitive to press. This is only partly true.
Author Ron Suskind, in The One Percent Doctrine, replayed an event that unfolded deep inside the White House. As President Bush and Vice President Cheney watched, a senior CIA operative laid a map of Afghanistan out on the floor and argued for an immediate commitment of American troops to seal Pakistan’s side of Tora Bora, thus cutting off a potential al Qaeda escape route. [10]
He displayed satellite imagery to prove that Pakistan’s military was not yet in place to accomplish the task. Further, the CIA man strongly suggested that Pakistan could not be counted on to fulfill their promise of troops to secure the area.
According to Suskind, President Bush was not completely swayed, and opted to trust our Muslim allies in the new war on terror. The back door would remain wide open to the enemy. We were not pleased.
With their southern flank secure, al Qaeda could focus on the west, north, and east, and they built their defenses accordingly, around the assumption that those big border mountains were inviolate.
On the ground, we knew that back in 2001.
Even our huge advantage in air surpremacy was not going to work in our favor, at least for a while. Those valuable air assets were not yet even based inside Afghanistan. Bagram airfield and the Kandahar airport, dubbed FOB Tahoe, were not ready to accept aircraft. For the present, the planes were still bedding down well to the northwest in Uzbekistan and to the southeast in a remote stretch of Pakistan, and the air fleet was being downsized in a strange attempt to fool the terrorists. It was not difficult for us to envision how the great distances could hamper air support during a gunfight in Tora Bora, with us out there at the tip of the spear.
Aware of all of the things that were not likely to be successful, or were disapproved by some higher levels, the squadron boss Ashley, operations officer Super D, and the rest of the staff went to work to identify things that might make our mission work.
Recent satellite imagery and pictures from high-flying reconnaissance planes allowed the analysts to measure what was happening in the mountains. The information was packaged into a color-coded PowerPoint slide show. Winter temperatures were frigid, the mountain range was sheathed in low and lingering clouds, and deep snow was stacking up in various valleys and passes.
The clear conclusion was that those vital passageways were so clogged that al Qaeda and bin Laden could not be leaving the mountains anytime soon, which meant they would have to make a major defensive stand.
Ashley wanted to make those possible exit routes even more dangerous by dropping some CBU-89 GATOR mines into the passes. The GATORs would spread a minefield that would both deny enemy foot soldiers their escape routes and also knock out vehicles, leaving the enemy trapped and shaping the battlefield more to our liking.
Even this logical request was disapproved at some higher level, most likely even above the four-stars at CENTCOM. Later, after the battles were done, we learned that indeed there had been a political twist to it because some of our allies threatened to opt out of the fighting should the GATORs be employed.
Multiple sources still said that bin Laden was in the mountains and reported that he was still alive, well protected, and moving continually on horseback from cave to cave. Additionally, we learned that he enjoyed widespread support among the local population.
That was no surprise. Since at least 1985, he had been providing jobs and jihad opportunities for many residents during the construction of the trenches, bunkers, and caves that comprised the mountain redoubt. Either his fellow Muslims in the area genuinely believed in him or bin Laden had simply bought their allegiance. This is not meant to suggest that all Muslims support bin Laden or are the enemy, for they clearly do not and are not. It’s very likely many were just too scared to turn on him.
Save for the big intelligence coups that it was winter in the Afghan mountains and bin Laden could ride a horse, neither we operators nor our commanders had much to go on. We knew our ability to move crosscountry mounted in the Toyota pickups was limited, so the only remaining solution was for us to just walk up the mountains.
A final piece of bad news was that our first-line quickreaction force, or QRF, would not be made up of American Rangers after all, but of Afghans. We all initially overestimated the ability and willingness of the Afghan muhj, but for the time being, we were going to bet our lives on them. Thinking the muhj could do as well as the Rangers was a complete pipe dream.
One limitation was the inability of the muhj to fight at night, a deficiency that was originally chalked up to their not having much night vision capability. We would soon learn that the muhj did not really need any night vision equipment; they had no desire to fight in the dark.
It was a friction point that would get even uglier when the shooting started.
Things were shaping up for an interesting next couple of weeks.
Bin Laden’s major assumption, as well as personal desire, was that the United States would introduce massive numbers of conventional troops, just what the Soviets had done in this same terrain. He figured that large numbers of Americans would face the same challenges as Russians. In his mind, it all added up to another opportunity for his guerrillas to inflict large-scale casualties on another superpower. After our turn-tail-and-run withdrawal from Somalia, he had to believe that hard and costly combat might invoke an American or even worldwide outcry to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Of course, details of al Qaeda’s defensive disposition remained unknown while we were planning at the ISB. Satellite imagery is nice, but clarity, confirmation, and documentation of the al Qaeda fortress came only after American boots had walked the ground.
A small cluster of task force planners, commanders, and Delta operators gathered inside a makeshift briefing area at the ISB. White sheets of target cloth served as walls, and we took seats in rickety chairs. It was a pretty dilapidated feel for a place in which such an important mission was being finalized.
A laptop computer sat on a large cardboard box next to a small projector that threw the image of a slide with black letters on the wall: A SQUADRON MISSION BRIEF, 2 DEC 2001.
Our sister assault troop would continue the hunt for Mullah Omar in the south. Our teammates had been in that fight since the beginning and were well versed in the Taliban order of battle there.
Meanwhile, the majority of our Unit would focus on bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan. As close as I can remember, it went something like this: On order, conduct linkup with the Eastern Alliance Opposition Group in the vicinity of Jalalabad, Afghanistan, to facilitate killing or capturing Usama bin Laden.
That was a pretty simple and direct set of orders. Meet and greet some local Afghan mujahideen, then go find bin Laden and kill or capture him.
Placing the word “capture” in the mission statement was standard practice, because some targeted personalities are more valuable alive than dead. They might have valuable information that can lead to someone higher up the food chain or reveal critical information that might disrupt a planned terrorist operation.
The fact is that the live-or-die decision is not complicated for a Delta operator. When an operator enters a room, his first task is to eliminate all threats in his designated sector. If the targeted individual happens to be standing there, he determines his own fate. If he is unarmed and not displaying hostile intent, then he lives and is chalked up under the capture category.
Delta does not waste time looking at the face, but takes an instant snapshot of the entire person before focusing on what is critical-the hands. If the target has a weapon, well, he is a dead man with a one-way ticket to martyrdom with carry-on baggage only.
Usama bin Laden was different. Simply put, he was more valuable being dead. It was made crystal clear to us that capturing the terrorist was not the preferred outcome. The president had already signed a memorandum of notice that authorized killing the terrorist mastermind on sight. [11]
Bringing a captured bin Laden to trial in the United States would surely have created a media frenzy that would make the O. J. Simpson trial look like a catfight between mothers at the local PTA. Other nations would be undoubtedly drawn into the ugly mix.
Biting their fingernails at the idea of such a trial was our critical ally, the Saudis. Bin Laden was a native of Saudi Arabia and part of a huge, rich, and important family in that country. A major trial of bin Laden in a Western court of law would expose and embarrass members of the Saudi royal family and our double agents inside Saudi intelligence and perhaps put the entire regime at risk.
Following the short brief, Maj. Gen. Dell Dailey issued the commander’s guidance. He was adamant that we stay focused on bin Laden and not get swept into sideshow firefights. Once bin Laden was killed, we were to give his remains to the Afghans.
He voiced concern about our ability to operate at such high altitudes in extreme winter weather, and he queried the intelligence officer about the minefields. The general also tried to temper our natural offensive mind-set with caution not to outpace our ability to resupply as we pushed into the al Qaeda stronghold. The general went on and on. He seemed to have a hundred concerns, and his staff could provide very few answers.
All good stuff, but somehow I got the impression the general was not too keen on Delta venturing up into the mountains. There was an impression of hesitancy, almost as if some folks still hoped the problem would somehow solve itself before we entered Afghanistan. Then we all could return to our normal training routine at home.
The general seemed concerned that we might stage a massive uphill frontal assault against an entrenched enemy who owned the high ground. He had to be aware that Delta doesn’t march single line abreast into automatic weapons fire.
Dailey also told us that we were not going to Tora Bora to support the friendly Afghan mujahideen. That was an odd statement because it was exactly what the 5th Special Forces Group had been doing with the Northern Alliance for weeks.
We appreciated the general’s concern for our health and welfare, but his comments were out of synch with our mission statement. After all, just a few minutes earlier, one of the slides specified that we were to link up with a warlord to kill Usama bin Laden.
As assault troop Sergeant Major Jim and I listened to the comments, we shot each other curious looks: Can you believe this shit?
Bottom line, it was not perfect, and nobody ever said it had to be. We couldn’t rewrite the script to our liking.
Bin Laden was up in Tora Bora waiting for us, and we had no problem obliging him, regardless of the strategic or operational limitations.
Still, I didn’t leave that briefing with a warm and fuzzy feeling.
Only a few minutes after the briefing broke up, Dailey approached Jim, Ski, and me. He still wore that look of concern, but then he paused, focused, and very general-like gave us all the command guidance we had ever really needed.
“Fellas, kill bin Laden…and bring back proof!”
That was more like it.
At midday on the fifth of December, we loaded several MC-130 Talon II aircraft for our four-and-a-half-hour journey into Afghanistan. In addition to several dozen operators, each aircraft contained two pickup trucks strapped to the floor and loaded down with supplies and combat gear. I took up a seat on the passenger side of a white Toyota that still smelled showroom new.
I plugged in a laptop computer so it was powered by the vehicle battery and called up the FalconView software. On the screen, I began sorting through layers of satellite imagery and maps, including a Russian-made 1:50,000 of Afghanistan.
A cable snaked out of the truck window to a circular GPS antenna behind one of the aircraft’s window blackout screens. That linked us with several airborne satellites that gave life to a tiny royal blue airplane icon that represented our plane. That little image crept over the map on my screen as our aircraft crossed the Arabian Sea.
We hugged the Pakistan border just east of Iran and bent around the southern and eastern side of Afghanistan. Somewhere above the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan, the pilots banked hard to the west and we entered Afghan airspace, heading toward Kabul.
Bart, the squadron operations sergeant who had given us the first word on the September 11 attacks, was there to meet us on the runway at Bagram. He led us to an old, bombed-out rectangular building, our new home away from home, where we dropped our gear. To keep the frigid air away, the advance party had boarded up the windows in the hard clay walls, acquired kerosene space heaters, and covered the cold concrete floor almost wall to wall with crimson red carpet.
The building, and one just like it sitting roughly forty meters away, was among the very few where the land mines had been cleared outside. Only enough space had been cleared to allow us to walk around the perimeter by staying close to the buildings and to pull up a few pickup trucks in the front.
Within thirty minutes, we were summoned to the Joint Intelligence Agency Task Force building a couple of hundred yards down the street. With land mines in our thoughts, we walked to the building, which was a little larger, a little warmer and had more divided rooms. This was the austere home of the Fusion Cell, the relatively new designation given to an ad hoc faction of professionals charged with collating, analyzing, and making heads or tails out of the various intelligence collected by multiple means; hence the name Fusion. Their task was daunting, even for such a talented bunch of men and women, and it did not take long for some jokers to add a prefix to the name, changing it to the Confusion Cell.
Gus Murdock had beaten us into town from the ISB, and was in charge of joint advance special forces operations, as part of the Fusion Cell. After some quick handshakes and dirty jokes, we sat down to get our former squadron commander’s take on our next move. The news was not good. Gus said the intelligence community was estimating that between fifteen hundred to three thousand enemy forces were currently inside the Tora Bora Mountains.
That was when we started to realize Delta was being asked to do something clearly outside our Mission Essential Task List. We were quite certain that Delta had never before been tasked to tether their combat operations to a tribal opposition group. Moreover, we were to conduct military operations while relying on indigenous security and guides, local quickreaction forces in lieu of Americans, and do so with an extremely untimely and weather-dependent casualty evacuation support plan. It was most un-Delta like. General Dailey’s vagueness began to make sense.
The CIA had passed word while we were still in the air that Gen. Hazret Ali, the head of the Eastern Alliance, was ready to receive us immediately over in the border city of Jalalabad. We were looking forward to it, because we had zero information about the Afghan warlord with whom we were to link, other than the basics of his biography. Ali, a Sunni Muslim, had come from the Pashai tribe in Nangarhar Province, and distinguished himself as a field commander in the war against the Soviets. Beyond that, we knew zilch.
But the CIA in Jalalabad, Team Jawbreaker Juliet, said Ali was ready to help, and that was good enough for us. Anyway, we had been told the Afghans must appear to be a part of any action. We did not think that was any big deal, but it sure became one.
We were to drive down from FOB Yukon to Kabul, link up with a few advance force operators and CIA folks, and receive a quick intelligence dump. From there we would proceed under the escort of a dozen or so CIA-funded mujahideen over to Jalalabad, where the Afghan warlord kept his headquarters.
Gus told us it was all set and we needed to move out soon. While I briefed Jim and the boys on the situation, Sergeant Major Ironhead, and reconnaissance troop Sergeant Major Bryan, code-named B-Monkey, our communicator Bernie, and Shag, a Pashto speaker, loaded two trucks. Jim elected to stay behind to coordinate things and oversee preparations to eventually move the rest of the boys forward once the details were worked out with the CIA and General Ali. We figured it would be a day or two at most.
We were under strict instructions that we could only “borrow” the linguist Shag for a few days and would have to send him back to Bagram very soon. Somehow, once we reached the shadows of Tora Bora, we forgot that order.
After packing, we went back inside to try to get warm while we waited to leave. We were too amped up to sleep, so we just sat on some cardboard boxes, tapped our feet on the floor to keep our blood flowing, huddled close to take advantage of one another’s body heat, and crossed our arms to cut the chill.
Bernie, our communicator, who was checking his laptop computer, called out with a hoot. “Hey, Dalton! You just got promoted!”
Higher headquarters back at the ISB had become nervous because I, the senior man representing the task force in this important meeting with General Ali, was only an army major. After all, in the American military, a general officer does not typically deal with lowly majors, and having someone of such menial rank handling the delicate high-level meeting might suggest to the Eastern Alliance and its venerated commander that we were not serious.
To alleviate the problem, they authorized me to masquerade as a lieutenant colonel for this particular mission, as if being one step higher on the ladder would make a difference.
Just like that, while sitting in a cold, cold room, I became make-believe Lt. Col. Dalton Fury: No promotion ceremony, no extra pay, no fanfare, just 100 percent unofficial. In fact, the only thing I got was a lot of sharp wisecracks from the boys around me.
The phony promotion was totally unnecessary. Field marshal, lieutenant colonel, major, or Private Gomer Pyle would have made no difference to General Ali, as long as whoever it was didn’t impede the cash and arms flowing in from the good ole United States of America.
In fact, if anything would have helped me impress General Ali, it would have been a thicker beard.
But our thoughts soon returned to what lay ahead and the unforgiving enemy that controlled the treacherous terrain where we would be fighting. We would be outnumbered, and intelligence analysts were saying that our new Afghan allies did not think anybody, including us, could win in the Tora Bora Mountains against the al Qaeda fighters who had been part of the massive guerrilla uprising that had already faced, and beaten, another superpower, the Soviet Union.
Ironhead, cool as ever, spoke the squadron motto: “Molon Labe.”
That was the challenge given by the Spartan king Leonidas at Thermopylae when Persian king Xerxes I offered to allow the outnumbered Spartans to surrender, if they would just drop their weapons. The defiant term means-Come and get them!
<a l:href="#_ftnref6">[6]</a> The political will to use Special Operations Forces prior to 9/11 is well documented in a January 2004 edition of the Weekly Standard. In an article titled “Showstoppers,” author Richard Shultz provides nine reasons why US officials never sent our Special Operations Forces after al Qaeda before 9/11. See http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/613twavk.asp.
<a l:href="#_ftnref7">[7]</a> Authors David Tucker and Christopher Lamb in their book, United States Special Operations Forces, discuss this Way Ahead meeting.
<a l:href="#_ftnref8">[8]</a> Former CIA official Gary Shroen, in his book First In, discusses the Delta advance party sent to Afghanistan to develop rescue plans for the Shelter Now International hostages.
<a l:href="#_ftnref9">[9]</a> Author Derek Leebaert, in his book To Dare and to Conquer, discusses these capability exercises performed by Delta for visiting VIPs.
<a l:href="#_ftnref10">[10]</a> In Cobra II, authors Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor recount the meeting between representatives of the CIA, Vice President Cheney, and President Bush.
<a l:href="#_ftnref11">[11]</a> See article on “Targeted Killings” published by The Foundation for Defense of Democracies. See http://www.defenddemocracy.org/publications/publications_show.htm?doc_id=218872.