Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (20 page)

Tora Bora is “a fortress like section of the White Mountains that stretches about six miles long and six miles wide across a collection of narrow valleys, snow-covered ridgelines and jagged peaks reaching 14,000 ft.” Bin Laden, scion of a prominent engineering enterprise in Saudi Arabia, built a road into the area, excavated new tunnels, and reinforced existing ones to create a military honeycomb. Around 30 November, he retreated to this redoubt with 1,000 or so Spartan warriors prepared to die in his defense, in their own, last-stand Thermopylae.

In the valley, a handful of CIA had established a base in a schoolhouse, from which they dispensed gold coins to two local tribal leaders and their militias. In early December, ninety Delta Force commandos joined this team, dressed as Afghans. Major “Dalton Fury,” commanding them, told the Senate inquiry that bin Laden’s communications were constantly monitored, partly thanks to an al Qaeda radio retrieved from the body of one of bin Laden’s jihadists. A CIA specialist confirmed that one of the voices was that of bin Laden. It was just one gem in a jewel box of intelligence confirming that the Americans had the world’s leading terrorist within their grasp.

The Tora Bora assault began with an intensive aerial bombing offensive in which Special Forces, moving in pairs, played a key role, creeping close enough to the enemy positions to be able to target them precisely with global positioning devices and laser designators. The hired Afghan warriors “insisted on retreating to their base at the bottom of the mountains each night, leaving the Americans alone inside al Qaeda territory.” Nevertheless, two Delta Force soldiers got close enough to al Qaeda positions to call down air strikes for seventeen continuous hours, forcing the enemy to retreat. One attack used a 15,000-pound Daisy Cutter bomb—capable of sucking oxygen from the air around the massive explosion over a wide area—rolled from the tailgate of a C-130, in a return to the tactics of the Vietnam War. The bomb “shook the mountain for miles around.”

By 14 December, bin Laden was writing his will, a remarkable document later recovered by the CIA: “Allah bears witness that the love of jihad and death in the cause of Allah has dominated my life and the verses of the sword permeated every cell in my heart, ‘and fight the pagans all together as they fight you altogether.’ How many times did I wake up to find myself reciting this holy verse!” In his own reinterpretation of the Koran, he left orders that his wives should not remarry. He apologized to his children—whom he had treated harshly—for devoting himself to jihad. And then he escaped into Pakistan.

The reason, as the Senate committee explains with a wealth of supporting evidence, was that repeated requests from the CIA and Delta for more American boots on the ground, to ensure that the back door into Pakistan was firmly blocked, were rejected in Washington. It asserts: “The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his troop commander, General Tommy Franks, the architect of the Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel widespread insurgency…. The Afghan [military]model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.”

General Tommy Franks, leader of U.S. Central Command at the time, has always contended that there was no hard intelligence about bin Laden’s whereabouts at the time and, further, that it was best to leave the fighting to Afghans because they knew the Tora Bora terrain best. That view is not shared by the British SAS soldiers who fought alongside their Delta Force blood-brothers at Tora Bora.

Bruce Anderson, an influential British journalist, describes a visit by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to the SAS base near Hereford in January 2002, soon after bin Laden’s latest feline disappearance. “Kissinger rapidly realised that he would have to defend his country. He was talking to men with a grievance, who believed that American generals had let bin Laden escape. Some of Dr Kissinger’s audience had just come back from Afghanistan. They had taken part in the attack on the cave complex at Tora Bora, where two squadrons of the SAS [around 120 men] went into action: a significant proportion of its total strength…. The SAS was fighting alongside Delta Force…the SAS was happy enough with Delta Force. It was the American high command which let their own men down, and everyone else. The SAS and Delta Force won a victory for the West. The American generals then ensured that the full fruits of victory could not be harvested.

“By the end of the battle, the SAS was certain that it knew where bin Laden was: in a mountain valley, where he could have been trapped. The men of the SAS would have been happy to move in for the kill, dividing themselves into beaters and guns. Going round the side, the guns would have positioned themselves at the head of the valley to cut off bin Laden’s retreat. The beaters would then have swept up the glen. If such a drive had taken place, the SAS is convinced that bin Laden would not have escaped. It would have been happy to fight alongside Delta Force and would have been glad of the assistance of American ground-attack aircraft. But it would also have been confident that it could finish the job on its own.

“It did not get the chance. The SAS was under overall U.S. command, and the American generals faltered. Understandably enough, they wanted Delta Force to be in at the death. They would have preferred it if bin Laden had fallen to an American bullet. So would Delta Force; every bit as much as the SAS, its men were raring to go. It was their commanders who held them back.

“Being in at such a death involves the risk of death. It seems unlikely that bin Laden could have been bagged without casualties. The men on the ground did not quail at that prospect; the generals on the radio did. They wanted Delta Force to kill bin Laden; they were not prepared to allow their men to be killed in the process. They would not even allow USAF ground-attack aircraft to operate below 12,000 feet. As far as the SAS could tell, their hope was that the ragged-trousered militants of the Northern Alliance would do most of the dangerous stuff—and take most of the casualties—while Delta Force came in for the coup de grace. Nor were the American generals willing to allow the SAS to win the glory which they were denying to American troops.

“So strategy was sabotaged by schizoid irresolution. There followed hours of fiffing and faffing, while gold coins were helicoptered in, to encourage the Northern Alliance. The USA is the greatest military power in the history of the planet, spending well over $300 billion a year on defence, yet everything was paralysed because it would not allow its fighting men to fight. While the generals agonised about bodybags, bin Laden was escaping. Henry Kissinger tried to put all this in context. He told the SAS that in his first five weeks as National Security Adviser, the U.S. lost at least 400 lives every week in Vietnam, and that was only a small percentage of the total casualties. The scars of those losses in a lost war take a long time to heal.”
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If Tora Bora was mishandled, then the battle known as Operation Anaconda that followed a few months later was worse. Like Tora Bora, it depended heavily on local militia known as the Afghan Military Forces, assisted by Special Forces and backed up by air power. It was to prove a deeply flawed order of battle. Many of the Afghan militia were not up to the job and air power was critically restricted by bad visibility, poor coordination with ground forces, and refueling problems. The attacking forces, yet again, had no artillery other than mortars. To win a mountain battle, fighting uphill, would depend on good luck, the element of surprise, coordination, and overwhelming firepower. In the event, most of these ingredients were not available in the right order, or time.

Following bin Laden’s escape, the remnants of his army held out in the Shahi-Kot Valley, a killing zone on the Pakistan border surrounded by 10,000-foot mountains. It was familiar terrain to mujahideen who had twice whipped Soviet soldiers there. Bin Laden’s veterans stayed there through a freezing Afghan winter, stoically awaiting the next Allied assault and their tickets to paradise. In February 2002, they were joined by al Qaeda volunteers from Uzbekistan and Chechnya as well as the Middle East and further afield. Britain’s signals intelligence center, GCHQ, detected a flurry of cell phone traffic centered on the river running through the valley. A Special Forces recce on 10 February detected an enemy presence. There was also human intelligence that was hard to evaluate. An initial estimate of 1,000 enemy fighters was reduced to 200.
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That was a mistake. The original figure was nearer the mark. To an optimist, the revised intelligence seemed a gift that offered the chance to crush the last of the Taliban in open battle. As ever, the coalition believed that thanks to technology, it could count on an unequal fight in favor of the coalition, adding a new luster to the phrase “asymmetric warfare.” As an old SAS joke went, “I don’t believe in dying for my country. I believe in allowing the other guy to die for his.”

But in practice, Taliban intelligence about coalition forces was as accurate, if not more so, than that of the allies. Well in advance of the operation, the Taliban evacuated women and children from local mountain villages.
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They prepared a defense in depth, with machine guns, mortars, and rocket launchers on the heights, and fallback sanctuaries in caves. What Western forces expected—a three-day action with few casualties—became a 17-day pitched battle notable in American history as the highest-altitude battle its soldiers ever faced. The engagement involved 1,700 U.S. conventional soldiers, Army Special Forces, Navy SEALs, and the CIA’s Special Activities Division. It also drew in hundreds of allied forces: men from the Australian and New Zealand SAS Regiments, British Royal Marines, Canadian snipers, and Special Forces contingents from Norway, Denmark, and—in spite of political inhibitions—Germany. Afghan friendly forces totaled 1,000. The air assets included French Mirage aircraft. The number of Taliban fighters is guesswork, something between 150 (the initial estimate) and 1,000 or more. A thousand was a healthy number to fight a well-prepared defense.

Operation Anaconda was probably compromised from the start. A five-man Delta Force reconnaissance team, codename Juliet, was inserted by helicopter as a preliminary move. Its lightweight, all-terrain vehicle imprinted tracks in the snow like Man Friday’s footprint that were spotted by local guerrillas. The element of surprise was now lost. The five-man Delta team, perched on a high point with a lordly view over the hostile villages, lost sight of the opposition that stalked them as a snowstorm began. A day or so later, as an official report put it with masterly understatement: “Increased enemy activity in the valley seemed to indicate that the enemy forces were aware that something was afoot.”
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As it dawned on the top brass that Anaconda required a major operation, a grand and complex plan of attack was composed. Basically, one force of Afghan militia, with Special Forces liaison teams able to summon air strikes would be Task Force Hammer, attacking enemy positions. A second would be Task Force Anvil, a stop-party to intercept Taliban fugitives. Western forces would provide circles of containment: the anaconda that would devour its prey. Objectives to be seized by heli-borne commandos were painstakingly identified. In the event, Hammer came to grief before it made contact with the enemy. “As the trucks moved off the main road [in darkness] and onto the muddy track that was the main approach route to the valley, things began to go wrong. One of the large ‘jinga’ trucks tipped over, halting the convoy. After cross-loading the troops and equipment, the convoy began to move out again, only to have other vehicles become stuck, break down, or tip over. Hours were consumed extricating the vehicles….”
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The militiamen, in desperation, threw hundreds of combat rations under the wheels of vehicles to provide a stable platform for wheels that spun in snow and ice. Many of the Afghan friendlies gave up this struggle and marched toward the official battle start line.
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Thanks to the use of headlights, as well as shouted voices, the element of surprise was now lost on this part of the battlefield. The convoy came under heavy fire. A mortar bomb scored a direct hit on the leading Special Forces vehicle. Worse, a C-130 USAF Spectre gunship lurking above the Hammer team mistook the convoy for enemy and shot it up, killing Chief Warrant Officer Stanley Harriman, aged 34, belonging to the Third Special Forces Group. Two Afghan militiamen were also killed and up to fifteen wounded. Evacuating them delayed the advance by another hour. Promised air support produced only a handful of bombs on the heights surrounding the convoy, from which Taliban fire, including artillery, rained down. The lack of support “demoralized the Afghans and frustrated the Special Forces.”
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Unaware of this shambles, elements of the U.S. 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne divisions were delivered by helicopter to a flat, exposed area near the targeted villages that was, in truth, a killing zone. Two Australian SAS soldiers were attached to this group. Martin Wallace, a signaler, knew he was in trouble the moment his boots touched the ground. The smoke trail of a rocket-propelled grenade fired from 300 meters fizzed toward him, missing him by inches. He said later: “The RPG round hit the ground and slid through the mud, chasing us up the hill as we ran from it. It just lay there steaming in the ground as we scrambled for cover.” In a later interview he recalled: “We hadn’t moved 100 meters from the choppers when we started taking heavy fire from machine guns and RPGs. It was relentless. There was no cover and 82 people were looking for some.” He watched, horrified, as a mortar round struck a group of Americans. “I was just lying there, watching them out of the corner of my eye and about five or six of them [U.S. soldiers] disappeared in a puff of gray smoke. It was basically a direct hit on the American mortar from the al Qaeda mortar.” Under fire, Wallace ran forward and dragged those who were wounded but alive into a ditch where he had found shelter.