Black Ops: The Rise of Special Forces in the C.I.A., the S.A.S., and Mossad (21 page)

Wallace had one weapon that saved the day. In the confusion that followed their landing, most of the American soldiers, following normal procedure in such a tight corner, dropped their backpacks so as to be more mobile. Wallace had not discarded his pack because “we didn’t have as far to go for cover.” It contained his radio. He was able to call for air support. He told his headquarters: “We are in a bit of a shit-fight. We need help.” Tactical air-hq obliged and sent a B-52. “I was lying on my back, watching the B-52 come overhead and you could see the bomb bay doors open and the bombs as they started to fall. You’re just hoping that they’re going to be on target.”

The ground shook, but the bombs silenced enemy fire for only 15 minutes. The combined airborne force, codenamed Rakassan, was pinned down for more than 18 hours before Wallace was able to bring in a Spectre gunship. This gave the team covering fire as helicopters rescued the assault team, with its wounded. Having heard the story, General Frank Hagenack, overall commander of Anaconda, acknowledged: “I would not have wanted to do that operation without the Australian SAS folks on that ridge side. I mean they made it happen that day.”
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During the following 24 hours, 3–4 March 2002, the action shifted to an 11,000-foot peak named Takur Ghar overlooking the entire Shahikot Valley. At 3
A.M
. on 3 March, two Chinook helicopters tried to land near the summit to deliver two SEAL teams on a recce mission. They were advised that the place was undefended. As the first machine touched down, it was shredded by small arms fire. The Taliban were dug in and waiting for this moment. Three RPGs hit the Chinook. Petty Officer 1st Class Neil C. Roberts, on the tailgate, was hurled out of the aircraft under the impact, taken prisoner, and later shot dead. The crippled Chinook crash-landed in the valley four miles away. A second Chinook dropped another SEAL patrol on the same mountaintop to search for the missing petty officer. For the Taliban it was a turkey shoot. They killed Technical Sergeant John A. Chapman, a USAF Special Forces combat controller, and wounded two of the newly arrived SEALs. This patrol, codenamed Mako 30, retreated down the mountain. Shortly before dawn, yet another rescue team—25 Rangers on two helicopters—made another attempt. The first to land was disabled by heavy fire. Three Rangers and a member of the helicopter crew died immediately.

The second heliborne Ranger team was put on the ground “several hundred meters away.” But “these Rangers were forced to move slowly up the steep slopes of Takur Ghar as their comrades were engaged in sharp fighting at the top.”
¹⁴⁴
The two parties linked up but came under attack from enemy reinforcements that had contrived to climb to the summit unnoticed. By now, al Qaeda had declared jihad and every able-bodied man in the region was expected to join the fight as a religious duty. The renewed battle continued all day. The Rangers had found the body of the missing SEAL. The bitter cold wore down one of the wounded, an Air Force medic. He became the seventh and last American to die on Operation Anaconda. The Rangers dug in and held on until they were extracted as darkness fell on 4 March. The U.S. Army’s history of the battle records that the rescue was at a final cost for the U.S. of seven dead: two Army, two Air Force, and one Navy (as well as the first fatal casualty, CWO Harriman victim of friendly fire). “The fight on Takur Ghar was the most deadly firefight during Operation Anaconda.”

Opinions differed about the true nature of this battle. General Tommy Franks, commander of Central Command, saw it as “an unqualified and complete success.” His aides believed that 800 enemy had been killed, though there was no body count to substantiate that. The journalist, author, and pathologist of military mishaps Seymour Hersh dismissed it as “a debacle, plagued by squabbling between the services, bad military planning and avoidable deaths of American soldiers, as well as the escape of key al Qaeda leaders, likely including Osama bin Laden.”
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Did it have to happen this way? That this became an unexpected battle of attrition was due to an intelligence failure of some sort. Why was the first estimate of enemy strength—1,000 fighters—massaged down to a more optimistic 200? The Pentagon does not say. An exhaustive review of the battle, completed in September 2003, was passed from one DOD office to another and underwent “an extensive security review” before being cleared for publication in February 2009. The review did note: “Anaconda shows the liabilities of relying on questionable human intelligence and of trying to use communications intelligence (COMINT) when the enemy has good communications security. The best solution is often better ‘boots on the ground,’ reconnaissance by Special Operations Forces and Army units,
which was not heavily pursued at Anaconda owing to the desire to surprise the enemy
”
¹⁴⁶
[author’s emphasis]. The Anaconda battle was a success for American forces and their allies in that an unknown number of enemy were killed and a terrorist base area was eliminated. But the affair increased the credibility of the Taliban and al Qaeda as a well-organized fighting force capable of taking on the best from the West. It was, arguably, a pyrrhic victory in spite of the heroism of the men sent to win it.

Soon after Anaconda, in the spring of 2002, there were renewed tensions about the quality of intelligence when the CIA came up with a possible location for bin Laden’s latest hideout in Pakistan. Another target in the same area was his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian doctor. Military top brass questioned the accuracy of the CIA’s intelligence and, given the political risks inherent in a clandestine cross-border operation, were reluctant to sanction a reconnaissance. Unfortunately, shared intelligence with Pakistan was also fraught with the risk that what the CIA shared with Islamabad’s intelligence service might be promptly shared by some within the ISI with bin Laden. Nevertheless, a Green Beret reconnaissance team tiptoed across the border with Afghanistan. Bin Laden was not at home. The hit team tiptoed out again. An anonymous Pentagon spokesman seemed to regard the latest failure as some sort of vindication of the Army after Tora Bora and Anaconda. He or she told the journal
USA Today
: “We like to underpromise and overdeliver. That other agency likes to overpromise.”
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Alongside Anaconda, sniping between the Pentagon and the CIA’s futuristic portals at Langley had continued as usual. In February 2002 an Agency-controlled Raptor loosed a missile at a white-clad figure in eastern Afghanistan, apparently on the basis that he was tall and so was Osama. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld allegedly commented: “God help anyone over five-foot-four in that country.” In some of his later public statements he was more generous about the Agency. But when the bruises of Tora Bora were still fresh, the Pentagon went on the record with a litany of complaints about its CIA comrade-in-arms. These were that the Army was held responsible for air strikes and ground attacks based on faulty intelligence, leading to civilian deaths; the Agency had wanted to arm warlords who then used the weapons in local feuds or worse, perhaps, against U.S. forces; optimistic CIA leaks about the hunt for bin Laden undermined confidence in operations when the hunt produced another false lead.

The complaints reflected, at best, naïvety about the nature of this irregular conflict, with its constantly shifting loyalties, loyalties shaped by two often-incompatible factors. These were tribal dedication to some longstanding local blood feud versus the lure of the dollar as Uncle Sam’s inducement to stay onside. Differing interpretations of the Koran and its additional doctrinal work, the Hadith, complicated matters further. Then there was the burgeoning heroin trade. And endemic corruption at every official level. The CIA was familiar with all this and had learned to live with it. During the campaign to defeat the Soviets, one of its surrogates was Gulbudding Hekmatyar, a warlord who received hundreds of millions of CIA dollars by way of the Pakistan intelligence agency ISI. Langley might have detected a hint of things to come when Hekmatyar, having taken the money, refused to travel to New York to shake hands with Ronald Reagan. Instead, he espoused Islamist fundamentalism and became an enemy of the West and ally of bin Laden during the civil war that followed Soviet withdrawal. Identified by the U.S. as “a global terrorist,” Hekmatyar was the target of an agency-launched missile attack on his convoy in Kunar province on 6 May 2002. The missile missed its intended target but killed ten civilians.
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There was also the Stinger saga. During the anti-Soviet war of 1979–89, the Agency’s Afghan Task Force had supplied around 2,000 of these anti-aircraft, shoulder-fired missiles to the resistance movement. When that war was over and the risk to U.S. military and civilian aircraft became apparent, case officers were dispatched in secret to buy back any missiles still in circulation. The going rate ranged from $80,000 to $150,000. This was not a CIA misjudgment. The Agency had initially opposed the introduction of such a deadly, Western weapon into a Cold War conflict but was overruled by the administration. The initial outcome was a military success. As the French analyst Olivier Roy concluded: “A staff of around 100 CIA officers; no American citizens killed or imprisoned; no retaliation against U.S. interests and the nominal expense of $2 billion over ten years: these were relatively low costs for one of the most important post-World War II conflicts.”
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The anti-Western jihad that followed the Soviet defeat was regretted at Langley, no doubt. But the CIA knew from long experience that you have to lose some to win some.

In the hunt for bin Laden, it lost two valuable paramilitaries, ostensibly working as civilian contractors, on 25 October 2003. They were Glenn Mueller, aged 32, of San Diego (a former SEAL) and William (“Chief”) Carlson, aged 43, of Southern Pines, North Carolina. Soon after joining the CIA, Mueller spent a year living like a vagrant, “rocking ’n’ rolling,” as he told a friend, in Western Iraq. Shortly before he died, he telephoned home and told a lifelong friend: “We’re looking for the golden ring,” meaning bin Laden’s inner circle. The day he died, he and Carlson were in the badlands adjoining the Pakistan border when they were trapped in a Taliban ambush. An Afghan commander with whom Mueller had established mutual trust was hit and went down. Mueller broke cover, entered the killing ground, and dragged his buddy to safety. In doing so, he stopped a bullet in the chest. Carlson died with them. Known as “Chief” in recognition of his heritage as a member of the Blackfoot Nation of Montana, Carlson was a former Delta Force soldier who had retired after twenty years in the Army and still thirsted for action when he signed the Agency contract.

At the CIA headquarters, just inside the imposing entrance, on the north side, they have a Wall of Honor, decorated with stars. Each represents a life sacrificed in the line of duty. Some, such as the one commemorating William Buckley, the Agency’s station chief tortured to death in 1985, are clearly identified. Many others remain anonymous, even in death. For their names to be revealed, posthumously, could compromise ongoing operations. In February 1991 there were sixty-nine stars, dating from 1950. By the time Carlson and Mueller were commemorated at Langley in 2004, the number had increased to eighty-three. They included three stars that were added following the Carlson ambush. But
three
stars? The extra one was a tribute to a man whose name was still withheld. At the commemoration, Director of Intelligence George J. Tenet said: “Chris and Chief put the lives of others ahead of their own. That is heroism defined.” These deaths underscored the risk of Special Operations of all kinds. One expert assessment is that although SF men comprise only two per cent of U.S. armed forces, they record thirty-one per cent of combat casualties.
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The hunt for bin Laden was downgraded in 2005, when Alec Station was formally disbanded. Its analysts were reassigned to other duties within the Counterterrorist Center—though, subsequently, retired CIA veterans were brought back into service to sit in caves in the badlands of the Pakistan border with Afghanistan. The CIA briefed journalists to suggest that al Qaeda was no longer as hierarchical as it once was. Nevertheless, it was also a move away from a longstanding American fondness for personalizing complex political issues, as if the troubles of the world were a manichean cowboy movie inhabited by good guys in white hats (with or without the cattle) and the bad guys in black ones. The Tom Mix/John Wayne approach and its concomitant demonization of bin Laden probably contributed more to his legend than did his deeds.

During the first few years of the war in a region to be renamed by Obama’s team as “Af-Pak,” the symbiosis of Green Beret and Agency Special Activities operators was contradicted by increasing rivalry between the Pentagon and Langley. As Rumsfeld’s people at the Defense Department saw things, if the CIA could exercise a military role, then DoD could run an intelligence business. It deployed clandestine teams from the Defense Intelligence Agency “to deliver intelligence that’s finer-grained than what the CIA provides, for example, architectural details of a building that commandos must storm.”
¹⁵¹
In 2005, the defense analyst William Arkin identified more than a hundred secret units, intelligence initiatives and linked operations invented by the Pentagon as part of the Gobal War on Terror. They included, for example, Joint Task Force Aztec Silence, set up in December 2003 to counter international terrorism in North Africa.

In Tampa, Florida, the Army’s Special Operations Command, SOCOM, had 50,000 commandos, most of them Green Berets for strike operations. It also controlled an ultra-secret intelligence team that regularly changes its name, chameleon-like, every two years, to confuse everyone. Variously known as the Intelligence Support Activity, “The Activity,” “Gray Fox,” and “Capacity Gear,” it was based at Fort Belvoir outside Washington and, for that reason, acquired yet another, informal name, “The Army of North Virginia.” The ISA’s primary role, what it does best, is covert surveillance of terrorists, which enables other security forces to strike hard and true, to kill terrorists and, sometimes, rescue hostages.