Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man

by Dalton Fury

  Now they were at the safe house after the long jaw-jarring drive, and the boys spent some time doing minor maintenance on the trucks before getting a welcome hour of rack. Four tall walls surrounded the house for protection, but just in case some uninvited guests decided to make an appearance, Jim put the boys on the second floor and left the muhj guides down on the ground floor.

  We were anxious to get the snipers and assaulters down to the schoolhouse so we could get some things rolling. One thing was for certain: come morning, the boys would be in no mood to sit around the schoolyard with coloring books and marbles. They would be arriving hungry and chomping at the bit.

  And unlike Allah, the Merciful and Compassionate, Delta planned to show no quarter, no mercy, and no compassion for al Qaeda.

  General Ali had some visitors waiting that afternoon, the council of elders—the Shura—from the surrounding area. We noticed them as soon as they stepped out of their vehicles, and we made it a point to get out of sight. They were a lively bunch, roughly a dozen older men with long gray beards and dark skin with deep wrinkles from the decades of unrelenting sun. All were dressed in pseudo-formal attire—large, bright yellow turbans with matching shawls. There had been a rumor of American soldiers coming to Tora Bora to help the general fight al Qaeda, and they were concerned about them and reminded Ali that this was not the true Muslim way.

  The general assured them that he had a handle on things. Americans were not welcome as long as he was in command. That was not quite the same as saying we weren’t already there. But convinced of his sincerity, likely with a wink and a nod, the village elders pledged their support to Ali in eliminating bin Laden.

  With everyone having done what was required in the strange political dance, the elders promised to activate their version of the neighborhood watch program for any sign of bin Laden. Then they left.

  George, Adam Khan, and I met with Ali for a final time, inside his sleeping quarters, as the day came to an end. Boots off at the door and teacups in the middle of the rug.

  The major topic of interest to the general was the status of the BLU-82 drop that had been postponed several times and was now expected early the next morning. I assumed the changing of the drop times had been the harebrained idea of someone far removed from the battlefield realities. It was likely some staff officer just doing his job by trying to provide his best operational advice to his commander. But the big bomb had kept us all waiting.

  George brought Ali up to date, with Adam Khan meticulously translating and Ali nodding in the affirmative. Ali said that he planned to exploit the bomb drop, as soon as it was safe to do so, by attacking with about two hundred fighters. A reserve of another two hundred fighters would be held nearby to provide him some flexibility.

  His tanks would roll out in full force as well, and one would move farther up the foothills to throw some direct fire straight down the valley. Several mortars to the east would also support the attack. Ever the gracious host, Ali insisted we be his guests for this special trip to the front lines, so as to observe his fighters’ skill. It all sounded good, but terrifically unrealistic.

  The reported danger radius for the BLU-82 was four thousand meters, which meant that all friendly forces had to be that substantial distance from the intended point of impact. If anyone realistically expected the muhj to exploit the attack in a timely manner in the rugged mountains of Tora Bora, the distance should have been reduced to about four hundred meters, not four thousand! Even a professionally trained army would have their hands full if they expected to maneuver four thousand meters uphill under mortar, rocket, and small-arms fire in the middle of the day.

  Even so, we resisted the urge to rain on our host’s parade. At least he was showing some initiative and finally displaying an offensive mind-set.

  I politely asked the general to keep us informed as much as possible about how far his troops had advanced to the south so we could adjust the bombing and ensure that the weapons were killing the correct folks. Just as Adam Khan began to translate the request, the general’s bedroom lit up with a flash and we turned in time to see a spectacular strike up in the mountains through the bedroom window. It shook the ground under the schoolhouse. General Ali’s smile grew wide!

  George praised him for his actions to date. After that compliment, as if on cue, the radio sputtered to life with the excited sound of hardcore Pashto being spoken. Some of his men had spotted enemy fighters descending the hills, heading for a small village, and Ali’s force was lying in ambush. The general beamed with the pride of a first-time father and motioned to us as if to say, “See, we are doing good things here.”

  Our meeting turned back to operational matters. George asked Ali where he planned to command the battle from once things got rolling. The response was typically noncommittal, and he palmed the ball right back to the CIA man. “Wherever you go, I will go,” he said, gesturing to both George and me.

  The general was fairly upbeat about finding bin Laden. He said his men were motivated and thankful of America’s help and the willingness to commit her “special commandos.” His men were committed to the end and wouldn’t fail. With that, we pushed our teacups into the center of the rug, lumbered to our feet, put our boots back on, and slipped out into the frigid night air.

  I was ready to bag out on the dirty cement floor of our own building for a couple of hours after the meeting with Ali, but it was not to be.

  “Sir, there is a message you might want to read from the commander.” Bernie, our communicator, hit me with the news as soon as I came through the door of our corner classroom. It was dark in the room except for the bright green LED readout displays on the state-of-the-art communication suite, the weak flickering glow of a kerosene lamp that had been purchased locally for about fifty cents, and the screen of the small Toughbook laptop computer.

  Colonel Ashley was asking for the grid locations of where we planned to put in our sniper teams and what area they planned to lase for the bombers. In his words, he had to “feed the beast.”

  I commented to Bernie, “Can you imagine the pressure that must have rolled downhill through four or five levels of command to get this request to us?” And it was not only several layers of general officers breathing down Ashley’s neck for the information, for he explained, “Everybody from POTUS on down is asking for details.” It went all the way up to the White House, for POTUS is the acronym for the president of the United States.

  “Bernie, this is exactly why we will never be as good as the Israelis at killing terrorists,” I said. “We have too many bureaucratic layers and decision makers who stifle initiative and waste precious time.”

  Before replying to the anxious brass up the chain of command, I briefed Ironhead and Bryan on the particulars of the meeting as an evening lullaby of thundering bombs impacting on al Qaeda positions rolled from the mountains.

  After that, I thumbed open my notebook, turned back to the small laptop and wrote a subject line for the message: NIGHTLY FIRESIDE CHAT WITH THE GENERAL.

  “What the hell,” I wisecracked to the boys. “If George W. cares enough to ask, who are we to hold up the show?” I started writing.

  9

  The Daisy Cutter

  Tora Bora

  The name is so familiar

  Sounding so close, so ancient, so complex

  As the cave complexes witnessing the conflict

  Between the latest, highest, most lethal modern technology

  And the most primitive, backward, pointless theology

  —KURDISH POET KAMAL MIRAWDELI

  The much-anticipated drop time for the BLU-82 had finally been set for the early morning hours of December 9. There was no point in dropping the big bomb at night, when the al Qaeda fighters were warming themselves inside their caves and the muhj had done their evening retreat because they did not play in the dark and the press couldn’t witness the explosion.

  Almost everybody in our compound got up early that morning to watch the show. The CIA o
peratives mustered in a close group in front of a short rock wall just behind the schoolhouse, each wearing an outfit that was part Afghan, part stylish North Face gear. Some stood proudly with their arms around each other, some held on to their AK-47s. For a memory photo, one held a small piece of cardboard with the inscription “Tora Bora, AF, BLU-82, 9 Dec 2001” scratched in thick black letters. The CIA was gleeful, confident, and hopeful of a turning point in the battle.

  General Ali also made an early appearance, dressed in his white pajama-looking garb, his trademark dark brown leather jacket, and a tan pakool hat to ward off the morning cold. Although the CIA had promised great results from the bomb, and certainly seemed pleased with themselves, the general remained apprehensive. He gripped his two-way radio and spoke to his forward commanders to confirm that all his fighters had moved back the minimum safe distance from the planned target area deep in the mountains.

  The huge bomb was called a Daisy Cutter, and one had not been dropped in anger since the Vietnam War, when it was employed as an easy way to clear away the jungle to create an instant landing zone for helicopters. Naturally, the CIA hyped its capabilities, and after hearing the celebrated buildup, I was also anticipating a spectacular show.

  Above us a small dark spec came into view against the clear blue sky, far above the 14,000-foot peaks. The MC-130 Combat Talon entered the area from northwest to southeast at such a high altitude that it appeared to barely be moving. Any al Qaeda fighters up at dawn must have looked up with curiosity. They had become accustomed to the four white contrails of B-52 bombers flying at 30,000 feet or fighter-bombers streaking down lower, but this was different. The lumbering MC-130 might have the look of a cargo plane, but its belly was full of something the enemy fighters had never experienced.

  Fittingly, after their extraordinary work over the past five days, the busy observation post with the call sign Victor Bravo Zero Two cleared the aircraft hot to drop its load. The Combat Talon turned it loose and banked sharply away from the target area to the west, as if the blast might reach up and snatch it from the sky.

  “There she is, and here it comes,” one CIA operative called. “Look out, al Qaeda.”

  “I’d hate to be the bad guys with OP duty this morning,” commented another.

  At this point, I would like to write about shock and awe and fireballs and mountain-shaking thunder to describe the explosion that took place at 0611 hours local time. We expected a huge blast that would rattle the buildings and momentarily lift us off our feet.

  In reality, there was barely a tremor beneath our boots at the schoolhouse. Poof. The big bomb was a bust. We got up early for this? The first reports trickling back from the pilots observing the impact from far above told of a possible “low order detonation.” In other words, the bomb didn’t strike as advertised with maximum destructive force, but it certainly did not fizzle either.

  It didn’t matter; General Ali had clearly expected a better performance. He had no idea whether it exploded properly, but it did not take long for him to find out exactly where it landed.

  Frantic reports squawked over the radio from his men, reporting that the bomb had hit close to them. We all listened intently as the distress calls poured in nonstop for several minutes. The general looked at the CIA guys and waved his hands about, pointing toward the mountains while still transmitting commands to his men.

  Ali was saying the Daisy Cutter had hit one ridgeline too far to the east, was roughly five hundred meters off its mark, and exploded near one of his groups’ positions. I didn’t need any translation to understand the general’s obvious disappointment.

  Adam Khan pulled out his own portable satellite phone and punched in the speed-dial code to reach Gary Berntsen of the CIA back in Kabul. Gary answered so fast that it almost appeared that he was expecting the call.

  “It does not seem as if the BLU-82 exploded,” Adam Khan said calmly. “The general is frantic and pissed about it. He says it hit the wrong place.”

  Gary was not buying it, and barked back, “You tell that son of a bitch the bomb hit the right target and it exploded properly!”

  Adam Khan didn’t argue with the CIA chief. “Well, it was not much of one,” he said, and cut the connection.

  Fortunately, the BLU-82 show was followed a couple of minutes later by a pair of B-52 bombers that laid down three separate strings of multiple JDAMs. The first load of smart bombs looked like a linear strike along the crest of a ridgeline, and General Ali, in utter dismay, began waving his hands again and calling out loudly to us that those bombs also had struck a location where his men were holed up. Apparently, the muhj had ignored the warnings to pull back to a minimum safe distance of 4,000 meters.

  The second load appeared to be more of a pinpoint strike and went in at the exact spot where Ali said the BLU-82 should have landed. Finally, there was something to cheer about. The general and the few fighters with him jumped up and down with joy, jigging around like children as they watched the flashes of massive red and orange explosions that gave way to thick, rising dark gray plume of smoke.

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Ali said, “That’s where al Qaeda [sic]!”

  The third B-52 strike was much less impressive than the previous two, hitting farther to the west, although closer to us. Ali’s temporary euphoria evaporated and he let us know, once again, that the air force had hit the wrong spot. Some quick math gave us one out of four, or only a 25 percent success rate. Not good. The B-52s put on a great show and were fairly accurate, but the main item on the menu was to have been the showy BLU-82 provided by the American taxpayer, and it did not live up to expectations.

  In defense of the U.S. Air Force we can say, dud or no dud, that bomb landed where the flyboys were told to put it. All the pilots had to do was get their plane to the correct release point and let her rip, and that they did. Any blame for the off-mark strike had to lie elsewhere.

  No Afghan on the battlefield could look at one of our maps, or even one of the Russian maps from the Soviet-Afghan War, and tell us where the pockets of enemy fighters were. In fact, they couldn’t tell us even where friendly fighters were. The best you could hope for was a good guess, depending on where the muhj pointed from a distance.

  That was the totally unsophisticated technique used to designate the target for the BLU-82. A signal intercept of bin Laden communicating with his fighters in the mountains provided the baseline location, and that had been corroborated by locals as being bin Laden’s current location.

  A day or so before we arrived, General Ali himself had provided the target refinement. He stood outside the schoolhouse and pointed to the spot where the chief terrorist was located. When that discussion ended and it was time to send the targeting location to the air force, the coordinates were transmitted.

  Either the terrain was read incorrectly or there was a typo in the coordinates that were sent; the bomb hit right where it was supposed to, but was off by almost a thousand meters. Whatever the cause, it was an egregious error.

  It underlined the absolute need for putting the Delta boys up in those mountains to set up observation posts that could provide the needed high-tech target guidance, not just an “over there” estimate based on fingerpointing.

  Bin Laden once said that it was the duty of all Muslims to kill not just American military personnel but any American who pays taxes. If the few dozen Tomahawk cruise missiles launched in 1988 at Zawir Khili, near Khost, in retaliation for the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa didn’t impress him, we would soon be introducing him to tons of bombs, courtesy of those same American taxpayers. Although the hype outshone the performance, I’m certain the sheer power of the Daisy Cutter got bin Laden’s attention that morning.

  I never saw the photo op cardboard sign of the CIA again.

  Thirty minutes after the BLU-82 drop, ten Toyota pickup trucks rolled up to the schoolhouse carrying the Delta snipers and assaulters. They had managed only an hour or so of sleep in Jalalabad before beginning the final leg of their jour
ney. The three-hour trip was uneventful except for a few stops to pick up additional muhj fighters and grab some chow at roadside stands. They even managed to watch the BLU-82 drop and subsequent JDAMs light up the early morning mountainside.

  The boys were all smiles, and it was a relief to see them: Caveman, Stalker, Stormin’, Grumpy, Murph, and Crapshoot, to name but a few. Most were full bearded, with long hair dangling out of the back and the sides of their traditional Afghan wool pakool caps. They were embarking on a journey they would remember for the rest of their lives.

  I caught a glimpse of General Ali stealing a peek at these guys from his doorway. Even Ali couldn’t resist wanting a glimpse of such an awesome set of American commandos.

  While bombs grumbled along the ridgelines and valleys every twenty minutes or so, we gave the boys a quick info dump to orient them to the area. After the highlights, they stowed their gear inside their temporary new home and hid the vehicles inside the compound walls.

  Ironhead and Bryan coordinated a reconnaissance of al Qaeda’s positions for Jim, another seasoned Delta troop sergeant major who had just arrived, and they left within the hour. It was critical that these leaders got a good look at what I had seen the day before in order to give a quality check to my information and plans. With just a single vehicle and several muhj piled in the back, they slipped by the press and made it up to Mortar Hill without incident.

  A bomber was in the sky, so al Qaeda stayed still and let them take in the view and orient their maps, but when the bomber cleared the airspace twenty minutes later, the mortars cranked up and several rounds impacted fifty meters away. They had seen enough, and with no need to push their luck, the three most experienced commandos on the battlefield returned to the schoolhouse.