The man said nothing. Spann snapped his fingers in front of the prisoner’s face. “Hey! Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did you get here?”
A pause. “What, are you puzzled?” Spann asked. He knelt down on the blanket, trying to photograph the man with a digital camera.
“Put your head up,” Spann said. “Push your hair back. Push your hair back so I can see your face.”
Silence again. A Northern Alliance soldier grabbed the man’s hair and pulled. Spann snapped the picture.
“You got to talk to me,” Spann said. “All I want to do is talk to you and find out what your story is. I know you speak English.”
The second agent, Dave Tyson, walked toward Spann and called out to him. Spann remarked that the prisoner wouldn’t talk.
“Okay, all right,” Tyson said. “We explained what the deal is to him.”
“I was explaining to the guy we just want to talk to him, find out what his story is.”
“The problem is,” Tyson said, “he’s got to decide if he wants to live or die and die here. We’re just going to leave him, and he’s going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life.”
It was the prisoner’s decision, Tyson said. “We can only help the guys who want to talk to us.”
Spann faced the detainee. “Do you know the people here you’re working with are terrorists and killed other Muslims?” he asked. “There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Koran teaches? I don’t think so. Are you going to talk to us?”
The man said nothing.
The agents gave up; they had offered the prisoner his chance. A Northern Alliance guard approached and took the man—John Walker Lindh, soon to be known as the “American Taliban”—back to the line.
• • •
The uprising began about two hours later with explosions and gunfire. Taliban prisoners jumped Spann and tackled him, kicking and tearing at him.
Tyson scrambled toward his comrade and shot four of the men with a nine-millimeter pistol and then seized Spann’s AK-47. When a group of fighters charged him, Tyson opened fire, backpedaling as he shot.
The Taliban fighters dashed to the cells and freed their comrades. From there, they stormed an armory inside the fort, grabbing rifles, grenades, ammunition, and rockets. They rushed back out, prepared for battle.
Amid all the shooting and explosions, Spann lay on the ground, shot twice in the head. He was the first American to die in combat since the war in Afghanistan began.
• • •
Ben Bonk was at home when his phone rang early that morning. “One of our people is missing,” the caller said. “Something’s happened.”
Bonk knew that nothing more could be said over the unsecure line. He hurried to his car and drove the short distance to CIA headquarters.
Information coming out of Qala-i-Jangi was sketchy. American Special Operations Forces had descended on the fortress and were fighting for control. Tyson was trapped but alive. No one knew what had happened to Spann.
A group of senior agency officials gathered together in the office of Hank Crumpton, who was heading the CIA effort in Afghanistan. Tenet came down; Cofer Black and Crumpton briefed him on the developments.
Black thought of Spann’s wife, Shannon, also a CIA employee. She was on maternity leave and away from her home in California, taking a mini vacation with her family.
“We’re going to have to tell Shannon before she finds out herself,” Black said.
“You can’t leave Washington,” Tenet replied. “Not in the middle of this.”
The task fell to Bonk. He gathered some of Shannon’s friends and a member of her husband’s unit to join him on the trip to the West Coast. They flew by government jet to John Wayne Airport in Orange County, where other colleagues had already rented cars for them. By the time they reached Spann’s house, Shannon was there. She and her family had returned home after she received a call letting her know that a group from headquarters was on the way.
Bonk rang the bell. Shannon opened the door, a newborn baby in her hands.
“Shannon, can we come in? We need to talk.”
“Sure.”
She handed the baby to a member of her family and led everyone to the living room. Bonk relayed the information that the agency had learned about the shoot-out at Qala-i-Jangi.
“We don’t know where Michael is at this moment,” he said. “But given what’s happened, I think the chances are remote that this is going to work out well.”
Shannon asked some questions but held together. “This is what he wanted to do, and he knew it was important,” she said softly. “We’ll get through this.”
They spoke until there was nothing left to say. All of them would be staying at a nearby hotel, Bonk said, and would keep Shannon updated.
Days passed until word came that Michael Spann had been killed. Bonk returned to the Spann home to break the news.
• • •
The dusty journey of al-Qaeda’s caravan to the mountains of Tora Bora had been, as usual, rough going. As the flat expanse of Jalalabad gave way to the first glint of rocky mountains, the cars clattered over large stones, generating teeth-rattling jolts.
After three hours of tortuous travel, the peaks of Tora Bora loomed above. Cars veered up a steep narrow path, one with no pretensions of being a road. They skirted the cliffs, coming perilously close to tumbling down the mountain. Another hour, and driving became impossible—the fighters had to hike the rest of the way through a barren vista. Thousands of feet up, there were huts that bin Laden had once used as a home; this time, he and his followers would hide out in the mountain’s honeycomb of caves. At the end of the climb, groups of al-Qaeda members were assigned to stay in particular caves. But they soon noticed that their leader was nowhere to be found. Bin Laden had simply vanished.
On the eleventh day of Ramadan, November 26, bin Laden reappeared and joined some of his fighters in their cave at Tora Bora. He sat with them while holding a warm glass of green tea, then launched into his standard refrain about the call to jihad.
“Hold your positions and be ready for martyrdom,” bin Laden told them.
He stood. “I’ll be visiting you again, very soon.”
Followed by his guards, he walked out of the cave and disappeared into the pine forests, leaving his fighters behind to fend for themselves.
• • •
On the morning of November 27, Tommy Franks was speaking with Victor Renuart Jr., director of operations with Central Command. With Afghani fighters in hot pursuit of al-Qaeda and bin Laden, the two generals were working on plans to provide air support in the battle that was moving into Tora Bora.
Rumsfeld telephoned for Franks.
“General Franks, the president wants us to look at options for Iraq,” he said. “What is the status of your planning?”
Out-of-date, Franks said. The Afghan conflict itself presented some issues for the Iraq strategy, called OPLAN1003. Force levels in the region were different, and much of what had been learned in the past few weeks about the use of Special Forces units needed to be incorporated.
“Okay,” Rumsfeld said. “Please dust it off and get back to me next week.”
• • •
The following day, the anxiety was palpable in the hearing room of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The anthrax letter mailed to Senator Leahy, the committee chairman, had been discovered twelve days earlier. Traces of the bacteria were found in three more locations at the Hart Senate Office building. And new cases of anthrax infections—including some that were fatal—had been reported. But the business of Congress continued on this day with the first Senate hearings about the military commissions order.
Among those sitting at the witness table was Neal Katyal, the law professor who expounded to his students what he considered the constitutional horrors of the order. His wife, Joanna Rosen, had begged him not to go
to the hearing, out of fear that he might contract anthrax. When he told her that this was something he had to do, she made one request of him: Don’t breathe too deeply.
Katyal listened in silence as other experts testified in support of the plan. Michael Chertoff, the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, presented the administration’s case. Finally, it was Katyal’s turn. From his opening sentence, he attacked the order, calling it an unconstitutional assumption of power by the president.
“Our Constitution’s structure,” he said, “mandates that fundamental choices such as these be made, not by one person, but by the branches of government working together. Ignoring this tradition charts a dangerous course for the future.”
While there had been rare times in history that the government had to temporarily dispense with civil trials, such an action was never before taken by a single person.
“A tremendous danger exists if the power is left in one individual to put aside our constitutional traditions when our nation’s at crisis,” he said. “The safeguard against the potential for this abuse has always been Congress’s involvement in a deep constitutional sense. The default should be faith in our traditions and faith in our procedures.”
Bush’s decision to bypass Congress set a dangerous precedent, Katyal said. Any future president could unilaterally declare that specific types of crimes—such as drug trafficking or gun offenses—should be outside the legal system and shifted, instead, into the commissions. The examples might seem unbelievable, Katyal said, but they were smaller steps than the ones already being taken.
“I believe the administration is trying to do its best, but that’s part of the point,” he said. “Our constitutional design can’t leave these choices to one man, however well intentioned or wise he might be.”
Katyal paused. “We don’t live in a monarchy.”
With those final words, Neal Katyal took his first tentative steps in what would prove to be his multiyear court challenge to the Bush order. His client would be Salim Hamdan, the bin Laden driver who had been seized at a roadblock in Afghanistan just four days earlier.
• • •
Over several days near Kunduz, combatants loyal to General Dostum continued taking custody of men who surrendered, including confessed Taliban members and Muslims who claimed to be innocents trapped by the bombing. Dostum maintained his policy of sending the Afghanis back home while detaining the foreigners captured by his troops.
On November 28, another group of Muslims riding in a truck outside of Kunduz gave themselves up to Dostum’s militia. At gunpoint, the men were removed from the vehicle and forced to their knees while Dostum’s fighters searched them for weapons and identification. Three of the men—Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal—were British citizens from Tipton, England, who would later insist that they had come to Afghanistan the previous month to provide humanitarian aid. The only reason they were in the region, they would say, was that they had traveled to Pakistan in September for a wedding.
But they mentioned none of this when they were seized on the road outside of Kunduz. As Britons, they were foreigners, no different under Dostum’s edict from Pakistanis or Egyptians or any other outsiders. The Northern Alliance fighters tied the hands of the hundreds of new prisoners behind their backs then drove them for more than a day to Mazar-e Sharif, where they were sealed into large containers ordinarily used to transport cargo. From there, they were moved to Dostum’s prison at Sheberghan and locked into large cells.
Many of the detainees died during the journey, from the heat and cramped conditions in the containers. But the British men survived and would be turned over to the American military for interrogation.
Before long, they would be dubbed the “Tipton Three,” and their names would be known worldwide.
• • •
The Battle of Tora Bora began on November 30. The Jawbreaker team had conducted an arduous expedition to a mountaintop and discovered hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters. An air force combat controller in the group called in airstrikes; a laser that the team had brought with them was used to “paint” the targets, giving the bombers something to lock onto. Explosions rocked the mountainous region.
• • •
The rebellion at Qala-i-Jangi was put down six days after it blazed through the fortress. When guns and bombs failed to quell the uprising, the Northern Alliance turned to more vicious alternatives. They poured liquid fuel into the basement where the prisoners were making their last stand. When that didn’t force them out, the soldiers diverted a stream, sending down a flood of freezing water. The fort filled with the screams of drowning men until finally the remaining Taliban announced their surrender.
More than eighty prisoners crawled out of the subterranean vault—dirty, hungry, and suffering from hypothermia. A few guards handed out fruit to the starving survivors. One gave an apple to a thin, disheveled man who was holding himself up on a stick.
“Thank you,” John Walker Lindh said in English.
• • •
The flatbed trucks pulled into the rubble-strewn fortress courtyard, evidence of the American bombs that struck Qala-i-Jangi over the past few days. Forcefully, the Northern Alliance soldiers wrangled the survivors on board.
Rumors circulated that one prisoner could speak English and perhaps was an American. Colin Soloway, a freelance reporter from Newsweek, heard the story from his translator and decided to find out for himself. He stepped up on a truck bumper, then looked around at the dirty, injured Taliban members inside. A guard pointed to a man sprawled on the flatbed. Soloway thought this fighter looked like a hippie.
“Are you an American?” Soloway asked.
“Yeah,” Lindh replied.
A fifteen-minute conversation ensued. Lindh spoke in measured, carefully chosen words. He had come to Afghanistan, he said, to help create a true Islamic state.
But Lindh was with a Taliban fighting force. Was he al-Qaeda? “Did you support the September 11 attacks?” Soloway asked.
“That requires a pretty long and complicated answer. I haven’t eaten for two or three days, and my mind is not really in shape to give you a coherent answer.”
Soloway pressed the question. Did he support the terrorist attack on the United States?
Lindh relented. “Yes,” he said. “I supported it.”
• • •
Nearby, Matthew Campbell, a correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, was counting the drenched and tattered men as they passed, asking questions that none of them would answer. Then a barefoot prisoner wearing a soaked green tunic stopped in front of Campbell.
“Where are you from?” the reporter asked.
“Where am I from?” the man replied. His English was perfect.
He glanced around the compound and sniffed the air before responding. “I was born in America,” he said.
“Where?”
Another pause. “Baton Rouge,” he said. “Baton Rouge, Louisiana. You know it, yeah?”
An American? Who was he? How had he come to fight here, so far from his home? Campbell asked.
Before the detainee could answer, a guard pushed him forward. The man glanced back once as he walked away, heading toward the trucks.
Months would pass before United States officials would realize that the man, Yaser Esam Hamdi, was indeed an American, the second to be captured at Qala-i-Jangi. Until then, he would be held by the military alongside the foreign fighters.
• • •
Bombs ripped apart a valley in Tora Bora that al-Qaeda had hoped would be a stronghold. With the fighters cleared out, a member of the Jawbreaker team went to inspect the area.
On the ground, he saw a mangled body clutching a Yazoo radio, the kind al-Qaeda favored. He listened to it and realized that it was tuned to the frequency used by the terrorist group. He could hear them calling for food and water, and proclaiming their desire to kill Americans.
Then there was a voice he recognized from more than fifty intercept
s and tape recordings. It was bin Laden, urging his men to keep up the battle.
Another fighter spoke. “Zamat, how is the sheikh?”
Someone answered, “The sheikh is fine.”
This was the proof. Bin Laden was nearby, no farther than the radio frequency’s range.
• • •
The reporters at Tora Bora seemed to outnumber the American fighters. The Jawbreaker teams were convinced that more troops were necessary—they were at a watershed moment, just days or maybe hours from a final confrontation with bin Laden. The terrorist leader who had brutally killed so many Americans could soon be dead or imprisoned, if the Pentagon was willing to make a push.
At this point the Pakistanis and the Eastern Alliance were the only hope of catching bin Laden, but neither seemed up to the job. Since it was Ramadan, the Eastern Alliance members who had been fasting all day retreated from the battleground for dinner once the sun set; the Pakistani military had left numerous paths from Tora Bora to their border uncovered, and members of the Jawbreaker units questioned whether those soldiers would stop—or aid—escaping al-Qaeda members.
The Americans could fix those problems. All that was needed, the Jawbreaker leaders agreed, was a battalion of Army Rangers dropped behind al-Qaeda’s positions. They would stand the best chance of blocking the terrorists from reaching Pakistan.
The request reached Tommy Franks and Rumsfeld. And they turned it down. Both now wanted to avoid committing many troops and instead rely on the Afghani allies working with Special Forces teams. The United States needed to keep a light footprint in Afghanistan, Rumsfeld argued, or there might be a rise in anti-American sentiment that would fuel an insurgency. Plus, throwing together the troops and the means for keeping them supplied might be too difficult to accomplish in such a short time. Suddenly, when the Pentagon was most needed for the fight, Rumsfeld was no longer willing to become more involved. With the CIA and Special Forces having led the way to victory without much input from the Pentagon—and over Rumsfeld’s demands that the armed forces spearhead the fight—the defense secretary and his lead general packed up their marbles and went home.
500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars Page 23
