88 Days to Kandahar: A CIA Diary

by Grenier, Robert L.

  The morning of the 18th brought less welcome news. Gul Agha’s people reported that while the Pak-supplied RPG-7s were fine, the AK-47s were old and heavily used, and many were essentially unserviceable. When I relayed this to Jafar at an emergency meeting at ISI Headquarters, the general didn’t want to believe it.

  “Afghans are reporting this to you?” When the word “Afghan” crossed the lips of this Punjabi tank commander, it sounded like a curse. I wouldn’t be able to verify the report until my officers were on the ground and, given the number and varied provenance of Gul Agha’s weapons, probably not completely even then, but I asked that Jafar look into what might have happened in the meantime anyway.

  Shortly after I returned, Dave walked into my office. I could always tell from his expression when he was bearing bad news. We had developed a sort of joking protocol for such times. “Wait,” I’d say, raising my hand. Walking out from behind my desk, I would lie down on the couch, staring up at the ceiling as though in a psychiatrist’s office. “Okay. Let me have it.”

  But I could see that this was no time for jokes. The cable he handed me stated that the ODA at Jacobabad could not deploy to Afghanistan. Instead, a “pilot team” comprised of two CIA case officers—Mark and Duane—along with the two Gray Fox operators should join Gul Agha in Shin Naray alone. The military members of the team should remain at Jacobabad and would only be allowed to deploy if reporting from the CIA-only advance force justified the additional personnel. I was incredulous.

  I was nearly as disbelieving when Hank himself picked up immediately on the other end of the secure line to headquarters. After the briefest of greetings, I got straight to the point.

  “Hank, we’ve received a headquarters cable stating that only CIA personnel can deploy with Gul Agha, and that the ODA has to remain behind.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Look, the Taliban has forces in the area, and they could attack Gul Agha’s people at any time. We don’t know for sure how many fighters he has, and we don’t know whether they’ll stand and fight. We need to have the military with us.”

  “Our people will be armed. They can defend themselves.”

  “No, if we’re going to have to rely on ourselves, we need to have a minimum number of guns to maintain a defensive position until the team can be extracted. Besides, the most important thing for us is to be able to direct CAS [close-air support]. We need the ODA for that.”

  “The Gray Fox operators have been trained to direct CAS.”

  “Fine if they’ve had some training, but we need people who do this for a living.”

  “Well, it may sound harsh,” he said mildly, as if in sorrow, “but if people are going to die, it’s better we limit the number of casualties.”

  This was insane. The full team we proposed to send was already extremely small—sixteen people, at a maximum. If we sent in a much smaller number, with no organic link to the military and without any adequate means to defend themselves, then all surely would die if anything went wrong. As I began to protest yet again, Hank raised his voice in anger.

  “Look, CIA has always gone in first. That’s the model we’ve used all over the country.”

  Ah, so that was it: one-upping the military. In fact, what he was saying was not true. CIA officers may have deployed in advance of the military in the north, but it was different in the south, where we were operating behind enemy lines, and he knew it. When Team Echo had deployed with Karzai just three days before, CIA and the military had gone in together. But Hank had moved on. “. . . And another thing. What were you doing discussing a joint interrogation center with the Pakistanis? You had no authorization. . . .”

  A few days before, in anticipation that the Pakistanis would soon be capturing Arab fighters and members of al-Qa’ida escaping across the Afghan border, I had raised with General Jafar the idea of establishing a joint interrogation center under U.S. supervision, in which we could invite friendly Arab intelligence services to participate as well. The idea would be to leverage our extensive intelligence and the Arabs’ local knowledge and linguistic capability in one location, where information could be instantly shared among all of us, and where there would be continual CIA monitoring to ensure that no human rights abuses occurred. Jafar had responded enthusiastically, and was willing to take the idea to President Musharraf, but when I raised it formally with headquarters, CTC had quashed it.

  Once again, I was being slow on the uptake. Here I’d thought this was a discussion. It was nothing of the sort. Hank might have been speaking still, but I could no longer hear him; his voice had been drowned out by a roaring sound in my ears. There was no point in continuing.

  “Nice speaking with you, as always,” I said. I held the receiver over the cradle for a moment, and then dropped it.

  I sent an immediate message to Mark in Jacobabad, explaining the situation. We both knew that he had the option to back out, given the unnecessary risks he and the others were suddenly being asked to assume. I didn’t mention it, though, and neither did he: it was his duty to go forward, and we both knew that, too. This was his operation, and he was the case officer for it. Mark was the doting father of five children.

  Among the many dozens of officers rotating on temporary assignment into and out of the station during that time were a large number of annuitants, some long retired and quite senior in their day, including five former deputy chiefs of the Near East Division—three of whom were present at that moment. That night, the unofficial doyen among the annuitants, Dan Webster, wrote a long e-mail to Hank’s deputy John Massie, with whom he had worked in the past. He recounted the history of CTC’s “obstructionism,” of which the current withholding of the ODA was but the most recent, and most egregious, example.

  “Together,” he said, “my retired colleagues and I represent over 300 years of operational experience. We all agree that in that time we have never, ever, seen such poor Headquarters support to the field. Please help us.” I only heard about it later, but given the number of headquarters components living under the CTC boot in those days, it was probably inevitable that the e-mail would get out, and that it would go viral when it did. It apparently created a huge stir in the building. Someone even printed out a copy and passed it to Director Tenet, as he would tell me later.

  The Special Forces were at least as outraged by this development as we were, but there was nothing they could do. We were still only in Phase Two of General Franks’s four-phase campaign plan, which meant that military units could only enter Afghanistan to team with indigenous forces if they had CIA agreement; for the moment, as least, CTC would not agree. But when Mark and his colleagues boarded two helos at Jacobabad for the flight into Shin Naray the following night of the 19th, the young Special Forces captain commanding ODA 583, to his everlasting credit, insisted on accompanying them, and brought two of his troopers along, despite the lack of authorization. When I heard of it, I very much feared for this young officer’s career. I was much relieved to learn later on that his superiors, apparently sharing his sentiments, had elected to ignore the episode.

  The Special Forces, it seems, have formulas for just about everything. One such formula they use to estimate the number of fighters in an area involves counting the number of campfires they produce at night. CW3 Poteet was listening in on the cockpit communications as the SF helicopter pilots circled Shin Naray, marveling at the number of fires they could see on the surrounding valley ridges. They estimated that Gul Agha had some 1,500 fighters. The following day, the Foxtrot “pilot team” made a ground assessment and determined that Gul Agha’s forces indeed numbered over 1,000 fighters. This was duly reported, accompanied by a request from the ODA commander to allow the remainder of his small force to join them. I don’t recall a specific response from Langley, but within twenty-four hours of the commander’s arrival in Shin Naray, his ODA was whole again.

  NOVEMBER 23, 2001

  “Abdullah! Abdullah! Is there anyone in that house?” Mark was shouting to be
heard over the din of gunfire. Long bursts from AK-47s were being loosed right in front of them, while salvos of RPG-7 rounds were roaring overhead, fired from positions just behind. Hostile fire was emanating from a ridge and from a small mud-walled compound a short distance away. A strike on the compound might well destroy the house as well. Were there any civilians left inside?

  “No, no! They have all run away!”

  “Abdullah, are you sure? Are you sure?”

  As soon as the bomb struck, the firing from the compound ceased. Minutes later, with smoke still hanging in the air, they entered the house adjoining it, only to find a woman, dead, inside. Next to her lay her eleven-year-old daughter, dazed by the concussion. Her left cheek had been flayed open, cut to the bone. They were just east of Takht-e Pol, located on Highway 4, a third of the way from the border post at Spin Boldak to the Taliban capital, on the sole east-west highway from Pakistan to Kandahar City.

  Two days before, on November 21, with Gul Agha’s force still in Shin Naray, it had appeared fleetingly that his advance might be far less contested. The Taliban commander in Arghistan offered to meet with Gul Agha’s representatives just after dusk to negotiate a potential surrender. They apparently hadn’t anticipated the Americans’ ability to watch, through night-vision goggles, as they moved a large number of armed men to covered ambush positions surrounding the proposed meeting site shortly before the appointed hour. Rather than a negotiating party, the Taliban representatives attracted a hail of gunfire from Gul Agha’s men, precipitating a short, sharp exchange. The same day, as Mullah Omar’s office chief and Taliban spokesman Tayyib Agha made a two-hour visit to Spin Boldak on the Pakistan border, pledging before the media that the Taliban would fight to the death and prevail in the south, other Afghans claiming to represent Mullah Osmani and the Taliban finance minister, Abdul Wasi Agha Jan Mohtasim, contacted Shirzai’s relatives in Quetta seeking negotiations. They were told they should look for Shirzai in Kandahar.

  At dawn the following morning, Shirzai’s force began to move out of the valley, swinging toward the southwest in the direction of Highway 4. Mark stood at the western entrance, counting men and vehicles as they filed past. The forty-two machines in the convoy included a wide assortment of pickups, elaborately decorated British Bedford “jinga” trucks (so-called because of the sound made by the metal pendants that typically hung by chains from the undercarriage of these garishly appointed vehicles), and even farm tractors pulling flatbed trailers. The start was not encouraging. No sooner had the column begun to exit the valley than one of the larger trucks broke down with a faulty transmission. Several men crawled underneath, and after a lengthy effort, it lurched forward once more, the rest of the file moving slowly behind it, until it broke down again less than a kilometer down the dirt track. Mark was beginning to wonder whether they would ever get out of Arghistan district, let alone reach Kandahar City. This time Gul Agha himself crawled under the truck and lay on his back, wrestling for forty minutes with the balky driveshaft. Once again, the truck was fired up and lurched forward. It would not break down again.

  Apart from occasional sniping, the first day’s march was largely unopposed. As with most such rump militia forces, it displayed an appalling lack of fire discipline. The sound of a gunshot from a far distance would usually be answered with a salvo of rocket-propelled grenades, fired at nothing and no one in particular. Word of Shirzai’s advance was spreading widely through the area. That same day, in Spin Boldak, elders of the Achakzai tribe, apparently unimpressed by Tayyib Agha’s boasts, approached local Taliban officials and asked them to leave.

  The moving column’s first night was spent at a little village called Bala Zar, about halfway between Shin Naray and Highway 4. From the villagers Shirzai was able to purchase enough bread and mutton for the entire force. The following morning, he held a jirga with the elders and senior commanders to determine where they should go. As a disproportionate number of the elders were from Arghandab, a lush agricultural area just to the north of Kandahar City, they lobbied heavily to liberate their home district first. The fact that Arghandab was administered by Mullah Naqib, Gul Agha’s old rival and adversary, may have made him susceptible to their arguments. After some discussion, a consensus was reached: They would break off to the north and west, and go to Arghandab.

  As the proceedings broke up, Mark, who had been listening with growing alarm, quickly pulled Gul Agha aside.

  “Shirzai, what are you doing? What do you want with Arghandab? When Hamid Karzai arrives in Kandahar, is that where you want to be?” That stopped the Barakzai chieftain in his tracks. He looked back for a moment as the elders were beginning to shuffle off, and then leapt to his feet to get their attention.

  “On to Kandahar!” he shouted.

  The jirga is a peculiarly Afghan institution. Although held ostensibly to reach a consensus decision on some matter of public importance, it is often more about showing respect and giving prominent members of the community an opportunity to have their say, rather than achieving a particular outcome. Here the group had reached a firm consensus in favor of investing Arghandab and wresting it from the Taliban, only to have its leader arbitrarily overturn the decision immediately thereafter. The elders stopped and looked at one another. No one seemed particularly upset. They gave a sort of collective shrug, and remounted their vehicles: Kandahar it would be.

  In typical CIA fashion, Mark was acting under the loosest of operating directives. He was to work closely with Gul Agha, leveraging the support of the military, and somehow seize Kandahar. There was no firm plan for how he would do this, apart from supporting Shirzai, and it would never have occurred to me to provide him with one. The situation was too fluid, and there were too many variables. He could only improvise as he went along. I and the station were there to provide support and assistance, and whatever guidance they might seek, but Mark and Duane were the case officers on this operation. It would be up to them to do as they saw fit.

  CTC, seeing an opportunity to duplicate in the south the degree of direct control it nominally enjoyed in the north, insisted immediately after its arrival in Afghanistan that Team Foxtrot would operate as an independent entity, rather than as a sort of “mobile base” of Islamabad Station, as we had conceived of them. As soon as Mark and Duane crossed the Afghan border, we were told, they would no longer be formally subject to my command. Given the loose and informal way we normally operated, this was an amusing conceit, made all the more so when the crude satellite communications apparatus which headquarters had supplied for Foxtrot’s use could not be made to work. The only remaining secure, dedicated CIA communications link available to Mark and Duane was an encrypted satellite commo package of the sort we normally supplied to our principal Afghan sources. Thus, their only two-way communications were point-to-point with the station. To communicate with their masters at headquarters, Foxtrot would have to do it through us. CTC/SO sternly admonished us that we were not to edit or otherwise interfere with Foxtrot’s communications in any way; their missives were to be transcribed as received into cable format and forwarded on to headquarters. We all found this wryly entertaining—as if Mark and his colleagues would have somehow suffered amnesia, and now place their trust in the people who had tried to deny them military support not twenty-four hours before.

  All day on November 23, the column made its slow way south and west, with Mark providing updates when he could. As night fell, they were approaching Takht-e Pol; they intended to stop as soon as they reached the highway. Mark reported some firing on their perimeter from straight ahead; elements of the ODA, he said, were going forward to investigate. Soon they were in a general firefight, with the ODA calling in airstrikes on Taliban positions. Just before midnight, they decided to break contact, withdrawing under fire after inflicting heavy losses in men and equipment, and having taken some sixty Taliban prisoners, including the famous “Commander Lalo.” The following morning, they pushed forward again, only to find that the Taliban had largely aban
doned the town. As of November 24, the main avenue of communication between Kandahar and Pakistan had been cut. It was a major turning point in the southern campaign. Gul Agha now had a straight path before him, down Highway 4, to Kandahar.

  With Gul Agha’s campaign well under way and vectored toward Kandahar, and with Hamid Karzai having survived the Taliban onslaught at Tarin Kowt and preparing to move south, we learned that yet more help might be arriving on the scene—but not in a good way. The U.S. Marines, we were told, were planning to seize the royal Emerati hunting camp and air strip in the Registan Desert 100 miles southwest of Kandahar—the one so disingenuously offered to us by Haji Juma Khan Baluch, the drug-runner—which they dubbed “Rhino.” “Bill,” an old friend, had been assigned as the CIA liaison to the invading Marines. As they marshaled their forces in southern Pakistan, he stopped in Islamabad to brief us before moving out. Bill had no idea what the strategic intent of this Marine Expeditionary Force might be, beyond investing Camp Rhino, but promised to keep us informed. On November 25, the first helicopter-borne units of what would eventually become a 1,100-man force began landing in the remote southern desert.

  Dave shook his head. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Marines are so damned aggressive.” If a large U.S. force were to move north and start destroying things, we knew, it would very likely have a negative effect on a political environment which was just beginning to turn in our favor. And with allied Afghan forces beginning to close in on Kandahar, we were concerned about the Marines’ ability to distinguish friend from foe. There had been almost no advance warning of this development, and no way of telling whose idea it was, but it smelled to us like interservice politics and a ploy to get the Marines into the fight. This would bear close watching.

  Shirzai’s initial successes were nothing short of thrilling, and a vindication of the strategy we had long advocated against steadfast resistance from headquarters. Meanwhile, and perhaps not incidentally, I found myself embroiled in yet more difficulties with CTC/SO. When Mark had first arrived in Shin Naray, he had immediately verified the initial reports concerning the substandard Pakistani weapons. Everyone with whom he spoke had the same story, and he was shown a significant number of badly worn AK-47s. One was so old as to qualify as a genuine antique; he’d love to keep it as a souvenir, he said, but believed it would be suicidal to fire. I actually cut out the paragraph from Mark’s message and showed it to Jafar.