22
War in Afghanistan
Billy Waugh stood in line to draw money at CIA headquarters in Langley, where a clandestine operator goes to get advance money for a trip, usually hundred-dollar bills in banded stacks. It was a bright, sunny day, not a cloud in the sky this second Tuesday in September 2001. Waugh was heading to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a clandestine meeting with Khun Sa, the notorious Asian drug lord and guerrilla leader of the heroin-financed Shan State Army in Myanmar. Khun Sa was one of the most dangerous men in the world. In the hierarchy of Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle, he was the top tyrant, the Prince of Death. With an estimated personal fortune of $5 billion, he was the world’s fifth-richest drug lord on record (four slots behind Pablo Escobar, who was worth $30 billion when killed). Once, the Drug Enforcement Agency calculated that 45 percent of all heroin in the United States came from Khun Sa’s empire. The covert-action operation that the CIA was engaging in with Khun Sa in the fall of 2001 remains classified.[national security you know DC]
Standing in line at CIA headquarters, Waugh kept one eye on an overhead television set. One of the news programs was reporting that a passenger airplane had hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, a second airplane hit the South Tower, making clear this was a terrorist attack. An alarm sounded. Emergency lights began to flash. “In all my years at the Agency I’d never seen or heard that before,” remembers Waugh. Over the intercom, a prerecorded voice instructed all employees to exit the building and leave CIA grounds immediately. “Everyone except for Special Activities Division,” says Waugh. “We were told to report to the north parking lot and wait there.”
Lawyer John Rizzo heard the evacuation order over the CIA’s intercom system, too. But standing in his office on the top floor of the original headquarters building, watching hundreds of employees evacuate the grounds, he decided not to leave. Instead he closed his door, sat down at his desk, and pulled out a blank yellow legal pad. “I began writing a list of potential covert actions the CIA might undertake in the coming weeks,” Rizzo recalls.
Waugh headed over to the lot. It was filled with many faces that had become familiar to him after forty years of working with the CIA. Nerds in suits, knuckle draggers and bearded guys. For roughly thirty minutes, the group sat in the sun discussing what had happened. Suddenly someone shouted out that a third hijacked aircraft had crashed into the Pentagon. The White House and the Capitol were being evacuated, and U.S. airspace was now shut down. A minute before 10:00, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed. On an average working day, 50,000 people worked there, not including daily visitors. Just a few minutes later a fourth hijacked aircraft crashed into a Pennsylvania field. At 10:28, the North Tower collapsed. “Pretty much everybody was thinking the same thing,” says Waugh. “America was going to war.”
After a few hours, one of the more senior members of the division came out to the parking lot and addressed the group. “Prepare to RON,” he said. Remain overnight. Then he told everyone to go get back to work.
Inside the building, Waugh found a large wooden table in an upstairs conference room, sat down, and began reading everything available on Afghanistan.
That night, around 9:30, CIA director George Tenet met with President Bush and his top advisors inside a bunker beneath the White House. Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and national-security advisor Condoleezza Rice were among those present. Tenet told the president and his inner circle that the Counterterrorist Center had identified Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda as being behind the attacks and that a hard-line group of Islamic fundamentalists called the Taliban were providing the terrorist organization with a safe haven inside Afghanistan. The meeting in the White House bunker focused on an incontrovertible reality, Tenet said. The terrorist threat was not a one-country problem. “We have a sixty-country problem,” he said.
A follow-up wave of attacks could come at any time, from anywhere around the world.
“Let’s pick them off one at a time,” the president said.
The following morning, at 8:00, Tenet arrived back at the White House, this time to deliver the President’s Daily Brief. He described the CIA’s recent covert- action operations in Afghanistan, explaining how the Special Activities Division had spent years developing assets inside anti-Taliban guerrilla groups. The most promising of these fighting forces was the Northern Alliance, but their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud, had been assassinated by Al-Qaeda three days ago—a strategic preemptive move. The CTC was working around the clock on a plan of action for Afghanistan, and it would be ready for the president to view the following day.
“Whatever it takes,” the president said.
On September 14 Cofer Black, chief of the CTC, accompanied George Tenet to the White House to lay out a plan of attack unprecedented in American history. The CIA, not the Defense Department, should lead the attack against Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban in Afghanistan, Tenet said. The CIA’s Special Activities Division was best suited to wage an unconventional warfare campaign in Afghanistan. U.S. special operations forces would augment the CIA paramilitary operations being proposed, but Tenet was very clear about the fact that the CIA would lead.
When it came time for Cofer Black to speak, the room grew quiet. Black was a huge man, six foot three, with energy reserves as big as his frame. A twenty six-year veteran of the clandestine service, he had spent decades running covertaction operations in war-torn countries and failed states like Angola and Sudan. With the terrorist attacks just a few days old, and the dead still thought to number 10,000, Cofer Black presented his plan of lethal action against Al Qaeda, springing out of his chair, throwing papers on the floor, and hurling his fist in the air to emphasize his points. Timing was everything, he said. Another attack likely loomed on the horizon. America needed to respond immediately, with a heavy as well as a hidden hand. The CIA’s Special Activities Division was fast, flexible, and lethal, Black said, and if given the mission it would destroy Al-Qaeda’s leadership. “They’ll have flies on their eyeballs,” he told the president. After that, Cofer Black became known among the war cabinet as the “flies-on-the-eyeballs guy.”
In the days since 9/11, President Bush had been candid about his determination to hunt down and kill the terrorists responsible for the worst attack ever on U.S. soil. Now he was being told by an impassioned CTC chief that there was a way to do this immediately. Everyone in the room knew that the Defense Department would need many months to get boots on the ground inside a hostile, land-locked country like Afghanistan. Just a few hours later, at a National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room, the president told his advisors that he was going to approve the CIA proposal and allow the Agency to lead the war in Afghanistan.
The group reconvened the following day at Camp David to discuss what would happen next. Tenet delivered a presentation called “Going to War.” The Top Secret proposal called for what the CIA termed the Worldwide Attack Matrix, a hidden-hand antiterrorism campaign that would span eighty countries around the globe. The opening phase of the war would focus on Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaeda, and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. After that, the scope would widen to include all of the Middle East, much of Asia and Africa, and a host of other nations.
In order to implement the Worldwide Attack Matrix, the president would need to grant the CIA what Agency lawyers called “exceptional authorities.” President Bush would have to sign off on a Memorandum of Notification that would allow the CIA to conduct covert-action operations around the world without having to come back for another MON each time a new operation was proposed. This MON would modify and supersede the findings signed by President Reagan and those later amended by President Clinton, which hamstrung the CIA’s paramilitary teams under legal constraints. When the meeting ended, President Bush took George Tenet aside to say he was going to approve all of Tenet’s requests. All he needed now were documents from the CIA’s lawyers.
At CIA headquarters, John Rizzo reviewed the language of the MON he’d been drafting one last time. “I wrote the September 2001 MON,” said Rizzo, in an interview for this book. “Lethal direct action was [expressly] stated. So was the authority to capture, detain, interrogate.” At the time, there was no way to foresee where this would all go. “How those two [sets] of three words [each] would later be interpreted. This is the tricky thing about MONs,” Rizzo explains. Lethal direct action would become known as targeted killing. “Capture, detain, interrogate” would become known as enhanced interrogation, or torture.
In September 2001, John Rizzo was the number two lawyer at the CIA. He’d served eleven CIA directors and seven presidents. “The first MON I ever drafted was during the Iranian hostage” crisis, he explains, and “this [September 2001] Memorandum of Notification was nothing short of extraordinary,” he says. As he wrote in Company Man, “It was the most comprehensive, most ambitious, most aggressive and most risky Finding, or MON, I was ever involved in.” A second document drafted by Rizzo delineated the orders and steps for authorization to be followed and taken by the president’s war cabinet. This included financial investigations, diplomatic efforts, military planning, and additional covert actions necessary to go after terrorists around the world. Satisfied with the language, Rizzo had the documents sent over to the White House for signature. Both documents were classified Top Secret. Both remain in effect today.
The Memorandum of Notification was radical in terms of scope, ambition, aggression, and risk. It also contained another authority that would revolutionize the way in which individual people would be targeted and killed. At the CTC, ever since President Clinton had forbidden the CIA from killing Osama Bin Laden with a paramilitary team, Hank Crumpton and Cofer Black had been trying to weaponize the Predator drone. Recently, they’d figured out how to retrofit the airframe with laser-guided missiles to strike a target from 25,000 feet overhead. On 9/11, the CTC had a total of two Predator drones, one of which was armed. This new MON authorized the director of the CIA to pull the trigger on a lethal Predator drone strike. Tenet passed this authority on to the chief of the Directorate of Operations, who passed the job on to Cofer Black.
The following day, President Bush signed the MON and summoned his advisors. “The purpose of this meeting,” the president said, “is to assign tasks for the first wave of the war against terrorism. It starts today. I want the CIA to be first on the ground.” The CIA, not the Department of Defense, was the lead agency in a war.
Billy Waugh did not want to be left behind. Intent on getting himself on a CIA paramilitary team headed to Afghanistan, he went directly to Cofer Black’s office and knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Black said.
Billy Waugh stood in the doorframe. Black was inundated with responsibility. Many of his duties approximated those of a military general. Waugh addressed his former boss using Black’s old code name from Sudan.
“Crusader,” Waugh said, “get me in on this war.”
Black remembers how absurd it seemed at the time, what Billy Waugh was asking of him. Waugh was old—he’d fought as an infantry soldier in the Korean War. “I asked him how old he was,” Black recalled in 2017. “He said he was about to turn seventy-two. I told him he wasn’t going to Afghanistan. He said yes he was. I said he was too old.”
Although Billy Waugh was not aware, his legacy at the CIA—his decades long work as a clandestine operator—loomed large, and not just at the Agency but at the White House. Enrique “Ric” Prado, one of Cofer Black’s Senior Intelligence Service advisors and a longtime colleague of Billy Waugh’s, was preparing a briefing for Vice President Dick Cheney.
Ric Prado was a rare breed of CIA officer—a man as comfortable operating behind enemy lines in disguise as he was strolling the halls of power in a suit. Having grown up in the Special Activities Division, first as a paramilitary operator and later as an operations officer, he was uniquely familiar with the kind of dangerous work Billy Waugh had done for the CIA over the previous decades. In this time of national crisis, Prado had conceived of how to make use of Waugh’s tradecraft. Waugh and a handful of male and female operators like him had managed to photograph the world’s most wanted terrorists in the world’s most dangerous places. This was a key element of a new way forward, Prado told me in 2018.
The Counterterrorist Center was putting together a list of Al-Qaeda leadership it had identified as potential targets of lethal direct action. Ric Prado’s plan was to widen that list and to put additional focus on the mid- to upper-level terrorists—the facilitators that the Al-Qaeda leadership relied upon: bomb makers, weapons traders, money men, recruiters, trainers, commanders, and radical imams. Prado discussed his plan with Cofer Black, who set up a meeting in the White House Situation Room with Vice President Dick Cheney. Also present at the meeting were Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis Libby, White House legal counsel David Addington, and the CIA’s John Rizzo.
Ric Prado was considered tough and intimidating by friends and enemies alike. At the CIA, he held the rank of SIS-2, which made him the civilian equivalent of a military major general. In addition to being a strategic thinker, Prado, a former U.S. Air Force Pararescue veteran, was a highly trained warfighter. He was an expert in parachute insertion, scuba exfiltration, evasive driving, knife fighting, and a host of other close-quarters combat skills. With his fourth-degree black belt in martial arts, Prado spent his first ten years at the CIA with the Special Activities Division, some of it as a Ground Branch officer, including nearly four years in the jungles of South America. Over the next decade, he was posted at six CIA stations overseas and served as deputy chief, East Asia Division for the Koreas. In 1996, he returned to Langley to become deputy in charge of Alec Station, the original bin Laden task force. In 2000, he was named chief of station in Khartoum, where—like Waugh—he drove around the city disguised as African, wearing a rubber mask designed by the CIA. In 2001, Prado became chief of operations at the Counterterrorist Center. In a matter of months, he would move into an ultra secret unit called Special Investigations Group.
Accompanying Ric Prado to the meeting in the White House Situation Room was a colleague from the Latin America Division, Jose Rodriguez, also a larger than-life figure from the Senior Intelligence Service. Rodriguez had recently been moved over to the CTC to serve as Cofer Black’s chief operations officer. During the meeting at the White House, Ric Prado and Jose Rodriguez showed Vice President Cheney photographs of terrorists taken by singleton operators like Billy Waugh. These photographs were acquired the old-school way, they explained, with a 35mm camera and a long lens. They included pictures of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue nuclear scientist who had developed Pakistan’s atomic bomb, and Mamoun Darkazanli, who the CIA called the Dark Man, a member of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who joined Al-Qaeda to help finance the 9/11 attacks. The reason for showing the vice president and his advisors the photographs was to demonstrate the obvious: the Special Activities Division had for decades been developing a capacity to get a singleton operator within striking range of a terrorist, close enough to kill the man.
Before 9/11, the Clinton administration’s Presidential Findings allowed the CIA to conduct reconnaissance and take photographs but not engage in lethal direct action against terrorists. The September 17, 2001, MON signed by President Bush changed all that. Ric Prado was proposing that the CIA maximize its ability to locate human targets, fix their position, and if necessary, kill them. The concept, derived from Special Forces doctrine developed in Latin America in the 1980s, would later become known at the Defense Department as Find, Fix, Finish. According to three individuals familiar with the program, Vice President Cheney agreed that the CIA should develop this capacity. It was provided for in the MON and was precisely the kind of covert action the Worldwide Attack Matrix required. It called for the expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary army.
At the time, says Crumpton, “The CIA paramilitary arm was tiny and weak in terms of raw kinetic firepower.” Within days of the 9/11 attack, that changed as the Special Activities Division expanded in unprecedented ways. A new entity inside the Counterterrorist Center called CTC/Special Operations emerged, made up of “more than fifty rabidly dedicated officers scrambling in a disciplined frenzy of duty and revenge.” Hank Crumpton would run the internal part of the CIA’s war in Afghanistan. Ric Prado would oversee counterterrorism operations around the globe, including those for the bin Laden group, Hamas group, Hezbollah group, and others. “We started recruiting people in the hallways,” Prado recalls. “A deliberate mix of officers with a range of disciplines from different parts of the clandestine service and even the larger CIA,” Crumpton explains, “personnel from Near East Division, Central Eurasia Division, Africa Division, communications officers, medics, bomb experts, all came together under temporary assignment to CTC/SO.”
Roughly fifty percent of the men on the teams deployed into Afghanistan were from the Special Activities Division, Ground Branch. Highly classified and totally deniable, Ground Branch is like a human version of the Predator program: zealous, uncompromising, and deadly when necessary. In 2001, roughly half of its efforts were directed at reconnaissance and surveillance missions, with the other half acting as a lethal direct-action strike force. Over time, Ground Branch—like the Predator drone program—would radically transform.
The day after President Bush signed the CIA’s MON, he signed into law the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was directed against Al-Qaeda and “associated forces.” Days earlier, Cofer Black had called a veteran field officer named Gary Schroen into his office and asked him to lead the first of nine Special Activities Division teams into the war zone. Fluent in Dari, the native language of roughly 50 percent of Afghanistan, Schroen had worked covert operations in the region since 1978, including ones involving the recently assassinated rebel leader Ahmed Shah Massoud. During the Taliban years, from 1996 to 2001, when there was no U.S. embassy in Kabul, Schroen served as CIA chief of station, Afghanistan, by working out of an office in Islamabad, Pakistan. With the Agency rank of SIS-4, Gary Schroen was a senior intelligence service officer at the very top of the ladder. And yet he was going to fight in Afghanistan, age sixty. That the CIA was sending Schroen directly into a war zone to lead a direct-action team is nothing short of remarkable. It also demonstrates just how far apart the CIA and the Pentagon are in their thinking, their doctrine, and their moves.
The Defense Department is a war machine: a labyrinth of rules and regulations, field manuals, and chains of command that make up a massive trillion-dollar bureaucracy that prides itself on being the most powerful fighting force in the world. The CIA’s covert-action arm lives at the opposite end of the spectrum. Its manuals are mostly unwritten. Agency operatives are taught how to break laws of foreign countries. How to circumvent the rules. No one calls anyone else “sir.” The smallness and secrecy of the CIA’s paramilitary arm—its light, flexible footprint—is exactly what allows its officers and operators to make quick-thinking life-or-death decisions on the fly. “Men calculatingly reckless with disciplined daring who are trained for aggressive action,” was how William Donovan described the unconventional warrior-spies of the OSS Special Operations Branch. The Special Activities Division is the closest thing to an heir.
Covert action was created to act as the president’s hidden hand, the third option when military force is inappropriate and diplomacy has failed. The concept of plausible deniability has been built into the very fabric of a covertaction mission since its inception in 1947. When an operation is over, the role of the CIA is to go back to remaining hidden from the world. In Afghanistan, an entirely new hybrid way of war was under way. Part unconventional, part conventional. Part covert, part overt. Part Title 50, part Title 10. How, exactly, was a CIA-led, Pentagon-augmented war going to work?
“Let me explain something,” Crumpton told me in 2018. “I didn’t really care about the hidden hand. The mission was so immediate, so driven by speed and precision—if something leaked, that was beyond my control. The country was in a panic. Everything was driven by need. Need and speed. Some of our guys carried AKs because of the availability of ammo.… Our teams [were] in constant danger on the ground.”
On September 20, 2001, Schroen and the first paramilitary team of the war flew into Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in a CIA cargo plane. Six days later they boarded an old Russian-made Mi-17 helicopter and were inserted into the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul. Flying into Afghanistan in a flashy Black Hawk helicopter was out of the question, because no one wanted to convey the idea that the Americans had arrived.
The CIA personnel were armed with weapons, secure satellite communications gear, GPS mapping equipment, and $10 million in boxed cash, highlighting yet another difference between the CIA and the Defense Department. The U.S. military cannot legally pay cash bribes. The CIA’s men were met by guerrilla fighters from the Northern Alliance and taken to the village of Barak. There, they established the first of more than a dozen forward operating bases across Afghanistan. The first order of business was to set up secure comms with the CTC back at Langley for this intelligence-driven war.
If the Pentagon is a war machine, the CIA is an intelligence factory. “Intelligence was the foundation of everything we did,” says Crumpton. “We were producing intelligence and we were also a consumer of the intelligence we were producing,” he explains. “We could be much more productive that way.” The paramilitary teams were on the ground to forge a partnership with Afghan allies and to fight with them, but their ultimate goal was to gather intelligence. “Think of everything you can learn from the pocket litter on a dead Al-Qaeda leader,” Crumpton adds.
In the field, Schroen and the paramilitary teams started learning as much as they could about Al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership from local fighters on the ground. “Our Afghan allies described the enemy positions in sharp detail,” says Crumpton. “They even knew Taliban commanders by name and sometimes communicated with them. They routinely ran recon teams across [enemy] lines,” to learn more. Human identity was at the center of the hunt—potential targets for the CIA’s kill-or-capture list. The CIA could not identify these men on its own, because the leaders of terrorist organizations are masters of disguise. Think of Carlos the Jackal, how he was able to live on the run for nearly twenty years, or Imad Mugniyah, the most wanted man in the world until Osama bin Laden took his place.
With the president’s Memorandum of Notification in place, the Special Activities Division would transform how terrorists would be identified, located, and captured, or killed. Technology would be leveraged, and the concept of targeting would undergo a revolution. For that, the CIA would build a new tool called the Magic Box.
In the fall of 2001, Ken Stiles had been working as an overt CIA officer for seventeen years, meaning that he did not have to hide the fact that he worked for the CIA. A geospatial and imagery analyst by training, Stiles was one of those people who could see things in satellite images others didn’t know were there. What might look like a black spot to most people, Stiles could identify as the entrance to an underground weapons facility. He was excellent at what he did and never intended to have another job, he explained, in a 2018 interview for this book.
“On October 1, I received a phone call from a person who identified himself as ‘Dan’ wanting to talk to me,” remembers Stiles. “I was taken down to the basement in new headquarters, into this cramped, windowless space filled with computers, copiers, briefing binders, books, maps, and communications gear. I was told, ‘Hank Crumpton needs a map.’ And not just any map. What Crumpton wanted was a complex, three-dimensional image system,” that could accurately represent the battle space in Afghanistan, in real time. In 2019 this is easy to imagine, not that different from a GPS system fused with a video game like Fortnite. In 2001, it was groundbreaking.
This map would incorporate layers of information—data on everything from geography to anthropology. From the location of schools and mosques to terrorist training camps and caves. “I was confident I could build it,” says Stiles. “I said, ‘What Crumpton is looking for is called a geographic information system, GIS.’” At the time, the software already existed in the public domain.
Someone handed Ken Stiles a Post-it note with a telephone number written on one side. “They told me to go give it to my boss, and come right back. Tell the boss I worked for the Counterterrorist Center, now.” Ken Stiles’s life would never be the same. In an instant, he went from being a GIS analyst at a desk to being the man responsible for building the CIA’s roadmap for its targeted killing program. At the time, he had no idea that one day he’d deploy into the battlefield, wear a flak jacket, carry a 9mm Glock and an M4, ride in a Black Hawk helicopter with a team of paramilitary operators and their Black SOF partners from Delta Force. For now, he was the head nerd working overtime in the basement at the CIA.
By that afternoon Ken Stiles began building CIA’s three-dimensional targeting map. One of the first layers of intelligence entered into the system came from hand-drawn battle maps created by Russian Army cartographers after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. “The information was still highly accurate,” remembers Stiles. “There hadn’t exactly been a construction boom since the Soviets’ withdrawal.” The CIA invited its National Security Agency partner to Langley to add a layer of signals intelligence into the system, things like the location of cell phone and fax intercepts. The same went for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, whose technicians added satellite imagery. “The combination of layers ran into the scores,” remembers Crumpton. “Eventually Ken and his team could calculate and display hundreds of combinations.” This new system “enabled a new perspective [on] war for the CIA, military and policy makers,” Crumpton later explained.
In Afghanistan, Gary Schroen’s team worked with Afghan warlords and rebel armies to send human intelligence back to Langley to be inputted into the system. This included data like locations of existing minefields and Al-Qaeda safe houses, as described by Afghan sources. Now, with the stroke of a computer key, the CTC staff could see these locations. And CIA paramilitary operators could better understand the physical environment from a geospatial point of view. But there were technical difficulties in the field, and the CTC decided to have Ken Stiles personally train one member of each team, usually the communications officer, on how to input data into the system before they deployed. Which is how a Green Beret named Nathan Ross Chapman wound up on a CIA paramilitary team.
“I trained him for a week,” remembers Stiles. “We became friends. We shared a passion for hunting and shooting, so we were alike in that way. Nate was very smart and the kind of person who always did an excellent job.” A quiet professional with a host of warfighting skills including combat scuba diver, sniper, and parachutist. After a week of working with Ken Stiles in the basement at CIA, Nate Chapman left to be part of a team deployed into Khost, Afghanistan. With the geographic information system up and working, Stiles briefed CIA director Tenet, who briefed President Bush. The system was so impressive, the White House started calling it the Magic Box.
The Counterterrorist Center was growing at a furious pace. By late fall 2001, there were over two thousand CTC employees. The Office of Terrorism Analysis expanded from twenty-five people to more than three hundred. Operations were being driven 24/7 from inside the CIA’s Global Response Center, located on the sixth floor of the original headquarters building. The center shared a secure direct line to the Defense Department’s Joint Intelligence Operations Center at Central Command, in Tampa, Florida. In Afghanistan, the action on the ground was about to shift gears as the war moved from covert to overt. The CIA’s paramilitary teams would now be augmented with special operations forces from the military, mostly Green Berets and Delta Force. And the Pentagon would begin its bombing campaign.
Shortly after midnight on October 7, 2001, fifteen U.S. Air Force bombers, twenty-five strike aircraft, and an unspecified number of U.S. and British ships and submarines fired more than fifty Tomahawk missiles against terrorist targets across Afghanistan. In a press conference, the Defense Department identified the targets hit as the Taliban’s defense ministry, its command centers, air defense installations, airfields, electrical grids, and other energy production facilities. The hybrid war—part covert action, part conventional warfare—had begun.
Upstairs at Langley, on the seventh floor, Cofer Black returned from a meeting at the White House to find Billy Waugh in front of his office, stretched out on a cheap folding chair. “The kind you take to the beach,” Black recalled in 2017. More CIA paramilitary teams were being put together for Afghanistan, and Waugh had not been chosen for any of them, which infuriated him. Black refused to assign him a spot on a team; Waugh’s protest was the beach chair setup. Cofer Black was annoyed. “There was a war going on. I had two secretaries running around. All kinds of people were coming to see me, and every goddamn one of them had to step around Billy Waugh in that cheap folding chair.”
Cofer Black went into his office and slammed the door. The demands on him were staggering. He also had Billy Waugh on his mind. It was Waugh’s dogged insistence, his never-give-up ferocity in the field, that had helped him achieve so many hidden-hand wins for the CIA, the kind only a handful of people would ever know about. Big victories in places where a less determined operator would have likely been captured, compromised, or killed. Cofer Black thought about how, on numerous occasions, he had directly benefited from Waugh’s wins. This included the Carlos the Jackal reconnaissance operation and capture—whose success is often attributed to Black.
“Billy leaned his head in my office again and said, ‘Goddamnit, Crusader, get me in on this war.’ This time I said, ‘Fine. Get the hell out of here. Go to Kabul.’”
Four days before Thanksgiving, Billy Waugh departed for Afghanistan by way of United Arab Emirates. Waiting on the tarmac there was a C-54 piloted by someone Waugh recognized immediately. “An old clandestine operator who flew covert missions for SOG, in Vietnam and Laos,” forty years before. “It is a small, small world,” says Waugh. He boarded the aircraft and, together with a half-dozen operators and officers from the CIA’s Special Activities Division and its Near East Division, flew to the newly captured Bagram Airfield, outside Kabul.
The tarmac was littered with rusting Soviet-era aircraft. The windowless air traffic control tower was pockmarked with bullet holes, the perimeter of the airfield ringed with unexploded antitank mines. With him, Billy Waugh carried an M4 carbine, an AK-47 assault rifle, a Heckler & Koch 40mm grenade launcher, and a suitcase with $6 million in cash. He was going to war and he was about to turn seventy-two years old.
23
Poke the Bear
Billy Waugh made his way the sixty kilometers from Bagram Airfield to the CIA facility in Kabul, which was located inside the Ariana Hotel on Silo Road. The square outside the Ariana was infamous: it was where the Taliban in 1996 had beaten and castrated the last communist president, Mohammad Najibullah, before laying siege to the city and taking control. After tying Najibullah to the back of a pickup truck and dragging his body through Kabul, they had suspended his body from a pole outside the hotel to demonstrate that a new era of Islamic piousness had begun. Najibullah’s brother was executed in the same way. For the next five years, Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah conducted public hangings of people deemed “would-be assassins” here. Billy Waugh crossed the square and went into the Ariana Hotel. While checking in, he learned from the clerk that the Taliban’s top warlords had taken over the hotel the year of Najibullah’s death and lived here right up until their exodus from Kabul two weeks ago. Before the CIA was allowed to move in, it was required to pay the Taliban’s overdue hotel bill.
In November 2001, the guests at the Ariana were a sight to behold. The place was filled with Special Activities Division and special operations forces personnel. If you were here, you were the best in your field: Delta Force, Green Berets, U.S. Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force Combat Control Teams, Air Force Pararescue, Marine Force Recon, and others. The few who weren’t unconventional warfighters were Olympic-level performers in their particular field, be it language, anthropology, signals intelligence, or spycraft. Waugh settled in and did what he always did in a hostile environment, where survival depended on knowing the lay of the land and how to escape if cornered. He went out for a jog. This proved fortuitous when a group of special operations forces arrived to join the CIA paramilitary teams, mistakenly dressed in military fatigues. Waugh knew the route to the local bazaar, where the soldiers were able to buy woolen shawls, caps, and shalwar kameez to blend in with the Afghan partners they’d be fighting alongside.286s
The Pentagon’s original plan for Afghanistan was to put 300,000 infantry troops on the ground, young American soldiers, the majority of whom had never seen combat before. Instead, the CIA sent 115 veteran Special Activities Division officers and operators to lead the charge, augmented by what would total around 2,000 special operations forces. Each team consisted of eight or nine men: a team chief, a deputy chief, an operations officer, someone with local language skills, a paramilitary officer, a communications expert, a medic, and one or two tactical weapons experts. Each unit was made up of eight to twelve men, mostly Green Berets and Delta Force. Attached to each team was an air force combat controller to call in tactical air strikes.
The CIA teams spread out across the country. Schroen’s team had been leading the ground war up north alongside General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a warlord of questionable repute. Team Alpha had already been made famous for riding into battle on horseback, something American soldiers had not done since World War I. Team Bravo deployed into Mazar-e-Sharif up north. Team Charlie was assigned to central western Afghanistan, to link up with warlord Ismail Khan and fight all the way to the Iranian border. Team Delta was in Bamyan Province to fight alongside a Hazara tribe, Shia Muslims who claimed ancestry with Genghis Khan. Team Echo was led by Greg Vogle, considered by many to be one of the most competent paramilitary fighters in SAD. Echo was tasked with securing the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and fighting alongside a guerrilla force assembled by Hamid Karzai, the soon-to-be future president of Afghanistan. Team Foxtrot, led by Duane Evans, went south to occupy TakhtehPol. Team Hotel was in charge of securing Afghanistan’s porous eastern border with Pakistan. Team Romeo, Waugh’s team, would insert into Logar Province. Team Juliet would fight Al-Qaeda in Tora Bora, the place from which bin Laden got away.
After three days in Kabul there was already bad news, including a Taliban prisoner uprising up north that occurred during a covert operation near Mazar-e Sharif. In preparing for a covert war, the CIA had overlooked the issue of what to do with POWs captured on the battlefield. Agency lawyers neglected to create a post capture writ. In the fog of war, each paramilitary team’s default position was to turn the captured Taliban fighters over to their Afghan allies, in this case to the warlord General Dostum.
The move proved deadly. Declassified State Department intelligence reports reveal that General Dostum ordered his men to herd the surrendered Taliban into metal shipping containers, without ventilation or water, then close and lock the doors. While waiting to be trucked to a prison facility, 1,500 Taliban POWs suffocated to death. Those who tried to escape were shot by Dostum’s men. The bodies were buried in a mass grave under a stretch of desert outside Shibarghan. Photographs were included in the State Department report.
Roughly one hundred captured Taliban prisoners lived, American John Walker Lindh among them. General Dostum transported these prisoners to a medieval fortress called Qala-i-Jangi, outside Mazar-e-Sharif. Dostum’s men failed to search the surrendered men for weapons and instead herded them into the basement of the citadel. When CIA paramilitary operations officer John “Mike” Spann went inside to gather intel, he was ambushed, shot, and killed. A second CIA paramilitary officer identified as David fought his way outside, where he met a German film crew, who lent him a satellite phone to call the CIA. The Qala-i-Jangi prison uprising became an international news story, Spann being the first CIA officer to die in the war. His death marked the moment that the CIA’s paramilitary presence in Afghanistan became known publicly.
The following week, Waugh and Team Romeo were inserted into Logar Province, southeast of Kabul. Logar was a Taliban stronghold and Al-Qaeda safe haven. There was a cave complex in the mountains that served as sleeping quarters for Al-Qaeda, and where four of the 9/11 hijackers trained. The team’s helicopter was met by a Special Forces unit led by Colonel John Mulholland, commander of the 5th Special Forces Group. They set up camp in an abandoned schoolhouse, alongside a fighting force of sixty heavily armed Hazaras. The cash Waugh carried was used to buy allegiance, security, and information—a similar bargain that was being struck by CIA paramilitary teams across Afghanistan.
“The foundation for the alliance was simple,” Hank Crumpton insists. “The CIA wanted Al-Qaeda. Our Afghan allies wanted their country back.”
Back to what? When the Taliban took over in Afghanistan in 1996, the goal of the Islamists was to put an end to the anarchy, violence, and revenge killing among warring tribes that had plagued society since the Soviet withdrawal, in 1989. The Taliban made things worse. By the time of the U.S. invasion in 2001, less than 6 percent of the country had electricity. Eighty-five percent of the population was illiterate. Infant mortality was the highest in the world. Women were routinely beaten by their husbands, boys routinely raped by older men. Afghanistan, a five-thousand-year-old civilization, was the Mad Max of the modern world, a dystopian nightmare. How was any of this going to work? After a few weeks in country, a Ground Branch operator, call sign Shark, remembers thinking, “No wonder Alexander the Great lost his mind here.”
Nothing was simple in Afghanistan. No one person could pretend to have any idea what the Afghan definition of allegiance was. “You can never buy the loyalty of an Afghan, only rent it,” a British officer of the Great Game once famously said. And who should be the rightful ruler of a country made up of a patchwork quilt of warring ethnic groups? In Logar Province, Waugh and the CIA paramilitary team met with assets, gathered intelligence, and made assessments about who and what they encountered. “I didn’t trust any of them,” Waugh recalls. “From the look in their eyes, I knew they’d just as easily cut my heart out as they’d offer me tea. It was whatever their warlord told them to do.”
Over time, shifting allegiances would threaten every team. One of the warlords working with Schroen’s team, General Fahim, demanded an outrageous sum of money, to be paid in cash every month. A warlord in Logar Province charged the CIA a fifty-dollar-a-head toll every time its operators drove down the town’s only street. Guerrilla fighters working alongside Team Delta pulled guns on the team in Tora Bora, just a thousand yards from where Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda commanders were hiding in a cave. One of the Delta Force operators working with the CIA team that day later told Sixty Minutes he was convinced that holdup allowed Osama bin Laden to vanish into Pakistan.
The CIA and the military were faced yet again with the central question of guerrilla warfare: Can the United States ever really buy loyalty from the foreign fighters it pays to arm and equip? The conundrum has plagued seasoned spies and soldiers for as long as wars have been waged. After World War II, during the Korean War, Russell Volckmann, Aaron Bank, and John Singlaub fought over this unanswerable question. And here, now, in Afghanistan, CIA paramilitary officers and operators, and their Defense Department counterparts, were facing the same conundrum yet again. Should America be fighting an unconventional war in a foreign land in the first place—after so many grave missteps and failures in Vietnam? Or was the president’s third option, these hidden-hand operations, going to be a wise and fruitful way forward?
When Al-Qaeda attacked the United States on 9/11, U.S. air force lieutenant general Michael Hayden had been director of the NSA for more than two years. After 9/11, he became an advocate of the find, fix, finish approach to counterterrorism. As director of the NSA, Hayden also served as chief of the NSA’s Central Security Service, which was in charge of providing combat support for the Defense Department. The war on terror “was an intelligence driven war,” Hayden told colleagues. “All wars are, of course, but this one especially.” A career soldier, he had spent much of his professional life fighting the Cold War. “The enemy was pretty easy to find” when the Soviets were the enemy, he says, meaning Russian tank armies and Soviet intercontinental ballistic missile fields in Siberia were visible in satellite imagery. “Just hard to kill,” he adds. In this new war against terrorists, the calculus had been inverted. “This [war] was different,” Hayden said. “This enemy was relatively easy to kill. He was just very, very hard to find.” Hayden and his intelligence community partners were determined to change that.
One night in the fall of 2001, Michael Hayden recalls having dinner with U.S. air force lieutenant general Charles Holland, the commander of Special Operations Command (SOCOM), at Holland’s home. The two men had known each other for years. That night, over dessert, they discussed the central problem facing the CIA and Special Forces direct-action teams in Afghanistan. That the enemy was proving impossible to find, let alone fix and finish. The CIA had killed Al-Qaeda military chief Mohammad Atef, but Hayden pointed out that there had been no significant kills since. Holland dropped his fist on the table. “I need actionable intelligence!” he said. The reason Al-Qaeda leadership wasn’t being killed or captured en masse was an intelligence problem, not a combat one, according to Holland.
The way Hayden recalls the story, in this moment he was finally able to convey to SOCOM Commander Charlie Holland what he believed was the way to win an unconventional war. The concept was as old as hunting, killing, and spying, Hayden said. It involved the act of provocation.
“Let me give you another way of thinking about this,” Hayden proposed. “You give me a little action and I’ll give you a lot more intelligence.”
In other words, Hayden explained, “We need operational moves to poke at the enemy, make him move and communicate, so we [can] learn more about him.” U.S. special operations forces and CIA Special Activities Division teams needed to aggressively poke the bear.
A six-year veteran of Ground Branch explained it this way: “You work with a bad guy and let him think you think he’s a good guy. Doesn’t matter. He’ll go home and make contact with another bad guy, who will make contact with another bad guy, going right up the chain of command.” The reason this system works, they both say, is because the NSA can listen in. “To everything, everywhere,” says a third Ground Branch operator, a former team leader. “We’d put ears on a person,” he says, referring in a general way to the classified technique that allows the NSA to pull electronic data from an enemy fighter’s cell phone and other electronic devices, and from his land line and fax machine. “The goal would evolve—to get the actionable intelligence to send a Ground Branch team in.”
Often it worked well—as in the case of Taliban intelligence chief Qari Amadullah in December 2001. Through Afghan intermediaries, the CIA’s Team Delta got a message to Amadullah. Much to the CIA’s surprise, Amadullah said that he wanted to broker a deal for himself in exchange for information on several top Al-Qaeda leaders. But the NSA had listened in on him for months and told its CIA partners that it suspected the man could not be trusted. Tony, the deputy team leader of the CIA team, was told to set up a meeting.
In 2001 it was dangerous to meet with anyone in Ghazni Province, Al-Qaeda controlled territory. The team headed in, first by vehicle and then on foot. The CIA’s two Predator drones were each assigned missions elsewhere in Afghanistan, which meant that the CTC did not have eyes on the target; nor did the paramilitary operators have air support. As happens with many Special Activities Division missions, the team was on its own.
Qari Amadullah did not show up at the safe house, as agreed. Instead, he sent a subordinate. When the team arrived, the room was filled with hostile Taliban fighters. Weapons were drawn. On Tony’s signal, the team overpowered the Taliban fighters. The men were flex-cuffed, bound, and left on the dirt floor. The emissary for the Taliban’s intelligence chief was rolled up into a large Afghan carpet, carried out of the house this way, taken down the mountainside, and loaded into a Ground Branch vehicle.
“Within twenty-four hours of his capture, the Taliban prisoner revealed Al-Qaeda and Taliban command posts and other positions along the Pakistan border,” says Hank Crumpton.
Based on this new information, the CIA moved its Predator drone into position over new targets obtained from the source. The building was larger than could be eliminated by the Predator’s Hellfire missiles, so the CIA asked the Defense Department for an air strike, turning the enemy compound into piles of rubble and rock. At the CTC, Hank Crumpton recalls watching the operation through the viewfinder of the Predator drone, hovering 25,000 feet above the target site. After the dust from the air strike cleared, says Crumpton, “The Predator picked up one individual fleeing on foot. He made it to a motorbike and tried to escape. He did not get far. He disappeared in a fiery blast.” Intelligence later confirmed that the man trying to flee on the bike was Qari Amadullah. “He should have taken our offer,” Crumpton says.
The pairing of technology and human intelligence did not always work in sync, and sometimes the results were deadly. On December 5, 2001, near Shah Wali Kot, outside Kandahar, Team Echo was inputting bombing coordinates into the geographic information system when the operator’s batteries went dead. In changing them, he didn’t realize he was erasing the enemy coordinates he had just loaded into the system, replacing those bombing coordinates with his own current location as the system rebooted. A B-52 Stratofortress bomber flew into the battle space and dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on Team Echo. Captain Jason Amerine, a Green Beret attached to the team, was studying a map on a nearby hill when the bomb hit. Amerine was wounded. Killed in the debacle were twenty-seven Afghan soldiers and three Green Berets: Master Sergeant Jefferson Davis, Sergeant First Class Dan Petithory, and Staff Sergeant Brian Prosser.
When the bomb hit, team leader Greg Vogle was talking with a tribal leader named Hamid Karzai in a building nearby. As the room exploded, Vogle threw his body over Karzai’s body, likely saving his life. The dust settled, and Vogle’s satellite phone rang. It was a United Nations delegation calling from Bonn, Germany—asking to speak with Hamid Karzai. There was news regarding the Bonn Agreement, the international agreement on Afghanistan, the caller said. Hamid Karzai had just been named the head of state of Afghanistan. It was official: the Taliban regime had been overthrown. The CIA’s hybrid war was being hailed as a success.
In the last days of December 2001, Team Hotel was infiltrated into Khost Province, along the porous border with Pakistan. The operators came in on a Russian-made Mi-17 belonging to the CIA. On board was Nate Chapman, the Green Beret communications expert who’d been trained by Ken Stiles, in the basement of the CIA, on how to collect intel and input the data into the geographic information system. After flying ninety miles from Bagram Airfield outside Kabul, the team would recon the area, set up a forward operating base, and secure the old airfield here in Khost, abandoned by the Soviets ten years before.
Located twenty-five miles from the Pakistan border, Khost had served as the epicenter of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist planning and operations for years. With its plunging valleys, mile-high mountains, and warren of sandstone caves, Khost was a garrison town and a guerrilla army’s dream. When the Soviets tried, and failed, to rule Afghanistan, they are said to have fired every weapon in their arsenal at Khost, except for a nuclear bomb. In August 1998, after bin Laden bombed the two U.S. embassies in East Africa, President Clinton hit Khost with dozens of Tomahawk cruise missiles. This effort aimed to kill bin Laden without looking like it was trying to kill him. The strike cost U.S. taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
Now Nate Chapman was part of a CIA paramilitary team here in Khost, on a covert operation to gather intelligence on enemy fighters in the area—to input data into the geographic information system that would help build up the CIA’s kill-or-capture list. On the morning of January 4, 2002, at a meeting with regional warlords already being handsomely paid by the CIA, things went dangerously awry. Shortly after the team arrived, there was a heated argument. Guns were drawn and then set aside, recalls team member Scott Satterlee, in an interview for this book. Then came the tea. Finally, amiable terms were agreed upon. After more tea and more talk, the team was able to get what it had come for: information from the tribe. The warlords identified a building on the outskirts of town as being an Al-Qaeda safe house. Local Afghans, armed with weapons and knowledge about the location, agreed to be hired to take the CIA paramilitary team to this target.
The operators climbed into four Toyota pickup trucks and headed out of town, down a single-lane dirt road. As was the case all over Afghanistan, the road that got you in was the same road you needed to travel on to get out. In this four-vehicle convoy, Nate Chapman had been assigned a spot in the last pickup truck. It was harsh winter weather, and the road was mostly frozen mud. The first three trucks moved quickly down the muddy, rutted road, but the fourth truck, the one carrying Chapman, got stuck.
Nate Chapman was sitting in the back of the flatbed truck, fiddling with the antenna on his satellite comms, when bullets struck. From roughly thirty feet away, three men with AK-47s had opened fire from a grove of trees. One of the paramilitary officers in the vehicle took a bullet to the chest, but fortunately he was wearing body armor, which protected him from being killed. Nate Chapman was struck by a bullet in the pelvis, severing his femoral artery. Bleeding heavily, Chapman fired back until the magazine on his M4 carbine was empty. Then he passed out from loss of blood.
The team’s Afghan driver raced back to the schoolhouse while the operators worked hard to keep Nate Chapman alive. Everyone knew that the Air Branch helicopter was on its way down from Kabul, but the flight took forty-five minutes, and by the time the helicopter landed in the wheat field outside the old Russian schoolhouse, Nate Chapman was dead. Because the mission was a classified covert-action operation, Chapman would not be officially identified for another thirteen years as having worked for the CIA.
Over in Logar Province, Billy Waugh’s tour of duty in Afghanistan was coming to an end. His last order was to travel to the CIA base in Kabul and pack up Nate Chapman’s things.
“He was a young soldier,” recalls Waugh. “A Green Beret, tasked to the Agency, just like me.” Packing up the belongings of a young man killed in battle was something Billy Waugh had done countless times, across fifty years of covert-action operations and war. “Some people die, others do not,” Waugh reflects. “There’s no explanation for any of this. Never has been, never will be.”
The classified CIA forward operating base at Khost was named FOB Chapman, in honor of Nate Chapman. In eight years’ time, this otherwise secret facility would become known to the world. In December 2009, FOB Chapman was the scene of the deadliest attack against CIA employees since Imad Mugniyah planned and executed the truck bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983. At Khost, an Al-Qaeda suicide bomber wearing an explosives laden vest, and erroneously believed to be a spy working for the CIA, would kill seven CIA officers and contract personnel, including the chief of base and the base security chief. A Jordanian intelligence officer and an Afghan security chief were also killed in the blast.
But it was January 2002, and this hybrid war in Afghanistan was just getting started. Just hours after Nate Chapman was killed in Khost, at CIA headquarters in Langley, Ken Stiles was told to pack a bag. He was being sent to Afghanistan to set up a geographic information system for the CIA station chief in Kabul, part of an expanding new effort called “targeting.” The CIA was doubling down on its plans to kill or capture Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Targeting would become the new way forward, the practice of identifying an individual for placement on the kill-or-capture list. From there, the goal was to find that person, secure his location, and kill him—either with a Predator drone or a Ground Branch team.
Three hundred analysts, called “targeters,” were now working at the CTC, leveraging information in the geographic information system, then pushing targeting packages back out to CIA paramilitary teams. “[Targeters] spend all their time looking at one target, [a terrorist] with one name,” explains Phil Mudd, deputy director of the CTC from 2003 to 2005. “Their whole goal in life [was] following one human being,” tracking that person until he is captured or dead.
“Everything was happening so fast,” says Ken Stiles of this time at the CIA. Before September 11, he spent his days behind a desk at Langley, providing geospatial analysis for CIA reports and briefings. Here he was now, just four months later, heading into the war theater. In Afghanistan, he remembers walking down the hallway at a classified facility in Kabul, just moments after arriving, when he spotted something that took his breath away. “Nate Chapman’s belongings,” he recalls. “His personal effects there on the floor, packed up in a pile.” These were the last things Chapman carried before he was killed. Now they were being sent home with his body, to a grieving wife and two fatherless children, ages one and two years old.
The Special Activities Division had begun its transformation from the small secret strike force at the CIA to a paramilitary army of such profound significance it would soon move into its own center, at CIA headquarters in Virginia. Under Title 50 authority, the Special Activities Center would begin using its Ground Branch arm to run covert-action operations not just in Afghanistan but around the world. First there would be another war.
24
War in Iraq
It was the fall of 2002, a year after 9/11, and the Pentagon was secretly preparing to go to war in Iraq. The CIA was assigned a more traditional role in the lead-up to this war: to prepare the battlefield with hidden-hand operations including sabotage, subversion, and assassination, OSS-style.
An unmarked aircraft filled with eighty anti-Saddam guerrilla fighters from Iraq crossed into Nevada airspace and made its way toward a classified facility within the Nevada Test Site, a secret test and training facility known as Area 51. This newly created foreign paramilitary force, code-named the Scorpions, was commanded by General Mohammad Abdullah al-Shahwani, exiled arch-nemesis of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The aircraft curtains were closed on approach so no one inside the airplane could identify the training facility or leak information. Plausible deniability was essential; Americans had no idea the White House was laying plans for another war.
The Scorpion guerrilla warfare corps was one element of a CIA covert-action operation code-named DB/Anabasis. DB was the Agency’s cryptonym for Iraq. Anabasis referred to the soldier-historian Xenophon’s epic masterpiece Anabasis, the story of an army of Greek mercenaries who tried to seize the Persian throne in 370 BC but failed. “One of the great adventures in human history,” remarked historian Will Durant of the effort. The planners of DB/Anabasis had equally high hopes for their program, which presaged one of the most egregious wrongs in American military history. The two men in charge of the program were Luis Rueda, chief of Iraq operations, and John Maguire, deputy chief.
“I know Iraq,” said Maguire, in a 2018 interview for this book. He had run operations in the country since 1991. “I still have a home in Baghdad, which I visit.” The pair brought range and experience to the table. Rueda, a Cuban American, came from a family of freedom fighters and spies. His father was a member of Brigade 2506, which stormed the beach at the Bay of Pigs. Enamored with paramilitary operations since childhood, Luis Rueda joined the CIA after college and spent years working covert operations in Latin America and the Middle East. He’d served as chief of station in Delhi, India, and was now a member of the elite Senior Intelligence Service. From his office on the seventh floor at Langley, Rueda would oversee DB/Anabasis plans. The fieldwork would be handled by Maguire, a legendary paramilitary operations officer whose areas of expertise included explosives and sabotage.
Maguire was old-school and proud of it, trained in the Directorate of Operations under Bill Casey. “Bush wanted an Iraqi version of the OSS Jedburghs,” says Maguire. “He was already thinking about this when I was called back to Washington on September twelfth.” Maguire believed in the effectiveness of OSS Special Operations Branch–style operations, he says. He discussed this in a meeting at the White House during the first week after the 9/11 attacks.
Maguire saw counterterrorism operations through a historical lens. “I worked on the issue even before there was a Counterterrorist Center” at the CIA, he remembers, including when Bill Casey, taking a page from Mossad’s book, drafted the original plan to train Lebanese hit squads to eliminate Hezbollah terrorists. “Casey’s thinking was way ahead of his time,” Maguire insists. With President Bush’s signature on the September 17 Memorandum of Notification, “the CIA got what Bill Casey envisioned two decades before,” he adds.
In 2002, the concept of using kill-or-capture missions as a primary means of combating terrorism was in its first official year. How to use a rebel army of foreign fighters to augment these lethal direct-action operations gave way to the Scorpions, the first of many war-on-terror partnerships to come. But out at Area 51, problems with these Iraqi émigrés began almost immediately. The unit was supposed to be made up of elite commandos, many of whom claimed to have previously worked for Saddam Hussein’s paramilitary army, the Fedayeen Saddam (Saddam’s Men of Sacrifice), before defecting. But one of the U.S. paramilitary operators assigned to train these Iraqi nationals complained to headquarters that an unusual number of the Scorpion fighters appeared to lack even the most basic military skills. John Maguire acknowledged the concern but was not worried, he says. The Scorpions’ commander, General Mohammad Abdullah al-Shahwani, was a longtime trusted ally of the CIA.
General Shahwani had a complex backstory. In 1984, during Iraq’s war with Iran, Shahwani led a successful helicopter attack against an Iranian stronghold in northern Iraq, elevating him to national hero status. But this popularity was a curse, causing the paranoid and jealous Saddam Hussein to view the general as a threat. Shahwani was arrested and jailed on suspicion of plotting a coup. He was questioned and released without charge, but the experience led him to defect to England, where he began working with the CIA. With Agency backing, Shahwani plotted another coup, this time from outside the country. Before the coup happened, he was betrayed as a co-conspirator. In revenge, Saddam’s Mukhabarat rounded up eighty-five men suspected of working with General Shahwani and executed them. Shahwani’s three sons, all still living in Iraq, were arrested and tortured to death. “I fight to avenge my sons,” Shahwani told Time magazine in 2004. “I [will do] whatever is required.”
Out in the Nevada desert in the fall of 2002, General Shahwani’s Scorpions were trained in unconventional warfare, ambush, hit-and-run operations, and helicopter insertion. They learned how to use explosives to blow up railway lines and power plants inside Iraq. They trained in close-quarters combat and long range sniper assassination. “Were they good soldiers?” a paramilitary operator who worked with the Scorpions asked rhetorically, in an interview for this book. “No comment. Were they wild? Yes. Very wild,” he says. “But General Moe [Mohammad Shahwani] was in charge of them. He kept them in control.”
To understand how the general’s paramilitary unit came to be, it’s necessary to back up to February 16, 2002, just five months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. President Bush signed a Presidential Finding authorizing DB/Anabasis in Iraq. The CIA’s lawyers were concerned that Title 50 operations in Iraq would not be covered under the September 17 Memorandum of Notification, because no link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda had been found. The Presidential Finding was to grant the CIA the authority to make certain a rebel fighting force was in place when the war the White House was now planning came to pass.
An argument over which rebel group inside Iraq was best suited to work on DB/Anabasis ensued. Some people within the Iraq operations group believed that the most competent and loyal anti-Saddam fighters were the Peshmerga, a guerrilla army of Kurdish fighters from northern Iraq. The Peshmerga had been oppressed by Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party for decades. In 1988, Iraq’s military used mustard gas and nerve agents, including sarin and VX, on Kurdish civilians living in Halabja, killing 5,000 people in the largest chemical weapons attack in history. But the Peshmerga, whose name translates as “those who face death,” had their own internecine problems and were presently divided into two rival groups. In April 2002, John Maguire flew to Iraqi Kurdistan to meet separately with the regional Kurdish leaders of these groups: Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Democratic Party, and Jalal Talabani, president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan.
“Barzani and Talabani were very skeptical of what we had planned,” remembers Maguire. “They’d heard this kind of proposal from us before. I told them, ‘This time, it’s for real.’” After listening to Maguire’s briefing on operations being planned under DB/Anabasis, Barzani and Talabani each expressed wariness. The efforts would be threefold, said Maguire: locate assets inside Saddam Hussein’s regime who could be turned; sabotage existing Iraqi infrastructure; and assassinate Mukhabarat officials. There was risk involved, he added. The hit-and-run operations against the Mukhabarat would almost certainly result in retaliatory attacks. Rivals Barzani and Talabani agreed to set aside their differences and work with the CIA to fight their common enemy, Saddam Hussein.
Before leaving Iraqi Kurdistan, Maguire asked to be taken in behind enemy lines. He wanted to observe an Iraqi military base for himself, he says. If Maguire were captured, he’d likely be executed on the spot, or put on trial for being the spy that he was. As a disguise, Maguire’s Peshmerga hosts outfitted him in the stolen uniform of an Iraqi Army colonel, complete with red stripes on the shoulders. In a car favored by Iraqi colonels—a four-door Toyota sedan, like an American police cruiser—the Peshmerga took Maguire to the outskirts of an Iraqi Army base, where he observed through binoculars soldiers keeping guard. “They were sitting around in shorts and flip-flops,” Maguire recalls. “I was looking at the Iraqi V Corps, and they looked entirely unprepared for war.” Mission accomplished, Maguire headed back to Langley.
Upon his return, Vice President Cheney requested a personal briefing on DB/Anabasis. The meeting took place in a conference room on the seventh floor of CIA headquarters. Rueda and Maguire shared with the vice president their plans for covert-action operations in Iraq.
“Cheney asked many questions,” recalls Maguire. “There was a lot of back and-forth. We answered his questions, he listened, then asked more questions. He was interested in… who we were working with. We said the Kurds. He wanted to know specifics. He was very involved.”
There was another problem that needed to be addressed, an issue Maguire insists he’d brought up the last time he’d briefed the vice president. “Four days after 9/11,” says Maguire. The meeting had been at the White House. “The issue was Iran. Iran, Iraq, Syria. The three were tied, we said. If you pull one brick out, the whole region could collapse. We tried building this into our thinking. Iran, Syria, Iraq.”
Maguire was not alone in his assessment. In Israel, Mossad had been tracking a devil’s bargain made recently between Syria and Iran involving Hezbollah, Iran’s guerrilla army corps. For decades, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad had allowed the Iranians to fly weapons into Damascus, then disperse them to Hezbollah terrorists in the region via trucks. In exchange for passage, President Assad received cash and anonymity, meaning Syria’s involvement remained hidden. In 2000 he died, and his son Bashar became the new president of Syria and renegotiated with Iran the terms of the secret bargain with Hezbollah.
According to Mossad, a year and a half into his presidency, in early 2002, Bashar al-Assad struck a new deal with the Iranians. “Assad opened his own army’s armories to Hezbollah, providing the organization with modern Russian weaponry that even Iran lacked,” explains Ronen Bergman. Iran, Hezbollah, and Syria had formed an alliance that posed an existential threat to Israel. Mossad called this triumvirate the Radical Front. Maguire says he told Vice President Cheney that if Iraq were to become destabilized, the Radical Front could take advantage of this weakness, move its hidden-hand forces into Iraq, and take ground.[and so it was DC]
Cheney did not need to be convinced of Iran’s intent to harm the West. In a speech at the Nixon Library two months before, he had called Iran “a leading exporter of terror.” But during the DB/Anabasis briefing at the CIA, Maguire says the potential for Iran to meddle in a weakened Iraq was not further discussed, that “Cheney was focused on Iraq.” The briefing ended. The vice president expressed his approval for the CIA’s covert-action operations with the Peshmerga. “He told us, ‘You have my full support,’” says Maguire.
Maguire returned to his office. He picked up the telephone and spoke to a veteran officer from the Near East Division named Charles “Sam” Faddis, giving Faddis the go-ahead to lead covert operations inside northern Iraq. Faddis had three months to prepare.
Sam Faddis had been a clandestine case officer at the CIA since 1988. He spoke fluent Turkish and conversational Arabic, had a degree in political science, and was also trained as a military lawyer with the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAG. In the months since 9/11, Faddis had been working clandestine operations in Pakistan, along its lawless frontier border with Afghanistan. Now he would be leading a CIA paramilitary team into Iraqi Kurdistan to work with Peshmerga rebels.
Orders in hand, Faddis put together the most experienced spies, soldiers, and combat veterans he could find, experts in reconnaissance, surveillance, covert operations, and warfare. Among them they spoke Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, and Kurdish. Two had served in Afghanistan, fighting in Kabul and Tora Bora. One had been at the Qala-i-Jangi prisoner uprising and fought alongside Mike Spann. In northern Iraq, the plan was for the teams to eventually be augmented with operators from Delta Force, Green Berets, U.S. Army Rangers, and other special operations forces.
On July 7, 2002, Faddis and a CIA paramilitary team arrived in Incirlik, Turkey, where regional politics were growing increasingly complex. The Kurds had a long-standing feud with the Turks and it took several days of bargaining before the CIA team was allowed in. Once approved, they climbed into jeeps loaded with weapons and ammunition and drove 425 miles to a border crossing along the Kharbur River in northern Iraq, just north of a Kurdish village called Zakho. Once inside Iraqi Kurdistan, they were met by Peshmerga fighters who brought them to meet separately with Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, as John Maguire had done three months before.
From Barzani and Talabani, the teams were briefed on a developing situation along the border with Iran. Islamist fighters aligned with Al-Qaeda had moved into the mountains there, Peshmerga leaders said. They’d set up a training camp and were running guerrilla warfare operations in a narrow set of hills that rose up from the Halabja plain. “The Peshmerga had captured dozens of these guerrilla fighters,” recalls Faddis. This Islamist army, which numbered between 200 and 1,000 men, had taken over several Kurdish towns. Local villagers described brutish, Taliban-like restrictions and said the foreign fighters destroyed local Sufi shrines. The radical group called themselves Ansar al-Islam, Defenders of Islam. There were local Kurds in their ranks but mostly they were non-locals, said to have journeyed here from Afghanistan.
There was open source information supporting these eyewitness accounts. Earlier that winter, in January 2002, the Kurdistan Observer reported on a document found in Kabul that called upon Sunni Kurds to “join Al-Qaeda and create a Little Tora Bora” in northern Iraq. The goal was to create a fighting force to “expel Jews and Christians from Kurdistan, join the way of jihad, and rule every piece of land with Islamic Sharia rule.” By summer of 2002 the fighting had begun. Ansar al-Islam attacked and killed 103 Peshmerga in an ambush. They tried to assassinate a Peshmerga military commander in Sulaymaniyah, but killed his office manager and four bodyguards instead.
Faddis asked to be taken to the front lines, to view the training camps and interview captured POWs. Dressed like Peshmerga fighters and armed with Peshmerga weapons, the CIA team was taken to the lawless border region with Iran. “We got eyes on Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam,” recalls Faddis. “Their heavy machine-gun positions and mortar sites [were] hidden inside medieval castles” across the region. The team interrogated prisoners and determined that the fighters were Al-Qaeda who’d escaped from Afghanistan. They’d journeyed across Iran, using ancient smugglers’ routes, and were rebuilding an army to fight American soldiers in the coming war in Iraq.
In the second week of August 2002, says Faddis, “we put together a plan to attack and destroy the Ansar enclave.” He sent CIA headquarters a list of weapons required to arm the Peshmerga rebels. “Five hundred 120mm mortars; 2,000 Kalashnikov rifles; 50,000 7.62mm rounds,” the cable read. Washington’s answer shocked Faddis. “The White House decided that they would not approve us standing up a Kurdish force to fight with us against Ansar. The president had decided to place the priority on invading Iraq instead.” This was a radical change of plans, he says. “The White House [now] wanted an Arab face.” The rebels needed to be Iraqi Arabs, not Kurdish Peshmerga, he was told, and that General Shahwani’s Iraqi Scorpions were to be his Arab face. “They were not to be used against Ansar; they were to be used against Saddam.”
After finishing training in the Nevada desert, the Scorpions were flown to a second training base, in Jordan. By the time they arrived in northern Iraq, the group numbered several hundred. To Faddis, the idea of working covert operations behind enemy lines with men he had no proven relationship with seemed unwise. He discussed his concerns with a team member, call sign Doc, the medic who’d been at Qala-i-Jangi when Mike Spann was ambushed and killed. Faddis says Doc agreed that they should conduct additional vetting on their own. They would screen General Shahwani’s paramilitary force individually before agreeing to work with them.
A neutral facility was chosen, inside a hotel near Shaqlawa, Iraq. Each member of the Scorpions was stripped of his weapons and interviewed. “Most of them were common criminals,” according to Faddis. “No military background whatsoever. General Shahwani got paid per person he supplied to the CIA.” After screening more than one hundred men, the CIA team agreed that there were just twenty-five of the Iraqi Scorpions they were willing to fight alongside. But with close-quarters combat training, Faddis says a complex new set of unforeseen problems arose.
“The Scorpions were raping each other during training,” says Faddis, “which possesses its own set of problems, including medical ones. What do you do when people start committing felonies during paramilitary training, at a black site? They’re committing felonies but officially they don’t exist, and neither does the program.” Faddis had spent more than a decade engaged in covert operations across the Near and Middle East. “Man-on-man sex is not unusual in this culture,” he says. “It’s not frowned upon. It occurs. The [fighters] go home to their wives, if they have them.” But as the leader of the highly classified DB/Anabasis operation, being privy to rape presented Faddis with an ethical and operational conundrum. “What I was dealing with was non-consensual sex among the fighters sent by Washington.”
The ongoing rapes among the Scorpion fighters were reported to the Iraqi Operations Group at Langley. Headquarters sent veteran Special Activities Division officer Greg Vogle to Kurdistan to assess the situation. It was Greg Vogle who’d saved Hamid Karzai’s life in the bombing incident in Kandahar in December 2001. Vogle went by the code name Snake. “Snake declared the Scorpions unfit for combat,” according to Faddis. They were undisciplined, unskilled fighters now committing criminal acts. “He told headquarters that the Scorpions were unable to perform any of the missions they’d been trained for.”
“We are going to get good men killed for no reason,” Snake warned.
But the plan to use the Scorpion fighters moved forward despite protestations from the CIA paramilitary team in the field. General Shahwani was supplied with Russian Mi-17 helicopters, “millions of dollars’ worth of air assets,” recalls Faddis, “all painted with scorpion logos, all bright and shiny and brand-new.” In At the Center of the Storm, his memoir, CIA director George Tenet praised the Scorpions, identifying them as an Agency-sponsored paramilitary group that “produced extraordinary successes.” General Shahwani, Tenet wrote, served as “one of the U.S. government’s most critical partners working against Saddam’s regime.” He was “a born leader with a significant following, someone who commanded the respect of everyone who worked with him.” Michael Hayden, who became CIA director in 2005, also praised Shahwani in his memoir, Playing to the Edge, calling him “a friend” who was “clearly talented and courageous.” The discrepancy in opinion between the covert-action operators on the ground and the top brass at the CIA is puzzling. According to Faddis, “Washington wanted the Iraqi Jedburgh story.” What they got “was an unmitigated disaster.”
As Sam Faddis focused his operations in partnership with the Peshmerga rebels, Saddam Hussein sent Mukhabarat hit squads to try to assassinate them, Faddis says. The assassins also included Islamists from Ansar al-Islam. In February 2003, CIA liaison Shawkat Hajji Mushir, a Peshmerga guerrilla commander and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan government official, was shot in the head at close range by a man posing as a peace negotiator. The Peshmerga pushed back against Ansar al-Islam, while the CIA team focused their attention on the Mukhabarat assassination teams dispatched to eliminate them.
Iraq’s state-run intelligence organization was notorious for torturing and killing its enemies. Its staff numbered roughly four thousand. Like the CIA, the Mukhabarat was responsible for international intelligence collection and analysis, but it also performed paramilitary, or hidden-hand, operations inside Iraq. The unit responsible for assassinations was called Directorate 9, Secret Operations. As part of DB/Anabasis, the CIA sought to turn a Mukhabarat assassin into a Special Activities Division asset.
“On three occasions,” recalls Faddis, “we set up… meetings in locations we could control and then captured [members of] Mukhabarat assassination teams.” The operators found the double agent they were looking for in a lieutenant colonel who worked for the Mukhabarat office in Mosul. From this asset, the team learned that Saddam Hussein also wanted to capture an American alive, “to put him on trial in Baghdad, get CNN and BBC world coverage [and] then hang him.”
The Mukhabarat officer agreed to act as a double agent in exchange for a large quantity of American cash. First, the CIA team created a scenario whereby this lieutenant colonel appeared to have succeeded in assassinating an American. They dressed one of their own in the uniform of a U.S. Army colonel, put him in a ditch on the side of a mountain road, covered him with mock blood, and photographed him as if he’d been assassinated. The asset brought the pictures to the Mukhabarat field office in Mosul. The branch chief was pleased, and forwarded the photographs on to Baghdad, to be shown to Saddam Hussein. The reply was high praise. The asset brought Faddis a memo he’d received that read, “You’ve killed a high-ranking American Special Forces Operations commander. Now get one alive.”
The CIA paramilitary team sought to lure a Mukhabarat snatch-and-grab team to a meeting point in Erbil, where they could ambush the team. Messages were exchanged by courier. But at the last minute, the asset’s branch chief in Mosul requested a cell phone call with the asset before he sent the unit to Erbil. The call was arranged, with the CIA listening in. “You could almost feel sorry for that Mukhabarat [chief] in Mosul,” remembers Faddis. “You could almost hear exactly what was going on in his head… to pull this off and be a great hero” in the eyes of Saddam. “On the other hand, you could also hear that he was not an idiot.” In the world of espionage and betrayal, nuance is key. The CIA interpreter listened carefully to the Arabic subtleties in the words spoken. When the call ended, the interpreter told the case officer that he believed the team’s Mukhabarat asset had been made. The mission was called off. “The case officer was right,” says Faddis. “We never heard from the Mukhabarat officer in Mosul again. But they heard from us. In response for all the times the Mukhabarat tried to kill us, we had a team build a satchel charge in a briefcase which [one of] our Kurdish asset[s] took into Mosul.”
Faddis was referring to a World War II–era demolition device made of dynamite or C-4 plastic explosive and designed to look like a simple courier bag. The asset walked it into the Mukhabarat headquarters in Mosul, placed it on the ground floor, and quickly left. “It blew the shit out of most of the building,” remembers Faddis. “The ensuing fire destroyed the rest of the structure—burned it down to the ground.”
That there was pressure from Washington, DC, to find a pretext for military action was increasingly impossible to ignore. The White House was determined to go to war in Iraq regardless of the evidence at hand. In February 2003, Secretary of State Colin Powell went before the United Nations citing information provided by DB/Anabasis that Ansar al-Islam was training terrorists in the mountains of northern Iraq. Then came the untruthful twist on the facts. “Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization,” Powell said, insisting that Saddam Hussein was working with Ansar al-Islam. The speech would prove disastrous for Powell, who would later call it a “blot” on his record of national service. It eventually became entwined with the false foundations upon which the Iraq war was built. This is an example of the dark side of covert action, how operations designed to remain hidden can so easily be deliberately manipulated or contrived. The construct of plausible deniability can be used by a president and his advisors to build a house of cards.
As the United States prepared to invade Iraq in 2003, the CIA paramilitary team watched Ansar al-Islam fighters who’d been holed up in the mountains pack up and move out. And on the eve of the war, they watched the Scorpion guerrilla warfare corps commit mutiny and vanish. “They simply disappeared,” Faddis maintains.
In the early morning hours of March 21, sixty-four Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired against the Ansar al-Islam terrorist training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. Paramilitary officers with the Special Activities Division, alongside Green Berets, infantry soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, and more than 1,000 Peshmerga fighters fought a ten-hour battle with the terrorists, with orders to kill or capture anyone left alive. From the dead, the team pulled passports identifying the fighters as having answered the call to jihad from as far away as Somalia, in Africa, and Dhaka, in Bangladesh. Among the prisoners captured, six were deemed Al-Qaeda enemy combatants and sent to the U.S. prison complex at Guantanamo Bay.
The opening salvo in the Pentagon’s war in Iraq began with a display of shock-and-awe force meant to paralyze Ba’ath Party infrastructure and destroy the will of Saddam Hussein’s fighters—to get them to surrender. Susan Hasler, a CTC analyst and early member of Alec Station, saw the writing on the wall. “Shock and awe does not end wars on terrorism. It only creates more terrorism,” she says. During the 1990s, Hasler sometimes edited the President’s Daily Brief and on occasion wrote portions of Clinton’s counterterrorism speeches. Uniquely familiar with covert operations against terrorist organizations, she considers hidden-hand operations to be the most effective way to combat terrorism in the modern world. Big military operations encourage more terrorism, she says. “Money starts to flow to terrorist groups. People become more radicalized. Wars on terror should be fought under the radar, as quietly as possible. But counter terrorist operations are, by their nature, not very satisfying to a frightened public.” After a mass casualty attack like 9/11, the public becomes enraged and unnerved, and thinks they want revenge.
After Baghdad fell to U.S. forces, on April 9, 2003, Saddam Hussein’s Mukhabarat was disbanded. The U.S.-led Multi-National Force released Order 69, establishing a charter for a new Iraqi National Intelligence Service, or INIS. CIA strongman General Shahwani, commanding general of the mutinied Scorpion paramilitary team, was named Iraq’s new intelligence chief. Shahwani was installed in Baghdad and presented by the Pentagon to news outlets covering the war as being a “nonsectarian force [able to] recruit its officers and agents from all of Iraq’s religious communities.” His credentials for impartiality were listed as his being a Sunni from Mosul married to a Shiite woman, whose deputy hailed from Kurdistan.
But privately it was a different story. Revenge-based justice began to undergird the narrative: lex talionis, the law of retaliation, as it was called in the ancient world. From Mosul to Najaf, vengeance was the new normal, and assassination became a law enforcement tool. Muwaffak al-Rubaie, Iraq’s new national-security advisor, told Time magazine, “[General] Al-Shahwani calls for a mix of aggressive tactics, reinstating Saddam-era Mukhabarat intelligence professionals and carefully picking fights that can be won.” Newly appointed local officials began making public threats, and encouraged violence: “Be ruthless. Either they kill you or you kill them,” and “With them, there can be no mercy”—the “them” being those who’d held power before. A kill-or-be-killed approach emerged. Iraq’s new prime minister, Ayad Allawi, echoed the call for retaliation-based justice. “I say that we will hunt them down to give them their just punishment,” Allawi said of the old regime.
One of General Shahwani’s first moves as chief of the Iraqi National Intelligence Service was to create his own paramilitary units to exact revenge and assassinate former enemies. By July, Time reported the general had graduated “at least five classes” from the Special Tactics Unit (STU), allegedly a new national paramilitary force. In fact, its members were trained and overseen by Special Activities Division, Ground Branch, teams. In time, STU would number five thousand men. Soon thereafter, the Washington Post’s David Ignatius reported that Iran had entered the conflict and was engaging General Shahwani in tit-for-tat assassinations. “Shahwani’s operatives discovered the Iranians had a hit list,” he wrote, “drawn from an old Ministry of Defense payroll document that identified the names and home addresses of senior officers who served under the former regime. Shahwani himself was among those targeted for assassination by the Iranians.”
The situation spiraled out of control. “The CIA had hoped that Shahwani’s INIS could be an effective national force and a deterrent to Iranian meddling… to mount effective operations against the Iranians,” the Post reported in a second article. But the fact that General Shahwani had recruited the chief of the anti-Iran branch of the Saddam-era Mukhabarat “made the Iranians and their Shiite allies nervous.” The Radical Front—Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah—began to move fighters into the chaos that was now Iraq.
Farid al-Khazen, a Christian Lebanese lawmaker allied with Hezbollah, explains how Iran was able to step in and conduct operations in Iraq. “The big story [became] Iraq,” he says of the Americans’ unforeseen mistake. “In their invasion in 2003, the Americans unwittingly opened it up for the Iranians. The stakes are much higher in Iraq,” he explains. In Iraq, “there is a Shiite majority, oil, the shrine cities and borders with Saudi Arabia.” This was an opportunity Iran and its proxy army Hezbollah were unwilling to overlook.
Sheikh Naim Qassem, Hezbollah’s deputy secretary general, acknowledged his organization’s efforts to pass experience along to other Iranian-aligned forces. “Every group anywhere in the world that works as we work, with our ideas, is a win for the party,” Qassem told the New York Times. “It is natural: All who are in accordance with us in any place in the world, that is a win for us because they are part of our axis and a win for everyone in our axis.”
Sam Faddis returned to Washington. A new team of Special Activities Division officers and Ground Branch operators were inserted into Mosul. “We started getting targeted for assassination by operatives from Iran,” says a Ground Branch sniper, call sign Zeus. “We had targets on our backs. These were long range snipers. Well trained. We were told they were from Hezbollah.” A rumor started to swirl. Imad Mugniyah was directing the operations himself. So untouchable and elusive was Mugniyah that his nickname was Father of Smoke.
Billy Waugh was sent to Iraq. The missions he was assigned remain classified, but photographs show him working out of Uday Hussein’s former palace in Baghdad. From there, Waugh was sent on a singleton mission to the Balkans, where he received an extraordinary call.
“I was in Zagreb, Croatia,” remembers Waugh, when “someone showed up and gave me a new passport,” with a new identity. A new travel visa. “It was a fast, ‘go-now’ operation,” says Waugh. “To Saudi Arabia.”
In forty years of covert operations for the CIA, Waugh had worked in sixtyfour countries around the globe, but never Saudi Arabia. “I didn’t know who the target was,” he says. He’d learn why when he got there.
Waugh landed in Riyadh. He traveled to the U.S. embassy, where the CIA station employed roughly one hundred clandestine service officers and operators. “There was a Navy SEAL who’d gathered a lot of intelligence on the target. He knew where the target lived. But the SEAL didn’t want to go after the target,” says Waugh.
The target needed to be photographed, not killed, but the SEAL told Waugh he was unwilling to pull out a camera and start taking pictures on a Riyadh street. He had concerns he’d be captured by Saudi intelligence. Being captured in Saudi Arabia was a fate worse than death, says Waugh. “They’d torture you. Probably lock you up and throw away the key.”
When it came time to learn the identity of the target, even Waugh, a battle hardened clandestine operator, recalls being surprised.
“The target was Imad Mugniyah,” he says. Father of Smoke. A die-hard Hezbollah operative for Iran who loathed Saudi Arabia. “What the hell was Imad Mugniyah doing in Saudi Arabia?” Waugh wondered. Before 9/11, Imad Mugniyah was the most wanted man in the world. Now Billy Waugh was on a mission to do what no CIA singleton operator had been able to do in more than twenty years: get an identifiable photograph of him. Without getting killed, captured, or made to disappear.
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Imad Mugniyah
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