25
Imad Mugniyah
Billy Waugh gave himself twenty-four hours to get the job done and get out. The Saudi intelligence apparatus, renowned for its brutality, reported directly to the king. “Whatever Mugniyah was doing there,” says Waugh, “it had to have been strictly a blackmail deal.” Waugh theorized that the Saudis had something on Mugniyah that was so tarnishing of his reputation within Hezbollah that he’d become susceptible to blackmail. “What goes on at the top level is a whole bunch of dirty shit. It was our opportunity to get in on that.”
To prepare to photograph Mugniyah, Waugh studied geographical intelligence and satellite images of the city and its streets. He had the target’s address, and he studied the roads in and the roads out of the area. From the Navy SEAL at the embassy whose operation he was taking over, Waugh learned everything he could about the target’s pattern of life. He became familiar with the Agency camera he’d be using, a digital Canon with a 200mm lens and a 2- gigabyte SD card. To rehearse his movements, he tied and retied everything to his body in case he had to run.
Early the next morning, just after the first call to prayer, a CIA driver took Waugh on a driving lesson around Riyadh. Confident he’d learned the Saudi road system well enough to drive on his own, Waugh told his driver to take the rest of the day off and leave the vehicle with him.
Waugh drove to the southeastern part of the city, to the address he’d been given. As fortune would have it, across the street from the target’s apartment was a Sudanese restaurant, a busy establishment where he could conduct decent surveillance. He parked a few blocks away, walked to the restaurant, and sat down at a table. “There were a bunch of people inside. Black. Seven foot tall. Meant one thing,” recalls Waugh. “They were from the Dinka tribe.”
Waugh ordered a Sudanese coffee. “I started shooting the shit about Khartoum. Drank more coffee, talked a little more, got the Dinka to reminisce about the home country. Even conversed a little in the native Dinka tongue.” Chatting with the Sudanese tribesmen, Waugh kept an eye on the target’s address across the street as he began to formulate in his mind where he might best position himself in order to photograph the man. “There was a Dempsey Dumpster right out front. It was good cover.” The distance from the Dumpster to the front door of the building was about 250 feet. Waugh paid for his coffee. Bade the Dinka good day and left.
The following morning, around 7:30, Waugh returned to the target area. He parked the vehicle and walked down the street toward the Sudanese restaurant. Concealed by his jacket was the Agency camera equipment. Confident no one was watching, he climbed into the Dumpster and waited.
After some time, recalls Waugh, “the front door of the house where the target lived opened and he stepped out. He was carrying what appeared to be a set of clean clothes, covered by a see-through cover from a dry cleaner. He was a mean-looking son of a bitch, a little on the fat side.” In front of the building were ten wide steps leading down from the entrance to the street. “This meant he had to walk slowly down the steps, with his body at an angle so he didn’t fall.” And it made getting nice, clear photographs of the target relatively easy for Billy Waugh.
As the man walked down the steps, Waugh took photographs in rapid succession. “Mugniyah was alone, carrying the clothes. He reached his vehicle, opened the door, and hung the clothes in the back.” Waugh took several more photographs. He climbed out of the Dumpster, walked back to his car, and drove to the U.S. embassy building in Riyadh.
Once inside the CIA station, Waugh slid the camera’s SD card into an Agency computer and examined the photographs he’d taken from the Dumpster. Excellent. “They were of identification quality,” he remembers. He brought them to the chief of station, who stared silently at them for some time. It was Mugniyah, the chief said. “They satisfied the chief of station in Riyadh.”
Waugh prepared to leave the kingdom immediately. There was still a chance he could be stopped, arrested, and disappeared. An Agency employee drove him to the airport. Using the false identity and visa provided to him by the CIA, Billy Waugh vanished from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, never to return.
Billy Waugh’s photographs confirmed the existence and location of Imad Mugniyah. Now the ultra secret U.S. Army unit formerly known as Gray Fox, later renamed Orange, could gather SIGINT. Hezbollah’s chief of operations could be fixed and ultimately finished. The United States and Israel had individually been trying to kill or capture Imad Mugniyah for decades. Now they would join forces to accomplish the task. Or maybe they already were: “Mossad can’t operate freely in Saudi,” says Waugh. “It’s probably the only place they don’t have a major [footprint].” A secret arrangement was made. Provided it remain the hidden hand, the United States would assist Mossad in fixing and finishing Imad Mugniyah.
Just a few weeks after Waugh took the photograph of Mugniyah in Riyadh, on July 19, 2004, a senior Hezbollah commander named Ghalib Awali was killed by a car bomb in the suburbs of Beirut. Awali was getting into his car when the vehicle exploded. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah accused Israel of assassinating Awali and vowed to “cut off the hands” of the killers. To honor their martyred brother, Hezbollah’s propaganda wing created a memorial film about Awali, dispersing copies to its operatives in the region. Mossad got hold of it and screened it for members of a combat intelligence team, Unit 8200, Israel’s equivalent of the NSA.
Unit 8200 collects SIGINT and decrypts codes. Its analysts, technicians, and field operators have reach and power. “They are highly focused on what they look at,” says Peter Roberts, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, the oldest defense science think tank in the world, “certainly more focused than the NSA, and they conduct their operations with a degree of tenacity and passion that you don’t experience elsewhere.”
For years, Unit 8200 operated without a name or an insignia. Its members are highly skilled level-five riflemen who have undergone extensive special forces training. From a classified base in the Negev Desert, which is one of the largest listening bases in the world, members of Unit 8200 follow targets using SIGINT. They monitor phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications to collect and decode. Unit 8200’s Arabist linguists assigned to the Mugniyah operation were shown Hezbollah’s martyr film about Ghalib Awali. In one of the images, Hassan Nasrallah is seen viewing electronic maps on a computer screen. Behind him stands a bearded man wearing glasses and a cap. In the photographs of Mugniyah taken by Billy Waugh, a key identification marker was obtained, namely the size of the target’s earlobes and the distance between them. This may have helped confirm to intelligence officers that the man in Hezbollah’s martyr film was indeed Mugniyah. Unit 8200 confirmed Mugniyah’s identity by his voice.
There was a disagreement about how and when to move. If Mossad didn’t act swiftly, one group feared that Mugniyah would vanish into thin air. Mossad chief Meir Dagan had the final word. “Don’t worry,” he reportedly told his operatives. “His day will come.” Here began a clandestine joint effort between the intelligence services of the United States and Israel to track down Mugniyah and kill him.
A new form of intelligence emerged called HUGINT, the synthesis of human intelligence and signals intelligence. It is said to have been invented at Mossad, with credit for its development going to an officer named Yossi Cohen. He had worked for Mossad’s Junction Unit, a special operations team that oversees asset recruitment around the world. Yossi Cohen became the director of Mossad in 2016.
Israeli press describes Yossi Cohen as someone belonging in a Le Carré novel —a master linguist, soldier, and spy. In addition to his native tongue he is said to speak flawless English, French, and Arabic. He runs marathons and is called “the Model,” owing to his good looks and stylish dress. For years, when he was undercover, he went by the moniker “Y.” At Mossad, the discipline of HUGINT requires the acquisition of the most private, scandalous details about enemies, for the purpose of blackmailing them and turning them into assets. To this end, Mossad collects information on infidelities, illicit sexual encounters, drug use, porn habits, the taking of bribes, and anything else that compromises the reputations of allegedly pious members of terrorist organizations, including Hezbollah and Hamas. Leaked documents indicate such “vulnerabilities, if exposed, would likely call into question a radicalizer’s devotion to the jihadist’s cause, leading to the degradation or loss of his authority.” Unit 8200 tapped phone lines and undersea cables, planted electronic monitoring devices, and used mini-drones and other surveillance platforms equipped with electronic devices to listen in. Owing to HUGINT, Mossad was able to turn operators inside Hezbollah and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard into assets.
After Waugh photographed Mugniyah in Saudi Arabia, Mugniyah returned to Lebanon, where he was assigned by Iranian commanders to undermine U.S. forces in Iraq. “Hezbollah [had] developed a dedicated unit to train Iraqi Shia militia under Imad Mugniyah and several of his key deputies,” says Matthew Levitt, an expert on Hezbollah. General David Petraeus, U.S. commander of forces in Iraq, told Congress that Iran was arming, training, and directing fighters into a “Hezbollah-like force to serve [Iran’s] interests and fight a proxy war against the Iraqi state and coalition forces.” He said that it was Iran that was supplying armor-piercing IEDs called explosively formed projectiles to the Mahdi Army—Iran’s action arm in Iraq. These explosive devices had already killed more than two hundred U.S. soldiers in 2004. A declassified Defense Intelligence Agency report identified a Hezbollah-funded assassination unit, called Unit 3800, that provided “training, tactics and technology to conduct kidnappings [and] small unit tactical operations… to bleed the United States militarily.” To the U.S. intelligence community, it was time to kill Imad Mugniyah.
Meir Dagan met with CIA director Michael Hayden; the minutes of the meeting remain classified. After completing a wave of regional assassinations in Lebanon, Mugniyah moved to Damascus in 2006. Damascus was one of the most difficult and dangerous places for Mossad to operate. But the United States maintained an embassy there. CIA Director Hayden met with President Bush, who signed off on a Presidential Finding that allowed the CIA to use its Title 50 authority to kill Mugniyah. If there was backlash, if the hidden hand were revealed, the White House would cite Article 51 of the UN Charter, the right to self-defense. General Petraeus had testified that a “Hezbollah-like force” was sending assassins into Iraq who’d been targeting and killing U.S. military personnel.
There were conditions, President Bush is said to have told Hayden. There could be no collateral damage. No civilians passing by could be injured or killed. The targeted killing operation had to be precise. Kill Imad Mugniyah, and Mugniyah alone.
In 2007, a team of Agency operators traveled to the Syrian capital and began tracking Mugniyah’s movements. For some time, Mossad had considered using a cell-phone bomb, similar to the one that killed Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash, the Engineer. That idea was ruled out after Unit 8200 determined that Mugniyah too often changed out cell phones. One version of the events is that the United States now took the lead in engineering the device: at the Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity, in North Carolina, a team of explosives experts designed, built, and test-fired an array of devices. When engineers felt confident that they’d developed one with a blast radius precise enough to kill a single man only, they turned the device over to Mossad. Another version of events is that Mossad built the bomb. But according to numerous sources interviewed for this book, both organizations were involved. “This was a gigantic, multi-force operation, with crazy resources invested by both countries,” said a Mossad commander involved in the operation. “To the best of my knowledge, the most ever invested to kill a lone individual.”
On the evening of February 12, 2008, Imad Mugniyah met with senior Hezbollah commanders and members of the Radical Front in a building in the Kfar Sousa neighborhood of Damascus. Shortly after 10:30, he exited the building. As he walked toward his 2006 Mitsubishi Pajero 4×4, parked in a lot down the street, two CIA paramilitary operators and a local asset had eyes on him.
The explosion detonated around 10:45. A massive fireball engulfed the car, incinerating Imad Mugniyah. It is said to have been detonated remotely by Mossad officers watching in Tel Aviv. Dozens of people rushed to the location, including several of the Hezbollah commanders with whom Mugniyah had just met. The CIA operators on the street took photographs, and these images would be uploaded into Agency databases for future use.
“We were shocked to learn that he was killed in Syria,” Mugniyah’s aunt told Agence France-Presse. “We thought he was safe there.”
For seven years, the United States remained the hidden hand in this operation. Then, in January 2015, five former intelligence officials confirmed with Washington Post reporters Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima that the United States had built the bomb that killed Mugniyah. The CIA declined to comment. Mark Regev, chief spokesman for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, told reporters, “We have nothing to add at this time.” Meir Dagan told 60 Minutes, “I’m not sorry to see the fact that he was perished from this world.”
The U.S. ban on assassination again came to the fore, with the oft-repeated statement “Executive Order 12333 prohibits assassination” printed and reprinted around the world. Michael Hayden, as director of the CIA, acknowledged the less palatable truth.
“Assassination,” said Hayden, is defined as forbidden lethal acts “against political enemies.” Terrorists are not political leaders. They do not run sovereign states. “U. S. targeted killings against Al-Qaeda are against members of an opposing armed enemy force,” Hayden clarified. “This is war. This [targeted killing of Mugniyah] is under the laws of armed conflict.” As for the reports that the operation was a joint effort with Mossad, he said, “Israel is probably the only other country in the world who thinks like the United States—that what we do there [that is, in this calculus] is legal.”
“The Americans remember,” Dagan said of Mugniyah’s attacks against the United States. He was referring to those killed in the U.S. embassy and the marine corps barracks in Beirut, in 1983; to the kidnapping, torture, and killing of station chief Bill Buckley, in 1985; and to the deaths of hundreds of soldiers in Iraq. “They appear to be liberals [merciful], but they are far from that.”
One of the most curious footnotes to Mugniyah’s assassination is that there were no immediate retaliatory attacks by Hezbollah, neither against Israel nor the United States. No assassinations. No bombing attacks or kidnappings of prominent people in revenge. Perhaps Billy Waugh was right, that blackmail really is the name of the game at the top; that whatever Mugniyah was doing in Saudi Arabia involved “a blackmail deal,” the details of which, if released to the public, would make the martyr Mugniyah appear shockingly treacherous. But there was much more going on than has been reported before. It would be another ten years before a radical truth about the CIA’s hidden-hand operation would become known, through my reporting in this book.
26
The Moral Twilight Zone
It was the late fall of 2007, and a group of Special Activities Division, Ground Branch, operators sat around a firepit at a classified CIA facility in Kandahar called Gecko base, wondering what to do about someone on their team, an Afghan fighter who they suspected was a double agent for the Taliban. Some of the Ground Branch operators felt that their lives were in danger.
They were taking a vote on whether or not they should kill this indigenous fighter, who went by the name of Saif Mohammad. The Ground Branch team called him Saif the Snake. Although this proposed killing had not been initiated from higher up, to an outside observer the scenario feels reminiscent of the 1969 Green Beret Affair in Vietnam.
In the six years since the CIA had first deployed its paramilitary teams into Afghanistan, one element had significantly changed. “The teams got Ground Branch heavy,” a Senior Intelligence Service office who oversaw this expansion clarified for this book. The emphasis in Afghanistan and elsewhere was now on lethal direct action, which is what Ground Branch does best.
Few people have ever gone on record to discuss Ground Branch activities. That Ground Branch trains indigenous fighters to go on kill-or-capture missions with them is an even more closely guarded secret. These soldiers were not part of the Afghan National Army, meaning that they did not appear on any official books. They were paid by the CIA in cash, every two weeks, according to the Ground Branch operators who relayed this story.
In 2010, reporter Bob Woodward first identified these CIA-led indigenous force units as Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams, but almost nothing substantive has been written about them since. No Ground Branch operations have appeared in any classified documents stolen by whistle-blowers and leakers (and subsequently published online). At most, occasionally one finds a reference to “OGA”: Other Government Agency, a euphemism for the CIA. The idea of having indigenous soldiers fight alongside CIA paramilitary operators is a direct descendant of the Civilian Irregular Defense Group in Vietnam. Billy Waugh and others spent years teaching South Vietnamese indigs to sabotage, subvert, and kill Vietcong. The goal was to train local fighters how to push back against the communists trying to take over their country, so the Americans could leave.
In Afghanistan, the paradigm was the same. The Ground Branch operators were here to train the Afghan indigs to sabotage, subvert, and kill Taliban who were trying to take over the country, so the Americans could leave. But the indigs were also a White House mandate, meant to serve as the so-called Afghan face, similar to how the Scorpions were meant to serve as the Arab face in Iraq. When a Ground Branch team raided a home or compound in search of a high value target on a kill-or-capture list, the idea was that local civilians they ran into along the way would feel as if their own people were fighting this war—not the American CIA.
At Gecko, many problems got solved around the firepit. The pit was located just a few dozen yards away from where the Ground Branch operators lived, each man inside his own Conex shipping container, stacked two high. The Afghans lived separately, in barracks down the road. Saif the Snake was one of eighty or so indigs assigned to the unit. If the Taliban were to insert a mole inside a Counterterrorism Pursuit Team at Gecko base, the result would be catastrophic. The team could get ambushed on the way to or from a mission, or the base could get blown up with an IED.
Part of the problem here at Gecko was the provenance of the indig fighters. On most other CIA bases around Afghanistan, the indigs were independently screened before employment. But at Gecko, the Afghan soldiers were supplied to the CIA by Hamid Karzai’s notoriously corrupt half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a former restaurant owner who’d been living in America—in Chicago— until his brother became president. A neighbor in Chicago who owned the hot dog stand next to Ahmed Wali Karzai’s restaurant recalls seeing him standing on a street corner the week the Taliban fell in December 2001. Ahmed Wali Karzai was carrying a suitcase and waiting for the bus.
“Where are you going?” the neighbor asked.
“Afghanistan,” he replied. “My brother is president.”
Now, six years later, Ahmed Wali Karzai was in charge of Kandahar, the second-largest city in Afghanistan.
Since December 2001, Ahmed Wali Karzai had been living in Kandahar as a kind of Mafia boss. His official title was chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council, but everyone knew him to be emperor. Local newspapers called him the “Little President.” To American infantry soldiers he was “the Godfather.” In a leaked classified State Department cable, the ambassador’s office informed Washington: “As the kingpin in Kandahar, the President’s younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai (AWK) dominates access to economic resources, patronage and protection.… The overriding purpose that unifies his political roles as Chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and as the President’s personal representative in the south is the enrichment, extension, and perpetuation of the Karzai clan.”
In Kandahar, it was the same old story repeating itself: Ahmed Wali Karzai was a corrupt, treacherous bad guy, but he was our bad guy. Like President Trujillo or the shah. Like the corrupt Diem brothers who’d been propped up by the CIA and the Defense Department in South Vietnam forty-five years before. Ground Branch operators recall seeing Ahmed Wali Karzai drop by the Gecko base, always with a posse of local bodyguards, sometimes as often as two or three times a week. “He always left with a suitcase full of cash,” says a Ground Branch operator, call sign Hatchet.
“We were absolutely convinced that AWK was the source of all evil” in Kandahar, Lieutenant Colonel Ketti Davison, U.S. military intelligence chief for the Kandahar division, said in an interview with the Washington Post. But at the CIA’s Gecko base, the State Department and the Defense Department were to accept what the CIA was attempting to accomplish with its hidden hand.
Around the firepit, the Ground Branch operators wondered what to do about the possible traitor, Saif the Snake?
He’s called the Snake, one of the operators, call sign Shark, emphasized. Shark suggested that this was downright biblical.
“That’s just what we call him,” someone else reminded Shark. And that they all used made-up call signs on a black program.
The CIA chief of base at Gecko had been brought into the loop; Saif the Snake had been identified to him as a possible double agent. Two of the Ground Branch operators caught Saif sitting on a rooftop inside the compound sketching a map of the base. “Entrances and exits. Who lived where. The location of the armory.” When Saif was formally questioned, he said he liked to draw.
There was more. Saif had been caught with a list of names of the Americans on base, as well as “the vehicle count, with numbers identifying each vehicle attached to the teams.” He’d been seen with a cell phone on a mission. Cell phones were not allowed on missions; a traitor could phone in the team’s location for an ambush. But the CIA’s rules of engagement stated that you couldn’t search the indigenous Afghan soldiers, “same as you can’t shoot a bad guy in the back, even if he’s running away from the gunfight you were just having with him.” On the operation where Saif Mohammad was seen with a phone, the team was ambushed. Two Afghan soldiers got blown up with an IED and lost limbs. One Ground Branch operator had been shot in the chest, his life saved by his body armor. All three soldiers were medevaced out and survived.
“Circumstantial evidence,” one of the team guys said of Saif’s cell phone.
There was another operator at Gecko who was concerned, a Ground Branch officer named Brian Ray Hoke. Hoke was young for Ground Branch, just thirtythree. He was a kind of Renaissance man, a philosopher-poet and warfighter in one. He had studied oceanography at the U.S. Naval Academy. Ran marathons. Played the violin. After college, he passed Hell Week and became an officer with the Navy SEALs, deployed to Europe and into the war theater in the Middle East.
In 2004, Brian Hoke retired from the Navy SEALs and joined the clandestine service of the CIA, becoming a paramilitary operations officer in the Special Activities Division. He had a wife and three children at home in Virginia. He wanted to get home to see his kids. He’d been on a mission with Shark a few months back where Saif the Snake had simply disappeared in the middle of a gunfight. Later they found him sitting in one of the Ground Branch trucks. He said he was cold.
A Ground Branch operator with the call sign Stingray was unconvinced Saif was a bad guy. “No way,” he insisted. Stingray had been at Gecko longer than anyone else on the team. He’d also been on missions with Saif the Snake. He may not be the best fighter, Stingray said. Hardly any of the Afghans were. But he was loyal.
Shark remained unconvinced. “This is not a tough one to figure out,” he insisted. Saif Mohammad was a traitor who needed to be dealt with. There was too much to lose.
Saif had already been reported to the National Directorate of Security (NDS), Afghanistan’s equivalent of the CIA. He’d been questioned, released, and returned to Gecko base. “Everyone knows NDS is a kangaroo court,” said another operator, call sign Axe. Besides, he’d been supplied to the CIA by Ahmed Wali Karzai, so he was protected.
The Ground Branch operators had to wait it out. For now.
Training the Afghan soldiers for the Counterterrorism Pursuit Teams was its own secret nightmare, starting with the general incompatibility of the two groups’ codes of conduct. Ground Branch operators are among the most qualified and experienced Tier One and Tier Two paramilitary operators in the United States. They have near-impeccable service records, no blemishes or black marks. The men must regularly pass a polygraph test. Must be accountable to the CIA. If you fail your polygraph, you’re out of Ground Branch for good.
Ground Branch officers and operators are high-level problem-solving warriors who operate in the most radical, nonpermissive combat environments in the world. They must think clearly and act flawlessly in a 360-degree gunfight; in close-quarters combat; in ambush, hit-and-run, snatch-and-grab, and rescue operations. To infiltrate a target, they must be able to fast-rope out of helicopters, perform HALO and high-altitude high-opening (HAHO) jumps out of airplanes, walk twelve kilometers or more behind enemy lines, carrying seventy-five pounds of gear or a wounded soldier. All of this must be performed in any terrain or temperature, on the top of a 10,000-foot mountain or in subsurface underwater environments such as an ocean or a river, from subzero freezing to 122-degree Fahrenheit heat. The operators need Olympian confidence and stamina when they go on kill-or-capture missions and rescue operations.
“You must be completely amoral and completely moral at the same time,” says a Ground Branch operator, call sign Lightning. Amoral meaning “unconcerned with the rightness or the wrongness of something because the laws, rules and codes you are operating inside have been already set by others.” By lawmakers in the United States.
“You are doing what you are doing on the orders of POTUS,” the president of the United States, says an operator, call sign Cheetah. Amoral must not be confused with immoral, Hatchet clarifies. “Immoral means in violation of your moral code.”
The early days of the Taliban begin right here in Kandahar, at Gecko base. When the Taliban took over Kabul, in 1996, the CIA started keeping a file on the group’s founder and supreme leader, a one-eyed mujahid from the Soviet war named Mullah Mohammad Omar. “Not much is known about Mullah Omar,” deputy chief of mission John C. Holzman wrote in a classified cable to Langley. “He formed the Taliban in late 1994 as a reaction against ‘immoral’ local commanders” who had raped several girls in their village outside Kandahar, Holzman wrote.
Like many guerrilla warfare leaders before him, Mullah Omar’s stated purpose was to rid the land of a corrupting and evil force. The way the narrative goes, Mullah Omar and several friends ambushed the suspected warlord-rapist, executed him on the spot, then suspended his corpse from a tank barrel parked in the town square. Mullah Omar commandeered the town’s radio and explained to the villagers why he and his friends had done what they’d done.
“The religion of Allah is being stepped on! The people are openly displaying evil. They steal the people’s money, they attack their honor on the main street,” Mullah Omar cried. “They kill people and put them against the rocks on the side of the road, and the cars pass by and see the dead body.” This was a horrible crime against Islam—and it was exactly what Mullah Omar had just done to his victim’s body, the suspected warlord-rapist. Clearly the Taliban was not suggesting any kind of Golden Rule to begin with, the Golden Rule being Do unto others as you would do unto yourself. Omar’s group claimed it would “stand up against this corruption.”
Mullah Omar became popular. He took risks. Once, during a public speech on a rooftop, a gathering of the faithful in Kandahar, he pulled a holy relic, the cloak said to be worn by the Prophet Mohammad 1,400 years before, from a sacred holding place and draped it over his own shoulders, declaring himself the emir of all Muslims. “People in the crowds threw up their turbans to be blessed by it,” observed a BBC reporter on hand to film the event. “It was like being in some great religious ceremony in the Middle Ages.” The action marked the beginning of Mullah Omar’s rise to power. In less than two years, the Taliban seized Kabul.
A spokesman for the Taliban attributed Mullah Omar’s greatness to three traits regarded by the fundamental Islamists as admirable: “his religious piety, his reputation for incorruptibility, and his bravery in the jihad.” Under his supreme rule, the Taliban famously banned music, football, and kite flying. They cut off the hands of thieves and the fingers of women wearing nail polish. They cut off the heads of infidels, adulterers, and anyone caught carrying “objectionable literature.” Homosexuals were thrown off rooftops or tortured to death by a medieval practice of being buried under a mud-and-wattle wall until death comes by suffocation.
Mullah Omar was renowned for his piety. He was said to sleep on cement floors and consume only broth and dry bread. But it did not take long for the supreme leader to become corrupt. Soon he was driving around Afghanistan in a Land Rover and living in a garish palace, the one where the Ground Branch operators now lived. These luxuries—the fancy cars and the palace—were gifts given to Mullah Omar by his benefactor Osama bin Laden.
After bin Laden was kicked out of Sudan and arrived in Afghanistan in 1996, the Al-Qaeda leader moved his family to Kandahar and pledged loyalty to Mullah Omar. In exchange, bin Laden was allowed to operate his terrorist training camps in the country, including one called Tarnak Farms, in Kandahar, and another called the Lion’s Den, in Khost.
The Kandahar palace that bin Laden built for Mullah Omar was a tawdry affair. It had gold-plated chandeliers and murals of waterfalls and mud-hut villages painted on its cheap Formica walls. Canadian soldiers who fought alongside Ground Branch operators called it Graceland, for its Elvis-level kitsch. There was a private mosque with a mirrored minaret, stables for horses and camels, a water fountain, and a swimming pool.
Mullah Omar occupied it until sometime before October 19, 2001, when an unusually large, thirty-man Delta Force team conducted an airborne assault on the palace, with the intent of killing or capturing Mullah Omar. Four Chinook helicopters set down inside the palace walls and unloaded the Delta operators, several all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), and sixty U.S. Army Rangers assigned to secure the perimeter. The palace compound was huge, roughly five kilometers in diameter, and the ATVs unloaded from the Chinooks helped the Delta operators quickly secure the compound. The fortress had been built up against a mountain, into which a warren of caves had been carved. Some had showers and squat toilets, U.S. forces discovered.
The original assault on the compound was a Defense Department operation. After a four-hour search of the palace, the Delta operators and the rangers were ambushed by Taliban armed with rocket-propelled grenades and were extracted from the compound under fire. An American was injured during the firefight, reportedly losing a foot to an RPG, and one of the Chinooks lost a piece of its landing gear after getting hit. Mullah Omar was nowhere to be found. The CIA later learned that the one-eyed leader of the Taliban, together with his top commanders, had fled into Pakistan to regroup.
The Taliban government that boasted piety, incorruptibility, and bravery left behind in its wake one of the most immoral, corrupt, criminal, debauched societies the modern world has ever known. Civil order had been destroyed. “Adults [left] traumatized and brutalized,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, in Taliban. “Children rootless without identity or reason to live except to fight.” In the words of Lakhdar Brahimi, a former United Nations diplomat, “We are dealing with a failed state which looks like an infected wound. You don’t even know where to begin cleaning it.”
Now, six years later, in late 2007, very little had changed. Michael Hayden, as director of the CIA, audaciously called Afghanistan “still the good war” despite everything that was known about how dire the situation was—how security for Afghans had gotten worse, not better. In six years, the Americans had set up the Karzai government in Kabul and established the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) to train Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF). The ANSF was supposed to assist in rebuilding key government institutions while fighting the Taliban insurgency. But in reality, by the time 2007 came to a close, civil society had devolved into anarchy and terror that rivaled what it was like before the Americans arrived.
Improvised explosive devices were introduced into the pandemonium, detonated in mosques, at schools, on roads, and at sporting events. The year 2007 marked the most violent year in Afghanistan since the Americans had arrived, with 1,120 IED attacks in Kandahar alone. The birthplace of the Taliban was now the most violent province in the country.
For the Ground Branch operators, the violence was one element, but two issues that no one ever talks about kept getting in the way. These were moral center issues, says Axe, using a decidedly Western term.
“Moral wounds of war,” says an operator, call sign Spear.
“Things no one wants to discuss,” adds Cheetah.
Cutting to the chase, says another operator, call sign Sampson, “Afghanistan is a moral twilight zone.” A mix of horror, psychological thriller, suspense, and things so strange it feels like science fiction. “All usually end up with a macabre, dark, and evil twist.”
“There are new episodes daily,” Cheetah recalls. “You never have to watch reruns.”
“It’s like the Alice in Wonderland book I read to my kids,” says Hawk. He quotes Lewis Carroll: “If you don’t know where you’re going, all roads will lead you there.”
“Hello darkness, my old friend,” says Axe, recalling a lyric from the sixties.
“In Afghanistan, you are confronted with evil situations you think can’t be outperformed, but then they are,” explains Shark. There’s the moral twilight zone outside the wire and inside the wire, he says. But sometimes the evil and wickedness showed up directly at the front gate. Shark relays the story of an indigenous Afghan soldier named Assadallah who requested three days off to walk to a wedding twelve kilometers away. The CIA chief of base said fine.
“Assadallah came back. In two separate pieces,” recalls Shark. “His head had been separated from his body. They left him at the front gate.” Shark volunteered to go get the body. Accompanying him was a medic who’d graduated from West Point. “The medic wanted to do an autopsy. Find out how Assadallah died. I said, ‘Isn’t it obvious? They cut off his head.’”
Shark found the moral twilight zone unbearable at times. “Sometimes you can deal with it, other times you cannot.” A twenty-seven-year veteran of the U.S. Special Forces—with nearly a decade spent on a Tier One team—Shark’s Spartan warrior values sometimes brought him into conflict with the behavior and actions of the Afghan soldiers he was training. Yes, some were exceptionally brave soldiers, he says. Of the five to six hundred fighters Shark trained and fought alongside over a five-year period in Afghanistan, three of the soldiers were like brothers to him.
By 2007, when the meeting took place around the firepit, Shark and a colleague had already been awarded one of the CIA’s highest medals, for a voluntary act of courage performed under hazardous conditions and with grave risk to one’s own life. During an ambush by the Taliban, the two operators had saved the life of an Afghan teammate whose limb had been blown off by a grenade. Honored for courage under fire, Shark and his colleague had been flown back to the United States to receive the award. All they had were their operator clothes. Shark’s ex-wife FedExed a suit to his hotel. The two Ground Branch operators had their pictures taken, were given their medals, and were told that everything would be locked away in a vault until some future date. There was always the question when, or if, programs would get declassified. MACVSOG operators had to wait more than thirty years for it to happen. “By then,” says Axe, “the public has forgotten. And the real issues are no longer anyone’s concern.” Cheetah points out that headlines appear in the U.S. press occasionally referring to assassination teams being run by the CIA. “We operate under Title 50 rules,” says Hatchet. “The indigs we train, and the bad guys we kill, live in a world where there are no rules except ‘kill.’”
Outstanding Afghan fighters were rare among those trained for joint indig/CIA operations. Most of them are high on opium a lot of the time, a fact reiterated by every Ground Branch operator interviewed for this book. Eight out of ten soldiers were illiterate. Many had trouble counting beyond thirty. When it came time to train indigenous bodyguards for President Karzai’s security detail (he objected to having CIA and Delta Force operators only, concerned it made him look bad), each applicant was required to fill out a questionnaire. According to the Washington Post’s Joshua Partlow, all but one of the Afghan recruits handed the paper back blank. Only one in the entire group of applicants could read. Karzai’s recruiter sought to hire the man, but the others in the group objected. “He’s our teacher in the village,” they told Karzai’s recruiter. “If we give him to you, we won’t have anyone to teach our children.”
On occasion, during heavy snows, when some of the CIA’s more remote forward operating bases got snowed in, Shark tried teaching math to the indigenous fighters. “This was not math 101,” he says. “This was first-grade math.” Once, in an effort to explain conceptually how big numbers and long distances work, Shark took a group of soldiers outside to look at the full moon rising up over the Hindu Kush mountains. “I said to them, ‘So the moon is 250,000 miles away.’ And while I was on the subject, I said, ‘By the way, we landed there fifty years ago; the missions were called Apollo.’ One of the soldiers said, ‘That’s impossible.’ He pointed to the moon and said, ‘The moon’s too small to land people on.’”
Welcome to the twilight zone.
“A lot of them were so stoned so much of the time it looked like they’d been swimming in a heavily chlorinated pool,” says Spear.
“A few hours before we’d go out on a mission, I’d personally go into their barracks and confiscate their pipes,” says Shark. “Make them turn over their drugs until we were done fighting.”
“Fighting bad guys high on drugs is a really bad idea,” says Axe.
“They do it,” says Hatchet. “We’re told to accept it. It’s how it is.”
The other problem, says Shark, “was that they seemed to spend all their free time raping each other in their barracks,” a fact confirmed with ten Ground Branch operators interviewed. “We had a code. If I needed them, I’d knock loud on the door to indicate they needed to wrap it up and knock it off, but they ignored that.”
“It’s disgusting,” says Hatchet. “They do it. We had to accept it. We’re told, ‘It’s how it is.’ Some of them rape underage boys.”
Ken Stiles, who set up the CIA’s geographic information system for Hank Crumpton in the basement of Langley in the first weeks of the war, confirmed that rape was said to be a “cultural norm.” Stiles was sent to Kabul to set up an in-country electronic targeting system for the CIA. On occasion, he was flown to FOBs in the war zone. “I once asked an Afghan soldier why he joined special forces as opposed to the regular army,” recalls Stiles. “He said, ‘Because in special forces you get raped less.’”
Why was this not reported more thoroughly in the press? Four months after the war started, the New York Times ran an article entitled “Kandahar Journal; Shhh, It’s an Open Secret: Warlords and Pedophilia.” Then, the press went silent for almost fifteen years. The raping problem was endemic to all Afghan military forces, it would later be revealed, not just within the indigenous forces being trained by the CIA. By 2007, ISAF consisted of approximately 55,100 personnel from thirty-nine countries, including 23,220 troops from the United States. And yet conspicuously missing from the constant rush of war reports were any about Afghan soldiers raping each other and raping and enslaving young boys.
Not until 2018 would the U.S. inspector general produce a devastating report exposing 5,753 cases of “gross human rights abuses by Afghan forces,” including the “routine enslavement and rape of underage boys by Afghan commanders.” What about the Leahy Amendment, which cuts off U.S. aid to foreign military units that commit human rights abuses? Erica Gaston, of the nonprofit organization Afghanistan Analysts Network, explains: “There is a blanket ‘waiver’ in the DoD version that allow[s] the Secretary of Defense to waive the Leahy law in ‘extraordinary circumstances,’ implicitly where serious national security interests are invoked.” As an example, Gaston cites Kandahar.
Are the Ground Branch operators correct in their assessment that Afghanistan is the moral twilight zone? And what does this have to do with assassination as a political tool? In a rare authorized interview in 2011, a Green Beret captain identified as Matt told the Christian Science Monitor, “The ugly reality is that if the U.S. wants to prevail against the Taliban and its allies, it must work with Afghan fighters whose behavior insults Western sensibilities. There are no good guys by our standards. There is no standard to begin with. There is no justice system or rule of law to hold people accountable.”
No justice system. No rule of law. Nothing to hold people accountable. Two trillion U.S. dollars spent in Afghanistan, in more than seventeen years of war, not including veterans’ health costs. Every U.S. president has options. When diplomacy fails and war is not—or is no longer—an option, the president can exercise the third option, the CIA’s hidden hand. But to what end?
To understand the rest of this story, what the Ground Branch operators proposed to do about the suspected double agent in the ranks, and to evaluate it objectively, it’s important to comprehend how profoundly secret and compartmentalized the world of a Ground Branch operator really is. As specific and singular as this situation may seem, no Ground Branch operations in Afghanistan have been made public.
For Ground Branch operators, secrecy and anonymity override every mission. Ground Branch operators work under pseudonyms and regularly change their aliases. They travel into the war theater using a CIA-engineered second passport that has given them an identity separate from the one with which they were born. The different name, different address, even different parents within the backstory—all are elements and attributes of the CIA’s hidden hand. An operator who uses the pseudonym David Smith at Gecko might go by Richard White at Jalalabad or Jeff Hill at Khost. And there is another identity that exists within personnel services at CIA headquarters, a consistent identity that chronologically keeps track of each operator’s assignments as they accumulate. This pseudonym usually ascribes a false ethnicity to the operator.
For example, an Irish Catholic Ground Branch operator from Wisconsin might be identified in the central database as Danny Nooradian (as if he’s Armenian American) or Peter Andropolis (as if he’s Greek American). Billy Waugh’s database identity made him sound Chinese American. If a Ground Branch operator who works as a contract employee (a green badger) is audited by the Internal Revenue Service, they must follow stringent protocols to ensure that their true employer, the CIA, is never revealed.
An equally complex problem arises if a gunshot wound, endured in the war theater, gets infected back home. U.S. doctors are required to report gunshot wounds to administrators, and patients are required to truthfully explain how they got their injuries. The general rule among Ground Branch operators with regard to an infected wound is to say to the hospital doctor, “I shot myself hunting,” but this becomes a problem when it happens more than once.
If a Ground Branch operator is killed in action overseas, his body is sent to a refrigerator located at the nearest CIA station. There, the dead man waits. Only when the Ground Branch operator’s “in true” passport is sent from the CIA can the soldier’s physical body be repatriated to the United States. Spouse, children, and other family members are not told the circumstances in which their loved one died. Nate Chapman’s family had no idea he was on a Special Activities Division, Ground Branch, team until 2015, when the CIA awarded him a star on its marble Memorial Wall.
Identity in Afghanistan for Afghan nationals is as strange as it is complex. “Having a proper identity is everybody’s human right,” says Najibullah Hameem, a child protection specialist with UNICEF, in Kabul. “This is something which is lacking in Afghanistan.” Less than 1 percent of the population have a birth certificate. Even if the government started issuing birth certificates, the Afghan government is incapable of registering and storing this information, says Hameem. If you ask an Afghan soldier how old he is, says a Ground Branch operator, “everyone will tell you he is twenty-five. Some of the twenty-five-year-olds look eighteen, some of them look fifty. But they’re all just twenty-five.”
“They don’t think of time the way we think of time,” says Hatchet. “It’s fight, fuck, eat, sleep, fight, fuck, repeat.”
“Kind of like us,” says Cheetah, half-joking.
Blood is a major issue. Most civilians don’t know offhand what their blood type is, but for a combat soldier in the war theater, this information is critical. “Almost everyone needs a blood bag at some point or other,” says Axe. For this reason, before each mission Ground Branch operators write their blood type in indelible ink on their body armor and their skin.328s
“The blood problem is bigger than this,” says Shark. “Because of all the [man-on-man] sex, many of the fighters have hep B.” “If someone looked into how much Cipro is given out to Afghan fighters, that would be a story right there,” says Cheetah. Setting aside what anyone thinks about the sexual behavior, says Shark, the real problem is blood-on-blood contact between fighters on the battlefield. When an Afghan soldier named Taj Mohammad had his leg blown off on a kill-or capture mission, Shark worked quickly to get a tourniquet on him before he bled out. But Shark had also been hit by grenade frag and was bleeding, meaning that the two soldiers had blood-on-blood contact on the battlefield while Shark was trying to save Taj’s life.
According to a declassified government report, the Afghan National Army does not have the supplies or equipment to test for blood and requires that new recruits go to a doctor and pay to have their blood types tested, without reimbursement. Almost no one does this. As a result, “a suspiciously large number of soldiers were reported to have the same blood type.” And everybody was twenty-five years old.
What to do about Saif Mohammad, the traitor at Gecko base? The consensus around the firepit was: Wait. Gather evidence.
Shark accepted the Ground Branch team’s decision. Everything that happened here had to be agreed upon by the team. Then, just a few weeks later, two team members from the Canadian unit brought hard evidence to the Ground Branch team. They had a folder. Inside the folder was a photograph. “In the photograph, there was Saif the Snake, yakking it up with known Taliban [leaders] in Pakistan.” Saif Mohammad was most certainly a traitor. Something had to be done.
There was a vote on the table. Why not just kill him? But timing is everything, and before anything could be done about Saif the Snake, the chief of base at Gecko approached the team.
“Something’s come up,” he said.
Something’s come up was a euphemism for “there’s a kill-or-capture mission on the board.” Everything on these kinds of missions was extremely time sensitive. Once a high-value target was found and his location had been fixed, the movement to finish the individual had to happen fast. This is how the CIA’s action arm has worked since the war on terror began. Direct-action missions were fraught with peril and consequence, potentially good and potentially very bad. “Potential positive strategic effects of HVT operations include eroding insurgent effectiveness, weakening insurgent will, reducing the level of insurgent support, fragmenting or splitting the insurgent group, altering insurgent strategy,” reads a leaked CIA directive on “High-Value Targeting Operations.” On the downside, “Potential negative effects of HVT operations include increasing the level of insurgent support… strengthening an armed group’s bond with the population… creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating or deescalating a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.” The devil was always in the details of the mission, as the Ground Branch team at Gecko soon learned.
A top Taliban commander and high-value target was holed up in a compound in Sangin, eighty-seven miles to the northwest of Gecko base. With him were three accomplices, also HVTs. This Taliban commander was responsible for financing, building, and placing IEDs on area roads. Scores of coalition forces and hundreds of Afghan civilians were dead because of his IEDs. Just weeks before, a suicide bomber had blown himself up at a dog-fighting competition in Kandahar, killing eighty people and wounding a hundred, the deadliest attack since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. The commander’s location had been fixed. His pattern of life suggested he’d leave Sangin at dawn. “These were the same guys we’d gone after before,” recalls Shark. “The fact that they’d popped back up was huge.” A decision had to be made to go or not. The team had two hours to decide.
The team gathered in the tactical operations center, a huge room with high ceilings and a sand table. The mission was heavily debated. A consensus had to be reached. The Taliban compound was standard for the region: square, made of mud walls, with several inside rooms, a back courtyard with a variety of vehicles. It was likely that bomb-making materials were stored there. Using GPS coordinates, the team was to travel to a specific location. This would be the vehicle drop-off point. They would exit the vehicles, set security, and send two teams out to assault the target.
They had more than enough Ground Branch guys, augmented with Tier One operators on loan to the CIA. The Canadian operators were on standby as backup, as was a quick reaction force (QRF) in the area. An AC-130 Spectre gunship would be with the team, overhead, for the movement there. There would be a short gap with no coverage, then A-10 Thunderbolts flying overhead on the way home. The gear was set. The QRF was set. The primary negative was that there weren’t any helicopters available to infiltrate the target with the Ground Branch team. This meant that the team had to drive to Sangin in a twelve-vehicle convoy on a cratered-out, muddy, ruddy, single-lane road that was hard to navigate due to recent heavy rains. One way in, one way out, on a road notorious for ambushes and IEDs.
Finally, a consensus was reached. The operators agreed to accept the mission. Everyone plugged the coordinates of the target area into their GPS systems. Shark jumped on a motorcycle and headed down to brief the Afghan soldiers at their barracks. “We always gave indigs the edited version of our plan, for our safety,” says Ground Branch operator Drew Dwyer. “Never specifics of where we were going.” A ten-year veteran of the Special Activities Division, Dwyer’s first Ground Branch mission was in 2002, and he has participated in covertaction operations on all five continents.
Using a sandbox, the team showed the Afghan soldiers the basic layout of the target area in Sangin. After the briefing, the soldiers were told to have their vehicles in convoy formation lined up at the gate. They had twenty minutes.
Soon, they would set out through Kandahar. Through the land of IEDs.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Just War
There are lots of ways to describe Sangin, in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, and Ground Branch operators describe it in their own ways. The Heart of Darkness. The bad place. The Taliban’s heartland. The sordid matrix of opium poppy production. And then there’s this: pure evil. In official Pentagon parlance, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates said of Sangin: “This district [is] one of the most dangerous not just in Afghanistan but maybe in the whole world.” Over a ten-year period, more American marines and British soldiers would be killed in Sangin than in any of Afghanistan’s four hundred other districts.
Now the Ground Branch team from Gecko base was heading here, its twelve vehicle convoy lumbering along the ambush-prone road. Shark, driving, focused on the taillights on the vehicle in front of him. They’d been painted over with black and covered in tape so operators weren’t blinded by the night vision devices they wore. There was a decent outline of the truck ahead, and at the same time, the convoy was hidden from people officials called Taliban, or anti-coalition militia. Ground Branch guys knew them simply as bad guys with guns.
“It was a perfect night, as far as light conditions were concerned,” remembers Shark. “Enough moon and stars out that night that the night vision was perfect, and through those devices I looked as far as I could see down Highway One.” To Shark, the road “looked like it never ended, and it looked a bit eerie, too. The compounds that were in eyeshot were scattered around and had only smoke coming from within them, very little light. Some small fires were visible. The night was over for them—the villagers who lived there—they had eaten and were getting ready to sleep, most of them were.” If it wasn’t war, this night might have been a beautiful thing, and for a moment, a very brief, very dangerous moment, Shark thought of his own children back home.
“For a split second, I wondered if my kids were safe,” he says.
Then instantly, instinctively, he shut that thought down. In the combat zone, behind enemy lines, “you never think of anything that makes you vulnerable,” he says. “It interrupts the forward momentum that’s been ingrained in you through training. This is a momentum you must maintain every second of every mission, no matter what.”
Suddenly there were flashlights going off. Flashlights. Afghans signaling to one another, from just outside their homes. This was optical telegraphing. Shark’s first thought: Saif the Snake. The enemy had been informed.
Technically, this was a kill-or-capture mission: four high-value targets, a bomb maker and his three lieutenants. But when someone knows you’re coming, capture is off the table. The mission becomes kill or be killed.
“Having Saif the Snake on any mission was very much like putting together a ticking time bomb and bringing it along with you for the ride,” says Shark. Driving eighty-seven miles from Gecko base to Sangin seemed to take forever, every curve in the road presenting some fresh danger. Thirty minutes outside the target, the convoy came to a halt. There was a guard tower problem. A guard tower problem? An old Soviet-era guard tower that never had anyone in it now suddenly had someone in it. Comms said something about the Afghan national police.
“Every minute you’re sitting still on an operation] is a very bad minute,” says Drew Dwyer.
“‘Sitting ducks’ is the term,” says Hawk.
Shark adds context. “We had Spooky, the [AC-130] gunship, overhead. And that takes away a lot of concerns, but it doesn’t eliminate them altogether.”
Finally, the team was cleared to move onto the target. Five minutes out, the pilot broke radio silence to announce that the target area was active—that he could see at least ten personnel in the compound, next to a mosque. The convoy moved the final one hundred meters to the target. It was wet, cold, and muddy.
“The makeshift road was saturated and sloppy,” remembers Shark. “The steering wheel felt loose, like there was no traction.” His thoughts were interrupted by a whooosh sound streaking right by him. So close, it felt like inches. So loud, it sounded like the volume had been turned up. He watched an RPG-7, a rocket-propelled grenade, blast down the halted line of Ground Branch trucks. Then whooosh, a second rocket fired by the convoy somehow missing them on a second try. The Taliban don’t have night vision, and shooting in the dark means shooting blind. It was one of the advantages a Ground Branch team has, that and Spooky tactical air support. The rocket detonated behind the convoy in an empty space that was supposed to be the entry point into the target area.
“We exited the vehicles,” recalls Shark. “Get out of the death box and take cover, return fire.”
A volley of fire. Kill or be killed. There’s always a firefight when you’re Ground Branch. Then, as fast as the ambush started, the shooters were gone. The Taliban were masters of irregular warfare. They knew surprise, kill, vanish like the back of their own hand. In the winter of 2008, Afghanistan had been at war for twenty-nine consecutive years. First with the Russian invaders, starting in 1979; then with themselves after the invaders left, from 1989 until 2001; and now with a coalition of American-led invaders, but invaders nonetheless.
The voice of the pilot flying the AC-130 Spectre overhead came over the comms. “Three in the ditch, heading toward your location,” the pilot said. Calm, steady.
Ditch, what ditch? The opium-poppy growing land here in Sangin was zippered with irrigation canals, some filled with water, others with ice. Another update: “Be advised you have eight on foot behind you.” Then came the distinct pfffmmpggggg sound through Shark’s noise-reducing comms. A ripping sound, as the gunship fired down at the enemy from overhead. “Spooky laying waste to whatever threatens your position, in a variety of calibers,” said Axe.
The AC-130 Spectre gunship—Spooky—is a heavily armed side-firing aircraft. With its sophisticated network of sensors and navigation and fire-control systems, the gunship provides close air support at night in adverse weather and can loiter in an overhead circle for extended periods of time. The suite of sensors on board allows Spectre pilots to visually discern friendlies from enemies, and to attack two targets simultaneously from above. There’s little moral outrage over Spooky. It’s a war machine used by the Defense Department, in keeping with the laws of war and the rules of engagement.
The pilot repeated, “Eight on foot behind you… three in the ditch” and began firing. In a matter of seconds, all eleven humans were dead.
Then silence. No more shooting. The compound was straight ahead. The pathway to the target was heavily wooded. Shark walked along. He had eight Afghan soldiers with him, following along in a line. After a few minutes of walking, the area erupted in gunfire once again.
Again the shooting stopped. Shark continued to move forward to the target, his gun trained ahead. The mission was to locate the bomb maker and his lieutenants. The eleven dead were almost certainly foot soldiers, which meant that the four high-value targets were probably hiding somewhere right around here. The compound needed to be cleared. There was work to do. Shark readied to make entry over the compound wall when suddenly it occurred to him that he was alone. Where had the Afghan indigs gone? Alone? How was this possible? Alone is dangerous. Two rules: Never get in the trunk. And never try to clear a room alone. But he was here. There was work to do. They’d come all the way to Sangin. Against his better judgment, Shark decided to go at it alone.
He walked across the roof of the compound. He looked down into a hole, like a stairwell minus the stairs. There was a wooden ladder leading down inside. “It came to me that a flamethrower would have been nice,” recalls Shark. “I could have cleared the whole room with the flamethrower.” But Protocol III of the Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons prohibited soldiers from using incendiary weapons, which made little sense if you had just seen what Spooky did to the eleven men. “They used flamethrowers in every other war, so why not here?” Shark wondered. He headed back to the trucks to locate the rest of the team. At the convoy he found that the Afghan soldiers were sitting around, some of them inside a vehicle.
There was more work to be done, Shark said, including the SSE, or sensitive site exploitation, of the compound—a search for materials, paper intelligence, bad guys’ cell phones. There were two or three vehicles parked behind the compound that needed to be searched as well. Half the team needed to stay with the sensitive equipment in the trucks. The other half needed to go with him.
Back at the target, a perimeter was set up and the compound was cleared, then searched. The HVTs had long gone. The SSE took four hours. Spooky kept watch overhead. Then it was time to go.
Back at the trucks there was an unbelievable commotion under way. A brand new truck borrowed from the rangers was upside down in a hole. Sabotage? Had one or more of the Afghan indigs tried driving the truck away? The only thing more dangerous than lingering on infiltration was lingering on exfil. Time to get out of Sangin.
But first, the sensitive communications gear in the vehicle needed to be destroyed. Destroy the entire vehicle—that would do the job. Ground Branch operators poured three jerricans of diesel fuel over the truck, tossed a thermite grenade inside, and watched it burn. The operators piled in the trucks, and the eleven-vehicle convoy inched home across the same dark landscape. The indig fighters whose truck had mysteriously been turned upside down squeezed in beside the Ground Branch team. In each vehicle, a computer screen displayed the bird’s-eye view of the journey back to Gecko base, one layer of the geographic information system (GIS) created in the basement of Langley by Ken Stiles and his team six years before. The metadata in the GIS had since been increased by orders of magnitude. Layers of anthropology and geography had been fused with every form of intelligence available. But was there any progress being made here in Afghanistan, any at all? Could America ever win this war? Or was the whole effort like the upside-down truck in Sangin? Expensive, intractable, waiting to be burned to the ground.
After the team got back to Gecko base, all the data gathered in Sangin was inputted into the system, including photos from cell phones recovered, papers found in the compound, pocket litter from dead Taliban. All this information would be used to provide targeters working at a classified CIA facility in Kabul called Eagle base with more information about whom to target and kill next. “We were producing intelligence and we were also a consumer of the intelligence we were producing,” Hank Crumpton said of the original intent of covert action in Afghanistan. Now, six years later, all across Afghanistan, Ground Branch teams were still doing the same thing. But the goal, to “become more productive,” had arguably not been met. The situation in Afghanistan had gotten a lot worse.
After all the SSE data from the Taliban compound in Sangin got turned over to the CIA chief of Gecko base, the debrief took place. Shark brought up his idea about the flamethrower.
“I explained my reason for it. It was valid, in my eyes—beyond valid—and some of the guys loved it, but not everybody,” he recalls. “The boss rolled his eyes and said, ‘Let’s discuss this offline.’ It wasn’t received well, and I still don’t understand why. We drop bombs on [bad guys]. Fire cannons from the sky, which sets people on fire. Why is a flamethrower so taboo?”
Only a few of the guys made it to the post mission fire pit discussion that night. “We just sat there on the homemade wooden benches and pieced together the night. The issue of Saif Mohammad came up, and, why wouldn’t he? It was not a normal situation,” says Shark. “Having him on a mission felt like inviting suicide.”
Now, with the mission to Sangin over, the issue about killing Saif the Snake was back on the table.
“Let’s get rid of him,” one of the operators said.
Shark suggested they throw him out of a helicopter. “That would fix the problem,” he said.
Several of the Ground Branch guys agreed. They were almost at a consensus now. Almost.
“I told the chief what we thought should be done. Take him up on a helicopter, tell him it was a mission, then throw him out when we were up there,” remembers Shark. Problem solved.
Shark says the chief of base was horrified. “You can’t do that,” he said. “The chief of base pulled me aside,” recalls Shark. “He asked me if I wanted to talk to a doctor. Said maybe something was wrong with my head. I didn’t appreciate that.”
Shark headed back to his sleeping quarters at Gecko base, the second-story cargo container inside of which he lived. “I grabbed my Copenhagen tobacco and my satellite phone. I had one call to make, the kids would be getting ready to go to bed soon, it was early morning for us. When I found that right spot to call home, a spot where my phone could access the satellites and get a call out, it all seemed very normal to me,” he recalls.
“Hello?” It was the voice of his ex-wife, whom he still loved even after their divorce. He always experienced pain and difficulty talking to her. She was an excellent mother, and their children always did whatever it was she instructed them to do. They couldn’t make their marriage work; he had to accept that. They both loved their children more than anything in this world.
“Let him say everything first,” Shark’s ex-wife said to the children, back there in the United States.
“They always started their first volley of conversation with, ‘Hi, Daddy,’” Shark recalls, “their soft, safe voices, with a unique twang added depending on what stage of baby teeth coming in or out they were in. Many of the times I would be on the receiving end of the sat phone for an extended period of time, just listening as they told me everything about the day.”
This time, like many times, Shark stared down at his own physical body. His boots were covered in someone else’s blood.
Six days passed. “I was standing in front of my metal fortress sleeping area speaking with a medic when I heard a call over the base radios,” remembers Shark.
“Come to the operations center, there’s something to see,” Stingray said. He insisted it was important. Inside the team room, one of the guys was grappling with some cables and a huge flat-screen TV that was attached to a concrete wall. After a few adjustments, the TV screen came to life.
Whatever the operators were here to watch, it was from the point of view of a Predator drone. You could see the desert floor through a window of superimposed white crosshairs. A structure came into view. The Predator was hovering high in the sky, directly over a building in Sangin. There was tension in the air. Someone offered an explanation: the four Taliban they’d pursued six days before—the bomb maker and his three lieutenants—had been identified as presently being inside the compound they were now observing through the Predator’s viewfinder.
The room was quiet. The image played without any sound. Everyone sat there, enthralled. A few seconds passed. The screen went dark for a brief moment. When an image came back into view, there was a small cloud of smoke. Debris, ash, and fire blanketed the desert floor below. The cloud held strong for a few seconds, until it became clear that all that was left of the compound was a rubble pile. The focus in the room was intense.
Someone said, “Fuck yeah.” Someone else said, “Un-fucking-believable.” “For as dramatic as it was,” recalls Shark, “we knew not to celebrate too loud, or too often. It takes away from your readiness. That is what we are taught.”
Everyone stood up and started to leave. Then someone said, “Hey, look at that shit.” Focus went back to the TV screen.
Out from beneath the pile of rubble, a human being emerged. Stumbling. Wounded. Alive. One of the four high-value targets—the bomb maker or one of his three lieutenants—had survived the drone strike. As the man stood there on the ground, bending over, gathering his senses, the numbers at the bottom center of the Predator’s viewfinder began to move.
“Here we go again,” thought Shark. He was right.
The screen went black for a moment. Then the rubble pile came back into view. This time, there was no movement on the ground. The fourth high-value target was dead. There were a few high-fives in the room, and then the atmosphere returned to normal.
“We went back to what we were doing,” remembers Shark.
Something had to be done about Saif the Snake. In Afghanistan, says Lightning, “you have to be willing to take the long route to an objective and a victory, because the fighters there, the Taliban and the other bad guys with guns, they’re unlike anyone else you’ve gone up against before.”
The Ground Branch operators had been forbidden to kill Saif the Snake. “So we came up with the next-best idea, and that was to shame him,” says Shark. “Make him lose his stature on the base.”
To orchestrate his fall from grace, the Ground Branch operators organized a friendly—or not so friendly—regulation boxing match. A bloodless hidden-hand coup d’état. There would be rules that had to be followed. A boxing ring was built. Regulation headgear and boxing gloves were brought in from the United States. The fighters were drawn randomly from a container of names in a box, says Shark, no funny business allowed. “Except the funny business we factored in so a certain Saif Mohammad would be fighting the biggest man on base.” The carefully chosen opponent was the Ground Branch team’s Afghan mechanic, a 210-pound heavyweight with teeth so strange he’d been given the nickname Jaws. By luck of the draw, the referee announced over the megaphone, “The fight is between Saif Mohammad and the mechanic!”
Saif the Snake stepped out of the crowd of soldiers and walked into the sandpit, where two American referees waited. “Saif wore a strained smile on his puffy face. He had a full beard and it was well-kept,” recalls Shark. “He was shorter than most of the other Afghan soldiers, and it looked like he hadn’t been missing any meals.” He wore desert camouflage trousers and a large white T-shirt. Jaws, the mechanic, lumbered into the ring. “He was big and slow, like a high school football player who hadn’t yet grown into his oversized body,” and he was a head taller than his opponent.
The referees gave the fighters instructions, translated through an interpreter. The fight began. Out in the stands, the spectators went wild. “A giddy crowd of soldiers who’d never seen a boxing match before,” says Shark. The local day workers on base stopped working and were scattered around in the background, leaning on shovels or squatting down.
The mechanic moved steadily into the center of the ring. Saif the Snake froze. The mechanic moved forward until they were face-to-face. It appeared each man was having second thoughts about the competition. The spectators went quiet. The bodies of the two fighters went tight, “each as if he’d come upon a predator that required total stillness to get out alive,” recalls Shark. Then Jaws hurled himself toward his frozen opponent, swinging at Saif with his sixteen ounce regulation gloves. Saif put up his hands, but the blows came hard and fast. One of the lobs struck him in the side of his head, protected by light headgear.
The audience went wild with excitement. There were cheers and boos at the same time. The mechanic moved his arms, working hard to generate solid punches. Mixed in the fighting was a sloppy combination of slaps and punches, but they were all flying in Saif’s direction. He had not moved his gloves from the guard position. He stood there stunned and defenseless in front of the jeering crowd. “His stature in the camp was being denigrated by the minute,” recalls Shark. Break.
Round Two. The mechanic raced in and unleashed a barrage of punches. Several went straight into Saif’s gut. When Saif reached down to hold his stomach, the mechanic saw the opening and hurled a volley of punches his way. Saif stumbled, tripped, and hit the sand. “Jaws leapt on him, smothering him and making strange jerking movements, like someone was using a shock collar on him. The mechanic engulfed Saif—he was hardly visible anymore.” There were several more punches thrown, hard blows to the gut and chest. As Saif Mohammad lay there looking straight up at the sky, Jaws mounted him and began pummeling him, as if he had some training. The mechanic leaned in and began wailing on him, over and over. This was obviously not a regulation move, and the referees moved in. Break. Round Three.
The Ground Branch team had advertised a three-round fight, with the winner receiving a ten-dollar prize. Toward the end, the fighters were getting tired. Interest was fading. “The Afghan soldiers needed a nap,” says Shark, “and they probably needed to hit the hookah again, too. They had a routine, and as much as they like anything, it is short-lived and they get bored.” The whole point of the fight was to have all the soldiers watch Saif the Snake lose. Then suddenly, just as some of the fighters were beginning to wander off, the mechanic suddenly went at him again, full-bore. Saif didn’t try to defend himself this time. “He simply absorbed the blows,” recalls Shark. “There was no knockout punch; he just fell over. Legs out, arms up, like he’d raised his hand to ask a question. The referees ended the fight. Saif the Snake lost his stature, and therefore his power. No need for war.”
Shark rotated onto another CIA base, where he trained another one hundred Afghan soldiers and led kill-or-capture missions in dark places that felt evil, too. A few fighting seasons later, he was back at Gecko base in Kandahar.
“I figure it was two weeks after I returned that we were called into our oversized coliseum of a meeting room. It was an all-hands meeting,” he says. “The room was quiet, there were no terps [interpreters] allowed, it was only us. I wanted someone to tell a joke, to get rid of this quiet, at least talk normally. Something. Then the boss [chief of base] put out that Saif Mohammad was found guilty.”
The story was explained: a wide variety of explosives and bullets had gone missing from the arsenal at Gecko base, and were then discovered with Saif and an accomplice. Officials got involved. Saif was sent to the National Directorate of Security. He talked in prison and led investigators to his alleged accomplice, an Afghan supply officer employed by the CIA at Gecko base. NDS located information about a plan to attack the Ground Branch team on base. It was written out in the accomplice’s workbook, including sketches and maps. The plan was to steal a Ground Branch truck, fill it with 2,000 pounds of explosives, then drive it into the area near the Conex boxes and the firepit—where the team guys made satellite phone calls home to their kids. For reasons no one could explain, but everyone understood, Saif Mohammad had been released from the NDS and had simply vanished, at least for now.
After several months fighting in Kandahar, Shark rotated out again. He was transferred to yet another CIA base, where he trained another one hundred Afghan indigs and went out on what by now amounted to hundreds of missions with them.
In 2011, Ahmed Wali Karzai, the president’s brother, was assassinated in his home by his closest confidant, a man named Sardar Mohammad. In the ensuing investigation, more information about the Afghan indig fighters at Gecko base surfaced. The unit was called the Kandahar Strike Force, the papers said, and described the fighters as Karzai’s personal paramilitary force. These were “highly-trained and elite troops who [underwent] regular physical training, including jogging and calisthenics, target practice and classwork such as lectures on choosing targets for kill-and-capture raids.”
Why did Sardar Mohammad kill Ahmed Wali Karzai? Rumors flew. Speculative blame was divided. One theory proposed that Sardar Mohammad was a CIA assassin. Another claimed he was a double agent for the Taliban. A third supposition speaks to life in the moral twilight zone that Ground Branch operators are asked to live in.
In A Kingdom of Their Own: The Family Karzai and the Afghan Disaster, Josh Partlow, a Washington Post reporter in Afghanistan, described what he learned from senior U.S. military officials about the assassination. “Sardar Mohammad was a pedophile, and his pedophilia had gotten way out of hand and had become an embarrassment,” Partlow wrote. A group of fathers whose sons Sardar Mohammad had kidnapped, chained to his bed, and held as captives for raping “had gone to AWK and said, ‘You’ve got to rein this guy in. He’s out of control.’ AWK decided he was going to fire [Sardar Mohammad] from his security job and give him some other job. He summoned him over there that day to do it. And [Sardar Mohammad] got wind of it.” He shot Ahmed Wali Karzai in the head and chest, killing him instantly.
Nine years after the mission in Sangin with the upside-down truck, five hundred miles to the northeast, in Jalalabad, Brian Ray Hoke and a Ground Branch operator named Nathaniel Delemarre were shot and killed by the Islamic State during a kill-or-capture mission. It was October 2011. The “potential negative effects of HVT operations” warned about in the leaked CIA directive “High Value Targeting Operations” had come true. The lethal direct-action missions conducted against HVTs had resulted in precisely what the directive had forewarned: “creating a vacuum into which more radical groups can enter, and escalating… a conflict in ways that favor the insurgents.” The CIA has not released any further information about the circumstances of either man’s death.
In Afghanistan, the violence continued to escalate. With the 2009 inauguration of Barack Obama, there was the widely held expectation that this new president would bring peace to the troubled Middle East, that diplomacy would predominate and the two wars America was fighting would end. Nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize occurred just eleven days after Obama took office, and his inclusion on that list was a preemptive move by the Nobel Committee. “We are hoping this may contribute a little bit for what he is trying to do,” said its chairman, Thorbjørn Jagland. “The prize is a clear signal to the world.… We have to get the world on the right track again.” Publicly, there was hope. Privately, there was the reality of Tertia Optio.
In his first three days as president, Barack Obama took action on two of the CIA programs he’d inherited from the Bush White House. After reviewing the enhanced interrogation program, also called the torture program, he signed Executive Order 13491, revoking it. He ordered the CIA to shut down its detention and interrogation facilities, also called black sites, and prohibited the Agency from opening new ones. After reviewing the lethal direct-action program, including the drone strike and Ground Branch programs, President Obama ordered these operations to be accelerated. His decision to shut down the enhanced interrogation program was made public, but his decision to accelerate lethal direct-action missions was kept hidden.
On Obama’s second day in office, a Ground Branch team conducted a kill-or capture mission in Khyber Agency, Pakistan. The target was a Saudi Al-Qaeda operative named Zabu ul Taifi, involved in a series of terrorist bombings in London on July 7, 2005.
The kill-or-capture operation was run jointly with indigenous forces, but one of the men involved told Pakistan’s The News that the mission had been led by the CIA. “The Americans seemed quite excited after capturing the Saudi national and immediately bundled him into their vehicle,” the Pakistani soldier said. That same second day in office, President Obama also authorized two drone strikes in Pakistan, killing one Al-Qaeda high-value target and up to two dozen other people. Critics accused the president of solving the torture program problem with a killing program solution.
That fall, on October 9, 2009, the Nobel Committee announced that President Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. In December, he traveled to Oslo, Norway, to receive the award. In a speech entitled “A Just and Lasting Peace,” President Obama talked mostly about war, evoking the concept of just war theory, a set of ethical principles based in Christian theology and first written about in AD 400. In the sixteen hundred years since, just war theory has been providing leaders with a framework in which to rationalize war by reconciling three juxtaposing ideas: taking human life is seriously wrong; a nation has a duty to defend itself and its citizens; defending moral values can require the use of violence. Morality and warfare have been entwined across history, always with the strongest opinions reserved for assassination. Is assassination that is carried out in the name of defending the country, or the moral values of the country, virtuous or corrupt?
In his acceptance speech, President Obama defended the war in Afghanistan as a “just war,” a war of last resort, of self-defense, of proportional force. He said that the goal was to spare civilians from violence. “I understand why war is not popular,” he acknowledged, but “peace entails sacrifice.” Without mentioning covert action, he reminded those familiar with the construct why it even exists in the first place: to prevent World War III. “Yes, terrible wars have been fought, and atrocities committed,” he said. “But there has been no Third World War.”
The Nobel Committee in Norway applauded the speech sparingly; the audience gave President Obama a standing ovation at the end. The president skipped the honorary lunch and a concert. He attended the honorary dinner and went home
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