Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tora Bora

The name is so familiar
Sounding so close, so ancient, so complex
As the cave complexes witnessing the conflict
Between the latest, highest, most lethal modern technology
And the most primitive, backward, pointless theology

   
—KURDISH POET KAMAL MIRAWDELI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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