Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (19 page)

“Valid target,” pronounced a military lawyer standing at Franks’ side.

The convoy entered Kandahar and drove through the predawn streets, then stopped as some of the passengers got out and entered a building. “Valid target for Hellfire,” said the lawyer, but the vehicles moved on before the drone could fire. When the convoy stopped again, several passengers entered a mosque, off-limits for a strike without special permission. Meanwhile, David Deptula, mastermind of the 1991 Iraq bombing campaign and theorist of effects-based operations who was by now a two-star general directing all allied air forces in the Afghan War, was also glued to the Predator video feed at his headquarters in Qatar. As he told me later with some irritation, he had four planes over the mosque, waiting for clearance to obliterate the building. “Suddenly a vehicle parked outside the building blows up. I said, ‘Who the hell ordered that?’” It turned out that Franks himself, chafing at the delay, had ordered the drone operator to fire a Hellfire missile at the vehicle, a Toyota Corolla. Like many people, Deptula was not used to the notion that commanding generals were now bypassing the entire chain of command to blow up cars. Minutes later, the remainder of the convoy came to a halt and various passengers disappeared inside a large building. Would it be in order to kill everyone inside, including innocent parties? Franks thought he had better consult Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.

Rumsfeld announced he was going to refer the matter to the president. Five minutes later he reported back that Bush had agreed the building could be hit. Then the CIA officer monitoring the video reported that the building might be a mosque. Franks, as he wrote later, “swore silently,” concluded that it didn’t look like a mosque to him, and ordered a waiting Navy F-18 fighter-bomber to bomb the building forthwith. “You’re still good,” said the lawyer. A few minutes later, Franks received a call from Air Force Chief of Staff General John Jumper, who had been watching the entire episode on the Predator screen in
his
office and who smugly informed him that he thought he had seen the high-value targets escape from the building before the strike. Enraged, Franks demanded that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have Jumper’s screen removed. In this new kind of war, video conferred power, at least in Washington.

Unbeknownst to the high-ranking audience gazing at their separate screens, Mullah Omar had indeed been in the convoy. Earlier that evening an American missile had plowed into his home compound as he huddled in the basement, sparing him but mortally injuring his ten-year-old son. According to the Mullah’s driver, later interviewed by journalist Anand Gopal, the Taliban leader had set off with his family and dying child in the Corolla. But the child could not be saved. When the car exploded from the missile strike while he was inside the building, he and the rest of his family ran off (leaving the remainder of the convoy to proceed on its way), and he has not been seen by any Westerner since that day.

Overall, the initial campaign in Afghanistan was deemed a great success, particularly by Rumsfeld, who relished the notion that it was all thanks to “a combination of the ingenuity of the U.S. Special Forces, the most advanced precision-guided munitions in the U.S. arsenal, delivered by U.S. Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps crews, and the courage of valiant one-legged Afghan fighters on horseback.” (Rumsfeld had been taken by reports of one Northern Alliance fighter charging the enemy despite a prosthetic limb.) There was a certain amount of truth in this. Resistance to the U.S.-supported Northern Alliance did collapse when the Taliban lost the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif. But most casualties came after the Taliban surrendered, when many prisoners were crammed into shipping containers and left to suffocate. Had the air strikes really had the devastating effects as claimed in Rumsfeld’s history, there would have been a large number of wounded. Yet in the north, where the bombing had been most intense, there were very few fighters to be found among the casualties at local hospitals, even within days of the fighting. Elsewhere, where U.S. planes caught Taliban formations in the open, such as in front of the town of Tirin Kot in Uruzgan Province, they did inflict heavy casualties, but at Ghazni, which had been heavily bombed thanks to the large number of Taliban tanks based there, the total number of casualties, according to postwar local testimony, was three. More important contributions to the victory were the orders from the Taliban’s overseers in Pakistani intelligence to give up the fight and go home as well as the hefty cash payments handed out by the CIA to various Afghan warlords to abandon their Taliban allies.

Meanwhile, the hunt for high-value targets was pursued with unrelenting but somewhat indiscriminate vigor. Bin Laden himself had slipped the net with relative ease. Having evaded efforts to corner him in his Tora Bora mountain redoubt, he took himself off to the mountainous and heavily forested Kunar Province and thence across the border to Pakistan, settling in the pleasant district of Haripur, where he lived in wedded bliss with his youngest wife for two years before moving to a purpose-built compound in equally pleasant Abbottabad. His immediate subordinate, the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, also escaped. Less fortunate was Mohammed Atef, another Egyptian, who in addition to being generally considered the military commander of al-Qaeda was also a valued mentor to bin Laden. (Atef’s daughter married Mohammed bin Laden, Osama’s son.) He was killed along with seven associates in a drone-assisted bombing strike during the initial American air assault, but was swiftly replaced as military commander by another Egyptian, former army colonel Saif al-Adel.

The list in Bush’s desk had originally contained some two dozen names, but although the president carefully updated the list with excisions whenever news of a fresh kill came in, the number of nominated high-value targets continued to grow. Just as strategic bombing campaigns that commence with a limited number of select targets have traditionally tended to expand, the attack on Afghanistan that began as a hunt for the perpetrators of 9/11 inexorably widened. In part, this was a function of demand, as the number of hunters eager to join in the chase proliferated. In particular, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, irked by the prominent role played by CIA paramilitary teams in the initial overthrow of the Taliban, was eager to enhance the U.S. military role in covert operations. “Have you killed anyone yet?” he would query General Charles Holland, chief of Special Operations Command, whenever they met. In December 2001, a Joint Special Operations Task Force, code-named Task Force 11 for the occasion, with personnel drawn from elite units of all three services, arrived in Afghanistan with the specific mission of killing or capturing al-Qaeda and Taliban “HVTs” (high-value targets).

Task Force 11 appeared to embody the vision of a twenty-first-century military as described in George W. Bush’s September 1999 speech at the Citadel: “agile, lethal … able to identify targets by a variety of means, then be able to destroy those targets almost instantly … able to strike from across the world with pinpoint accuracy … with unmanned systems.” Not only did the task force have the services of the CIA’s Predators, armed and unarmed, the intensely trained elite troops also carried high-tech radios and satellite phones designed to put them in instant communication with commanders near and far. At their disposal were AC-130 Spectre gunships, which could not only lay down withering fire against enemies on the ground but also provide close-up pictures of any area a unit might be thinking of occupying, thanks to the profusion of TV and infrared cameras on board. The NSA and service communications intelligence assets vacuumed up targets’ radio communications and tracked their location. The drones rolling off the General Atomics assembly line gave commanders up to the level of Tommy Franks and beyond a bird’s-eye view of unfolding battles.

Despite the profusion of sensors, it was still hard for the task force to find targets, because in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Taliban regime, there were few to be found. The al-Qaeda leadership had disappeared to Pakistan and elsewhere, as had many of the leaders of the regime. Most of the Taliban had simply retired from politics, at least for the time being, accepting that Afghanistan had entered a new era. Nevertheless, a central war aim of the U.S. military machine had been “to capture or kill as many Al Qaeda as we could,” according to General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The targeting apparatus embodied in organizations such as Task Force 11 and the CIA paramilitary squads demanded victims. Therefore, supply met demand. Strongmen and warlords found they could dispose of two birds with one stone by denouncing rivals in local power struggles to the credulous Americans as Taliban or al-Qaeda leaders and thereby ingratiate themselves with the country’s new rulers. Even those with ironclad proof that they were not al-Qaeda or Taliban were swept up, including a Syrian named Abdul Rahim al-Janko, who had been arrested by al-Qaeda on suspicion of being a Western spy and tortured into giving a videotaped confession that he had been sent by the CIA and Mossad to kill Osama bin Laden. In a jail in Kandahar when the Taliban regime fell, al-Janko was handed to the Americans, who sent him to Guantánamo. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft later played part of the tape of his confession to journalists, claiming it was a would-be suicide attacker’s martyrdom video. The audio was muted, on the excuse that it might contain coded messages for other terrorists.

Meanwhile the search teams thirsted for bigger game. “By February 2002,” Army Special Operations Colonel Andrew Milani drily noted in a later report, “the Joint Special Operations Task Force (i.e., Task Force 11) had become frustrated by the lack of actionable intelligence for high value targets.”

Even genuinely active Taliban leaders were at this point hard to find. One such was Saifur Rahman Mansoor, a youthful son of a famous anti-Soviet fighter who had risen to be a mid-level Taliban commander. Following the fall of the Taliban regime he had retreated with a few hundred followers, including assorted Uzbek and Arab jihadis, to his father’s old redoubt during the Russian war, a remote, narrow mountain valley close to the Pakistani border called the Shahikot. Finding his arrival unpopular with local tribes, he opened negotiations with the authorities in Kabul, using tribal elders as intermediaries, offerring “to end his armed defiance of the interim government.”

Mansoor’s surrender offer was quickly brushed aside, for the U.S. military, eager to “flush out” such a conveniently consolidated collection of the enemy, was preparing a major assault. A surge in cell-phone traffic from the area and sightings of a number of SUVs had convinced the CIA and Task Force 11 that one or more of the highest-value targets of all—Osama bin Laden, his second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri, or Mullah Omar (quickly dubbed “the big three”)—might be wintering there, protected by a large force of bodyguards. According to the plan, conventional U.S. Army troops would drive down the valley from the north in expectation of pushing the enemy, or at least their leaders, into the arms of other units blocking escape routes through the mountain passes leading toward Pakistan. The special operations units, U.S. Navy Seals and others, would be waiting on observation points, ready to scoop up or kill fleeing high-value targets. In keeping with the exclusive and obsessive focus on these particular targets, the Task Force 11 teams were under an entirely separate chain of command from the conventional force, free to act as they chose. Code-named Operation Anaconda, it would be the largest U.S. military ground operation since the 1991 Gulf War.

The ensuing battle featured almost all aspects of the remote-control high-technology approach to war, notably the abiding faith in remote sensing as a substitute for the human eye. The results were instructive, if tragic.

Overlooking the southern end of the valley was a 10,000-foot mountain, Takur Ghar. Task Force 11 planners thought the summit would be an excellent spot for an observation post. “Unfortunately,” as Milani noted in his report, “the enemy thought so too.” Just to make sure, the task force dispatched one of their favorite tools, a four-engine AC-130 plane, to make a reconnaissance of the mountaintop and confirm that it was unoccupied. The plane carried a formidable amount of firepower, including heavy machine guns and a cannon. But Special Forces esteemed the aircraft even more for the array of surveillance devices it carried, including electro-optical and infrared cameras as well as radar. Relayed back to task force headquarters, the pictures showed no sign of any human presence, nor did any other intelligence report from the various surveillance aircraft and other systems blanketing the area. But they were wrong. In fact, as the elite Navy Seals were shortly to discover, several dozen of the enemy, highly trained Arab and Uzbek fighters, were well dug in, complete with a heavy machine gun in a fortified bunker, concealing themselves with the low-technology aid of snow, trees, and a tarpaulin.

To the naked eye, on the other hand, the enemy force was by no means invisible. There was snow on the mountain, and trails of footprints showed up clearly, as did goatskins and other detritus left in plain view by untidy jihadis. These were exactly the kind of telltale signs that Marshall Harrison, the forward air controller prowling the skies over South Vietnam in his wide-observation little plane, had been ready and able to pick up: a trail of footprints left in the mud after early-morning rain, extra clothes on a washing line, and other indications visible to a well-trained human observer. Staring at the images from Takur Ghar on their (relatively) high-definition video screens, the task force mission planners saw no such signs. Believing these systems to be infallible, the commander ordered the SEALs to head for the mountaintop.

So it was that on the night of March 2, 2002, a helicopter flew a SEAL team directly to the summit. They noticed the fresh tracks and goatskins the moment they touched down, but a discussion on whether to quit the scene was interrupted when a rocket-propelled grenade hit the helicopter, which was simultaneously ripped with machine-gun bullets. The pilot quickly took off again, flying the badly damaged craft to a landing several miles away on the valley floor. But in the sudden jolt of the takeoff, a SEAL, Petty Officer Neil Roberts, who had been standing on the rear exit ramp, fell off, stranding him alone amid the hornets’ nest of aroused jihadis.