The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (23 page)

I took the three papers that were under my arm and put them on
the desk. “You’re all over them, man,” said Jake.

Dave in Berlin

“None of us speak German, do we?” McChrystal asked. “They could be going, ‘This asshole, look at the jerk in green.’ ”

“How was your run this morning?” I asked.

“We lifted. Getting a touch of plantar fasciitis. I’ve had it for ten years. Just a touch.”

Jake, who was stationed in Berlin in the eighties during the Cold War, remembered a little bit of German. He started to translate the papers.

“You’re here, you’re the commander, and you were giving the overall strategy in the north,” Jake said.

Charlie was getting pissed about the small talk. He wanted to get the Estonia trip straightened out. He tried to interrupt.

“This FM and the agenda for it is completely fucked up,” he told McChrystal. “No one has got control of it. They don’t know what foreign ministers are going to be there.”

“We just talked to Tallinn,” Jake said, referring to an advisor who was currently in the Estonian capital. “He’s walking into the meeting, he says, ‘I don’t even know who is in this meeting.’ ”

“Here’s the option—” Charlie tried interrupting again.

McChrystal was still looking at the papers. “This says essentially I am handsome and well hung,” McChrystal said.

“In German,” said Dave, looking up from his scribbling on the whiteboard.

“This one, too,” said Jake, laughing.

“That’s our story,” McChrystal said.

“We’re sticking to it,” said Jake.

They wanted McChrystal to either go to Estonia or sit in on a meeting via video teleconference. The possible plan: to leave at 0530, arrive at 0830, stay on the ground for four hours, back on Ocean 11 at 1345, and 1445 on to Kabul. The wives were going to the train station tomorrow. They would just tell them good-bye.

“Where’s my body double?” McChrystal said about the video teleconference. He’d have to sit for two hundred forty minutes in front of a camera to broadcast his image onto a screen in a meeting room in Estonia.

“We’ll just have to get a sock-puppet cutout of you,” said Jake.

“If they come back and say they want you for three hours, an option would be, leave here at five in the morning. Five thirty is takeoff,” Charlie said. “The pilots can make this.”

“I think so,” said Dave, laughing—the fucking Air Force.

“What’s your recommendation?” McChrystal asked.

“I recommend: One, we don’t know on the agenda,” Charlie said, predicting the Estonians would react in the same positive way as the Germans. McChrystal, though, was concerned his presence might overshadow other NATO delegates.

“He would be beside himself if you showed up,” Jake said, not as concerned, referring to the Estonian foreign minister.

“Like, ‘Wow, the guy has actually made the effort to get here,’ ” Charlie said.

“We know Clinton is there,” Jake said. “But they don’t know who else.” Getting possible facetime with Clinton, an ally in his policy battles with the White House, was an incentive.

“Do they have a seat for me?” McChrystal asked.

“We’ll make sure they do. I told them we’re looking at timing and would brief you,” Jake said. “They got kind of, ‘Okay, please keep us informed.’ ”

“If it’s three hours, I’d rather do it in person,” McChrystal said, rejecting the VTC option.

Okay. The room went silent. McChrystal gave his orders.

“Course of action: One, we need to get there an hour ahead of time—”

“We don’t have badges, we don’t have shit,” Charlie said.

“Can you give me a place to shower and change?” McChrystal said. “I’d rather not ride in uniform.”

“Or you want to do it in ACUs,” said Charlie. The ACU, or Army Combat Uniform, was the style of outfit McChrystal wore while in Afghanistan. It wasn’t a dress uniform; it was like a camouflaged jumpsuit with sand-colored boots.

“Good idea,” said Jake on the ACUs. “All the way back to the fight.” It would remind the civilians at the foreign minister conference, Jake explained, that McChrystal was a combatant commander from a live war zone.

“Oh hell yeah,” McChrystal said. “Just find me a shred of reason to do it.”

“That would take away the shower part,” said Dave.

“Here’s my guidance,” McChrystal said. “I want to go. I’ll do that as the primary, assuming that’s what they want. I want to make sure. I don’t want to show up here and people say, ‘Why’d you do this?’ ”

“They’re all VTCing in now,” Jake said.

“Why couldn’t they fly out?”

“They got diverted. One of them got as far as Dubai and flew back.”

The volcano, again ruining plans.

“Okay, so that’d be course of action two,” McChrystal said. “It’s easier to go there. I can have a bigger impact face-to-face.”

“You’d have a big impact on Rasmussen,” said Jake, referring to NATO secretary-general Anders Fogh Rasmussen.

“That’s the point. He’s the one I’m really worried about. But I just want to make sure—”

“You’d made the effort to see him going back into Kabul, and made the gigantic fucking effort with the meeting in Tallinn—” said Jake.

“Of course, last time I went to the foreign minister, I got an ugly note from Colin Powell,” McChrystal said.

“Really?” said Jake.” He’s not even there.”

“He’s not even in government,” McChrystal said.

“What was his point?” Jake said.

“What were you doing in Clinton’s territory? I sent him a note right back, I said, ‘The secretary-general directed me to be there.’ I got a chain of command.”

“Which [FM] was that, sir?” Dave asked.

“The one in December [2009]. It was at the height of all the foolishness,” McChrystal said. McChrystal had gotten the note at the end of Obama’s strategic review, and he didn’t appreciate the unsolicited advice from Powell.

“He thought I was fighting our government, which I wasn’t,” McChrystal said. “What are you doing going there? I was fucking ordered there.”

“Like we want to get on a plane,” Dave said.

“Like you’re just looking for reasons to get there,” said Jake.

“I didn’t know if you knew him well,” Dave said.

“I think his thinking was DC thinking,” McChrystal said. “That was early December, prior to my testimony. Everybody was accusing us of trying to do the political thing.”

McChrystal tabled the decision on Estonia for later in the day. I left the control room. I had an appointment at the Afghan embassy to get an entry visa to Afghanistan.

Lieutenant Stanley McChrystal enters an army in the late seventies that is broken, riddled with drugs and race problems. The soldiers aren’t very good: a collection of drunks, dirtbags, junkies, and scammers. He graduates from Special Forces school in 1979, eventually becoming the regimental commander of the elite 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger regiment, in 1986—a dangerous position, even in peacetime, as nearly two dozen Rangers are killed in training accidents during the eighties. It is also an unorthodox career path—most soldiers who want to climb the ranks to general don’t go into the Special Forces.

He revolutionizes the training regime for the Rangers—a habit he would develop, trying to transform systems in place that he felt were outdated. According to Command Sergeant Major Michael Hall, a longtime friend who would serve with him as the highest noncommissioned officer in Afghanistan, McChrystal introduces mixed martial arts, like jujitsu, to the hand-to-hand combat training and changes the drills on the rifle range (requiring everyone to qualify with night-vision goggles), and forces soldiers not just to run, but to build up their endurance
with weekly marches carrying heavy backpacks. He checks a few more boxes on his career in the late nineties, spending a year at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and then the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, where he coauthors a treatise on the merits and drawbacks of humanitarian interventionism. (“I didn’t want to write anything at first,” he says, playing the anti-intellectual card. “But I ended up enjoying it.”)

What McChrystal learns at West Point—and reinforces as he climbs the ranks in the Special Ops world—is how to walk a very fine line in the rigid military hierarchy and yet still succeed. He sees exactly how far he can go without getting tossed out. Being a highly intelligent badass can get you ahead. He was, after all, managing editor of
The Pointer
, and graduating two hundred ninety-eighth isn’t really that bad. His behavior demonstrates his capacity for risk and his willingness to put his views out there, consequences be damned. “He was very focused,” says his wife, Annie. “Even as a young officer he seemed to know what he wanted to do. I don’t think his personality has changed in all these years.” His personality is perfect for the “Rules be damned” ethos that takes hold after September 11. He does his first tour in Afghanistan as the chief of staff of the XVIII Airborne Corps. In 2003, he serves as a Pentagon spokesperson alongside Victoria Clarke at the start of the Iraq War. The stint is memorable for quotes that would have acted as albatrosses to most others, like backing up Donald Rumsfeld’s infamous remark about looting in Baghdad—“Stuff happens.” As Pentagon spokesperson, McChrystal gave his take on the chaos: “Looting is a problem, but it is not a major threat. People are not being killed in looting.” He also, rather unfortunately, mentions that major combat operations in Iraq are over, a week before Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech.

At the end of 2003, he takes over as commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, running the most elite units in the military, including Delta Force, Navy SEALs, and the Rangers. He’s extremely successful as head of JSOC: During the Iraq surge, McChrystal’s team killed
and captured “thousands, I don’t even know how many,” says General Flynn. McChrystal is credited with helping to stabilize Iraq, almost in equal measure to Petraeus’s surge.

It’s during this time that McChrystal, along with Flynn, develops what was for the U.S. military a fairly radical view on information, all in the goal of searching out terrorist networks. They map out networks, picking off various scumbags and insurgents and hunting them down. They take this worldview—networks, information sharing, the impossibility of controlling information, when to apply lethal force, when to kill, when to capture—with them on the next big assignment to Afghanistan in 2009. They even, in a way, have brought it to how they view all their enemies, both foreign and domestic: Find who is linked to whom, find who’s at the wedding, and be faster, smarter, ballsier than everybody else. Then take the fuckers out. “The Boss would find the twenty-four-year-old kid with a nose ring, with some fucking brilliant degree from MIT, sitting in the corner with sixteen computer monitors humming,” says a Special Forces commando who worked with McChrystal in Iraq. “He’d say, ‘Hey—you fucking muscleheads couldn’t find lunch without help. You got to work together with these guys.’ ” Military experts will later describe McChrystal’s JSOC as “industrial-strength counterterrorism.”

Controversy is never far behind: McChrystal’s career should have been over at least two times by now. He is tainted by one of the most controversial scandals of the previous administration: detainee abuse and torture at prisons in Iraq, and the cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death. The behavior surrounding Tillman’s death will continue to haunt him, though. “We didn’t want to give [the family] a half-baked finding,” McChrystal said, yet Tillman’s family felt McChrystal had done exactly that. He would apologize to the family in public during his testimony, but he never personally calls Pat Tillman’s mother, Mary—a slight which she agonizes over to this day.

At the time, Tillman’s death also revealed how savvy McChrystal could be when he was inclined to serve his political masters. The football
player’s death is being spun as a heroic, good-news story during the contested 2004 election cycle. Bush is being overrun with bad news, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the disastrous first attack on Fallujah. McChrystal is trying to help President Bush out, according to members of Tillman’s family. (Though personally a Democrat, McChrystal felt great loyalty to Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Bush.)

Tillman’s family would later accuse McChrystal of a “cover-up” and trying to “cover his ass.” “The false narrative, which McChrystal clearly helped construct, diminished Pat’s true actions,” wrote Mary Tillman in her 2008 book,
Boots on the Ground by Dusk
. Mary Tillman believes that McChrystal got away with it because he was Dick Cheney’s and Donald Rumsfeld’s “golden boy,” she writes. He’s close to Cheney—according to U.S. military officials, a number of times throughout the Bush administration McChrystal got orders directly from Cheney. McChrystal even goes so far as to send a message to Cheney that the JSOC “guys all really love him,” according to Pentagon insiders. Rumsfeld and Cheney embrace McChrystal’s willingness to get things done, even if it includes bending the rules or skipping the chain of command. Author Jon Krakauer, who’s written the most definitive account of Tillman’s death, will accuse McChrystal of having a “credibility problem.”