The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (5 page)

Not much happened worth writing about, I thought. Well, there was always Normandy.

Duncan and I started to walk back to the hotel.

“The trip to Normandy is off,” Duncan told me.

Fuck. That was the entire reason for me to be there—to get a scene at the beaches of Normandy.

“With the wives here, and the high tempo of operations in Afghanistan, it’s been decided that it would be better just to stay in Paris.”

“Oh, okay,” I said. “That’s cool with me.”

Normandy was off. It wasn’t actually cool with me, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Par for the course, really. In my experience, reporting trips rarely went according to plan, especially when the military was involved. There was almost always a fuckup, a logistics disaster, a lengthy delay, or an interview that was promised that would never come through. The only option was to roll with it and try to scramble to find material to take its place.

Back at the hotel, Duncan brought me up to the third floor, room 314.

The suite had been converted to an operations center, set up to run the war on the go, and McChrystal’s traveling staff of about ten was gathered there. Ray, the communications guy, had set up about fifteen silver
Panasonic Toughbooks across the tables, crisscrossing blue cables over the hotel carpet, hooked into satellite dishes to provide encrypted and classified phone and e-mail communications.

Duncan pointed out the other members of the team.

Major General Mike Flynn was considered within the military as one of the most brilliant intelligence officers of his generation. This was the fourth time he’d worked as McChrystal’s number two. He was of Irish descent, wiry, with black hair and a touch of gray, “a rat on acid,” as one of the staffers called him, pointing to what his staff jokingly called a severe case of attention deficit disorder. (“You would never want to be his assistant,” Duncan warned. “He goes through them very quickly.”) He’d partied hard growing up in a family of nine, regularly getting out-of-control drunk while narrowly avoiding serious trouble. He followed in the well-established career path of youthful screwups: He joined the Army, finding his home in the military intelligence branch. He kept his interests varied throughout his career: He took up surfing on a stint in Hawaii and got a master’s degree in telecommunications in the mideighties. Since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had started, he’d become a reservoir of the country’s most critical secrets, a walking database of highly sensitive intelligence in the War on Terror—whom we wanted to kill, whom we killed, and what country we killed them in. His colleagues, though, also considered him somewhat indiscreet; he felt that information should be widely shared, a shift from the traditional bureaucratic practices within the intelligence community of hoarding the choicest intelligence morsels. While he worked at the Pentagon, he didn’t even bother to lock the doors to his car—“a used, beat-up, crappy car,” as his wife described it. He didn’t think anyone would bother trying to steal his old cassette tapes, he said. When he talked to me, I could almost see the sparks fly inside his skull from the clash between the classified and unclassified halves of his brain.

Duncan pointed to Mike Flynn’s younger brother, Colonel Charlie Flynn, who was leaning over Ray’s shoulder, staring at a laptop screen. It
was pretty unusual to have two brothers as part of the same general’s staff. I started to get the sense that McChrystal viewed his staff as an extension of his family, surrounding himself with men from whom he could expect absolute loyalty. While Charlie looked like a shorter and thicker version of his older brother, their personalities were diametric. Mike came across as flighty and imaginative, a man who could go from point X to Z to Y, outlining the insurgent network of the Pakistani Taliban, then wondering where he placed his ham sandwich. Charlie was a stickler for going from point A to point B, so hurry the fuck up. Charlie joined the infantry rather than military intelligence, choosing the physical over the cerebral, and he was now McChrystal’s executive officer, meaning his primary job was keeping The Boss on schedule. Charlie would be the one to tell me when my interview with McChrystal was finished. You’ll notice it’s over, Duncan told me, when a vein on Charlie’s forehead starts to pop.

A middle-aged fellow in a startlingly white Navy uniform was sitting quietly, reading over some papers. Maybe late forties, early fifties. He was Rear Admiral Gregory Smith, director of communications for ISAF. His face reminded me of the cartoon dog Droopy. Duncan explained Smith was his internal rival in determining McChrystal’s media strategy. Duncan was a civilian contractor; Smith was military public affairs. They regularly clashed over the best way to handle the press. In recent years, the Pentagon had moved from relying on military public affairs officers toward civilian experts like Duncan who had real-world media experience. (The traditional military style of public relations—a combination of stonewalling, poorly written press releases, and making demonstrably false claims—had become such an embarrassment during the Iraq War that the Pentagon had launched a searching, multibillion-dollar effort to overhaul and reshape its media strategy, which included hiring guys like Duncan, who at one time worked as a producer for CNN. The Pentagon had about twenty-seven thousand people working on public relations, spending $4.7 billion in a single year.) Nowadays, it was normal for each general to have his own personal media handlers—sometimes numbering
as many as a half dozen within an entourage—to raise his profile in the press.

I knew Smith’s name from newspaper stories—whenever ISAF had to respond on the record to a top media outlet like
The Washington Post
or
The New York Times
, his name would be attached to the typically banal quotes. He’d also just gotten involved in a nasty exchange with a popular freelance journalist named Michael Yon. Yon, considered very military-friendly, had been kicked off an embed. He retaliated by calling Smith and his public affairs staff a bunch of “crazy monkeys” and Smith in particular “another monkey.” Yon accused Smith of being part of a “smear campaign” against him. “Next time military generals talk about poor press performance in Afghanistan,” Yon wrote on his Facebook page that April, “please remember that McChrystal and crew lacked the dexterity to handle a single, unarmed writer… How can McChrystal handle the Taliban?”

The younger staffers on McChrystal’s team came in and out of the suite: Major Casey Welch, thirty-two, with a classic Midwestern look, was McChrystal’s aide-de-camp. Khosh Sadat was an Afghan Special Forces commando and the other aide-de-camp. He was brought along on the Europe trip to provide good visuals during meetings and photo ops. (McChrystal wanted to show that the Afghans were part of the war, too, so they deserved a high-profile slot on his staff.) Then there was Lieutenant Commander Dave Silverman, a Navy SEAL; he’d worked under McChrystal in Baghdad, running a Special Forces team to capture and kill Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

An older white guy in a suit and tie walked by without saying hello. He had thinning hair and a bitter aura, his wardrobe unfamiliar with an ironing board.

“That’s Jake,” Duncan said. “He’s kind of a dick.”

Jake McFerren, a retired Army colonel, was McChrystal’s longtime friend and confidant. They’d been roommates at West Point, and McChrystal hired him to be his top political advisor.

McChrystal walked into the room through the connecting door. He’d ditched his uniform and was now wearing a blue shirt and tie—off-the-rack civilian casual. He sat down at the table.

“General, do you have time for Michael to ask a few questions?”

“Let’s do it.”

I hit record on my tape recorder.

“Is this an open line?” McChrystal asked, pointing to a phone that Ray had installed.

“Ray, is this an open line?” Duncan repeated.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

“Do you need it open? I want to make sure we’re not talking in front of a telephone.”

Duncan hung up the receiver.

I sat down next to him and started fumbling with my questions. I wanted to begin with his career and family life. First, I asked him if he’d gone for a run that morning. One of McChrystal’s defining characteristics, according to all the biographical material I’d read about him, was his obsession with fitness. He regularly would go on jogs for six or seven miles. When he briefly lived in New York to work at the Council on Foreign Relations, he’d run to the office from his place in Brooklyn. His running fetish had become a staple in every profile about him—journalists seemed to view it as a measure of his toughness and drive that translated directly into the ability to win a war.

“I actually like touring by running. I went this morning down past the Louvre at the end, then down the river, and came up by Voltaire’s old house,” he said.

He described his relationship with his father, Herbert, who had fought in Korea, then been a battalion and brigade commander in Vietnam. Herbert had graduated from West Point in 1945; McChrystal had graduated in 1976. He explained his own notion of his career: “We really felt we were a peacetime generation,” he said, comparing his father’s generation
with his own. “I never thought I was going to be a general, and I certainly never thought I’d be fighting a war as a general.”

Duncan interjected, cleverly trying to dictate the direction of the interview.

“Michael is going to come to Kabul for a week, the first week in May,” Duncan said. “He’s going to hang out with us. Some of the piece is in the next few days. We’re originally hoping to bring him up to Normandy, but obviously that sort of changed. But your advice: What are the questions he should ask your team in the next few days, because he’ll be spending time with them as much as you?”

“I think that’s a good idea,” McChrystal said. “Try to understand each of them. Who is related to who? Like we do with the Taliban, or Al-Qaeda. Who was at the wedding? It tells you a lot more about organizations than an organizational chart.”

We talked for about eight more minutes until, as Duncan predicted, the vein on Charlie Flynn’s forehead bulged.

“He has to go,” Charlie said. The general had an important dinner to attend.

McChrystal leaned back. Duncan had told me he hated to do these kinds of events—dinners, ceremonies, diplomatic niceties.

“How’d I get screwed into going to this dinner?” McChrystal demanded.

“The dinner comes with the position, sir,” Charlie replied.

McChrystal turned sharply in his chair.

“Hey, Charlie, does this come with the position?” He flicked Charlie the middle finger. He stood up.

“What’s the update on the Kandahar bombing?” McChrystal asked, shifting back to the war.

“We have two KIAs, but that hasn’t been confirmed,” Charlie said. (The final result of the attack: three dead civilians and seventeen wounded.)

He took a final look around the suite. “I’d rather have my ass kicked
by a roomful of people than go to this dinner,” McChrystal said. He paused for a beat. “Unfortunately, no one in this room could do it.”

With that, he went out the door.

“Who’s he going to dinner with?” I asked Dave, the Navy SEAL.

“Some French minister,” said Dave. “It’s fucking gay.”

I’d spent many weeks around the country’s most senior military officials, and I’d never heard them talk like this before. It was the kind of banter I’d heard on the front lines, but not inside headquarters, where blandness and discretion often trumped colorful language and obscene hand gestures, at least in front of reporters. What exactly was I dealing with here?

“Mike, by the way,” Dave said to me, “there’s no way he could kick my ass.”

JANUARY TO MAY 2009, KABUL AND WASHINGTON, DC

In January, General David McKiernan receives an e-mail from the White House. They’re looking for a new ambassador to take the place of William Wood, a Bush appointee, in Kabul. Chemical Bill—that’s what Embassy officials call him; a man obsessed with poppy eradication, as he’d done with coca when he was down in Colombia. Chemical Bill has run the embassy into the ground. Under his watch, private security contractors from AmorGroup North America party hard, engaging in “deviant actions” that “took place over the past year and a half and were not isolated incidents,” according to a report from a government watchdog group. The guards’ behavior will eventually make headlines when the lewd pictures they’ve taken of themselves are posted on the Internet. There’s a name for the kind of alcohol shots the guards take: vodka butt shots. The world is treated to digital pictures of drunken and overpaid bald men spraying shaving cream on one another’s penises.

Wood’s own fondness for the occasional cocktail doesn’t go over very well in the Islamic culture. American military officials aren’t always impressed with him, either. During an hour-and-a-half meeting at the U.S.
embassy in the fall, attended by a congressional delegation, Wood disappears for fifteen minutes. When he comes back, according to a U.S. official who attended the meeting, he’s in “high spirits”; he starts interrupting McKiernan, he starts interrupting the congressional delegation. After the meeting, McKiernan tells a staffer that he never wants “to go to the embassy again.” None of that, however, has much to do with why Wood is being replaced—he’s been in Kabul for two years already.

The White House wants McKiernan’s input on who should take Wood’s place. What about Karl W. Eikenberry?