JK Idema’s
THE SIXTH PILLAR
- TASK FORCE 7 -
_____________________________________
The Making of An American Holy War
©2012 Penny Alesi, The
Sixth Pillar Collection, all rights
reserved.
Seven Green Berets, Seven Men, Seven Agents, Seven
Forces
Operating covertly, clandestinely, and off the
reservation against the forces of Terror
They were disavowed by their government before they
ever started
Literary Agent-
Marianne Strong
Strong Literary Agency
New York, NY
Stonglit@aol.com _
212/249-1000 _
212/831-3241 _
Copyright 2006
THE SIXTH PILLAR
- TASK FORCE 7 -
By
December of 2003, Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida
network had gotten back on their feet, fueled by the magnetic pull
of a new jihad in Iraq. America had made the
same mistake in Iraq which the Soviet Union had made in Afghanistan. Bush and
his advisors had underestimated the amount of poor young Muslim fundamentalists
just looking for a way to enter paradise. Bin Laden had dispatched his best men
left to Iraq to lead the new resistance against the infidel. His ability to
inspire, and his skill atthe delegation of tasks and authority was unmatched. If in fact it was him. Or was he
dead, and was it covertly led by someone else?
At
the moment, that mattered not. What did matter were the 36 al-Qaida
operatives that had been dispatched into the United States to
conduct a new wave of terror, an operation that would eclipse 9/11. Just as
they had when the backpack nukes went missing from Russia in 1991, on their way
to Islam, the U.S. government once again found itself unable to stop the
threat, or even counter it. But Jack Idema did not, he had been hunting those
weapons for 16 years. Bin laden called it The Sixth Pillar,
a parable based on the Five Pillars of Islam. Six nukes, six US cities, six
teams of six. To combat it Task Force 7 was formed. Seven men, seven agents,
seven forces, operating covertly, clandestinely, and completely off the
reservation. They were disavowed by the government before they ever started.
They were publicly disavowed when the secret operation went awry. It was a
conflict between bin Laden and a man then known in Afghanistan only as Jack,
and it was, without any doubt, a personal battle. Waged in a personal style, on
a personal level, through personal acts at a level of intensity hard to
comprehend.
It
literally altered or destroyed the lives of everyone in its wake.
Al-Qaida
did not mean “the base,” as was believed. It meant “the basis.”
The first brick in a
foundation—bin
Laden’s foundation for a worldwide Muslim revolution. The basis for a
world-wide jihad, fueled by zealots, run by “the Sheik,” and implemented
through the internet. Bin Laden had used his first jihad
in Afghanistan to begin the basis of what he knew would be a
worldwide movement. He would bring that movement to the world in a new way,
electronically, and it would be called megaterrorism. Starting with using text
messages on mobile phones, and satellite phones, he would eventually use the
internet to run his new terror corporation, dubbed Holy War, Inc. by some. But
just as al-Qaida became more astute at running a
terror conglomerate, they also became more media savvy.
With
the advent of Abu Ghraib they learned a new skill. Cry torture and let slip the
dregs of terror. Time after time al-Qaida terrorists
would be set free for lack of evidence, only to return to the fight filled with
stories of torture and humiliation at the hands of the infidels. They would use
those horror stories to recruit more foot soldiers to their cause. Al-Qaida
had come up with the ultimate defense: Torture. Yell torture when
caught and slip away to kill again. It was brilliant, and thanks to the press,
it worked.
In
the end, Jack would lose. Bin Laden and his Sixth Pillar would
slip away. Jack and his men would be prisoners of war, tortured, beaten,
starved, and imprisoned for ten years. But not before they stopped an al-Qaida
plot to kill diplomats, hundreds of American soldiers, and topple
the Afghan government.
However,
it wasn’t bin Laden that brought Jack and his team down. It was the FBI. This
is their story.
A
story of intrigue, terrorists, spies, covert black ops, renegade Green Berets,
and insidious treachery. It has been one of, it not the, biggest stories of
2004 in the War On Terror, even eclipsing the Abu Ghraib scandal. This is the
real story of Task Force 7, told from inside the Taliban’s most notorious
prison. Of their crusade against the enemies of America. Just the way it
happened. The way the government said it didn’t.
Rough Working Outline
Introduction
Prologue
Part I – Afghanistan/Iraq/New York/Kabul/Fort
Bragg/Washington
1. The Sixth Pillar – al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden,
their new plan begins
2. The Call – Zabi Calls Jack to first identify the
terrorist threat
3. Honor Thy Country – The FBI/DOD/CIA are alerted to
the terrorist threat
Part II – Fort Bragg/Washington/Kabul
4. Bureaucrats & Bullshit— Drama in D.C.;
FBI/CIA/DOD/NSA– why we can’t win
5. The Box— FBI Lie Detectors, AQ instituting their
Iraq protocol in Afghanistan
6. Building a Team— CTG, Zabi, Boykin, Rohen, the
boys, the groundwork, the logistics, and how a clandestine operation is
conceived and implemented
7. Hunting “the G-Man”— Red Cross GITMO Letters,
Meeting with OBL’s Daoud
Part III – Delhi/Kabul/Tora Bora/Pakistan/Bagram
8. In-Country — Zabi, logistics, recruiting Northern
Alliance and Jack’s old soldiers
9. Boots on the Ground— getting there is half the
battle
10. Building an Alliance— working with the NA, repore,
Kyber Pass, etc
11. OPERATION MONK— Task Force-180, Task Force 176,
CIA, etc
12. Mike Spann— Return to Mazar-i-Sharif/CIA/the
prison revolt/General Atta and bringing Zorro into the team, buying Stinger
missiles with the State Dept.
Part IV – Kabul/Jalalabad/Khost/Eastern and Southern
Afghanistan
13. “770297”—The plate # – the capture of “G-man” on
Jalalabad Road
14. Breaking the G-Man – getting the G-man to talk
about the assassination plot
15. Busting Serajan – an intricate part of the assassination
plot; a Hekmatyar terrorist
16. The Raid on Malikyar – the most frightening
terrorist of all
17. Aggressive Interrogation – breaking down
terrorists the Jack way
18. The Terror Plot unravels – identifying the entire
terror network and the targets
Part V – Kabul/Washington/Langley/Fort Bragg/CENTCOM
19. The CT Op Starts Unraveling – At war with the FBI
and Ambassador Khalilizad
20. Hitting The Fan – The capture and arrest of Jack
and his team, treachery & deceit
21. Welcome to Dozakh – Taken into NDS custody;
interrogation/torture/and pain
22. “A bad day is no brother” – It appears the NA
deserts the team and disavows
them
23. The Trial – convicted by the international press
before it ever started
24. The Appeal – The press is banned; secret hearings,
secret deals, secret results
25. The Siege at Pulacharke Prison – Saber 7 loses
some of their best friends in battle
26. Always the Hard Way – three years at the world’s
most infamous prison
27. Karzai Folds – in Afghanistan you only win by
force
28. Leaving Afghanistan – how in the end, Mullah
Mujahed was traded for Jack.
Epilogue
Note: The above chapter list is just a personal rough outline of the
people, places, events. I am not writing the chapters as I did in the Hunt for Bin Laden and in Task
Force Dagger, which
were long and detailed. I am going to write this in the style of sample
chapters you see here. Short chapters, fast action, abrupt twists and turns.
Most of the chapter layouts will be more like Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and Angels
& Demons than The Hunt for Bin
Laden when each chapter
covered an entire event or place. Much of the book was written longhand, pen
and paper, and smuggled out in sections. A publisher will be supplied with a
copy of the drafts so there is no question about how it was written, or by
whom. The first book finished will be The Sixth Pillar
- Task Force 7. That will be the real story, not the hyperbole lies the press
has concocted. The story is backed up by extensive evidence (an understatement)
supporting everything, almost every conversation, every meeting (audio and
video). Personally I have only given short interviews to Rolling Stone and
Maxim. These are the only two news organizations I have actually given an
interview with. Although I talked briefly with Financial Times in August
(2004). The reporter’s name was Viktoria (my first wife’s name) so, as you
might imagine, I couldn’t turn her down. If anyone else says I gave him or her
an interview, or any of my guys gave them an interview, that is a lie. It never
happened. (A good example is Shamus McGraw at Stuff—I NEVER gave him interview
and all those quotes were made up). Further, there will be no interviews ever again.
In the past two years I have turned down more than 60 interviews including
several paid interview offers. The next time this story gets told, it will be
in my own words, no one else’s. The way it really happened, not the way the
media invented it happened.
The enclosed article The Deadly Dreaded “T” Word, was written for Vanity Fair in a
small mud cell, by pen, on scrap paper, smuggled out in sections. It is a
comprehensive outline of what the book will look like. However, three main
differences are; 1) the book will not have the torture of us as a lynchpin, 2)
the book will be written in chronological order, 3) the book will be in third
person, unless it’s happening directly to me, then in first person.
The style is unusual, but I think it would be very
cool. But I am really open to suggestions on this once a publisher sees the
first draft.
The next two books will include the fall of the Soviet
empire and the nukes that al-Qaida gained access to years later. It is
basically done, and needs one more rewrite before being ready, but I cannot do
that until I return to the US. The other one is called TASK FORCE SABER –and is the complete story of my first year in
Afghanistan, the fall of the Taliban, and the war, from my perspective as the only person
operating alone with the Mujahadeen
and Northern Alliance from
October 2001 until August 2002. That book was 80% complete
before I left for Afghanistan in April 2004. It will be completed about 60 days after
I finish The Sixth Pillar.
Chapter 1 of The
Sixth Pillar is
already written at the office in NC. I do not have access to it at this time.
So it is not enclosed. It is cool, it starts with a secret al-Qaida meeting in Afghanistan
and a covert contact in Iran. All of which actually happened.
Introduction
Everybody remembers a story differently. Everybody
that reads Major Jim Morris’ best-selling War Story comes
away with a different view of the Vietnam War. Every eyewitness recalls a different
version of an accident, or a crime. Everybody spins a news story the way they
want it to spin. That’s the beauty of a story, once it is over and you tell it,
you tell it your way, and it’s your story. More than one thousand news articles
have been written about this story. But that was their story. Those were their
facts– and believe me when I tell you that most of them were bullshit.
Well, this is my war story. It’s my version. Maybe
some things were worse, maybe some things were better. But it’s the way I
remember it. And it’s the first time I’ve told it, in my own words.
Jack
Christmas 2004
–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
It was a really fucked up day….
Unconsciousness did not come with the first blow,
although the flashes of light
and bombardment of bright tiny supernovas shooting through
my brain should have
brought a swift blackout and an end to the pain.
Unfortunately they did not.
I have been in hundreds of fights and plenty of
shootouts in my life. It has been
my ability to stay conscious and focused that has
always helped me stay alive even in
the worst of circumstances, and against far superior
opponents. But this time I prayed
for unconsciousness. God granted my prayers and
somewhere between the seventh and
eighth blows to my head, I slipped into a better
world. One of distant memories and
unfulfilled dreams.
The press had been brutal throughout our trial… and before… from the moment
someone used the dreaded and deadly “T” word—Torture. The Associated Press had
cast the die on Day One. The reports were complete
lies. Prisoners were found hanging
upside down, tortured, in the private house of three
Americans in Kabul… A brief
shootout… the random kidnapping of bearded Muslim men
off the Kabul sidewalks in
the hopes of finding a terrorist and getting a big fat
reward. And, of course, the “T”
word. More Americans, torturing more Muslims. That was
the story. And the press
only got worse from there. A lot worse.
Our story has been turned into the most controversial
case in years. Our counterterrorist
task force had been referred to alternatively as
vigilantes, secret government
operatives, free-lance bounty hunters, nut jobs,
spies, and/or mercenaries. According to
the press, we were either misguided crusaders,
disavowed agents, torturers, black ops
“cut loose,” con men, or American heroes, depending on
who you asked, and which day
of the week you asked. We were in fact— TASK FORCE
SABER/7.
Every American with a son or daughter serving at
Bagram Air force Base in
Afghanistan, every husband or wife with a spouse, and
every American who has a
friend serving at Bagram, should remember the
terrorist bombing of the Marine
barracks in Beirut and remember the 9/11.
Then they should ask why the government failed to stop
these attacks. The
answer is a failure of human intelligence, action, and
imaginative daring. Those are not
my words, those are the words of 9/11 Commission.
When we alerted the FBI to a terrorist threat against
U.S. personnel they failed to
act in any positive way against the terrorists, even
though one of the terrorists was fully
identified by name, description, and location.
Clearly, to us, the FBI was failing to act
again.
After contacting the Pentagon we acted; asked for deconfliction
instructions
(deconfliction
is the phrase for keeping covert
ops out of each other’s way), asked for
support, briefed them on our mission, and then we
immediately deployed to
Afghanistan. Working with our former Northern Alliance
allies, we captured first a
man known only as Ghulamsaki, the terrorist the FBI
was informed of previously, and
then subsequently captured 95% of the entire al-Qaida and Hezb-i-Islami terrorist
operation cell behind the bomb plot. In four different
operations and raids, we captured
terrorists, explosives, detonators, and vehicles that
were to be used in the terrorist
scheme.
The plot involved the assassination of the Afghan
President, Minister of Defense,
Minister of Education, two ambassadors, and the
leaders of Commander Ahmad Shah
Massoud’s Jamiat Party. Had any of them been
successful it would have resulted in
certain civil war and the deaths of untold Afghan and
American lives. The lives of
American soldiers, not just from civil war, but from
the destruction of our major
military base in Afghanistan.
As I look around I realize how patently bizarre life
really is, imprisoned with
terrorists in a distant desert land, caged and beaten
in a primitive world, while the
terrorists who we stopped, have been set free, to
kill again.
I have always loved exotic war torn places. Africa,
Latin America, South East Asia,
and Afghanistan. In 1978, as a very young Special
Forces sergeant, I pined over the end
of the Vietnam War. Since the age of twelve I knew my
destiny. I knew I would be a
Green Beret,1 I knew I
would serve my country, and knew I would help “cleanse the
world of communism,” as my high school art teacher,
Wally Noahkowski wrote inside a
first edition copy of The Green Berets,2 which he gave me at my high school graduation
in Poughkeepsie, NY. As one of the smallest,
skinniest, non-athletic runts in the class,
no one except Mr. Noahkowski actually expected me to
become a Green Beret. Not
even my mother.
1 Editor’s Note: Jack became
America’s youngest Green Beret in 1975
2 I still have this book with the
inscription if Vanity Fair would like to see it.
Two years after Wally Noahkowski gave me that book, I was jumping out of airplanes
on the border of Eastern Germany with the10th Special
Forces Group (Airborne). We
were America’s clandestine spear into the evil
empire’s heart. I had expected exotic
women, rainforests, and jungle battles; what I got,
was a runny nose, freezing on
snowshoes, and sitting in German cow dung filled
fields spying on the East Germans
and the Soviets.
In the fall of 1977 I had already sent back a “BORIS”
Intel report identifying and
recording the first ever in-flight sighting of an
armed Soviet FOXBAT fighter. I’d also
gotten the first picture as it came about three
hundred feet over the grazing field’s tree
line. 10th Special Forces Group Battalion Headquarters
in Bad Tölz, Germany didn’t
believe my report, especially since it contradicted
the current CIA reports that
FOXBATS had not even done test flights in Eastern
Europe yet.
So began my opposing stance to the status quo determinations and intel quality
of America’s intelligence agencies. So also began my
belief that nothing in war beats
HUMINT– Human Intelligence– eyes and boots on the
ground. One thousand
intelligence analysts, logistics, and support
personnel cannot do what a handful of
operators can. Sure, an operator needs their support, but
it is not indispensable. The
operator is. An operator is a door-kicker first; an
intelligence agent, a shooter, field
agent, a medic, a commo man, a demo man, a spy, and a
diplomat without portfolio, all
rolled up in one little neat package. Operators, as
they are referred to in Special Forces,
Delta Force, and the British SAS, are indispensable to
war, any war, especially the War
On Terror. The best operators can convince you they
are whatever they need to be at
the time. And that means whatever they need to be to
win. In our world— the world of
an operator— winning is all that matters.
Vietnam had ended on April 25, 1975 and with it my
quest to meet the communists on
the battlefield. But, by the spring of 1977 I was
fortunate enough to be one of only two
dozen elite super-secret Hwa Rang Do warriors clandestinely trained at Fort Bragg, NC,
by the legendary Michael Echanis, and his “deputy”
Charles Sanders of the 5th Special
Forces Group (Airborne) also at Fort Bragg back then.
Mike was arguably the best hand-to-hand combat killer
in the entire world. He
became infamous for his completely unconventional
look. Wearing rip-stop jungle
fatigues that hadn’t been issued since Vietnam and
were dyed black, Mike and Chuck
Sanders sauntered around Fort Bragg with impunity. I
can still hear Jimi Hendrix
playing on Mike’s 8-Track in his stripped down Jeep
Wrangler. Their long hair,
handlebar mustaches, Hwa-Rang-Do tiger
& dragon tattoos, and black-dyed Coral
Bootie sneakers sent a signal to aspiring young
Special Forces trainees– black ops,
spook missions– as CIA sponsored activities were
referred to– were still around for the
Green Berets, even if for only a elite select few.
Echanis was keeping alive the main
reason soldiers joined Special Forces– for that one chance
in a twenty-year career, to
embark on a clandestine mission that could help alter
the map of the world, for the good
mankind. Such was the motto of the Special Forces, “De Oppresso Liber,” we liberate
the oppressed.
The mission of the JFK Special Warfare Center’s Hwa Rang Do hand-to-hand
Combat Special Weapons and Tactics Committee was to
train and deploy 44 instructors
throughout the Special Forces, Navy SEALs, Army
Rangers, and Marine Recon units.
They would then carry the art to a few dozen SMUs (Special
Mission Units) and Special
Operations teams. It was the forerunner of the SF
Charlie Companies, which were the
Special Forces hostage rescue and counter-terrorist
strike forces. But, with only about
20 or so individual operators ready, General Emerson,
the Fort Bragg commander,
ordered the project terminated. It was too violent,
too “scary,” and way too politically
sensitive.
In the wake of CIA congressional hearings, President
Ford had issued an E.O.
(Executive Order) banning assassinations. Our organization
had been formed after the
E.O. was issued making it even worse in the
administration’s view. And, once the real
purpose leaked out, the course and the unit was
immediately disbanded. Colonel
“Chargin” Charlie Beckwith, the creator and first commander of
Delta Force was not
happy and voiced strong objections. Beckwith knew this
type of soldier would be
needed one day. Still, Echanis’ “boys” were dispersed
to different units, not allowed to
teach their skills, and would never officially operate
again together.
By 1978, the Communist Sandanistas were rolling over
Nicaragua and Mike
asked me to join him and Chuck in Managua. I wouldn’t
be engaging Soviet soldiers,
but I would be killing their proxies. Beggars can’t be
choosy, so Nicaragua it was. At
least target-rich jungles were back on my radar
screen. A few short months later Mike
and Chuck were killed when a SAM-7 rocket hit their
twin engine aircraft. There were
lots of stories about how it happened, but most were
bullshit– even then the press rarely
got anything right in war.
Jimmy Carter had officially pulled everyone out, and
abandoned Somoza and his
National Guard, which was out of ammo, out of medical
supplies, almost out of men,
but still fighting valiantly. Mike was dead. Chuck was
dead. And the Sandanistas were
overrunning the entire country at an exponentially
increasing rate. Things were going
rapidly downhill. As much as it pained me, I left
Nicaragua, voicing, like McArthur in
the Philippines, to return one day and help liberate
its people. Just five years later,
thanks to Ronald Reagan, America did, and I spent the
next few years in and out of El
Salvador, Honduras, and finally, Nicaragua.
Reagan, the CIA, and Special Forces were changing the
course of history– for
the better. Then the Iran-Contra scandal broke.
Special Ops were under the gun, black
money dried up, cross-border ops were severely cut
back, and the press was on
everyone’s ass. But by that time it was too late, communism
was falling like dominos
in reverse. Even though (luckily, as it kept out
conventional military forces and the
military-industrial complex) Congress had imposed a
“speed limit” of only 55 American
“advisors” in El Salvador, the FMLN insurgents had
been slaughtered, and El Salvador
was destined for peace and democracy. Now, twenty
years later, look at Central
America. Americans are building beach houses in
Nicaragua, and dive resorts in El
Salvador.
With another communist country just a stone throw away
from our southern
border, I started following the events in Afghanistan
during the Soviet invasion on
Christmas 1979. Finally, it seemed there was a place I
could meet the “evil empire”
face to face. Some of my friends were already working
on the top secret “mule pack
program.” They were getting weapons, ammo, and MANPAD
ground-to-air missiles
into the hands of the Afghan Mujahadeen. First Red-eyes, then Stingers, guns, and
ammo. Stinger Missiles flowed like rainwater thanks to
Congressman Charlie Wilson
and his boys.
I wanted in on it, badly, but 5th Special Forces Group
(Airborne) had the deal
locked up. Even my pleading and begging could not open
that door. Luckily, I was
already focused on a different area of operations that
would not be mainstream for
another 20 years– counter-terrorism. I was good at it,
so good in fact, that the JFK
Special Warfare Center and School (the G-3, director
of operations) sent me to SOT to
evaluate the course.
Special Operations Training (SOT) was conducted at the
army’s super-secret
Mott Lake Compound, out in the remote regions of Fort
Bragg. “Special Ops” was a
new phase for SF, and this was more than a decade
before “Special Operations” was
endorsed by the old war horses and grew into a 25+
billion dollar a year (SF only gets
4%) separate major command known as US SOCOM (US
Special Operations
Command).
In fact, Mott Lake and SOT were so secret that when a
couple of local cowboys
drove their pick-up truck down the wrong road one
night—after more than a couple of
beers—they were quickly interdicted by a bevy of 40mm
grenades. Apparently they
were too drunk to read the signs “Deadly Physical
Force Authorized Beyond This Point
Without Warning - TURN BACK NOW!” Little was left of
the truck or the two men.
I was a ringer in the course, sent to send reports and
my evaluations back to the
command at JFKSWCS. Apparently there was a growing
concern that America’s
premier CT (Counter-Terrorist) school was ineffective,
outdated, and poorly run. In
1983 it was, and as a result of my input several
instructors were transferred and the
course completely revamped. Today it is– thanks to the
skill of the highly trained Green
Berets that run its successor– the best CT course in
the world. My “undercover” partner
during the course was a decorated Vietnam hero named
Gary Rohen. He had just been
promoted Major, but during the course he wore
captain‘s rank so he wouldn‘t outrank
the school commander. He was also one of my best
friends, and hopefully still is.
By 1991 I was engaging the Soviets again, this time
directly. But now they were
Russians, and known as the OMON, a state-sponsored
terrorist group operating in the
Baltic Republics. They were killing Lithuanians and
Lithuanians were hunting and
killing them.
Lithuania was in a desperate struggle to break the
communist stranglehold.
Soviet tanks were driving through the streets and over
Lithuanians.
Nothing gives you a sense of the fragility of life
like watching a Soviet T-80
battle tank drive over people. Their mangled bodies
are left behind bearing the gaping
tiger claw marks of iron tank tread lacerations.
This was the Soviet Union I knew and hated. My best
friend in Lithuania was
then, and now, Jouzas Rimkevicius, a former major in
the Soviet Militia. We had
become quick life-long friends after a shooting
contest in the basement range of the
Lithuanian KGB Headquarters.
Jouzas hated the Soviets. I hated the Soviets. Jouzas
loved a good bottle of
cheap Russian Vodka, and so did I. It didn’t matter
who won the match, although I did
barely, what mattered was us sharing that bottle of
vodka, and a common enemy.
The short and skinny is; we uncovered an OMON
operation to transfer nuclear
materials and weapons to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
Some of the nuclear materials
were stopped, most were not. The Soviet Union
collapsed. Eight Lithuanian border
guards were killed, and the backpack nuclear weapons
were in my sights, as was the
Soviet spy leading the operation.
Then the FBI got involved after I gave a July 1992
Pentagon briefing during
which I accused the FBI of being compromised by the
KGB. After the briefing an FBI
agent named Pitts and I came within inches of a
fistfight. The FBI not only wanted my
sources; they wanted me to shut my mouth about KGB
moles inside the Bureau.
Despite my battle with the FBI, I never stopped the
flow of information to the United
States Department of Defense. The FBI warned me then,
and later, repeatedly, that it
was not in my interest to resist them. A smart guy
would have listened to them. A few
months later I got set up on phony criminal charges.
Of course the FBI still insists I was
guilty of wire fraud. We won the first trial (11 to 1
for acquittal- a hung jury), ran out of
money, and lost the second trial. The FBI tried to
capture the nukes and the smugglers
themselves and failed. My wife and I went to prison
and the nukes were loose. The
Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Special Operations and Low
Intensity Conflict (SO/LIC) wrote a letter3 to
the judge asking for my release. It was on
official stationary, and said, “… Idema may be the
last person for whom the phrase I
give you my word still has meaning. To Keith [Jack],
honor is everything, and his word
is the manifestation of that honor. I have accepted it
frequently in the past, and I have
never been disappointed.” The ASD SO/LIC is the top of
the food chain in Special
Operations. A DOD letter such as this, to a federal
judge no less, has never before, and
I doubt ever will, be written again, for anyone.
Dozens of letters like this, on official
stationary, were sent from Special Operations people
all over the world, including
Rimkevicius, who had become chief of Lithuanian
INTERPOL. So much for a web
blog claim that I was a shitty soldier.
CBS 60 Minutes did a story called “America’s Worst Nightmare,”
about the
beryllium smuggling part of the operation. One
shipment of beryllium– used as a
reflector in nuclear weapons– was permeated with
weapons grade U-235 Uranium
traces. U-235 is used in SADMs (Special Atomic
Demolition Munitions). The press
3 This letter, along with dozens
and dozens of similar letters, can be provided by Master Sergeant
Thomas
Bumback 910/323-8581, or my wife.
calls them briefcase nukes. There is no such thing;
they are man-portable nukes or
“backpack nukes.” They don’t fit in a briefcase, or a
suitcase. They are deadly. That’s
where I met Gary Scurka, a former Connie Chung
producer who produced the CBS
piece on nuclear smuggling, and won a huge award for
it in June 1996.4 I didn’t go to
the award ceremony. I was in federal prison fighting
the last remaining superpower in
the world with a typewriter and a law book.
Earl Edwin Pitts was arrested in December of 1996 for
espionage. I danced the
jig on a table in prison. I lost my wife to a buck
sergeant at Fort Bragg. On September
15, 1997, CBS 60 Minutes ran another special about
nukes. This time Russian Vice
President Alexander Lebed admitted they were missing.
Two days later I was released
without ever giving up my assets to the FBI, or
telling them anything else, besides “fuck
you.” I didn’t trust the FBI then, and I haven’t
trusted them since. Almost two years
later, Robert Phillip Hanssen, a senior FBI official
who was also head of the FBI’s
NSD,5 which was involved in my case, was also arrested for
espionage. I danced the jig
again, this time with my new wife and soulmate,
Viktoria. Danny Coulson, another FBI
senior agent that buried me was forced to resign over
Ruby Ridge and Waco. Another
enemy, FBI Deputy Director Larry Potts also got fired.
My spooky world had come full
circle.
Life was good. I had a house, a dog, a hot tub, a new
turbo-charged Grand Prix,
a great job, and a beautiful wife. My old enemy, the
Soviet Union was extinct. I was
writing a book and I had just won the prestigious
National Press Club Award.6 Special
Forces are now called the “quiet professionals,” but
in the old days, we were the “silent
professionals.” To me, that meant silent stalking and
missions, not being afraid to speak
out– and lots of guys didn’t like me because of my
penchant for sounding off about
things I thought were good, or bad, or stupid,
depending on the given situation. I’ve
never said I wasn’t a wise-ass with an attitude.
Still, everything was grand.
Then the fucking terrorists blew up New York...
4 IRE Tom Renner Award for Investigative
Reporting. www.ire.org
5 You can download the Hanssen
report at the FBI website- www.doj.gov
6 Best Reporting on-line, 2001, for
“The Colonel’s Wife.” See National
Press Club site.
The first tower had not even collapsed yet when my
wife Viktoria turned from the TV in
tears and said in a soft voice,
“You’re going back to war aren’t you?”
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“I do, I’m going to lose you,” she said.
“Hey, we don’t even know who did this yet,” I was
trying to reassure her, but she
knows me to well.
“No, but I know you have an idea, and when you find
out I know you are gone.”
Like so many others, our lives were changed that day,
but my destiny was clear.
I would engage terrorists wherever they were, wherever
they hid, wherever they ran. I
would die before I let them do this again. Some people
say you write your own destiny,
others say it is written for you before you are born.
Bin Laden wrote mine on
September 11, 2001.
A few weeks later President George Bush said we were
all soldiers in the war on terror
and every American must do what they could to stop
terrorists and fight terrorism.
I was a Green Beret, and I knew what I could do. By the
way, I am still a Green
Beret. The funny thing about Green Berets is that you
don’t retire, wake up the next
morning, and say, “wow, I’m a former Green Beret.”
Marines say, once a Marine,
always a Marine. With the Green Berets it’s not only a
concept, it’s a law. The Green
Beret is a presidentially7 authorized insignia,
which just happens to be headgear. You
are awarded the Green Beret. You earn it. It is not
like the maroon beret of America’s
airborne forces, or the US Army Ranger beret, which is
given to you when you arrive at
the unit, and relinquished upon leaving. There are no
former Green Berets, unless of
course they’re dead. You can be a former member of the
US Special Forces, but you
are always a Green Beret.
The next day I was packing my bags for Afghanistan. It
was to be a
humanitarian aid mission. I would set up drop zones
for airdrops to Northern Alliance
soldiers fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida. Their beloved commander, Ahmad Shah
Massoud, had been assassinated by al-Qaida during an interview just two days before
9/11. I would also provide combat medic assistance to
our wounded allies. My friend,
Gary Scurka, then a producer with National Geographic,
went with me. Also along was
Gregg Long, a Lt. Colonel with DIA (Defense
Intelligence Agency) who was now
working in de-mining operations in Cambodia.
7 “The Green Beret is “… a symbol
of excellence, a badge of courage, a mark of distinction in the fight for
freedom.” John F. Kennedy, describing the Green Beret on December 10, 1961.
This became a Presidential
Executive Order that would forever protect the Green Beret as the official
headgear of U.S.Army
Special Forces qualified individuals. On or about 1974, the US Army officially
began awarding the
“S” designator after a person’s MOS (Military Occupational Insignia) which
remains with the person
for life. In the mid-1980’s the SF (Special Forces) Tab was also awarded as a
non-revocable,non-expirable
badge and official award. By 1990 the Army would create the new “18 Series” for Special
Forces, assigning all graduates an additional lifetime designation.
I asked ten other “retired” Green Berets to go with
us. They all said they were
either too old or it was too crazy and dangerous.
Jouzas sent me an email saying he
would never return to Afghanistan, where he had been
with the Soviet Army. He said it
was a place where even your best friend would have you
for dinner with his family, then
say “goodnight my brother,” and cut your throat the
minute you turned your back. I had
no idea how in the end, Jouzas would be so right.
Well, almost right. Little did I know
it would be my own people that slit my throat, not the
Afghans.
I knew Glen, a lawyer, and a doctor, would be a great
asset on the team, so I gave
him a call. Problem was, Glen was also a Reserve
Warrant Officer on a Special Forces
team. Glen wanted to wait on the chance they would
deploy his team. I tried to tell him
the war would move too fast, too furiously, and it
would be years before his reserve
team was sent, probably on a civil affairs
reconstruction mission. But Glen insisted they
would be deployed any day. This time I was right, Glen
wouldn’t get into Afghanistan
until almost two years later.
We were to be in-country just a few weeks, during
which Gary would document
the plight of Commander Massoud’s Northern Alliance
soldiers, and their desperate
need for aid and supplies. I promised Viktoria I would
be home by Thanksgiving.
In early November 2001 we were already making a huge
difference on the ground,
bringing in supplies, and providing front line combat
medic support to the NA (as
Special Forces referred to the Northern Alliance).
Long was busy mapping minefields
and helping me find out who was poisoning the HDR food
drops– the Pentagon
originally announced it was the Taliban. It turned out
to be our side. Our report made it
to Rumsfeld and Colin Powell. We stopped the poisonous
airdrops of HDRs
(Humanitarian Daily Rations) which were rupturing as
they hit the ground from 30,000
feet and spoiling quickly in the desert environment.
TASK FORCE DAGGER Special
Forces teams started bringing in bags of rice instead,
and everyone was happy. Of
course a Colonel in the Army who had his own private
humanitarian aid project quickly
took the credit. He had never even been to
Afghanistan.
Scurka and Long were on a hilltop in Kal-a-Khata when the first rounds started
impacting around them. It was 140 miles of battlefield
front line trenches between the
NA and the Taliban. The only other armed Americans in
the area were Master Sergeant
John Bolduc’s “TIGER 03” Special Forces A-Team. Bolduc
and TIGER 03 would, by
the end of the war, be called the most significant
team of the war,8 dispatching
thousands of Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists to paradise, and destroying hundreds of
tanks, artillery and armor pieces. No other force
would inflict the damage on the
enemy, as did Bolduc’s team, not before, not after,
not ever.
8 Speech of Colonel John
Mulholland, US Embassy Compound, December 2001.
I had told Gary not to leave my side, but while I was
bandaging NA soldiers and
helping the Mujahadeen sight
in mortars to stop Taliban tanks from breaching the front
lines, Gary had wandered up to a hilltop to film the
battle.
Long had just told Scurka they should leave the hill
when the explosion sent
them both flying through the air. An unusually brave
NBC producer named Kevin Sites
helped pull Scurka off the battlefield and put a
tourniquet on his leg. Scurka was a
bloody mess when I got to him. Greg was tough as
nails, but he had a worsening
concussion from the explosive impact. But, thanks to
Sites, Scurka was alive, and
Long’s concussion didn’t start affecting him until
after he made sure Scurka was safe.
Gary and Greg were medevac’d back to the states a few
weeks sooner than they
planned to return. A long list of wannabe heroes tried
to take credit for saving Scurka,
not the least of which was a phony Green Beret aid
worker from Los Angeles who had a
penchant for claiming he was knighted by the Vatican,
and, wore fake Silver Stars and
Bronze Stars at public events.9 The
problem was that Sir Edward, as he liked to be
called, was about a hundred miles away at the time.
There was also a mousy little
reporter from U.S.A. Today named
Tim who two years later claimed he saved Scurka–
I guess an old scarf wrapped on Scurka’s leg and a
bunch of screaming counted as lifesaving
medical care. The Taliban and AQ had just completely
fucked up one of my best
friends, and now this was completely personal. I told
Scurka to head home and I’d see
him when Afghanistan was free.
I knew this war would go fast. The Taliban were using
old Soviet armor and
infantry tactics. Special Forces were using close air
support (CAS) and lasers
(SOFLAM). Even outnumbered 500 to 1, the Green Berets
would make mincemeat out
of the terrorists. Like then CIA Counter-Terrorism
Chief Cofer Black said, “After 9/11,
the gloves were off.” That meant Special Forces could
fight with no conventional
restrictions. Sergeants, the backbone of the U.S.
Army, were free to control the
battlefield. No briefings, no orders, no strategy
sessions; we’re dropping twelve of you
in the desert (A-Teams are 12 Green Berets, some had
one or two combat controllers
assigned to work CAS missions), just kill all you can
and seize as much territory as
possible. Even the best optimists at the Pentagon
thought it would take 9 to 12 months.
But even they underestimated the Green Berets once
they were completely unleashed,
and the Northern Alliance once they had ammunition and
aircraft.
I was now alone and free to operate my own way, just
like the active-duty Green
Berets. I joined the Northern Alliance as their
advisor, and rode across the country–
sometimes by captured AQ SUVs, sometimes by decrepit
Russian jeeps, sometimes by
barely flying helicopters, and sometimes by horse–
fighting the good fight, avenging my
country, and getting to know the Afghan people I would
come to love.
I did whatever it took to destroy the terrorists,
whether it was protecting aid convoys,
raiding terrorist caves, escorting journalists to the
front lines– at the request of President
Rabanni– to see the Mujahadeen fighting
in rubber slippers and ragged clothes, driving
9 For verification and further
information, contact Francis Pizzulli, Attorney- 310/451-8020. Request acopy
of the Edward Artis Sworn Deposition transcript.
IV bags and medical supplies into isolated Special
Forces teams during OPERATION
ANACONDA, leading Mujahadeen into
battle in Nangahar, or bandaging women and
children during the Nahrin earthquake.10 Later
in the war we got close to bin Laden
twice, only to be foiled by CENTCOM bureaucrats.
In November 2001 I had sent my wife an email message
by satellite. I told her to take
every dime she could find or borrow and buy me combat
trauma dressings because we
were overwhelmed with bullet wounds and the U.S. was
not getting enough medical
supplies on the ground fast enough. She sent boxes and
boxes Federal Express to
Uzbekistan, where they were driven to a secret NA
airbase in Tajikistan and then sent
by chopper to me. My wife takes things literally and
has learned not to question me in a
crisis– she used every dime we had, including her rent
money for two months. By
Christmas she was homeless. I never knew until a month
later.
In the summer of 2002 my mother died, and I returned,
a few weeks late, to bury
her. I had been delayed by an operation during which we
thought we were close to bin
Laden for a third time. During the war, my mother, and
my wife had repeatedly shipped
clothes, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid to the
Afghans. In their own way they
had been as much a part of the war as anyone.
For the next year I delivered aid to Afghanistan,
thousands of books from my
mother’s library and from our family, medical
supplies, clothes, and baby food. My
wife never complained, even though we were now
homeless. I had come to love and
admire these rugged fighters and the Panjshir Army was
now my band of brothers.
By late 2003, we were still living in my office. But
my war was not over. I
helped fund a new clinic in Afghanistan with money
raised by my 2001 capture of the
8mm VideoX al-Qaida Terrorist Training Tapes. Every American has seen their images
on CBS
60 Minutes II with Dan
Rather, on Fox News, NBC
Dateline, in Newsweek, on
the front cover of U.S. News & World Report and literally hundreds of other reports
around the world. Terrifying images of what Osama bin
Laden and al-Qaida has
planned for America and are training for.
Besides relief supplies and medical clinics, I have
used those licensing fees to
fund my own war against al-Qaida. That also includes paying my intelligence assets,
the same ones the FBI want, but can’t seem to buy at
any price. Every news
organization pays to license them, except FOX News,
who I am suing (now awaiting
appeal in the California Court of Appeals), and those
license fees save people and fight
terrorism. Sort of my way of forcing the networks to
be proactive and benevolent in
war they watch from the sidelines, while they rake in
the dough.
10 Editor’s Note: Landing a
helicopter while the ground was still shaking, Jack was the first medic to get
to
people trapped in Taliban threat areas, treating hundreds of women and
children– See: “Jack
Does
House
Calls” Associated Press, April 3, 2002. Maybe you want to actually
include some sort of note in
the
article text, but I wouldn’t want to have it coming from me since it is rather
self-aggrandizing.
Between November 2003 and March 2004, I learned
through my clandestine sources, in
the desolate regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that
new attacks were planned in the
continental United States. Because I was also in the
United States, the Pentagon and the
CIA insisted I deal with my old nemesis, the FBI. The
FBI handled “domestic issues”
and domestic intelligence sources. Of course I was a
little confused. If the FBI was
now allowed to cross the line and operate in Pakistan
and Iraq as virtual combatants,
why couldn’t the DOD and CIA operate in the U.S. to
save American lives? I already
knew the official answer; Posse Comitatus (Power of the Country - restrict the force- in
other words the Army can‘t operate inside the US),
E.O.s, and a stack of other laws
stopped them. Additionally, the CIA can’t “run assets”
in CONUS (the Continental
United States). Legally, I had no choice. So off it
was to the FBI. Hesitantly.
After four months of bureaucracy filled meetings with
the FBI CT (Counter-Terrorist)
Watch Command in Washington, repeated polygraphs at
the FBI’s secret Counter-
Terrorist Task Force office in Tysons Corner,
Virginia– by idiots that couldn‘t even
pronounce al-Qaida correctly–
one thing became overwhelmingly obvious, the FBI was
far to bureaucratic, and stupid, to stop al-Qaida.
Three years after 9/11 the FBI is still in reactive
mode. They wait until
something blows up and then send investigators by the
bushel to inspect the American
bodies and ask questions. They were, after all, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation,
NOT the Federal Bureau of Interdiction. For
seventy-five years they have been
catching bank robbers, Mafia kingpins and bad guys
AFTER they commit the crime.
What America needed, and still needs, is someone to
catch the terrorist before the
boom, not after the sky has already fallen.
By March 25, 2004, I simply could not take it anymore.
I had given the FBI CT
Watch Command 405 captured al-Qaida documents, and after four months they didn’t
even have one-page translated yet.11 One
of the documents had the plane ticket and info
on bin Laden’s money courier. Nor did the FBI even
alert NSA or anyone else when I
handed them the location and phone number of al-Qaida’s #2 man. When we gave
them the location of bin Laden, they didn’t even check
it for a week, and then confirmed
he had been there, but left. When I told them about a
car bomb plan to attack targets in
Afghanistan with taxis, they called a briefing in
Kabul and increased security, but didn’t
have a clue as to how to catch the bombers. When I
transmitted the names, countries,
and descriptions of six al-Qaida terrorists that had entered the U.S. they informed me
their computers were incapable of identifying them,
they needed their passport numbers.
I replied by asking them if I also needed their DNA
screens and shoe sizes.
Regarding one terrorist, a top-official called me one
night, and said, “Shit! We
just got more than a thousand hits in the terror
data-base on one of the guys you gave
us.”
11 CBS 60 Minutes ran a
comprehensive special on the FBI’s inability to translate and interpret
competently
in the fight against terrorists. Further, my communications can be verified
through
documents
currently held by Attorney John Tiffany (973/566-9300) whom you have permission
to
contact
and view documents through, if a confidentiality agreement is obtained.
“Wow, that’s great. So pick him up,” I replied.
“We have no way of locating him here.”
“I thought you were the FBI?” I asked.
“Yeah, but my bosses say you’ve got to get us a hotel
address or something.”
“Dude, if I knew his hotel, he’d already be dead.”
My blood pressure was rising rapidly faced with the
FBI’s inability to function at even
minimal levels in the search for al-Qaida. My frustration, their stupidity, and the
politics of it all. People were going to die–
Americans were going to die, and once
again, friends of mine were going to die. I packed my
bags and headed back to
Afghanistan. I was determined to make a difference in
a world where most people,
especially government officials, wait until the house
burns down before dialing the fire
department.
The Pentagon, and another agency, assured me that once
outside CONUS
we could circumvent the FBI and they could directly support
us. Like the first
time, I told my wife everything would be fine, and I
would be back in a few
weeks.
I told the same thing to Brent Bennett, a young,
hard-charging Airborne soldier,
who had joined the Counter-Terrorist Group more than a
year before. Short on
experience with only six years in the military, he was
a quick learner and a tactical air
controller. Brent Bennett was not afraid of anything
or anyone. That alone made him
right for the mission.
We also took Ed Caraballo, a four-time Emmy Award-winning
investigative
journalist who was making a documentary about the War
On Terror based on the plight
of the Northern Alliance and the significance of the 8mm VideoX al-Qaida tapes. But
now I was taking him on an actual mission. The DOD had
previously asked me to take
two other well-known journalists to Afghanistan, both
of which I turned down. I trusted
Ed, and that should always be the determining factor
in any mission. Ed wrote the PAO
office for the CT Task Force and asked for help with visas.
By the time we left he had
been fully “embedded” with us, with the full
knowledge, and assistance, of the
Department of Defense.12
My Intel and operations officers stayed behind to
coordinate. The rest of the
Counter-Terrorist Group team would meet me in
Afghanistan where we would link up
with my Afghan Indig officers (spook-speak for
indigenous military forces) that had
been with me since the war started in 2001. Once we
had our Tactical Operations
Center (TOC) on line we would bring our intel assets
on board. This would be a quick
easy mission. We would interdict the two terrorists we
were looking for, get the
complete identities of the 36 AQ terrorists in, or
headed into, the U.S., stop the taxi
bombers, and get the most recent location of bin Laden.
Everything would be in the
hands of the DOD’s J-2 for Intelligence and the
Undersecretary of Defense for
12 We can provide copies of Ed’s
letters, and the PAO letters confirming this if needed. Again, subject
to
a confidentiality clause.
Intelligence in a few weeks, and Task Force 7 would be
soon be clinking cocktails at the
bar onboard a plush Virgin Atlantic 757. Homeward
bound, bada-bing bada boom. The
FBI would be sucking wind again. No problem. Clean and
easy. In and out.
Four months later I was lying in a pool of blood on a
cold and dirty cement floor
in the basement of the Taliban’s most notorious
torture chamber. The metal cuffs
restraining my hands were made by a Wisconsin
company, American Handcuff
Company, stamped serial number 177079. It was an
instant, perverse reminder that
this entire NDS torture operation was financed by my
old chums– the FBI. The cuffs
were sparkling new. The ancient leg irons were not.
They consisted of two rusted iron
bars with solid iron ankle shackles held by large
Chinese padlocks. Red Chinese. My
world had come full circle again.
In spite of the excruciating pain, I was fascinated by
the design. They were straight out
of the inquisition– Marquis de Sade would have admired their simplistic ingenious
design. They insured constant pain on the ankles while
keeping my legs spread about
three feet apart. You could not stand, only roll. The
beauty of these babies, at least
from the Taliban’s viewpoint, was that you could drag,
beat, and torture your prey, and
his only response would be limited to screaming. And
scream I did.
The echoes of my screams penetrated the solid concrete
walls, leapt up the mud
brick fences over the tops of the Kalashnikov toting
guards, and crept into the streets for
two solid days. With each pummeling my body took, each
time my arms were lifted
from behind my back to above my head, each succession
of blows to my temples, the
screams leapt like flames out of the underground
chamber.
The funny thing was no one ever asked me anything.
When you think of torture
you think of questions, interrogations, some
information gathering purpose. But this
was sport. Torture just because I was a Kafir, a
non-Muslim. This was their pleasure,
not their business. This was payback for Abu Ghraib,
for Lynndie England’s pictures,
and for all the times they wanted to kick an
American’s ass but couldn’t.
Sure, we all want to believe that James Bond really
gritted his teeth and remained
painfully restrained, suave, and in-character during
his torture at the hands of the North
Koreans in Die Another Day. Silent through it all– the beatings, the scorpions, the
agony, the soul searing pain– true to the image of the
calm, cool, and collected secret
agent. Glaring silently and gritting his teeth as they
cut the flesh from his body.
That folks, is Hollywood. It’s a little different in
real life. When the torture
cranks up, so will the intensity and volume of your
screams. Sooner, rather than later,
you will be hyperventilating and gasping for air. Not
from the pain, but from the need
to fuel your blood curdling gut wrenching primordial
screams.
You will scream for God, even if you have never called
upon Him before. You
will scream “please!” and occasionally, “please,
please!” And eventually you will just
scream, sometimes early in anticipation of the pain
about to befall you.
And, when your antagonist walks away leaving you in a
huddled mass of
battered bones and hemorrhaged eyes, you will
invariably mutter “fuck you,” under
your breath. If you cannot resist the urge to assert
some remaining hint of courage and
defiance, you, like me, will whisper “fuck you” before
your demons exit the room,
spitting your blood on the floor for punctuation.
You will then instinctively know while your words are
still in the air, that it was
a mistake. Because, regardless of how tired your
punisher is, he will return, if only to
kick you two or three times before he takes another
break for a cup of chai.
Curling up the best you can with iron bars between
your legs– into a fetal
position– you will contemplate whether your tormentor
is drinking green tea or black
tea. You will pray to God– even if you are atheist (I
am not)– to deliver you from your
torturer’s whip, stick, or whatever he happens to be
using at the time. All the while
flashes of vivid, yet fleeting, images of walking in
Central Park with your wife will be
passing before you. You will ask God to just let you
die and get it over with. Then you
will see your wife again, and your survival instincts
will kick in telling you that you
must live… for another walk in Central Park.
And then you will start to think. Exactly how did I
get here, from there?
Chapter 1
Allah Akhbar
“You will never defeat us.
Like the Russians, your arrogance will be your
downfall ”
-Mohammed Atef
Taliban Defense Minister, October 2001
Just ten days before a JDAM vaporizes him
Tribal Lands, Pakistan/Afghan border
August 2003
Sorry, this was written quite some time ago, but I do
not have access to it at this time. It
involves a classified conversation between
Ayman-al-Zawahiri (AQ #2 most wanted
terrorist) and two others members of al-Qaida. The conversation passes messages from
what is allegedly bin Laden, but no one yet knows if
he dead or alive. It is a great read
into the mindset of the top level of terrorists and
what they expect to achieve.
One of my agents was present when it went down, so it
is written from his interview and
recollection just a short time after it occurred.
Chapter 2
The Call
“It is the right of every man to dream heroic
dreams”
-Ronald Reagan-
Ft. Bragg/Fayetteville, NC
December 2003
Zabi and Jack had been talking frequently for the last
year. Every call centered
around the same subject, when was Jack returning to
Afghanistan? It had been more
than a year. Not only was Zabi still waiting, so were
all of Jack’s soldiers. True, Jack
had remained in constant touch with them through
INMARSAT Satellite
communications, faxes, encrypted emails, and regularly
through the Kabul mobile
phone network Jack had helped set up. But the boys, as
Jack referred to his Afghan
Mujahadeen, needed face time. Like anyone who had come to work for Jack they
were
now adrenaline junkies, and they needed a “Jack fix.”
Zabi was the worst of them all. Zabi was a complete
addict. Jack was heroin,
and every time they went on a mission it was
mainlining. Zabi had now been without a
fix for almost two years. Their last mission had been
in June 2002. Since that time they
had been delivering humanitarian aid to Afghanistan,
working on building clinics,
supporting schools, and promoting American assistance
to Afghanistan. Honorable
endeavors, and worthy causes—but not what Zabi, or
Jack, were all about. They had
kept their intel net alive inside the Taliban and al-Qaida, but intel was sporadic at best,
rarely actionable, and difficult to act on with Jack
12,000 miles away. Back in the old
days, when Task Force Dagger and Task Force Saber were
in full swing, Jack’s Intel net
had rivaled anything the CIA had, or could even dream
of. Those days were over. As
far as Jack knew his AQ, as Special Forces referred to
al-Qaida, contacts and assets had
long ago been assimilated back into their terrorist
mindset, and could probably not be
trusted anymore. Jack often considered the probability
that his double agents, had been
tripled, and were now working for the enemy again.
Zabi was now 23 years old. He was still immature,
wild, and uncontrollable.
But, when it came to intelligence tradecraft and the
spy business, Zabi was a pro, with
fifty years experience packed into those last five
years. He was also the kind of man the
Agency, as the CIA was called by the old operators,
would never, never employ or work
with. The Agency hated rouge agents, guys that did
what they wanted, when they
wanted, the way they wanted. The Agency was made up of
“career foreign officers.”
Men, and a few women, who wore Brooks Brothers suits,
wingtip shoes, and drank
Cognac. Gone were the days of freewheeling, fly by the
seat of your pants, risk taking
patriots who carried three pistols and two knives.
Those are the men who protected our
nation from the shadows in the fifties and sixties,
and seventies. Men who were born in
the fire, drama, intrigue and danger of World War II
and the early days of the Cold War.
Hard fighting hard drinking former OSS operator, many
who had parachuted behind
enemy lines in France, Germany, Algiers, North Africa,
and Burma. Men like Colonel
Aaron Banks who infiltrated into France on an OSS,
Office of Strategic Services,
Jedburgh Team, with only a radio, a pistol, and a bag
full of money. In the 50’s Colonel
Bank formed the U.S. Army Special Forces, in his own
vision of what kind of force
America would need to fight the jungle wars and
insurgencies of the next century.
Those men became rarer and rarer as time went on,
replaced by Georgetown
graduates, scholars and analysts who could wade
through a stack of Soviet radio
intercepts and satellite photos and compile it into a
950 page analytical study that no
one had time to read. Granted, they were smart, even
brilliant, but they wouldn’t last
ten minutes alone on a back street in Beirut.
Zabi was the kind of guy that Colonel Bank would have
whole heartily
embraced. Zabi was OSS material all the way. Raw
material, but the best raw material
in all of Afghanistan.
But for the new CIA, Zabi was everything they ran away
from. His worst trait,
in their view, would have been his inability to follow
orders, or a plan, and his penchant
for taking risks. Jack was not much different.
Although Jack was twice Zabi’s age, you
would swear they were separated at birth. Both were
brilliant, spontaneous, able to
make hard decisions on the fly, impervious to the
stress of their environment, rational
during a disaster, irrational in personal issues,
loyal to a fault, temperamental, able to
improvise instantaneously, borderline psychotic, and
100% complete absolute
adrenaline junkies.
They were also a team, even if they fought frequently,
sometimes physically, and
they always succeeded in every mission they took on.
Another important trait they both
shared was one that the U.S. Army Special Forces spent
hundreds of millions of dollars
seeking out in the 1970’s. They were self-sufficient,
able to operate alone and
unsupported, indefinitely. Colonel Charlie Beckwith
called the ability to survive,
operate, and persevere alone, indefinitely, the single
most important trait for a Special
Forces soldier. Beckwith believed that all other
skills could be taught, but the unique
ability to operate, change course without direction,
and reach your target without
direction, and reach your target without guidance was
unique. It was a trait which you
could not acquire. Either you were born with it, or
you weren’t. When Beckwith later
formed SFOD-D, Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta,
also known as Delta
Force, it was that trait which he sought out in his
core of initial recruits.
The CIA had learned many things from their failure to
stop 9/11, or even suspect
it before it occurred. They had learned to stop
chasing a defunct threat from the former
Soviet Union, start retiring Russian linguists and
start recruiting Arabic linguists, forget
billion dollar satellites for tracking terrorists, and
start re-focusing on HUMINT –
Human Intelligence – a skill that had been lost in the
great CIA purge of clandestine
agents (spies) in the late 70’s.
But there was one thing they still hadn’t learned, or
maybe just hadn’t come to
grips with. They needed to stop hiring engineers,
accountants, and analysts with
MBA’s and start recruiting snake-eating self-reliant
commandos with high IQ’s that
could be trained in tradecraft. The Farm, as the CIA’s
clandestine services training
wing was referred to, could train anyone to do a dead
letter drop in Gorky Park or an
agent contact in Palestine. But could they teach a
recruit to do it without flinching,
without hesitation, without perspiring, and without
fear. Those attributes were
embedded in one’s soul before birth, they could not be
trained or “drilled” into you.
You either had it or you didn’t.
Two years after 9/11, the CIA was still running half
page and full-page ads in
The Economist – headlined “Possibly, the most
demanding job in the world.”
Searching for “extraordinary individuals” who want
“the Ultimate International Career,”
the CIA Directorate of Operations, Clandestine Service
was looking for spies with a
bachelor’s degree in international affairs/business,
science, or technology.
Thousands of Americans were dead, we were in full
scale wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, shadow wars in Malaysia, Columbia,
Indonesia, Yemen, and Bosnia.
Terrorists were blowing up shit all over the world,
narco-terrorism– fueled by al-Qaida
produced opium in Eastern Afghanistan– was less than a
year from hitting U.S. shores,
North Korea now had nukes, Iran was developing nukes,
half the 7-11’s in America
were funneling money to Islamic terrorists, Ukraine
was missing enough U-235
Uranium to turn New York, L.A., and Washington into a
smoldering ash heap, Arabs
were learning to fly crop dusters to drop biological
warfare payloads over Miami, RPG
rockets were sailing through the sky in virtually
every zone the U.S. military was
declaring “under control,” Pakistan was selling
nuclear secrets and materials to anyone
who hated us…
And the fucking CIA was still recruiting dweeb
analysts and engineers as spies
and clandestine intelligence agents, who couldn’t
survive one night in Harlem no less
six months in Tirkit. Yet guys like Zabi, who had been
fighting the Taliban and al-
Qaida since they were twelve, and living in the remote
mountains of Afghanistan
dealing with terrorists on a daily basis, and spoke
five languages, couldn’t even get a
cell phone to call the CIA when they found bin Laden’s
location, which was often.
Two questions came to mind; exactly what moron was
running the CIA’s ad
campaign, and what fucking planet were the deputy
directors of the CIA living on?
This concept does not take a rocket scientist to
figure out. You’re in a Toyota
Surf SUV on a pothole dirt road at 9,000 feet above
sea level in the Kut-Tangai
mountains of Afghanistan when six turbaned men with
foot long beards and dark black
inset eyes brandishing Klashnikov’s – the Afghan name
for Russian AK-47’s –
surround you and your afghan guide/interpreter. Does
the guys who reads the
International Journal of Scientific Studies pull out
his slide ruler and proceed to give
these cave dwelling cretins a dissertation on Stephen
Hawke’s Theory of black holes
and anti-matter. Or, does the former Green Beret
sergeant who grew up in Tennessee
shooting woodchucks, who reads Men’s Health, pull out
his radio and proceed to
explain, while looking up at the sky, that he’s lost,
but the B-52 bomber above the
clouds has pinpointed his location and he’ll be
leaving soon. I vote for the Green Beret
buck sergeant who has already clicked off the safety
on his weapon before he even
stopped the Surf.
Bluffing takes nerves of steel, balls, brains, and a
tinge of insanity, more than
skill.
Zabi had it all.
Zabi wanted to work for the Agency. It was his dream,
to work for the
Americans that had liberated his country. To help
track down, hunt, and kill, the al-
Qaida terrorists that had killed his beloved Commander, Ahmad Shah
Massoud.
Massoud had been assassinated by al-Qaida terrorists posing as journalists, on
September 9, 2001, just two before the World Trade
Center towers came crashing down
on 9/11.
While most Americans have no idea who Massoud was, nor
the significance of
the assassination in the scheme of al-Qaida’s global plan, the significance and timing
was not lost on Jack.
COMPLETE INSERT HERE ABOUT MASSOUD-KHALILI- THE BOMB,
(NOT IN CAMERA, IN BATTERY BELT) AND THE CIA’S MEETING
WITH
MASSOUD ONE MONTH BEFORE. CAN BE PULLED FROM MY HUNT
PAPERBACK MANUSCRIPT.
Massoud’s death and 9/11 were the catalysts for a bond
that would bring Zabi
and Jack together for three straight years of war, and
for the rest of their lives. It was
also the bond that forged an unbeatable alliance
between the Green Berets of Task Force
Dagger and Massoud’s Northern Alliance. An alliance and
a partnership that ultimately
brought about the fall of Kabul in just two short
months and the complete defeat of the
Taliban and al-Qaida terrorists
in just six months.
In Afghanistan, for over a thousand years, one concept
remains unwavering –
your friend is my friend, your enemy mine.
The literal translation is clearer – “My enemies
friend is my enemy; my enemies
enemy is my friend” – at least until the war is over.
Then all bets were off.
It was with this intimate understanding of this
fundamental Afghan concept that
Jack forged relationships in Afghanistan that he would
need to engage the enemies of
America.
While many of his relationships forged during the war
had become distant as the
political and warfare map of Afghanistan changed, the
relationship with Zabi and Jack’s
small group of Panjshir commandos had withstood the
test of time. Massoud’s Panjshir
soldiers were the best of the best. Rugged, hard,
seasoned, and most of all loyal. The
Panjshir was deep in the heart of the Hindu Kush
Mountains in Northern Afghanistan.
It had never been occupied, never been breached into
the core of the Panjshir, and had
exacted a terrifying toll on its invaders. Hannibal
had lost tens of thousands of men
trying to take the Panjshir. Alexander the Great had
occupied it briefly, just long
enough to build the ancient roads that would be the
killing grounds of his soldiers
ambushed from the cliffs above. The Soviets drove
their armor columns into the
Panjshir, only to have General Haji Wassi drop ten
thousand tons of rocks on them,
sending their T-72 tanks careening into the rivers
below, where they still lay overturned
in the water, rusting as a reminder to all those that
might think they can penetrate the
Panjshir.
Most villages in the Panjshir are inaccessible by road.
You must walk up the
mountainside on small cliff-side trails to reach them.
Zabi’s village is one such place.
Crossing a small rickety suspension bridge over the
Panjshir River you step onto a wide
clearing covered with boulders. None of them are large
enough to provide protection
from the thousands of bullets fired from the
overlooking hills upon any uninvited
visitor.
During the Soviet occupation of the 1980’s, the
Mujahadeen would fill the
branches of the trees lining the river with the
hanging corpses of Soviet soldiers who
dared to venture into the Panjshir Valley. There they
would be left to rot, hanging with
a shovel tied in their hands. Apparently it was a
reminder to bring your own shovel if
you wanted to be buried.
Bazerak was legendary among the Mujahadeen. It was a place where great
warriors had been born for a thousand years. Zabi’s
father had been one, severely
wounded in battle, Massoud had relieved him from
further combat duty. However,
when he insisted on continuing in the army, he was
made a driver.
In spite of its remote mountain location, Bazerak actually had power, not much,
but enough to supply at least one or two light bulbs
in each house. Generators had been
salvaged from destroyed Soviet tanks, then wired
together and turned by makeshift
windmill type devices submerged in a mountain stream.
During the Soviet and Taliban
days the power lever was manned religiously from
sunset to sunrise. As soon as the
radio alert came warning of approaching aircraft or
helicopters the Panjshir villagers
immediately went to “Blackout State.” Still, the
Soviet and Taliban Air Forces had
occasional success in targeting a village. Mujahadeen
soldiers were rarely hit, they
were in other areas fighting. The bombs would kill
their families. The Soviets
mistakenly thought this would break their will to
fight. It had the opposite affect – a
soldier who has lost anything worth living for becomes
a far more dangerous adversary.
This was the environment that forged Zabi from
childhood.
Zabi was like most Panjshiri’s.
Fiercely independent, completely isolationist,
and ready to fight and kill all invaders, all
foreigners, all threats to the purity and
sanctity of the Panjshir. Somehow Americans had been
accepted as an ally, possibly
even a brother, of the Panjshiri’s. Jack
certainly had. More than once an Afghan
soldier would question Jack’s authority, only to be
slapped by Zabi and told Jack was
from Bazerak
– in other words, don’t fuck with
this American.
Chapter ____
“Blow me… ”
-Joe Blow
October 2001 Talking to Ayman al-Zwahiri
Iran/Afghan Border
September 2003
“Asalimanikum,” the female voice answered in Arabic. She was
answering a
Thurya Satellite phone in Iran.
“This is Mohammed Kadir, may I speak to my brother?” The
man asked in
Arabic, the language in which the entire conversation
would take place.
“Your brother is not here, he has left a few days again
and will not return,” the
female on the Thurya Satellite phone said in a guarded
and convincing tone.
“Allah
Akbar, zendabot god wa de,” the
man replied. God is Great.
“Wait one moment, my cousin will speak to you.”
The caller’s “brother” was there. The question,
response, and reply was exactly as it
should have been to make contact with Ayman al-Zawahiri,
al-Qaida’s number two
man. Al-Zawahiri was nswering a phone in Madrash, Iran.
Al-Zawahiri
Chapter 3
The _______
Fayetteville, NC
December 2003
It was a fairly normal day. Viktoria had been up at
7am, showered, put her
make-up, shorts, and track shoes, and already walked
thirty dogs. Jack had slept in,
having worked until 3am.
The building was a non-descript, one story
commercial brick building in
downtown Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was 10,000
square feet. One side housed
The Ultimate Pet Resort, a high-class pampered pet
resort for boarding very spoiled
dogs, and finicky cats. A bright hot pink sign hung
over the entrance. Inside were 75
“condos”, tiled floors, two exotic playgrounds, a
grooming salon, Caribbean resort
music, a half dozen cute girls providing “room
service” for the guests, and Viktoria
frequently reminded customers, “no cages.”
From the outside the entire building looked like one
big pet resort, surrounded by
a huge outdoor playground. Upon closer observation you
would notice that the two
windows on the right side were black bulletproof
glass, and the right doors had a small,
in fact tiny, sign that read “No Admittance.” That
door had a triple lock entry that
always remained secured. While customers and their
pets were constantly coming and
going from the Pet Resort, visitors were far and few
between on the other side.
You could knock all day long without an answer. Three
covert concealed
cameras monitored everyone that even passed by
briefly. The only rear door was 3 inch
thick steel with two large steel beams sealing it.
This was Jack’s lair. The headquarters of the U.S.
Counter-Terrorist Group.
Counterr Group, as those in the know referred to it,
had been in existence for more than
25 years. It was the oldest “private”
counter-terrorist organization in the world.
Formed in 1978, Counterr Group originally specialized
in training for hostage rescue
missions. It was headquartered in upstate New York on
a 200-acre private airport,
complete with a dozen state-of-the-art live fire
training ranges, rappelling towers,
aircraft, bus, and train assault ranges, and an
impressive staff of Green Berets, Delta
Force, CIA, and SMU (Special Mission Unit) commandos.
Even the British SAS,
Special Air Service, loaned Counterr Group instructors
on a rotating basis.
Counterr Group flourished in the 1980’s, an
environment where plausible
deniability was the modus operandi of the Reagan administration. Counterr Group
operators worked in Central America, Southeast Asia,
Africa, the Caribbean, and
Eastern Europe. Officially they only provided training
and instruction, but unofficially,
they advised, led, and conducted a variety of real
world covert, and often clandestine,
missions.
By 1992, the need for Counterr Group was virtually
non-existent. The U.S. had
spent billions creating, building, and equipping a
variety of Special Operations schools
and forces that eliminated the need for organizations
such as Peregrine, the International
Defense Development Corporation, Counterr Group, and a
few others.
Counterr Group was unable to metamorphosis into
mainstream defense support
services like KBR, DYNCORP, Vennell, Bechtel, and
others who derived their core
business from logistical support and construction of
defense facilities. Counterr Group
was comprised of shooters, not businessmen, and it
found itself on the dust heap of
history.
That is until bin Laden took it off the storage shelf.
Now Counterr Group was operating full time. Incredibly
small, less than a dozen
people. Incredibly under-funded, a budget of less than
$200,000 per year. Incredibly
secret, nobody knew what the purpose was, not the
people that worked there, not the
U.S. government, not anyone, except Jack. Even the
director, Thomas Bumback, a
retired Special Forces intelligence officer didn’t
really know what they were doing most
of the time.
They didn’t have money, they didn’t have satellites,
aircraft, or support, and their
sanction was shaky at best. But they did have HUMINT.
Exceptional, even staggering
HUMINT. Three times in two years Counterr Group had
positively targeted bin Laden,
only to have bureaucrats fuck it up.
One thing was clear to everyone in Counterr Group. The
only target, the only
goal, was al-Qaida.
Inside the offices were maps of Afghanistan, Pakistan,
Iraq, and Iran. Elaborate
matrix charts tracked details, last known locations,
and personal characteristics of the
top twenty al-Qaida terrorists, and a few dozen other
HVT’s (High Value Targets).
Why they were doing it, how they were doing it, and
whom they were doing it
for, no one knew. But they were doing it
none-the-less, and God and Country was
enough of a reason to keep them all going, even though
no one was getting paid. For all
of Jack’s attributes and for all of his flaws – which
were not few – there was one
undoable rare quality that rose above all others. Jack
was infectious. He infected you
with enthusiasm, bravado, skills, knowledge, honor,
and most of all sense of mission. A
few weeks with Jack and you found your life in
shambles, your rent unpaid, your
children abandoned, and divorce papers on your
doorstep. None of it mattered –
because above all else, your entire body, soul, and
spirit, was gorged with a sense of
being and clear understanding of being and clear
understanding of purpose of life unlike
anything else you ever, even remotely, felt before.
Jack invited you into his world for a
look, then gave you a taste of his world, then sucked
you in for good.
It was simple really. He just placed a red pill and a
blue pill there for you the
decision was yours. Take the red pill and go home,
take the blue pill and abandon all
that you had ever known, ever loved, ever lived for.
Jack invented the Matrix scene
long before Keanau Reeve had ever donned a black
trench coat.
It is often said that the most important trait of
leadership is to infect people with
your belief, determination, and drive to reach a goal.
No one was better at that then
Jack.
Today was proof.
“Counter-Terrorist Group, good morning.”
“Is Jack there?” the caller requested in a mid-eastern
accent but good English
none the less.
“He is on another call right now.”
“I really need to speak to him,” the man insisted.
“I’m sorry, that is impossible.”
“I’ve been calling for two weeks trying to speak to
Jack, what is this sheeet?” the
man was clearly upset, and quite irritated.
“Look, Jack has been traveling for the last few weeks,
today is his first day back
in the office can you please call back?”
Viktoria heard the exchange from across the office,
“who is that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” the girl said putting her hand over
the phone.
“Well find out!”
The receptionist turned her attention back to the
caller, “excuse me…” she was
cut off abruptly.
“This is Zabi, fucking Zabi.”
“It’s Zabi,” she called out to Viktoria.
“I’ll take that call,” Viktoria ordered, “put him on
hold.”
“Please hold for Viktoria.”
“Zabi, this is Viktoria, how are you?”
“I am not good, I want to speak to my brother.”
“If he’s not off the phone in two minutes, I’ll get
him off the phone.”
“I’m not waiting two minutes.”
“Ok, where can he call you back?”
“You know Viktoria, I have to tell you something.”
“Go ahead Zabi,” Viktoria answered.”
“I have been waiting for one man for two years. We
have all been waiting, my
country has been waiting. What should I do?” Zabi had
not been waiting two years, but
he had been waiting for a year, and it had been almost
eighteen months since they did a
mission against al-Qaida together.
“Zabi, I don’t know what to say.”
“Tell me he is coming back to Afghanistan.”
“He is, I just don’t know when,” Viktoria paused, she
could sense the extreme
frustration level in Zabi’s voice, “hold on a minute.”
Putting Zabi on hold she went into the room where Jack
was on a conference
call. “Zabi is on the phone.”
“Tell him I’ll call him back.”
“I think you better talk to him, he really sounds
upset.”
Jack took the call. He and Zabi talked for about
fifteen minutes and everything
seemed fine. Jack hung up the phone promising to call
him in a few days.
“He just needed a Jack fix,” Jack said as he went back
to his conference call.
“Boy do I know that feeling,” Viktoria said smiling.
Three days later Zabi called again, this time Jack got
right on the phone.
“Ok, are you feeling better?”
“Jack, we need to do a secret call,” Zabi said
abruptly.
“Now?”
“Yes, urgently, right now,” Zabi responded.
“It will take thirty minutes to set-up, maybe
fifteen.”
“I will be waiting,” Zabi said.
“How long before you are ready?”
“I’ve been ready for two years,” came Zabi’s smart-ass
reply.
“Out here.”
“Zabi wants to go secure,” Jack told Bumback moving
swiftly over to the
INMARSAT Satellite system. He grabbed the black
aluminum briefcase and went out
the back door into the park. Pulling out a compass he
oriented the satellite antenna to
hit the Mid-Atlantic COMSAT Geostationary Satellite.
Zabi would have already set his
up to hit the Indian Ocean satellite. Next Jack
adjusted the antenna’s angle based on
location and elevation.
Powering up the INMARSAT four bars indicated a direct
link. He would need
five bars for a reliable secure link without dropout.
Two minutes later, after a few
minor adjustments, five bars appeared on the receiver
handset.
Jack dialed Zabi.
“Hello.”
“Hello Jack.”
“Encryption activated.” NOTE: describe scene more here
“Yes.”
“What have you got?”
“Six, possibly seven al-Qaida on the way to America.”
“How good is this intel?”
“It is from our agents.”
“Which one?”
“Laurel and Hardy,” Zabi responded. That got Jack’s
attention. Laurel and
Hardy were the code names for two of Jack’s assets
deep inside al-Qaida. Their Intel
had a sterling record of accomplishment (track record), they were the real deal.
Intelligence assets were rated with letters and
numbers A was the best and in terms of
trustworthy and loyalty. F sucked. 1 was the best in
terms of intelligence provided, 6
sucked. Laurel and Hardy were B-1, arguable A-1 in
Jack’s opinion, even though they
were inside al-Qaida, and enemy combatants for all
practical purposes. Jack could
never quite figure out what their motives were, it
certainly was not money. They asked
for little, and received little, barely enough to
survive on. They had worked for Jack
since the days of Tora Bora in December 2001. But for
the last twelve months they had
went dormant. Jack had written them off long ago, as
either dead, or doubled –
meaning switched back to the bad guys again.
Now they were back on the radar screen with, if true,
extraordinary intelligence.
“I thought we lost those guys long ago,” Jack said.
“They never stopped working for us Jack. They just
didn’t have anything big
enough to break security for.”
Great, so what do we know?”
“We know there are six, possibly seven AQ terrorists
that are on the way to the
United Sates. We know a few may already be there. We
know all their names and
countries of birth…” Zabi was interrupted.
“The names on their passports they’re using to get
into the U.S., or their real
names, or they’re alias names, or their al-Qaida
names?” Jack knew all of these were
different. Al-Qaida terrorists changed names faster
than Jennifer Lopez changed
husbands. They used a single name to identify
themselves among the al-Qaida network,
but their real names, alias names, and travel names
are all different. Add to that the fact
that they all had “Mohammed” somewhere in each of
their names, except their “famous
name,” and you had a complex, confusing nightmare that
would even strain an NSA
Cray super-computer to keep track. The important name
for tracking and finding them,
was what they referred to as “famous by the name of.”
That was usually a single or
sometimes double name by which they were known
throughout the terrorist network.
But they could also have a second “famous by” name
which they used inside a specific
terrorist operation cell, for a specific terror
mission.
“Right now we have their al-Qaida names, but we will be able to get their
Afghan passport names.”
“What do you mean Afghan Passport names?”
“They had Afghan passports issued under false names.”
“When, and why would they get Afghan passports? Those
won’t help them get
into the U.S.”
“They got the passports a few weeks ago. Their plan is
to send a few people in
through Canada, which routinely gives Afghan people
visas. The others will take the
Afghan passports back into Pakistan, get Paki passports,
go to Europe, and get new
passports from their agents there.
“Zabi, this is so fucking complicated, how can we
possibly expect to track and
find these guys?”
“Jack we can do it.”
“Impossible – we have names that won’t even be their
names in a week, might
not be their names now, and probably never were their
fucking names.”
“We have pictures….”
“WHAT?” Zabi had immediately gotten Jack’s attention.
“Pictures.”
“We have them now?”
“We are getting them.”
“Ok, now you’ve got my attention.”
“We can stop these guys Jack, you and I can stop
them.”
“Well, were going to need some help; when can you
transmit initial names?”
“Right now.”
“Shoot.”
Zabi ran down a list of seven names, approximate ages,
and country of birth and
basic description. Jack read it back for confirmation.
“Do we know their target?”
“Not yet, but I will meet our agents tonight in the
mountains.”
“Great, be careful. Call me as soon as you get more
info. Tell Laurel and Hardy
thanks.”
“We can get these guys Jack,” Zabi said ever so
seriously.
“I hope so. Good luck. I’ve got to get on a plan.”
“Bye brother,” Zabi clearly loved Jack.
“Bye.” Jack hung up the phone and hoped this was real
not just a ploy to get him
back to Afghanistan.
Chapter _______
Over the next five days Zabi and Jack stayed in
communication daily. They were
developing intelligence quickly, but not actionable
intelligence. By the end of the week
they knew more, but not enough. They knew there were
seven AQ terrorists on the
way. They knew the targets were six U.S. cities. But
it really boiled down to what
Donald Rumsfeld once said, which the press considered
stupid. Rumsfeld was not
stupid; he was straightforward and honest. When it
came to terrorists, their methods,
and the intelligence war against them, the press were
the ones that were stupid.
“There are things we know, that is to say known
things. There are known
unknowns, that is to say things we know we don’t know,
and there are unknowns, that is
to say that there are things we don’t know we don’t
know.” (Note: check this quote and
make sure it is exact – I wrote it from memory).
After ten days of constant contact with Zabi and our
agents inside the AQ, Jack
had all three “Rumsfeld Intel sets.”
First there were “the knowns” – they knew bin Laden’s
al-Qaida network had
sent in six or seven terrorists already. They knew
there might be thirty-six. They knew
that there were six targets.
Then there were “the known unknowns” – that was to say
they knew there were
36 terrorists, but they didn’t know the 36 names or
identities. They knew there were six
targets, but they had no idea what those six targets
were. They knew thirty-six terrorists
were entering the United States but they did not know
how, when, or where.
And then, there were “the unknown unknowns” – Jack and
his boys could work
hard, gather intelligence, and brainstorm to come up
with different scenario’s,
possibilities, probabilities, and potential answers to
the first two categories. But how do
you focus on unknown unknowns. The list could be more
than a thousand possibilities.
Were there another 36 on another mission? Military or
civilian targets, this year, or
next year – the 9/11 plan took more than two years –
hostage taking? Bombs?
Chemical warfare? Biological weapons? Nukes? Arabs?
American Muslims? Funded
by bin Laden, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iran? The
list went on and on.
And then there were the two or three things that would
not make it on even the
most comprehensive list assembled by a hundred of the
best intelligence analysts at
Langley. Those were the wild cards, the unknown
unknowns – things we did not have a
clue to either the answer or the question. These were
critical factors that if discovered
could interdict and stop the terrorist plot. And if
not discovered, could bring down more
buildings and/or kill thousands of more Americans.
Only one thing could uncover the missing questions,
and ultimately the answers
to those elusive questions – HUMINT – Human
Intelligence. That was the forté of Zabi
and Jack, developing and assembling HUMINT and turning
it into actionable
intelligence.
It didn’t take Jack long to develop a mission concept.
He brought in his
incredibly small tight-knit group of Intel sergeants,
support personnel, hunters, and
killers. For now, everyone would concentrate on Intel.
Priorities were listed. Russian
nuke smuggling documents, AQ HVT (High Value Target)
dossiers, files, and charts,
and everything related to Iraq was to be put in
temporary storage. There was an
immediate CONUS (Continental United States) threat to
American civilians. Almost
everyone had lost friends on 9/11. The air was somber,
serious, and charged with stress.
“We need to fire off an initial SITREP to the DOD,”
Tom Bumback suggested.
“Right – some unknown, vaguely identified, Arab
psychos are going to blow up
six of something, someday.”
“Hey, it’s a start,” Bumback answered.
“Lets wait a few days until we can narrow this down,
cross out T’s and dot our
I’s,” Jack explained. “I don’t want a Chicken Little
paint job on this by the FBI. If they
want to play Chicken Little with their bullshit terror
alerts let em’, lets stand above
that.”
“Agreed.”
“But let’s be ready. Mary, I want Rumsfeld, Boykin,
Shoonmaker, “L”, and the
CT Task Force on the commo wall, every number, fax,
Airborne address, and direct
office extension listed, and big enough to read from
ten feet away. And get the routing
codes for Boykin from the National Command
Communications Center at the
Pentagon.”
(Note: this last page might need better rewrite –
written while half asleep.)
NOTE: We jump way ahead now to an overview of the next
six months which
has taken from the article I wrote in 2004. So this is
real rough and just for
reference. I have not written anything between January
2004 and July 2004
because I have been concerned that it could fall into
the hands of someone else.
To this day I have never told anyone the story of what
happened between January
through July 2004. There is a record of it hidden in
the mountains of Afghanistan
which can be recovered at the appropriate time. These
are my rough notes in a
very rough overview:
Acting on intelligence developed since November 2003 and
gathered by our Afghan
assets, Task Force 7 was set up as an American/Afghan
Counter-Terrorist team. The
intention was to work directly with the Northern
Alliance. Regular military and activeduty
personnel were now prohibited from working with the
Northern Alliance by a
classified State Department directive to the Pentagon.
“Task Force 7” conflicted with
the designation of an Iraq task force, so we were now
named Task Force Saber 7.
Just three days before, four Generals, three Karzai
officials, two Ministers,13 and one
Ambassador (at an embassy, not in a pear tree), were
saying my entire team deserved to
be awarded the country’s highest medal. In four
daring, swift, and dangerous raids, we
had captured five confirmed14 terrorists
that were about to assassinate key leaders,
including a presidential candidate (Qanooni) in order
to spark a civil war and derail the
election. Not only had we stopped the assassinations, we also stopped
explosive rigged
fuel tankers from turning the U.S. Bagram Airbase into
a flaming, grand scale repeat of
the 1983 Marine barracks bombing that murdered 244
American Marines.
It was called Operation ACME. We nicknamed the mission “RoadRunner,” and we
were looking for “Wily Coyote.” The following
information was derived from the
“Sensitive Secret” OFR (Original Field Report) sent to
Department of Defense
headquarters in Washington. Our first operational
overview had been transmitted to the
Pentagon shortly after we hit the ground in April
2004.
Our final operational overview was transmitted on June
30, 2004 and carried the rather
serious subject line as: “Al-Qaida & Hezb-i-Islami
Bomb Plot to Kill Fahim, Qanooni,
Abdullah Abdullah, Foreign and US Ambassadors and
Detonate Fuel Trucks in US and
ISAF Bases.”
The OPERATION ACME “OFR” stated, “It is commonly known
that terrorist
insurgents financially backed by al-Qaida and bin
Laden, and working with Gulbideen
13 Both Yunis Qanooni- Education
Minister, and Marshall Mohammed Fahim- Defense Minister
14 The Afghan CIA and National
Security Council confirmed they were terrorists, as did American intel
sources,
as did Judge Bakhtyari when he announced in open court, “Ok, we accept they are
terrorists,
we
know they are terrorists.”
Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami party, are doing everything
they can to disrupt the first
National elections in Afghanistan in September.”
In May 2004, we captured Mullah Sherajan. Sherajan was
the Chief of Taliban
Intelligence Department 5, responsible for terrorism,
sabotage, subversion, and writing
Night Letters against coalition forces to incite
rebellion and civil war. He admitted that
he had been with Osama bin Laden in December 2001 when
bin Laden escaped by
helicopter from Tora Bora. He had a message from
Taliban leader Mullah Omar in his
pocket, along with phone numbers to ISI/al-Qaida
liaisons. He also agreed to change
his avocation and go to work for the United States.
This was a major coup for us and
the operations room erupted into cheers and high fives
the moment the Afghan CIA
confirmed his identity. Roughly 12 hours later we were
delivering “the package”
(spook-speak for handing over a prisoner) to an
armored TF 180 convoy of paratroopers
on a deserted stretch of desert road under the
starlight, seven clicks south of Bagram.
The ACME OP report also stated that six weeks later,
“[o]n June 19, 2004, Task Force
Saber 7, received an emergency tip from an informant
who provided the license plate
number of a bus carrying one of the prime bombers from
Laghman to Kabul to start the
attacks. That man was Ghulamsaki. The FBI has been
actively searching for
Ghulamsaki for five months. In a high-speed race to
interdict the bus, Ghulamsaki was
arrested on Jalalabad Road by Task Force Saber 7,
[with the Afghan MOD, and NA.]”
When we nabbed him he gave us a fake name and said he
never heard of anyone named
Ghulamsaki. Then I found the Red Cross letter in his
pocket from his brother, an al-
Qaida operative currently in GITMO, Cuba. I turned to Brent, Ed, and the
crew,
“Jack… pot.” At first Ghulamsaki insisted he was an
innocent shopkeeper in Kabul.
Two days later Ghulamsaki confessed on videotape to
his involvement in the bomb ring
and led us to another of his co-conspirators.
Ghulamsaki admitted that his specific job
was to kill Vice-President (and Minister) Fahim,
Minister Qanooni, and “all the leaders
of the Jamiat party.”
The OTR laid it all out, “[o]perating on intelligence
provided by Ghulamsaki, Task
Force Saber 7 raided a house on the outskirts of
Kabul, with Serajan being arrested three
days after the bus raid on Jalalabad Road. From that
raid on June 22 at Serajan’s Kabul
safehouse, rare Alpha 1X2 (similar to TNT) explosives
and Aluminum Magnesium
incendiary explosives were found as well as other bomb
making materials, switches and
ammunition. ISAF German EOD teams working with the
Swedish Liaison Team were
called in by Task Force Saber 7. The explosives being
used, while known about by
ISAF explosives experts, had not been discovered
before, and the dogs had not been
trained to detect them.” At my direction, we turned
over the detonators, explosives, and
the gas tank to ISAF EOD (Explosives Ordnance
Disposal) teams so that their dogs
could be quickly trained to detect these explosives
(during our trial ISAF would deny
taking possession of these, and after we played the
video in court, they finally fessed
up).15 Serajan’s taxi was moved to the ISAF EOD range and
tested positive for the
presence of explosives by German Bomb Dogs, Gizmo and
Nina. Unfortunately, during
the raid, Sabir, the ringleader and a top al-Qaida terrorist, who was staying with
Serajan, escaped over the back wall of the compound.
Page 2 of the 12-page report stated that interviews
with “Serajan yielded a great deal of
intelligence about the plot, the chain of command
leading to Gulbideen Hekmatyar and
bin Laden, methods of financing, and targets. Serajan also identified a unique plan to
destroy the heavily fortified US and ISAF compounds.
Loosely based on the Marine
Barracks bombing in Beirut, Serajan’s cell was to place
super-incendiary explosive
charges on fuel trucks headed into Bagram Air Base and
ISAF facilities. The charges
would be placed and the trucks driven into US bases.
Serajan insisted that the trucks
would be exploded before they entered Bagram Air Base,
but this was determined
through collateral intelligence to be untrue.”
How did we get Ghulamsaki and Serajan to turn? Did we
dangle them upside down and
use them as ashtrays, as the press has so frequently
reported? No, that crap does not
work. Using deception tactics, such as convincing
Serajan that others not found were
already in custody, and using face-off techniques
(having the terrorists confront each
other), sleep deprivation from non-stop questioning (I
drank a lot of coffee), non-stop
Melissa Etheridge music (they hate it- I love it),
promises of money and a job (I hated
that- they loved that), and the threat of allowing
Afghans to do the interrogation (no one
likes that), Serajan led the team to where explosives
had been hidden by Sabir, his
leader. More importantly, Serajan provided information
that led to the capture of
Serajan’s terror cell leader, Malikyar, just two short
days later.
We knew that with Ghulamsaki and Serajan in custody,
the rest of the cell would scatter
like rats. Time was running out. On the night of June
24, 2004, after briefing Minister
Qanooni, several Ambassadors, the DOD, and the Afghan
CIA to the threat, we made
two separate attempts to raid Malikyar’s house. Both
were deemed too dangerous to
execute because they presented a Mogadishu like
scenario. The moment I saw the area
I knew it would present major problems. The streets
were dark and narrow with high
walls. It was impossible to turn around or turn at
all, you couldn’t even back-up. The
area was a perfect linear ambush site for us in this al-Qaida controlled neighborhood.
We were expecting RPG rockets to scream down the road
at eye level any second. It
was totally intense. Zero cover. Zero concealment.
Zero defense. One hundred
percent stress. Brent and my Afghans wanted to hit the
house. Ed wanted more body
armor. I wanted no casualties. The mission was
scrubbed.
15 John Tiffany and my wife can give
you the name an number of a German TV producer that can verify
several
German ISAF officers made public statements that we were the most professional
and
competent
people they worked with during the entire time they were in Afghanistan.
The next morning we hit Malikyar’s terrorist compound
shortly before 0600 hours.
Malikyar was having a meeting over chai with seven other men.
This raid was assisted by Delagha, Minister Qanooni’s
Chief of Security, and an elite
Panjshir bodyguard team sent to act as a protective
detail force for Task Force Saber
after the raid and during the 14 hour search of the
compound. The report sent to the
Pentagon stated: “also arrested in that raid was
Malikyar’s two brothers, Aserlhaq, who
works at Kabul airport as an investigator and is now
known to have the responsibility of
placing bombs on airplanes, such as Fahim and
Qanooni’s planes and using remotely
detonated mines to destroy coalition aircraft.”
The trouble would come with the next paragraph of the
report, which levied serious
charges against a Karzai appointee, by stating;
“Mawlawi Sidiq is a chief in the court
system, who is responsible for recruiting terrorists
and arranging access to government
officials to be assassinated. Documents and
photographs obtained during the raid
irrefutably link Sadiq and his brothers to Hekmatyar’s
highest level, and provide
extensive evidence to their meetings and coordination
with both Hekmatyar and bin
Laden. It is believed that Sadiq is at the operational
planning level but that is
unconfirmed at this point. Malikyar and other members
of the bomb cell confessed that
they get their explosives primarily from two al-Qaida bomb makers, both named Noor
Mohammad, one in Logar and one in Kabul.”
To us, it seemed like a no-brainer. Sidiq had already
done ten years in prison for
subversion against the pre-Taliban government. He was
released by the Taliban, and
then promoted to a high-level official. This is
indisputable. Now Sidiq, turns up as a
Religious Punishment Judge in Karzai’s Supreme Court.
Each of the three brothers had false identification
and false names (just like Ghulamsaki
and Serajan) when we first questioned them. Extensive
information about ISAF
facilities and about the entire terrorist cell was
uncovered during the raid. The Swedish
ISAF Liaison Team had been an invaluable asset to us
during the search and provided
area security during the raid. Only one mistake
occurred—the result was that a critical
terrorist mobile phone, along with a few hundred
dollars, and “some jewelry,” ended up
missing when the local police were left alone in a
room. Of course, later on, we would
be accused of theft.
Sidiq would also later tell an Afghan Court, and a
slew of reporters, that we had
mistreated the harem of women at his house. The
reality was that we never dealt with
the Afghan women. We requested from General Babajan,
the Kabul Police Chief, and
were provided with, a female national police detective
to speak to the women. My
people were never allowed contact with Afghan women. I
had learned a long time ago
that a foreigner should not even look in the direction
of an Afghan woman, unless you
wanted RPG rockets to start flying through the air.
The terror plan was complex and violent. Their
ultimate goal, through instability and
civil war, was to make room for the al-Qaida backed Hezb-i-Islami party and to insure
Hekmatyar could seize the presidency. Using taxi’s made to look disabled on the side
of the road and loaded with explosive rigged petrol
tanks, the terrorists planned to block
the motorcades of their targets. This method of attack
is used by Hezbollah and Hamas
in the mid-east. It was also well-documented in the 8mm VideoX al-Qaida tapes I
captured in 2001.
Besides Qanooni and Fahim, other prime targets
included the Corps Commanders of the
Northern Alliance and Ministry of Defence; Generals
Atta, Gulhaider, Daoud, Hazrat
Ali, and others. All of these people were close
friends of America and fought with
American Special Forces during the war. All of them
were ordered killed by Osama bin
Laden. All of them just happened to be my friends.
The DOD’s ability to move fast and counter a threat as
compared to the FBI was tested
by this paragraph in the report; “To further spread
panic and in attempt to drive US and
Coalition forces from Afghanistan, Serajan confessed that remotely detonated bombs
would be placed in fuel trucks bound for,” Bagram,
ISAF, and other US military
installations. Within one hour of notifying the
Pentagon, Bagram’s General Franklin L.
“Buster” Hagenbeck was ordered to delay the entry of
all tankers and trucks into the
base until further notice.
We worked closely with Afghan officials before and
during every raid, and they were at
the highest levels; the Afghan National Security
Council, all of the NA Corps
Commanders, Amniat (CIA) intelligence officers, and
national police chiefs. Everyone
had representatives standing by for, and showing up
after, each raid.
On June 29, 2004, the brother of Minister Qanooni
stated in a three hour private
meeting, that Task Force Saber 7 did not just save
two lives (the Minister and Marshall
Fahim), but the lives of “25 million people in what
would have been a bloody civil war
had any of the assassinations occurred.”
As it turned out, one of the captured terrorists
(Malikyar) had an office right next door
to Minister Qanooni. While no bombs were found in or
around the Minister’s office, it
was clear that the groundwork was being laid to set
them in the near future. We
continued to try and locate the remote bombs set at
the airport.
Attached to the OPERATION ACME report was our chart
outlining the entire terror
cell identifying who was captured and who was still at
large. We succeeded in
uncovering the terror cell where others failed because
we worked with and trusted the
Northern Alliance Mujahadeen that
fought with Special Forces from the very beginning
of the War on Terror.
On January 27, 2004, Canadian ISAF Corporal Jaime
Brendan Murphy, age 26, of the
3rd Battalion Royal Canadian Regiment, was killed on
Darlaman Road in Kabul.16 His
Afghan interpreter was also killed, and three Canadian
soldiers were wounded. ISAF
had already closed the investigation with no leads,
saying it was “the work of a lone
suicide bomber.” That myth was now blown out of the
water. Murphy’s murder was
part of an al-Qaida operation.
During the course of our investigation, one of our
terrorists confirmed that it had
not been a suicide bombing and the dead bomber was in
fact a member of their cell.
The bomb's detonator had malfunctioned, prematurely
setting off the explosion and
killing the terrorist as he threw the explosive onto
Murphy’s jeep. We now had
Murphy’s other killers in custody. It was On June 27,
2004—four months to the day.
We then notified the Pentagon and the Canadian
government.
The report ended with a final “Analysis and Opinion”
by stating; “AQ terrorists
assassinated Massoud, and if another member of
Massoud’s family or party is killed,
there will be war that all of the US and Coalition
military might well be powerless to
prevent, just as the Russians could never defeat them.
We defeated the Taliban because
they were a regular army, and because the Northern
Alliance Mujahadeen were with us.
If this al-Qaida plot had succeeded, one million Mujahadeen would have taken up a
guerrilla war against the Pashtun tribes, ISAF, and
all foreigners that would have made
the Iraq resistance look pale by comparison. This
operation was successful only
because a small group of Americans worked closely and
hand in hand with our old
allies from the war. America must work with our
Northern Alliance friends, the people
that fought with us and are loyal to us—we cannot
forsake them.” I knew this part of
our report would send the Department of State into a
tizzy (remember that “Dear John”
letter they sent to the NA). In retrospect I should
have left the last sentence off.
While we continued to chase this new al-Qaida and Hezb-i-Islami coalition, the
security situation in Afghanistan continued to
deteriorate. According to assets inside
the terrorist organizations, bin Laden and Hekmatyar
issued death warrants for the
members of Task Force Saber 7 and it was clear they
were actively seeking us.17 The
hunters became the hunted, which, if it had only been
the terrorists, would have allowed
us to engage the bad guys quicker and more directly.
Unfortunately, we were also being
hunted by the FBI, who should have been hunting the
damn terrorists instead.
We were once again close to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and
bin Laden, both on the
most wanted terrorist list, and we were about to raid
two bin Laden funded and
Pakistani ISI supported bomb factories. ISI is the
Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence
16 See Canadian
Forces Combat Camera website at www.combatcamera.forces.gc.ca/find_e.asp
17 One of our SUVs was
machine-gunned by a taxi leaving Fahim’s neighborhood one night. We can
supply
pictures of the bullet holes and damage resulting from our subsequent pursuit.
The photos also
show
ISAF chalk marks and ruler tape from their investigation later that night.
Directorate. The American government says Pervez
Musharraf and the ISI are helping
us. Sorry, I don’t see it that way. I see them
double-crossing us and lying to us on a
daily basis. I see them as just another evil empire,
which we’re nice to because they
have nukes. They are, after all, the father of the
Taliban. America was just the rich
uncle.
Just prior to July 4th weekend we had repeatedly
requested assistance and the transfer of
prisoners to U.S. military custody. We were told that
Task Force 176 (TF-180’s
successors) would contact us to arrange pick-up of the
terrorists just as soon as DIA
could set up the shipment (spook-speak for “EPW
turnover”). As patriotic as we were,
Independence Day was completely fucking us up. While
we were dealing with
terrorists, it seemed everyone else was partying.
At the same time someone was putting out “wanted
posters” saying I was being
sought by the FBI for “interfering” in “force
protection.” Whoa, I thought we were
doing a pretty good job of interfering with the
terrorist’s plan to interfere with “force
protection.” I was really getting confused now.
We had located both remote-controlled bomb factories,
and were now armed
with the photos and locations of the lead terrorist
running the terror plot for bin Laden
and Hekmatyar, but instead of arresting them, I was
now forced to deal with being an
FBI poster child.
We immediately sought the counsel of our people at the
Pentagon, who stated,
Jack, relax,“it was an overzealous [army] captain” who
thought he was helping the FBI
and “we are trying to resolve it.” I was wondering if
anyone in the U.S. government
knew anything about what anyone else was doing? And, I
was wondering if the FBI
knew anything about anything anyone was doing. The FBI
later claimed that the poster
was a fraud, but to our knowledge, never arrested or
even questioned the person that
authored this bogus poster.
We then contacted the Afghan ambassador who we were
working with (he was
also a target of the terrorists, and bin Laden’s al-Qaida had severely wounded him
during the September 9th, 2001 suicide bombing that
killed Massoud). We also
requested by phone, meetings with Amrullah, Chief of
NDS, and with President Hamid
Karzai. Both these meetings were already scheduled for
the following week.
With only a small combat team, we just didn’t have the
manpower to hold the terrorists
any longer. On Friday we had privately met with
Minister of Defence Marshal Fahim
for several hours and asked if we could put the
terrorists in MOD custody until Bagram
and TASK FORCE 180 could get their heads out of their
asses.
I briefed General Fahim on the entire operation, and
requested three things; 1) a
meeting with General Daoud (MOD intelligence Chief);
2) transfer to MOD custody of
the terrorists– if the U.S. did not arrange transfer
in 72 hours; and 3) assistance with
security on the way to Bagram Air Base. I also showed
him the poster and he asked if
he could discuss it with Ambassador Khalilzad that
next afternoon at the Friday July 4th
celebration at the U.S. Embassy. General Fahim had no
doubt Khalilzad would clear it
up. We agreed and left the poster with him.
On Saturday, and Sunday July 3-4, we sent more emails
to the Pentagon and U.S. Navy
Captain Frank at the American Embassy requesting
assistance. Captain Frank, we had
already been told, was our new DIA liaison at the
Embassy.
We again reached out for the spooks at the Canadian
Embassy in Kabul and in
Canada, where our U.S. office contacted Canada’s
super-secret JTF6 to confirm: 1) that
the Canadians would take custody, and 2) that the
Canadians would prosecute if we
gave them enough evidence.
We also contacted General Attiquallah Lodeen, 3rd
Corps Commander in Logar.
We discussed this with his senior staff because
General Lodeen was in Dubai at the
time. We felt it was important to get General Lodeen’s
opinion because the same
terrorists had engineered both prior attempts to blow
up his car. The map of one of the
assassination attempts was found in one of the
terrorists personal notebooks. General
Lodeen’s son brought back the message that we could
turn that particular terrorist over
to the Canadians.
Unfortunately, the Canadian government did not feel
that prosecuting Jamie
Murphy’s killers was a top priority, and did not
notify us of their decision prior to our
arrest.
July 4th weekend was at a close, the Canadian
government was too busy with
cocktail parties to worry about the killers of a
corporal, and since nobody at Bagram or
the Pentagon was answering their phones, satellite
phones, or emails, I had made a
decision to deliver the terrorists to Bagram. Along
with that, I would deliver an eightpage
plus report and interrogation videos detailing the
terrorists’ plots and plans to kill
allied leaders and American soldiers, which was all
ready to go.
We had more than enough evidence to send the bad guys
away for life; rare
Alpha-1X2 explosives (an ISI marvel), grenades, terror
expense lists, the cryptic Red
Cross letter from an al-Qaida brother
being held at GITMO, maps of bomb routes,
pictures of one of the terrorist’s meetings with
Hekmatyar, and their statements on
video. Everything was tied up in a neat little bow.
Even the FBI would be able to
figure this one out.
In just three hours it would be sunset and we would
head to Bagram under cover
of darkness to deliver the terrorists. I’d missed July
4th weekend with my wife, but I’d
be home for my father’s birthday and our family
reunion in August in New York.
We had saved a lot of American lives. Thanks to the
Office of the
Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence passing our
info to Task Force 180, we had
stopped the explosive fuel tankers from breaching
Bagram. And, according to Ibrahim
Qanooni, “saved the lives of millions of Afghan
people…” Life was good, we were on
top of the world; in ten days we would wind up the
operation and head home—mission
complete. Everything was going according to plan.
So, exactly why was I lying on the concrete floor of
a torture chamber semiconscious
and writhing in pain?
General Babajan, a fat gregarious man who had never
been much of a General,
was now the national police chief in Kabul. He arrived
at our gate just a few hours
before we left for Bagram with the terrorists.
As the first, of about 200 police began to climb our
walls one of my soldiers
yelled “Jack!” and pointed. I knew right then it was
going to be a really bad day. My
Panjshir soldiers– all either Majors, Lieutenant
Colonels, Colonels, or former elite
bodyguards of Commander Massoud– immediately clicked
off their safeties and aimed
their guns at the police. It was not an unwarranted
act. With their mismatched ragtag
uniforms, we had no way of knowing if they really were
police. For all we knew, it was
a Taliban or al-Qaida faction.
My car had been machine-gunned just weeks before
while leaving Marshall Fahim’s neighborhood by what we
first thought was just another
taxicab. In Afghanistan things are often not what they
appear.
Although the “police” outnumbered us in assault rifles
about 20 to 1, with a
single snap of my fingers, we could have annihilated
them with RPG rockets and
grenades.
In the middle of the standoff I heard Babajan’s name
yelled in the street. I
ordered one of the men at the gate to get Babajan. I
wanted to see if he was really there.
He was, and when I saw him at the gate I yelled, “guns
down, no shooting.” It took
several times to get my boys to listen. I could almost
hear them all taking up the slack
in their triggers and two of them had already pulled
the pins on grenades and armed
RPG rockets. Babajan, was a friend, or so I thought.
He was being nice enough to me,
but his guys weren’t lowering their guns. Babajan looked
confused and dazed. He
seemed to be neither in control or cognizant of what
was happening. I thought to
myself, how odd, why is he standing here staring,
almost in a trance?
“Have them lower their guns too,” I told him pointing
to the apoplectic NDS
guys waving around their Klashnikovs. Babajan noticed
one of Massoud’s bodyguards
with me and he ordered his men to lower their guns; he
knew where there was one there
were more, and he knew one more thing, as did everyone
in Afghanistan; Massoud’s
bodyguards and Panjshir soldiers would not hesitate to
pull a trigger, in a Kabul minute,
neither would Brent and I.
I invited Babajan inside to discuss “the problem.”
Babajan assured me he just
wanted to “talk to me.” But once I let him in a few
more followed and talk went to
arguments, which quickly turned into mayhem. Babajan
still wasn’t saying much, just
standing there silently confused. It was like he was
trying to figure out what I was
doing there and which side was I on. My interpreters
wasted no time attempting to dial
Ministers and Ambassadors on our cell phones. Cell
phones in Kabul never really work
when you most need them.
I recognized our friend Mohammed Naeem, a tough young
agent who worked
with the American spooks as a liaison between the
Afghan Intelligence agency. “Jack,
we have no problem with you, the FBI and OGA (Other
Government Agencies, spookspeak
for CIA) just want to talk with you,” he said. “No
problem, lets go talk to them.”
If the FBI just wanted to “talk” to me, I was ready to
give them an earful, and I had no
problem meeting with the CIA. But I was leery of the statement. I could not imagine
the CIA involved, and they did not have a problem with
us, nor did DOD, as I had been
talking to both repeatedly. In retrospect, as I sit here beaten and swollen, maybe
I
should have shot it out, but we were supposed to be on
the same side. Press
lie # 37,
“there was a brief shootout.” Not a single shot was
fired, nobody fought, nobody had
their hands up. The entire scene was captured on
videotape by Ed.
Right before I stepped out into the dusty street and
into the police truck, I handed
my pistol to Brent. The cops would only steal it if I
brought it with me. Besides, I had
a back-up Makarov pistol under my uniform.
Babajan disappeared, and we found ourselves driving
into NDS Headquarters
(the National Directorate of Security- known as Amniat). There was a day when NDS
and I were close. Engineer Araf was in charge then,
and most of the Afghans still liked
Americans. Now NDS was controlled by Amrullah Saleh–
put in place by Karzai to
diminish Massoud’s Northern Alliance power base and
cater to the CIA, and more
unbelievably, the FBI. Of course neither I nor anyone
else could figure out exactly
what the FBI’s purpose in Afghanistan was anyway.
The beat up old Toyota SUVs pulled in fast and stopped
in the rundown unkempt
courtyard. The decrepit white buildings still carried
the bullet holes of the last gun
battle with the Taliban, starkly contrasted by the
dozens of wild rose bushes ranging
from bright red to brilliant yellow. It was a
surrealistic scene reminiscent of the day we
took back the U.S. embassy in November 2001.
Destruction and roses, all in the same
place. Brent, Ed, Zorro, Ezmerai, and myself, were all
crammed into the back of the
SUV. Initially, it was only to be Brent and I, then
one of the terrorists got brought out
and all bets were off. Everybody was going, including
Ezmerai who had only been
there are about an hour. Ezmerai was a Panjshir major
in the Ministry of Defense. I
wouldn’t find out until later that everyone had been
put in vehicles and brought to NDS.
I turned to Ed and voiced my earlier silent
observation; “this is about to be a really bad
day.”
“Don’t worry Jack,” Zorro, one of my interpreters
responded, “Marshall Fahim
and Minister Qanooni will have us out of here by
tomorrow.”
“I don’t think so Zorro, the Afghan government did not
arrest us, the FBI did--
they were just too gutless to do it themselves.”
“Jack you are a hero in Afghanistan, the Generals love
and respect you as their
brother, don’t worry.”
“That’s the problem Zorro, those are the Generals that
the U.S. has now deserted
and want in jail alongside me.” I was referring to the
Corps Commanders like General
Atta Mohammed in Mazar, General Hazrat Ali who fought
with us in Tora Bora,
Generals Lodeen and Gulhaider who fought with us in
OPERATION ANACONDA,
and General Daoud who was our great ally in Kunduz and
Taloqan.
These were America’s greatest Muslim allies, yet I
knew something few others
did. There had been a secret U.S. State Department
directive to abandon the Northern
Alliance. Even though they had fought violently by our
side, had died next to us, and
are incredibly loyal to America, the U.S. military was
to cease all support of them and
to back Karzai’s Pashtun tribes (Lodeen was Pashtun,
but his forces remained loyal to
Massoud’s Northern Alliance and anti-Taliban).
It was the theory of appeasement and double-cross
which the U.S. State
Department had become so adept at over the last 50
years– recruit partisans and guerilla
fighters to topple a tyrannical government, then sell
them out in the interest of coalitions
and lasting peace. How many countless times had we done it? How many allies had we
sold out? The Hmong and Montanguard tribes in the
highlands of Vietnam, Somoza in
Nicaragua, the Karen on the Thai Burmese border. But
the peace never lasted, and
bringing former Taliban enemies back into the
government wasn’t going to work this
time either. Hell, we had just arrested three former
Taliban officials who were now all
in the new government, including one as a judge, and
they were about to blow up their
new government.
While the active duty military was trying to
discredit, dismantle, and destroy our
only true friends and allies– who the press had dubbed
“Warlords”– I was cheering
them on to continue fighting al-Qaida and working to reestablish relations between
them and America. Was I right? Well, I was the only
American out there everyday
living alone with them. I knew their loyalty was to
America, and that their hearts were
with us. On the other side was the State Department,
living behind twenty foot thick
walls, protected by a swarm of Marines, with near zero
indigenous contacts and having
daily cocktail parties.
I also knew it was only a matter of time before the
State Department’s scorn for
these loyal—yet sensitive— Mujahadeen fighters would ferment their separation
anxiety into violent hate. America got engaged with
the NA for business reasons, then
dumped them right after the honeymoon and ran off with
their worst enemy. Then, as if
that wasn’t enough, then the State Department called
their ex-fiancé a whore. Only they
used “warlord” to describe her. In fact, all of our
Northern Alliance allies who fought
with us were suddenly “Warlords.” God this world was
really fucked up. The press
had
created this myth, lumping Massoud’s corps commanders
into one big group, which
even included Massoud himself, who was nominated for the
Nobel Peace Prize. All of
this was fueled by a few real “warlord” types that do
traffic narcotics and cause trouble.
Press Lie #17- Zorro “worked for a Warlord.” Zorro, is a Ministry of Defence
employee and worked for General Atta Mohammed, who was
in fact the 7th Corps
Commander in the Ministry of Defence and is now the
Governor of Mazar.
On the bumpy road to God knows where, we had finally
reached Minister
Qanooni’s brother on his cell phone. Trying to keep
the cell phone conversation low
key was no easy task with a dozen soldiers swarming
around the SUV as we pulled into
the middle of the NDS courtyard. Qanooni’s brother,
Ibrahim, assured us it was all just
a big mistake and would be resolved in an hour.
Taken one by one into the basement, I immediately
recognized every mud brick
in the place. I had been here many times before after
we occupied Kabul on November
12th, 2001 as the Taliban were in full retreat to the
east and south. Back then the
courtyard had been splattered with blood, and littered
with bodies when the last of the
Taliban skipped out of Kabul in the middle of the
night on November 10th, 2001.
I had returned this time, not as a liberator, but as
a prisoner. My wife is usually
the one that hates it when I am right. This time I
hated it. It was clearly a bad day. The
underground cell I was thrown in was cold, dark,
gray, and barely lit with peeling paint
and splattered bloodstains. Just what you would
expect. I looked around and wondered
just how much blood was spilled here. Then I moved to
a more important question– just
how much more blood was about to be spilled here. As
I surveyed my situation a
variety of insects crossed the floor. I knew things
were going to go rapidly downhill
from here…
Chapter ____
NOTE: This is Amrullah arriving at NDS the night of
July 5th, 2004
Four shiny Toyota LandCruisers raced down
the narrow pot-holed street in central
Kabul City. Three were new. One had seen its better
days. Kabul police cars instantly
slammed on their brakes seeing the approaching convoy
and allowed it to pass. The few
Kabul traffic cops still on duty that night dropped
their German made wooden hand
signal signs to their sides and saluted. A rare
gesture, reserved for Marshall Fahim,
Minister Qanooni, Ambassador Wali Massoud, and
occasionally, for President Karzai.
This convoy carried none of those people. The fact
that three of the
LandCruisers were packed with plainclothes Afghan carrying Kalikov assault
rifles and
wearing Eddie Bauer style-hunting vests was not
unusual. The fact that the convoy was
running every single car, bicycle, handcart, or
pedestrian off the road was not unusual.
The fact that the convoy literally ran a white UN LandCrusier with diplomatic plates off
the road was not unusual. This was still Afghanistan,
where power and guns, and
powerful looking entourages ruled.
What was unusual was the cleanliness of each of the
vehicles – nothing evaded
Afghan dust – that and the destination at 8pm at
night.
The convoy barely slowed as it passed the Mustafa
Hotel and turned into NDS
headquarters, the lair of the Afghan CIA. The two
camouflaged soldiers racing to open
the gates barely made it in time to prevent the lead LandCruiser from smashing them
open with its bumper.
Skidding to a stop the NDS bodyguards were out of the
SUVs in a second. In
another second the back left passenger door of the
second LandCruiser was opened and
out stepped an impeccably dressed man, large but trim
in physical stature, almost
terrifyingly large in physical pretence, and
disturbingly, eerily, imposing in his complete
lack of emotion.
He did not need to adjust his dark suit, his tie, or
brush off his pants from the
ride. It was clear from his first step, everything
about him was impeccable.
Wasting no time he walked swiftly up the stairs and
into the building, never looking
back to see if his men were behind him. Never hesitating
for a door to open for him.
NOTE: Extreme Rough Notes inserted from article, needs
complete rewrite:
I could hear voices, rustling, footsteps, and cell
doors opening and closing. As far as I
knew they had only taken four of us. I wondered if all
my Panjshir soldiers had made it
out. Half my reason for arguing and delaying back at
our compound was to get Minister
Qanooni or Marshall Fahim on the phone, but the other
half was to allow my Panjshir
commanders to slip away.
It wasn’t long before I heard the footsteps in the
hallway stop in front of my
rusted iron door. Three weathered men in ragtag green
camo uniforms stepped inside
and escorted me back upstairs. In the hallway they
took out the handcuffs and told me
to put my hands behind my back. I told them they were
making a mistake. One of them
looked exactly like Oddjob in James Bond’s Goldfinger film. I mean exactly. Even his
clothes, except that he was missing the hat.
And Oddjob was not smiling...
Sy, one of our interpreters, was also brought up. Sy
was a wreck, crying and
shaking. Sy’s job was not a military one. He was in
charge of hiring house staff,
purchasing anything from diesel fuel to fly spray, and
repairing the house, which was a
full time job. But Sy never participated in any OPs,
never had contact with the terrorists
and never wore military gear or clothes. Sy always
wanted to fight the terrorists and the
Taliban, but he was just a 19 year-old kid with no
experience and his only “crime” had
been loving his country too much. He once picked up a
machinegun in our living room
and I ripped it out of his hands explaining that he
was never to touch a weapon.
Here was Sy, crying while NDS was threatening to kill
him on the spot. I took
his head to my shoulder, patted him on the back and
told him, “Don’t worry Sy,
everything will be fine, they won’t hurt you.” That
was the second lie I told Sy. The
first was when I had told him everything would be
alright back at the house. I
remember the time I told a gunshot Northern Alliance
soldier everything would be
alright during the war. I kept telling him that as he
died in my lap. Sometimes people
don’t need the whole truth. Sometimes the truth can
just add to the pain.
By now about ten men had streamed in. Three were
pointing AK-47’s
(Klashnikov’s as the Afghans refer to them) at us. It
took me only a few seconds to
compute favorable odds that I could kill all ten in
just about the same few seconds. A
hundred percent, no doubt, no second thoughts. One
Klashnikov would be in my hands,
safety off, slide racked to prevent dropping the
hammer on an empty chamber, then the
two guys still with guns would be first, then Oddjob
since he was clearly the most
dangerous. All of them would be dead before you could
say, “I’ll have a cold Corona
and an ashtray,” at the Hard Rock Café. I’m sorry, but
that’s the way a Green Beret
thinks. Get over it.
The problem would have been getting the rest of the
guys out and then getting all
of us through the hail of bullets that would be
flooding the rose-filled courtyard as we
made our exit. That and the fact that we would be
killing our “allies.” So much for
“Plan A.”
I opted for “Plan B,” the kinder gentler approach,
“Look, he’s a kid, don’t beat
him I am requesting you honor a long Mujahadeen tradition. Do not hurt my men, I am
the commander, and I will take the beatings for them,”
having already figured out that
Oddjob spoke English. I allowed them to handcuff me
behind my back. And with no
hesitation I had my request immediately approved.
Confirmation came when Oddjob smashed the left side of
my head, squarely on
the temple.
As one of them held my cuffs the blows came swiftly.
All with an open hand,
but Oddjob’s hands were like kiln-fired bricks
traveling at the speed of a Louisville
Slugger. One after another they came. Oddjob was a pro
at this. That was clear by the
third or fourth blow. Blood spewed from my mouth, my
nose, and my eyes. But I
remained standing and silent. I have no idea how, but
I did.
From there I was taken back across the courtyard to a
large building. I’d been
here many times in the old days. It was the NDS
“Executive Offices.” Upstairs I
stepped into a nicely remodeled room. Very upscale for
Afghanistan.
“Have a seat,” my host directed in a suave and
debonair tone of articulate
English.
“And who might you be?” I asked the meticulously
dressed and groomed man in
the dark $500 suit. He nodded to the right, just a
slight, ever so faint nod, and Oddjob’s
right brick hit me again.
“I will ask the questions,” clichéd the man in the
dark suit.
“Ahh, it took me a second, I was still a little dazed
and my vision is blurry,” I
paused briefly, “but I know who you are. You must be
Amrullah. A pleasure to finally
meet you,” I said slowly and coldly. He did not
respond.
“Who are you working for?”
“The Northern Alliance and the Corps Commanders.”
“They no longer exist,” he said.
“The Corps Commanders do, and it’s my job to keep the
NA allied with the
U.S.”
“You are running another Abu Ghraib here. You have
been cutting off fingers,
electrocuting prisoners, raping them…”
“What the fuck,” I interrupted, “are you talking
about…” Oddjob smacked me
again as I slumped back in the soft couch blinking my
eyes to stop the flashing lights
from swirling through my brain like a Timothy Leary
kaleidoscope.
“I also do the talking here.” Amrullah crossed his
legs and continued, “we know
about the women you killed whose bodies you left in
the desert to rot. How many
people have you murdered and where are their bodies?”
“We haven’t killed anyone, we haven’t hurt anyone, but
we have arrested some
very important terrorists, and we did so with your
government and informed our
government.”
“General Barno does not know who you are.” He was
speaking about the U.S.
Army commander at Bagram Air Base.
“General Barno is an asshole. Call the Pentagon. The phone
number is in the
mobile they took from me. Ask for the Office of the
Deputy Under Secretary of
Defense for Intelligence.”
“No, I think I will not,” he paused, silent for a good
minute, and then continued.
“Two years ago you were at a party, with music and
dancing on our greatest religious
day.”
“Yes, I remember that. It was a party by ABC Australia
for a journalist that was
leaving Kabul.”
“You violated our religion.”
“I didn’t violate anything, I didn’t even know it was
a religious day. I was only a
guest, and the only thing I did was stop some fanatics
from killing about a dozen
American and Australian women,” I argued.
“They violated our religion, was it your job to
interfere?”
“It is my job to stop anyone from murdering anyone,
especially women, and
especially American women.”
“And now,” Amrullah paused, “who will protect you?” I
didn’t answer. I knew
we were on our own, out in the cold, the minute we
were accused of the “T” word,
torture. We had already been disavowed, and there was
a good chance it was going to
get worse. The American soldiers, like Lynndie
England, with their childish,
humiliating, and unprofessional behavior, had started
a prairie fire in the Muslim world.
They had given the terrorists torches with which to
burn us all alive in this war on
terror.
“You met with Fahim from 10am until 1pm, what was that
meeting about?”
“About the terrorists that were trying to kill him,” I
replied.
“He would never have met with you if he had known you
were wanted by the
FBI.”
“Well the FBI has their own agenda.”
“You will hang, and so will your friends,” Amrullah
said as his eyes stared at me
without so much as a blink.
“A small price to pay for the hundreds of American
soldiers we saved,” I replied
calmly.
“And a price you will pay. You will never leave
Afghanistan alive.”
“I figured as much,” I said with the same arrogant
tone that has punctuated bad
events becoming worse events in my life.
Amrullah nodded his head and again Oddjob proceeded to
toss me out the door
and down the concrete steps. The significance of the
conversation was not lost on me. I
had just had a private conversation with the Afghan
equivalent of George Tenet. Except
that the NDS had no Executive Order prohibiting murder
and assassination. Basically, I
was fucked, and so was everyone with me.
I was taken back to the cell in the underground
dungeon. There, they took off
my desert combat boots and placed the iron leg
shackles and bars on my ankles.
Oddjob had stayed behind. Five new men were there now,
all in green camo uniforms,
and all with ragged beards and weasely looks. Sitting
spread legged on the floor my
handcuffs came off and I was told to remove my desert
tan uniform shirt. I handed my
shirt to one of them and he promptly spit on the
American flag on my right sleeve. As I
tried to stand he dropped it to the floor and ground
the spit in with his boot. I
recognized the all to familiar word now, Amerikan
Kafir, and grabbed the flag off the
floor. Kafir meant a non-Muslim, and to radical
fundamentalists, that meant a nonhuman
in this twisted world.
He was a little surprised when I caught his boot at
the ankle in mid-air with my
right hand right before it connected with my face; as
my left hand barely stopped
another’s boot. Mohammed, or what ever the bastard’s
name was, seemed even more
surprised by the second catch, and became very nice,
calling me his friend. Then the
handcuffs went back on.
The next thirty minutes was classic Taliban. In came
the rubber hose, then the
flat-wood stick, and they proceeded to play crochet
with my body. My ribs were broken
in a rather short order. My shoulders were torn as
they held me up by the cuffs and
hammered at my stomach. The wooden stick on my shins
was probably the most
painful, although it all blended together after a
while.
No one ever asked me anything. This was not
interrogation, this was simply
torture for sport and I tried to block out their
laughter with my own laughter– induced
by a special blend of fantasy and desire. I closed my
eyes and thought about blowing
off their kneecaps, among other things, and leaving
them to bleed to death.
As the beatings continued, they would get tired, and
then take a chai break.
About an hour later they would come back and start all
over again. At some point it got
more personal, and they just started slapping my head
with open palms apparently not
wanting to do too much visible damage to my face. On
that note they failed.
Eventually it stopped and I either passed out or just
fell asleep on the floor.
Chapter ____
NOTE: This is the two FBI guys arriving at Ariana Hotel
the night of July 5th
The white four door Ford Taurus rounded the turnabout
circle and drove quickly, but
not fast, past the monument being erected to Commander
Massoud. On the left was the
shoddy guard-post and gate that blocked the access
road to the Presidential Palace. The
road had been blocked to through traffic since the day
after Jack recommended the
security upgrade to President Rabanni in December
2001; just forty days after Kabul
fell to the U.S. Army Special Forces and Northern
Alliance.
Sitting at the guard post were four Afghan soldiers in
mismatched uniforms. In
front of them stood an old six foot long wooden table.
On the table sat four olive drab
old Russian helmets, three Klashnikov assault rifles,
and one Russian PK belt-fed
machinegun, old, rusted, but still operational.
The white sedan veered left and a past a sign written
in English, and obviously
for journalists. It said “No Photos,” and had a camera
in a red circle occluded by a
diagonal red line. On the left were lines of dark
green plastic drums encapsulated in
thick metal chicken wire. The drums were filled with
sand and dirt. Behind them,
another line of drums, three high, stacked in a
pyramid and surrounding the entire
compound. Behind them, a stone wall. Behind that 40’
long steel shipping containers
filled with dirt and stacked three high creating a
barrier more than thirty feet high and in
some places more than fifty feet high. It was American
Army improvised security at its
best.
Behind all those, and the machinegun turrets, guard
posts, heavy metal gates,
zig–zag entrance, and roof mounted rocket launchers,
was the Ariana Hotel.
The Ariana Hotel was the most secure, protected, and
heavily armed hotel in the
world. At least until the U.S. war machine geared up
in Baghdad and prepared for the
long-haul after declaring “victory” in Iraq. But it
still ranked as the most heavily
guarded and armed resort in the world outside of
Baghdad.
This was where General Tommy Franks stayed during his
brief visits to Kabul in
the years before. Where the CENTCOM housed it’s top
ranking officers. Where the
DIA, NSA, CIA, and all other alphabet agencies put
their people when temporarily in
Kabul. And, now, it was where the FBI housed their
field agents hoping to get in on the
action.
It was Ritz-Carlton in Afghanistan, fine food, dotting
servants, imported
furniture, and three bars, all fully stocked. Of
course General Order number One
prevented U.S. military personnel from consuming
alcohol in a combat-zone– thanks to
Tommy Franks– but that didn’t stop anyone else.
When the white sedan stopped inside Mohammed Naeem
opened the door for the older
man, the other American was already getting out. Both
Americans were dressed in L.L.
Bean cargo pants and the familiar Afghan safari vests
all spooks had taken to wearing,
including the wannabe spooks. Both these men were in
good physical condition, in
spite of the ten extra pounds they had actually gained
in a place where the average
Green Beret lost twenty-five pounds. It was a
testament to the Ariana Hotel’s fine food
and cold beer.
The older man shook Mohammed’s hand first.
“Thanks for a great day, a really great day.”
“I am always at your service,” Mohammed replied
dutifully.
“And we appreciate it,” the younger American answered.
“We’ll see you in the morning, how about 10?” The
senior man stated.
“That late?” Mohammed looked slightly perplexed.
“Hey, when your day goes this well, its Miller Time,
and we intend to knock
down a few tonight.”
Mohammed had excellent English, and good command of
slang, sarcasm, and
American colloquy, but Miller Time eluded him. Sensing
his lack of understanding, the
younger American, although he was at least forty years
old, clarified their meaning,
“We’re going to celebrate with a few beers,”
“More than a few,” the older man interrupted.
“Yeah more than a few. Miller is an American beer
‘Miller Time’ means its
time.”
“Got it,” Mohammed responded as he shook their hands
again and turned back to
the car.
“Hey,” the older man said, “great day, I mean a really
great day, we got em!”
“The last time someone said that, it was your Paul
Bremer about Saddam. The
next time I thought I would hear it was when we got
bin Laden,” Mohammed said, not
only with a quiet hesitation, but with an unnoticeable
spark of confusion in his brain.
“As far as our boss is concerned, this was just as
good, we not only stopped him,
we got him, and his crew,” the younger American
explained.
“Tomorrow,” Mohammed said. He then got in the Sedan
and watched the two
men give each other a congratulatory high five. It was
something Mohammed was
already familiar with, having learned its meaning from
the first American Special
Forces soldiers he worked with in Northern Afghanistan
in the beginning. The two
Americans walked off towards the bar, gleeful, even
giddy with their day’s work.
Mohammed drove away and out the Ariana’s fortified
gate having second thoughts
about the last five days.
NOTE: Extreme Rough Notes inserted from article, needs
complete rewrite:
The next day I was moved to the regular NDS prison
area, another rundown decrepit
structure. This one housed 500 al-Qaida and Taliban prisoners. But it wasn’t to be for
long. That night I was back in the dungeon. This time
for a more interesting adventure.
In came the psychos again, but they seemed more
concerned about my condition.
“Cheturasti?” one said in Dari for “How are you?”
“Hoopesie,” I replied in Dari for “fine.”
“Chai?” one asked me, as he held a teapot and two glass
cups in his hands.
“I have no idea how I will drink it with my hands behind
my back.” At first I
thought, how nice, he is going to pour me a cup and
help me drink. Then the son-of-abitch
poured the boiling water into my crotch as the leg
irons kept my legs spread.
There was no way to avoid it, two other men were
holding my ankles and I was locked
into a “V” flattened out on the floor as he
strategically swept the boiling water down the
insides of my thighs, trying, it seemed, not to
actually pour it on my balls. I was sure
they could hear those screams on the other side of the
Khyber Pass a hundred miles
away…
Another break, and when the two of them returned one
was holding a gold-plated
double-edged razor. I strained to see the whole image
before me. The blood in my eyes
and mouth had dried now, and left this irritating
desire to scratch my face, which was,
of course, impossible.
At first I thought I was going to get my head or my
beard shaved, but this was
Creative Torture 101. They spun me over on my stomach, and, grasping the
head of the
metal razor inside his palm with the handle protruding
between his index and ring
finger, one of then began punching my back in this
weird Kung Fu routine. First he
would hold his hand back towards his chest, then wind
up, yell “Allah-o-Akbar” (God is
Great) and then slam the metal punch into my back. It
was an interesting concept–
direct all your energy into a ½ “diameter spot.
“Please…” was about the only word I
could muster between the yelps and screams.
Soon it was time to move on. Their next game was rape.
I had wondered how
long it would take the sick bastards to get to that.
The Arab and Muslim races have
long used rape as torture. I had been hoping they
could skip that part and get right to
the beheading.
Thanks to my Desantis/ICS Helicopter Extraction
Assault Belt the stupid
bastards could not figure out the Velcro® buckle
release, and the iron bars between my
legs had finally accomplished something for my
benefit. But these two things were
sideshows to my vicious adrenaline enhanced struggle.
Attempted rape is a motivating
experience, and I wondered why some women just
submitted to the fear.
I remember teaching anti-rape classes for women at a
police academy in NY– I
thought I was an expert. I drilled the classes in
intricate hand-to-hand combat
techniques. In retrospect, I didn’t have a clue. Now I
do. Forget about those fancy
self-defense moves. Just release that primal survival
extinct and lash out with every
fiber of your being. I had in fact figured out the
ultimate rape defense for women– just
go postal.
They couldn’t hold me down. And they couldn’t get my
body to stop moving.
At one point I managed to throw the biggest one
completely over my shoulders using
the leg irons as a catapult.
My attackers settled on a few symbolic dry humps to
get their point across. Then
spit in my eyes and mouth, and left.
Over the next night I could hear the screams of Zorro,
Ezmerai, and Sy. Ezmerai
was a major, commander of the Communications Battalion
of the First Base of the
Panjshir. He had only been visiting my house, to
discuss working with me again.
Ezmerai had been with me for most of my first year in
Afghanistan and had been my
Close Protection Officer, in charge of my Panjshir
security detail. He was walking
through the desert next to me on the front cover of
the NY Times best-selling book,
THE HUNT FOR BIN LADEN–Task Force Dagger. I had been happy to see Ezmerai
again. But his loyalty to me was to be his undoing
All of their screams were different. Sy’s screams went
for three nights. They
were the pitiful whining piercing sort you would
expect. Part fear, part pain, part
begging.
Zorro’s screams were older, deeper, less persistent
and quieter– if you can
describe a scream as “quiet.”
Ezmerai’s screams were those of a hardened Mujahadeen who had fought with
Commander Massoud. They were the sort you admire. In
fact, I don’t think Ezmerai
even started screaming in earnest until they hooked
him up to the electricity.
I wondered why they had broken our agreement to only
torture me. I assumed
they decided that only applied to the Americans with
me, not the Afghans. It wasn’t
until weeks later I learned that the three had refused
to sign false statements against me
and this was their punishment. Sherzai had signed a
statement accusing me of every
thing even remotely imaginable. I could not understand
why– the statement including
everything from prostitution, to hash smoking, to rape
and wild parties. I would learn
why months later.
It took about a week for Sandy Ingram, the Consulate
Officer at the US Embassy,
to show up. She was a typical State Department
diplomatic officer. A condescending
holier than thou bitch that made it clear she was only
doing her job when she handed me
a box of water. Her first question was “how are you
doing?”
“Well my ribs are broke in numerous places, I’ve got
welts all over my body, my
sternum is probably fractured, my head feels like a
whiffle ball, and both my eyes are
blood red from hemorrhaging. I’m seeing floaties (eye
matter breaking up in your
retina) that are increasing daily and might indicate a
detached retina in progress, but
other than that I am fine. I want to know how the
other guys are.” I was angry and
Ingram sensed it. And I had every right to be.
“Ed and Brent look better than you,” she replied.
“Good.”
“Did they beat you?” A typical DOS question into the obvious.
“No, I got this falling up a set of stairs,” pointing
to the bruises and abrasions on
the sides of my head.
Sandy just stared at me in disdain.
“Of course they beat me.” I paused and considered the
gravity of what I was
about to ask. “Would you like to get us into U.S.
custody? The Afghans claim they
arrested us for the FBI. So we should be transferred
to U.S. custody. Right?”
Basically, I got nowhere with Sandy Ingram. She was a
forty year-old lawyer,
who told me I didn’t know shit and she knew everything.
Sandy Ingram was a typical
bureaucrat. When we discussed the legalities and
application of the Geneva Convention
during a subsequent visit, Sandy informed me that she
had been a trial lawyer for eleven
years and had tried “hundreds of cases.” It didn’t
require rocket science math to take
the lowest figure of 100 cases and divide it by the
length of her experience; which
averaged out to one trial every forty days for eleven
years straight, not counting
holidays, weekends, and vacations. Yeah right.
Sandy informed us separately that women’s bloody head
coverings had been
found in our house. The NDS and FBI claimed we were
running a torture chamber and
private jail, and we had entered the country illegally
using phony Indian passports. It
was one hundred and ten percent fabrication and
fiction. But, Babajan and the FBI had
been smart. Once Babajan found out we really were
working for the government, really
had arrested real terrorists, and that every general
in the Northern Alliance was trying to
get us released, he also realized that he and NDS had
completely screwed up getting in
bed with the FBI.
So, since the damage was already done, the only thing
to do was to initiate the
cover-up. The FBI, through Babajan, quickly released
to the press all the insane
accusations, plus a bunch of new ones– we had been
hanging terrorists upside down,
burning them with cigarettes, dipping them in boiling
water, starving them, and beating
them. Press Lie #32, Associated Press not only reported that the terrorists had been
found hanging upside down, but that we had a shootout
with the police, and then
surrendered. The die had been cast, and the press now
had a story that would grow by
leaps and bounds in fantasy and false allegations. We
later found out that AP’s
“unnamed source” had been an Afghan working for the
FBI.
Then came the final coup d’ grat. Press Lie #41: None of them were terrorists,
and we were simply kidnappers selling our victims for
money. Never mind the fact that
there was no ceiling in our sand brick compound
capable of hanging anyone from
without the roof collapsing. No one had any burns or
marks the day after all this
supposedly occurred. We had no stove on which to boil
all this boiling water. And our
take-out bills for restaurant rice and kebob were
about a hundred dollars a day, unheard
of in Afghanistan.
The press, fueled by Abu Ghraib and picture of that
mop-haired freak Lynndie
England, did the rest, convicting us before we could
snap our fingers. Freelance
torturing psychopaths sold stories and pictures, and
the second-stringers in Afghanistan
finally had a cash cow story to rival Abu Ghraib.
Meanwhile, the FBI finally showed up in person. Two
young guys who looked
pretty darn squared away. I had seen them before driving
through Kabul and thought
they were Special Forces sergeants with their beards,
blue jeans and shoulder holsters.
Kevin and Jim, if those were their real names, took a
different approach with me then
they did with Ed and Brent. They had accused Ed of
murder, outright. And Ed, the
consummate gentleman that he is—unlike me— lit them up
with a perfect retort,
“Quite frankly, I don’t care for your tone.” Ed then
returned to his cell without
waiting for permission.
They were nice and made no threats to me. Ed and Brent
had both basically told
them to “Fuck off” in the first minute of their
conversations and said I would do the
talking if there was any to be done. My boys were
troopers, and Ed was rapidly
converting from journalist to commando.
“Did you kill anybody?” started the exchange.
“NO. If you get in a firefight then your raid was
poorly planned and pitifully
executed,” I replied.
“Did you cut any fingers off?”
“No,” I laughed, “that gets bullshit confessions to
anything, not information
about other terrorists.”
“What did you do?” Kevin asked. Kevin was slightly
older and had ten years in
the Bureau. I had asked for their résumés during the
introduction phase. Both were
prior Army, so I gave them a break on the snotty
comments I usually handout to FBI
Agents.
“Mostly?” I paused for them to nod, “we kept then up,
played loud Melissa
Etheridge and Joe Cocker music, and tricked them into
thinking the other terrorists were
already cooperating. And then we flipped them like
flapjacks.”
“How did you keep them up?” Jim asked.
“Loud Rock and Roll music and water… cold water.”
“Can you prove they are terrorists?” Jim questioned.
“You guys have been looking for Ghulamsaki for almost
six months, what do
you think?”
“We think we need to get you out of here so we can
catch the rest and transfer
these guys to U.S. custody. I assume there are more?”
“We had three more raids planned for after we turned
those guys over to Bagram.
But what you suggest is never going to happen. FBI
Headquarters will be too
embarrassed that we got them before they did.”
“Let us worry about that. How did you get all those
marks and bruises?”
I told them and they seemed genuinely concerned. Over
the next seven to ten
days the FBI came almost everyday. They brought all of
us cigarettes, Pepsi, and paid
the jail to feed us Kebab. They were using the same
tactics on me that I had used on the
terrorists. The difference was that we didn’t need to
be flipped, we were already on
“our” side. During our second or third late night
meeting, they showed me pictures of
several house searches they did in Khost to the south.
I explained that they should be
getting big guys with me instead of grabbing low level
Taliban foot soldiers with one
Klashnikov and some spare ammo. They agreed. It was
the Soviet Union all over
again, the field agents knew what to do and how to
fight a war, and their bosses didn’t
have a clue.
I was actually beginning to like them, and even trust
them. Kevin wanted to
know what he could do to get Ghulamsaki to talk. I
said “just bring him in and let me
question him– but most of all let me look like I’m in
control and once I get him talking
they could take over. I also explained that there was
something more important to me
than helping us– they had to get the terrorists into
U.S. custody and segregated quickly.
All of my interrogations had been videotaped so U.S.
interrogators at Bagram could use
the tapes to get up to speed on the operation, names,
and facts. I also explained that we
were losing valuable time. Bin Laden had surely
already moved. Sabir, the terror cell’s
leader might already be on the run, and my
surveillance on him might already be
compromised. As for the bomb builders, they would have
already sanitized their
locations. Again, total agreement, and they were
sincere about it.
I straightened up my uniform, tucked in the laces of
my desert boots, and
completely re-arranged the room to resemble where
Ghulamsaki had his last discussions
with me. Then they brought Ghulamsaki in and let me
roll. He actually believed I was
still in control. The ruse worked like all the others
I had subjected the terrorists to.
Ghulamsaki sung like a canary, telling almost
everything to the FBI. Because he was in
an NDS prison he would not admit to actually being one
of the men that was going to
kill Qanooni and Fahim, but he did lay out the plot and the entire fuel truck bombing
plan to turn Bagram into an inferno. When we were
through with Ghulamsaki we
talked privately about him and his information.
“Sorry I couldn’t get him to admit he was the one who
was going to kill Qanooni
and Fahim with Serajan, but he’s scared, there was an
NDS guy in the room and he
figures the Panjshir guys will kill him or beat him if
he admits to that while in Afghan
custody.”
“Hey, we figured. Besides, blowing up Bagram is good
enough for us. We
camp out there ever now and then, and there’s no shortage of fuel trucks going in and
out every day.”
“You know, I just tried to save Americans and my
friends, and I did. You know
that, don’t you,” I told them.
“Jack, you’re a hero with us. We mean it,” Kevin said.
“You are a hero Jack, we both really do mean it.
Nobody would have taken the
risks you did for your country,” Jim added.
“Yeah, you’ve got our vote, now let’s just see if we
can get you and your guys
out of there,” said Kevin. He sounded so sincere, but
so had I when I promised my
terrorists sat phones and money.
“Thanks,” I said, “but your bosses will never allow
it– politics are more
important than stopping terrorists,” I told them.
“Let us worry about the politics,” Jim said. I hoped
that they knew what they
were getting into, but the reality was they had no
idea…
A few days later the Kebob stopped coming. My FBI
friends had disappeared
off the face of the earth. But not before Washington
ordered them to take all
exculpatory evidence, including 500 pages of emails,
letters, and documents between
our team and the U.S. and Afghan governments. The FBI
also confiscated fifty plus
rolls of film and more than two hundred videotapes.
The pictures and the videos
showed we were working with both governments on a
daily basis. Every interrogation
had been videotaped by Caraballo and those tapes would
have freed us and put the
terrorists away for life. A few photos did survive–
some digital copies of several photos
that had been emailed to the Pentagon and copied to “a
friend” in the U.S. for a “rainy
day,” and today was a raging typhoon.
But, there was no way to get the documents and photos
we needed back to
Afghanistan for our defense.
By now, I had been seen by three Afghan doctors who
Sandy sent. They
confirmed the hemorrhaging in my eyes, the trauma to
my head, and the injuries from
the torture, all of which was still present when they
showed up two weeks later. The
doctors wrote a report, which the Embassy had still
not released to me five weeks later,
in spite of written demands and FOIA requests. Over
the next three weeks Sandy grew
more and more adversarial, refusing to give me the
medical reports. Weeks later one of
the doctors, who had read The Hunt for Bin Laden book, told me they had been made to
rewrite the original medical reports and “soften them
up.” I was livid.
Each week Sandy showed up at the prison with water,
and magazines, many of
which were donated by Special Forces guys at the
Embassy. We appreciated these
small gestures. The water kept us from dying and the
magazines kept us sane. But, the
Consular Office was supposed to be a little more
proactive when Americans were being
held in such horrendous conditions, especially in a
prison funded by U.S. taxpayers.
Two of our favorite deliveries were Men’s Health and
Vanity Fair. The Men’s health
issue with an article about The Punisher, had a great
workout regime when you don’t
have weights. Great for an al-Qaida cell workout. Ed decided we should write our own
version— the “Mud Cell Workout,” with no furniture and
flies. Vanity Fair was great
because it was thick and had lots of chicks. Sometimes
lots of ads can be a good thing.
Even a really good thing. That meant you could pass
one issue around and keep the
terrorists busy for hours and you’d have a half-day
free of chanting. Not to mention it
held up to the “Afghan taste test.” Send out People and it comes back shredded. Send
out Vanity Fair and comes back with a few pages
missing, but still readable. Vanity
Fair, interesting I thought. What if I could tell the
story in my own words, unabridged,
unmolested, un-chopped, and accurate. I pulled the
hidden pen out of the ceiling and
the scraps of paper out from under the carpet. I wrote
“Vanity Fair” on top of the page,
and began to write. I am writing it now.
My beatings continued, and most weeks Sandy was met
with new bruises and
battered body parts. Her main emphasis seemed to be
ensuring there was no visible
damage for the press to see when we appeared in Court.
She stopped sending doctors
for a month, after I requested the medical reports
through a FOIA request. The last
thing the State Department wanted, or wants is
documented evidence that U.S. “allies”
are torturing U.S. citizens. Worse than that of
course, is the revelation that the State
Department knows about it and FBI officials condone
it.
At one point we asked for aspirin, Ibuprofen, and
Ciprofloxacin, which are the
three things that can keep you alive and well in an
Afghan prison. Sandy informed me
that this required a doctor’s visit, for which we
would be billed. I explained that these
things cost about five dollars total at any pharmacy
in Kabul and were non-prescription
drugs in Afghanistan. It didn’t matter. The doctor
never came, the beatings continued,
and all of us got sicker and sicker and more
depressed. Especially Ed. He was a
journalist. He had neither the mindset nor the
training to endure. On our fourth or fifth
court appearance Ed showed up with the soles of his
feet black and blue, barely able to
walk. One look at his soles and I knew he had been
beaten on the bottom of his feet
with a large wooden stick– classic Taliban. This was
the first time they had overtly
tortured an American besides me. Perhaps the NDS was
upset with the video evidence
Ed was about to show in court of Ghulamsaki
confessing. The photo of his feet
appeared on the AP wire service. The prosecution
claimed he slipped in the latrine. Ed
refused to discuss it. The U.S. Embassy did nothing.
The reality was we would die in here, at the hands of
the very people we
liberated. Maybe this year, maybe next year, or maybe
in ten years, but the odds were
we would die, and lots of people were counting on it,
especially FBI headquarters in
Washington.
Until that time comes, we spend our days listening to
prayer five times a day by
people who are asking God for the destruction of our
country and our way of life.
Because we are not Muslims, neither are we humans.
That brings a host of further
inhumanity with it. (REPEATED in another section previously, rewritten to avoid
repetition- really look at this for editing?) After almost sixty days, my third bath today,
from a small bucket of dirty water. The first and
second times I was beat with five-foot
long wooden poles the size of 2x4s. Apparently I took
longer than the three minutes
allowed to Kafirs. It was then I realized the futility
of trying to defend yourself when
naked. I could have killed them too, but what was I to
do about the 200 soldiers outside
with machineguns? It was best just to take the
beating. After that I gave up bathing– it
just wasn’t worth it. Besides, Brent had passed me a
message, which was more
information than I needed to know– the wooden poles
were used to unclog the toilet
trenches and drains. Then today, they came, and I
refused, and they graciously agreed
to five minutes and no wooden sticks.
People complain about the treatment of al-Qaida prisoners at GITMO in Cuba.
America needs to wake up and smell the coffee. I’d rather
be in GITMO. This is war,
and war is brutal. Al-Qaida showed
us that on September 11th.
Here you have to buy your own food. Since the NDS took
all of our money it
means you starve, not completely though. The Afghan
government gives us one piece
of nun
(Afghan bread) and about two cups
of rice per day. The five al-Qaida
terrorists
that share my compact cell eat fairly well. Their
families are allowed to bring them
food several times a week, and they buy food and
prepare it every day. A small bag of
tomatoes or onions is about ten cents. Chili peppers
are a nickel each. They chop them
and stir them in water, dirty water, and then soak the
bread in it for a meal.
At first they hated me openly. Now they just hate me
because I won’t convert to
their religion and say President Bush and all
Americans deserve to die. They seem to
love Clinton though, and love talking about Monica and
Clinton’s prowess with
“American whores” – all American women are whores
according to them, and put on
earth by Allah solely for their pleasure.
The chanting, the praying, the hate, and the
brainwashing rhetoric– this is an al-
Qaida breeding ground. If you were on the edge when you got here, within
months you
will be over the edge. Ed began praying to Allah and
wearing Muslim clothes. His life
got better. It was the smart thing to do. Praying in the
Muslim religion is a five minute
ritual (unless
you have a Mullah in your room—then it goes on forever * Here or put
during that night we were all together at NDS?) of bending, kneeling, and prostrating
ones self, while silently reciting salutations to Allah
and the Prophet Mohammed. This
is done five times a day, beginning at 0500 hours. For
Ed, a lifelong student of the
human condition, this prayer helped him better
understand the culture and gave him his
only exercise in his claustrophobic yellowed cage. The
problem isn’t the religion. As
Ed pointed out to me one night in the mountains watching
our soldiers pray under the
moonlight, just as we had seen them do with Massoud, it
was pure in its purpose.
Communal praying can be a strong factor in bonding
soldiers joined shoulder to
shoulder, under the desert stars, asking for God to
grant them the will and the strength to
beat their opponent.
Massoud and his Northern Alliance proved faith’s value
when they drove the
Soviets from their homeland. But, al-Qaida, the Taliban, the PLO, Hezbollah, Islamic
Jihad, Hamas, and a hundred other radical fanatical
groups have perverted their faith
and misinterpreted the Qur’an (Koran), for their own politics and recruitment purposes.
I have a fundamental psychological problem praying
with individuals that use God as
their excuse to kill women and children and spread
terror across the planet. I could
make believe, secretly asking God to give me a machinegun,
but even the thought of
kneeling next to al-Qaida terrorists
and saying “Allah-o-Ahkbar” makes me sick. That–
“God is Great”– is what al-Qaida yells every time they kill us. I also have a problem
eating food supplied by the very people I am sworn to
destroy. That and the fact that
animal guts boiled in oil– the dinner meal, mostly oil
and one handful of guts for six
people– does not sit well with my palate or my
digestive tract. Sandy and the Embassy
had an answer– eat terrorist food or starve. I am now
twenty pounds lighter.
The magazines given to us by Sandy provide an intimate
look at our enemies. If
they see a dead body in TIME or Newsweek their eyes
light up and the invariably point
to the pictures and ask me, “Amerikoyee?” I always reply, “No, al-Qaida,” even
if the
body is a U.S. Marine. They frown. All of them want
only one thing– actually two
things, to kill Americans, and to rape American women.
Not necessarily in that order.
Hand them– actually they just grab it– an ELLE,
Cosmopolitan, People, or
Vanity Fair (they went wild over the October 2003
issue) magazine, which the
ladies at
the Embassy send, and they immediately search for bare-skinned women.
“Amerikoyee?”
I usually tell them the truth, and if that answer is
“yes,” their response is always
the same. They make a variety of crude gestures
indicating they want “to fuck” them.
Then they jab their index and middle finger into the
picture’s crotch as hard as possible,
and at least three or four times.
So, apparently they don’t want to just kill us all,
they want to rape our women
first, then kill them. Welcome to the real mindset of
a Muslim terrorist.
CRAAAACK! Kadir’s hand hit me so hard and so fast that
I never even
contemplated blocking it. I was reeling for a second.
There was no sense in striking
back. Had I done that, ten more of the bastards would
have been down the hall in
seconds. I just wobbled a bit, shook my head, and said,
“Whoa, calm down, I just
wanted water. Aab, aab, maan tanha aab mekhwastam, I
just wanted water from
Brent.” Kadir was a six foot five two hundred and fifty
pound Taliban Commander, and
he was towering over me with his right meat hook
hovering for a second blow. My
crime had been saying, “Brent, send me some water,” as
I passed his cell on the way
back from the latrine. Kadir was the Bashi, that meant
he was in charge of our floor at
NDS. Kadir was not a nice person.
Brent, Ed, and I, were never allowed to communicate.
Ed devised an ingenious
system of communication between our cells. The New
York Times Sunday Magazine
contains a crossword puzzle in the back. He wrote an
encrypted message in the
crossword puzzle then sent me the magazine to read.
Pretty soon we were sending
magazines back and forth with messages hidden in the
puzzles or in crack of the
magazine’s spine. POWs in Vietnam used Morse Code on
the walls of their cages.
Special Forces SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance,
and Escape) School teaches you a
variety of classified ways to pass messages, but not
crossword puzzles. Amazing how
something like, “how are you holding up? I’m fine,”
can give you hope and keep you
sane.
Eventually, after our lawyers arrived, we were allowed
to walk together on
several occasions and whisper to each other. Of course
we had a Klashnikov pointed
directly at us the whole time.
Daily Log Idea here? July 20---We are not allowed to see the “evidence” against us,
or
our own evidence (videos, pictures, and documents
which were confiscated by the FBI),
or even read the “indictment,” all in violation of
even Afghan law. We cannot read, or
even see, the statements of the terrorists or even our
Afghan co-defendants. And, God
knows what they admitted to under torture and
electrocution. We don’t have attorneys
and so we are not allowed access to the few pictures
NDS still has that could prove our
innocence by showing the Afghan government was always
with us during operations in
which terrorists were captured.
The evidence doesn’t matter anyway because the FBI
took anything that was
important. Then they destroyed the documents between
the DOD and us, destroyed or
“lost” all the pictures, and now we find out that they
erased the videos that would really
help us. So, we have little proof we were working with
DOD, the bad guys were
actually terrorists, or that they were about to kill a
presidential candidate, two Ministers,
and blow up American soldiers at Bagram Airbase.
The terrorists are now all free. The FBI had the
terrorists released in a deal to
testify again us, and now it boils down to our word
against theirs, and they are Muslims.
Not to mention that we were never allowed to speak in
court at first, and now that we
are allowed, we aren’t allowed to finish half of our
sentences, and none of our
statements or evidence explanations.
Nor are our own interpreters, like Zorro, allowed to
interpret for us the dialogue
of what is being said in court. The first time Zorro told us what was being said in court
he ended up in chains and has been there ever since.
But, the court– three judges who barely have an
education, no less a law degree–
believe that they are showing the world that Karzai
has brought democracy to Central
West Asia.
Pay no attention to the fact that not a single judge
has read the Criminal Code for
Courts and have violated more than 90% of the rules
governing trials. Or that when I
quote the law in court the lead judge says it’s only a
guideline, and doesn’t have any
bearing on a trial. Ignore the fact that the
terrorists now want us to pay them for
missing work. Ignore the FBI and Embassy cheering them
on and laughing at us openly
in court. The whole event is like a bad acid trip that
never ends.
Even the prosecutor has admitted to us privately that
we were set up by the FBI
and that the Ministry of Defence would force them to
dismiss the case, free us, and send
us after more terrorists the same day, but for Karzai
and the FBI, who have allegedly
threatened to put the prosecutors, and the judges in
jail if we aren’t convicted.
We save the life of the only candidate that can
successfully run against him and
he orders the court to convict us before the trial
begins. Meanwhile, the FBI gets
permission to do whatever they want in Afghanistan,
even though they have no legal
authority to operate in their “war fighting” role.
Since when is Afghanistan the 51st
state? Instead of getting the medals we were promised,
we are going to be spending
twenty years in prison with al-Qaida.
Now, why would that be so important to Ambassador
Zalmay Khalilzad? Well,
when was the last time you heard of the president of a
foreign country picking the U.S.
ambassador, or better yet, one of his best friends for
U.S. ambassador? It is not in
Karzai’s interest, or the State Department’s interest,
to have leader like Yunis Qanooni
running for president. While Qanooni is a U.S. ally,
and a true friend, he is not a
political lackey without his own will.
Occasionally, in the beginning, I stole one of Sandy’s
pens when she wasn’t
paying attention, which is often. It is also how I
managed to write this story. But you
can’t hold onto the pen for long because there are a
few places to hide a Uni-ball® pen
in a barren concrete cell. After five weeks of
bringing water, and having me steal her
pens, Sandy finally just started giving her pens to
me.
We sleep on a concrete floor, covered by a worn out
filthy wool blanket. The
terrorists have beds, basically mats on the floor. Kafirs are not allowed to have a
mattress. Only human beings are. In other words, Muslim terrorists have beds in our
world here. Americans do not.
Each day brings with it the implied, verbalized, and
pantomimed threat to cut off
our ears and noses if we don’t shed our American
uniforms and American flags, learn
the Koran, and become a good Muslim. I have no
intention of doing any of those
things. Ed is a journalist though. And I am glad he is
doing whatever he has to in order
to survive.
It is his survival I depend on to tell the entire
story one day, the real story, and to
let Americans know that this war is the greatest
challenge America will ever face. The
FBI will do everything they can to stop him. Including
lie, cheat, and steal. That
includes painting him the deadly “T” word, falsifying
evidence, and destroying Ed’s
tapes. ????????????
transition ???????
Our enemy hates us. Make no mistake about it. They
simultaneously hate and
desire our way of life, our freedom, our unveiled
women, our wealth and standard of
living, our freedom of religion, and the terrorists
mean to assimilate us into their twisted
interpretation of the Muslim faith– by force, or kill
us off to the very last man, woman,
and child.
That my American friends, is what this war on terror
is all about. Let no
politician tell you differently. Let no Americanized
Muslim tell you differently. This is
a religious war, radical Islamic Fundamentalist
Muslims against us, the Kafir. I know.
Forget that politically correct crap you hear from
politicians and pundits. For the last
three years I have fought and bled with the Northern
Alliance against them. I have
captured them, killed them, interrogated them, been
tortured by them, lived with them,
and now, finally, share a prison cell with them, And
there is always the chance that I
will die with them.
In the end, someone will ask– possibly my widow– if
all the pain it has brought
my family, friends, and me, was worth it.
The answer to that question lies in the faces and
smiles of all the people we
liberated in Northern Afghanistan– a real liberation
where they fought and died next to
us– in the faces and smiles of the kids I saved during
the Nahrin earthquake and
countless other places, and all the soldiers I operated
on that made it out of the battles.
The answer lies in knowing that Yunis Qanooni lives to
the best presidential candidate
to beat Karzai, a restaurant operator that hid in
Virginia whiles his countrymen died
fighting the Soviets, the Taliban, and al-Qaida. The same guy who made it big on the
CIA’s payroll but let American Special Forces soldiers
like J.D. Davis, Dan Petithory,
and Cody Prosser do his dying for him. That answer lies
in knowing that Yunis
Qanooni, wounded four times fighting for his country
and America, did not meet the
same fate as his mentor, Commander Massoud.
(So how will I expect to be CT Czar writing this??? Talk
about it with Ed)
But most importantly, that answer lies in the future
of the hundreds of American
soldiers that will make it home instead of dying in
their bunks at Bagram in a ball of
fire.
Was it worth it? Damn right it was. Brent and I would
have gladly given our life
to anyone one of them, so we give ours freely having
saved them all.
Note: Jack Idema wrote this story in August 2004 sitting on
the floor of one of the
worst prisons on the planet. The scraps of paper used
to record it were smuggled out
one page at a time. While Idema concentrated on
recording their story, Brent Bennett
concentrated on planning their escape. The drawings
in this article are the actual
escape drawings used by Task Force Saber/7 to plan
their break out from the al-Qaida
prison in Kabul. All they were waiting for was
notification that the Geneva Convention
Central Information Bureaux in Switzerland had
assigned their POW status, making
both a breakout and the collateral force needed,
legal. Before that occurred, they were
found guilty at trial, sentenced to ten years, and
transferred to Pulacharke Prison,
Afghanistan’s largest and most secure facility, built
by the Soviets, and which housed
more than 20,000 prisoners.
Ed Caraballo continued to meld into his surroundings,
assimilating the look and feel of
the al-Qaida terrorists they were forced to live with.
Caraballo became known as
Najeeb. In the meantime Idema and Bennett set about
their new plan, to seize their
hearts and minds by force. Together they worked on
gaining their freedom, one way or
another. In the meantime, the Northern Alliance stepped
in and helped. This is the rest
of their story….
Chapter ___
The Pros From Dover
“Put some relevant quote full of here”
-sdfsdfsdfsdfsdfsdf-
August 26, 2006
NDS Prison
There were bad days, and there were good days. The bad
days were really bad,
and the good days were just bad. Good days were far
and few between.
We had, once again, prevailed in throwing a monkey
wrench into the broken
down, totally insane, and dysfunctional Afghan justice
system, getting us another week.
The few conversations that Ed, Brent, and I were able
to sneak always centered around
the same few subjects. The surreal world we were
living in, whether we would ever
survive it to tell our story, how fucked up our
al-Qaida prison “mates” were, and who
was driving the bus on the trip to totally fuck us.
Was it the U.S. government, the FBI,
or Karzai. We almost always decided it was all three.
But our frustration and anger had
re-focused – right now we mostly wanted to kill the
two lawyers that had been
promising to show up for almost two months.
If they ever arrived, we discussed, would we hug them,
thank them, punch them
out, or kill them? We decided they were never coming,
we were on our own.
Kader came to my cell sometime that afternoon and told
me to come, “taz
burrow.” He
really started bitching when I started putting my boots on waving his arms
like normal, stressed out by my failure to jump like a
trained monkey. He rambled
something about Americans and I figured it was either
the U.S. Embassy, or the CIA. I
was not about to rush for either, or for anyone for
that fucking matter.
As I walked by Brent’s cell I noticed that he was not
going, so I excluded the
U.S. Embassy tramp. Ed was at the end of the hall,
already waiting, and wearing the
Afghan cloths that drove me crazy. He had no idea
where we were going either. Then
Brent joined us. It must have been a visit from the
U.S. Embassy.
We went outside the prison building through the rose
garden and up two sets of
stairs towards the Commandant’s office. The door to
the meeting room was open.
Inside were Ed’s two Afghan lawyers. Sitting on the
couch was an older gentleman
slightly balding with grayish white hair. It took a
second, and then I realized it was Bob
Foglenest, the criminal defense lawyer I met at the
Mustafa Hotel bar four months
before. This was a good day, and spirits lifted
quickly. Just as I reached out my hand
and he stood up, I noticed the other man already
standing.
John Tiffany was forty, in outstanding physical condition,
good looking, square
jawed, and casually dressed, but wearing a tie. A big
smile crossed his face and he
skipped the handshake and hugged me.
“Boy am I glad to see you guys,” I said, moving over
to Foglenest and hugging
him too.
“We got here as soon as we could,” said Tiffany.
“We gave up on you guys weeks ago,” I said.
“Hey, it’s a long story and we’ll tell you all about
it when we get time. Were
going to have a long talk and when we’re through
you’ll be doing some serious
revisions on your list of friends.”
“Yeah, I can already guess.”
“Oh no you can’t, I’m going to lay it all out for
you,” Tiffany said in a classic
New York accent.
Right then I knew I was going to like this guy, but I
had no idea then how much I
was going to like them both. I was already impressed
with Tiffany’s look and
demeanor. He could easily pass for CIA, and that would
be a plus in dealing with the
NDS and other Afghan officials.
Ed and Brent made their introductions and it was like
old home week. I sat on
the old wood desk; legs folded Indian style, right on
the top.
Rolly was sitting on the couch with the two Afghan
lawyers from the ILA. Then,
finally, I noticed another woman sitting in a chair on
the other side of the room. She
was stocky, with ragged black head veil, and clothes
you would surmise came off a bag
lady in New York City. I glanced at her for less than
three seconds, but I knew every
detail. Then I spent an extra 2 seconds staring at her
feet. Afghan women were
renowned for their feet. Covered head to ankle, not
toe, their blue burhka covered them
completely. Usually your only way to judge a woman’s
appearance was by her feet.
Filthy ankles in rubber slippers was not a good sign.
A well to do woman might be
wearing mid-heeled sandals with black stockings. A
younger woman, high heeled
strapped pumps with fishnets. And the good looking
ones would usually have open
toed heels, nicely painted toenails, and always
fishnets.
I could have guessed this woman’s appearance in two burkas.
Her cheap open
toed well-worn shoes revealed a left stocking missing
the entire toe, and a right stocking
with the heel completely torn out.
“And your name is…?” I said hopping off the desk and
extending my hand to
her.
“Whabullah,
wakiel for Mr. Brent.” She had just told me in Dari that she
was
Brent’s new attorney.
“Great, Hoop, great,”
I said shaking her hand. Normally shaking hands with a
woman would have been strictly off limits, and I knew
this well. But this was a private
personal setting, and Whabullah was an attorney. She
needed no burka to enter the
prison– as much as the police hated it – and the
handshake was appropriate, barley.
Sitting back up on the desk, I lit another cigarette
and everyone finished his or
her introductions.
“Ok, bring us up to speed, where the fuck have you
been?” I was looking at
Foglenest and Tiffany.
“Hey it was like pulling teeth trying to get money to
get over here,” Foglenest
defended.
“Jack, Keith, Jack…” Tiffany said.
“Jack, its Jack, its not Keith, its not Jonathan, its
just Jack. I never liked Keith,
and when I was growing up that book Jonathan
Livingston Seagull made my life hell in
school. Its Jack, you can make mistakes in just about
everything else that goes on here,
after all, its Afghanistan, but don’t make that one
again, its Jack.”
“Jack, look, I was dialing for dollars for a straight
month. Beau Bauman, the guy
that’s making a movie about you, fuck him, all he kept
saying was that the movie didn’t
have an ending yet.”
“The movie has an ending, I, we, caught the
terrorists, saved a presidential
candidate, saved a defense minister, saved a thousand
Americans from burning alive,
and are now in jail for the rest of our lives. That
sounds like a whole damn second
movie and a blockbuster ending.”
“Apparently not to him,” Tiffany explained.
“Maybe he never saw Midnight Express, Hurricane
Carter, Pappion, Brokedown
Palace, or a dozen others that ended this way?”
“I know that guy, he stayed at my crib, the guys that
was in the Turkish prison,”
Bob Foglenest said. Somehow his use of words “crib”
didn’t set well with me. I related
it to the shit that black Detroit gang-bangers
“rapped” in federal prison. I ignored the
statement.
“Did he give you any money?”
“No,” Tiffany replied.
“Not even a thousand?”
“No.”
“Five hundred?”
“Nothing, zip, zero,” Tiffany explained.
“I’ll deal with that prick when I get back,” I said
quietly. Inside I was
disappointed, fuming. I had sold Beau Bauman the
rights to my story during the
Afghan war, my fight alongside the Northern Alliance,
for about two million. I liked
Beau, and signed a deal that required not one penny
down until the movie was in final
production. And he knew I would be using all the money
to continue my personal war
against al-Qaida and bin Laden. A personal war that
would continue until that Saudi
bastard’s head was in a burlap bag soaked in his
blood.
We all sat down and got comfortable, but not before
Foglenest quietly warned us
not to trust Brent’s new lawyer. Apparently she had
already confirmed her
incompetence, and ignorance, in a meeting with the
judge that morning. I explained
that it probably did not matter letting her stay in
the room, it was obvious that she had
not a clue to a single word of English.
Foglenest immediately took control of the meeting, the
conversation, and the
direction. That was not something I was either used to
or prepared for. Still, I grit my
teeth and held back, they were after all, at least we
hoped the pros from Dover, and our
ticket out of hell.
“Look, I’m from New York City, I lost a lot of friends
in 9/11, some of my best
friends. I am here on a mission; we need guys like
you. We need someone to fight
these bastards, and we sure can’t rely on the FBI and
CIA to protect us. I will not desert
you guys. I’m going to get you out of here,” Foglenest
paused and motioned to Tiffany.
“We’re going to get you out of here.”
“That’s what I’m counting on,” Ed told him.
“Well, Jack…and Brent, don’t take this wrong, but my
first responsibility is to
Ed, he’s my client, but we view this as a joint
defense, either we prove you all innocent,
or you all go down. That’s where our defense strategy
differentiates from Skibbie’s.”
“Yeah, what the hell was he thinking about?” Tiffany
said.
“Hey, Skibbie was an idiot, a public defender from New
Hampshire that
probably never won a case and came to Afghanistan on a
vacation, to get laid, and to
see the sites and add it to his resume.”
“Well that was pretty stupid, nobody gets laid in this
country,” I said.
“Yeah these are the most homophobic, sexually repressed,
psychologically
disturbed people in the world,” Ed pointed out.
“What, you mean there’s no hookers here?” Foglenest
said.
“There’s some at the Chinese restaurant, but none that
I would fuck,” I answered.
“I came back to Afghanistan because I was relying on
you to set me up and point
the way to the best private bars and hookers,” Bob
smiled. “Hell, that’s why I was
making friends with you guys at the Mustafa bar. I
figured guys in black, carrying
machineguns into bars had to have a handle on the hotspots.”
We all laughed, and I changed the subject.
“I came here to kill terrorists, liberate a country,
and stop another 9/11, not bang
Chinese hookers,” I said smiling.
“Please, enough with the talk about Chinese hookers.”
Ed said
“You got a problem with hookers?” Foglenest asked
laughing.
“No, he’s got a problem with Chinese women, his
ex-wife is a bona
fide, slanteyed
bitch,” I said jumping in.
“Hey we all got one of those,” Foglenest said.
“Not me, I’m not only friends with al of my ex’s, I’m
still in love with them all.
And its only gotten better my wife now is not just my
mate and partner, she is my soul
mate and a little commando,” I said.
“Well I can’t attest to your wife’s attitude,” Tiffany
said looking at Ed, “she
wouldn’t even give us any documents or evidence to
prove you were a journalist.”
“That figures. She’s an executive producer at ABC
News, they specialize in
uptight domineering vindictive ruthless control
freaks,” Ed replied. I’d met Diana, and
he was not exaggerating. Her last two years had been
dedicated to destroying Ed's life,
and seizing total control of their beautiful baby
girl.
“Your wife has got some issues too,” Tiffany said
looking at me. I knew what he
was talking about already, but he explained anyway.
“Sometimes I couldn’t reach her
for weeks, she’d just drop off the face of the earth.
Then I would get her on the phone
and get some wild story. Promises of money sent that
never arrived, and irrational
behavior,” I let Tiffany talk, I could sense he needed
to get it all out. “And I wasn’t
asking for much, just enough to get here and pay
expenses.”
“Look, I know Viktoria’s got problems, but in her
defense, most women couldn’t
last seven weeks in my lifestyle, no less seven years.
Last time I told her I was going to
deliver food to refugees after 9/11 for three weeks
and didn’t come home for a year.
She thought I was delivering humanitarian aid next
thing she sees me on MSNBC
putting my bleeding best friend on a medevac truck,
and on CNN blowing up Taliban
tanks. At least three times in six months people
called her and told her I was either dead
or mortally wounded. By the time I did get home she
was drinking a bottle of Vodka a
day. And when I finally got her stable again, bang,
I’m off chasing terrorists for another
six months and bin laden himself puts a quarter
million dollar hit on my head. Then I
get home, take her to the beach once leave on another
three week mission, then the FBI
puts a wanted poster out for me, and five months later
I’m in a Taliban torture chamber
strapped to the wall being beat to death by our former
allies and I’m the one being
accused of torture,” I paused and lit another
cigarette. “So, what do you think? You
think there are women in the world that could maintain
their sanity and remain stable
living in my world?”
“I don’t think there is anyone that can survive in
your world, that’s why I think
we need Ed out of here as soon as possible. So don’t
get pissed if I try to bargain him
out first,” Bob said, “it doesn’t mean we don’t want
you all out, and won’t keep trying.”
“Hey, you’ll get no argument from me or Brent,” I said
very matter of factly.”
“I want us all out,” Ed said.
“Ignore him, he has no idea of what he’s gotten into,
what he’s doing, or what’s
about to happen,” I leaned forward on the desk, took a
long drag of my cigarette, and
proceeded while everyone else was still trying to
dissect my last sentence. “I only need
you to do two things while you are here. One – get me
access to the evidence room,
alone. Two– get Ed out. I could give a damn about
getting Brent or me, or my Afghans
out. We signed up for this war”– I pointed at Brent
and myself– “Ed came as a
journalist. I knew all the risks, and intentionally
withheld several of them from
everyone, including Brent and Ed.” Bob interrupted me.
“John and I have accessed this, unless we get the
three of you out, none of you
will get out.”
I raised my voice and forcefully interjected, “You’ve
been in Afghanistan about
24 hours, you have no fucking idea of what the
situation is counselor,” I paused
realizing I was being a little too combative with the
guys that had just flown 8,000 miles
into a combat zone to help us. “Look, you just get Ed
out and me into the evidence
room, and your job is done. Ed will get the rest of us
out, even if it takes a year.”
“Of course we will try to get Ed out of here alone if
we can’t get you all out, but
we want all three of you home.” Bob Fogelnest said,
finally beginning to grasp that I
had a plan not yet revealed.
“All seven of us?”
“What?” Fogelnest asked.
“Seven of us,” I answered.
“I thought there were just three of you?” Tiffany then
asked.
“Seven of us including our four Afghans,” Brent said.
I smiled. Brent barely
spoke in the meeting, in fact not at all after initial
introductions. I returned a cocky
smile, Brent knew exactly where I was heading. Ed was
engrossed in looking at a
plastic folder of pictures Bob had given him of his
baby girl, dad, and dog.
“Did you guys read The Hunt for Bin Laden before you got here?”
“Yes,” Tiffany answered, “of course.”
“I’m reading it now,” Bob said.
“Well read faster if you want to understand what is
going on in this world. And
finish it, then you’ll understand what I am talking
about,” I said.
“Why don’t you…” I cut him off.
“We leave no man behind! Do you understand? No man,
American or Afghan.
Anything less is unacceptable. Brent and I will hang
with them if need be,” Ed shot me
one of his disdaining looks communicating displeasure
for my flair for the dramatic in
an argument. But this was a non-negotiable point. “Let
me say that one more time so it
sinks in. We leave NO man behind. If you don’t
understand that concept now you will
by the time you leave here.”
“Jack’s right,” Ed said, “We have to get the Afghans
out with us, we all have to
get out.”
“Ed doesn’t know what he is talking about,” get him
out, get a package I give
you out, and then Ed can get us all out.”
“Well, were discussing deportation of you all,” Bob
said, “that could be a double
option.”
“Not an option. No option at all, pursue it for Ed,
but not for Brent or me,” I told
him.
Chapter _____
0000 Hours, August ?, 2004
Kabul, Afghanistan
Dawarty answered his cell phone, “Bali.”
“We might have a problem,” the caller on the other end
needed no introduction.
It was the voice of General Prosecutor Fatah.
“Yes.”
“The American lawyers have arrived in Kabul and are at
the prison now meeting
with the Americans now.”
“I know, they called and requested I meet them there.
I told them I was too busy
today. But what is the problem.”
“Are we sure they’re lawyers and not CIA?” Fatah
asked.
“I’m not sure of anything right now, but what makes
you think they are anything
but lawyers?” Dawarty asked.
“Why has the CIA been completely quiet on this? Why
have they not contacted
us to discuss this matter? And I just received a call
from Commander Mustak at the jail.
He say’s they don’t look or act like lawyers.”
“Well general, they are American lawyers.”
“So was Michael,” the general said referring to
Skibbie.
“They are very aggressive, but more importantly, they
are not wearing suits, just
ties.”
“It’s hot,” Dawarty replied.
“Shirts, pants, and ties made in Afghanistan with the
folds and look that they just
came out of a package in Kabul. CIA posing as lawyers.
I want you over there now.”
“Bali,” Dawarty was already on the way to his car before
the general hung up the
phone.
