that, he was wounded while fighting in Kandahar. Again he recovered. Again he went back, and in November, 2003, he was wounded for the fourth time, in Baghdad. Who would not shake up a VIP schedule for that kind of operator?
Further into the CAPEX, Rumsfeld listened to Pope, a Delta sniper team sergeant, describe the dozen or so modifications to the Toyota trucks that our guys had made. It was more of a diversion, and while it was going on, another Toyota pickup slowly made its way up behind the visiting party. Four operators armed with AK-47s and RPGs, adorned with healthy beards and dressed in Afghan rags, were propped menacingly in the bed of the truck as it rolled to a silent stop roughly forty meters away.
Pope asked Secretary Rumsfeld to turn around and take a look at how we planned to use these new vehicles that had been bought out of his budget. A wide smile lit Rumsfeld’s face and he marveled about how authentic the boys looked.
After an hour or so of discussion and demonstrations that included a show by special helicopters and a free-fall parachute demonstration by Navy SEALs, I climbed aboard an old school bus with the secretary and a bevy of generals from the Special Ops community and senior Delta officers to move to still another demonstration site.
Rumsfeld had a slight look of angst, and he said to me, “What we really need is small groups of folks, say two to four people, that can go anywhere in the world and execute discreet missions against these people [al Qaeda].”
I was shocked! Did the secretary of defense, a month and a half after 9/11, still have no idea what Delta offered our nation? Was Delta’s operational security so tight that not even the secretary understood the Unit’s capabilities?
I didn’t have to worry about answering because various generals and senior Special Ops officers nervously showered him with answers, buzz words, and reassurances that the capability he had just described was exactly Delta’s job! Those unique abilities he described had already existed for many years.
Throughout the exercise, we emphasized that we were capable of operating alongside Afghan warlords, infiltrating hostile areas, conducting long-range helicopter assaults in extremely cold weather, and fighting in dangerously unforgiving mountain passes.
As the CAPEX came to a close, we had shown Don Rumsfeld, the cleanup hitter for the world’s only remaining superpower, that Delta Force, the most versatile, lethal, and trustworthy tool that he had, was ready to be pulled out of the toolbox and put to work.
In fact, our sister squadron was already operating secretly inside Afghanistan. Delta was the United States’ premier counterterrorism force, and it was high time that someone treated us that way, and gave the taxpayers their money’s worth.
Little did we know at the time of Rumsfeld’s visit, but our squadron’s fate was being determined some 7,000 miles away in northwest Afghanistan.
On a sunny but cold day at Bagram Air Base, about thirty-seven miles north of the capital city of Kabul, four men were gathered around the hood of a Humvee outside the headquarters of Task Force Dagger, home of in- country Special Forces operations at the time. Gary Berntsen, the lead guy on the ground for the Central Intelligence Agency, was paying yet another visit to barrel-chested colonel John Mulholland, the commander of Dagger, to lay out fresh intelligence sources on the whereabouts of Usama bin Laden.
It was not the first time the CIA had approached Mulholland on the issue, and the first request had been unequivocally rejected. To increase his chances this time around, the CIA man had brought along more firepower, in the persons of Lt. Col. Mark Sutter of Delta Force, and a Special Forces officer we will call Lieutenant Colonel Al, who was attached to the CIA.
The three visitors felt so strongly about the new intelligence that they would not discuss it by phone, even over secure lines. But to do anything with the vital information, they needed more than just to share it; they needed an army. Short of that, they would settle for a Special Forces A Team or two from Mulholland.
To Gary Berntsen the new details were hot enough to be “actionable intelligence,” by definition something that could be acted upon. In the past week, credible sources had placed bin Laden in the historic city of Jalalabad, close to the Pakistan border and the entranceway to the Khyber Pass. Locals had reported scores of vehicles loaded with al Qaeda fighters and supplies moving south, toward bin Laden’s old fortress, the caves and secure positions nestled high in the Tora Bora Mountains.
There already were numerous Special Forces A Teams working in the western part of Afghanistan, and that put these highly skilled soldiers at the top of the CIA wish list for assistance. Mulholland voiced his concern that bin Laden held well-prepared defensive positions up in those mountains, as well as a significant terrain advantage.
But there was something else going on, too, for the colonel’s Special Forces teams had been burned already by Afghan warlords who had personal vendettas and agendas that were counter to the United States objectives. The warlord the CIA was now backing to hunt down bin Laden was a relative unknown, and had not yet been vetted to Mulholland’s satisfaction.
Gary Berntsen continued his hard pitch, placing the Green Beret commander in a dilemma. For a few uncomfortable moments, it looked like a stalemate.
Then Lieutenant Colonel Al, who had been friends with Mulholland for a long time, looked the colonel in the eye and promised that any Green Berets that Mulholland could spare would be used only under Al’s personal guidance and within their capabilities. He promised to watch over them like they were his own.
Mulholland wanted bin Laden dead as bad as the next guy, probably even more so if the death of the terrorist might get him out of godforsaken Afghanistan a little earlier. He reluctantly agreed to commit some Green Berets, but not before leveling a few veiled threats at his friend Lieutenant Colonel Al: Don’t get my guys killed in some harebrained reenactment of Custer’s last stand.
Once they had Mulholland’s blessing, Lieutenant Colonels Sutter and Al, along with the operations officer of the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Special Forces Group, went to work developing a plan that would pass muster by the various decision makers back at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, and at Fort Bragg. A gentlemen’s agreement made over the hood of a Humvee in a country that was one big battlefield is quite different from appeasing the senior leaders managing the war from the United States.
In a rare display of unity, during that single afternoon, the three planners cast aside all politically correct barriers, or the stovepiping of information, embraced a united front, and developed a viable interagency plan. All parties involved had to wipe the snot from their noses and sing from the same sheet of music. It was a bonding not often achieved among senior levels of the intelligence and the military communities.
That agreement was nice, but whether this hunt for bin Laden would turn out to be a great success or a complete goat screw was yet to be seen.
Based upon that meeting at Bagram, our squadron’s luck changed, and a day or two later we received deployment orders to Afghanistan.
We spent a couple of days tying up loose ends, spent time with our families, and studied the available intelligence reports on potential targets. Then we walked out of the Delta building in North Carolina and loaded the buses for our long journey to war.
We were going off one man light. Former Ranger and Delta assaulter Scott had wanted to go to Afghanistan as much as the rest of us, but a civilian job had been aggressively recruiting him. He stalled as long as possible and even pushed back his end-of-service date, hoping for the deployment orders to come through before he had to make the final decision. The timing was all wrong, and he had dropped the paperwork that ended his military career just before we got the word to move out.
It was a disappointment for everyone, including Scott, but he came out to meet us at the bus, in civilian clothes with his long hair blowing in the wind, to shake hands and wish the squadron luck.
Acouple of C-17 Globemasters hauled us across the Atlantic Ocean, long and tiring flights to the ISB, our intermediate staging base near the Arabian Sea. The change from the chill of North Carolina to the searing heat of the Middle East hit us hard. We stowed our gear, dressed down into brown T-shirts and black running shorts, and got down to preparing to enter Afghanistan.
Intelligence remained painfully scarce, since very few friendly forces were inside Afghanistan at that early date. The whereabouts of bin Laden and his stubborn and faithful Afghan host, Mullah Omar, were unknown. Anyone’s
