5. CIA vs the Taliban: Bin Laden's Trojan Horse (Ep 2)

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Rest Is Classified – Episode 5: CIA vs the Taliban: Bin Laden's Trojan Horse

Host/Authors: David McCloskey and Gordon Carrera
Release Date: December 11, 2024

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Introduction

In Episode 5 of The Rest Is Classified, hosts David McCloskey, a former CIA analyst turned spy novelist, and Gordon Carrera, a veteran security correspondent, delve into a pivotal moment in the early stages of the War on Terror. Titled "CIA vs the Taliban: Bin Laden's Trojan Horse," the episode unpacks the complex interplay between CIA operatives, Afghan warlords, and Al Qaeda fighters within the strategic stronghold of Mazari Sharif.

Setting and Background

The episode opens with a vivid recounting of the geopolitical landscape in Afghanistan post-9/11. David and Gordon outline how the CIA's Team Alpha, in collaboration with the formidable Afghan warlord Abd al Rashid Dostum, maneuvered through treacherous terrains to reclaim Mazari Sharif from Taliban control. The city's capture marked a strategic victory, yet it set the stage for unforeseen complications.

David McCloskey ([02:41]): "Folks have listened to the last episode of Mazari Sharif where we last left them. They took the city from the Taliban without pretty much any fighting. And they are now ensconced in a fort waiting to see what happens next."

The Fort of Kale I Jangi

At the heart of Mazari Sharif lies the formidable fortress of Kale I Jangi, or the Fort of War. David provides an intricate description of this 19th-century British-built structure, emphasizing its strategic design and robust construction.

David McCloskey ([03:02]): "It's a gigantic, essentially hulk of mud that sort of rises out of these plains outside of Mazari Sharif... six points a large tower that rises about 80ft up its walls... 30ft thick."

The fort's architecture includes parapets, moats, and fortified bunkers beneath the Soviet-built Pink House, previously utilized by the Taliban for storage and rumored torture.

The Entrance of Al Qaeda Fighters

Following the Taliban's nominal surrender, a contingent of Al Qaeda fighters, referred to as a "Trojan horse," was introduced into Kale I Jangi. This maneuver was perceived as a strategic ploy to infiltrate the city and rekindle Taliban influence from within.

Gordon Carrera ([07:17]): "And of course, the CIA and the Americans want to question these people. They want. This is potentially a gold mine."

The mix of detainees included a diverse array of nationalities, further complicating the interrogation efforts and raising tensions within the already volatile environment.

The Prisoner Revolt

On the morning of November 25, 2001, chaos erupted within Kale I Jangi. As 400 Al Qaeda fighters were housed in the Pink House cellar, a suicide grenade attack decimated several guards, including a figure resembling Dostum.

Gordon Carrera ([08:30]): "And one of the problems is they don't all have their weapons taken off them or they're put in the pink house... it's a pretty chaotic scene."

The lack of restraints and the presence of concealed weaponry allowed the detainees to seize control rapidly. CIA operatives Mike Spann and David Tyson found themselves overwhelmed as the situation spiraled into a full-scale revolt.

David McCloskey ([14:06]): "It is critical to kind of set this up on the morning of November 25, 2001... It's sudden and extremely dangerous."

The British Special Boat Service Intervention

Amidst the turmoil, British Special Boat Service (SBS) forces arrived to assist the beleaguered CIA team. The SBS, known for their rugged and unorthodox appearance, played a crucial role in attempting to quell the uprising.

Gordon Carrera ([19:16]): "They're going to play an important role in dealing with this revolt because I guess they're set up to fight."

Despite their efforts, friendly fire incidents occurred during airstrikes intended to suppress the revolt, resulting in casualties among the Northern Alliance fighters allied with the CIA.

David McCloskey ([28:11]): "There are the first four Purple Hearts, which is an award given for being wounded in combat, go to these Green Berets. From friendly fire."

Quelling the Revolt and Aftermath

After intense fighting and strategic bombardment, including the deployment of an AC130 gunship capable of firing 7,200 rounds per minute, the tides began to turn. The SBS and allied forces managed to breach the Pink House, leading to the eventual surrender of the remaining Al Qaeda fighters.

David McCloskey ([33:26]): "They do that for... it takes a long time, of course, to fill up over a day to kind of fill it up. And eventually 13 fighters come out and surrender one day on the 30th and then 73 the next."

The operation concluded with the recovery of CIA operative Mike Spann's body, marking a somber milestone as one of the first casualties in what would become America's longest war.

Gordon Carrera ([34:05]): "So where's Dostem all this time as the battle's going on?"

Reflections on Strategy and Consequences

In the episode's reflective segment, David and Gordon critically assess the strategic decisions made during this operation. They ponder whether a more focused counterterrorism approach, emphasizing the elimination of Al Qaeda and bin Laden, could have altered the subsequent decades of conflict in Afghanistan.

David McCloskey ([35:55]): "I think it goes very wrong. It's an unanswerable question... this approach might have borne more fruit."

The hosts also debate the broader implications of the U.S. strategy—whether to engage in nation-building and democratization or to collaborate with local warlords, whose alliances often came with moral and ethical compromises.

Gordon Carrera ([37:14]): "These are dark characters, but whether the US should be working with those rather than building something new."

Conclusion

Episode 5 of The Rest Is Classified offers a gripping exploration of a decisive yet tumultuous chapter in the War on Terror. Through detailed narrative and insightful analysis, David McCloskey and Gordon Carrera illuminate the complexities and unintended consequences of early counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan. The episode serves as both a historical recount and a cautionary tale about the intricacies of espionage, warfare, and international strategy.

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Notable Quotes:

• David McCloskey ([03:02]): "It's a gigantic, essentially hulk of mud that sort of rises out of these plains outside of Mazari Sharif."
• Gordon Carrera ([07:17]): "This is potentially a gold mine."
• David McCloskey ([35:55]): "This approach might have borne more fruit."

Timestamp Highlights:

• [02:41] - Introduction to the CIA team's mission in Mazari Sharif.
• [07:17] - Discussion on the strategic value of interrogating Al Qaeda fighters.
• [14:06] - Description of the chaotic revolt.
• [28:11] - Impact of friendly fire during airstrikes.
• [33:26] - Resolution of the revolt and surrender of fighters.
• [35:55] - Reflections on the long-term consequences of the operation.

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This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key events, discussions, and reflections presented in the episode, providing listeners with a clear understanding of the narrative and its broader implications without having to engage with the original podcast.

Transcript

[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

So if you want to make sure you're safe online, you should take advantage of our exclusive NordVPN discount. All you need to do is go to nordvpn.com restisclassified and when you sign up, you can receive a bonus. Four months on top of your plan and there's no risk with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee. The link is also in the episode description box. This episode is brought to you by AWS. Amazon QBusiness is the generative AI assistant that can securely understand your business data, summarize results and streamline tasks. Learn what Amazon Qbusiness can do for [e-mail] learnmore. When Allah had made the rest of the world, he saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and then threw them down onto the earth that was Afghanistan. I'm Gordon Carrera and that's a quote from Ahmad Rashid, the journalist in his account of Afghanistan, recounting a folktale about the creation of this country where our episode is set.

[David McCloskey]

Well, welcome to the Rest is classified. I'm David McCloskey and we're telling the story. Gordon, of the first CIA team was sent into Afghanistan. This country of bits and pieces, went behind enemy lines, linked up with a fairly notorious warlord, Abd al Rashid Dostum, and fought their way against the Taliban all the way to the city. Folks have listened to the last episode of Mazar I Sharif where we last left them. They took the city from the Taliban without pretty much any fighting. And they are now ensconced in a fort waiting to see what happens next.

[Gordon Carrera]

That's right. And this is the crucial setting for the story we're going to tell in this episode. The fortress of Kale I Jangi, or the Fort of War as it's known. A place which has now been taken by the Uzbek forces of Dostum and the CIA team, but which previously was run by the Taliban.

[David McCloskey]

Listeners who listened to the last episode will of course recognize there were Wild west references throughout.

[Gordon Carrera]

Horseback, cavalry charges.

[David McCloskey]

Horseback, cavalry charges and forts. And we've got another fort, Kali Jangi. It is a gigantic, essentially hulk of mud that sort of rises out of these plains outside of Mazari Sharif.

[Gordon Carrera]

It's massive, isn't it?

[David McCloskey]

It's massive. For our listeners, I would picture it almost as a distended six pointed star that is about a half a kilometer for our American listeners, a third of a mile across. It has at each of its six points a large tower that rises about 80ft up its walls. We say mud. That makes it sound weak. It's not at all. They're about 30ft thick. There are sort of parapets, there are moats. There's sort of a big grade that rises up to the walls from the fields below. Surrounded by moats. There's firing slits out of the towers. These towers, again, are not, you know, dainty things. They are big enough so that a tank can literally go up these paths to get to the top to fire down. It is a massive structure. I mean, literally there are fields planted inside it. That's how large. Yeah.

[Gordon Carrera]

Trees and things like that.

[David McCloskey]

That's right.

[Gordon Carrera]

Separate houses, I think is one called the Pink House, which is going to be important part of our story.

[David McCloskey]

And I think it is worth setting up here that this place was Abdul Rashid Dostum's headquarters when he ran Masri Sharif. So as the CIA's Team Alpha and Dostum have come to Masrif, retaken it, they've reestablished essentially their headquarters there. And I think a little more on the structure of the fort is critical. Right. This is an old 19th century fort. It's been occupied by the British, was actually built by the British, Gordon. It's been occupied by the Soviets and the Taliban have been using it essentially as a. As a base during their occupation of Masri Sharif. And we should think about it almost as that star that's kind of been divided in half. There's a southern compound and there's a northern Compound, the southern compound, which is going to be absolutely critical to the story to come, has in its center this thing called the Pink house, which is a kind of Soviet built concrete structure. It's only a story above ground, but it has these massive fortified bunkers underneath it that were used for storage probably for torture by the Taliban because they're sort of blood spattered by the time CIA Team Alpha arrives. And also the Taliban in their withdrawal critically, Gordon, they've covered the entire place in feces. So it is a disastrous mess by the time the CIA arrives.

[Gordon Carrera]

And we heard in the last episode, Mazari Sharif fell without really a fight. So what has happened to the Taliban and Al Qaeda? They surrendered. Is that the right way of putting it?

[David McCloskey]

Yes, ish. Surrender. Ish. So, interestingly, the CIA and Timaf, they've taken Masri Sharif. The Taliban has quote, unquote, surrendered, but there is still a force of Taliban in another city outside of Masri Sharif. And Dostum has negotiated or is in the process of negotiating a surrender with this group of Taliban. Now, this group of Taliban also has an Al Qaeda fighting brigade attached to it. And of course, the CIA and the Americans want to question these people. They want. This is potentially a gold mine. And it's still very murky. And I think we should credit. There's a journalist named Toby Haren who's written probably the account of this part of the story. The negotiations over the surrender are still very murky. But what Dostum seems to negotiate over is the Taliban will surrender. These foreign fighters, these Al Qaeda fighters who come from all over the, you know, Islamic world, will be taken in trucks to Kali Jangi to the fort of war in Masri Sharif. So the Taliban sort of forces in this other city will surrender, but they'll turn over these Al Qaeda fighters and bring them to Mazari Sharif to be questioned.

[Gordon Carrera]

And even the notion of surrender doesn't quite mean the same thing, I think in the Afghan world of Afghan warlords as it does to us because it's almost a kind of negotiated thing. And sometimes you keep your weapons and you're offered safe passage. It's not quite the same as just giving up and being disarmed.

[David McCloskey]

No, that's right. And as soon as these Al Qaeda fighters get to the fort, it's very clear many of them don't think they've surrendered. Some of them think there's been a deal kind of struck for them to get safe passage to the south to the Taliban stronghold down in, you know, near Kandahar. Others think they're going to go to Iran. And still others seem to think, well, we haven't surrendered at all. We're actually here, here to fight. And what seems to have happened is that the Taliban commander in the north has outwitted Dostum and that these Al Qaeda fighters are actually a Trojan horse effectively to get into Mazari Sharif and to serve as a fighting element to take bits of the city, take the fort, and eventually allow the Taliban, who have sort of beginning to mass in some number outside the city, to come back in and retake Mazari Sharif.

[Gordon Carrera]

And one of the problems is they don't all have their weapons taken off them or they're put in the pink house, where I think there are still some weapons hidden or left over. And so it's a pretty chaotic scene. And there's even some video, I think, of the CIA guys interrogating these people.

[David McCloskey]

Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

And there's hardly anyone around. I mean, it's just these two CIA people interrogating some of the Al Qaeda detainees and talking to them. But without much support and massively outnumbered.

[David McCloskey]

It'S critical to kind of set this up on the morning of November 25, 2001. So 400 of these fighters have been bused in.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

Put in the cellar of the pink house. Now, that makes it sound like their entrance was very peaceful to get there. It really wasn't. As soon as they're unloaded, there's instantly a suicide grenade attack that kills a couple of these Northern alliance kind of guards, including a guy who looks very much like Abdul Rashid Dostum. So it's very dangerous. As you mentioned, not only is Khalid Jangi, I mean, the Taliban had abandoned it, but there are these massive sort of shipping containers on site that are loaded with weapons that they've left behind, including some weapons that literally date back to the early 20th century.

[Gordon Carrera]

Enfield rifles, right?

[David McCloskey]

Exactly. So these Al Qaeda guys are brought in, 400 of them are put in that cellar. Right. And it is an absolute potpourri of nationalities. Arabs, Turks, Uighurs, Indonesians, some Westerners, some white Westerners, and including an American named John Walker. John Walker, Lynn.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And as you note, Gordon, many are not searched because there is this Afghan custom of surrender where you sort of take it on good faith that the other side is going to surrender, but the reality is that none of these guys who were in the cellar are Afghan. These are Al Qaeda fighters from other parts of the Islam committed jihadists who hate the Americans. And many, yes, many of them in particular, this sort of Uzbek contingent of jihadists, they're kind of heavy hitters. They have been trained in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They don't see themselves as prisoners, of course. And you think about that night in the cellar right before the CIA starts questioning them. Multiple prisoners are killed down there. There's explosions, there's weapons that are obviously still down there. Nobody is restrained or flex cuffed, which is astounding. I mean, in all of the sort of supply drops over the course of.

[Gordon Carrera]

No one gave handcuffs.

[David McCloskey]

No. Yeah. Because the prisoner question hasn't been an issue until now.

[Gordon Carrera]

It's worth saying that because we're about to get into this question of interrogating and detainees, this becomes a big issue for the United States and especially for the CIA is interrogation. And prisoners after 9, 11, they've not really thought about it. I mean they're not set up for it. They've never really had to deal with this kind of problem before. And you absolutely get a sense of that in this case. Suddenly you've got a whole load of detainees who've been captured who may have valuable intelligence maybe about where Osama bin Laden is.

[David McCloskey]

Many of them have met him, many.

[Gordon Carrera]

Of them with Osama bin Laden. So you want to interrogate them, but how do you do that? Who does that? Under what conditions? I mean it looks very chaotic, very unprepared for, pretty haphazard and quite dangerous.

[David McCloskey]

The CIA guys, David Tyson and the paramilitary officer Mike Spann who are going to go into Khalid Zhangi to do this questioning, they have been operating over this month that they've been in country. They are making basically one phone call to CIA headquarters every day to kind of report in on what's going on. They are the ones making decisions. The CIA has pushed decision making down and I think quite rightly to the lowest possible level here, acknowledging that you can't run this kind of conflict from CIA headquarters. You know, these guys have to make decisions on the ground. And so they go into Khalid Jangi on the morning of November 25, 2001, knowing that they've got the first big group of Al Qaeda prisoners that has been detained since September 11th and that many of these guys might know about active plots. Many of these guys know bin Laden potentially and some of them might know where he is.

[Gordon Carrera]

So you can see why they want to interrogate them. But it does look extraordinary when you see some of these videos because there is video of this because there was a German, I think, TV crew who.

[David McCloskey]

Journalists.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, there's journalists there at this fort. And it's just, you know, Mike's ban, wearing kind of his jeans and a fleece, you know, and he's got a gun on him. But with just hundreds of Al Qaeda prisoners just sat in front of him and very little else around him.

[David McCloskey]

That's right. And all these prisoners are let out of the pink house that morning. They actually, because they don't have restraints or flex cuffs, they start, they take like pieces of their clothing and turbines and things like that and actually use it to bind the prisoners. They spread them out in rows in this southern compound of the fort outside the pink house. And they're trying, you see in the videos, Mike Spann and David Tyson are trying to question them to figure out you're trying to sort through 400 people who's important, who's not the prisoners. There's this back and forth. Many of them, of course, don't have documentation. It smells terrible because no one of any of these people, including the Americans, has taken showers in weeks. They're collecting weapons from the prisoners as they come up from the Pink house, including in one case, there's brass knuckles taken, there's grenades, there's rifles, there's pistols. And they get the full 400 of them kind of in these five lines kneeling in this massive southern compound just outside the Pink house. And I think David Tyson and Mike Spann start to realize they need to call, they need proper interrogators brought in to manage this because it's just, it's just going to be too much. But mid morning, all of a sudden there are sort of shouts. You can see in the videos, there's explosions and a group of Al Qaeda fighters come rushing out of the pink house straight at Mike Spann who's interrogating some prisoners out of that field. And this is a point where there's essentially a scrum, a melee. Mike Spann probably shoots a couple of them with his rifle and pistol, gets off a few shots and then he's just overwhelmed because there's so many prisoners out in that field. Now David Tyson is watching all of this from 40 or 50 yards away because he's been dealing with another group of prisoners. And Tyson's going to talk later about how just time starts to slow down. He can't hear all of the explosions and the chaos around him, but he can hear Mike's band calling out his name. He's saying, dave, Dave, Dave. And the prisoners. Now it turns into a full revolt. Chaos, yeah. Prisoner revolt.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. They're on the rampage and they're grabbing weapons and Going for weapons which are just lying around, effectively in various parts of the compound.

[David McCloskey]

There's weapons everywhere.

[Gordon Carrera]

There's weapons everywhere. So they can just grab them. And Dave Tyson himself, I think, grabs a weapon. I mean, he runs initially, then there's shooting. He looks bewildered. I mean, he looks, you know, he's in shock. He's in shock because his colleague has just been jumped on and, you know, he assumes probably killed.

[David McCloskey]

That's right. In fact, later the CIA will establish that he probably died in the.

[Gordon Carrera]

Mike Span.

[David McCloskey]

Yeah, right away, Mike Span dies. You know, again, it's chaos and sort of all comers coming at him because, I mean, frankly, some of these prisoners, they also just want to escape the fort too, you know, but there is this sort of hardcore group that are trying to instigate this revolt. So David Tyson, you picture him, he's in this southern compound. Again, you picture this sort of star cut in half, right? He needs to run away, right? So he's trying to run into the northern part of the fort and he has prisoners coming at him. He actually. A couple grenades, he'll say later, bounce off of him and don't detonate because, of course, a lot of the weaponry there is very old. He, on his way in, his run north probably kills at least 12 al Qaeda fighters and maybe 40 more. You know, the numbers, we don't know. But he just runs down this massive street up, away from the fighting in the south, up toward this northern courtyard, and over the course of 11 minutes, that's it, 11 minutes, finally gets away and gets into some safety in a massive sort of building in the northern.

[Gordon Carrera]

Part of the compound, which is where these journalists are.

[David McCloskey]

Which is where the journalists.

[Gordon Carrera]

Where the German journalists are. You know, it's kind of interesting because the German journalist, I think, you know, says at the time he was kind of could sense something terrible has happened.

[David McCloskey]

And you could hear in the videos, I mean, it's just. It's chaos. You can hear gunfire, you can hear explosions.

[Gordon Carrera]

And Dave Tyson wants his satellite phone to kind of call out. And it's quite an interesting one as a journalist at that point, because, you know, this guy's clearly CIA. How involved do you get, you know, by giving someone a phone who's going to call the CIA, but equally, your life is in danger at that point. So the German journalist says he was a bit of a pacifist and he was no fan of the CIA, but I think at this point, he realizes he's.

[David McCloskey]

They're all in this together.

[Gordon Carrera]

They're all in this together in this compound. And so he gives Dave Tyson the phone, who then, I think, makes a series of phone calls to try and basically say things are getting bad here and we need help.

[David McCloskey]

Well, you think about it, you're in his position. How many phone numbers you know do you know off the top of your head? Well, yeah, so he knows his wife's phone number. So he calls back in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. So he calls her. The first words out of her mouth are happy Thanksgiving. And she's excited because actually they haven't. They've only spoken once, very briefly in the entire month he's been there. And so she's thrilled, but she can instantly tell something's very wrong. She can hear the explosions in the background. Basically, he gets in connection with the embassy and the station there and the entire focus now of the war in Afghanistan, which had been so not focused on Masri Sharif after the victory, because, you know, we're done. The entire focus of the war is going to now focus on the fort of war, Kali Jangi in Maharash Sharif.

[Gordon Carrera]

And buy a bit of fortune. There are some people not that far away who are going to be able to come to the aid of the Americans.

[David McCloskey]

I knew you were going to bring in the Brits.

[Gordon Carrera]

There's a bit of a role reverse.

[David McCloskey]

There's going to be British people brought in, aren't there?

[Gordon Carrera]

Yes, it's the Brits who come riding to the rescue like the cavalry to the Americans in this case, because it's a contingent of the sbs. Most people have heard of the sas, the Special Air Service. This is a Special boat service who are another unit of British Special Forces. The clues in the title of the difference between them. But they were both operating in Afghanistan at the same time. SS may be more famous, but the SBS will tell you they're just as good, if not better. They'll tell you. And, you know, I've seen pictures of these guys. They're scruffy guys, you know, they're not, again, dressed as your traditional soldiers.

[David McCloskey]

They've got the beard, burly bearded men, burly beards.

[Gordon Carrera]

Someone actually sent me a picture of some of these guys actually at this compound at the time. And, you know, having arrived, and they certainly look the part of what you'd expect a kind of deep cover British Special Forces team to do. And they're close by and they're real fighters.

[David McCloskey]

That's right. And maybe with, as I can't believe I'm saying this, the British coming to the rescue, we take a pause. There With David Tyson in Kaliya Zhangi under heavy fire, SBS and some Americans. Gordon and some Americans on the way. Let's pause there and when we come back will hear the exciting conclusion of this revolt in Kali Zhangi.

[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

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[David McCloskey]

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[Gordon Carrera]

Welcome back. It's November 25, 2001, and we're in Mazari Sharif and specifically Kalle I Jangi, which is the fort of war in that city. And it's the site of what's now turning into a ferocious battle. The U.S. cIA and Special Forces team, along with their allies, had taken this fort. They'd been holding prisoners there. But there's been a prisoner revolt. And at the same time, it looks like the Taliban had been playing a trick, a ruse on the Americans and their allies. General Dostum, because there's another force of Taliban, I think, coming or massing at least of 800 men, which satellite imagery is picking up potentially heading towards the town as well. And there's this revolt by the Al Qaeda fighters, the Trojan horse. The Trojan horse. Inside, inside this fort, Mike Spann, a CIA paramilitary officer, has disappeared, I guess under a crowd of bodies. Not sure what's happened to him. And at this moment, things are looking pretty bad actually for the small CIA team that's there. Although the Brits are coming.

[David McCloskey]

The Brits are coming. Thank God.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

And David Tyson is in. He's the other CIA officer who's. Who's there. And he is trapped really in the kind of northern part of this compound with a team of journalists, essentially. And it's been very loud at the fort, let's say, Gordon, over the course of that morning. And so the team, there's, there's, of course, there's some Green Berets, this kind of ragtag group, frankly, of other American military officers in Mazeri Sharif who have heard this. Right. Because they're not so far away. There are some Brits in Mazari Sharif as well, who really like to fight, isn't that right? Who have also heard this and sense that something's very wrong at the fort.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I like the description of them. They've got. There's a Cornishman, someone from the West Riding of Yorkshire, someone from the West Country. So you got a collection of accents.

[David McCloskey]

Can you do these accents for our American listeners? Because I was bewildered by what the difference is.

[Gordon Carrera]

I'm not even going to try.

[David McCloskey]

They've got barber jackets on.

[Gordon Carrera]

No, they do not have barber jackets on. They're looking rugged, I think it's fair to say. And I was told not even to give any of their names or even their nicknames. Someone told me some of their nicknames. They were like, don't even use those because these guys are so deep undercover and they don't want to be identified. And I think there's even actually, weirdly, one American who is embedded in the SBS team.

[David McCloskey]

So he's on an exchange program.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, I love it. I love this idea. You have an exchange program for Special Forces. It's like going to university in America for a year. No, no, I'll go to Britain and go to the SBS for a year. And suddenly he's there bailing out his fellow Americans.

[David McCloskey]

What's even greater is that the Americans didn't know that he was American. So, I mean, he's literally fighting with the Brits and the Americans think he's a Brit.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah, yeah.

[David McCloskey]

I don't know how he pulled that off. He was good at drinking tea by that point, I guess.

[Gordon Carrera]

But it is interesting because they're going to play an important role in dealing with this revolt because I guess they're set up to fight. I mean, the CIA officers were there really for intelligence and for interrogation and for guiding dostums forces. They're not equipped to fight, whereas the Brits have got heavy machine guns and that kind of Equipment and they're set up to really take on the Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners.

[David McCloskey]

That's right. So this team of SBS officers and a fairly ragtag group of Americans decide they're not going to just let this happen. They head to the fort around the mid afternoon. Now they are calling in air support, of course, but it's going to take some time to get there. And when they arrive at the fort, they see that David Tyson is up in that northern compound still under fire with the journalists. And it's, it's absolute chaos there. The Northern alliance guards, who we should note, there's maybe a hundred of them who are fighting the Al Qaeda prisoners who are rebelling in this kind of southern part of the fort. It's a crazy kind of Afghan shooting war in what a lot of the CIA guys will call Afghan spray and pray where they're literally, you know, picking Kalashnikov rifles up and pointing them over their heads, over the power, getting on shoulders of another guy so they can reach over and sort of fire wildly into the compound. So it's, it's absolute chaos. But what the SBS team does is they get up in one of these towers so they kind of have a view of the northern compound where David Tyson is pinned down and the southern compound where the Al Qaeda prisoners are, and they set up a massive general purpose machine gun essentially and begin to just wreak havoc into the southern compound.

[Gordon Carrera]

And then Dave Tyson escapes effectively with a German journalist. He flees over a wall at one point to try and get out and get more help.

[David McCloskey]

Well, yeah, up to this point, of course, you know, there were some other people in that kind of house with him. A couple of them had already jumped out and taken a taxi to get away. A taxi? A taxi.

[Gordon Carrera]

So this taxi.

[David McCloskey]

Well, this is the crazy thing about this battle is there's a battle going on inside this fort and yet outside the fort there's just, there's traffic on the roads, Life goes on. Taxis, life goes on. I mean, a lot of the Northern alliance guards, it's amazing quotes, air quotes, guards were vegetable farmers from around the city who had kind of come in to earn a little bit of money. And as soon as, you know, as soon as the fighting happens, they just, they flee, they go back to their farms. So you have this weird situation where there's this immense concentration of violence and chaos in the fort and yet the town is just, is just normal. Now the SBS team firing up in that tower, they're not able, although they do an incredible amount of damage to the Al Qaeda prisoners, they're not able to actually link up with David Tyson. So, and David Tyson jumps over, jumps kind of down the wall with this group of this German TV crew and they catch a cab right out on the main road, get away. Now there is some bombing of the fort during that day. I mean, Arab support is brought in and it's not, it's. Yet it's not enough to quell the uprising. So you kind of have this situation where at the end of the day, the SBS team has left, David Tyson has left. By the way, the Brits have maybe fired 2,000 rounds over the course of that afternoon. And Mike Spann's body, though, is still in that southern compound.

[Gordon Carrera]

And so they want to get the body for the CIA and the Americans and they want to effectively deal with this revolt. So this is going to be an ongoing battle.

[David McCloskey]

That's right, that's right. So the next day a team decides to go back to do just that, recover the body. And they're playing a role in quelling the revolt. But the brunt of that is being sort of held by these Northern alliance kind of guards and fighters, Dostum's people, who were in the fort trying to keep Al Qaeda at bay. So they go back to the fort then. The other thing that's critical to this is to defeat the Al Qaeda group in that southern compound, you are going to need to bring air power to bear, which only the United States can do.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

So by this point, J.R. seeger, the commander of Team Alpha, has come back from being with Dalstam outside of Mazari Sharif. And a group of Green Berets and SBS guys go back to Kaliya Janki to try to call in airstrikes, which they do.

[Gordon Carrera]

But although one of them goes wrong, doesn't it?

[David McCloskey]

Well, yeah, this is tragedy among many in this story, but as they are working out the coordinates of where to drop this 500 pound bomb from an F18, they put the wrong coordinates in, the pilots do, and there's a miscommunication between the pilots and the team on the ground. And they actually end up bombing a tower that's held by the Northern Alliance. They destroy a tank that kill maybe six Northern alliance fighters, and there are four Green Berets who are actually injured in this airstrike. So the first four Purple Hearts, which is an award given for being wounded in combat, go to these Green Berets. From friendly fire.

[Gordon Carrera]

From friendly fire.

[David McCloskey]

These are the first four Purple Hearts in Afghanistan. Over the next 20 years, there's going to be another 57,000 Purple Hearts of water. But these are the first four.

[Gordon Carrera]

And so you've got that. You've got the air support coming in. I think helicopter gunships as well. These AC130s come in to help try and clear the fort. And this is starting to turn the tide now.

[David McCloskey]

So it's the next day. Right. I mean, we're kind of. It starts to really extend this revolt because this pink house, this cellar, is almost impenetrable. So these committed fighters can kind of go in there for cover. So they bring in overnight an AC130 gunship, which is this big, you know, rotor plane, essentially four rotor plane that the Taliban, they call them water buffaloes. By the end of the conflict, it can fire from some of its guns 7200 rounds per minute. And it has the largest airborne gun in the world on it. And they bring that to bear for over an hour over the fort. But Al Qaeda, they're still firing mortars. They're still embedded in the pink house as this gunship is working eight miles away at the kind of new headquarters in Masri Sharif for the CIA and the Green Berets. You can hear that the windows are rattling from this gunship working, and yet Al Qaeda is still there.

[Gordon Carrera]

So how do they get them out in the end? What's the.

[David McCloskey]

Well, so initiative, I think, at this point, kind of does start to shift. I mean, a lot of the Al Qaeda forces are dead now. We should note the critical thing for the agency is Mike's band's bodies. That's what they were still there. But I think the tides are shifting at this point after this amount of sort of air power has been. Has been brought to bear, the compound. And we should say, Gordon, I mean, at this point, it is medieval and it's carnage. I mean, there are bodies and body parts everywhere. You can see there's. There's dead horses. Some of the horses, actually. It looks like the Taliban have been kind of, you know, cutting them up to eat them, or the Al Qaeda guys, rather, to eat them while they're in there. It's. It's absolute. It's an absolute mess. And the Northern alliance, though, is starting to make some inroads into that southern compound. They're bringing larger tanks in.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah.

[David McCloskey]

To actually clear it. And there's. Yet again, it's insane. As they get closer to the pink house, there's yet another grenade attack from inside from these prisoners that kills more Northern alliance guys, even as they try to kind of uproot them and so.

[Gordon Carrera]

Finally they're basically ensconced in this pink house and they've closed in on them. And that's where the last hideout is of those Al Qaeda fighters.

[David McCloskey]

That's right. Now they do manage to finally clear it, with the exception of the seller of the pink house. And they're trying to find Mike Spann's body. And one of the Afghan commanders, David Tyson, now has come back in to identify where Mike's body might be. And one of the Afghan commanders, you know, approaches David Tyson and says, you know, Mike was wearing cowboys, right? That's the term that Afghans use for blue jeans. And he was, he's wearing that and a fleece. And they found, they find the body exactly where David Tyson thought it was and they put him into a body bag, they drape it with the stars and stripes and he's carried out of Kali Zhangi. He's going to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. And it is, you know, 3,000Americans had died on nine, 11, obviously hundreds of Afghans in the war up to that point. But he's kind of the first, this is the first casualty of this kind of new stage of the war on terror. But they still have Al Qaeda in the pink house.

[Gordon Carrera]

And the way they deal with them is quite amazing because rather than go in there and fight, I mean, they flood it.

[David McCloskey]

They flood it. Well, they come up with some other ideas first, don't they? So you can see in the video, I mean, tossing grenades and firing rocket propelled grenades in, shooting Afghans spray and pray in. They try to pump diesel down some of the vents and then light it, but of course it's not flammable, it doesn't light. And then they do eventually have this idea on the 30th of November, so the fifth day of the uprising, we're just going to pump this thing full of water. And so they divert an irrigation stream, pump the cellar full of water and you know, they do that for. It takes a long time, of course, to fill up over a day to kind of fill it up. And eventually 13 fighters come out and surrender one day on the 30th and then 73 the next. So 86 Al Qaeda prisoners survived this chaos and finally at last, they surrender.

[Gordon Carrera]

I met someone who went into that cellar not long afterwards, a British. And he said to me it was medieval, this place, this kind of, it was like a dungeon, you know, that had been flooded and just the sense of kind of evil and death there, which sounds extraordinary. But out now they've got these Prisoners. And among them, actually is an American, John Walker. Linda. Which is astonishing. You know, the American Taliban, as he's called, you know, who's captured and seen on video being interrogated. Who was one of those last fighters who'd been in there injured during the fighting.

[David McCloskey]

That's right.

[Gordon Carrera]

But then finally, at this point, they've got back control, they've got the fort, and that battle is over.

[David McCloskey]

That's right.

[Gordon Carrera]

So where's Dostem all this time as the battle's going on?

[David McCloskey]

Yeah. Dostum has missed the entire battle, hasn't he? So he is away trying to negotiate the surrender with some of the Team.

[Gordon Carrera]

Alpha guys of the other Taliban guys who.

[David McCloskey]

And he's gone. He's not in Khalil Zhangi. He is absent. Right. And when he finds out what happens, of course, realizes he's been tricked, and he promptly gets extremely wasted.

[Gordon Carrera]

But he starts drinking.

[David McCloskey]

He starts drinking, and he had not been drinking. He was known to enjoy his vodkas, but he gets fabulously drunk upon realizing that the Taliban have tricked him. But he's totally gone for the entire uprising. I think, Gordon, it's probably worth a little bit of a step back here, because I think the story. There's incredible human dimensions, of course. You know, there's immense tragedy, but heroism, bravery, incredible self sacrifice. And you think about these teams that went back to try to get Mike Spann's body. No one's giving them that order to do that. I mean, there's this sort of personal call, right. But this ends up being the very opening sliver of what becomes America's longest war. And the United States doesn't withdraw until, you know, 2021. Nearly 2,500Americans are killed in action over the course of the next generation to come that'll fight in Afghanistan.

[Gordon Carrera]

I think there's a really difficult question, isn't there? Because we're looking at it now with the Taliban back in power, and you start to look at it in hindsight and go, could it have worked out differently? Was there a different path? Did this strategy play out correctly? Were the right lessons learned? It is interesting, isn't it? Because at that time, no one would have predicted what would happen in the following years. And yet it does kind of go wrong, doesn't it?

[David McCloskey]

I think it goes very wrong. It's an unanswerable question. But there is hanging over this story as we read it now, 20 plus years later, I think the sense of, was this a path not taken in terms of a very light American footprint approach to Afghanistan? One Very focused on Al Qaeda and bin Laden. I think this was a strategy that could have worked much more effectively at defeating Al Qaeda and finding bin Laden had we continued to go down this route. And yet we can even see. This story ends in late November of 2001. Within a couple weeks, there will be initial conversations about a war in Iraq that happen in Washington, and there will be politicking in Kabul and in Washington to decide how the Afghan central government will be sort of structured that start to. You can see this kind of strategic confusion already seeping into the picture, you know, as they're cleaning up the pink house.

[Gordon Carrera]

Which goes to this question, which is, what should America be doing? Should it be nation building, building a democracy, building a modern state in Afghanistan, or should it be working with the warlords, some of whom, as we've said, are very unsavory characters? And, you know, a lot of actual prisoners.

[David McCloskey]

Dustin couldn't travel to the States because.

[Gordon Carrera]

Dustin and actually a lot of prisoners he takes die in a container soon after this, you know, and so, you know, these are dark characters, but whether the US should be working with those rather than building something new. Another question I guess I have is whether the US Became very focused on Al Qaeda, Taliban as one thing, and not bringing the Taliban, who actually did represent part of the population of Afghanistan, back into the political mix, but instead they were like, well, you're with bin Laden, so we're going to fight you and destroy you, when actually they did have a constituency within the country, the Taliban, not Al Qaeda. And so whether there was, you know, whether that confusion of who the US Was fighting and how also made it harder to kind of build a sustainable political kind of community and nation in Afghanistan. I think that's another question for me.

[David McCloskey]

Well, I'm an unrepentant CIA man, Gordon, and I feel. I appreciate that the strategy that the counterterrorism center and that Team Alpha represented sort of dealt with Afghanistan then as it was. Dostum is colorful and charming, and he's also cruel and has a tremendous amount of blood on his hands, but he's a tool that we can use to sort of get closer to bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Right.

[Gordon Carrera]

Although bin Laden. It takes another decade.

[David McCloskey]

It does take.

[Gordon Carrera]

I mean, that's a story we'll do another time. But, you know, he gets away at this point. So in one sense, that crucial strategy of getting to bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda, even that doesn't quite work at this point.

[David McCloskey]

Right. Well, and you could make the argument that head. This approach of these kind of teams. Right. Like Team Alpha. Had that approach been embedded as the strategy to get bin Laden in Afghanistan, might that eventual might his eventual flight from Afghanistan not have happened if we had remained radically focused on trying to find him in those crucial couple months when he was still in Afghanistan, you know, before he, before he went into hiding? I mean, we don't know. But I think this, this approach might have borne more fruit.

[Gordon Carrera]

Yeah. Well, it is a remarkable story of horseback, cavalry charges and forts and which I think does tell us a lot about what happened in 2001, but also what came after in Afghanistan. So thank you very much for listening to the rest is classified. And we'll be back next time with another episode.

[David McCloskey]

See you next time.