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First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
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About First In: An Insider's Account Of How The CIA
Product description While America held its breath in the days immediately following 9/11, a small but determined group of CIA agents covertly began to change history. This is the riveting first-person account of the treacherous top-secret mission inside Afghanistan to set the stage for the defeat of the Taliban and launch the war on terror. As thrilling as any novel, First In is a uniquely intimate look at a mission that began the U.S. retaliation against terrorism–and reclaimed the country of Afghanistan for its people. From Publishers Weekly Just days from retirement, Schroen, a former CIA station chief in Pakistan, was tapped to lead the effort to establish contact with the Northern Alliance in the days following 9/11; the 35-year CIA veteran commanded the first American team on the ground in Afghanistan. At the proverbial tip of the spear, the team slipped into the country and made contact with the Northern Alliance (a loose confederation of Afghan warlords that had been fighting the Taliban government and their al-Qaeda allies), secured their cooperation and set the stage for the deployment of Special Forces teams into Afghanistan. Schroen tells the story crisply and with intimate detail, taking readers on a journey that lurches from harrowing through exhilarating to frustrating—particularly in the realm of communications. "Sitting in the Panjshir Valley," the author glumly concludes, "I seemed to be shouting down a deep, dark hole" at brass thousands of miles away. Events eventually outran the policymakers, however, when a Northern Alliance general finally lost his patience and announced to his CIA contact, "I am going into Kabul regardless of what your NSC decides." Schroen delivers what he advertises: a powerful account that takes the reader inside war councils and 19th-century– style cavalry charges in the months just after 9/11. (May 31) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Schroen had recently retired from 35 years of service with the CIA when the U.S. was attacked by terrorists on 9/11. With experience operating in Afghanistan, he was tapped to lead a team to link with the Northern Alliance to prepare for a military operation against the Taliban. Two days before the attack on the U.S., Northern Alliance leaders had been killed, supposedly on the orders of Osama bin Ladin. On September 19, the CIA team, with six members and $3 million, deployed to Afghanistan on a harrowing mission that included the order to kill bin Ladin. Schroen offers a first-person account of the intricacies of American politics and military operations in an atmosphere charged with the war on terror. He also incorporates historical background of U.S and Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and how the nation came to be in play in the war on terrorism. In an afterword, Schroen looks back on the mission--its successes and failures--from the perspective of the recent elections in Afghanistan and acknowledges the continued challenges in the region. Vanessa Bush Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review Advance praise for First In “A real-life ground-truth account of CIA human intelligence operations that were incredibly successful. The country owes Gary and his comrades, who almost single-handedly won the first phase of the war in Afghanistan. Told with the nitty-gritty detail by the leader who was there –real and compelling.” –Bob Woodward, author of Bush at War and Plan of Attack “First In adds yet another enthralling chapter to the endless martial history of Afghanistan. My old colleague Gary Schroen tells his forceful story with the sharpened senses that come only from years of living in the long shadows of the Khyber Pass. You can almost smell the cordite and the chapattis! A terrific yarn about a sad and storied land.” –Milt Bearden, author of The Black Tulip and co-author of The Main Enemy “I have read books by army officers who fought in wars past, but never one so true and thorough from a frontline intelligence officer, especially one involved in such an important episode in American history. This is really a grand achievement.” –Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars About the Author GARY C. SCHROEN has served in the CIA for thirty-five years, much of his career focusing on the Middle East, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. His honors include the Intelligence Cross, the highest award given by the CIA. He lives in Reno, Nevada, with his wife, Betsy. From The Washington Post On Oct. 19, 2001, five weeks after Sept. 11, the U.S. military got its first warriors into Afghanistan. That night, amid howling winds, two MH-53J Pave Low helicopters struggled from a former Soviet air base in Uzbekistan through Afghanistan's Panjshir Valley to try to link up with anti-Taliban militias. When the all-weather choppers thudded to the ground, a huge man loomed out of the night to greet the team of U.S. Army Special Forces. "Hi, I'm Hal! Damn glad to meet you!" boomed the apparition -- one of the CIA paramilitary operatives who'd already been in country laying the groundwork for the Taliban's demise for weeks. Gary C. Schroen's astonishing new book tells the story of how a handful of CIA agents like Hal led the initial post-Sept. 11 charge against al Qaeda and its Taliban patrons, far outstripping the agency's lumbering competitor, the U.S. military. The CIA, which had been working with Afghan assets since the 1980s jihad against the Soviet occupation, was quick out of the blocks after the 2001 terrorist attacks; the U.S. military, despite having bombed al Qaeda camps in August 1998, had no off-the-shelf invasion plans and had to scurry to the drawing board. The Pentagon's Special Operations units would hook up with their CIA counterparts weeks later. By underscoring that gap, the pointedly named First In will make Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grind his teeth. Schroen, the strong-willed son of a union electrician from East St. Louis, Ill., had been the CIA's station chief in Islamabad from 1996-99. By Sept. 2001, he was on a glide path to retirement, having spent time in the agency's senior management ranks as deputy chief of the Directorate of Operations' Middle East and South Asia division. Two days after the attack, Cofer Black of the Counterterrorist Center asked Schroen to lead a small team of CIA officers to lash up with the Northern Alliance; he accepted on the spot. Osama bin Laden and his deputies were not to be merely captured or "rendered" to justice, Black ordered: "I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden's head to the president." The resultant CIA campaign has been described in such books as Dana Priest's The Mission (which recounts the above story about Hal) and Bob Woodward's Bush at War (for which Schroen was clearly a source), but never with such authority or specificity. Schroen's seven-member team -- codenamed JAWBREAKER -- flew from Washington to Germany, then Uzbekistan, then choppered over the Hindu Kush into northern Afghanistan on Sept. 26. They winged it from there, enduring bumpy rides across the Panjshir and peeling off wads of cash, including an initial payment to the Northern Alliance of $500,000. During Schroen's 40 days in the valley, he spent a cool $5 million, "the vast majority passed to our Afghan allies" -- a sum Schroen considers a bargain for renting the local fighters who would work with U.S. spies and soldiers to end al Qaeda's Afghan haven. His team, working with the Northern Alliance, also cajoled more than 400 intelligence reports out of co-opted Taliban soldiers or Afghan civilians behind Taliban lines, enabling U.S. bombs to hit al Qaeda and Taliban targets far more precisely. One might suspect that the CIA let this book, with its astounding detail, survive the prepublication-review gauntlet because the agency relished the chance to relive a brief, shining moment: The triumph of toppling the Taliban, after all, was sandwiched between those unconnected pre-Sept. 11 dots and that disastrously mistaken post-Sept. 11 assessment of Iraq's WMD programs. Still, First In is likely to cause headaches at Langley. Schroen's heroes are his fellow JAWBREAKER operatives, as well as a few senior CIA officials such as Black and his deputy, known here only as "Hank"; beyond that, Schroen grimly sets about settling bureaucratic scores. His particular bête noire is the Defense Department, which he excoriates as ponderous and timid. JAWBREAKER's men raged at the delays in the arrival of Special Operations forces, and when U.S. bombing finally began on Oct. 7, a disgusted Schroen warned Hank that the first forays "could best be described as modest." Schroen reports that the Pentagon got repeatedly rebuked back in Washington for its sluggish pace, including what seems to have been a cabinet-level spanking for Rumsfeld on Oct. 15. But he also takes swipes at clueless stateside officials from his own agency, snarling over a secure phone that one CIA scold "might like the job out here" instead. Schroen is also still fuming at the policymakers who flung his team into harm's way before the Bush administration was willing "to fight a winning war in Afghanistan." In particular, he holds a grudge against the State Department, Pentagon and NSC officials who hesitated to aid the Northern Alliance before Sept. 11 and continued dithering afterward. According to Schroen, they worried that providing the concentrated, northern-front bombardment necessary to help the alliance defeat the Taliban would also let its Tajik leaders take over Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, and start settling scores with the country's more numerous ethnic Pashtuns. The alliance's leaders felt the mistrust keenly, and so did their JAWBREAKER patron. Schroen came to bitterly resent the "strong anti-Tajik lobby within the ranks of senior U.S. policymakers," including Gen. Tommy Franks of the Joint Chiefs and a State Department official whose name Schroen does not provide but whose resumé is spelled out with venomous precision. Ultimately, events on the ground made U.S. policymakers' decisions for them; as the war cabinet debated, one alliance general told his CIA liaison, "I am going into Kabul regardless of what your NSC decides." Schroen's hard feelings were probably exacerbated by at least two spectacular episodes in which "friendly fire" almost killed some of his men. On Oct. 10, he got an urgent call from a military officer back home supervising the flights of remotely piloted Predator drones -- the high-tech tool that, in the fall of 2000, had spotted a "man in white" widely thought to be bin Laden before being grounded until after Sept. 11 as Bush administration policymakers argued about whether to delay reconnaissance-only missions until armed planes were readied. The mission manager now reported that a Predator was currently looking in real time at two non-Afghan men in Western garb on a newly built airfield on the Shomali Plains. "One of the men is very tall and thin and may be bin Laden himself," the voice on the line reported, asking permission to launch an anti-tank missile at them. "You're not going to believe this," Schroen told a comrade after checking the coordinates, "but I think the Predator is looking at Chris and Ed, and this guy thinks Ed is bin Laden. They want to hit them with a Hellfire." The other CIA man yelped, "My God, they're going to kill Chris and Ed!" Later, an equally confused B-52 bomber crew dropped a 2,000-pound bomb not on the coordinates of a Taliban troop position but on those of the CIA team nearby; one of Schroen's men was blown to the floor of a mud building, bruised, scared and scraped -- along with the Afghan leader he was briefing, future president Hamid Karzai. The author is relatively laconic about battlefield blunders, but he is far less forgiving about what he sees as a massive strategic error: the Bush administration's shift of its focus to Iraq at the expense of the country he helped liberate from the Taliban. The only way to get bin Laden's head on that pike, Schroen warns, is to win full cooperation from Pakistan's balky military, beef up the CIA presence in the region, bring back the indispensable Special Operations units that had been pulled out "as early as March 2002" to prepare for the Iraq invasion, and launch a relentless, coordinated manhunt on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. This is deeply informed advice, ignored at American civilians' peril. The staggering detail in these pages -- operational, geopolitical, even gastrointestinal -- makes First In unlike any other CIA memoir. Other recent offerings in the genre have come from disgruntled former operatives far from the action (Melissa Boyle Mahle's Denial and Deception) or comically detached from it (Lindsay Moran's breezy, chick-lit-influenced Blowing My Cover). Schroen's book isn't perfect; his writing is often flat, we learn far too much about the team's digestive woes, and a life in government has left him acronym-happy. First In is also seriously weakened by several lengthy passages in which Schroen, instead of summarizing exchanges heard by his compatriots, offers purportedly verbatim recreations of dialogue he never heard. But this is still a stunning book -- both an essential document about the strange and oft-forgotten war against the Taliban, a withering policy critique and a proud memoir from an aging man who risked life and limb to try to kill al Qaeda's masterminds. Readers expecting just a rip-snorting yarn will find themselves surprisingly moved when Schroen's team repaints their rickety old Russian helicopter's tail boom with a new registration number: 9-11-01. Reviewed by Warren Bass Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. CHAPTER ONE In northern Virginia, the morning of 11 September 2001 was beautiful, with clear blue skies and mild temperatures that gave just a hint of fall. That morning I left my home in Alexandria, Virginia, an hour later than my past routine had called for, having entered into the CIA’s ninety-day Retirement Transition Program just eleven days earlier. I had spent the time since then cleaning up loose ends at the office, preparing a resume covering my thirty-five-year career in the most exciting, challenging, and—not infrequently—dangerous job within the CIA. Retirement was going to be a dramatic shift for me, and, quite frankly, it was a stretch to say that I was looking forward to it. The Retirement Transition Program is designed to help ease employees into retirement and alleviate, as much as possible, the inevitable career-change angst. The three-month period I would spend in the transition program with others facing their own retirement—many with excited anticipation, I’m sure—would help us in our respective searches for “life after the CIA.” Although I was interested in exploring employment opportunities in the private sector, I had no idea exactly what I wanted to do. I was hopeful that the transition program would provide the time and the insights to allow me to develop a clear plan for the next several years. I was anxious to reach the office, because I had received bad news late the previous day that Ahmad Shah Masood, the charismatic Tajik leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, with whom I had a long professional relationship, had been killed in a suicide bomb attack at his headquarters in the Panjshir Valley. Worse for me was the news that Masood’s senior political adviser, Masood Khalili, had been seriously injured in the blast and might not survive. Khalili and I were professional colleagues and close personal friends. I felt saddened and helpless at the news of his condition. The assassins were identified as two “Arab journalists” representing some, as yet, unidentified Islamic organization based in Europe. This was disturbing news. The Arab angle immediately pointed to the possibility that Usama bin Ladin and his al-Qa’ida organization were responsible for the attack. Bin Ladin, hosted by Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, was hiding in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government was applying all the pressure it could muster to force the Taliban to remove bin Ladin from their country. The Taliban had grown from a handful of refugee Afghan religious students in the radical madrasses (religious schools) of northern Pakistan in early 1994 to a force now controlling three-fourths of Afghanistan. The only serious military opposition to the Taliban rested in Ahmad Shah Masood and his Northern Alliance forces, which controlled the rugged, mountainous northeast corner of Afghanistan. Masood’s absence would seriously weaken the Northern Alliance, a shaky collection of regional warlords held together primarily by their charismatic leader. Killing Mullah Omar’s last major opponent seemed a sure way for bin Ladin to gain continued acceptance as the Taliban leader’s favored guest. When I arrived at the CIA compound in Langley, Virginia, I drove past the Old Headquarters Building, passing my former parking spot located just fifty yards from the front entrance of the building. The spots in the immediate front of the building are reserved for senior officers in management positions; as deputy chief of the Near East and South Asia Division of the Directorate of Operations (DO), I had been part of that rather small group. Now I was relegated to parking in the West Parking Lot, the lot farthest from the building, and I would join the morning scramble to park there, then face the ten- to twelve-minute walk back to the building. A little thing, to be sure, but it was a clear daily reminder of my changed status. I was in the Near East Division (NE) front office suite, down the hall from where I had sat for the last two years. It was a comfortable office, and I was near my friends and colleagues, at least for a few more days. Once I finished the remaining administrative tasks facing me, I would stop coming into the office on a daily basis. I reached the office this morning only to find that there was no further news from Afghanistan concerning the fate of Khalili or the status of the Northern Alliance leadership in the aftermath of what should have been a serious, perhaps crippling blow to them. I slipped into my morning routine of getting on the secure computer system, checking e-mail, and reviewing the work I would focus on that day; then I wandered toward the area in front of the division chief’s office to get a cup of coffee. At least five or six people were standing there, including Chief NE, Jim H., and the television set was on. This was unusual, because the morning is a busy time at the DO. Our stations overseas are open while Washington sleeps, and when we arrive in the morning we have a full dump of incoming traffic from the field to review, organize, and respond to. I joined the group and I too stood transfixed by the images on the television screen. The first tower of the World Trade Center poured a billowing cloud of black smoke from its wounded side, staining the clear blue September sky. There was confusion within the group watching the TV, and people spoke softly with an ear to the commentary. A small plane had hit the building. No, it was an airliner. How could this have happened? How badly was the tower damaged? I recalled that a B-25 bomber had struck the Empire State Building on a foggy morning in late 1944, and although there had been extensive damage, the building itself withstood the explosion and fire. Surely the World Trade Center buildings were equally well constructed. Someone reminded the group that one of the towers had withstood a terrorist attack in the early 1990s when a truck filled with explosives was detonated in its underground parking garage. Then, as we watched, a second aircraft flashed into the picture and penetrated the second tower. The scene rocked the room. We all recognized that this was no tragic accident unfolding before us; it was a deliberate, planned attack. Word soon came from friends in the Counterterrorist Center (CTC) that perhaps as many as six commercial airliners had been hijacked that morning. More attacks were to come. The group standing before the television set grew and changed as people joined the crowd and others wandered off, dazed and shaken. Then we watched the screen—as did millions of Americans—in disbelief and horror as the first tower collapsed. I am not sure of the sequence of events after that. I was too shocked by the unbelievable scenes playing out in real time before us. There was a telephone call at my secretary’s desk, and she picked up and listened carefully. I recall a hush beginning to settle on the group around her, and she looked up and said, “The Pentagon was just struck by an airliner. It crashed right into the building, at the side just next to Route 395.” I was reeling. My son, Christopher, worked at the Pentagon. Was he hurt? Was he dead? What was going on? I could not recall what area of the Pentagon he worked in, and I prayed that he was safe. I called my daughter Jenny, who is a State Department officer in the East Asia Bureau. She came on the phone choked with emotion, having also heard the news about the Pentagon. She had immediately tried to call Chris on his cell phone, but the cell network was overloaded with calls and she could not get through. I asked about Kate, my other daughter, and Jenny said she had gotten through to her at her office in Rosslyn, Virginia, and she was fine. Kate said she’d remain at her office until she knew what was going on. I said good-bye to Jenny with a large lump in my throat; it seemed to me that the State Department complex would be an attractive target. Jim came out of his office and called for attention. He had just been contacted by our Seventh Floor (senior CIA management resides there) and was told that the decision had been made to evacuate CIA Headquarters save for a small, key skeleton staff. There were reports that at least one other hijacked plane was in the air and heading for Washington. The attack on the Pentagon was taken as confirmation that key government installations in the DC area were targets, and all were to be evacuated. All CIA personnel were to close up their offices and immediately depart the compound. It was an eerie experience trudging down the stairwell from the sixth floor with friends and colleagues, leaving when there was a crisis under way. It ran contrary to all my years of experience as a CIA operations officer. A time of crisis was when we dug in and worked the hardest. This evacuation seemed too much like running away. Insult was added to injury when we exited the building and saw the massive traffic jam that had already begun, as thousands of employees tried to exit the compound at the same time. I was angry and frightened, and I thought of my wife and children. I had tried to reach my daughter Kate before leaving my office, but the phone lines were still jammed. I hoped she really would stay in her office until the attacks were over and the streets clear. And I thought of my wife, Betsy, now in Beirut, Lebanon, on a temporary duty assignment with the State Department. Who knew what impact these events would have overseas. Beirut had become much safer in the past few years, but I hated to think of her there at a time like this. Later that evening the news was better. Christopher was safe, having delayed going in to work after a late night in the office on 10 September. He had just arrived at the metro station at the Pentagon when the plane struck, and the exits up to the street level and the Pentagon itself had quickly been closed. Passengers in the station were safe and were able to exit the station on following trains. Jenny and Kate were back home, s...
