Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man (15 page)

Among this galaxy of professional and experienced commandos was our Delta squadron commander, Lt. Col. Jake Ashley. A tall and lean man, Ashley had a vocabulary the equal of an Ivy League law professor’s, and I often thought he would be more comfortable as a congressman than as a commando.

Although a little short on personality and pleasantries, his ability to package data and collective insight before smoothly presenting the goods was extraordinary. When it came to briefing and putting the decision makers at ease, he had few peers.

Our frustration at not yet riding into the fray was compounded by what we were seeing on television. Every major network was spotlighting politicians and self-advertised military experts, few of whom had any idea about what role Delta would take. One of the silliest suggestions was that we should be put aboard civilian airliners as federal air marshals. Granted, a Delta operator could do that job, and just prior to 9/11, several recently retired Delta warriors had been hired as primary instructors in the air marshal training program. But this was not how the nation needed to use the sharpest knives in the drawer.

There were lengthy discussions of the harebrained idea on the news, during which government officials who should have clearly understood the importance of operational security were freely tossing about our Unit designation, which remains classified to this day.

As our sister squadron moved into the final days of rehearsals before leading the charge in Afghanistan, our squadron was handed two interesting and challenging missions. The first cannot be discussed in this
book because it remains strictly compartmentalized. In fact, some of my men likely still don’t know that sensitive target location or the person targeted. That short-notice mission, however, kept some of us planning around the clock for several days before the intelligence dried up.

It only increased our frustration. We were used to scrapped missions after being put on short standby, but this latest word to stand down reminded us of pre-9/11 days. We were hungry. Hell, where were all the terrorists?

The second mission was to rescue Shelter Now International hostages being held somewhere in Kabul, Afghanistan, which was under Taliban control.

We went to work studying photos from the intelligence shop and reviewing Predator footage of the major hardball and hard-packed dirt roads. Some photos taken by the unmanned aerial vehicle also had been sent via satellite from some of our guys on the ground with the CIA north of Kabul, and near Kandahar in the south.
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All routes in and out of the capital city were controlled by sporadic and intermittent Taliban checkpoints.

We decided our only way to reach the hostages, short of fighting our way in, was to look like a bunch of ragtag Taliban or al Qaeda fighters ourselves.

Only small groups of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters enjoyed freedom of movement inside Kabul after nightfall, and for that the Taliban favored imported Toyota pickup trucks. There you have it: We would become terrorists for an evening.

The unit acquired a dozen Toyota 4×4 pickup trucks and while our mechanics modified them to fit a dozen specific mission parameters, we gathered Taliban-like turbans, mujahideen wool
pakool
hats and other Arab and Afghan clothing.

Higher headquarters needed some prodding to appreciate the tactic we were setting up. One afternoon, troop sergeant major Jim and I sat around brainstorming how we might garner more support for our plan to hide in plain sight.

We pulled a recent photo of some Taliban fighters in a pickup truck near
Kabul. We then outfitted one of our assault teams with similar clothing, RPGs, and AK-47s, loaded them in a similar pickup, and took their picture.

The two photos were almost identical and we packaged them in a short PowerPoint presentation. To the slide with the two photos juxtaposed, we added the caption, “At less than 10 percent illumination, what does the enemy actually see?” The unit operations officer was convinced and he took it over to higher headquarters. A few hours later, we had approval.

The options for a successful rescue inside Kabul were still limited. Sure, the 160th SOAR pilots could deposit us wherever we wanted, but that was only half the performance. The idea was not just to get out with the hostages; it was to bring them home alive.

The basic idea was to pass ourselves off as an al Qaeda convoy moving through the city at night, taking advantage of bombing that would be going on north of the capital. We had no illusions of being able to pass any close inspection or talk ourselves past a sentry, but all we needed was just to avoid being recognized at a distance by the brief look of a sentry.

If our ploy worked, we would continue to roll toward the hostage location. If not, we would eliminate the guards with our suppressed weapons to keep things quiet from neighborhood ears. We did not want a Mogadishulike confrontation.

Then we had some very good intelligence from the CIA about the hostage building, right down to which rooms they were in. Unit engineers constructed a mock-up of the building so we could rehearse the assault dozens of times.

The cover-for-action theory looked good to us, and maybe the rescue of the hostages in Kabul might have worked, but it all became moot because the Taliban collapsed so fast. When Kabul toppled on November 10, the Taliban ran for their lives, and some sympathetic Afghans spirited the hostages out of the city to a point where they were safely picked up by helicopters.

In late November 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld visited the Delta compound and my troop was tapped to demonstrate the Unit’s unique skills.

These capability exercises, or CAPEXs, occurred every other month or so for various VIPs, and most were just a pain in the ass, since they took away valuable training days in preparation.
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However, times were different now; we wanted to show this wartime secretary of defense more than we would unveil to an average visiting ambassador, congressman, or even a general officer. Since my troop was putting on the demonstration, the responsibility for most of the briefing fell to me. We wanted to impress the hell out of Rumsfeld, for our goal was to hear him tell us that we were going to Afghanistan.

The day of the CAPEX, a teammate approached me roughly thirty minutes before the secretary’s arrival. Cos had been wounded in action in Somalia in 1993 and again was wounded during the October 19, 2001, raid on the home of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Cos was now back in the United States, nursing his latest wounds, and asked if I minded introducing him to Secretary Rumsfeld.

Here was an operator who had spilled blood fighting for our country, and I thought the request totally reasonable. Cos had earned an introduction, but that didn’t mean I should not pull his chain a bit. “Well, Cos, I don’t know. That’s not part of the approved itinerary,” I wisecracked. “Hmmm, I wonder how high the approval authority would be for a last-minute request.”

He knew that I was kidding, but I quickly changed gears. “Absolutely, Cos, I’d be honored to do it. Be outside standing in the background. As soon as the secretary is turned over to me from the Unit commander, I’ll break the script and call you over.”

“I’ll be there. I owe you one, Dalton,” Cos replied.

“Easy day, Cos. Easy day.”

It was an unusually warm day in North Carolina and Sergeant Major Ironhead and I squinted into the sun as the VIPs approached through the Delta garden.

Flanked by several dozen uniformed officers from various higher headquarters, the secretary and his party made their way toward the bus. I recognized Steven Cambone, the special assistant to the secretary, and Pentagon spokeswoman Torie Clarke, who was walking with a cast on her foot.

After shaking Rumsfeld’s hand and asking about the weather in Washington, I motioned Cos to come forward. The looks on the faces of some of the senior officers present was incredulous.
Who does this major think he is breaking the rehearsed itinerary for this type of shenanigans?
Sergeant Major Ironhead shot me a smirk.

Rumsfeld was clearly enthralled as I described Cos’s dedication and explained his convalescent status. He was genuinely appreciative of the operator’s sacrifice and commitment. The whole episode lasted less than a minute and was more than worth the slight change in schedule. A few days later, Cos was back in Afghanistan. Two days after 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.