Licensed to Kill Read online

  I ask him who “they” are.

  “TF,” is his curt reply—task force.

  Apparently, some videotaping I had done earlier had not gone over well. “You’ve filmed their base and vehicles. If the bad guys catch you across the border, they will use it to hit this place.”

  He seems most curious to know how I got here without getting attacked. “Did you see those antennas on all four corners of that pickup truck? Those are jammers. People around here bury antitank mines and then detonate them with cell phones or car-alarm-detonated triggers. They hire kids to sit at the side of the road and wait for Americans. They tried to kill Musharraf yesterday, and his jamming system was the only thing that saved him. Delta can’t figure how you got here in one piece. I am sure they are looking you up right now.” He smiles, then walks off.

  I head down to the main firebase. The once-friendly Afghan commander, Shah Alam, quickly approaches me with a tone of near-panic in his voice. “You came here to take pictures,” he says. “You have enough pictures, now please go.” He obviously has orders to get me off this hill and going in the opposite direction of Miram Shah. In a typical Afghan gesture, he then asks me to join them for lunch before leaving.

  The Contractor reappears as I am packing up to leave and inquires about my destination. I tell him I have been staying near Gardez with a man I call Haji, whom I had met a week earlier at a gathering of tribal elders. Haji is well known from his days as a mujahideen commander, and before that, a cross-border trucking czar, a former drug smuggler, and a supporter of the Taliban, back when they were better known for crushing warlords than supporting al-Qaeda. He has now retired but remains a man who can be called upon to resolve critical problems and defend the weak. Without hesitation, he had invited me to stay at his home for a week, on the condition that I not reveal its exact location or his full name. With no fear of overextending the elder’s endless hospitality, I invite the Contractor to join me at Haji’s.

  The opportunity to go through Taliban territory with a stranger obviously intrigues him. He is supposed to be heading back to Khost for some R & R, so the idea of taking a taxi instead of going in an OGA convoy has a bizarre appeal. He gets his battered mountaineering backpack and tosses it into the ancient white-and-yellow taxi. We start out on the drive, but first I insist we stop at a small market a few miles from the base. Sixty dollars turns my new American friend into a rough facsimile of a bearded farmer, complete with wool hat, waistcoats, and light blue salwar kameez tunic. Satisfied we both look like idiots—but Afghan-looking idiots—we take off.

  Despite his initial bluster, he is not used to being so exposed, so out in the open. As we come up on checkpoints, he drills me on how to evacuate the car from the same side, how to keep a pistol under my leg, and how the windshield will deflect rounds. As we head into the series of switchbacks that mark the start of the mountains, the Contractor starts to loosen up. We have a long time to talk on the ride, bouncing and rattling down the potholed dirt roads. He agrees to answer some questions about his work on the condition that I not reveal anything that might harm his mission and that neither he nor his home base be identified. I agree. His story fascinates me as I type it into my pocket computer.

  “What you were looking at was part of TF-11—‘JAYSOTUF,’ or Joint Special Operations Task Force [JSOTF]. There were some REMFs in there on a dog and pony, but the team also has a couple of shooters, usually three or four Delta, a vanilla twelve-man SF team, an Air Force CAST, a case officer, an OGA element, and about thirty or forty Afghans for weight. They are the tip of the spear out here—the hunter-killers in this part of the woods.

  “I am a contractor. The CIA has been using civilian contractors for decades—guys who are neither officially military, government, or intel. They started in Vietnam. They needed a deniable operator—someone that if he is caught they can say was not part of the U.S. government. These days the CIA has plenty of money, so it’s easier just to hire us than train new people. There are the soldier-of-fortune, beer-bellied, raucous, ring-wearing guys you see in town, and then there are us—guys into fitness, in their late twenties to late forties. They have inside and outside guys. Inside are guys who never admit they work for the CIA; outside guys are the ones who for some reason got outed. One guy was outed because the CIA sent him a W-2 with ‘CIA’ in the space under ‘employer.’”

  Most of the operators are “sheep dipped,” he says, serving in some official capacity to provide a plausible military or civilian cover but actually working “black ops,” top-secret CIA operations that are never revealed in their military CV. He tells me, “Most of the paramilitaries come from Delta Force, and I only met one SEAL…. They typically are recruited from the serving military and then seamlessly join the Agency as contractors. They get out and are directly flipped. They get recruited with enough time to do the background process early enough so they can go straight in. Guys in the military usually have a clean record, no financial problems, no gaps, no legal problems. By watching them and flowing them into the Agency, there is no explanation time in between. There is no shortage of volunteers…. People make fun of the Agency, but all the SF guys are trying to work there. You get whatever you need, you don’t get dicked with, you have your own chain of command, and you don’t answer to the local military commander. You are not in the federal system, or in the military system.

  “Working in Afghanistan is pretty easy,” he continues. “You sign up, train up, and fly in. Most of the operators go into Tashkent [in neighboring Uzbekistan] via commercial and then to Kabul on a military flight. You land there, and they pick you up in a truck and check you in at the hotel. Nobody asks any questions…. You check in, get a couple days in town, and then talk to the chief of base. You get your walking papers and fly out to Khost, Ghazni, Kandahar, or wherever you’re going.” The going wage, he says, is $1,000 to $1,250 a day for a contractor with security clearance, slightly better than in Iraq. Three months is the usual tour of duty. “People get freaky if you leave them out here more than ninety days.”

  Our driver and my translator, Doc, stare straight ahead, looking for freshly disturbed potholes, a place the Taliban like to hide remote-detonated mines. I’ve told them that the Contractor is my cameraman, and he is enjoying his undercover role as sidekick. He uses his GPS to mark checkpoints and track the road as we travel up into higher altitudes. The checkpoints, manned by Taliban and warlords’ foot soldiers, are simply speed bumps guarded by armed men who stare into the front of the taxi. My driver boldly waves them off and keeps going. I try to look as Pashtun as a blue-eyed feringhi, or foreigner, can. With his heavy beard, the Contractor looks more like an Afghan than I ever will. I tuck my glasses in my pocket, pull my dirty brown blanket tightly around my face, and stare impassively out the front window as we go through the checkpoints. We somehow easily pass through four more where both trucks and passenger vehicles are being stopped and emptied.

  The first base the Contractor was assigned to, he tells me, was set up in the most remote area that could be resupplied by helicopter. “They flew us in after dark on a nighttime resupply mission on a CIA Russian helo—a bird that wouldn’t say ‘Here come the Americans.’” A four-truck convoy came out to meet them. The new crew hopped off, the old crew hopped on, and the helicopter took off.

  “When I first saw the terrain through the NVGs [night-vision goggles], all I could think of was the surface of the moon—talcum-powder dust, rocks, dirt, and low barren foothills rolling into mountains on each side, all in green. There was nothing but stars, rocks, and a medieval mud fort in the distance. Inside there is this big bearded guy with a Western hat warming himself over a diesel fire in a fifty-gallon drum. He sees us, laughs this crazy laugh with his face lit by the fire, and yells out, ‘Gentlemen, welcome to the edge of the empire!’ Man, I got the crazies when I heard that.

  “The outpost used to be someone’s compound. You’ve seen this place in a hundred movies. Star Wars, Mad Max, Beau Geste, and a dozen Western
s. It’s that last outpost of civilization before you hit the savages…. The CIA rented it because it was on a busy infil route for the Taliban and al-Qaeda from Pakistan. I got my first clue when I saw a map in the deputy minister of security’s office marked ‘Top Secret.’ It had little green circles clearly marking where the bad guys were. The problem is that the circles were all in Pakistan in places like Miram Shah and Wana.

  “When I got here, they sent two of us to meet with the Pakistani border guards. It was a three- or four-mile drive. Seems like they hadn’t seen armed plainclothes Americans before. They swiveled the big gun on us as we were driving up. They were damn hostile to us. They said their head intelligence guy would come to meet us there tomorrow, so the next day we all meet in a little hut with the Waziristan Scouts. We did the initial scout and then the two of us went back to pick up the chief of base, the young case officer, and a translator. The translator told them what we are doing here, why we are here, and what we want to cooperate on—‘Can we give you a phone?’ ‘We might have to chase someone across the border,’ et cetera. They said it’s not a problem as long as we didn’t go too far inside the border. They didn’t really say what would have happened if we had hit the town. It was another three miles to the town.”

  The hunt for bin Laden, he says, is not like the hunt for Saddam, with thousands of troops looking under every carpet and behind every tree. Even the Pakistanis can’t operate in the tribal areas without serious backlash.

  “Our job is to shake the apple tree,” the Contractor says. “We aren’t hunting bin Laden from the top. Our strategy is to focus on the little guys—just like how they do drug busts in the States. Put the heat on the runners and little guys until they get nervous and start contacting higher-ups. Then we intercept their calls and the hunt begins. We are just hired killers. Guns with legs. We were there to provide security to the case officer, roll guys up, or do hits. The fort was run by the chief of base, a CIA bureaucrat that wouldn’t give us the time of day.”

  The Taliban, he says, aren’t a priority. “Mullah Omar is not an issue. We are looking for al-Qaeda…. We hunt al-Qaeda. We are not trying to develop intelligence inside the religious schools. We are looking for people connected to bin Laden.

  “We ask simple questions like, where do they sleep at night? Once we can find where they sleep, we can monitor them. When we find the house, we can pick up any electronic communications and send them directly to Langley, [MI5 headquarters in] Cheltenham, or Washington…. Once you find their base, you don’t want to hit ’em; you let ’em talk and use that intel to roll up the lower-level people. We can do voice-print on them and even know who they are talking to if that person is in the database. If they set up a meeting or give us a GPS location, somebody might get hit the next day. If they still don’t contact higher-ups, then you snatch another guy or make him disappear. You do that a couple of times and they will get nervous.”

  Doc, I notice, has been listening intently. The Contractor adjusts his rust-colored wool hat and admires his Afghan look in the mirror before continuing.

  “The trouble is that we are doing this inside Pakistan,” he says. “That’s why you need a contractor. Our government can say that ‘we’ are not going into Pakistan. But you can be damn sure that white boys are going into Pakistan and shooting bad guys.

  “The chief of base runs the show. The case officers are buried on the base. I had been there a month before the case officer went outside. The base is an Agency operation with enough troops on the outside to make it look like a military base. The Agency is leasing the property the base is on. The army runs their own operations, but they tell the chief of base what they are doing. The CIA is still compartmentalized by country. If you go inside Pakistan, you have to call the chief of station in Islamabad and he can’t poach the project.”

  Most of the contractors at his base spend their downtime working out, running sprints between the helicopter pad and back, and doing triceps presses with big rocks.

  “We like to stay in shape. When you’re in combat, you want to make sure you’re using everything you got. You want to make sure you take a few guys with you, even if you only have your bare hands. Most of us are into steroids big time. D-balls [Dianabol] to bulk you up and Sustanon to help you maintain what you gained. The doctors turn a blind eye to it. We get the stuff across the border in Pakistan. When you see guys bulked up, you know what they are on. We keep control of it, though.”

  He looks at the arid terrain and high adobe forts around us. He shifts his AK, then smiles. “These days the Agency is looking for Mormons and born-agains. People with a lot of patriotism and the need to do good. At least we start that way…. I don’t drink, smoke, or eat crap,” he says, smiling. “My only weaknesses? Pepsi and women.”

  As we wind down the backside of the Taliban-controlled mountains, I see the familiar tabletop range that marks the location of Haji’s compound. The Contractor seems pleased that he has loaded the road and all of its checkpoints into his GPS. Haji lives in one of the largest compounds in the Gardez area, a good indicator of his importance. Each of its four outer walls stretches over nine hundred feet long and thirty feet high. His compound sits on a barren plain outside of town in front of the dramatic backdrop of Taliban-controlled mountains, just past the U.S. base in Gardez. In the mountains to the south lies the deadly Shah-i-Kot Valley, location of Operation Anaconda in March 2002, and beyond that the mountain redoubt of Zhawar Khili, the massive cave system built by bin Laden to provide shelter against Soviet air bombardment. Extensive poppy fields stretch to the north and east. Inside the compound, Haji has a separate guesthouse and two more walled areas, one for his family and the other for his crops. Designed for maximum defensibility, large square guard towers cap each corner of the compound, and each section has its own full stock of weapons and ammunition. Even the outside toilet, a long walk up a rickety ladder, has three gun ports. Each corner tower used to have an antiaircraft gun, but Haji said he removed them out of fear of being bombed by the Americans. From the early morning until late into the night, the sky above Haji’s compound is filled with Apaches, Blackhawks, Chinooks, B-1B bombers, and jet fighters.

  Haji welcomes me with the bear hug and double buss of a prodigal son. He immediately senses that my friend is much more than a cameraman. In addition to carrying an AK and wearing Oakleys, the Contractor has the disconcerting habit of pacing twenty yards back and forth as if doing a security sweep, and scanning every room he enters for hostile elements. But since the Contractor is my friend, he is welcomed without question.

  Since I had first arrived at Haji’s compound a few days prior, we had by now established a pattern of three daily long meals served on the floor, followed by endless cups of tea, and hours of conversation through a translator. It was really all we had been doing since I had arrived. Though it had taken Haji some time to grow comfortable with me, he eventually had opened up about his opinions of the current situation in Afghanistan.

  The first night we had engaged in small talk, his stance was neutral. Yes, he supported the Americans, even though he still seemed angry over something they had done in 2001. Yes, he thought the Taliban was finished. The second night we discussed more specific concerns. There is violence here, no government, only one school but no teachers. By the third night, as the remains of dinner were picked up and green tea was poured, Haji had finally become more forthright. I had asked him if the reports of the Taliban’s return to the area were true.

  “Yes, they come here… usually at night. They ask for food or shelter. They do not stay long, and we do not ask them where they are going. In some cases they intimidate people, and in other cases they pay. But they seem to know who to talk to. In every group of twenty or so Taliban, there are about four or five Arabs. They need to be with the Afghans because they do not know the way, and they do not speak the language.”

  Haji has enough stature to speak his mind about the Taliban, but even he sees the need to be cautious when discussi
ng the Arabs, what Americans call al-Qaeda. “People do not like the Arabs here because they are arrogant and act superior to the Afghans.” He laughs. “We like to say they are more interested in taking videos than fighting.”

  It is clear that al-Qaeda is still here and still intimidates. Back at the tribal meeting before Haji invited me to stay with him, I had asked to stay with another elder who controlled a border region. The long-bearded man had replied, “You are welcome to stay, but the Arabs will leave a letter at my door that unless you leave the next day, they will kill me and my family.” I had thanked him for his offer and accepted Haji’s invitation instead.

  “During the jihad against the Russians, there were people in every village who would cook food and help us,” Haji tells me. “No one ever worried about being betrayed or discovered. No one even posted sentries. Now these same people are scared when they see the Talibs or the Arabs. The Arabs have to use sat phones to communicate and sneak into villages at three A.M., usually leaving before light the next day.”

  Haji first met bin Laden in the 1980s, when bin Laden was a wealthy young Saudi helping the mujahideen in their battle against the Soviets. The Pakistani ISI had given Haji three truckloads of rockets but no way to transport them back to Afghanistan. “What was I going to do with three truckloads of rockets? The ISI told us that Osama had an office near the University of Peshawar and to go and ask him for help…. We went to his office and filled out an application so that he would pay for the camels and mules. They wanted to know things like how much the rockets weighed. I didn’t know how much the rockets weighed.” Since Haji wasn’t with one of the Saudi-backed mujahideen commanders, bin Laden said he couldn’t help them.

  Haji only knew bin Laden as a man helpful to the mujahideen and never expected he would become what he has, but he doesn’t think bin Laden will ultimately succeed in Afghanistan because “the Afghans are tired of migrating and fighting.” Haji says he thinks bin Laden has taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border, in a valley town called Chitral. “That is where people traditionally hide from those who seek them. There is little movement there in the winter. The airplanes don’t work well [for surveillance] that high up, and you will know when people are coming. Bin Laden knows the tribal areas very well, and the tribes know him very well.” His answer makes sense but doesn’t quite ring true somehow. Newspapers in Pakistan have been reporting that bin Laden has visited the tribal areas between Gardez and Khost. I would guess that Haji probably has a pretty good idea of bin Laden’s location, but knows that it would be dangerous for an Afghan to possess such information. A close friend of his was sent to Guantanamo Bay for knowing the same people whom Haji knows.