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  When asked about Mullah Omar, he responds promptly, “Mullah Omar was in Miram Shah during Ramadan and has now moved to Quetta for the winter.” This time his tone is matter-of-fact. He won’t say how he knows this, but his guess coincides with both Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf’s and Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s statements about Omar and other senior Taliban being spotted at prayers in Quetta.

  Despite having worked with the Taliban, Haji has mixed feelings about their reign in Afghanistan. “I met many times with Mullah Omar and all the other Taliban commanders. They were not educated men. They were not even good Muslims. The Taliban took all the prostitutes to Kandahar, and the Arabs were all screwing around. In time, they considered themselves separate from the people. A foot soldier was more trustworthy than a tribal elder.” Now, he explains, “there are two categories of Taliban: the jihadis, who want martyrdom, and the people who fight for money.

  “The Taliban are not Pashtun. We have dancing. We sing. We make decisions in jirgas [a democratic-style group of representatives].” The Taliban, Haji tells me, has ignored its Pashtun culture by becoming entranced by Wahhabism, Saudi-backed religious extremism. “Afghans do not like Wahhabis. The Taliban relied on other people and lost touch with the Afghan people. That is why, in the end, the Taliban could never be governors, only occupiers.”

  Haji has an equally bleak forecast for the Americans: “I can guarantee you the Americans will not succeed. They rely on people they pay money to. Now they are surrounded by people who want money. They have turned away from the tribal elders and made bad friends.”

  He does not show a preference for either contingency, responding in disgust, “I try not to involve myself with these things.” Though he may hold unspoken preferences, clearly neither has earned his full support, perhaps because both seem to view his role as a tribal elder as irrelevant under the new system.

  I grow to like Haji, and he treats me like a son. He insists that I sit on his right-hand side and urges me to eat the best part of the sheep, not clearing the vinyl mat until I have eaten to his satisfaction. He makes sure I sit on the warmest part of the floor. He pesters me to grow my beard out and tugs at it every day as if that will speed the process. It was Haji’s generosity that had made me want to invite the Contractor to join me for a visit at the compound, though the Contractor’s awkwardness ends up trying Haji’s hospitality.

  At dinner the night we arrive, Haji wants to hear all about my trip. He pushes food directly in front of the Contractor: choice cuts of greasy mutton with fresh bread and a dish—specially prepared by Haji’s wife for the guests—of what appears to be curdled milk with oil poured into it. The new guest keeps his arms folded and mumbles, “Gotta get to ten percent body fat.” Haji makes several attempts before giving up, staring hard at the Contractor, then looking at me with hurt confusion. “Just pretend to eat something and compliment the food,” I tell the Contractor. The Contractor frequently stands up in the middle of the hours-long meal, making excuses about having to shoot some video. When he leaves the room for good, Haji turns to me and asks through the interpreter, “What’s wrong with your friend?”

  The same scene repeats at each breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three days. Two of Haji’s sons and an ever-changing parade of locals who come to ask favors from the elder usually join us. Haji’s brother visits with his three-year-old grandson and asks me to come by to try to fix his satellite phone—a phone that still makes free calls courtesy of the CIA. The Contractor mostly stays silent. He seems genuinely interested in the conversations but doesn’t seem to know how to interact with Afghans who aren’t informers. The Contractor continues to refuse to eat even a grain of rice, and I come to dread Haji’s stone-faced looks in my direction. Haji even tries shopping for us himself, apologizing for not having eggs at one breakfast because it is too cold for the chickens to lay. The Contractor, meanwhile, gets by on Atkins Bars and sips of bottled water pulled from his pack at daybreak and before bedtime.

  Haji had welcomed the Contractor, but the feeling was different than when I had been staying there alone. It was an official sort of hospitality now, one designed to discharge Haji’s responsibilities in order to communicate something to someone most Afghans in the area would consider the enemy. Haji adamantly wanted his opinion of a recent bombing to reach someone at a level of authority inside the American forts. So finally, on the third day with the Contractor, he breaks out of Pashtun protocol, speaking frankly to tell his mysterious American guest about the increasing frustration that the tribal elders have with the Americans. He has received word that a family of eight has been killed in the nearby town of Seyyed Karam. He doesn’t explain how he knows the details of their deaths so soon.

  “A local thug lived there for eighteen years and has been threatening to rocket the meeting in Kabul,” he tells us. “An informer called the Americans, but by the time the air attack took place, the man was long gone. Instead another man and his family were hiding out in the house because the man had killed someone in a property dispute. He, his wife, and his six children were found buried under a wall.”

  Haji explains that the people in town are upset. Not about the fugitive, since this was perceived as an odd form of justice, but for the man’s innocent wife and children who had no quarrel with the Americans or townspeople.

  “This man could have been arrested with a minimum of violence, but the Americans chose to attack the house with aircraft and weapons designed to destroy tanks.”

  What’s going on is clear to Haji. “The informers are making money from both sides.” The Contractor says he understands, and the meal ends in silence.

  After breakfast, I thank Haji for his hospitality. He talks to me like a clucking mother hen, pushing me to get a move on and to stop messing around with my camera. Once we get out in the daylight, he rushes us to get in the car and drive away, lest we are spotted outside of his compound. He trusts the discretion of the locals who have come by to visit over the past few days, but if word had gotten around that he had some unidentified Americans staying with him, unfriendlies could be watching the compound. Across the horizon, the rotors of Blackhawks slice through the crisp morning air.

  On our way back toward the border, the Contractor wants to stop in at another base and talk to someone from OGA (other government agencies), a euphemistic term used to describe high-level clandestine operators who don’t fit into the traditional military structure. He seems eager to pass along Haji’s complaints about the Americans’ use of excessive force and reliance on paid snitches. I stay outside.

  After just a few minutes, he emerges, shaking his head. “Seems like the OGA guy wouldn’t even get off his cot to say hi. He just sent his local peon to say he already had the intel.”

  The Contractor holds up a stack of dirty Pakistani rupees. “The puke said thanks and here are some rupees for the cab ride.” He shakes his head. “Company policy is to always give something to someone bringing intel.”

  Looking at the pile of grubby notes, he shakes his head again. “That’s fucked, man,” he says, getting back into the car. What better reason for someone to feed the Americans a bunch of lies than to get a handful of money out of it.

  To be fair, the idea that an armed American civilian would just stroll into a military base with relevant information might give any official pause, since the military only works with established intelligence sources. Walk-ups are considered the most unreliable form of intelligence, but being on the other end of a wad of dirty rupees clearly pisses off the Contractor.

  Reliance on bad intel and the lack of good relations with the local population has compounded the security problems, he says. “When you do a madrassah hit”—that is, a raid on an Islamic school—“the locals get pissed. You don’t always find bad guys, but everyone gets slammed to the ground, zip-tied, bagged, and tagged. You forget to give them a hundred bucks at the door and they’ll swear to get you. They will, too. The next time the Americans are on patrol in their Dumbvees, t
hey are set up.”

  This reminds me of a traditional Pashtun saying Haji told me days before: “If you take your revenge in a hundred years, you are rushing things.”

  Despite the treatment he just received from OGA, the Contractor insists the folks he works directly with are beginning to catch on and improve their methods of collection. “Now we want to get inside the heads of the people we are dealing with. We want a softer, more personal relationship, instead of basing the transaction on money.

  “A while back, Rumsfeld said we might be creating more enemies than we are killing…. Duh… But things are changing. We don’t work with local Afghan commanders so much. We also don’t give a shit about what the Paks say, so we are allowed to slide and glide a little more inside Pakistan…. For some reason Pakistan is still like the Catholic Church, where it is sanctuary,” the Contractor tells me. “The bad guys are inside Pakistan using Pakistani protection to attack Americans inside Afghanistan and then running back knowing they won’t be chased. Hopefully, things will change.”

  For now, though, covert operations continue and task force looks for excuses to cross the border, the Contractor says. An American civilian operating inside Pakistan could need help, which gives the U.S. military a reason to cross the border in support, hot pursuit, or just to call in mortar and air fire on nebulous “bad guys.” But until they do, the shadow war depends on men, like the Contractor, willing to work and fight in a no-man’s land just beyond the reach of U.S. power. I ask him if there’s an extraction plan if a mission in Pakistan gets messy. “The extraction plan is that once you are across the border, you are on your own. There is no uplift. You are screwed if things go wrong.” But that vulnerability is essential to the role of a contractor. “You are not in the federal system or in the military system,” he says. “You are deniable, disposable, and deletable.”

  That independence—and the secrecy that goes with it—is part of the Contractor’s code. And, as far as he is concerned, it should remain inviolate even in death. “When we get killed, it’s usually because we fucked up,” he says. “We lost two guys, set up and ambushed. We lost a case officer in a training accident. That, along with [Johnny Micheal] Spann getting killed in the middle of an interrogation, adds up to four CIA operators killed in this war.” Traditionally, the CIA does not disclose an operative’s identity, even if he is killed. But in Spann’s case, the Agency decided that his anonymous star would be going on the Wall of Honor at a time when the Agency desperately needed a publicly identifiable hero. “That’s a decision that has been made since September 11 to polish up the CIA’s image. You can’t shit on a dead hero, so I think the number-two guy at the Agency has decided to grab some glory to counteract all the Agency fuckups since the Bay of Pigs…. Tenet got hammered because of 9/11 and wanted to show that we are still working, to show that we are putting out an effort. The problem is that fucks the rest of the guys and their families because this leaves the wives and families dangling in the wind, and you have more tradecraft exposed…. I don’t know why we have to be the poster boys to fix the CIA’s reputation.”

  Revealing Spann’s name made him a hero, but it also exposed his wife, which blew her cover and publicly identified his children as the offspring of two covert officers. When I thought about it later, I understood that the Contractor saw this public celebration of his private tradecraft as a violation of his own tribe’s code. The Contractor’s willingness to talk to me seemed to be driven by his anger over seeing that code of secrecy begin to crumble. The independent contractors he works with in the covert world of OGA assignments signed on for the job because they could be assured their exploits and identities would be kept under the radar, if for no other reason than for the protection of their families. But now it seems the CIA is willing to sacrifice that commitment to its operators in order to grab a little glory.

  The Contractor asked me to leave him off a short distance from his base. He didn’t want to have to explain what he was doing driving around in Taliban territory. I said good-bye to the Contractor near his little mud fort at the edge of the empire and carried on in my little yellow-and-white taxi.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  The Praetorian Guard

  “At the end, we all knew there might be a conflict of interest.”

  —CONTRACTOR WORKING ARISTIDE’S PERSONAL

  SECURITY DETAIL DURING HIS DOWNFALL

  The fall of the Taliban did not guarantee American forces a respite from random violence, ambushes, and daily attacks by bombs and rockets. In the new Afghan reality, the number-one target is Hamid Karzai. Karzai is a Westernized “moderate” Pashtun with a noble lineage and diplomatic skills who speaks fluent English along with four other languages. He was an easy choice for the United States to support as leader, but any Afghan who dared to align himself with America became a target of not only the Taliban, but also disgruntled warlords like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Afghanistan has a long history of using assassination to change the course of their nation, so a future attempt on Karzai’s life seemed a near certainty.

  The U.S. government originally began training a team of Afghan bodyguards to protect Karzai but soon recognized the unreliability of the custom-made palace guard. It seemed no amount of training would make the Afghans an effective security force, and the indigenous detail remained vulnerable to infiltration. Other Afghan leaders, like General Rashid Dostum or Ismail Khan, had trusted contingents of hardened fighting men who had fought with them for decades, some having endured prison time and great hardship in the service of their leaders. Karzai had little military experience and no trusted men who could be counted on to take a bullet for him, if necessary. Karzai called the State Department and begged for a security detail.

  Dictators avoid ethnic or tribal intrigue by hiring professional mercenaries as palace guards. For example, the Saudi royal family hires ex–Delta and Special Forces independent contractors for their protection. However, it is unusual in modern times for one country to contract and pay for the only protection for a foreign leader (although at one time the State Department managed the security of Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, before handing it off to a private firm).

  As an interim measure before a long-term solution could be formulated, the assignment went to JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command), who assigned a detail from SEAL Team 6, the covert antiterrorism group. Better known as DEVGRU, for Development Group, SEAL Team 6 is the naval equivalent of Delta Force. As one of its specialties, DEVGRU provides personal security for high-ranking military in high-risk environments. The SEALs deployed on June 2, 2002, and their security detail was in place by the fifteenth of that month. This particular team was scheduled for a six-month rotation, to end on December 15.

  The SEALs shadowed Karzai much like special operations groups guard U.S. generals and admirals when they visit Afghanistan. The show of force that followed Karzai around may have given the impression of tight security, but it wouldn’t be long before an enemy of the new Afghan government would exploit a critical vulnerability to take a shot at the president. While using an American detail may have removed the threat of infiltrators from Karzai’s immediate protective force, it did nothing to prevent the same in the security forces of other Afghan leaders.

  On September 5, 2002, Karzai traveled to his hometown of Kandahar to attend his younger brother’s wedding. After evening prayers, Karzai was leaving the governor’s compound in his black American-made SUV when an uniformed member of the palace guard, who had just been hired seventeen days earlier, fired four to eight shots at Karzai with a Makarov pistol. Flying bullets barely missed Karzai, instead hitting Governor Gul Sherzai in the neck. When the assassin fired the first shots, a twenty-three-year-old shopkeeper leapt, pulling him to the ground to wrestle the gun away. A young boy also moved in to help. The SEALs, trained to kill at close quarters, began shooting in the direction of the assassin and killed all three Afghans. Although there was only one assassin, the young boy and shopkeeper were ki
lled for their well-intentioned, if amateur, attempts to save Karzai. The bloody event hit the news and instantly communicated a message that the U.S. military protected Karzai and dealt out violence without regard to the innocent or guilty. The fallout from the incident made it an even greater imperative to devise a new answer for Karzai’s protection problem. Luckily, Craige “Mad Max” Maxim had already been working on replacements.

  Maxim, a white-haired, compact man in his midfifties, has thirty years in the army, with twenty of those years in Delta. Oakley sunglasses usually mask his no-nonsense facial expression. Craige headed Delta’s training program and gained fame in the service for running high-risk PSDs to protect generals and dignitaries in war zones or other areas with a high likelihood of attack. He is up front about his motivations for getting back into the business as an independent contractor after retiring from Delta: “I missed the action. It was my way of doing something after September eleven. It became personal.”

  Most agreed that the emergency deployment of SEAL Team 6 was overkill and expensive, but the importance of Karzai’s survival to U.S. national interests made even extraordinary measures necessary. Using the SEALs bought time until a long-term solution could be devised, which is what Craige had in mind when he pitched the idea to the State Department of recruiting a detail of independent contractors to keep Karzai alive. He had the contacts and experience, and said he could have a crew of three dozen American bodyguards up and running in sixty days.