First Casualty: The CIA Secret Paramilitary Teams in Afghanistan | Toby Harnden | Ep. 121

special operations covert ops espionage the team house with your hosts murphy and david park [Applause] hey everybody uh welcome to episode 121 of the team house i'm david park here with my esteemed co-host jack murphy uh tonight we have a very special guest for you we have uh toby hardin uh the author of uh bandit country deadman risen and his latest book first casualty about the first uh cia team in afghanistan um but first welcome a word from ourselves thank you very much great to be with you nice to be here now being a brit um but living in america do you drink tea or coffee i drink tea uh i'm a naturalized american citizen since 2009 so duel so um you still still keep my british roots i think most of my kind of behaviors are american uh but tea is one of the british things uh i keep and you know probably four or five uh not cups of tea mugs of tea uh a day i think mugs obviously not a patriot hippies and communists guys i just want to take a moment to tell you about the sponsor of tonight's show uh this is tail horse coffee they are a company that was started in 2019 they're veteran owned and operated uh have our coffee rotisserie roastery i'm sorry in chesapeake virginia the two owners don and gray have over 50 years of combined service to our country in the navy and air force which is where they discover their passion for great coffees and they hope to share their love of country and caffeine with you and your family i have been drinking pale horse for the last week and i really enjoyed it um so i hope you guys will go and check it out they offer subscriptions and vip subscriptions and they are opening their second coffee shop in december and you can use the promo code it's team 10 right team 10 and uh at checkout when you go to pale horse coffee and you'll get 10 off your first order so thank you pale horse for supporting the show and um hope you guys will enjoy some of their coffee hey if you don't drink good coffee created by veterans then the terrorists win so toby thanks again for for joining us tonight um thank you the first question that we generally ask our guests is what is your origin story you know what got you into writing in the first place what was your childhood like did you see this path for you uh no i didn't see it uh i grew up in the uk obviously you can kind of tell from from the accent uh my dad was in the navy uh i ended up being the fourth generation military his father was in the army uh my great-grandfather was in the army in fact two of my great-grandfathers were in the army and so i always thought i would serve uh and i was always you know i guess you know you always want to you know little boy wants to emulate his father and you know and all that so that that sort of led me to the navy so he moved around a fair bit he i mean he left the navy in his late 20s i became an architect we ended up in manchester northwest of england uh not very close to the sea um but you know i just had this i do remember this sort of distinct uh like desire you know to just get out of the place it seemed very insular and to just get away and uh join the navy and and see the world and never return to manchester again and kind of that's what i did i got a i got a um place at the equivalent of the naval academy uh in the uk dartmouth um when i actually when i i got a place when i was 16 uh which is the time around the time of the falklands war so i was seeing ships being sunk you know as i was sort of doing these interviews i then got a cadet ship to college to oxford university i did a year at the naval academy and um sort of basic training before going to university which made university a lot more enjoyable i can tell you um so i was actually a survey naval officer at university i never wore a uniform and i was as scruffy and kind of lazy and rebellious as as the next person but in the vacations i'd sort of scrub myself up and you know get my hair cut and join a ship and then after yeah i was pretty you know i was pretty ambivalent about it i didn't really see it as a long-term thing although i had sort of you know flashes of enthusiasm sort of along the way but you know i went back back into the navy sort of full-time spent six and a half years but yeah at sea and shaw bases in scotland and i worked for an admiral in the uh you know in the ministry of defense which is in some ways a disillusioning experience um but the problem for me with that whole period was you know it was after the falcons war which was a big war for the for the brits um there was the gulf war in the in you know 91 you know i joined the navy in 85 left in 94. um they managed to uh win the gulf war without me i mean i i actually agitated to to get there and i guess the opposite of a draft dodger i you know i wrote letters and pissed people off by saying you know you need to sort of just get my post here in scotland and and send me right which my my my boss didn't particularly like um and so you know i sort of i'd always enjoyed writing i'd uh you know i lived i had a flat in scotland and i ended up doing some theater reviews for the scotsman newspaper i was kind of moonlighting uh i wrote some obituaries of admirals for the independent when i was still serving um and i just decided you know i needed to get out i needed to in a way sort of satisfy some of the urges which hadn't been satisfied uh in the navy and um you know and part of that i guess was sort of conflict and and combat and war and that's the way it worked out because very early on uh as a journalist i got sent to northern ireland which i mean i think one of the reasons why i was sent there was because the newspaper the telegraph felt that the conflict was over uh it wasn't and but i was the i was the guy on the ground i was the northern ireland correspondent and it turned into you know one of the biggest stories in the world and for me was this sort of perfect combination of sort of politics terrorism military and the sort of interplay between those things which was you know for a for a journalist starting out was was fantastic yeah and and how long were you writing as a journalist before you decided to write because your first book bandit lands was about that conflict or about a part of that conflict so left the navy 94 spent probably you know two years in london and sort of finding my way and just establishing myself you know getting us getting a job on the paper and sort of covering crime and and and all sorts of stuff everything from like the royal family to you know goodness knows what in you know in in london um and so by the time i got to northern ireland it was it's 96 and i spent three and a half years there and i just immersed myself in this place it was a very small patch of land if something went bang you know i could be on the scene tops an hour and a half and often often i would just i would hear it in belfast uh in south belfast where i lived and i'd be in west belfist in sort of 10 minutes and i um you know i kind of went in with this idea that i was just going to go to everything and meet everybody and see everything and i was you know some of my competitors were kind of lazy you know they've been doing it for a while they were taking stuff off the radio you know literally phoning it in and so you know i was able to just you know by going to places every single even if it wasn't really that much worth it for the story i'd meet somebody or i just have a sense of something else or i'd just be talking to a local who would you know give me sort of a sense of maybe another story and so during that three and a half years period i became fascinated with this place called south amer which was the ira's border heartland but it was kind of like deny it was within the united kingdom but sort of denied territory to you know her majesty's government and so soldiers um you know the bases were resupplied by helicopters because the roads were unsafe safe policemen couldn't you know uh answer a call uh about a burglary or or domestic violence or something without you know an army platoon going with them and it was it was just incredible and i got to know some uh british army officers there and and and police who who worked there who you know were obviously steeped in it as well and i just you know i found out that you know there's basically six families you know running south omaha ira and some of these families you know went back you know a century or so um as you know ira families and and even further back as sort of high women and smugglers and and robbers and what have you so there was sort of a place apart with um you know sort of uh so this inbuilt resistance to authority and i also found that it was sort of all roads led to south america so you know you had an ira sniper team that was operating there in fact it was two sniper teams uh using a a barrett like 50 50 caliber rifle um to kill kill soldiers and police at you know sometimes very long ranges and just striking terror it was kind of a psychological weapon as well um you also had the ira's chief of staff a guy called slab murphy um who was a sort of a pig pig farmer an oil smuggler who had a farm that straddled the border so literally half his property was in the irish republican half was in northern ireland uh and you had the the big bombs um in england in london principally uh in the 90s were being mixed and made in south omaha the operations were planned in south ameri and then the bomb was sort of taken over to england and so uh you know i wanted to read a book about this place and there wasn't a book and so i thought well you know it it felt a bit arrogant at the time being so you know being an outsider and being so new to journalism but i thought you know there's got to be a book about this place and and if if there isn't one then then i'll do it so that set me on the sort of the book writing track and was it i mean was it dangerous for you was it challenging for you being a brit like kind of going into these areas um obviously did they think you were intelligence you know uh british intelligence what was that like for you so it was definitely something i had to contend with also i'd very recently been a member of the armed forces right and i just found something online the other day about somebody saying you know do you realize he was in the navy two years before and that he'd be an obvious you know british intelligence plant and it was kind of a fair point i mean i wasn't um i think i used to play that down not surprisingly um it was the early days of the internet so you know there wasn't too much about me sort of online that that people could could find i mean i just presented myself as who i was i'm actually catholic born and went to a school had lots of irish catholics so i would kind of you know subtly drop that into a conversation if i was talking to republicans the other thing is i got some very good advice early on from actually a police officer uh you know an iec royal austin constable police officer he said never he's two things never ever pretend to be something you're not you know because that's when you get into trouble and there were cases of like like a folk singer or community worker or you know people who just were nervous and were sort of sneaking around a bit and they'd be dragged off and beaten up and interrogated so what i would tend to do i got to know the political representatives and if i was going to sort of a republican rally or an ira commemoration then i would sort of be you know the opposite of undercover i would be sort of blindingly obvious i'd walk up to the shin fame represented shake his hand how are you doing jim you know what's going on so so everybody could see me and then you'd see the people going to ask uh the um the uh you know the shin finger who is that so people knew who i was and then the second bit of advice was never feel safe and always be ready to leave and so i always did have this sense of you know okay this is going pretty well you know i'm feeling good but just never completely let your guard down because it can turn nasty i mean i don't know whether you ever saw i mean it was an extreme situation but you know um our mob killed two british army corporals in west belfast in 1988 who drove into a funeral um an ira funeral they panicked as reversed and basically the mob descended on them and and that and you know they were brutally sort of you know dragged off to wasteland and murdered now you know that's an extreme situation there's never a likelihood that that was going to happen to me but i was always ready to leave and you know uh sometimes i think okay i've you know outstayed my welcome here and you know time to go and so the book when you released it i mean it won the uh oral prize for books which is a very pretty uh prestigious one well that was the second book that was the second person that's dead i am so sorry yeah deadman no no so what what so uh what was the reception for that book and did that sort of launch you on your on this path of well i can write books i enjoy writing books well it certainly did so there was so the reception the reception was good um i mean i so what i decided to do was to to basically put everything i possibly could into this book and then leave and in fact i left before it was published and so i wasn't pulling any punches i wasn't trying to sort of um stroke any sources i wasn't trying to gain acceptance in any sort of um quarter and you know i think that was one of the strengths you know there was there was kind of no there was no holding back in the book um and i sort of felt that well you know i'll never be able to go back again and actually i don't think that that's the case i um i mean i did go back a few years ago to south omaha and i was certainly it was unpopular amongst some of the ira guys because i'd named them and i talked about what they'd done and i mean there was one guy i heard that you know he didn't mind me sort of attributing 20 murders to him but uh he didn't like me saying he was a womanized and he cheated on his wife and so you know i mean um even when i went back there probably about five years ago now it's such a small place you know i i i was careful because you know um i wasn't sort of mr popular um from from some of these guys and also some of them uh you know were completely unknown and i either named them or gave so much information about them that you know i sort of brought them out of the shadows which i guess they probably didn't appreciate but at the same time i think a lot of them actually either secretly or maybe grudgingly sort of did like it because it recognized the ira as um a sort of a competence and is in some ways you know very accomplished sort of guerrilla military force that you know went toe to toe with the sas and the british army at times and was kind of respected uh by the british army um and they weren't psychopaths and i didn't use the word terrorist in the book sort of in my own words because i just thought it was sort of an impediment to understanding i mean there was a song that you used to sing from the area like the fighting men of cross mclean across the pen was the main town there and you know it was it was more of a a sort of a fight rather than sort of killing civilians and and what have you because it was a rural area uh than it was in in in many other places and you know the british army it became for the few years left of the troubles after it was published it became a kind of a a manual for people who um who went there and i think it was also uh you know it was a good read for people stretching about 20 years that had served in south america and had you know were able to sort of uh read about the context and and show people like you know this is this is what i had to go through and for me personally i you know i loved being a journalist uh and there was no way i was going to sort of hang up my boots as a journalist and and just write you know stroke my beard and you know write books at that stage i i might kind of be more at that stage now but certainly about around about you know i was about you know 30 30 when i got to northern ireland early 30s when i left you know i i wanted to yeah i wanted to go to the middle east i wanted to see more of the world but uh it gave me a real buzz and a feeling of you know a book is forever it's it's history um no matter how good a newspaper i wasn't thinking about online then because it wasn't really you know particularly relevant but you know newspapers just like there's just saying in the uk it's fish and chip wrapping the next morning and i do think it's no matter how good a p yeah i've done some good journalism but i feel it's kind of forgotten sometimes even by me because it's just you know necessarily kind of ephemeral but but a you know a book is sort of something that you know it's never going to go away so the this is printed in 99 right uh or published in 99 and you left prior to it being published so we have about two years plus before 9 11. what was your track during that time so you know i've been pretty successful in northern ireland from the newspapers point of view and uh you know during that period the story became very political it was a peace deal good friday agreement of 1998 so you know i was covering um violence and um and you know ceasefires breaking down and ceasefire has been called but it was sort of moving in a political direction and you know tony blair was there brokering this peace agreement bill clinton was involved and so i was writing a lot about politics and although it's not you know it's never been my first love you know i kind of showed that i could do it and was was was pretty good at it and so um you know no good deed i'm punished i guess in where i got sent to washington um and i certainly wasn't complaining but you know i think maybe going to jerusalem or something would have maybe been a better fit for me at that at that moment um and i remember getting to dc you know in september 99 and first of all is a bit of a shock to the system because you know i was a deep specialist in this very s on this you know a big story in terms of its prominence in the world but you know it was a very small patch of land i knew all the players sort of personally and i was just steeped in it and i you know hadn't been paying attention to a whole lot else and then all of a sudden i get to washington dc i'm having to write about nuclear treaties and stuff happening in africa and and you know you know work out what the constitution is and all all this kind of stuff and um so i mean it was good for me because i you know i learned a lot and i had to learn very quickly and you know it's you know this often happens in journalism you're sort of learning as you're writing you know so you know you're writing about stuff you know almost nothing uh when you're starting to research it and then you know within a day a day and a half or so you you know you're presenting yourself as a great expert so you know i did all that and i was you know i think i sort of started to get the hang of it pretty well and um you know so i guess i've been there two years and yeah then 911 and so you know i guess the sort of war came to me really and um that day uh you know for everybody you know but for me it was like a day a day like nothing else you know i walked into the office in dc just as the first plane hit you know thought it was a cessna small aircraft that's what was being reported on tv i was due i just come back i just flown back the day before um you know my sister got married at that weekend and i thought about delaying my flight and thank goodness i didn't because a lot of journalists were caught sort of flat-footed that day and you know obviously the uh all the um flights were closed down and so there were a lot of people stranded and you know there's a couple of people it was you know their careers never quite recovered as there was a guy that was stuck on the qe2 come here to start his new job in in new york um but uh yeah so i was there and that that evening you know humvees and national guardsmen on the corners of washington dc street i knew barbara olsen a little bit who was the wife of um ted olson the solicitor general she was killed on the on the american airlines plane that flew into the pentagon so i knew one of the people being killed and there was this sense of you know is that is the next attack going to be you know tomorrow or next week or next month but it's it's coming um at the same time i was pretty eager to get out and get to afghanistan and um you know go to where the action was and of course the newspaper editors quite sensibly said no no no no you've got your feet under the table in dc we need you to cover the bush administration so for the next couple of years that's what i did so i missed you know i missed these early months of afghanistan i missed the start of the iraq war and i had my head in my hands the day the statue the saddam statue came down i can't believe i've i've missed this but of course you know spoiler alert it wasn't over and um so i did get i got sent to jerusalem at the end of 2003 and then by april 2004 when sort of the wheels came off in iraq with you know um sunny uprising in ambar and and sheer stuff happening inside a city i pretty much decamped from jerusalem to iraq and spence you know most of the next couple of years going in and out of iraq and covering that so that gets kind of it leads to your next book which is uh deadman risen and that's the one that won the orwell prize for books yeah where were you embedded with the welsh guard or did you just write about them so a lot of this yeah a lot of this stuff is connected so that was a little bit later so okay the to the welsh guards were in helmand province in 2009 so so after you know a year or two of more like two years in iraq um i was getting pretty burnt out i i went back to london and i was sort of a london-based foreign correspondent for a year i then met an american got married and we moved to to washington dc um i also in this period in 2005 i was um uh i was reporting in zimbabwe and got arrested uh with a photographer that i was working with and uh we were in jail for two weeks you know so and we and we were on we put on trial um we were acquitted we were the charge was practicing journalism without accreditation and um they couldn't read my shorthand i had lots of pictures of hippos and tigers on my um on my camera we'd uh pulled out the sd card of julian's from julian's camera and so we were quitted and deported so you know that was that was an adventure yeah um it's a baby's being thrown in a jail in a third world country is definitely not the first guest on the team house who has been thrown into the slammer in zimbabwe right and uh without going off on too much for tandem you know julia and i we were we were chained together um sometimes by our ankles sometimes by our wrists you know in the prison so if one one of us wanted to go and take a [ __ ] then you know both of us had to go and so you know the joke was worrying a bit thin after two weeks and uh that's when we were released and and and deported but that probably i think fed a little bit into a sense of this is this is getting a bit crazy and julian and i and julian's a good friend of mine and uh you know which is good thing because you know we were chained up together in intimate quarters for a while exactly how could you not be good friends at this point right exactly we both saw ourselves we both saw each other under pressure as well you know um you know we had a lot of conversation about life and and actually he just separated from his wife and so he was sitting in jail saying my life is a mess i was you know uh just about to turn 40 and was single and i was like well at least you've got a life i don't have anything so um i think that probably fed into 2006 getting married moving to the u.s and sort of back to washington and back into the politics but um you know clearly that the itch for sort of combat zones and and that kind of story uh never left me and you know and i i wanted to i wanted to sort of keep doing it and um so in 2009 a friend of mine rupert thornlow who was then the battalion commander of the wash guards uh lieutenant colonel um and he'd been a friend actually he'd been a key sort of source and influence in bandit country because he'd been in an intelligence liaison job as a as a captain in south amman so so we spent a lot of time talking about that place and and actually he'd held the job that a guy called captain robert nairo i could held in 1977 when he was abducted by the ira murdered you know body never found bits of teeth and blood and stuff in in the sort of parking lot and um and rupert had that job rupert was killed in action on july the first 2009 in helmand uh it was a huge news story in the uk uh you know obviously it affected me personally he was the first battalion commander to be killed in action since the falklands war colonel h jones of the parachute regiment in 1982. um that battalion had also lost a platoon commander and a company commander and in that order like platoon commander company commander battalion commander and that was the first time a battalion had lost those three sort of levels of leadership since the korean war so i had connections with the regiments um you know partly partly through rupa but also other welsh guards that i met in northern ireland and that actually led me to be sort of embedded with them in alamara in iraq in 2004 and so you know i made a few calls and you know there was some discussions and you know i decided that you know there was there was a great story i didn't know exactly what it was um but there was probably a book in this and so i went out to helmand uh for the last month or so of their tour with the aim of writing a book signed a contract with the ministry of defense which was you know didn't didn't particularly end well but that's what i needed to do to get out to get out there and um you know when i got out there you know they were still fighting um i was able to go you know see them in action and travel around with them and you know walk the ground and all that and also obviously do a lot of interviews about uh what had happened earlier on in the tour which was fantastic because it was very recent so it's before they'd been able to fully process it and sort of compare notes and come up with a sort of you know agreed version of events right um but you know there was i then i wrote the book proposal actually after i got back so there's a bit of a leap of faith involved in this um but then i got a deal and there was one publisher who i didn't sign up with who wanted sort of an almost instant book and i'm really glad i didn't do that because in the year or so afterwards that i spent um researching it it kind of changed so you know at the beginning it was a great story of you know daring do and heroism and you know men under fire and all that stuff but you know as time went on i realized it was also a story of what happens when you under equip and under man um in a war and when you also don't have a plan and so um you know i got managed to get my hands on a lot of documents including emails and and reports that rupert himself had written saying like you know i just i just need more men to do what you're asking me to do and by the way we don't we don't have the equipment we need either and you know tragically you know rupert who was actually you know he was very courageous guy and he was leading from the front um and but one of the reasons he was was doing that was because the young guardsmen were just scared shitless because they were having to look for ids um low metal contents or no metal contents ieds with metal detectors so you know one of them describes me is like you know walking along a track stream with ids with a golf club you know yeah just prodding the ground and so actually the day he died rupert was it was called operation bomber the british always have these weird names their ops computer generated names so searching for ieds with a metal detector was obama and rupert was doing it himself as a lieutenant colonel which is right out front that's incredible um yeah which meant that he was it meant he was riding in the front vehicle which wasn't properly armored uh it was all operations panther school which he said you know was kind of a futile exercise and so you know i mean it's one of those moments for me where i sort of realized you know the best the best stories in life are true because the moment of his death was sort of everything he'd been sort of arguing about and and sort of blowing the whistle on you know coming together you know i i am going to read this book and we're going to have you back on because i have so many questions now about the welsh guards about these men about their mission and i can only imagine the challenges that they faced being a unit that i've never heard of i i don't know about you but but i don't want to spend too much time on that now because we really really want to get up to first casualty and before we talk about first casualty i just want to take a moment to remind everyone out there about the second sponsor for tonight's show yes many of you may not be aware but today is international men's day nice yes nice it's a celebration of all you men out there in our contribution to human civilization thank you for being you and on that note we need to talk for a moment about male grooming this holiday season i'm giving thanks to our friends at manscaped do i tell my extended family that i have the performance package 4.0 from the global leaders in below the waste grooming you just did not to mention it includes their lawnmower 4.0 trimmer to tame my bush and score brownie points with the in-laws gift you're manscaped or this smells like a fun family doesn't it i mean seriously that sounds like a fun family gift yourself manscaped or the man in your life who needs it join the 4 million men worldwide who trust manscaped with 20 off plus free shipping with the code team 20 by going to manscaped.com hey guys it you want to look good you want to look good up here you want to look good down there you want to look good um it's uh yeah international men's day guys yes and give thanks give thanks it it's not the 70s anymore and that that men have a choice in how they look when they drop their drawers all right check it out let's let's good stuff let's jump back into the book in our regularly scheduled program do i have to endorse this product is that required i if you put your cards right there might be a free one in it for you yeah it's not required um but we both use it i mean okay i don't know if we don't want you to endorse it if you haven't used it but who doesn't like a clean well my girlfriend's my girlfriend said that i should not play balls with this uh with this concept so you know we'll see we'll see really so so you know what i say you try it see how she feels about it then she might it might open her eyes to a whole new world okay [Laughter] all right so the book yes so so how did this come about to begin with um so it's interesting because you know when you talk about this it makes me realize you know how many things are connected you know so you know we talked about the connection between you know uh rupert thornlow and bandit country in northern ireland and and dead mannerism um and we talked about you know 911 and so this book was you know just just being published 20th anniversary of 9 11. but you know the roots they go back to 9 11 and you know my sense of america you know being changed and this sort of completely new era so i was reporting on everything you know in american politics uh during you know those first few months and you know part of that was mike spann and i you know i vividly remember you know the first american casualty after after 9 11. um cia guy so his affiliation was um was made public um and i you know vividly remember shannon spann his widow speaking at mike's funeral on december 10 2001 at arlington very movingly but then everything sort of moved on um but you know we were getting into iraq and and and and all the rest of it and but a couple of years later i was in iraq strangely enough i was at the hammer hotel in baghdad the sort of journalists hotel and somebody said to me did you ever see the the footage of that cia guy you know running for his life in that dusty fort northern afghanistan um during that uprising and i hadn't seen it and i i watched it uh on youtube or whatever and it was david tyson who was cia case officer uzbek linguist and and really apart from i guess mike's banner sort of central figure in the book and this was kala jangi november 25th 2001. mike spanner just been killed you know minutes earlier david had had to he'd been in this sort of kill or be killed situation where he had to fight his way out killed i don't know two dozen three dozen al qaeda you know very close quarters um you know with pistol and rifle and just incredible and then he runs and this was captured by german television running across the courtyard and then he he bursts into the headquarters building on the northern end of the fort and sort of suddenly bumps into basically a german tv reporter and you know camera crew and various kind of afghans sort of you know milling around in this sort of chaotic situation you can see david's eyes like this talking about the you know thousand-yard stare and he's just going through i mean i remember looking at him thinking like god knows what he's going through you know he's he doesn't know whether he's going to live another five minutes or five hours he's just seen he's just killed god knows how many people he's you know that's gonna affect him for the rest of his life he's just seen his comrade killed and so i was became fascinated by david tyson and a few years later quite a few years later you know back in dc um it was 2013 um and i remember you know i was covering chris christie's re-election in new jersey not not particularly enjoying it i mean he was being a colossal dick basically to me and um some things never change right the phone rings says hey it's david tyson and so i i tracked him down i mean i found out that he was living in vienna virginia very close to to me here um and an academic at indiana university who he'd worked with had passed on my email and number um and he called me and um so we met up in a panera bread in vienna virginia um and talked and he was still serving in the agency um so he couldn't really talk you know fully and and freely but you know he was friendly and i i you know i really got a sense that there was an incredible story to tell and that at some kind of deep level he wanted to tell it and what you know when the moment was right and so i kept in touch with him um i mean around that period 2013 2014 i thought about you know writing a book about kala jangi the whole battle because it didn't just involve the ca but green berets british special boat service ac 130 10th mountain division abdulrasheed doston the warlord mullah fazel of the taliban you had all these characters converging on this uh you know this sort of six day battle john walker lin the american taliban so i knew it's a great story and i thought about doing it in that period but it kind of got sidelined for various reasons but uh i kept in touch with david although it was tenuous at times sometimes i wouldn't hear from him for a year or two sure um then at the beginning of 2020 um he called me up um and said hey i've just retired i'm ready to talk and you know not not particularly religious these days but i thought there is a god you know because because i actually i just got a book deal to write the book but it was kind of that leap of faith where i didn't quite you know i you know i presented myself honestly as as who i was and what i wanted to do but you know most of these sources sources were not in the back you know i'd spoken to a couple of people but i hadn't spoken to any of the agency guys um and then you know it was just the start of covid as well which uh weirdly i felt kind of worked for me because people were at home people were sort of in a reflected reflective mood people were sort of clearing out their attics and stuff and um and also most of these guys were not afraid to shake hands and not wear masks and sit around in fact they kind of craved it right and david certainly one of those and so we just talked and you know i went from person to person in team alpha um you know sort of building up credibility and trust with them that you know that i was you know straightforward and transparent i just wanted to tell that story it didn't have an agenda and so i just began to piece it together and you know again the best stories are true i mean i didn't have any idea about how incredibly sort of textured and fascinating you know on a sort of you know military level intelligence but also like on a psychological level and so it just became just a wonderful thing you know great sort of challenge um and a lot of responsibility because you have to get it right but just a real privilege to be able to kind of dig into this and talk to these people so how how did that happen though because you had this relationship with david tyson did he put you in touch with the rest of team alpha did you have to go through the agency in order to to for them to bless off on it or did they have to go or how did that all work out it was complicated and i didn't know how i was going to do it i didn't have a particular plan um you know i went through a very bruising experience with the ministry of defense over dead men risen where i had to sign a contract to get the embed um which meant that they had to look at the manuscript i had to give them the manuscript and they were you know able to check it for you know operational security and accuracies what they said but very elastic terms you know with with the military and you know it ended up with you know 500 suggested changes and lawyers and actually they had to buy the first print run and pulp it and we had to reprint it with a few redactions and i didn't really want to i didn't want to go through anything like that again and so you know thank god for the first amendment you know is is because you couldn't have that kind of system in in the united states um but no i didn't i didn't go to the agency i mean i was i was concerned that they might try and tell people not to speak uh they might have some kind of competing project or some kind of i don't know pet author that they will they were working with so um i went the other thing about it was all these guys are individuals so uh you know more so than in most walks of life so they can certainly say i spoke to this guy he seemed okay but they're not going to speak to me just because you know even a close friend particularly in cia you know um recommends it they're going to make their own decision and also you know people don't like you know you have to really know someone well to say you must talk to this guy so you know i went from david jr seeger who was the chief diary speaker the other case officer on the eight man team that was team alpha um he was long retired sort of writes thrillers now you know in his sort of spare time you know also does contracting and stuff but he was pretty much out there so i went to speak to him i've been trying to get a j.r seeger interview for like two years really come on give me a call jr we're nice we're cool here yeah he should do it i'll tell him i'll tell him yeah they make their own they meet their own yeah yeah yeah of course i went to just justin sapp who's who was the green beret on the team so you know he was the sort of eighth member 29 year old greenberg captain at the time he's still he's serving still as a colonel probably retiring fairly soon um he's at the u.s mission to the un and you know he's on linkedin and so i hit him up and so then i had three and uh at that point you know i also spoke to kofa black who was the director of the counterterrorism center you know who's kind of the man of the hour on 911 the one that sort of pitched the the plan to bush um hank crompton uh who was uh kofi's deputy and was the guy ahead of counterterrorism special operations new unit within ctc who ran the war day-to-day um so i did interviews with them and so i think you know i think they knew collectively that i wasn't a dick that uh i was trying to do it properly and i also felt at that point i had enough to be able to write the book also i've spoken to a ton of green berets who are sort of much easier to sort of get hold of and and talk to um and his sbs as well you know i've spoken to a couple of them and so at that point i did go to the agency because there were some people on so six surviving members of the team so mike spann obviously was killed on november 25th 2001. mark rauscenberger the medic was died in the philippines in 2016 so there were six left one of them andy is still serving so he clearly couldn't speak without the agency giving the okay um scott spellmaier very senior guy who had just retired um he wasn't going to speak unless the agency gave him the okay uh alex hernandez uh was uh the deputy chief sergeant major sf retired and um i mean actually when i eventually did get get to speak to him i mean we spoke for five hours but he had the reputation of never saying anything and wasn't gonna talk in it um so i went to the agency and said hey you know this is who i am this is what i'm doing they were like yes we know surprise surprise the word got to them and they didn't open the vaults you know they didn't give me the cables all my foil requests got turned down i mean that was a separate sort of department but they did um they did give the okay for serving and former people to speak to me and they facilitated some of the interviews so on a couple of the interviews i had a public affairs um officer from the agency present mainly for the comfort of the person that i was was interviewing and i interviewed andy who was still serving um and i so i interviewed all six surviving members of the team and so you know that was kind of a big surprise to me but i think they felt that um i mean george turner and cover black have described it as the agency's finest hour and they much rather talk about you know the victory over the taliban in the fall of 2001 than you know looking for wmd or connecting the dots before 9 11 or enhanced interrogation techniques so maybe that played into it as well and you know those are the kind of the bush buttons that i pushed as well but it but it's also it is a story it is history and it is a story that deserves to be told and and these men need to be deserve to be recognized right and you know for whatever reason that the agency facilitated that you know it it reflects well on them just in the sense that they did and they didn't like put the kibosh on it or try to shut it down yeah i think so and you know there's an element of trust in every kind of interaction and i and so you know they never said to me and obviously i wouldn't have done it but they never said to me can you send us a manuscript or can you let us know what you're doing or don't do this don't do that so they were kind of trusting me um and uh you know i mean i think it was the right call i mean i i know that you know i'm going to be speaking at the agency next month uh actually in january um about the book and you know i know that it's been very well received sort of in the building which and certainly from the from the team and the people associated with the events 2001 which is you know which is gratifying so you know part of my pitch was this is history it's 20 years ago there's very few operational security considerations here so it's time right and you know right so i'm glad i'm glad they went for it no it's great um so we i we were talking earlier and i told you that like in in most books in a lot of books it's it's you know 300 pages with 50 pages of content and you know 250 pages to to justify that content um this is like 300 pages and it's 800 pages of content somehow condensed down and it's it's dense and i don't mean that it's dry because it's not dry at all it is it will it is compelling reading and i encourage anybody who is even mildly curious about afghanistan the events leading up to afghanistan um because this isn't just when i when you sent this to me i thought and by the cover it seems like it's just about these men but you i mean you were covering things that were going on in the white house you were covering things that were going on um you know in in behind closed doors where you must have done so much research for this book yeah i mean it was very compressed because we we needed to publish on the 20th anniversary of 911. obviously we didn't know that the wheels were going to come off afghanistan at almost exactly the same time as well although i did have a sense this was coming to an end and both trump and biden were promising to you know withdraw all u.s troops um but yeah i mean i can you know i guess if i have a method of of writing it's sort of complete immersion where you're sort of you know every waking hour is um it's reading or talking to somebody or thinking about it and putting it together and i mean i really believe uh that you know there are great war stories and there are great stories of um you know bravery and you know the [ __ ] that happens on the ground but we've had a ton of that over over the last 20 years and so i didn't want it to be just another sort of bang bang book and so i believe that it was very important to capture it's about 9 11. it's about that period in our nation's history and the world's history immediately after those attacks and so i wanted to put the events on the ground in the strategic context and so it's not a tick tock of everything that happened in the white house you know throughout this period but certainly you know it starts on 911 with david tyson flying from tashkent to london justin sapping underwater on the special forces diver course in key west uh mike spann being in the in the building at langley and and his wife shannon being in the giant grocery store in in manassas park so it starts on 9 11 and you know then it kind of go back so you go back to the 80s and the and the cia working with the mujahideen and then the growth of al qaeda and bin laden al-qaeda finding safe haven in afghanistan and then the reason why kofo black was able to put together this plan which was the the cia operations in the late 90s or from from october 99 you had jawbreaker teams uh going in to the panchayat valley to see admin meet with ahmed sharma soon assassinated on september the 9th 2001 you know via tajikistan but so this so the agency had had a toehold um and you know 911 was sort of came out of the blue for most people but we'd had the millennium plot the uss cole in in yemen we'd had the east africa embassy bombings in 1998 and the cia jumping up and down and saying they are coming here you know and they will attack america and so i felt that all that context was was really important uh because it kind of anchored the narrative and gave a reason i think for the reader to to to read the book and so you know i want i want a book you know people have got you know limited time people's attention spans are shorter it's a big ask for somebody to say you know read my book because you know i've got piles of unread books and and you know metaphorical sort of you know virtual piles of other books i'd like to read and i'm never going to be able to to read them all so you know i wanted to sort of make it operate on on different levels and also particularly i think the psychological level of what david tyson went through what shannon spann went through um and you know the cost of the cost of war and also you know this war well you know america has just said this war is over we've just pulled out so let's go back to the beginning and look at why we went there the the principles of the sort of light footprints and hundreds of americans operating as you know advisers to the indigenous allies by with and through you know go kind of oss you know soe sort of formula and it you know it was a provisional victory but it kind of worked in 2001 and was a better a lot better than than people expected and so i think you know there's a real it's very important to go back and look at that when you know a lot of the commentary is kind of it was doomed from the beginning it was nation building and stuff well it did become that but but it wasn't that in 2001 so there were so many things to sort of get to right toby could you kind of walk us through what happened after 9 11 and sort of how the alpha team kind of jocked up for that mission i think one of the interesting things i've come across in the past is how short the chain of command was and and correct me if i'm wrong but it seems like it went from the president to the dci to right to sad pretty much and said hey make it make it happen this is your job go um could you kind of tell us about that process and how they got the mission what that mission was and sort of getting ready to infill into afghanistan and along with that the repercussions with rumsfield and tommy franks and everything else like that yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah so you know 911 you know ko for black is just the sort of man of the hour you know he gave me this description of it was like the tokyo subway system you know and he walked up to the seventh floor of cia quarters and the sort of you know the the crowd parted and he sort of walked through and uh you know there's one chair left for him in the director's office and you know everybody was looking to him and you know he'd been running count terrorism center had been you know running these operations in and out of afghanistan uh for the previous two years or so and there was a plan called well i don't know whether it was a plan but it was kind of a formula outlined in the thing called the blue sky memo that the bush administration didn't want to have anything to do with it and neither did the clinton administration but now it was 9 11 everything had changed and so um you know bush uh obviously wanted to go and kick some ass in afghanistan and that was pretty much uh you know a universal feeling in the in the us then i mean bush's popularity ratings that forward 90 percent uh one member of congress voted against authorizing um military force the un was on board nato invoked article five you know it was it was kind of a go and there was real sense and i remember this really you know sense of we just need to get in there quickly you know we need to stop the next attack we need to get the people who did this we need to get bin laden and expel al qaeda and the pentagon didn't have a plan so tommy franks was flat-footed you know they you think that pensing has a plan for everything up to and including invading canada but apparently not afghanistan you know and so kofo black who was an old africa division hand you know who'd you know worked in the sudan um you know against carlos the jackal bin laden had reputedly tried to kill him um or capture him which probably would have been worse um so he stepped forward and he you know he's the guy who said uh mr president you know when we finished there are going to be flies walking across their eyeballs which was crazy picked up in in africa he also said you know i want bin laden's head on a pike i want it on dry ice you know he had a sort of sort of flare for the theatrical and i think also you know he's a case officer he'd worked out what would work with bush and this is very much bush's you know character and certainly his sort of mentality in in that period and this is this is what he wanted what he wanted to hear he wanted you know he wanted a plan to go into afghanistan and kill al qaeda and that was what um kofo black was proposing and so the idea was that very small teams um team alpha was eight some of the other agency teams were smaller than that would go in um preferably with odas you know 12 men operational detachment alphas green berets um but the cia was not going to wait for for the us military there was you know cesar combat search and rescue considerations for the military which the cia didn't have um and so the cia went in first so initially a jawbreaker team went into the pancho valley september 26 2001. gary shron 60 year old then very very senior agency guy um being islamabad station chief and senior in near east division um but in a way not a fighting unit um and they ended up being kind of stuck in place and it was northern alliance controlled territory and so team alpha was the first team behind enemy lines and so it wasn't a team in existence before 9 11. i mean the core of it the four paramilitaries on the team from special activities division and they were kind of the core of the team um so you had alex hernandez um who was the former special forces sergeant major 49 years old at the time so he was the the chief of the paramilitary team uh the guy called scott spellmaier uh who was uh a ranger wounded in battle of mogad issue in 1993 um also paramount she had andy who was the guy who's still serving who former special forces reservist and you had mike spann a former marine so you had those four but on top of those you had david tyson the case officer former academic uzbek speaker who's based in tashkent so actually he joined at the last minute there was a former seal paramilitary who was taken off the team and put on a on a later team so that david could get in there as a linguist jr sega diary speaker worked with the mujahideen in the 80s so he was an afghan hand and then you had mark rosenberger the medic and and justin sapp who was chosen by then colonel john mulholland um uh who was commanding fifth group and which sort of became the nucleus of task force dagger uh as a sort of augmentee for the team partly for liaison partly because there weren't enough cia paramilitaries to sort of man all these teams at the time and one of the incredible things about it was was you know i mean you'll understand this and a lot of you know people watching and listening will as as well but these guys not only were they happy to go or they were okay with going they had a burning desire to go like send me and mike spann i think of all the people sort of personified that sort of feeling of you know we need to get in there and mike you know 32 years old uh he had a three-month-old son at the time he'd recently remarried um he had two daughters aged nine of four from his first marriage every reason in the world sort of not to go um but i mean he he kind of fought to go you know and you know justin sapp you know he he's he said to me it was like sort of he felt like he was riding his tsunami are just waiting to wipe out in those early weeks you know i mean mulholland's ex-delta guy his reputation was suffered no fools and you know you know you [ __ ] up and you're out and in fact one of the odas you know that was gonna go in before oda five nine five um mulholland didn't like the briefing they didn't they seem you know worrying about problems a bit too much rather than we'll just work it out and he was like we're done you know next oda please and so um you know justin i think justin was almost you know relaxing on the heli on the blackhawk into afghanistan because he made it you know you know for him the worst thing would be um getting kicked off the team yeah so you know these guys were you know put together in a matter of weeks some of them barely knew each other they flew out to uzbekistan tashkent originally then to k2 kashi khan about the air base and you know and then there was lots of issues with weather rumsfeld was pissed you know why the odas weren't getting in there was you know chinooks you know nearly crashing into mountains you know it's you know very tense and there's this push get in get in get in and um october 16 2001 uh after a couple of days of delay team alpha flew in on two black hawks and they were the pathfinders for the green beret so oda 595 the you know famous horse soldiers mark nooch bob pennington all those guys they they came in uh three days later and um yeah alpha linked up with abdul rashid dostum notorious warlord and you know went from there so you know there's there are some really interesting things here because you know you talk about you know the cia cover black like them having this plan and you talk about rich blee and and tashkent and he had had his eye on afghanistan since 99 and when when um when david showed up to afghanistan as a case officer blee was like hey you're focused on afghanistan something's going to happen there right that wasn't rich believe so rich that that was a guy called fred okay stationary station chief but rich blee was the chief of alex station so rich who i interviewed for book was he was kind of the cassandra about uh al-qaeda coming to america so he was the head of alex station but yeah fred i nearly said his last name there he wouldn't thank me um but fred was the station chief in tashkent um and so crusty old guy that was always sort of fighting with headquarters and yeah he told david when david uh arrived in afghanista in tashkent in 1998 you're going to be that afghan hand you know headquarters doesn't give a [ __ ] they will give a [ __ ] one day and and it's your job to be sort of ready for that for that day and and in august of 2001 cofer i mean the the basic presidential daily brief from the cia was al-qaeda is going to hit us probably here and there they may they may try to hijack planes yeah yeah i'm not sure whether i'd have to check whether hijack planes was on that pdb but certainly um uh the world trade center 1993 group had talked about flying planes into buildings in the us and including cia headquarters so the other fear on 9 11 was that the plane was going to um you know hit hit cia headquarters but yes i mean within you know it's kind of like concentric circles like kind of a ripple you know but right of the heart i guess alex station and rich blee every single day you know they're all sort of you know waking up with a cold sweat that we were going to be hit and then counter counter-terrorism center then cia then maybe nfc and then you know out to everybody else who just you know was completely oblivious or not paying attention yeah and one of the great things in your book i mean there's a lot of amazing things but one of the very reader friendly things in your book is like the who's who in the very in the very beginning because i think for a lot of americans we didn't understand the politics in afghanistan the different warlords what tribes they represented things like that um and you have them listed here and who they're interested in because there's and you go through their history too of who betrayed who at which times that you know right when they're fighting the russians they're concerted until there's a chance to get in under the other guy and so the cia had a relationship with a lot of these guys but but one of our primary allies in afghanistan part of the northern alliance massoud was killed and i remember that you know by uh by the ied and the camera uh just a couple days before 9 11. yeah so yeah so in those in the kind of two three years before 9 11 the cia who'd had a relationship with masood um you know years before in the mujahideen period sort of re-established contact and we're going in and out of the panchayat seeing him he was a tajik uh he spoke french he wrote poetry he had a big library you know he loved journalists um and everyone was kind of in awe of him you know he was thought of that the perfect afghan you know for the west um and actually david and other other well fred in the cia station in tashkent were actually concerned that there was too much focus on massoud and the tajiks and they were sort of agitating to um start connecting with people like dustin um who was you know an ethnic uzbek and so this was tash gets into uzbekistan so there was a sort of a you know a self-interest in a way because uzbek intelligence service had links with with with dostum and it was kind of work that could be done there but dawson was the opposite of massoud you know he sort of left left school at 12 you know he's a brute you know blood on his hands certainly didn't write any poetry sort of drank you know kill people you know even his sort of closest aides were [ __ ] scared of him and he wasn't you know you're sort of washington dc cocktail party type of person his wife's bizarre accident uh yes his wife story story is yeah listen who amongst us hasn't had their wife cleaning the kitchen uh and she accidentally knocks over an ak-47 behind the fridge but then falls over and shoots her twice in the chest i mean it happens it happens it could happen it could happen to anyone that could happen anyone yeah yeah well it happened to dawson's first wife yeah so you know so he wasn't he wasn't an attractive figure to us policymakers and you know and even most people in the in the cia and you know one of the things about dostum is he was this storage style star war ally exactly what the us from the point of view the cia certainly from team alpha needed in the fall of 2001 but before then nobody was interested and after then he was persona non grata and in fact was banned from visiting the united states and it's never been here um in the subsequent 20 years and i interviewed him went to see him in chebagan actually this almost exactly this time last year i was there and he's like a little sort of you know school boy you know who's all sort of upset that you know the um you know the teachers didn't like him you know when he'd been sort of the you know the teacher's pet for for a short period and so the agency they had some contacts they had us kind of like a toehold in afghanistan but it wasn't that much you know but you know these are entrepreneurial clever sort of adaptable people who just want to get in and and sort stuff out on the ground and they were empowered to do that after 9 11. and so yeah i mean um jack i mean the decision-making kind of pyramid you know which is often kind of like that it was like this and so the guys on the ground i mean j.r seeger is the team alpha chief i mean they went in with three million dollars in a big pack with you know non-sequential hundred dollar bills completely distorted the afghan economy because i have no right right dustin got a million dollars you know on landing but you know it was classic you had to manipulate the tribes you know with you know weapons and ammunition and supplies you know odas like so atom mohammed noah's tagic ally but also rival of dustin's he was really upset you know that he hadn't gotten oda he hadn't got any americans he hadn't got the cash right and so you know jr had to kind of work that you know because the danger that atta was going to attack dustin um and in the end otter got his oda he he got ci 18 bravo and you know then he and dustin were pointing in the same direction like north to mazari sharif so all that all that had to be worked out and you know i interviewed hank crompton about this and and he was just like well you know there was some you know there were some decisions he had to to make but usually he was leaving it to the team leaders on the ground and um the same thing happened with the oda's and you know romsfeld was upset that you know he was upset about a lot of things but you know he became upset that when it looked like success was on the cards he was upset that it was captains you know and warrant officers and team sergeants that were kind of achieving this victory so he was like you know we need to get some brigadiers in and and brigadier generals and you know two stars in there um and so that led to actually uh you know the odc the battalion commander went in and then you did have a two-star seal in masuri sharif soccer was in there admiral carland um and yeah that's when you kind of see the whole thing starts to change you know big army the pentagon right usa inc starts to you know want to get in on it early sorry i said it again building up the chow hall and the big bases yeah exactly all that yeah this the big convoys and yeah exactly the lobster in the trowel eventually and um yeah the fobs and um but in those early weeks it was just it was just a bunch of guys no military kit no body armor no helmets um you know no cool guy gear uh just getting in there and and doing the business yeah and what's interesting is you know you when you talk because you mentioned also like the paucity of the of the special activities division that prior to 9 11 there were senior people in the agency who were trying to get rid of their paramilitary element altogether and they were down to i guess bare bones right yeah i mean i think jim pavitt who was the deputy director of operations so the senior spy the senior operator i mean repute i haven't interviewed him but reputedly yeah he had no time for sad and they were sort of you know the poor you know the ginger stepchildren or whatever the phrase was the red-headed stuff yeah yeah the ginger the gingers the uh yeah the ginger the day walk the day walkers um well and the idea or at least cofer's idea was that the these cia teams would go in accompanied by an oda but that didn't happen because of the bureaucracy of it all even an sf medic who was slotted for a team was the team medic for a cia team wasn't allowed to go yeah yeah that's right not for team alpha that was another team but yeah there was a i mean hank crompton told me about this and he's still pissed you know that there was a guy you know waiting to get on a plane um and you know no go from the pentagon for some kind of bureaucratic you know uh reason when you know you know we felt i guess you know his his thinking was we're all are we all on the on the same team he wants to go we need a medic i mean even uh even tom greer wrote about it and killed bin laden how fifth group was restricted to these phase lines and he wanted more sf guys to come in and help uh surround bin laden's lair and move in and kill him um but you know big army or sf commander whoever it was was like no these odas can't move past the phase lines and they're kind of kept on the periphery of the mission yeah it's funny because uh when so the so team alpha had been in afghanistan for a couple days now and ramsay was so like he was so irate at this point about the military not doing their thing that he called the desk officer in karshikanavan and told him like knock it off he said i want him in like fly they're getting on those helicopters oh really i don't care what the weather is i don't care what the flying conditions are they're going yeah yeah and i you know there's alan mack who was um one of the new pilots who actually team alpha flew in uh on blackhawks but there was a chanute with them in case the um edward refueling from the 130 didn't work but yeah he told me about you know how how tense that was and i mean he was nearly in a fist fight from one of the other pilots because the pilot turned back because he was you know he was uh flying in and was just gonna hit a mountain and then out because because all the pilots wanted to get in as well and alan was like you [ __ ] you know you know and don't you realize that means you know the missions can be taken away my mission i'm not going to get my guys in and so there was incredible pressure and um it's astonishing actually that we didn't have a big helicopter crash in that period yeah it it it's amazing so i i there's so much to cover in this but i don't want to go over the entire book like but what are some of the significant moments of you like some of some of the cultural stories are very funny like david like like you said they had all this money but it was only 100 bills and right and for david who wasn't a a paramilitary officer he was a case officer and an academic you know he had a sense of justice and and i think there was a time when the stone was was it the storm or what otter i can't remember who was but they were going to take a goat or a sheep from somebody oh yeah that so that was abdul satar okay who was doston's chief bodyguard who i interviewed um uh last year um and actually was shot in august but apparently is okay is still alive and is currently in uzbekistan um but yeah he's another brute from central casting but even he was terrified of of dostum in fact he was the bodyguard assigned to justin sapp initially because every american had a bodyguard because um dostum didn't want any american killed because you know he learned from somalia and beirut that you know dead americans mean you know goodbye americans right and um justin was like you know i'm just walking around you know maybe i'm going to take a [ __ ] i i don't need you to be here and sattar said no you don't realize you know dawson will kill me he will chop my head off you know if you are killed you know so um so sato was a character um and you know he uh you know reputedly shot you know an afghan who was all the air drops didn't hit the you know didn't hit the target area and they were sort of strewn so you had supplies strewn across the mountainsides and and you know on the other side of rivers and afghans you know trying to grab the stuff and this was this was a problem and you know sata just shot one of them in the chest you know yeah um welcome to afghanistan but yeah he was they were in the market and um there was a bunch of sheep um and you know satire was trying to kind of strong-arm the villager into just giving him the sheep and dave was like no no we need to pay for it and so saturday just kind of threw a rusty knife at him and said well you you you kill him then you know you slaughter them yourself and of course you know david lived in a few fast long places but you know didn't especially want to slit the throat of a sheep with a rusty knife so that became kind of a running joke and one of the one of the things about david is because of his you know link linguistic skills um and his sort of immersion in the culture of south asia central asia um you know he lived in uzbekistan for years before he joined the agency you know when he was a student and at one point he didn't possess a pair of shoes you know it was that far you know towards going native um and so he sort of loved the afghans and just wanted to you know he just wanted to suck up everything about them and humor was a big part of it and you know there were jokes about you know why did afghanistan crouch down to take a piss because americans stand up and why are your american hands so soft and right you know if you know if you're so clever you know why can't why don't you even know diary and you know and uh all this kind of stuff and you know there was stuff about religion and uh alcohol so you know a number of the afghans it was one one afghan commander initially went to david sort of knocked on the door of his cave or wherever they were sleeping at that point and uh you know he said my you know my my hands shaking you know i need i need medicine and he used the uzbek phrase for devil's water and he wanted he wanted vodka and um so david um ordered vodka and so there was vodka flown in from tashkent and so these afghan commanders would sort of you know come to david one by always individually so they never talk amongst themselves and get like a little like talk of vodka you know for purely for medicinal purposes right and um and then there was there was a moment when david was on the sat phone to charlie gilbert who was by then the tashkent station chief uh ordering uh another three million dollars you know a load of vodka and alex was listening in and just joking says sir oh sounds like a pretty good party why don't we order some condoms as well and i don't know whether david realized or i think he probably you know so he's like yeah charlie we'll have some condoms and so some condoms got scented and um and the afghans saw these things and like what one of these and you know pictures of sexy women on the you know the packaging and david was like um um okay so you know these are to put on the rifles and then they're looking at the they're looking at pictures and so david says no okay well all right you know you put them on your dick so you don't have babies you know that's that's what they're for and these afghans just like just couldn't comprehend why anybody would ever want to do that it just didn't make any sense and so you know they were trying them on they were blowing balloons with you know it was sort of chaotic and in the end david had to you know it's the middle of fighting a war and everything and in the end david had said okay okay okay listen i'm sorry i played this stupid trick on you saying this ridiculous thing that you know these rubber things are to put on your dick no no no they you put them on the end of your rifle to stop the dust and dirt and grime you know getting in the rifle battle barrel i'm sorry i tricked you whenever i heard okay so so there's lots of this kind of stuff going on which um i don't know i found fascinating because you know david and and jr in particular with their languages you just have this real sort of sense of of the afghans and their sort of psyche and you know david um you know has a sort of a deep love of afghans and i mean the guy who was killed the same day as mike spann was called a amanola who was dustin's intelligence chief in the mountains and you know david still you know come as close to tears when he when he talks about him you know that and you know these afghan these brave afghans and ahmad been the taliban prisoner um he but he was a very sort of humane guy and you know so you know the death of some of these guys um cut deep um but the other thing about david which i think gave an another dimension to this to the book really into the story was um that you know he could talk about the afghans and know them better than almost any american could but he had this sort of moment of realization pretty early on that he talks about afghan onion and peeling the layers and you know he'd spent he knew the languages he spent many years in the region but he came to this realization that you know it would take him several lifetimes to be able to work out this country in these people um which was kind of sobering and for me it was sort of you know a bit of a an insight into you know in a way how foolish we were to think that we could just go in and transform this country and build a centralized democracy when people like david tyson who knew more than nearly anybody else realized he could never understand them properly you know so it's it's kind of this case of the more you know the more you realize you don't know right and it's something that americans don't really grasp like we think in terms of a national identity right even even if we hate our country we still recognize our country but they don't for the lord for the most part they they are tribal they see themselves as tribes and having this idea that we're going to form this this national identity is it's a very western thing yeah you know i mean there are a lot of great you know i'm a naturalized american you know and um i'm very proud to be an american and it's a great country and you know but some of our best qualities are sort of you know optimism and can do and we can fix it and um we're great and we want to offer what's great about us to everybody you know there's a there's a real sort of um there's a real flip side to that and of course you know this one of the tragedies of this is that the early success of this period is the success you know in the in the fall of 2001 you really by the start of december 2001 led us i think to believe that uh this was easy you know we just change your regime introduce democracy you know we'll let that nice hammered karzai i saw the details and let's go on to iraq and let's go do the next one and so that's the sort of the the flip side of the of the can do thing yeah yeah i think wesley morgan's book on afghanistan really reflects that as well yeah that the army had a sort of can-do attitude um that we were always eight months away from winning the war for 20 years right no i i mean that's a great book um and you know yes the way he um you know connects you know he focuses on one place and connects the history of that place from uh unit to unit really this should have been an army kind of department that was doing that but you know i saw that in helmand six you know six months brigade tours reinventing the wheel the whole time right you know new brigadier comes in big operation medal right claire's success right this many taliban killed and then that you come in again and and and do it so yeah you know that's that's yeah i remember being in iraq being told this phrase is 2004 irreversible momentum you know this irreversible momentum towards victory that was the first infantry division in 2004 and even at the time you know there was a pretty strong whiff of [ __ ] about that yeah yeah and you know i think like one of the one of the stories really because you know when you're setting the whole thing up and talking about how these different warlords interacted with each other whether it was against the russians and the way they work together but then then they betray each other or whatever um when you're talking when you talk about uh otta right and how he won't talk to j.r and they finally like works that over and so they meet do you can you tell that story do you remember yeah so um right so they they they arrive and they meet dustin and they know that at is in the vicinity and atta is on paper and ally and also wants to go and topple the taliban but atta isn't there and so jr says to dawson you know i need to see atta and he's like oh that's going to be a problem and so jr has to kind of you know lobby for an audience with atta you know who's this you know big sort of blackbeardy captain haddock from tintin you know very kind of dower sort of more much more religious than than dustin and you know he's seen by the americans as the subordinates dustin but he doesn't see it that way at all and he's a tajik and the tajik's uh you know sort of in command of the northern line so he's talking to fahim khan in the panchayat valley and so there's all these kind of you know connections and so jr goes to see him to see atta eventually who's very very nearby and um jr wears a pack all hats you know which is like a tagi thing and at a um you know the first thing he does is he corrects him and tells him he's not wearing the hat exactly the right way and he gets one of his aids to you know and jr's just kind of you know rolling his eyes i guess inwardly um and then jr speaks um uh speaks diary um uh but you know uh atar is uh saying that you know he wants uh he wants to speak i remember it was he wanted to speak in a different language uh or maybe it was he said that jr's diary wasn't good enough right i think he said that jr's diary wasn't good enough and so therefore jr had to speak in english to a translator who would translate it into diary and then speak to utter but it was a power play right and it also meant that atar had and i've i've encountered this as a journalist atta had twice he could understand the question in the first place um but he had twice as long to answer it and also his translator could you know alter the you know so um yeah ato was pretty pretty difficult uh to deal with and um but you know jr needed him on board and so what he did in the end was he he team alpha it was only eight of them but they were they were regularly broken up so three of them david tyson scott spellmaier and andy went on a 13-hour um horse ride to atta's headquarters um and they were the sort of three-man pathfinder team for uh oda 534 and team bravo and um so that you know atar had his oda he had his americans and and and he was okay but you know yeah i mean it's you know and in subsequent years atta and and and dostum have you know been fighting against each other i mean last year i went for an interview without a um what i thought was going to be an interview and i ended up um just meeting with one of his sons and two of his aides who were basically grilling me about who i was and and i didn't get the interview because i was too closely aligned with dustin my focus was too strongly on dustin right and i kind of you know i don't know whether i could have pulled off but i should have gone in there saying because i said listen i just need you know two hours of um you know um usted atta's time and they were like only two hours you know he's he's has a lifetime of stories right right what i should have said is you know i need five days with him you know and then so anyway so the rivalry you know the rivalry existed before you know i mean once they captured masuri sharif there was a deal they were going together and then atta went in before dustin right so you know afghanistan and money was a big part of it too right like they they want to know how much other people were making and they wanted that and that was part of the thing with that is he said oh i want this money and and uh jared was like oh well we gave khan 250 250 000 for you yeah that's right so right so that was kind of a you know fahim khan who the americans i mean tommy franks hated him and cia hated him um because he would they felt he wouldn't fight and he just wanted money um and so he was getting money from the americans that were supposed to be going to atta but i think jr had a hunch which i think was accurate that that fahim khan was just pocketing it himself right and so so he yeah there's a quarter of a million i think that fahim khan was supposed to give him to atta and so just said oh and of course is the 250 000 and after just kind of and then i was like oh yes of course and then presumably he was on the phone to to fahim khan the next day so yeah i mean it's this is just the complexity of this country yeah it's it's it's uh fascinating um another interesting a funny story about dustin was he presented himself well i'm not saying he wasn't like uh rough around the edges but he presented himself in a certain way to his troops but can you tell a story about uh him telling his team that the americans that he was sophisticated yeah yeah so i think to this day um jr doesn't know whether dawson really thought he was sophisticated or is kind of even more of a sort of sophisticated joke or subtle joke but yeah so you know dustin you know part of his you know he's been accused of all sorts of war crimes and certainly he's done some bad things and you know you don't get to be a warlord who survives for you know three decades in afghanistan um by by having clean hands but i think part of the way he operated was that he he kind of gloried in the myth of this kind of savage who would you know rip people's heads off and and you know throw them off mountains and and all that kind of stuff and you know he led by sort of inspiration and he commanded loyalty but fear was also an element of it and so there was one day in the diary suit valley um before the fall of masuri sharif where um you know he gave this sort of blood curdling addressed to his sort of evil battle address to his troops and uh you know jr was kind of a little bit taken aback and he actually thought it was it was like patton you know um like the opening scene of the movie which is actually a sanitized version of the real pattern speech um and i think dawson had spotted you know jr you know listening to this and he sort of said to him you know listen you know i know you think you know i am an unsophisticated man and i am a savage and you know primitive and um but you know i have to i have to talk to my men in a certain way to motivate them and get them to fight and but actually i'm very sophisticated you know do you know that um i once owned two cadillacs so that was his like measure of the sophistication and i actually checked it out i'm not sure about two he had certainly owned one cadillac an armor-plated cadillac in the 1990s that he'd uh driven around in so you know i mean dustin you know yeah i mean that's one of the most fascinating interviews i've i've ever sort of done in my life and um you know team alpha and oda 595 and mark neutron those guys they still love him you know because he was with them he fought and you know his reputation is horrendous but they'll never forget what he did in 2001 and and he is you know i think still uh you know what i interviewed him he was still sort of looking back on those days as as sort of the glory days and was pretty upset with the state department that he'd been sort of cut loose after that bolt yeah but it's interesting because he he also i think i believe it was him who you quoted as as saying that oh you know you're going to use me and i'm going to use you and then we'll part ways you know he had he had a realistic view of it at the time yeah i mean i think it's like a lot of people who um you know are sort of warriors but also sort of politicians in the kind of broader sense of the word and that they know how the world works and they know how to sort of manipulate they know how to you know they know how to look at people's self-interest and and where interests align and you know dawson's you know i don't know some people say he can't read and write i mean i think he can read but i don't know how well he can write but um he's not an educated guy um but he's clever you know he understands the way the world works and it's no accident that that he's survived this long and so yeah i mean he had a conversation with with david in the darius sioux valley which was essentially you know um you know he he asked david like what's gonna you know what's gonna happen you know you're gonna you americans still gonna be with me and you know david was sort of for now up till masri sharif yes absolutely after that i don't know which was a pretty honest answer and i think actually dostum appreciated it and he was like yeah that's what that's what i thought and and that's exactly what happened i mean once they got to masuri sharif um uh the even task force dagger was was starting to pull back and the green berries started to pull back from dust and trying to treat atta dostum and muhammad mohake who was the hazara as kind of a triumvirate of equals which was not the way it had been before so already there was a distancing and you know then there were accusations of you know prisoners being shot in the containers and all that and after that state department was like we're not dealing with this guy right yeah yeah that that made it tough um so uh october 25th so the the infill was october 17th so we're talking eight days later the dia gives a report about a a not favorable report what what do they basically brief the president so well it was a briefing to rumsfeld okay that um that rumsfeld then waved you know in front of the president or you know the national security team in the white house which was basically you know uh you're going to get bogged down in the winter uh in this you know once the winter sets in you're not going to capture masuri sharif until the next spring um and you know beware the experience of the russians um and you know at the time there was a sort of uh there were a number of articles johnny apple in the new york times in particular and and playing off him several others about you know is this the new vietnam now of course in a way it did become the new vietnam but but not just yet you know right but it was just kind of um you know along with this sort of push to get in quickly and get results quickly um there was a real impatience about you know well let's you know it's late october and we still haven't won this which i think about it mate it's kind of makes no sense we've been here for two weeks yeah right and you know and you know of course part of this is that um rumsfeld is pissed that the cia's in control and the cia got in there first and tommy frank's didn't have a plan and all this um and so um yeah i mean that's that's you know that's what romsfeld is saying and that's what he's passing on to colonel mulholland who's you know passing on to the odas and so at one point you know mark nooch wrote um like a i guess a cable back um to tasteful stagger saying you know and you know one of his sergeants said sir this this could be the end of your career that it was the making of his career um basically sort of laying out like you know you may think we're sitting on our asses doing nothing but in the meantime we're riding on horseback into battle you know uh we've killed this many um taliban today we've lost this number of people but you know we're winning and you know what in fact he used to sort of patent phrase you know we're killing them by the bushel yeah and by the time this gets back you know it is becoming more clear that masuri sharif is gonna gonna fall and just after it fell you know paul wolfowitz then the deputy um secretary of defense um reads it out reads that you know reads this out at um you know a big washington gala event at the ronald reagan trade center building and and he actually embellishes it and says that you know the green berries had swords as well not only are they on horseback but they've got swords and um you know so yes so that was actually part of the sort of legend of of poor soldiers and they at the same time they released pictures of um uh funnily enough i i don't think it was a d8595 it was some alex hernandez from team alpha and some of the um the odc on horseback but you know green berets on horseback and actually they weren't riding into battle they were just kind of riding around on that day but anyway there were great pictures and they accompanied um nucha's neutrals cable and so um but yeah when the that dia report was kind of tabled and then it was brought up again actually on the eve of the fall of masuri sharif and um hank crompton was in uh a white house meeting and basically said mazuri shri's gonna fall in within the next 24 or 48 hours and george tennant cia director is looking at him thinking i hope he's right and he was right right right it's a zero hero moment right yeah yeah um you know you talk about nooch um it's interesting because it's about the same time that now that things are sort of getting sexy right now that they're getting attention and things are getting sexy is when is when it's time for more officers because that's what we need right exactly that's what anyone so right exactly more officers more senior officers right so yeah so you know mark nooch you know who's actually you know wife was heavily pregnant actually gave birth in late i think late october or early november 2001 just haven't having to deal with all this he's he's done the classic um q course thing with the g chief um you know robin sage operate you know where you you get close to the g chief the guerrilla chief make friends with him stop him from killing you um committing war crimes stealing things um and you know get him to do what you want him to do um and you know he pulled it off mark pulled it off by all accounts you know magnificently well and and to this day it's kind of a love between these two men you know like like a father-son type of thing um mark was a uh a great horseman he'd grown up in kansas and so uh that was you know a huge advantage for for mark because you know most the green berets and the ca guys was like falling off the horses and there's lots of jokes and you know it's freaking painful and dangerous and and these scrawny you know stallions that would fight each other and you know it's pretty difficult to to deal with but you know mark was an expert horseman and um so he built up this relationship with dustin and you know there'd been a little bit of frustration initially because um the oda didn't bring in a soft lamb and didn't bring an air force combat controller in because they felt they could call in the airstrikes themselves uh triple nickel the oda in the pancha actually did have um an air force air control it with them anyway a couple of the air force guys get flown in the soft lamps come in with them and you know as a period it's not easy to coordinate 19th century style cavalry charges with you know the awesome might of us airpower in the 21st century and so that had to be worked out and kind of coordinated and synchronized and mark had managed to achieve that with dustin and he built up this rapport and this trust you know dostum who'd be very fearful of americans getting killed had actually kind of relented a bit and allowed the green berets to go forward because that's what they needed to do to get eyes on the target and call in the airstrikes so he worked out all this stuff which is you know not easy and then he's told uh right the battalion commander is coming in you know the odc mac max bowser's names coming in who was not a beloved figure um i think is it's fair to say uh the same thing happened elsewhere like oda 574 a little bit later a month or so later but you know in in tarrant coat with with karzai they had the odc coming in on on top of them jason amerine was the team leader and all of a sudden he's got lieutenant colonel and the you know major you know the exo coming in and wanting to wanted to do stuff wanting to get in on the action because that's what you need yeah right though you know i mean this [ __ ] happens as a journalist as well you know um i mean i've been in situ i used to happen to be in northern ireland you know you're there you're the person on the ground it's under control and then some huge bomb comes off and two of the top correspondents from london fly in to help you you know help help hey if i stand over there over in the corner help and you know the good you know you work it out because you have to and you know hopefully you're all grown-ups and you know i later on in my career was in that situation where i was the guy who was flown in to help and he had to respect the local correspondent and all that but yeah it's like you've got all this stuff on your plate and then you have to essentially deal with jockeying by sort of colleagues who are sort of nominally superior to you but actually you know on a day-to-day basis no less less than you so yeah so the odc got got brought in now colonel mulholland's kind of account of this is well ramsfeld was telling me he was gonna bring in conventional army brigadier generals or two stars if i didn't do something so to actually bring in the battalion commander the odc which was actually you know kind of part of this you'll know this more than the ejac but you know part of the sf doctrine that wasn't so bad and it stopped you know it stopped i don't know 10th mountain division brigadier general coming in so just you know that's it but anyway um it was a pretty tense relationship partly because of personalities um uh but also just i think just because of the situation and then so that was i think it was around november the second when bowers came in then mazuri sharif fell on november the 10th so like eight days later and then three or four days after that they send in sock sent admiral carland navy seal two star and he takes over from bowers so so dawson who's been perfectly happy in fact kind of overjoyed with the captain who's the oda commander then has to deal with bowers coming in and saying no no you have to deal with me and not captain mark and then there's a an admiral who comes in and says no no forget bowers it's me it's so you know it kind of complicated things yeah the oda is the maneuver element they are the main effort for this conflict and yeah as you say i mean there's no where in which an odb is supposed to be or or an aob which is not even a doctrinal part of special forces it's supposed to be like interacting with the indigenous force in that manner unless it's some sort of like staff and command college type stuff that you're doing in a in a more developed country but it's just bizarre well the the regime commander always gets himself involved with with a squad in regiment well this ca this came in um journalistically as well because the fifth group chain of command would not let the captains talk to journalists either because they wanted the higher ranking officers to be able to claim credit for what was going on on the ground from all those odas so the the actual team leaders were like forbidden because of quote-unquote opsec uh from talking to the press and talking to people like you at the time toby well yeah it's all well there's a book so there's a book called weapon of choice which is a very good book it's a use of sock us army special operations command i remember it yeah which um is you know you know it sources interviews with absolutely everybody which incidentally they wouldn't let me listen to or look at because of you know it was still classified you know 19 years later but anyway but i did the interviews myself but i still would have liked to have um you know had access to some of those um some of those audio recordings but you know somebody who was very close to the writing of that book um said to me or pointed out to me that everybody in that book apart from senior officers has a pseudonym even people whose names are out there um and certainly would have no problem uh with being named in that book reason being all the senior officers their names are in there and so they get the credit rather than you know some anonymous person you know who doesn't exist because it's not his name yeah well that's why there's only two people who are named in that in that 12 strong movie um under their actual names and you know one of them was as you say not very beloved known to be an alcoholic and sent home for sexually assaulting a male marine in the showers so it's it it's all gets to be a lot of [ __ ] that was going on when they should have left the focus on the odas and let the teams do their job yeah yeah i mean that's very much the view of the oda um but you know um oda 595 have have you know really sort of told their story and um uh you know i don't know why you know so that pseudonym mitch nelson was used in 12 strong i don't know why it wasn't mark nooch yeah um but you know they're actually increasingly sort of out there and in fact there's a there's a book uh i just saw today i think it's due out in uh may may next year um i forget the name forget the the name of it but anyway the but but mark newton bob pennington and i think jim de felice oh god as a sort of writer have have written their own account of oda five nine five yeah yeah they're getting the word out and of course they're marketing the whiskey back there's some whiskey horse soldiers whiskey behind me so you know they are the whole soldiers so they you know they prevailed in the end well and it's it's funny i i mean funny not like it you know anyway where when maurice comes in where nooch had this like pure relationship with those stone and and you know virus comes in and basically treats joe stone like a subordinate and me and immediately like takes photos with them and sends a cable back hey rapport is made i know i know i mean that really there's a photo there's a photograph of um dustin with max bowers and bowser has his arm around him and dustin kind of look looks mystified to the non-plus like what's going on here who is this guy and then in the corner of the photo you see mark nooch who just looks pissed and it's just it's kind of one of those pictures that just sort of speaks uh speaks volumes i mean you know one of the things i try to do when i'm writing this sort of stuff is um i don't want to be the person that's you know sitting in my armchair you know swinging a beer in 2021 saying you know this is how it should have been and you [ __ ] up and you were a coward and if only you'd done this um you know everything there is difficult everybody who was there you know um i think was there for good reasons and there's an element of bravery and just sort of being in that profession and being in afghanistan at that at that point um but uh you know having said that all the uh accounts of bowers um very few of them are positive uh put it put it that way and i think in particular you know the rapport with the g-chief is is key and it's very involves kind of a lot of sort of subtlety and yeah coming in as the big man on campus and you work for me i don't think they teach that at robin sage jack i mean you'd be able to no correct me no not i don't i don't recall that class yeah it's uh i don't know so can we can we talk about the female pilot oh yeah so i'm gonna need a refill for this thanks man so um you know as you know in afghanistan actually uh thank you you know when he was uh in charge of mazari you know of in control of mazari sharif in the late 90s you know women went to university and yeah he was a secular i mean he he fought for the russians not because he was a communist but more because he was a sort of a secularist and he hated the pashtuns and uh you know islamists and um so but even even for dostum you know the i mean you know i this time last year i was with him i didn't see him you know i didn't see a woman during the entire time i was sort of within his orbit you know all of everything the cooking the survey everything was was done by men no women anywhere and um so you know there was a day when uh dustin just david actually just been on that horse ride i think to atta and then had returned and he was you know he was dog tired he was snoozing in the in the sort of mid-morning and dustin kicked him and dustin was on the radio and dawson would often you know it was kind of psychological warfare with the taliban he taught the taliban telling me he had the americans there and he was they were going to die and they need to change sides and all that stuff and dawson uh kicked david and said like listen to this listen to this there's listen to this pylon he used this afghan word which was kind of like you know hermaphrodite or [ __ ] you know eunuch or something and you know sort of a man with no balls you know and david so listens and he's like no no no that's that's a woman and uh dustin was like a woman flying a plane actually i think it was a navigator but you know he and he just sort of couldn't believe it and so again this sort of speaks to dustin's kind of canniness in a way and sort of you know his sort of quick witness and his ability to sort of you know judge a situation but he sort of immediately had an idea and he was like oh okay okay so um you need to get this pilot david you need to get this pilot to say a poem you know i want i want her to recite a poem and his idea was he was gonna he was gonna put the two receivers together so the taliban commander who was also talking to could hear this woman recite this stuff and so so this f-18 um uh or f-14 i guess um whatever it was anyway who whichever player it was the navigator i think and was like you know i don't know any [ __ ] poetry that once was a man from nantucket right i'm just i'm like navigating a plane here and um uh you know i want to drop some bombs just you know and so so dave is like well she doesn't know any poetry who doesn't know any poetry um so i guess i guess you know dawson did know some poetry like you know or at least expected people to like the suit um so so dave's come on like there must be something um so um what's the call is it the navy fight song i think it is i think that's what it was yeah yeah so you know he gets her to recite this sing the song you know i don't know the words i was in the royal navy not the the the us navy but you know sort of like you know go go navy you know kick army's ass or whatever it is she recites a few lines of splines and saying dawson puts the two receivers together and said you know and then sort of taunts the taliban commander and says uh uh you know this is a you know this is an american woman you know who's come to kill you and she's telling you that you know your dicks are small and you'll you know get you can get [ __ ] up the ass by you know your cousin and you know just kind of demeaning them and taught them and so you know i guess psychological operations and um you know and dustin never got over the idea that you know that the americans had women in the skies who could kill the taliban you know he thought this was great yeah so for people who might not know like in afghanistan and places like that you know they just buy off the shelf icon radios or whatever they have preset frequencies they don't have crypto they don't have you know any kind of security so basically if you know what channel your enemy is operating on you can listen to them you can talk to them and so they would talk [ __ ] to each other all day and taunt each other and so and the local taliban and the local um you know northern alliance they kind of knew each other and they may have fought on the same side at times and they may be about to fight on the same side right and um yeah so they sort of knew the personalities and um yeah so they could talk you know talk [ __ ] to each other talk smack so before we get to november 25th the the last thing i kind of want to really i mean a lot struck me the last thing that really struck me was glenn was the medic yes so can you tell like his frustration with the medical equipment and then the advice that he needed on the battlefield so glenn's a great guy so glenn was the medic on team bravo and uh he's still serving in the cia um he actually told me the other day that his um cover's been lifted i'm not gonna i'm not gonna use his last name just in case but he said his covers are being lifted i think he's probably about to to leave and um you know he was uh special forces uh reservist who joined the agency as a physician's assistant and and has worked for the cia's office of medical service for the last 25 years or so and uh glenn ended up being part of the 15-man rescue team on november 25th and so he saw some very uh intense combat i think was pretty you know deeply affected by it and you know one of the great things about talking to these uh cia guys and green berets on the ground it's like everyone will tell you know tell it how how they see it and and glenn in particular who never holds back and um actually he my first interview with him was actually in my house because i you know i lived pretty close to cia courses and it's joined cobid and you couldn't go in and um there was uh glenn and a guy called greg who was a former seal uh who was also on team bravo and so the interview was in my house but the cia because they were still serving the cia public affairs officer came in and um glenn was effing and blinding and telling all these off color stories and and if sarah from the cia she was great she didn't bat an eyelid and uh and glenn was like and the [ __ ] agency did this and jesus this [ __ ] idiots in headquarters had no clue and and and anyway sarah was just like whatever you know it's cool anyway it's very it was very funny but um but glenn um so he was the medical team brothers so there are three members of team bravo but scott from team alpha was uh who'd gone over with this you know sub unit had gone over to um command bravo with at us they they rode with atta to masuri sharif and um you know this was i mean glenn describes it as like civil war style medicine so he he'd you know he's still pissed about it he felt that he got in with insufficient surgical equipment he wanted to have more kit and um he ended up having to perform field amputations on afghans who um either been sort of wounded in action or stepped on like toe popping mines and had their feet blown off and stuff and um he conducted i think three amputations uh with a schrade multi-tool which is like a leather mat you know with like a saw on it and actually his trade multi-tool is in the cia museum and so there's this afghan who you know had his most of his foot blown off and glenn needed to amputate the rest of it and kind of tidy it all up and uh and he'd never done it before so he's like you know i need some help here and so he he calls cia headquarters and says you know i need to do this i you know can somebody you know it's like the guy who the pilots had a heart attack and you're at the controls right and you've only ever flown and you need somebody to say you know how you land the thing and so um in cia quarters they're like okay you know stand by we'll call you know we'll call you back in 10 minutes and 10 minutes later the sat phone rings and uh it's an army doctor in landstuhl surgeon um and glenn's like you know he's on the phone and um actually scott who was there talk told me about this and um he's just listening to glasses going uh-huh okay uh-huh yeah okay all right okay uh-huh got it and then he puts phone down and then he gets his he gets the saw you know thing on his multi-tool and freaking stores the guy's um foot off and sews it all up and it's like okay good to go and he did that several times and uh you know it's kind of incredible and i mean glenn described the scene he said there was there was a guy you know there's an afghan with a stick who was there which was to beat off the dogs who were stray dogs who'd come in and um eat the bits of foot that sort of dropped onto the ground and they had like a light bulb one light bulb from a generator there's no stretcher so the guy was lying on a ladder with a bit of carpet over it you know dirt everywhere and you know glenn was just like you know civil war medicine amazing i mean it's just incredible and then he does this over the phone he's like yeah i gotta amputate this foot and i'm not quite sure how to do it so can you walk me through it i know i know incredible but you know it's sort of emblematic of this time where you know you just do what you've got to do right you don't you don't have all the right bits of kit uh there are no other options and so you just you just improvise and you know and move on yeah there are so many good stories in this book i mean so i just yeah so many good stories can you take us to november 25th and and kind of work up to it and tell us what happened sure so so mazari sharif falls on november november 9th um and then the americans go in uh november the 10th and they initially they go into kalajangi which is a big um 19th century fort built of sort of you know mud and wood um and it's like something out of the arabian nights and you know i was i was there last year incred incredible place um and you know it's a logical place to move into because it previously being dustin's headquarters the taliban had just fled left sort of [ __ ] and blood and god knows what everywhere like some of the rooms have been used to torture people and they trashed it on the way out but dawson had been there uh the russians had been there and you know it was sort of the may you know obviously it was secure had these you know 10-foot thick walls so the americans move in um but it's outside the city um it's uh the you know the [ __ ] and the dirty water everyone's you know um you know coming down with um you know diarrhoea and vomiting and all that stuff um and you know it was outside the city um and the accommodation wasn't great and so um around uh november the 20th there's a decision to move uh into the city and there's a building called like a five-story building the turkish school uh which was you know uh it had an outer perimeter wall and it kind of made much more sense there was you know running water and showers and stuff and you could set up a kitchen there um and so they move so they move in but so but the americans have lived in this kala jangi for you know a few days and uh the taliban left a lot of weapons behind um like going back to 19th century all sorts of stuff you know russian stuff um and it was um stored in containers these shipping containers which is sort of ubiquitous in afghanistan you know and they're used to transport prisoners to house prisoners to store weapons for also you know they become houses all sorts of things to eliminate prisoners well that as well i mean yes i mean i mean dawson was accused of it now in fact doston admitted to me that one of his men did you know uh you know fire on a container and killed a bunch of prisoners in inside it but you know there are stories stretching back of the taliban you know dropping containers full of people into the hamudaria river and you know containers being left in the desert for people to sort of just bait to death but anyway during that period when they were in college somebody you know flicked a cigarette end in a container or something and just complete went off and there's video of this of this you know ordinance just going off and and actually alex um mike spann was um kind of goofing around and you know jumping in front of the fireworks display for somebody to take photo and alex sort of came in and was like what the [ __ ] are you doing you know um and actually david videoed it and it's just like oh just another day in afghanistan you know um but uh you know it was fortuitous that they did spend that time in in kala jangi because you know mark mitchell who's from the odc he was the um he was ops officer so the number three in the battalion element he ended up leading the rescue force on november 25th and the reason why he went in was because he'd lived in kala janki and kind of knew knew the layout um so they move into the turkish school and you know things are kind of changing you know imperceptibly so masuri sharif has fallen but there's a sense from the cia who are going around you know uh looking at prisoners and you know questioning prisoners working out if any of them are al-qaeda and uh also trying to get a handle on where the taliban have gone to because in classic fashion most of them are just melted away just put down their guns and gone homes the pashtun villages in the area and they're just trying to you know work out what's going on and there's sort of a sense i mean david has talked to me about this about how even then you know the taliban are kind of creeping back you know through villages on november the 12th which were fine to go to by november the 22nd they weren't fined that's what dustin's people were saying you also had kind of a lot of tension between utter and dostum in particular because they're essentially fighting for control of of masuri sharif so it's a kind of ambiguous situation but at the same time task force daggers flying in you know quite a lot of new elements admiral collins in there apparently you know with his master chief carrying his starch uniform in sort of plastic covering um and you know a lot of support guys this dia linguists coming in and and you know actually mitchell was you know what was like who the [ __ ] are all these tourists you know because these are people that you know don't seem to have a military role per se but you know they require you know they have to be met at the landing strip and they have to be housed and fed and they take they take up time um but there's this um feeling that you know i guess in washington uh that uh you know conflict is over combat is over in masuri sharif the battle is in kunduz the the last stand for the taliban in the north is in is in kunduz that's where the main effort is and um so you know november you know first four to november the 24th 2001 team alpha is split so you have uh three or four of them down in cayenne polycamry sort of south of mazari sharif um or southeast of mazarishri so they were there to deal with sort of local warlords and try and persuade them to cut off uh the retreat route from kunduz for the for the taliban and then uh jr and scott were heading to uh kunduz with oda 595 and so you had kind of like a you know a skeleton crew back in the in the turkish school you also had admiral callum was there mcallen um on november the 25th was visiting a hospital with the guard his godfalls being four members the sbs which special forces who were there now the sbs are in masuri sharif because tony blair tony blair's government has decided that although they want to be shoulder to shoulder with the americans they don't want to be involved in a bloodbath so they've they've uh instituted a national caveat all the you know the rules of engagement which are you can fire but only when fired upon which wasn't a whole lot of use at the time right in northern afghanistan and the sbs are pissed and the americans are kind of like well okay you know um anyway that's why they were in masuri sharif but november the 24th the evening well the morning of november 24th 400 al qaeda turn up to surrender uh on the eastern edge of of masri sharif now there had been a murky uh surrender agreement sort of brokered between dostum and mulafazal who was a taliban commander in the north uh the americans had sort of stepped to one side um but the surrender was supposed to take place in kunduz but all of a sudden these these 400 and they were al qaeda not taliban they were all for they were all foreign fighters no afghans amongst them a few pakistanis but they were basically like the ansar you know brigade 055 yeah guys fighters rather than like sort of al-qaeda you know international terrorists but al-qaeda nonetheless um and so they turned up at the morning of the 24 to surrender and so the whole day the 24th this takes everybody by surprise um and there's a whole day of like working out what the hell's going on and then at dusk you know this you know the surrender is kind of finally agreed dustin's guys are [ __ ] scared of these al qaeda fighters arabs you know who have a sort of like boogeyman kind of reputation and that you know you could never kill them and they'll you know you know they'll you know fight to death and slit your throat and all that so so they're not really keen on searching them also there's an afghan kind of tradition of honor and you know when you surrender you just change sides or go home you're not disarmed and imprisoned and so the decision is taken that these 400 al-qaeda prisoners one of whom is john walker turns out to be john walker lind who who is released in 2019 right and is you know now writing articles for the intercept of course he's appearing at some conference in london tomorrow i don't think i think it's going to be remote or an audio message or something but he's yeah full-on sort of isis essentially propagandist yeah wasn't even whining about like how much we bombed them or something like that it's like how much you bombed isis yeah like yeah you can shut the [ __ ] up pal thanks yeah um so these guys so these 400 al qaeda are moved to kala jangi um around about dusk uh and actually justin sapp from team alpha mike spann and david tyson go to the fort on the evening of november the 24th and you know just as they're getting there uh an explosion uh suicide grenade goes off and one of the al-qaeda guys kills himself and takes out two of doston's uh commanders and so it's pretty cool ashley's a journalist british journalist who gets a bit of shrapnel it's very chaotic and some of this is on is on film which is sort of fascinating also there's this kind of sense of in fact there was a there was a pakistani prisoner who was being interviewed that evening he was like we are not surrendered you know what so some of these prisoners don't think they surrender they think they're getting safe passage to either to rat or down to kandahar so it's very kind of you know chaotic and and weird this grenade goes off and so dawson's guys are like okay we need to get the just get these guys into the uh into the cellar of the pink house so the pink house is this soviet-built building i think it was built sort of as a schoolhouse uh in the 70s um or 80s i guess probably um in the in the there's a sort of center of the southern half of the fortnite the fort is divided by a uh divided between north and south by this wall with with a gate in the middle and um so all these prisoners are sort of crammed crammed into this cellar and uh you know justin you know i remember saying to me that you know they were everybody was really amped up it looked like something really bad could happen and in fact if there'd been an uprising at that point you know that probably would have been a more opportune time for that al-qaeda guys to do it would have killed a lot more um i probably killed a bunch of journalists and probably the three cia guys and stuff um but anyway the three cia guys go back to the schoolhouse turkish school for the night uh that night in the in the cellar there are explosions uh and some of the al-qaeda prisoners are killed because there are you know clearly there's some kind of dispute going on about what to do and the next morning uh david tyson and mike spann arrive in the falls bout 8 a.m and you know of course the nature of something that goes wrong is that you know for years afterwards you know it's being litigated and every sort of decision is being questioned and so you know it's often said that um you know they went in without security they didn't know what they were doing they were too casual what were they thinking why were they questioning these prisoners out in the open with with you know um no sort of you know green berets uh helping them um but you know i mean i've talked to all of them everybody involved about this and so there's kind of a few elements one element that i discovered uh pretty late on in the research was that task force dagger had centered directed to the green berets to say because of the suicide attack no green berets were to go into the fort the next day cia didn't know this um but they didn't they were content to go in anyway because they had afghan allies and they've been working with these afghans every day for the previous 40 days and they trusted them and you know there was only eight in team alpha you know in you know half of covering sort of half of northern afghanistan and they didn't feel they needed green berets oda 595 were in condos you say that if they'd been there they would have gone in and i believe actually that the relationship between the oda martin neutra's oda and um team alpha was so close that actually that would have happened whatever the directive from task force dagger that that newton his guys would have said like [ __ ] off we're coming with you yeah i know you don't want us but you know we're we're coming with you three of our guys will go in i mean after all that morning four sbs were with guarding admiral carland going to visit hospital so anyway also justin sat was supposed to go in with them but justin was told he needed to deliver a vehicle um down to polycamry and so you know often i think when sort of catastrophic things happen you you look back and it's kind of like 12 things all came together and if you changed any one of those things it wouldn't have happened and then you know if you think about it by extension there would have been other days when 11 of the elements were present but not the 12th and it was okay we don't think about it but you know if justin had gone in with them that day everything could have been different but justin wasn't there and it was david and mike and you know the kind of tenor of the times was that you know this was al-qaeda this was the first time americans had been able to interrogate face-to-face al-qaeda since 9 11. but 400 of them uh we didn't know what was going on and it was kind of a a national imperative you know and we couldn't you know sense was we couldn't wait a day or two uh couldn't wait for perfect um circumstances we just need to get in and you know these conversations were had between mike spann um and david tyson and hank crompton the night before um you know at the same time i think people's personalities come into this i mean mike's mike spann was was determined to get to the enemy and to sort of make a difference david had less military experience than the other seven in team alpha and was perhaps more more comfortable with the afghans and less kind of suspicious than some other members of team alpha and so i do think it's very possible if jr or alex had been in masuri sharif that day it might not it wouldn't have gone down the same way because they would have had different kind of concerns and that's just sort of the nature of life but um it was those two that went in and um you know there a lot of this is on video so david shot some video and also dostum had an intelligence guy um who shot video right up until the point of the uprising and so mike and david along with um syed carmel who was uh the sort of mazari sharif intelligence chief at dustin amman allah who was the intelligence chief from the from the darius valley um and their various guys um took out brought out the prisoners in ones and twos from from the cellar and lined them up in the courtyard in the sunlight it was november 25th but it was pretty sunny day um and it's sort of every nationality you could imagine you know uh lots of arabs few pakistanis uyghurs africans um uh guys dagestanis chechens like you know david said to me it was like the smorgasbord of al-qaeda you know yeah and for him kind of incredibly exciting like like you know sort of the pinnacle of his life and career that he can use all his languages for something that's sort of incredibly important and i think for mike as as as well you know he's face to face with al qaeda guys who attacked america on on 9 11. um and so you know but david was sort of you know over the course of that morning began to realize that this was just sort of overwhelming it was not the these were not interrogation conditions because they could all hear each other and it was just too sort of chaotic and they couldn't be separated um and and so you could kind of get a sense of who they were but it was pretty hard to you know identify who was a commander and who was a really serious guy and who was just a sort of you know jihad tourist or or whatever term you want to use um it also became clear during the course of that morning that these guys had not been disarmed and so as they were coming up out of the cellar they had you know aks grenades you know freaking machine guns uh all sorts of stuff and there was a big pile of weapons inside the pink house which every so often would be uh cleared and then that these weapons would be put in a container but at one point david went into the pink house and a monolith system it's it's you can't be in here it's it's too dangerous um and so they're questioning these prisoners mike uh focused quite intently on john walker lind who had told he but he'd been directed to tell fellow al-qaeda and taliban fighters that he was irish and he did have an irish grandmother uh but to not say that he was an american so there was an iraqi prisoner that had told david and mike that there's an irishman over there so mike was particularly didn't speak languages he was particularly focused on english-speaking prisoners and so he singled out lind and was like you know who are you you know i know you speak english talk to me you know what are you here for you know do you believe in this you know muslims were killed on 9 11 is this what you know is this is this what you believe in and lynn just doesn't say anything just his head's just kind of bowed doesn't say a word um which was unusual on that day because most almost all of these guys were speaking it may have been [ __ ] or you know claims they were you know there's one guy from qatar who was like oh i'm a mossad agent i'm in the cia too i work for al jazeera so there's all this stuff going on uh some of them are admitting uh you know yeah i'm here for jihad you know i trade i trained in toxins at the alfa route camp but lynn says nothing and of course the family i think with you know some considerable justification sort of say you know he was in that cellar that night and you know he uh understood arabic and he would have heard the debates and he would have had had some inkling that was there was an uprising planned and you know we now know um from you know prisoner accounts and intelligence and you know putting all the pieces together this was basically a trojan horse plot by mullah fossil pretty clever one to um you know get control of the fort and retake masuri sharif and when the uprising happened there were um taliban elements moving from kunduz and from balk to the north west of mazari sharif sort of converging on on the city but but you know they weren't able to coordinate it properly but anyway you know at about 11am david is um uh you know i've talked to him about this because on the on the video um he just doesn't sound like himself his voice is very strained he's swearing a lot more than he he you know he swears like we all do but um but you know more than normal uh he's very very kind of rough you know intense um and he was the he was the bad cop and mike was the good cop in this sort of interrogation scenario but um i mentioned this to him and he said yeah my wife said that he said just doesn't sound like you um and so you know what i think was happening was that he had a sort of physiological reaction to the danger but his brain hadn't yet processed it but his body was telling him this is [ __ ] up you know you need to get out it's dangerous but his brain hadn't quite caught up um and you know 11am david was just sort of thinking you know we need to wrap this up there's you know a dozen 18 or so prisoners still in the cellar side carmel was telling him that you know these are hardcore guys who were left commanders probably uzbeks um and you know and sort of at that moment david was about 50 yards from the pink house uh mike was much closer with uh there were two doctors from afghan medics who were tending to the wounded and my could have seen on video is eerie you see him walking over to talk to some english-speaking prisoners there and at that moment uh this is the video dostum's intelligence guy the video stops at this point um but there's uh the sound of like shouting and an explosion and some gunshots uh within within the pink house and basically a group of prisoners uh had had come up the stairs and overwhelmed the guards kill the manola kill the other guards uh grab their weapons and you know in terms of the uprising it's kind of like game on and there's this sort of moment where you know again sort of maybe you know a slight sort of foretelling of the future i think there were enough afghan guards enough northern ireland's guards to deal with the situation but you know it wasn't dustin's a team or maybe even if sort of the c team you know the weak and the lame who'd been left behind while the main effort was in kunduz and they were either killed or they rap a lot of them ran and um so mike had uh an akms on his back so team alpha had gone in with ak east german akms's and uh glock 17s um and actually david was the only one who didn't have a kalashnikov and he had a browning high power and he only had a he only had his browning with him that day but mike had his akms sort of wheeled around uh shot two or three of the prisoners who were rushing towards him but at the same time the prisoners who've been lined up in the outside the pink house so they've been loosely tied with their turbans like kind of chicken wing so it's like on the upper arm but you know their feet hadn't been bound so they they jumped up and sort of jumped on him from behind and so he he pulled out his pistol shot a couple more of them um but was just sort of overwhelmed david sort of heard the commotion and he described to me um how you know time slowed down tunnel vision loss of hearing like classic sort of stress reaction and he's just like what the [ __ ] going on um and so again his sort of his brain kind of taking time to sort of catch up and he sees a guy an arrow prisoner running towards him who's got a macro pistol in his hand but he's sort of firing sideways like kind of like gangster style whatever it is and david's like what the [ __ ] is he doing you know and and then he can see the rounds being ejected uh from the pistol and he's like he's [ __ ] shooting he's shooting at me and he's and then david's like kill a [ __ ] and so he he he kills him he shoots him twice at the same time he hears mike shouting like dave dave dave and so david you know he describes this as you know he had no choice it was muscle memory and all the rest of it but you know i've thought about this a lot i've talked to him about it a lot it's sort of an incredible thing really to you know for anybody to run towards danger in a situation like that i mean he could have frozen he could have run the other way i mean there's a lot of afghans running the other way um and sort of my sort of theory on this is it's kind of like the court you know these incredibly stressful situations it's kind of like the core of your character of who you are sort of comes to the fore and so for david he just ran towards mike uh gets there and you know there's these four guys on top of him david shoots them one two three four four three two one so he she shoots eats each of them twice but kind of back and forth and then he kicks mike mike's on the bottom he kicks mike no movement no sign of life there's blood on the ground and at that point you know david grabs mike's akms and he's he's now in this situation of kill or be killed you know uh he's got guys head butting him flinging themselves at it guys come and he's just killing them you know he's just uh some of them are still tied up uh and you know there was an indonesian guy who was just head-butting him in the back and he just turns around and you know blows his head off basically blows his brains out and um and so you know this i think it was about 11 minutes or so where david knows that you know the best chance of safety is get to the northern end of the of the fort certainly get out of the southern compound and he just shoots his way out i mean at one point you know there's you know he describes it's almost comical where there's a guy shooting at him and he's shooting you know for popping out from behind a tree like kind of a western they're missing each other um at one point there was a there was uh a you know an al-qaeda prisoner who's got one of the uzbek guards um kind of in a headlock with a grenade and he's pulled the pin and he and the guard is kind of gesturing to david like if you shoot me then that means i'm going to blow myself up i'm going to kill a prisoner and me and you and so david kind of moves on and then side carmel the intelligence chief comes up from behind david shoots shoots the prisoner who then grenade explodes kills the guard uh so just you know there's rpgs because the the prisoners have now got the weapons they've gone to the containers they've got all sorts of weapons yeah i mean just just incredible and david is still you know he still wants to reconstruct the whole thing but he can only kind of get to about you know two or three of these 11 minutes yeah um but you know he gets to the he gets to the northern end of the the fort he burst you know he bursts through the door and then there's a german tv there's a german tv crew there and there's this sort of surreal bit of footage where you know that arnhem stout who i interviewed um who's the german tv reporter is questioning this cia officer who's just run in about what the hell's going on adam's pretty scared um and david is just like you know wide-eyed yeah it's i'm sure that like in his mind it's still surreal like the reality of the situation it has a hard time sometimes your brain has a hard time like catching up to what the actual reality is yeah and so dave david is you know dave adams asking some you know some good questions like what's going on and who are you and what's happened and then also some kind of goofy questions like you know so you were trying to infiltrate them and david david's sort of you know he's answering him and he's trying to be kind of cool or evasive he's sort of saying what so at one point he says oh it was me and some other guy and you know dave was like what the [ __ ] was i thinking you know first of all i shouldn't have just said anything and you know you know but i'm trying to sort of you know i realize my cover's blown uh you know i realize this is you know i'm on camera but you know i'm so i'm just saying this goofy [ __ ] yeah um and then and then for the next five hours they're holed up in in in that headquarters building david gets a phone from arnhem and he had only he's lost his notebook um the only number he could remember was that like the embassy and his house so he phones his house in tashkent his wife answers the phone as like happy thanksgiving uh because it was you know thanksgiving a couple of days earlier david's like listen this you know this is serious she drops the phone picks it up you know he and david's like you need to call charlie you know i mean color janky she writes it down like koala janky she's never heard the name of the fort before um but she realizes that you know this is really bad you can hear the gunfire in the background david speaks to the embassy um the air force uh defense liaison guy um and you know david says you know this is where i am you know we need help but don't he's really scared of airstrikes you know because you know he he doesn't want to get you know he doesn't want an airstrike on the headquarters building and get killed but you know in the meantime back at the turkish school the alarms raised there's a rescue team put together led by mark mitchell green beret major from odc 53 there's eight sbs guys there's a couple of dia linguists in there glenn the team bravo medic it um is in there uh and uh they drive off to the they drive off to the fort not knowing what they're gonna find and then there's um you know oh there's a seal called steph bass who uh received the navy cross for his actions on november 25th he's part of the sbs team who's um on an extra in an exchange billet with the sbs uh he's there and um you know david is on top of the headquarters building picking off al qaeda fighters who coming through the central gateway um he's being blown off his feet by j dams being um being dropped um and uh you know there's this sort of desperate kind of you know attempt to uh get him out um eventually um uh steph bass and tony who was an sbs corporal they kind of start to go forward steph leaves tony behind um and goes to the tower on the west and this is at dusk and peers out and um sees a prone body wearing blue jeans and a black fleece which was what mike's fan was was wearing um and the dead afghans there he's picking off kalashnikovs picking up clash clash from dead afghans and he fires two shots either side of the the legs of the body to see if there's any flinching there's there's no signs of life and so he pretty much confirms that that's mike's fan and and mike spann is dead david eventually escapes from the fort um just sort of slips over the wall um uh comedy is a taxi at gunpoint with the german journalists all in tow and various sort of afghans and goes back to uh the turkish school um and you know in the meantime the sbs have brought their gpmgs and killing you know large numbers of al-qaeda in in the in the southern compound and that's the start of a six day battle i mean the next the next morning the american forces try and end the whole thing with a 2 000 pound j dam which is dropped on a friendly position it was pilot of the f-18 got the coordinates mixed up um and so it it drops on the the northeast tower flips over a t-55 tank that the northern lights have kills a bunch of afghans wounds five americans the first purple hearts of the afghan war and some sbs no americans or friend you know western friendlies killed but that kind of ends it for that day ac 130s come in that night um pretty much ends the possibility of the al-qaeda prisons taking over the fort but this then there's sort of like a pitch battle every day and it's pretty much an afghan show um and uh most of the the remaining prisons that hold up in the basement mike spann's body uh doesn't get it takes three days for my expanse body to be recovered um and then it takes six days until you know the final they flood the basement this seller of the pink house um and 86 al-qaeda guys emerged you know one of them john john walker lind um so you know it seemed like it was all over and then this crazy sort of you know six day battle ensues i i it's okay i mean i honestly have nothing but respect for david like i i i don't know if people are critical or what but but i can completely understand his sort of shell shock is sort of like the whole you know matching reality with you know like it's it is in a battle haze after that i mean anyone would be that it's not easy he's fighting against uh against impossible odds at that point and then and then you go from this surreal situation into this you know somebody's like sticking a microphone in your face and asking you interview questions like like i like he might question why he said stuff but like it's totally normal like you're trying your brain is like you have so many cross circuits at that point in time like there is no normal right now and you know i totally get it yeah i mean certainly been second guessing over the years i mean yeah um and sort of in in the immediate aftermath because sure you know you're the guy that survived and the other guy you're the guy you're the only guy that can tell the tale although there were you know a number of sort of afghans there as well um but yeah i mean david one of the fantastic things about the research this book and dealing with david has been um you know the hours and hours of talking to him about how he processed this what he's been through and he's a very humble guy you know he's always saying you know i'm not a hero i mean he was awarded the distinguished intelligence cross for the cia like the you know the highest ola you know favela the highest award you know the cia equivalent of the medal of honor i guess and very very few of those are awarded um for his actions that day um but uh you know it's he decided um [Music] that you know it could either over overwhelm him um or he could kind of deal with it but either way it was gonna sort of define the rest of his life and so what he decided to do is essentially to sort of incorporate it into his sort of psyche and i think he had no other option because he can't sort of shut this kind of stuff out right and so he talked you know he talks about it um you know he kept scrapbooks of where he little snippets of you know news and stuff you know like a dozen scrapbooks and it's so he's literally trying to piece it together obviously he had diagnosed with ptsd and he um he um you know spoke to psychologists and therapists and you know who told him that you know you know part of his quest is to work out exactly what happened you know to try and get what he calls like god's video of what he what happened and what he did that day and the psychology of the statements just yeah he's been erased from the hard drive you're never going to get it there's no memory doesn't work that way i mean if you talk to four guys after a firefight they will all tell a difference or even if you saw it on video you would still have a hard time understanding memory just doesn't work that way you know um and that's probably for the benefit of the human race that our memory doesn't work out toby a couple uh a couple of viewer questions for you here um and this is actually kind of going more towards the beginning of our interview here uh in your opinion are the troubles over or on hold in ireland wow so i mean i guess i tend to so i'm not close to the events there you know sort of day to day or or week to week um i think in the you know the recent events with brexit um which have meant that you know northern ireland is uh not in the european union but the republic of ireland is has made the issue of the border uh you know it's brought it made it front and center again whereas sort of you know british and irish policy for the last 25 years to sort of make it an invisible border and like make it sort of just you know exist in sort of name only so i mean i've always believed that it'll probably only be over when there's a united island um and that the ira uh while it will have um you know have periods when it's active um and uh you know when it's uh got a sort of full-scale campaign there'll be other periods where it's sort of dormant but it will always kind of come back and that's what happened after you know the border campaign in the early 60s um and then there was sort of you know the iras sort of went away and this whole phrase of i think it was like um the pike in the haystack you know the pike would just be sort of put in a haystack and brought out so um you know i'm not gonna predict the core yeah this is probably true of any movement or you know ideological movement that that has offshoots but but how does the main body of the ira you know that it is that is working for peace or working for whatever how do they manage or how do they deal with the offshoots that might have uh you know more focused hard-line radical whatever you want to call it i don't want to like me but but a different agenda well it's like any movement i mean you know i mean i don't know look what the taliban's got to deal with you know they're split they've got isis k you know so they're they're trying to get some kind of international acceptance but they're also looking at the sort of you know hardliners uh now that's not to say the taliban aren't hardliners themselves other sometimes use the hard lane liners so-called hard liners to sort of you know as leverage in negotiations so it's very sort of complex but you know the history of the irish republican movement has been splits and and factions and offshoot groups and um you know the last 20 years or so when you've had part of the republican movement you know i don't believe they believe in peace i believe they believe that they can achieve their aims through politics um better than they better than armed conflict so it's a sort of a tactical dispute rather than a kind of moral um difference um but yeah i mean that this is the nature of uh of politics and movement you know yeah yeah uh all right next question here any observations from your interviews with military and intelligence services reflecting on their need for improving cultural competence versus the u.s centric lens in current and future ops well certainly um i think uh you know there's a sense from cia people and team alpha guys who um you know certainly two of them jr seeger and and david tyson had a you know great sort of cultural expertise and you know david is you know was the only uzbek speaker in the cia at the time which if you think about um you know the importance of uzbekistan the importance of uzbek speaking afghans was was pretty surprising and so i think there is a belief um that you know we need more linguists and we need more cultural expertise and that we can't just export america around the world but these things are sort of expensive and uh yeah difficult and you have you know you have issues with you know security clearances you know i mean this is kind of a joke you know which is based in some truth actually there were no mormons on t team alpha but there are a lot of mormons in the cia because they can pass the polygraph because they speak one language because they did a mission you know they only drink coffee and don't have alcohol and they get married and have loads of kids and they're very wholesome so they're perfect but are mormons the guys who are gonna go into you know understand afghans necessarily um and so you know you know if you know if you smoke pop when you were younger or you you did a few bad things or you broke the law occasionally you know and you live sort of close to the edge maybe that's the kind of person you know we sh we should be recruiting for intelligence agencies rather than sort of the goody two shoes that can pass the polygraph the first time so you know it's sort of an ongoing debate um but i think the i think the answer is you know we can that you know we can never as a country have you know too many people that speak language i say this is a person who doesn't speak any languages or you know a little bit of french but hardly anything really but essentially monolingual we can never have enough too many people who speak languages and have experience at different parts of the world uh ben asks which area of afghanistan if any would be the most comparable to i hope i'm saying it right uh south arma the the area in ireland that you studied um well i sort of hesitate that to make uh the comparison but you know i guess you know south america be the most rebellious least easy to to tame uh you know place in ireland and so i guess i mean you know i spent quite a lot of time in helmand you know in the pashtun south and i don't think that's a place that is ever going to be pacified um by uh the british or the americans so i guess i would say you know uh helmut on the other hand one of the things about south america you know it's border with the irish republic and so you know maybe like kunar province because you know you draw parallels between you know the you know somewhat limited sanctuary the ira had in the irish republic to the pakistan pakistani sanctuary that the taliban certainly have uh but you know i wouldn't draw these parallels too closely really they kind of get awkward and i think that that's one of the things is that people don't like we talked about earlier about the national identity of afghanistan or or a cohesive whether it's national or or religious or whatever but even if they share a religion in afghanistan they're what like 14 15 different ethnicities or 40 different languages and they they not only do they identify that but they group is that and they don't see themselves outside of that generally yeah i mean you know if you look so yeah jr said to me he doesn't believe that afghanistan's a country you know it's a collection collection of tribes and ethnicities and you know the pashtuns are the largest um ethnic group but they're not the majority you know if you add up the tajiks and the hazaras and and the uzbeks then you know there's more of them than than past dudes and so you know i think one of the you know again i hesitate to say that you know come up with sort of easy solutions or if only this had happened kind of you know pronouncements but i do feel you know we sh i mean given the you know federalism and you know 50 states that maybe the united states could have understood this better that rather than centralizing um we should have devolved you know but this got caught up in the warlords issue you know but really who bet you know okay so he's not a nice guy and he's not somebody that's gonna sort of pass muster in the salons of washington but you know who's going to command respect and going to be able to get things done in northern afghanistan well dustin is some pashtun is hamid karzai from kabul well no so why do we opt for centralization i don't understand it right right last question why did the taliban accept john walker lind uh i think they were pretty suspicious of him initially um and he wasn't kind of you know a roughy toughy you know gun-toting fighter type i mean he was a pretty um kind of weedy um character but you know he learned um he memorized the quran he learned arabic he was he was there um i think uh i mean he was so the interplay with john walker in between the taliban al-qaeda is interesting because uh he was sent by the taliban to al-qaeda to the al faroot camp which was and he was with ansar brigade the helpers uh with the arabs and he was asked at alfa route camp whether he wanted to carry out foreign operations so basically you know suicide bombings against you know israel european targets the united states and he said no i want to fight in afghanistan but i'm sure that there was a sense that this american could be used against the west somehow you know the taliban's an afghan group but you know it had this and still does this very close relationship with with al qaeda whereas you know you know we'll help you you'll help us and you know we'll we'll kind of um you know live or die together and so i think had uh john walker linde survived uh and you know not being captured uh then yeah he's a pretty committed guy you know he's he was supporting isis uh you know in handwritten letters uh a few years ago at a time when isis was beheading americans so his i think his ideological commitment has never wavered throughout the last 20 years so um i mean if you're the taliban uh you're very close to al-qaeda a guy like that could be useful sure i mean even now as yaya lind he's a writer translator and former prisoner of war yeah very very nice description folks uh everyone thank you for joining us tonight we really appreciate it i think this interview with toby has been amazing and i'd love to have you some back back again some time to talk about your other works actually absolutely man um please please uh like and subscribe to the channel go and check down in the uh in the links in the description to uh join our patreon if you want to support the channel there's some merch also if you want to get team house coffee mugs and all that good stuff and on instagram we're gonna do a giveaway soon yeah and uh also uh next week next friday we're gonna have caroline walsh on the show she is the author of fairly smooth operator she was a coastie and she was a cia analyst so we're looking forward to talking to her next week and toby where can people find you show off the book show off the goods here where can people find the book toby show the book as well here um i'm trying to be very easy to find um so tobyhondan.com h-a-r-n-d-n uh it's the website uh at toby harden is twitter and just to be different uh tobyhondan1 on instagram the number one um or just google me first i don't know whatever the phrase is wherever wherever books are sold el primo toby harden one and at uh toby or tobyharnen.com toby i know i've eaten up like three hours of your time can i ask you to stay for uh the bonus segment after for just a moment sure all right um so that's the show we'll see you guys next friday thank you every

Channel: The Team House

Views: 27,024

Keywords: The Team House, Jack Murphy, cia special activities center, cia paramilitary operations, ground branch, special activities division, afghanistan, toby harnden, first casualty, directorate of operations

Id: EI59XESzXFo

Length: 183min 43sec (11023 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 19 2021