The $10 Million Man
Veteran CIA officer Gary Schroen was the agency's pick to lead the first U.S. team into Afghanistan, only 15 days after September 11. In his new book, First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan, he vividly recounts how the seven-man team (code-named Jawbreaker) helped the Northern Alliance defeat the hard-line Taliban regime--and stored $10 million in boxes in their office ("I can't haul around a 1,000-pound safe," he told a nervous CIA bean counter).
Was America prepared for the war on terrorism?
The CIA was ready. We knew what to do. The U.S. military, and I'm not denigrating their activities on the ground, but they were not ready. The Pentagon did not have a plan on how to go into Afghanistan and fight the kind of war it was going to take--a special operations war to defeat the Taliban.
One of your first tasks before heading out was ... shopping?
There's not a Q-type person passing out the special laser guns. When you get called to go to Afghanistan or Iraq or Bosnia and you don't have the stuff in your closet, you go down to REI or L. L. Bean and buy your gear just like you were going camping.
You tell of being frustrated by Washington bureaucracy.
A lot of us felt the stuff we would send in from the field wouldn't even be read. There was that story I told in the book about the Predator [an unmanned drone]. Two of my guys go down to look at an airfield that I paid for. I had given [the CIA] the coordinates and the reasons why we're having it refurbished. And we get a call from [the Predator's operators] saying we see two people on an airfield and one of them looks like he's not an Afghan and he may be [Osama] bin Laden and we want to shoot him with a Hellfire [missile]. And we said, "Well, we sent numerous cables. Did anybody read them?"
Will we get bin Laden?
There is no effort being spared at headquarters. The problem is that, as far as we can tell, he's in Pakistan. Unless we decide to break the self-imposed rule that we won't go in after him without Pakistani approval, we will be hamstrung.
This story appears in the May 16, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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