American Heroes in Special Operations Page 20

  The helicopters swooped into freshly plowed fields around the target compound, flaring hard and throwing up a curtain of dust and sand. As soon as the wheels touched earth the operators charged out the back, eager to get away from the largest, loudest target on the battlefield. In seconds, everyone was fanned out behind the bird, bracing themselves on one knee, scanning the fading twilight for targets and bracing against forceful gusts of rotor wash as the choppers lifted off again.

  When they were gone, we moved quickly to the outer wall of the compound, Holton and I doing our best to stay out of everyone’s way and still get the action on “tape.” I followed the team leader of FAST Alpha—Carson Ulrich. He was one of the tallest guys on the mission, built like a cross between a swimmer and a pro wrestler. He moved fast, obviously eager to make sure the rest of his team got where they needed to be and didn’t get hurt in the process. Carson is the kind of guy whose presence makes any dangerous situation seem a little less so—he looked like he could handle anything.

  Two operators breached the outer door of the compound within sixty seconds and then the entire team flowed inside in a practiced ballet of weapons pointing in every direction. They immediately came upon several younger military-age males, who were taken into custody by Afghan Special Police Commandos. There was also a knot of about a dozen women and children, who had been sleeping on a raised dias. Though they were obviously terrified, the Afghan Commandos gently coaxed them into moving to a secure area of the compound where they were sequestered and guarded until the mission was complete.

  Old-Vietnam-era UH-1 “Huey” helicopters outfitted with GAU-17 miniguns did racetracks overhead watching for signs of the enemy. Within five minutes the entire compound was secure and a Spec-Ops K-9 dog and handler began searching the various rooms for drugs while the operators took up positions on the rooftop to defend against a possible counterattack from the surrounding orchards and nearby farms. Twice the pilots reported a man with a radio in hand, watching our movements. The helo gunners fired warning shots to discourage him. Taliban insurgents are known to use walkie-talkies to call in mortar fire.

  The search of the compound turned up a bag of black tar heroin, a stash of precursor chemicals, and a large bag of glass marbles. I asked the Afghan police captain in charge of the raid why they were important and he pointed out that the enemy has begun using marbles in IEDs because they can’t be seen by metal detectors.

  These converted Huey Helicopters flew as air cover for missions with the DEA in Afghanistan.

  To the west of the target compound, the operators noticed several acres of carefully cultivated, eight-foot-tall hashish producing marijuana plants. The “field of dreams” was so large, the FAST agents didn’t even try to destroy it. One of the FAST unit members did take care to burn a large stash of dried poppies stacked against one wall. The marbles, opium, and chemicals were moved a safe distance from the compound into a drainage ditch and wired with several pounds of plastic explosive. Two Afghan Commandos secured several men for questioning and released the rest while everyone else moved toward the pickup zone to wait for the Mi-17s to return. Then the demolitions men called “Fire in the hole!”

  We moved two hundred meters outside the compound and I readied my camera, capturing the black cloud of smoke that shot skyward as the contraband heroin, morphine base, and precursor chemicals were destroyed. Moments later the helos swooped in to pick us up and we ran through the dust cloud to the rear ramp and hopped aboard.

  The ride home was just as low and fast as the trip out, but the mood was completely different. The men were smiling, joking, and using their personal cameras.

  Dried poppies

  The men of FAST Alpha went on to raid dozens of drug bazaars around southern Afghanistan. Unlike our relatively uneventful 9/11 anniversary mission, they often found themselves involved in pitched battles with hardened terrorists. Then on 26 October, another DEA mission, supported by a U.S. SOCOM Spec-Ops team hit a large drug market in Farah province. They were quickly engaged by several dozen fanatical insurgents, of whom they killed more than thirty. On the objective, they found and destroyed refined opium worth more than a million dollars. The operation was a stunning success, but as they were extracting from the site, one of the nightstalker helicopters crashed, killing ten of those inside. Three of those killed were Special Agents—the first DEA casualties in the war on terror. The others were U.S. Army and MARSOC Special Operators with whom we went on numerous ops without losing a man.

  It was a devastating blow for all the organizations involved, particularly the tight-knit DEA community. Michelle Leonhart the Acting Administrator, made sure the entire team was brought home to attend all three funerals. For that, FAST commander Carson Ulrich, his men and their families were very grateful, realizing that most warriors aren’t afforded that privilege. They arrived back on U.S. soil with only one request—that they be allowed to return to Afghanistan as soon as the memorial services were over to see out the remainder of their tour.

  In their minds, it was the only way to properly honor their friends—by picking up the weapons of the fallen and carrying them back into the fight. And that’s exactly what happened.

  Back from a raid with FAST Alpha. Last man on the left is Chad Michael.

  DEA memorial for agents Forrest Leamon, Chad Michael, and Michael Weston

  Mi-17 helicopter

  DEA DRUG RAID

  JALALABAD, AFGHANISTAN

  We launched well before dawn on three Russian Mi-17 helicopters and while the pilots were American, it was a surreal experience for me. I trained for years in the Marines on how to shoot these down. Now I was riding into combat in one, armed with a camera and covering other young men fighting a different enemy. But most of those in this aircraft were neither Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, or Marines. This unit was different.

  According to colleagues back home, our FOX News team in Afghanistan missed all the excitement. After we left the USA in late August 2009, Washington saw one of the largest peaceful protests in history against a sitting government. A bold congressman rose during a televised joint session of Congress to accuse the president of the United States of prevaricating. The rhetoric in Washington was nearly as hot as the summer sun in Helmand Province. All pretty exciting stuff, I suppose. But as I glanced around the dim interior of the shuddering Mi-17, at steely-eyed warriors riding into battle, I realized I wouldn’t trade a single day with the Special Operations raiders with whom we were keeping company for all the hoopla in Washington.

  The “raiders” were an extraordinary cross section of talent, tenacity, experience, and courage. But one thing that made them different from many of our previous embeds—most of these Special Operators were not active duty military. In their ranks are U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agents, intelligence specialists, linguists, contract pilots, and air crewmen from the Department of Defense and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, contract weapons and tactics experts and some very dedicated, brave, and resourceful Afghan police officers. On this operation we were joined by a team of U.S. and coalition Special Operators.

  Throughout 2009 these kinds of “task-organized” units were becoming the nemesis of the Taliban and they did it all beneath the radar of the mainstream media.

  Our FOX News team spent nearly a month embedded with them on operations spanning the length and breadth of Afghanistan. By agreement, we would not photograph or videotape most of their faces or identify them by anything but their first names. We were not allowed to broadcast the specific unit to which any of these men belonged. On many of their operations, they flew non-U.S. aircraft and rarely used American military vehicles, in order to confuse the enemy. These measures combined with the DEA’s unique ability to collect accurate “full-spectrum intelligence,” validate it with human sources, and exploit that information with rapid, direct action account for the rai
ders’ unparalleled effectiveness in taking on the Taliban. The 14 September mission—launched by the DEA—is a dramatic example of how effective these kinds of operations have become.

  Afghan narcotics police

  The Birds headed southeast from Jalalabad, escorted by Vietnam-era UH-1 “Huey” gunships to the raid objectives, less than ten kilometers from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the incredibly mountainous Nangarhar Province. At first light, we touched down—a force of forty-three DEA agents, NATO Special Operators, police officers from Afghanistan’s narcotics interdiction and special investigations units, and two confidential informants who were actually residents of the village we were raiding, their heads covered with balaclavas to keep them from being identified and the resulting death sentence.

  The informants led the raid force directly to the first target—a way station on an opium ratline into Taliban-controlled territory in Pakistan. I stayed close to Walid, a muscular, bearded senior SIU investigator, as he trudged up the steep hillside to a dry-stack stone hut pointed out by one of the informants. Walid immediately found what he was looking for: precursor chemicals, opium, morphine base, and pure heroin. Some of it was buried in a shallow hole outside the building and the rest was stockpiled inside. As he riffled through a box of morphine base at the site, he looked up at me, smiled and said, “Money from these drugs will never get to the Taliban.” He then helped a team of Afghan narcotics police carry the haul to a corner of the courtyard where other Special Operators quickly rigged it with several pounds of plastic explosive.

  Moments later, the call “Fire in the hole!” came from the demolitions experts and everyone pulled back a safe distance to watch the explosion. When it went off, so did all the donkeys in the neighborhood, hee-hawing their displeasure at the thunderclap that echoed up the valley.

  Drug lab in Afghanistan making black tar heroin.

  Taliban drug lab blown up by DEA

  Walid was right. Nobody was going to be selling those drugs now.

  Then it was back to the landing zone for a quick flight to the second objective—a village much like the first—clinging as it had for centuries to a steep mountainside. This one was the suspected site of a drug-processing lab. The raiders, led by one of the informants, moved rapidly up the hill and set up a cordon, taking advantage of the element of surprise. By the time they made it to the target buildings, however, the occupants had fled—leaving two dirty, malnourished infants behind. The babies lay crying amidst used hypodermic needles and dirty clothes. Apparently the drug processors were also partakers of their poison. Afghan NIU police scooped up the children, trying to console them and find their mothers among a crowd of women and children huddled in a house further up the mountainside. Even here in the primitive villages of the Hindu Kush, opium destroyed everything it touched. The mothers of the babies were nowhere to be found.

  DEA Assistant Regional Director Keith Weis, a tall, dark-haired father of two who looked far too young to have been in this dangerous business for more than twenty years was the raid leader and one of the few we are allowed to identify. During the mission Keith said intelligence indicated the site was part of “a significant organization with ties to the Taliban.” That allegation was substantiated by documents and records seized from the building. The operator of the lab, who looked much older than his age due to sampling his own product, was identified by an informant, taken into custody, and the drugs and chemicals were wired with explosives by the NATO Special Operations team.

  It was an extraordinary haul. We found out later from Afghanistan’s deputy interior minister Mohammad Hanif Atmar that the six-hour raid destroyed one thousand kilograms of opium, three hundred kilograms of morphine, thirty kilograms of pure heroin, and more than two hundred kilograms of precursor chemicals and yielded weapons and reams of documents. Estimated street value of the drugs and chemicals in Western Europe or the United States: more than $3 million.

  After footage of the raid aired on FOX News Channel, the single greatest inquiry we received wasn’t about the drugs, the Taliban or the raiders; it was, “What happened to the little babies who were abandoned at the lab?”

  Here’s the answer: The DEA informants pointed out the two mothers in the crowd gathered nearby, neither of whom looked to be more than fifteen years old. The NIU officers handed the children back to them along with a tongue lashing for abandoning their children. The DEA unit’s intelligence chief, also named Keith, later told me, the NIU officers’ anger stemmed from embarrassment—that these wives of a lab operator would rush to save themselves and leave their babies behind. “They wanted to make sure the American news crew understood that’s not the way a proud Afghan should act.”

  As for their husband, if he’s convicted, it’s unlikely the children will ever get to know their father, but perhaps thousands of other children will be spared the horror of being on the receiving end of the drugs the man produced.

  For the men of this special mission unit—though they may not be recognized with awards and decorations, that knowledge is good enough.

  Exfil—the skilled pilots of these Mi-17s put these huge aircraft down on postage-stamp-sized terraces below the village.

  Special Operators on a capture-kill mission have to walk single file to avoid possible IEDs.

  CAPTURE/KILL MISSION

  NEAR HERAT, AFGHANISTAN

  They only had a matter of hours to plan the mission. After tracking a known Taliban warlord for months, the Special Forces team based in Herat received notice that their target was in a village only a few kilometers away. With no time to spare, the ODA, quickly planned a capture/kill mission for that very night and received approval. Though hastily devised, the plan was designed from mission templates they rehearsed over and over, and the team felt confident they could pull it off.

  Assigned to the ODA was Staff Sergeant Rob Gutierrez, the same stocky Combat Controller from San Diego, California, who had already distinguished himself in 2008 and earlier in 2009 on previous deployments to Afghanistan. Rob did a quick map reconnaissance of their objective and drew up some pre-planned “nine-line” fire missions that could be fed to attack aircraft supporting their mission. From aerial imagery available, he marked each building in the target village with a number, with which it would be simple to identify the locations of friendly and enemy forces.

  Night-vision view of laser target designator

  The other Green Berets scrambled around the base, readying night-vision optics, weapons, and equipment. They ran a quick walk-through with their Afghan commando counterparts so every man would know his assigned place in the mission. Though they all would have preferred to have more men for the mission, they made do with what they had and preparations went smoothly because they had done them all a hundred times before.

  As the sun sank over the ancient walls of the fortress built by Alexander the Great in Herat city, the special mission unit mounted up in Ground Mobility Vehicles and rolled out toward the foothills surrounding the city. The village where their target, a Taliban warlord took refuge was in an area proven to be very dangerous for Coalition forces. In these parts of Afghanistan, allegiance to the Taliban was high and attacks and IEDs were a major threat to “friendlies” venturing too far outside the city. So the Americans and their Afghan allies went loaded for bear, knowing their target was known to travel with a large and well-trained personal security detail that would fight to the death. If it came to that, the ODA would be happy to oblige.

  The only way to avoid IEDs was to stay off the roads completely. This meant the convoy of Humvees had to pick its way at a snail’s pace cross country through the farmland surrounding Herat. With the drivers using NVGs, it was agonizingly slow and painful going, as the vehicles bounced and jostled over the uneven ground.

  In order to keep their profile as low as possible, the unit decided to travel the last five kilometers on foot. Leaving a rear guard to watch over t
heir vehicles, the ODA and their Afghan counterparts dismounted at about 2200 hours and crept toward the village, following their GPS devices and doing their level best to avoid detection along the way.

  At midnight they reached the outskirts of the small hamlet that was their objective. It was surrounded by farmers’ fields, many of which had grown opium poppy earlier in the year but now were dry and barren. Others had a half-grown crop of wheat that would be ready in another month for harvest. Trees lined ancient, hand-dug canals that irrigated the fields. The moon was half full, throwing off enough illumination the men hardly needed their night vision whenever clouds were not blocking its light.

  The Special Forces Captain, who went by the call sign “Digger” was smart and methodical and this was his first mission as ODA commander. He split his force, sending half the men to set up an over-watch position where they could provide security for the maneuver element that would enter the village. Once the support element was in place, the rest of the team, made up of six operators including the commander and SSG Gutierrez, left cover and ran for the target building—the place where Intel indicated the HVT would be asleep with one of his wives.

  The building was constructed in typical Afghan fashion, high mud walls surrounded the compound at least eighteen inches thick, with flat-roofed rooms built against the outer walls and a courtyard in the center. The team moved up to the corner of the target building and pressed themselves against the wall.