The Rest Is Classified - 3. CIA vs the Taliban: Behind Enemy Lines (Ep 1)

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

America knew Al-Qaeda were behind the 9/11 attacks before the day was out. They knew they were being sheltered by the Taliban in Afghanistan and so the CIA went after them. Small teams were dropped behind enemy lines with bags of cash and very little else, instructed to link up with Afghan warlords like Abdul Rashid Dostum. It proved to be a devastating combination as they began to sweep through Afghanistan. Listen as Gordon Corera and David McCloskey discuss the first CIA teams first in Afghanistan after 9/11. Further Reading: First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11 by Toby Harnden - buy it here. Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ www.nordvpn.com/restisclassified It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! Email: [e-mail] Twitter: @triclassified Editor: Vasco Andrade Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, David here. Before you get to today's episode, I just wanted to say a huge thank you for all the amazing feedback on the podcast so far. We really appreciate everyone who's listened. And if you've enjoyed it, make sure you hit subscribe and leave us a review. This week, we're going to drop the first of two episodes on the very first CIA teams inserted into Afghanistan in the days immediately after September 11. The second of those episodes will be out Wednesday next week. I hope you enjoy. The warlord was standing in a small group of his senior officers. He moved with a strength and confidence that commanded attention and respect.

He smiled at the difficulty the Americans had in getting down from their horses. Welcome, welcome, my friends, he said, extending his hand to the CIA officer and his men. In just a few minutes, we'll start the attack. The warlord motioned them towards the battlefield. As the first line of cavalry reached the infantry line, an officer in the middle of the line stood in his stirrups and raised a sword in the air. A shouted command could be heard above the firing and the line of horsemen surged forward almost as one. Dostum turned his horse towards them, raising his arm and motioning in a broad sweep toward the battle.

Come friends, let's follow the attack. We can see nothing from here. And with that, he turned and kicked his horse's flanks, riding straight into the fight raging before them. I'm Gordon Carrera, and that's an account by J.R. Seeger, one of the first CIA officers in Afghanistan after 9-11. And he's describing one of the cavalry charges mounted against the Taliban in the opening battles of the war in Afghanistan. Yes, and I'm David McCloskey. Welcome to The Rest is Classified. This time we are telling the story of the very first CIA teams that went into Afghanistan in the weeks after the 9-11 attack. And I think Afghanistan, in kind of the CIA consciousness over the last generation, is a tremendous amount of resonance, right? I mean,

this is a place where there've been 18 CIA casualties in Afghanistan since 9-11. It's more than any other war in the agency's history. And maybe that doesn't sound like a massive number, but the agency is a very small place. This is a place where a lot of officers who came in after 9-11 served in Afghanistan. We're going to talk today about really the beginning of all that and the story of the very first casualty in Afghanistan, a paramilitary officer named Mike Spann, who was on this team that was inserted behind Taliban lines really just weeks after 9-11. It's a story of, as we heard in the opening quote, of cavalry charges,

horseback and forts. I mean, there is a Wild West feel to it, isn't there? There's very much a Wild West feel to this. It's a period, I think, where we were the insurgents in Afghanistan, which now is a very, it's almost impossible to think about that, but there was a Taliban government and the US and its allies were actually trying to overthrow it in many respects. And there were so few CIA officers there, which is another theme of this story. It's an exceptionally light footprint before this whole kind of militarization of the war that was to come. So we're recording it now with the Taliban back in control of Afghanistan after the US withdrew a couple of years ago.

But this is a point in which they are first overthrown by the US. And I think it raises some interesting questions about whether things could have turned out differently in Afghanistan in the following years based on what happened at this period in 2001. But let's go back, let's start in 2001 and that period around the time of 9-11, those attacks on the US in September 2001. Well, yes, the Afghanistan of 2001. Is it really a country? It's kind of a question. If it is, it's an unlucky one.

In the words of its former president, Hamid Karzai, it's a patchwork of, and this is going to be critical for the story here, but it is a patchwork of ethnic groups. The Pashtuns, which are sort of the dominant ethnic group in Afghanistan, are governing it on September 11th, run by this group called the Taliban, or as they like to call themselves, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. And for hundreds of years, Afghanistan had been sort of Pashtun ruled. But about half the population are not Pashtuns and have really resisted for much of that time sort of domination by Pashtuns. There are Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Hazara, which was sort of a Shia group. And there's been a civil war in the 90s between all of these groups, between 1992 and 1996, that's absolutely brutal. Bunch of ethnic killings, people locked and sort of baked alive in shipping containers. I mean, Kabul didn't have electricity for much of the 90s. And another key point here, Gordon, I think to sort of set up how the Afghanistan, the CIA comes into is that it's only recently that the Taliban has really conquered many of the places that we're going to discuss. They don't control the whole country. And there are groups of these Uzbeks and Tajiks,

so-called Northern Alliance, that have been fighting sort of this valiant rearguard action to try to resist the Taliban and who on the eve of September 11th, are really kind of losing. Many of them have been pushed out, their sort of domains have really shrunk over the last few years. And the key link with September the 11th, 2001, is that this is where Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaeda, has been based, sheltered by the Taliban, effectively planning those attacks on the United States. That's right. Yes. And he has, again, we think about bin Laden as being in hiding in a cave somewhere, but this is a period where he's close friends with the leader of the Taliban. There's a network of Al-Qaeda infrastructure and training camps in

Afghanistan. And there are hundreds, if not thousands of fighters. They're sort of an Islamic international in Afghanistan before 9-11 of fighters from all over the world who are paired up. They're Al-Qaeda, but they are effectively fighting for the Taliban. And the US and the CIA, I mean, Afghanistan has not been a high priority, has it, for these countries? So there's not much interest. It's not top of the Taliban. And the US and the CIA, I mean, Afghanistan has not been a high priority, has it, for these countries? So there's not much interest, it's not top of the agenda, but there are some links from the CIA and they've had some contact into Afghanistan in this period, particularly in the 90s. That's right. We don't have an embassy there. So there's not a CIA station or formal presence in country. It is a bit of a backwater,

I think, for the US national security establishment. But the CIA does know Afghanistan deeply. They have, it's sort of unique, I think, among the national security bureaucracy in the states in that respect. And of course, it goes back to links from the Soviet invasion when the CIA had this massive covert action program to supply the Mujahideen from 1981 to 1987. I mean, billions of dollars, tons of weapons, and a lot of cash, critically, for the story to come, a lot of cash given to warlords during that time period. So they've still got these links with these warlords from the 80s and through into the 90s. The CIA specifically, because it's the intelligence agency, it does those kind of covert clandestine links with organizations

and people like that. That's right. And as bin Laden is plotting attacks and conducting attacks against the United States through the 90s. I mean, you think about the East Africa embassy bombings, where a couple hundred Americans were killed in the late 90s, attack on the USS Cole, the destroyer in a port off of Yemen in 2000. So, bin Laden has blood on his hands before September 11th. And the United States, the CIA in particular, they're trying to find him and they are actually working with some Afghan warlords, supplying them with non-lethal equipment, communications equipment, night vision goggles, cash, in the hopes that they can help target and hunt

down bin Laden in Afghanistan. But it's been a bit, not half-hearted, but limited, that operation. And then, I guess, September 11th, 2001, nearly 3,000 Americans killed. And immediately they know it's bin Laden, don't they? Day of. Day of. And immediately they know it's bin Laden, don't they? Day of. Day of. They're sure of it. This attack has been plotted in Afghanistan. So suddenly, it moves Afghanistan to the center of the agenda with the desire to, I guess, quickly do something, which means people turn to the CIA and the agency.

That's right. And we should note that prior to 9-11, the agency had no formal authorization to actually kill bin Laden. There was no sort of off the shelf, what we'd call a covert action finding, a lethal finding to give the agency the authorization to do that. But what the CIA did have, and in particular, its counterterrorism center, there was a plan of what they would do in a kind of unconstrained environment if they had one to go and work with really warlords in Afghanistan to hunt down bin Laden. There is a so-called Blue Sky Memo commissioned by the National Security Council at the White House almost a year before 9-11, where the CIA and the Counterterrorism Center, what we call CTC, had actually come up with this plan. And it was basically, you think about the sort of militarization of the war in Afghanistan is the exact opposite of that. It was really a

prioritization of speed and agility, working with Afghan forces on the ground, this Northern Alliance, to support them, provide them with cash, provide them with weapons, provide them with intelligence, so that they could do the legwork to hunt bin Laden. And the CIA, the Pentagon, actually, interestingly enough, after 9-11, the Pentagon didn't even have proper maps of Afghanistan. The CIA is able to move quite quickly because it's got these plans in place. It's got these links with the warlords. The Pentagon wasn't. And I think there was quite a lot of tension, wasn't there? Because normally the military are the ones the president turns to

and say, can you do this for me? Can you overthrow the Taliban? Can you do something? Donald Rumsfeld was pissed off. Donald Rumsfeld, who was the Secretary of Defense at the time, was pissed off. And I remember hearing about this tension because suddenly it was the CIA people who were like, we can do this, or we can go now because we've got the links and the contacts to be able to go fast onto the ground with small teams in Afghanistan, which is the plan that they're basically coming up with. That's right. And there's a whole bunch of things now that seem insane, but the CIA's risk tolerance at that time really was much higher. The Pentagon, as they got into the planning, they were really concerned with, okay, well, if we send in any kind

of special forces teams, do we have the ability to kind of do search and rescue, right? The CIA was basically like, if we send our people in and things go sideways, we're going to die anyway, so we don't care. So there's a difference between how the Pentagon, the US military approaches these things and how the more nimble, if you like, in this case, CIA does it. That's right. And the plan was really that the CIA would send in these small teams, eight people or so, so very small, to link up with army special forces or sort of Green Berets, as they're colloquially known, to link up with these warlords and basically use US air power intelligence to supplement the warlords' infantry to take the fight to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. And the plan again is really to make

the US worthy insurgents in this plan, fighting against the Taliban. And it was run out of CIA headquarters by the counter-terrorist center. And this interesting guy called Kofa Black, who I've met, he's slightly larger than life character, larger in every sense, big guy, quite intimidating, speaks with a slightly unusual accent. I think he spent some time in England. He did, yes. Slightly inflected English accent. And I always remember someone else telling me, who was being sent into Afghanistan, that he went in to see Kofa and Kofa said, I want you to go there and I want you to bring back Bin Laden's head in a box on dry ice.

Which is a fairly graphic description of what you want. And I went to see Kofa Black about it and asked him about it. And I said, Kofa is, you know, do you remember saying that? And he just went, well, you know, I was like a junkyard dog which had been led off the leash. And I said, yeah, but did you kind of give that order? It sounds like- That's a yes, I think. It sounds like assassination and all. And he said, Gordon, it's called combat. That was his line to me. So he's that kind of character. So suddenly the CIA is kind of

unleashed to do things and go for places and go for people in a way it hadn't been before. You know, a sense of being bruised because of what happened on 9-11. Right. And I think we cannot emphasize that enough in the story as we are talking about a period where we are days or weeks at most distance from 3,000 Americans having been killed, and frankly, the specter of much more horror potentially coming, which now when we look back, we say, well, it didn't happen. But there's an urgency to it. And by really a week after, all of the legal dominoes are in place for the CIA to go to Afghanistan and try to bring his head back in a box. And so these teams are being sent. So these small teams are going to have to get into Afghanistan

with what, bundles of cash? Yes. And meet the warlords. That's the idea of it. There is a lot of cash that goes in. And so the first team actually goes in in the last week of September. And we should say here that a lot of what we know about this story all around Team Alpha and some of the immense detail comes from Toby Harnden's brilliant book, First Casualty, which I would absolutely commend to the listener if they want to read more about this incredible subject. And so, they go in, in the last week of September, with $3 million in cash,

non-sequential bills as one does. That's quite a lot, isn't it? It's kind of big pallets. In the memoirs from this time, there's a lot of discussion about how heavy the money is, where they store it. I mean, they end up, they're not bringing safes with them into the country. So, all this money is actually just being stored in duffel bags and pelican cases and things like that. And just kind of used almost as furniture in the places where the CIA officers are staying. Now, the first teams go in, they link up with a group of the Northern Alliance, just kind of north of Kabul in a place called the Panjshir Valley.

Now, this group that goes in first effectively doesn't do much for the first couple weeks other than try to get this thing going. There's a lot of diarrhea. There's a lot of coffee drinking and a lot of hand wringing from Washington because the fall of Kabul is a complicated affair. You have to be careful. We talked about the ethnic diversity of Afghanistan.

You need to be careful about- Who takes Kabul? Who takes it, right? Yeah, because I remember this. What is the government going to do? They were worried that if the wrong group takes it, they're going to just massacre everyone and it's all going to go wrong. They want it to hurry up, but they also don't want it to go wrong.

Right. all going to go wrong. So they want it to hurry up, but they also don't want it to go wrong. And so this group working with Tajiks north of Kabul are kind of, nothing quite gets going militarily for a few weeks, but there is an Uzbek warlord up in Northern Afghanistan, who has just recently returned from exile in Turkey. And he is a man by the name of Abdul Rashid Dostum. Okay, let's talk about him because he is a really interesting character. I spoke to someone who was in Afghanistan at this time, a Brit, and who was saying, A, he thought he was a bit like Attila the Hun, was his parallel. And his description of him was evil, but likable. Evil, but likable. That is a very fair description, I would say. So he is, I think he's a Dothraki horse lord,

is what he is. Okay, from Game of Thrones. So, he's a big guy. He looks sort of bearish. He's got this kind of gruff persona. He also smiles a lot. He laughs a lot. He has never been allowed to visit the US because of his sort of allegations of war crimes, right? He has a reputation for being really a, he's a very skilled fighter and politician. He's a brawler. He is a practitioner of the game of Buzkashi, which is a sort of polo-esque kind of horse-mounted game in which instead of, you know, you're battling over a headless calf, right? So, he's 47 in 2001. And the other thing to note about him, other than a reputation for violence, is that he fought for the communist regime in Afghanistan, right? He's taken money from the Russians, the Iranians, the Turks, the Indians. He's been a

partner with a lot of these Northern Alliance ethnic groups, but he's also fought them at various points. And that reputation for brutality, there's a great story. So many of these are probably apocryphal, but we should probably share them because they become part of the lore. There's a story that Dostum had a man actually chained to the tracks of a Russian made tank in a courtyard of one of his forts and actually drove the tank around until it smashed the guy to pieces. There were stories about him actually crushing people's skulls in his hands and that he was known to eat 12 chickens at a time and drink two quarts of vodka in one sitting. So anytime you're a warlord that's got this sort of

lore around you, you're probably doing something right. And this is the kind of the guy the CIA are going to work with? I mean, yes, the answer is yes. Right. And is that a little bit awkward, but I guess needs must, is that the thinking? That's right. I mean, he's not trusted by the CIA at this point. In fact, the CIA has not been in contact with him in the 90s. The CIA- Because he's too bad. He's too... Yes. He was not seen as the most sort of trustworthy ally for very good reasons. All the side switching and the war crimes, to name a few. But the CIA after 9-11, they need to get in

touch with him because he is that little patch of terrain that he sort of naturally would own in Northern Afghanistan, and which he did own and essentially ran as a mini state in the 1990s, is really crucial. How do you get in touch with someone like that if you haven't been in touch with them? Well, clearly you work through a friend who used to work at the National Automobile Dealers Insurance Trust in Washington, DC. Yes. So, Dostum, again, has no direct relationship with CIA. Dostum has a friend in the States who in the 80s got sort of connected to Afghanistan because one of his colleagues at the National Automobile Dealers Insurance Trust was an Afghan politician who had left after the war. So, Dostum gets in

touch with this guy who puts Dostum in touch with the Pentagon. Dostum gets put in touch with the CIA and specifically with a CIA officer named David Tyson, who's going to be critical for the story to come, and who is the only Uzbek linguist at the CIA. He's a Central Asian focused case officer who's been working in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, out of the station there. And he's the one person who speaks Uzbek in the CIA. He becomes a very important person in the CIA at this point, having probably not been the most important person previously. That's right.

And he's going in then with the team to see Dostum. That's right. And he gets on the phone with Dostum and says, you know, Dostum, of course, is asking him, well, how many tanks will you bring? And David Tyson says, well, it'll just be me and six or seven guys, but don't worry, we'll bring our sleeping bags. And of course, Dostum in the accounts is audibly taken aback by how light this footprint is going to be. But he's used to sort of improvising and he says, well, I have no armored personnel carriers or heavy guns. All I've got is horses, mules, and donkeys. So I suppose we're even. Okay. So with the CIA preparing to join

Dostum for this guerrilla war on horseback, let's take a break. We're in Afghanistan. It's just weeks after the 9-11 attacks in 2001 on the United States, which were carried out by Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. He's being sheltered in Afghanistan by the Taliban. And the CIA has sent in teams to try and link up with Afghan warlords who in turn have been battling the Taliban. David, tell us about what those teams are and what they're going to do. One of the teams I think we'll talk about extensively here is the CIS Team Alpha. And they are the first team that will actually go behind Taliban lines, be inserted

behind Taliban lines to link up with this Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum. And these teams, they're constructed in a very interesting way. They're small, Team Alpha's eight people. And the structure is basically, they're going to be headed by a senior operations officer who's going to have real deep regional expertise and linguistic ability to actually communicate with the Afghans that they're linked up with. Paramilitary officers, right? Because you think about that as basically a CIA officer who's going to have the ability to fight, to be armed. I mean, everyone will be armed.

But these are guys who have really special forces backgrounds, special operations backgrounds prior to joining the agency. And it might be worth saying here that that's something which the CIA does, which, for instance, MI6 in Britain doesn't do in the same way. The CIA has analysts. It has case officers, the people who kind of handle agents, and it's got this paramilitary division who are, if you like, the gunslingers. That's right. And at the time, it's known as the Special Activities Division. These guys, many of them work in ground branch is what it's called, that have these paramilitary officers that usually come out of army special forces or special operations backgrounds. There's a medic, a communication specialist, and as

many linguists as they could possibly fit in that also sort of aligned to those roles. Now, these teams, of course, they're going into a country that's ruled by the Taliban, and they're doing this under very covert auspices, right? So, there's not a lot of military equipment. And in fact, the teams went to outdoor and camping stores, in many cases, around Washington, DC to get the kit that they would bring in with them. Cargo pants, dry wick shirts, camping towels, binoculars, all this kind of stuff, because they didn't want anything to indicate sort of a military, in most cases, military or CIA, of course, or even an American sort of connection. Because I've seen some pictures and video of these guys, and they're wearing jeans,

some of them, jeans and a fleece and some boots. I mean, that's the look rather than kind of military gear. That's right. That's right. And a few of these guys are worth mentioning specifically. The head of Team Alpha is a case officer named J.R. Seeger, who's an expert on Afghanistan's tribes. There's a guy named, a paramilitary officer named Mike Spann, who's a former Marine. And there's David Tyson, who we mentioned before, who's the CIA's sole Uzbek linguist. He's added to the team a little bit late because of the connection with Dostum and the fact that Tyson speaks the language. And before leaving, all of these guys think it's important to say, there's a sense that, I mean, they know that they're going into immense danger. So, they update

their wills. A bunch of them have what they call kill files on their computers, which are basically instructions to their family on everything to be done in the case of their death. They go in on the 17th of October, Team Alpha. And there's a lot of debate over how to get them in. And of course, we think now about supply routes during the war into Afghanistan that were very stable. They had nothing of the sort. So there really is a debate about how to get them into the country. They think about parachuting.

They think about paying smugglers to bring them in. Eventually, they decide to fly in on two Blackhawk helicopters from Uzbekistan. And, you know, this is an interesting helicopter flight in because they've got, there's no seats, so everyone's just sitting on Pelican cases. They have, of course, a large green sack stuffed with $3 million in non-sequential $100 bills. Everyone has an East German version of the Kalashnikov rifle, a nine millimeter Glock pistol, and David Tyson has a pistol that he took from Tashkent Station. Its serial number ends in 007, which is- Little James Bond reference.

Little James Bond reference. That's right. And Tashkent Station is the CIA base. In Uzbekistan. That's in Uzbekistan. Exactly. Exactly. They've got no body armor or helmets, of course. They've got these little silk blood chits that basically say, you know, I'm a friend in all of the them the kind of support they need to be able to try and eject the Taliban from power. That's the plan. But that means working with Dostum. How do they get on with Dostum?

I'm curious. This kind of Dothraki warlord, as you've described him. I mean, it must be a strange relationship on both sides. I think it is strange, although it does help that the night they show up, J.R. Seeger hands him a bag that has a million dollars in it. So that's always a useful hello. That gets the CIA team invited in to, quote, have some tea, which is essentially a war council. And so we're 36 days after 9-11, and the CIA finally has a team behind enemy lines in Afghanistan. Now, I will say

they get on pretty well with Dostum because there is this incredible alignment of interest. And they basically set up and link up with him. And initially it is, of course, it's a little bit, they're feeling out how to work with one another. They set up at a place to, again, there's gonna be Wild West references throughout this. They set up at a place to, again, there's going to be Wild West references throughout this. They set up at a base and they nicknamed the Alamo. It's a sort of mud walled structure. They link up with a group of Army Special Forces or Green Berets.

This is US Special Forces, right? US Special Forces. The Green Berets are sort of organized into these groups called, call them Operational Detachment Alpha or A-Teams. These are 12-man groups. And the idea here is that this eight-man CIA team and these special forces teams will combine forces to both convince Dostum sort of how to fight, where to fight, but also bring in air power, US air power, which is going to be absolutely critical to the fight against the Taliban. And so, after they get into Afghanistan, they sleep for a few hours and the next morning,

Dostum appears at the Alamo early and he's on a horse. He's on his white horse named Sirkun. Pieces of this are going to feel like they're out of the Mongol conquests. And in fact, Dostum, he's an Uzbek, he's Turkic, he links himself by lineage to Genghis Khan and the Golden Horde. Right. In his mind. In his mind, he is the modern manifestation of Genghis Khan. It's out of, if you've seen the 1965 flick with Omar Sharif as Genghis Khan, he's got the white horse, this sort of burly Mongol.

And they basically, they come up with a plan whereby they'll get as close as possible to these Taliban encampments, which by the way, are not far off. They're in this sort of mountainous river valley. The Taliban control it. The idea is they're going to get close to those and they're going to bring down US air power. And Dostum has this great line after they come up with the plan. He says, now we will go and kill the Taliban. We leave in 15 minutes. We're going to get on with it.

We're going to get on with it. And horses are part of the plan. I mean, that's the thing. It's not just how he rides around. They're actually part of the battle plan. That's right. Well, you can't... We're talking about terrain that is a valley with massive ridges and cliffs and mountains on either side. So you can't drive a jeep. You can't drive most places.

Yeah. Yeah. So horses are absolutely critical to how you move around and scout the enemy's positions. Now, they take up a position on a hilltop over where the Taliban is, and this is going to be sort of the one model of attack here, is that they'll look down. Now, Dostum, it's important to say at this point, has a sense that if CIA officers die, if Green Berets die, the United States will just immediately leave. And so he really wants to keep these guys distant from combat and safe, which leads to some tension. And it also makes it a lot harder to call in airstrikes initially. So to start, you have a big B-52 bomber flying overhead. The special forces

there are trying to sort of guide the bomb in. Laser point targets. Laser point targets, trying to guide the bomb. Laser point targets. Laser point targets, or to give the coordinates. Right, so that the air support can come in. They demonstrate... I mean, you think about these big 2000 pound bombs detonating on Taliban positions. It's quite the demonstration, but to start, it's not particularly militarily effective because they're so far away. Although it will be noted, of course, that it is extremely terrifying to the Taliban to finally have an air force fighting against them.

But over time, over just a few days, Dostum sort of relents. The Americans start to get closer. There's also air force controllers that are brought in to more effectively target the munitions. And this is where you get this very interesting piece of the sort of battles here, because we're going to actually have essentially a kind of playbook in which US air power is brought in on Taliban positions, bunkers, trenches, things like that. And then the Uzbeks will ride in mounted on cavalry. There'll be cavalry charges, sometimes of four, five,

600 people charging Taliban lines after the US has bombed them. It does sound like something out of deepest history rather than something that happened 20 years ago. I spoke to one- Or Game of Thrones. Or Game of Thrones, exactly. I spoke to one person who'd witnessed one of these. I don't think he wants me to use his name, but he knows who he is. And he talks about watching these cavalry charges and they would put their heads down so they couldn't get hit, you know, kind of beneath the horse's head, then ride and kind of jump over the trenches. So they were kind of then behind the Taliban positions and then kind of attack the

Taliban positions from behind, having literally kind of jumped those trenches on horseback. And I mean, it sounds like quite a sight. Well, and it must be some of the largest cavalry sort of action since Second World War. Yeah. I don't know when else we've had cavalry charges recently. Well, and it is, I think it's worth a note on the Uzbek fighters and the horses, because the guys who are on the ground, the Team Alpha guys will note just how much willpower these horsemen have, how much suffering they've endured. And it makes them relentless and quite cruel in many respects. And of course,

the Team Alpha guys, David Tyson, Mike Spann, J.R. Seager, they have to be on horseback a lot. Now, many of that Team Alpha group were actually fairly accomplished horsemen and had experience on horses in the States. Hang on a sec. Is this normal in CIA training? Did you get taught how to ride a horse? Absolutely. Day one, they put you on horseback, just to see. Can you ride a horse? Seriously? They didn't put you through that? No, no, no. I had no horseback training during my time. That's not how I imagined the CIAs.

It's not normal. But the Afghan, these Uzbek horses, and the Uzbeks, by the way, will call their horses to the Americans Uzbek Humvees is how they refer to them. They're smaller than horses you ride in the States. They're meaner. They fight with one another. And the Uzbeks have trained them to run toward gunfire rather than away. David Tyson will still recount these rides up, you know, in kind of in this valley, sometimes 12, 15 hours. And you're in, you're on horses that are too small.

You're riding with saddles that are essentially like cardboard, very small saddles, stirrups that are too small for large American feet. It's extremely uncomfortable, extremely uncomfortable. And in fact, the Uzbeks get quite a lot of joy about how terrible the Americans are at riding their horses. So in the morning before David Tyson sort of gets into the saddle, one of Dostum's men got fond of bringing his own horse over and making his horse fight David Tyson's horse until David Tyson fell off. So this is the strategy. You're going to use horseback, cavalry charges, and air power. So a kind of mix of old and new to take on the Taliban. And the target for this group is a crucial city in the north of Afghanistan, isn't it?

Mazar-e-Sharif. You're not going to let me tell the condom story. Tell the condom story. You wanted to tell this story. All right. There's before we get to Mazar-e-Sharif and the military objective, there's of course a tremendous amount of culture shock between Team Alpha and their Uzbek companions. And all of the supplies are coming in by airdrop. Now, one thing to also note here is Abdul Rashid Dostum is a huge fan of military readies. These military meals, MREs. The ones you carry around and you can heat up quickly. That's right. Meals ready to eat. So he's a big fan of these.

He must be one of the few people who is. That's right. So every airdrop he loves when they bring in the MREs, but they also bring in some, a couple of Dostum's men ask for what they call devil's water, which is vodka. CIA drops Tashkent station in Uzbekistan is supplying these airdrops. They put some vodka in one and the station chief in Tashkent decided it would be fun as kind of a joke if he included some Uzbek condoms in one of the airdrops. Now, David Tyson tried to convince the Afghans that they were just for covering up their rifles. And there actually is something to be said for covering up your rifle with a condom because then it won't get wet, dirt won't get in. But the Afghans noticed there was a

picture of a scantily clad Uzbek woman on one of the wrappers, which led to more questions about what these actually were. David Tyson tried to explain they were prophylactics. The Afghans thought, why would we ever need these? There's some great stories about Afghans actually wearing them around to try them on. Then eventually, when some of them became frustrated with this, David Tyson apologized and said, no, no, they're just rifle covers. Don't worry about it.

So how easy was it for this CIA team to communicate with these Uzbek horsemen? Well, and of course, David Tyson spoke Uzbek. But for most of them, I think there really is this, and frankly, I think even for David Tice in the sense of there's a tremendous chasm between the cultures, obviously, but also just the ways of thinking, right? I mean, when the team alpha guys are talking with the Afghans about calling in, like where they call in an airstrike, the team alpha guys, the Americans are trying to find, they're trying to get like geocoordinates, you know, or point a laser at something. And the Afghans are talking about the elevation of the distances in relation to other pieces

of the geography, not in terms of meters or yards or steps or anything like that. They don't use that. They don't use that. They don't think about sort of the world that way. You know, Dostum could read a map. Most of his men couldn't. Even in their language, they couldn't read a map. And it's interesting talking with CIA Afghan hands who served in the country over the past 25 years, a lot of the assets, the Afghan assets, they wouldn't- The agents.

The agents- Yeah, that we're working with. In the ground. This is true of the Uzbeks then. Wouldn't really know what numbers were. And so, if they were given a phone and told to call this number at this time, it just wouldn't compute. And so, you have to enter a number into the phone, save it, and then put like a little orange sticker on the three and say, you're going to push this sticker when you need to talk to me because there's the idea of three, the number just wasn't in the vocabulary.

And yet, I don't say any of this to say that these guys weren't intelligent or smart. These guys were extremely physically courageous and it's a fighting kind of martial culture that the CIA was walking into. And yet the ability to sort of communicate was remarkably absent. They're moving toward Mazar-e-Sharif. It's the largest city in Northern Afghanistan. It is Dostum's former capital when he had run this region during the civil war in the 90s. It has the longest runway, military sort of runway in Afghanistan. And it's a critical piece of the fight against the Taliban. Now, I think it is worth noting here, Gordon, that the CIA teams at this point, their goal,

as Kofor Black so colorfully said, was to bring back bin Laden's head in a box. But as we're seeing over the first few weeks of this conflict, confusion might be too strong, but are we trying to unseat the Taliban or are we trying to hunt bin Laden? And I think the CIA teams at this point are very focused on the fight against the Taliban as a jumping off point to get to the Al-Qaeda fighters and bin Laden, right? Yeah. And I think it's a really important point because actually, I think in the long run, that confusion between Al-Qaeda and Taliban, I remember they used to call it the US military, you know, times I went to Afghanistan, AQT, and they'd conflate the two. But actually, they are different groups. But at this point, they think we've got to get rid of the Taliban

in order to get to Al-Qaeda because the Taliban have been sheltering them. And there's a fusion of them, right? Yeah, there's an overlap. As they're moving through this valley toward Mazar-e-Sharif, having essentially a series of battles with the Taliban where U.S. air power is brought down, the Uzbeks charge on horseback, they take a position, they take a village, they're moving toward Mazar-e-Sharif. Al-Qaeda is embedded with the Taliban, right? I mean, there are Al-Qaeda battalions that actually fight alongside the Taliban. So, you can see how you get this sort of confusion about who are we, you know, what's the ultimate goal? You're going to have to fight both. And there is kind of this sort of fundamental question that hangs, I think, over the engagement between Team Alpha and Dostum, which is, okay, the CIA wants bin Laden. What Dostum wants are his lands back and

his power, his ability to sort of deal with the central government in Kabul. So, you have this kind of tension hanging over it. And in fact, on the way to Mazar-e-Sharif, which by the way, along the way, the CIA team picks up something they call the magic bus, which is a Soviet era. It's a 10-ton Soviet truck with yellow soccer ball stickers on its doors. It's named after the Who song, and it's a solution to the horseback problem. They pick this thing up, and as they get out of the mountains, the CIA team decides we're not going to ride on these awful tiny Uzbek horses. We're going to ride in the magic bus. So as they're cruising into Mazar-e-Sharif or toward Mazar-e-Sharif, David Tyson at one point says to Dostum,

we're going to use you and you're going to use us until we get to Mazar. So it is this sense of what happens as we sort of think about the future of Afghanistan. We don't know. It's very transactional. That's right. Transactional and uncertain as you get to the future. But I mean, they take Mazar-e-Sharif pretty quickly and effectively, don't they? I mean, that's an important victory in the overall war against the Taliban and the toppling of the Taliban. That's right. And the Taliban had only held Mazar-e-Sharif for three years. They conquered it in 1998. When they did, the Taliban lost 12,000 men taking the city.

The Northern Alliance, as they cruise in with the T-MALFA on the magic bus behind them, there's fewer than 100. And the US doesn't even bomb the city. So you do have this, there's this sense, I think, that, well, everything's working, going according to plan. They go in. It's a scene of really jubilation in the city because this is kind of Dostum's patch of territory. The Green Berets are in horses.

The CIA Team Alpha is going in on the magic bus. Dostum arrives in kind of a white land cruiser. He's filmed. People are coming out. The markets are open. There's a shrine in Masri Sharif, which the Taliban had closed, shuttered over the last three years that reopens there. You know, women are not in burqas. So, there's this sense that something is lifted, right? In this sort of air of kind of jubilation and celebration in the town. Dostum goes in and sort of famously prays at this. He's not a

religious man by any stretch, but he knows- He knows he's going to do it. He knows he's a good showman, I think we can say for a horse lord. He prays at this shrine. He's got tears streaking down his face and kind of takes a victory lap around Northern Afghanistan because the Taliban have been defeated. I mean, they've landed on the 17th of October. In three weeks, they've taken the largest city in northern Afghanistan, this critical piece, and they've won every battle along the way. And it's a significant moment in the overall war as well, isn't it? Because there was frustration, I remember, in London and Washington that things until then had actually been going a bit slowly. They'd appeared stuck. Everyone was wondering about, I remember all this

talk about the Afghan winter, and if once that set in, it would be a disaster. And yet suddenly, things move very fast after this, and Kabul is about to fall, and it looks like the Taliban about to be ejected from power. But the question is, have the Taliban really been defeated here in Mazar-e-Sharif? Have they really disappeared? Have they really surrendered? It's not quite so simple, is it? No. And what we'll see is that it is not at all what it seems. Taliban and Al-Qaeda are regrouping for really another attempt at the city. And it's going to be a battle of medieval proportions in some respects, ancient in others,

because there will be a Trojan horse involved. More horse lords, of course, a prison revolt in Masri Sharif. And Gordon, you'll like this, some Brits are going to get involved as well. On that note, thank you for listening to The Rest is Classified.