The Rest Is Classified - 5. CIA vs the Taliban: Bin Laden's Trojan Horse (Ep 2)

Episode Date: December 11, 2024

Mazar i-Sharif has fallen without much of a fight. The Taliban's grip on Afghanistan is looking all the more shaky. It seems as if the American policy to work with the warlords is paying dividends. Enemy fighters are surrendering to them. But is it all too rosy? In the centre of Mazar i-Sharif, the Americans take 400 Al-Qaeda captives to Qala-i-Jangi, the Fort of War. They believe they have surrendered. But all is not as it seems... Listen as David McCloskey and Gordon Corera discuss the first CIA teams in Afghanistan in the days 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 Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Callum Hill Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When Allah had made the rest of the world, he saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and then threw them down onto the earth. That was Afghanistan. I'm Gordon Carrera and that's a quote from Ahmad Rashid, the journalist, in his account of Afghanistan, recounting a folk tale about the creation of this country where our episode is set. Well, welcome to The Rest Is Classified. I'm David McCloskey and we're telling the story, Gordon, of the first CIA team that was sent into Afghanistan, this country of bits and pieces, went behind enemy lines, linked up with a

fairly notorious warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum, and fought their way against the Taliban all the way to the city. Folks have listened to the last episode of Mazar-e-Sharif, where we last left them. They took the city from the Taliban without pretty much any fighting, and they are now ensconced in a fort, waiting to see what happens next. That's right. And this is the crucial setting for the story we're going to tell in this episode, the fortress of Kale-i-Jangi, or the Fort of War, as it's known, a place which has now been taken by the Uzbek forces of Dostum and the CIA team, but which previously was run by the Taliban. Listeners who listened to the last episode will, of course,

recognize there were Wild West references throughout. Horseback cavalry charges. Horseback cavalry charges and forts. And we've got another fort, Kali Jangi. It is a gigantic, essentially hulk of mud that sort of rises out of these plains outside of Mazar-e-Sharif. It's massive, isn't it? It's massive. For our listeners, I would picture it almost as a distended six-pointed star that is about a half a kilometer, for our American listeners, a third of a mile across. It has, at each of its six points, a large tower that rises about 80 feet up. Its walls, we say mud, that makes it sound weak. It's not at all. They're about 30 feet thick.

They're sort of parapets. There are moats. There's sort of a big grade that rises up to the walls from the fields below surrounded by moats there's firing slits out of the towers these towers again are not you know dainty things they are big enough so that a tank can literally go up these paths to get to the top to fire down it is is a massive structure. I mean, literally, there are fields planted inside it. That's how large it is. Yeah, with trees and things like that. That's right. And separate houses. I think there's one called the Pink House, which is going to be an important

part of our story. And I think it is worth setting up here that this place was Abdul Rashid Dostum's headquarters when he ran Mazar-e-Sharif. So as the CIA's Team Alpha and Dostum have come to Mazar-e-Sharif and retaken it, they've reestablished essentially their headquarters there. And I think a little more on the structure of the fort is critical, this is an old 19th century fort. It's been occupied by the British. It was actually built by the British. Gordon, it's been occupied by the Soviets. And the Taliban have been using it essentially as a base during their occupation of Mazar-e-Sharif. And we should think about it almost as that star that's going to have been divided in half.

There's a southern compound and there's a northern compound. The southern compound, which is going to be absolutely critical to the story to come, has in its center this thing called the Pink House, which is a kind of Soviet-built concrete structure. It's only a story above ground, but it has these massive fortified bunkers underneath it that were used for storage, probably for torture by the Taliban because they're sort of blood spattered by the time CIA Team Alpha arrives. And also the Taliban in their withdrawal, critically, Gordon, they've covered the entire place in feces. So it is a disastrous mess by the time the CIA arrives. And we heard in the last episode, Mazar-e-Sharif fell without really a fight.

So what has happened to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? They surrendered? Is that the right way of putting it? Yes, ish. Surrender-ish. So interestingly, the CIA and Timav have taken Mazar-e-Sharif. The Taliban has, quote unquote, surrendered. But there is still a force of Taliban in another city outside of Mazar-e-Sharif. And Dostum has negotiated or is in the process of negotiating a surrender with this group of Taliban. Now, this group of Taliban also has an al-Qaeda fighting brigade attached to it. And of course, the CIA and the Americans want to question these people. This is potentially a goldmine, and it's still very murky. And I think we should credit, there's a journalist

named Toby Harnden, who's written probably the account of this part of the story. The negotiations over the surrender are still very murky. But what Dostum seems to negotiate over is the Taliban will surrender. they'll turn over these Al-Qaeda fighters and bring them to Mazar-e-Sharif to be questioned. And even the notion of surrender doesn't quite mean the same thing, I think, in the Afghan world of Afghan warlords as it does to us, because it's almost a kind of negotiated thing. And sometimes you keep your weapons and you're offered safe passage. It's not quite the same as just giving up and being disarmed. No, that's right. And as soon as these Al-Qaeda fighters get to the fort, it's very clear,

many of them don't think they've surrendered. Some of them think there's been a deal kind of struck for them to get safe passage to the south, to the Taliban stronghold down near Kandahar. Others think they're going to go to Iran. And still others seem to think, well, we haven't surrendered at all. We're actually here to fight. And what seems to have happened is that the Taliban commander in the north has outwitted Dostum and that these Al-Qaeda fighters are actually a Trojan horse, effectively, to get into Mazar-e-Sharif and to serve as a fighting element to take bits of the city, take the fort, and eventually allow the Taliban, who have sort of beginning to mass in some number outside the city, to come back in and retake Mazar-e-Sharif. And one of the problems is they don't all have their weapons taken off them, or they're put in the pink house, where I think there are still some weapons hidden or left over. And so it's a pretty chaotic scene.

And there's even some video, I think, of the CIA guys interrogating these people. And there's hardly anyone around. I mean, it's just these two CIA people interrogating some of the Al-Qaeda detainees and talking to them, but without much support and massively outnumbered. It's critical to kind of set this up on the morning of November 25th, 2001. So 400 of these fighters have been bussed in, put in the cellar of the pink house. Now, that makes it sound like their entrance was very peaceful to get there. It really wasn't. As soon as they're unloaded, there's instantly a suicide grenade attack that kills a couple of these Northern Alliance kind of guards, including a guy who

looks very much like Abdul Rashid Dostum. So it's very dangerous. As you mentioned, not only is Khali Jangi, I mean, the Taliban had abandoned it, but there are these massive sort of shipping containers on site that are loaded with weapons that they've left behind, including some weapons that literally date back to the early 20th century. Enfield rifles, that kind of stuff. Right, exactly. So these Al-Qaeda guys are brought in, 400 of them are put in that cellar, right? And it is an absolute potpourri of nationalities, Arabs, Turks, Uyghurs,

Indonesians, some Westerners, some white Westerners, and including an American named John Walker Lynn. And as you know, Gordon, many are not searched because there is this Afghan custom of surrender where you sort of take it on good faith that the other side is going to surrender. But the reality is that none of these guys who were in the cellar are Afghan. These are Al-Qaeda fighters from other parts of the Islamic world. Committed jihadists who hate the Americans. And many, yes, many of them, in particular, this sort of Uzbek contingent of jihadists, they're kind of heavy hitters.

They have been trained in Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They don't see themselves as prisoners, of course. And you think about that night in the cellar, right before the CIA starts questioning them, multiple prisoners are killed down there. There's explosions. There's weapons that are obviously still down there. Nobody is restrained or flex cuffed, which is astounding. I mean, in all of the sort of supply drops over the course- No one gave handcuffs. No. Yeah. Because the prisoner question hasn't been an issue until now. It's worth saying that because we're about to get into this question of interrogating and detainees.

This becomes a big issue for the United States, and especially for the CIA, is interrogation and prisoners after 9-11. They've not really thought about it. I mean, they're not set up for it. They've never really had to deal with this kind of problem before. And you absolutely get a sense of that in this case. Suddenly, you've got a whole load of detainees who've been captured, who may have valuable intelligence, maybe about where Osama bin Laden is. Many of them have met him, trained with him. Many of them have met with Osama bin Laden, so you want to interrogate them. But how do you do that? Who does that? Under what conditions? I mean, it looks very chaotic, very unprepared for, pretty haphazard and quite dangerous. The CIA guys, David Tyson and the paramilitary officer, Mike Spann, who are going to go into Khalil-e-Janghi to do this questioning,

they have been operating over this month that they've been in country. They are making basically one phone call to CIA headquarters every day to kind of report in on what's going on. They are the ones making decisions. The CIA has pushed decision-making down, and I think quite rightly, to the lowest possible level here, acknowledging that you can't run this kind of conflict from CIA headquarters. These guys have to make decisions on the ground. And so they go into Khalid Janki on the morning of November 25th, 2001, knowing that they've got the first big group of Al-Qaeda prisoners that has been detained since September 11th, and that many of these guys might know about active plots. Many of these guys know

Bin Laden potentially, and some of them might know where he is. So you can see why they want to interrogate them, but it does look extraordinary when you see some of these videos, because there is video of this, because there was a German, I think, TV crew who were- Yeah, there's journalists there. Yeah, there's journalists there at this fort. And it's just, you know, Mike Spann wearing kind of his jeans and a fleece, you know, and he's got a gun on him, but with just hundreds of Al-Qaeda prisoners just sat in front of him and very little else around him. That's right. And all these prisoners are let out of the pink house that morning. They actually, because they don't have restraints or flex cuffs, they start, they take like pieces of their clothing and turbans and things like that and actually use it to bind the prisoners. They spread them out in rows in this southern compound of the fort outside the pink house.

And they're trying, you see in the videos, Mike Spann and David Tyson are trying to question them, to figure out, you're trying to sort through 400 people, who's important, who's not. The prisoners, there's this back and forth many of them of course don't have documentation yeah it smells terrible because no one of any of these people including the americans has taken showers in weeks right they're collecting weapons from the prisoners as they come up from the pink house including in one case there's there's brass knuckles taken, there's grenades, there's rifles, there's pistols. And they get the full 400 of them kind of in these five lines kneeling

in this massive Southern compound just outside the pink house. And I think David Tyson and Mike Spann start to realize they need proper interrogators brought in to manage this because it's just going to be too much. But mid-morning, all of a sudden there are sort of shouts. You can see in the videos, there's explosions and a group of Al-Qaeda fighters come rushing out of the pink house straight at Mike Spann, who's interrogating some prisoners out of that field. And this is a point where there's essentially a

scrum, a melee. Mike Spann probably shoots a couple of them with his rifle and pistol, gets off a few shots, and then he's just overwhelmed because there's so many prisoners out in that field. Now, David Tyson is watching all of this from 40 or 50 yards away as he'd been dealing with another group of prisoners. And Tyson's going to talk later about how just time starts to slow down. He can't hear all of the explosions and the chaos around him, but he can hear Mike's band calling out his name. He's saying, Dave, Dave, Dave. And the prisoners now, it turns into- A full revolt.

Chaos. Prison prisoner revolt. Yeah. They're on the rampage and they're grabbing weapons and going for weapons, which are just lying around effectively in various parts of the compound. There's weapons everywhere. There's weapons everywhere. So they can just grab them. And Dave Tyson himself, I think, grabs a weapon. I mean, he runs initially, then there's shooting. He looks bewildered. I mean, he looks- He's in shock. He's in shock because his colleague has just been jumped on and he assumes probably killed.

That's right. In fact, later the CIA will establish that he probably died in the- Mike Spann, yeah. Right away. Mike Spann dies. Again, it's chaos and there's sort of all comers coming at him. Because I mean, frankly, some of these prisoners, they also just want to escape the fort too. But there is this sort of hardcore group that are trying to instigate this instigate this revolt. So David Tyson, you know, picture him, he's in the Southern compound.

Again, you picture this sort of star cut in half, right? He needs to run away, right? So he's trying to run into the Northern part of the fort and he has prisoners coming at him. He actually, a couple of grenades, he'll say later, bounce off of him and don't detonate. Because, of course, a lot of the weaponry there is very old. He, on his way in this run north, probably kills at least 12 Al-Qaeda fighters and maybe 40 more. The numbers, we don't know. But he just runs down this massive street up away from the fighting in the south, up toward this northern courtyard. And over the course of 11 minutes, that's it.

11 minutes, finally gets away and gets into some safety in a massive sort of building in the northern part of the compound. Which is where these journalists are. Which is where the German journalists are. It's kind of interesting because the German journalist, I think, says at the time he was kind of could sense something terrible has happened. And you could hear in the videos. I mean, it's kind of interesting because the German journalist, I think, you know, says at the time he was kind of could sense something terrible has happened. And you can hear in the videos. I mean, it's just it's chaos.

You can hear gunfire. You can hear explosions. And Dave Tyson wants his satellite phone to kind of call out. And it's quite an interesting one as a journalist at that point, because, you know, this guy's clearly CIA. How involved do you get, you know, by giving someone a phone who's going to call the CIA? But equally, your life is in danger at that point. So the German journalist said he was a bit of a pacifist and he was no fan of the CIA. But I think at this point, he realizes he's- They're all in this together.

They're all in this together in this compound. And so he gives David Tyson the phone who then, I think, makes a series of phone calls to try and basically say, things are getting bad here and we need help. Well, you think about it, you're in his position. How many phone numbers do you know off the top of your head? So he knows his wife's phone number. So he calls her. Back in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. So he calls her.

The first words out of her mouth are, happy Thanksgiving. And she's excited because actually they haven't, they've only spoken once. Very briefly. In the entire month he's been there. And so she's thrilled. But she can instantly tell something's very wrong. She can hear the explosions in the background. Basically, he gets in connection with the embassy and the station there. And the entire focus now of the

war in Afghanistan, which had been so not focused on Mazri Sharif after the victory, because we're done. The entire focus of the war is going to now focus on the fort of war, Khali-e-Janghi, in Masri Sharif. And by a bit of fortune, there are some people not that far away who are going to be able to come to the aid of the Americans. I knew you were going to bring in the Brits, Gordon. A bit of a role reversal. There's going to be British people brought in, aren't there?

Yes. It's the Brits who come riding to the rescue, like the cavalry, to the Americans in this case, because it's a contingent of the SBS. Most people have heard of the SAS, the Special Air Services. This is a special boat service who are another unit of British special forces. The clues in the title of the difference between them, but they were both operating in Afghanistan at the same time. SAS may be more famous, but the SBS will tell you they're just as good, or better, they'll tell you and uh you know i've seen pictures of these guys they're scruffy guys you know they're not again dressed as

your traditional soldiers they've got the beard burly bearded man burly beard someone actually sent me a picture of some of these guys actually at this compound at the time and you know having arrived and they certainly um look the part of what you'd expect a kind of you know deep cover british special forces team to do. And they're close by and they're real fighters. That's right. And maybe with, as I can't believe I'm saying this, the British coming to the rescue. We take a pause there with David Tyson in Kaliyajangi under heavy fire. SBS and some Americans, Gordon, some Americans on the way.

Let's pause there. And when we come back, we'll hear the exciting conclusion of this revolt in Kala'i Jangi. Welcome back. It's November the 25th, 2001, and we're in Mazar-i-Sharif and specifically Kala'i Jangi, which is the fort of war in that city. And it's the site of what's now turning into a ferocious battle. The US CIA and special forces team, along with their allies, had taken this fort. They'd been holding prisoners there, but there's been a prisoner revolt. And at the same time, it looks like the Taliban had been playing a trick, a ruse on the Americans and their allies, General Dostum, because there's another force of Taliban, I think, coming or massing at least of 800 men, which satellite imagery is picking up, potentially heading towards the town as well. And there's this revolt by the Al-Qaeda fighters inside this fort.

Mike Spann, a CIA paramilitary officer, has disappeared, I guess, under a crowd of bodies, not sure what's happened to him. And at this moment, things are looking pretty bad, actually, for the small CIA team that's there, although the Brits are coming. The Brits are coming. Thank God. And David Tyson,, for the small CIA team that's there, although the Brits are coming. The Brits are coming. Thank God. And David Tyson, he's the other CIA officer who's there, and he is trapped, really, in the kind of northern part of this compound with a team of journalists, essentially. And it's been very loud at the fort,'s say gordon over the course of that morning and so the team there's there's of course there's some green berets this kind of ragtag group frankly of other american military officers in mazari sharif who have heard this right because

they're not they're not so far away there are some brits in mazari sharif as well who really like to fight isn't't that right? Who have also heard this and sense that something's very wrong at the fort. Yeah. I like the description of them. There's a Cornishman, someone from the West riding of Yorkshire, someone from the West country. So you've got the full collection of accents. Can you do these accents for our American listeners? Because I was bewildered by what the differences might be. I'm not even going to try. They've got barber jackets on.

No, they do not have barber jackets on. They're looking rugged, I think it's fair to say. I was told not even to give any of their names or even their nicknames. Someone told me some of their nicknames. They were like, don't even use those because these guys are so deep undercover, they don't want to be identified. I think there's even actually weirdly one American who is embedded in the SBS team. He's on an exchange program. Yeah, I love it. I love this idea that you have an exchange program for Special Forces. It's like going to university in America for a year. No, no, I'll go to Britain and go to the SBS for a year.

Suddenly, he's there bailing out his fellow Americans. What's even greater is that the Americans didn't know that he was American. He's literally fighting with the Brits and the Americans think he's a Brit. I don't know how he pulled that off. He was good at drinking tea by that point, I guess. But it is interesting because they're going to play an important role in dealing with this revolt because I guess they're set up to fight. The CIA officers, were there really for intelligence and for interrogation and for guiding Dostum's

forces? They're not equipped to fight, whereas the Brits have got heavy machine guns and that kind of equipment, and they're set up to really take on the Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners. That's right. So this team of SBS officers and a fairly ragtag group of Americans decide they're not going to just let this happen. They head to the fort around the mid-afternoon. Now, they are calling in air support, of course, but it's going to take some time to get there. And when they arrive at the fort, they see that David Tyson is up in that northern compound, still under fire with the journalists, and it's absolute chaos there. The Northern Alliance guards, who we should note, there's maybe a hundred of them who are fighting

the Al-Qaeda prisoners who are rebelling in this kind of southern part of the fort. It's a crazy kind of Afghan shooting war in what a lot of the CIA guys will call Afghan spray and pray, where they're literally picking Kalashnikov rifles up and pointing them madly over their heads, getting on shoulders of another guy so they can reach over and fire wildly into the compound. So it's absolute chaos. But what the SBS team does is they get up in one of these towers.

So they kind of have a view of the northern compound where David Tyson is pinned down and the southern compound where the Al-Qaeda prisoners are. And they set up a massive general purpose machine gun, essentially, and begin to just wreak havoc into the southern compound. And then Dave Tyson escapes effectively with a German journalist. He flees over a wall at one point to try and get out and get more help. Well, yeah. Up to this point, of course, there were some other people in that kind of house with him. A couple of them had already jumped out and taken a taxi to get away. A taxi? A taxi.

So there's taxis outside? Well, this is the crazy thing about this battle is there's a battle going on inside this fort. And yet outside the fort, there's traffic on the roads. There's taxis. Life goes on. I mean, a lot of the Northern Alliance guards. It's amazing. Quotes, air quotes, guards, were vegetable farmers from around the city who had kind of come in to earn a little bit of money. And as soon as the fighting happens, they just, they flee, they go back to their farm. So you have this weird situation where there's this immense concentration of violence and chaos in the fort. And yet the town is just normal. Now, the SBS team firing up in that tower,

they're not able, although they do an incredible amount of damage to the Al-Qaeda prisoners, they're not able to actually link up with David Tyson. And David Tyson jumps over, jumps kind of down the wall with this group of this German TV crew, and they catch a cab out on the main road, get away. Now, there is some bombing of the fort during that day. I mean, air support is brought in and yet it's not enough to quell the uprising. So you kind of have this situation where at the end of the day, the SBS team has left, David Tyson has left. By the way, the Brits have maybe fired 2000 rounds over the course of that afternoon. And Mike Spann's body, though, is still in that Southern compound. And so they want to get the body for the CIA

and the Americans, and they want to effectively deal with this revolt. So this is going to be an ongoing battle. They're back. That's right. That's right. So the next day, a team decides to go back to do just that, recover the body. And they're playing a role in quelling the revolt. But the brunt of that is being sort of held by these Northern Alliance kind of guards and fighters, Dostum's people who are in the fort trying to keep Al-Qaeda atostum's people who were in the fort trying to keep Al-Qaeda at bay. They go back to the fort. The other thing that's critical to this is to defeat this Al-Qaeda group in that Southern

compound, you are going to need to bring air power to bear, which only the United States can do. By this point, J.R. Seeger, the commander of Team Alpha, has come back from being with Dostum outside of Mazar-e-Sharif, and a group of Green Berets and SBS guys go back to Kaliyajangi to try to call in airstrikes. Which they do, but although one of them goes wrong, doesn't it? Well, yeah. This is tragedy among many in this story.

But as they are working out the coordinates of where to drop this 500-pound bomb from an F-18, they put the wrong coordinates in, the pilots do. And there's a miscommunication between the pilots and the team on the ground. And they actually end up bombing a tower that's held by the Northern Alliance. They destroy a tank that killed maybe six Northern Alliance fighters. And there are four Green Berets who are actually injured in this airstrike. So the first four Purple Hearts, which is an award given for being wounded in combat, go to these Green Berets from friendly fire. These are the first four Purple Hearts in Afghanistan.

Over the next 20 years, there's going to be another 57,000 Purple Hearts awarded, but these are the first four. And so you've got that, you've got the air support coming in. I think helicopter gunships as well, these AC-130s come in to help try and clear the fort. And this is starting to turn the tide now. So it's the next day, right? I mean, we're kind of, it starts to really extend this revolt because this pink house,

this cellar is almost impenetrable. So these committed fighters can kind of go in there for cover. So they bring in overnight an AC-130 gunship, which is this big rotor plane, essentially, four-rotor plane, that the Taliban call them water buffaloes by the end of the conflict. It can fire from some of its guns 7,200 rounds per minute, and it has the largest airborne gun in the world on it. And they bring that to bear for over an hour over the fort. But al-Qaeda, they're still firing mortars. They're still embedded in the pink house as this gunship is working eight miles away at the kind of new headquarters in Masri Sharif. For the CIA and the Green Berets, you can hear that the windows

are rattling from this gunship working, and yet Al-Qaeda is still there. So how do they get them out in the end? What's the... Well, so initiative, I think at this point kind of does start to shift. I mean, a lot of the Al-Qaeda is still there. So how do they get them out in the end? What's the... Well, so initiative, I think at this point kind of does start to shift. I mean, a lot of the Al-Qaeda forces are dead. Now we should note the critical thing for the agency is Mike's band's bodies is still there. But I think the tides are shifting at this point, after this amount of sort of air power has been brought to bear. The compound, and we should say, Gordon, I mean, at this point, it is medieval in its carnage. I mean, there are bodies and body parts everywhere. You can see

there's dead horses. Some of the horses, actually, it looks like the Taliban have been kind of cutting them up to eat them, or the Al-Qaeda guys, rather, to eat them while they're in there. It's an absolute mess. And the Northern Alliance, though, is starting to make some inroads into that southern compound. They're bringing larger tanks in to actually clear it. And yet again, it's insane. As they get closer to the pink house, there's yet another grenade attack from inside, from these prisoners, that kills more Northern Alliance guys, even as they try to uproot them. And so finally, they're basically ensconced in this pink house and they've closed in on them. And that's where the last hideout is of those Al-Qaeda fighters. That's right. Now they do manage to finally clear it with the exception of the cellar of the pink

house. And they're trying to find Mike Spann's body. And one of the Afghan commanders, David Tyson, now has come back in to sort of identify where Mike's body might be. And one of the Afghan commanders approaches David Tyson and says, Mike was wearing cowboys, right? That's the term that Afghans use for blue jeans. And he was, he's wearing that and a fleece. And they find the body exactly where David Tyson thought it was. And they put him into a body bag, they drape it with the stars and stripes, and he's carried out of Kalijangi. He's going to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. And it is, you know, 3,000 Americans had died on 9-11, obviously hundreds of Afghans in the war up to that point, but this is the first casualty of this new stage of the war on terror.

But they still have Al-Qaeda in the pink house. And the way they deal with them is quite amazing because rather than go in there and fight, I mean, they flood it. They flood it. Well, they come up with some other ideas first, don't they? So you can see in the video, I mean, tossing grenades in, firing rocket-propelled grenades in, shooting Afghans pray and pray in. They try to pump diesel down some of the vents and then light it, but of course, it's not flammable. It doesn't light. And then they do eventually have this idea on the 30th of November,

so the fifth day of the uprising, we're just going to pump this thing full of water. And so they divert an irrigation stream, pump the cellar full of water. And they do that for, it takes a long time, of course, to fill up over a day to kind of fill it up. And eventually 13 fighters come out and surrender one day on the 30th and then 73 the next. So 86 Al-Qaeda prisoners survived this chaos. And finally at last- They surrender. ... the uprising's over. I met someone who went into that cellar not long afterwards, a Brit. And he said to me, it was medieval. This place, this kind of... it was like a dungeon, you know, that had been flooded and just the sense of kind of evil and death there, which sounds extraordinary. But out now they've got these prisoners and among them actually is an American, John Walker Lynn, which is astonishing.

You know, the American Taliban, as he's called, you know, who's captured and seen on video being interrogated, who was one of those last fighters who'd been in there, injured during the fighting. But then finally at this point, they've got back control. They've got the fort and that battle is over. That's right. So where's Dostum all this time as the battle's going on? Yeah, Dostum has missed the entire battle, hasn't he? So he is away trying to negotiate the surrender with some of the team alpha guys. Of the other Taliban guys who- And he's gone. He's not in Khalil-e-Jong. He is absent. And when he finds out what happens,

of course, he realizes he's been tricked and he promptly gets extremely wasted. He starts drinking. He starts drinking and he had not been drinking. He was known to enjoy his vodkas, but he gets fabulously drunk upon realizing that the Taliban have tricked him. But he's totally gone dimensions, of course. You know, there's immense tragedy, but heroism, bravery, incredible self-sacrifice. When you think about these teams that went back to try to get Mike Spann's body, no one's giving them that order to do that. I mean, they just heard this sort of personal call, right? But this ends up being the very opening sliver of what becomes America's longest war. And the United States doesn't withdraw until 2021. Nearly 2,500 Americans are killed in action over the course of the next generation to

come that'll fight in Afghanistan. I think there's a really difficult question, isn't there? Because we're looking at it now with the Taliban back in power. And you start to look at it in hindsight and go, could it have worked out differently? Was there a different path? Did this strategy play out correctly? Were there lessons learned? It is interesting, isn't it? Because at that time, no one would have predicted what would happen in the following years. And yet it does kind of go wrong, doesn't it? I think it goes very wrong. It's an unanswerable question, but there is hanging over this story as we read it now, 20 plus years later, I think the sense of, was this a path not

taken in terms of a very light American footprint approach to Afghanistan, one very focused on Al-Qaeda and bin Laden. I think this was a strategy that could have worked much more effectively at defeating al-Qaeda and finding bin Laden had we continued to go down this route. And yet we can even see this story ends in late November of 2001. Within a couple of weeks, there will be initial conversations about a war in Iraq that happened in Washington. And there will be politicking in Kabul and in Washington to decide how the Afghan central government will be sort of structured that start to...

You can see this kind of strategic confusion already seeping into the picture as they're cleaning up the pink house. Which goes to this question, which is what should America be doing? Should it be nation building, building a democracy, building a modern state in Afghanistan, or should it be working with the warlords? Some of whom, as we've said, are very unsavory characters and a lot of actual prisoners- Dustin couldn't travel to the States. Yeah, and actually a lot of prisoners he takes die in a container soon after this. And so these are dark characters, but whether the US should be working with those rather than building something new. Another question I guess I have is whether the US became very focused on Al-Qaeda Taliban as one thing and not bringing the Taliban, who actually did

represent part of the population of Afghanistan, back into the political mix. But instead, they were like, well, you're with bin Laden, so we're going to fight you and destroy you, when actually they did have a constituency within the country, the Taliban, not Al-Qaeda. And so whether that confusion of who the US was fighting and how also made it harder to build a sustainable political community and nation in Afghanistan, I think that's another question for me. Well, I'm an unrepentant CIA man, Gordon. I appreciate the strategy that the Counterterrorism Center and that Team Alpha represented sort of dealt with Afghanistan then as it was. Dostum is colorful and charming, and he's also cruel and has a tremendous amount of blood on his hands. But he's a tool that we can use to sort of get closer to bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Although bin Laden, it takes another decade. It does. It does. I mean, that's a story we'll do another time, but he gets away at this point. So in one sense, that crucial strategy of getting to bin Laden and destroying Al-Qaeda, even that doesn't quite work at this point. Right. And you could make the argument that had this approach of these kind of teams, right, like Team Alpha, had that approach been embedded as the strategy to get bin Laden in Afghanistan, might that eventual, might his eventual flight from Afghanistan not have happened if we had

remained radically focused on trying to find him in those crucial couple months when he was still in Afghanistan, you know, before he went into hiding. I mean, we don't know, but I think this approach might have borne more fruit. Yeah. Well, it is a remarkable story of horseback cavalry charges and forts, which I think does tell us a lot about what happened in 2001, but also what came after in Afghanistan. So thank you very much for listening to The Rest Is Classified, and we'll be back next time with another episode.

See you next time.