One Rough Man - Brad Taylor [4]
After 9/11, the lines became blurred. Instead of focusing on state systems, everyone focused on the terrorist threat, with both the CIA and DOD thinking it was their mission. Kurt could see both sides, but the architecture in place had no room for the debate. Built for the Cold War, the system wasn’t designed for hunting individual men or small teams. Kurt watched the two organizations push and shove, unilaterally building up their own capabilities. At the time, he didn’t worry. The U.S. had figured out how to win before and would figure this out as well. Right after 9/11, he took the fight to the enemy in Afghanistan, figuring it was only a matter of time before the U.S. got serious on a global scale. Two years into the war, he had still been waiting.
To his disgust, he saw the sense of purpose begin to drift, watching the CIA and DOD do more fighting against each other than against the terrorist threat. He was convinced that they had spent so much time apart during the Cold War that they didn’t even understand each other, let alone trust each other.
Kurt voiced his opinions and waited on someone above him to fix the problems, but nobody seemed willing or able. When terrorists affiliated with Al Qaeda conducted the Bali bombings in Indonesia barely a year after 9/11, killing over two hundred people, he realized that the status quo wasn’t going to work. He banded together with like-minded men in the intelligence community and set out to change things on his own.
Their initial proposal was simple: a true joint organization—a blending of both CIA and DOD clandestine assets on a habitual basis. Eliminate the duplication of effort and mistrust at the grassroots level. The end result would be a fusion of intelligence and direct action, a capability that could follow a trail until it died, literally. They eventually got the ear of the National Command Authority and the green light to give it a try.
Kurt smiled at the memory. “Yeah, that first effort was a lesson in futility. I can’t believe how naïve I was. We didn’t get a damn thing accomplished, unless you count making enemies. If you hadn’t come along, I’d have retired and would probably be working at Walmart.”
Instead of hitting the ground running, the unit immediately ran into problems. A new unit, no matter how good, still had to deal with the bureaucracy built for the Cold War.
Kurt had spent an entire year pulling his hair out trying to get men out the door, running into one problem after another. If the military members weren’t denied a deployment order by some pinhead in the Pentagon, his CIA members were denied participation because of a lack of a presidential finding for a covert act. He had felt like he was trying to run a marathon in waist-deep water. No sooner did he break through the red tape on the DOD side than he’d run into issues on the CIA side. Once he got past the Washington bureaucracy, he’d be kicked in the gut by the ambassador of the country in which he wanted to take action. Time after time, the ambassador, either a political appointee or a career diplomat, decided that the current elections in that country, or the coffee harvest, or the latest New York Times article, made it a bad time to go after a terrorist. Kurt knew it was nothing but a bunch of bullshit political quibbling, but there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it, since the ambassador had the final word on anything involving the U.S. government in his domain.
Kurt finally got fed up. The Taskforce existed for twelve months before he threw in the towel. Not a single operation had succeeded. The unit was disbanded, with great fanfare and hooting inside the clandestine world, as the Cold War assholes reveled in its demise, their little bit of turf now free from