Spycraft - Melton [203]
However, December 2001 was not like previous years. The United States was at war with al-Qaeda and its protector, the Afghan Taliban government, and the mission would take the bomb techs directly into the combat zone. Some of the team’s members came from Headquarters while others flew in from field locations. All were volunteers.
OTS designed and printed propaganda leaflets to support the 2001 war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Little more than two months had passed from the first October air strikes against the Taliban and al-Qaeda terrorist training camps to the liberation of the Afghan capital, Kabul. The Taliban and its al-Qaeda cohorts were clearly on the run. While some Taliban forces were surrendering en masse in Kandahar, others had taken to the hills, literally high-tailing it on horses and on foot to the White Mountain range and honeycombed cave complexes of Tora Bora.
While the large-scale military operations were all but over and the rapidly advancing forward elements of the CIA’s paramilitary units now faced only sporadic small arms fighting, the country was still far from stable. As news broadcasts showed a jubilant population defiantly enjoying activities forbidden under Taliban rule, such as kite flying and men shaving off the formerly mandatory beards, the political and security situations remained dangerously volatile.
The war itself was progressing with lightning speed and, within weeks, the Agency’s Afghanistan mission shifted from tactical support of the Northern Alliance to assuring a safe transition to a new government. The request for the OTS officers came as the Taliban abandoned control of the southern third of Afghanistan and the key city of Kandahar. The city had been among the last of the Taliban’s strongholds and concern over what unpleasant surprises might be left behind was fully justified. The need for expertise in handling explosives and skills to assess, identify, and clear buildings of IEDs and conventional munitions became imperative.
The team was given seventy-two hours to ready itself for deployment. The mission was as ambiguous as it was urgent. In reality, no one knew what the team would encounter on the ground or exactly what equipment was needed. Broadly defined, the team would provide ongoing explosive detection, assessment, and disarming capabilities for Agency and military personnel. They would be operating in areas the Taliban and al-Qaeda had controlled for years, some of it captured only days or hours earlier. They would also likely be called on to provide secondary functions, such as establishing emergency communications, field engineering, and photography.
Intelligence reports from the field described hundreds of discoveries of tons of ordnance either discarded or cached during the country’s two decades of nearly continuous warfare. This meant the team had to prepare to work with explosives of Russian, Chinese, and Pakistani origin, much of it unstable. Most would have to be destroyed to prevent it from falling into the hands of local warlords or opponents of the new government. Ironically, some ordnance and weapons were quite familiar to the OTS officers, as it came from stocks the CIA provided the Afghanistan mujahedin during their 1980s war against Soviet occupiers.
The team’s housing would be primitive and amenities such as electricity and running water scarce or nonexistent. They would