We Should of Had Him
By Larry Johnson on December 29, 2005 at 2:25 PM in Current Affairs
by
Larry C. Johnson
The book the CIA didn’t want you to read, JAWBREAKER by Gary Berntsen, is out and it kills. I’ve sent Gary a nasty note because his story kept me up till 4 am today. Just couldn’t put it down. Gary spent most of this year battling CIA censors, who were refusing to release the book. They insisted on excising parts of the story that have already appeared in other books about CIA operations in Afghanistan written by Steve Coll and another CIA veteran, Gary Schroen.
Gary Berntsen was the second CIA officer sent to Afghanistan and put in charge of directing the destruction of Al Qaeda and the hunt for Bin Laden. He arrived in the fall of 2001, replacing veteran officer Gary Schroen, who had led the first CIA element into Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. Gary 2, i.e., Berntsen, built on Schroen’s foundation and played a critical role in directing the offensive that broke the back of the Taliban and scattered Al Qaeda.
The key news from Gary’s book is that we had Bin Laden in our sights but Tommy Franks and JSOC Commander, Dell Dailey, dilly dallied and did not deploy U.S. troops requested by Berntsen to the battle at Tora Bora. We could of had him; we should of had him; but we let Bin Laden get away.
Gary’s book is important in another regard. It shows what the CIA is capable of doing and why we need this capability in addition to the talents offered by U.S. military special operations forces. When the CIA puts its mind to it, it can move fast, innovate on the fly, and do some mind boggling things.
But JAWBREAKER also uncovers why the CIA is at times a faltering, incompetent, risk averse bureaucracy. Although the title of the book is the codeword for the Afghan operation in 2001, it may also be a clever reference about what may happen to you when you read how obtuse some CIA managers and other Government bureaucrats can be in the midst of a crisis. Your jaw may drop open and hit the floor. Hence, “jawbreaker”.
Consider for example what happened to Gary, who was sent into Afghanistan in 2000 with orders to capture a top Al Qaeda commander. His mission was sand bagged by another CIA Chief of Station who served in one of the neighboring “Stans”. This prima donna, a guy named “Lawrence”, was sending reports back to Washington lying about what Gary was and was not doing. Lawrence had his nose out of joint because he felt his turf was being trampled on. The petty jealousy of this bonehead (who in a previous overseas assignment had lost of his intelligence assets) is bad enough. Making matters worse, CIA Director Tenet and the Director of Operations, Jim Pavitt, helped pull the plug on the operation. This wasn’t a case of President Clinton getting cold feet, rather the CIA leadership pulled the plug on an operation that had a chance of success. And, Al Qaeda was left virtually unmolested until they struck the United States one year later.
If that doesn’t get your blood boiling maybe you will get riled when you learn that in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 Gary, who was serving in South America, was warned by the Director of Operations for Latin America to NOT, I repeat NOT, volunteer to go to Afghanistan even though Berntsen had led the last American team to go into Afghanistan. Hell, the World Trade Center was still smoldering and this CIA bureaucrat was more concerned about keeping his positions filled than using all available resources to go after Osama Bin Laden.
The list of CIA bureaucratic stupidities detailed in Gary’s tale is long and agonizing. But, the book also shows you what the CIA can do if it places mission over covering its own ass. In that regard it is important to acknowledge the harmful role that politicians have played in asking the CIA to carry out a mission and then feigning amnesia when the risk goes wrong.
Some folks of a liberal political persuasion may find Gary’s high charged, testosterone laden. type A personality a bit overwhelming. Be forewarned and enoy the ride. Gary is a refreshingly authentic soul who is more concerned with doing what he thinks is right rather than checking to find out what is politically palatable. Gary understood that finding and killing Bin Laden was a priority. Unfortunately, our current civilian and military leaders seem to have forgotten the promise to get him, dead or alive.
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LC..I watched Gary last night on during his interview on a Major Network..Was wondering if you saw it too..
His Agony..intensity and Frustration was obvious and Intense..
Thank God people can still get the TRUTH Out..
These Guys are the REAL American Heros..Thier story needs to be TOLD..
I’m gonna buy the Book..
Seems to me that the outline of this story has been known from the immediate aftermath of Tora Bora.
It seems to me that most CIA paramilitary ops must be very high risk - a few Americans, some locals you hope you can trust. Some go sour - who was the Pushtun we sent in as our anti-Taliban candidate with a satphone that got caught and hung?
I think UBL is very useful to this adminsitration fully alive.
Isn’t it “Should have,” “Could have”? Has the whole country forgotten how to write?
I wqould agree that UBL is an asset to this admin because he’s the perfect enemy while he’s loose. He’s the leader of an ideology that gives this pres an ongoing war/war powers. As pointed out, the fact that the backup wasn’t sent in gives the perspective that Franks also knew UBL was most useful on the run. Complicit. To think of those heroic CIA & military troops going up against such impossible odds, and overcoming them only to be let down is beyond unthinkable. And then, of course, most of them are left without a story they’re allowed to tell America.
Speed King:
Yes.
Larry, a fellow named Lasseter has been doing some bang-up work for Knight Ridder. The last few days he’s posted 2 stories out of Kirkuk, on the pending break-up in Iraq. These stories, and the story on Dec. 1st in the L.A. Times on that Kurd/Norwegian oil deal, makes me think the break will be soon. I would appreciate a post on this from you.
BTW has any one noticed that their computers seems to be running alot less cycles after the previous weekend? I think the spying agencies have begun removing their tracking and reporting bugs from our computers.
I know my computer was totally screwed up on Sunday. MS Internet Explorer just would not run correctly and had all kinds of errors. My hardrive has always been running, but Sunday it would not stop.
Since Sunday however the hardrive has stop its continuous running, and the computer is running very smoothly now.
Funny how a little thing like being reported about stops illegal, by law, surveillance.
Not to be too picky, but I agree that we “should have had” him.
Absolutely UBL (or OBL, if you please) is much more useful alive. In fact, I contend that he may be more useful than anyone will ever admit. But that’s another story.
I also believe that the insurgency in Iraq has been useful to this administration. It forces us to keep a large presence there and continues to serve as “war on terror” fodder for Bush, Cheney and company. “See, there are lots of people who want to blow themselves up and blow us up. We must be vigilant and continue the fight so we don’t have to fight them here.” Blah, blah, blah…
And according to the powers that be, it seems to be working. We’re all living happy-go-lucky lives here without any more terrorist attacks in over four years. Well, at least no fundamemtalist Islamic terrorist attacks. We did have those shootings around DC, we had that bomber in the midwest, we had the anthrax mailings late in 2001, but those don’t count. Not unless they’re carried out by swarthy Middle Easterners with a badass chip on their shoulders. Or something like that.
Just remember, in the world of make believe, things are not always as they seem.
Jawbreaker’s book coming out has Bush going on a campaign against whistleblowers re: his FISA spying.
Anything for distraction. Who the hell ever thought he’d openly embrace the fact this has gone on, like bizzarroworld? Then again they have to, Colin Powell was using his calls to entrap other leaders. Tony Blair had great manners as the world’s most suave nuthugger in the runup to the war. perhaps he had little choice.
How far was Powell kept out of the bubble before 9-11 re: the NSA? Pretty far to be in South America on 9-11 meeting the deposed King of Afghanistan.
Then again Daddy Bush was meeting some of bin Laden’s bros w/the Carlyle group at the time. He was still getting the POTUS briefings, unusual for a former POTUS.
Man to hear him and Bill Clinton in those briefings as they travel now. Certainly Bill has not passed up the chance to be part of the process when he’s that close…
There’s some interesting reading regarding previous CIA work, it’s a part of the history of the Company to stage things decades in advance and re-act on old directives. Hold fast policy assumptions in light of different context for its affect on shaping the surface of political interaction. Such resolve!
Case in point was the CIA and Cuba. It’s argued Kennedy pre-emtped the Bay of Pigs during the fourth debate with Nixon:
“Since March, the government had been planning a large scale covert action against Cuba run by Cuban exiles, an operation that he assumed Jack had learned about in his CIA briefings.Nixon was … a ferverent supporter… an understandable position considering that, if the agency had kept to its original schedule, the action would have taken place a few weeks before the presidential election.”
When JFK beat Nixon to the statement on the topic it disarmed their pre-emptive tactics because the world was watching. It shined a bright light on the plans that smothered of their own volition under the gangsters who were being used to run it when acted. Tobacco and petroleum interests fought to marginalize Cuba if they weren’t the ones controlling it anyways. One wonders what kind of free pass the wannabe JFK gave AWOL on the debate aside from the obvious ones on every question asked.
Why have we fallen to the same twice over since?
Central America, and Negroponte did a Capone on foreign policy and nuns. As well in Iraq where Chalabi now runs the oil ministry. Both war theatres are run with gangster warlords where the neocons do most of their business.
Gone is the concern for what the world would think. No other superpowers to upset(that is already over, China and the tech burgeoning sector expedite change to new speeds).
Even history shows Bush a fool in that light with Madrid, London, and Egypt suffering collateral damage. There was great collateral result , though not quite what the iron curtain embodies in its heyday for NATO member states. Fumbling proliferation will change that also.
Strange enough a lot of the policies John Kerry made part of his platform have, in hindsight, been what was needed for the situation. He had access to the same CIA briefings so he made more effecient policy to match the evidence and politicized it less.
To his own detriment, and to the country’s, it’s too bad he did not disarm Bush’s tactics and let America know Bush spied on his own fellow citizens in ways that essentially distracted the effort at hand.
Bush is writing online parking tickets while Mayberry bank gets robbed. Then again his brother was a bankrobber and the former CIA director Papa Bush pardoned Neil. One bullet Barney is a danger to all of us.
No wonder Shrubya has an aversion to this law-enforcement approach to fighting terror.
Book quote was from “The Kennedy Men” by Laurence Leamer, William Morrow(Harper Collins).
“Juergen Chrobog, who served as Germany’s ambassador to the U.S., has been kidnapped in Yemen. ”
Al Qaeda is widening its influence. They’re going afdter the support and staging points while the elements in iraq are simply fed up indigenous people who want their sovereignty and resources.
There goes the stage down problem, anywhere you stage down becomes a conflict point with the media there as sharp on our presence as Fox is on any bad PR for the Muslim community here…
Sy Hersh said what Jawbreaker said, in 2002. He had different sources- ground troops , commanders, and assets in India who dealt with the pakistan-Afghanistan connections:
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0201/21/ltm.10.html
“HERSH: Well, nobody knows real numbers. One of the things I did do is I went to India, because I did know that the Indian government has very close ties with the Northern Alliance, our allies there, and also had very good intelligence about it and did not speak publicly. But I learned that they were very upset as were, by the way, many members of our Special Forces, which were roaming around the countryside at that point, trying to kill Taliban or capture them. And that’s how I learned about the story initially.
Some of the Delta Forces guys were very unhappy. They had been doing terrific work that nobody has really been able to report on — we will one day, I hope — really ferreting out the enemy. And all of a sudden, the command — the Central Command in Florida, which runs the war, CentCom, put out a special order restricting airspace between Konduz, which had been a retreat area for most of the northern — in the northern part of Afghanistan.
You know, our war was so terrific, so quick, we attacked with such ferocity and such accuracy that we had the enemy on the run, and they all congregated at this little hill town call Konduz. And from there, all of a sudden one night around Thanksgiving, in the middle of the siege, an air corridor was set up between Konduz and northern Pakistan — northwest Pakistan 200 miles away. And at night, planes regularly flew through that corridor, the no-fly zones more or less, and Pakistani relief planes. And so, that’s how this whole thing began.
The Indians knew a lot about it. And after a few days in Delhi, the Indians told me their numbers were roughly 5,000. The best number I could get from an American was a few thousand. So we’ll never know.
You could imagine, the evacuation was asked for by Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, who said to us in effect, look, I’m in trouble now anyway because I’m supporting you guys in the war. And the Taliban are our allies, and I can’t have a lot of boys coming back in body bags. There were about 1,000 to 2,000 Pakistani army soldiers there training the Taliban army and Pakistani intelligence.
ZAHN: Right.
HERSH: And so, we agreed to fly them out. What happened is that, of course, as I quote somebody who served in the Vietnam War said to me at the end of the Vietnam War, when we evacuated, everybody took out their buddy. And you know, if there was space on a chopper for 10, he said, we put 14 on. “
Once again one is faced with the question of was it stupidity or the idea that if OBL were captured/killed they’d have less excuse to abuse their power? What’s Gary’s take on why they “dilly-dallied”?
Sy had different on/off record sources specifically sighted. Doubtful jawbreaker didn’t pour over every possible source…
Should the title of this post be “We Should HAVE Had Him” ???
Lear your own language syntax before writing…