False Tenets
Soldier of Fortune Magazine
Saturday, 24 November 2001, roughly 300 Taliban and al-Qaeda survivors,- from the American air attacks on Kunduz, including Afghan and foreign fighters, surrendered to Northern Alliance general Abdul Rashid Dostum. Incredibly, the prisoners inhere not searched on the spot. instead, they were put into trucks and transported to Dostum's headquarters, a sprawling fortress built in the 1880s at Qala-i-Jangi.
According to press reports, once the prisoners were inside the fortress, they were asked to empty their pockets, which they did – with lethal results. At least two pulled out grenades from their clothes, yanked the pins, and killed both themselves and two Northern Alliance commanders – one divas appropriately named Nadir – as well as several guards. Even after that, however, the prisoners were not stripped and searched. Nor were the Northern Alliance guards reinforced. Instead, the prisoners were taken to underground cells in the fortress’s southwest quadrant, where they joined more than 300 other> captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighter.
The following morning, Dave and Mike, two young Americans dressed in mufti, showed up at Qala-i-Jangi to interrogate the prisoners in order to identify the al-Qaeda members. Dave, who should not be further identified, and Mike, whose full name was Johnny Micheal Spann, were thirtysomething paramilitary officers from the Special Activities Division of the CIA's Directorate of Operations. Like most of those working for the horribly acronymed SAD, Mike and Dave were former U.S. military. They had been in Afghanistan since early October. Other SAD CIA personnel had been in-country since late September.
The SAD mission was multifold. Equipped with secure satellite communications equipment, and backed up by unmanned Predator drones and other aircraft, SAD had been tasked to gather intelligence to help U.S. Special Forces in the hunt for Osama bin Laden, as well as making contact with the Northern Alliance to provide the rebels with intelligence and help to coordinate their activities. Their purpose at Qala-i-Jangi, says E, a veteran CIA paramilitary officer, “was to sort out the al-Qaeda foreigners from the Taliban and identify for interrogation ... those who could be used to extract intel on the networks that brought those guys to the war zone.” Obviously, Dave and alike were also interested in eliciting whatever information they could about Osama bin Laden's whereabouts.
Johnny Micheal Spann was a text-book case recruit for the CIA’s paramilitary division. Motivated, patriotic, and dedicated to public service, Spann came from the small town of %’infield, Alabama, where he played high-school football and dreamed of becoming a Marine. He attended Auburn University after high school, and immediately after graduation he enlisted in the Corps. A Marine artillery captain with eight years of service including tours in Okinawa and North Carolina, Spann moved to Northern Virginia with his then-wife Kathryn and their two children, Allison and Emily, in 1999 to join CIA. He separated from Kathryn in April of 2000, and after his divorce quickly remarried Shannon, a young woman he'd met at CIA. On 8 June 2001, Shannon gave birth to their son.
How SAD
Soon after September 11, Spann was, according to some sources, put under the operational control of Langley’s reinvigorated Counter-terrorism Center and deployed to Afghanistan. SADS acronym may be new. Its mission is not. CIA has employed young paramilitary officers for decades. Felix Rodriguez, the legendary Cuban-born contract agent who helped capture Che Guevara in Bolivia in October of 1967, worked for the Agency’s paramilitary staff both in South America, and four years later, as a 30-year-old agent under U.S. Army cover, as a CIA counterinsurgency operative in Vietnam. Indeed, at least one future commanding officer of the .U.S. Navy’s elite SEAL Team Two was “sheep-dipped" by the Agency in the mid-1980s and used to great advantage in Cb5 secret war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas. Paramilitary officers were also an integral part of the Agency's NILE (Northern Iraq Liaison Element) teams sent to Salah ad-Din in Kurdish controlled northern Iraq in 1994 and 1995 to help coordinate the Iraqi National Congress's two unsuccessful coup attempts against Saddam Hussein.
There has been previous press cover-age of paramilitary or covert-action missions. It is usually followed by loud bitching about the endangering of national security from CIA officials. This time was different. Not only were SAD's covert activities in Afghanistan leaked to the press by high-ranking officials intimately knowledgeable and well-informed about SAD5 secret capabilities, the leaks occurred while dozens of officers li1ie Dave and Mike were and still are in harm's way. In harm’s way because when CIA paramilitary officers operate in mufti – civilian clothes – they do not come under the Geneva Convention rules for military prisoners. Unlike Marines or SF troops, captured CIA officers can be summarily executed.
But the fact that CIA personnel might be killed didn’t bother the highly placed sources for an 18 November 2001 Washington Post article by well-connected Washington Establishment reporter Bob Woodward. Entitled “Secret CIA Units Playing a Central Combat Role,” the article described in detail SAD’s mission and its tactical capabilities in Afghanistan. The article also went on to extol the Agency’s role in the war, claiming that “Senior administration officials attribute a significant portion of the speed and effectiveness of recent Northern Alliance advances in Afghanistan to the assistance of CIA units.”
Was there an immediate, huge burst of outrage from the CIA’s executive suite on the seventh floor to this massive lapse of OPSEC? The answer is: not a whiff.
The “Buzz” Around Town
Indeed, according to former and cur-rent intelligence sources in a position to know, neither CIA director George J. Tenet – a former Capitol Hill staffer – nor his hand-picked executive director, a former multi-millionaire investment banker turned spook named A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard, was apoplectic over the Post’s front-page coverage of CIA covert activities in Afghanistan, even though it put their own people’s lives at risk.
That, however, wasn’t how career intelligence professionals saw it. Woodward’s story was specific enough so that Weekly Intelligence Notes, the e-newsletter of AFIO, the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, took the story’s high-ranking sources to task: “[Woodward’s] CIA story, with its depth of detail and specificity regarding ongoing operations of covert action units ... totally undercuts the position of government officials who are urging secrecy and discretion in discussion of intelligence and military activities,” wrote WIN’s editors
What AFIO’s censure – and Woodward's article – failed to discuss, however, was the cynical political motive behind the dangerous leak. Woodward’s story bolstered Tenet and Krongard’s battered and tarnished status in certain Capitol Hill offices and within the intel community, where they are perceived as intelligence amateurs. It is on George Tenet’s watch, after all, that CIA was unable to penetrate al-Qaeda in order to determine its capabilities, and more important, the terrorist organization’s intentions, prior to September 11. It is on George Tenet’s watch that the CIA allowed the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade because it didn’t have the right maps. It is under George Tenet’s watch that the Khobar Towers and U.S.S. Cole bombing investigations have been botched. And it is under George Tenet’s watch that the Counterterrorism Center was, in the words of J, a former CTC official, “eviscerated.
“George Tenet stripped CTC,” the officer asserts. “It started when he was John Deutch’s guy. He did away with CTC’s Rapid Deployment Force in Europe and its domestically based teams. He took our equipment. He shut down our training capabilities. Worst of all, he stood by when our ability to recruit agents who had criminal records or had perhaps been party to human-rights abuses was cut off. I mean, who do you recruit to penetrate a terrorist cell, some grade-school teacher?”
It hadn’t always been that way. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, the Agency’s core of streetwise, experienced, Arabic-fluent case officers were able to penetrate the innermost circles of the PLO’s Fatah and Black September organizations with the full support of CIA’s leadership even though many of the agents they recruited were murderers. Black September's “Red Prince,” Ali Hassan Salameh, the bloody-handed architect of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre, was, for example, a CIA develop-mental.
Wanted: A few Good Spies
But those sorts of successes – or recruitments – don't often happen these days. Instead, you have a CIA where, according to one former Agency official quoted in a newspaper, the cur-rent executive director – the afore-mentioned A. B. “Buzzy”. Krongard – asks people he meets to punch him in the stomach to show how tough he is. If Krongard ever came up against the sort of conniving, shrewd, street-wise case officers who used to people the Agency when professionals like Richard Helms or William Casey were in charge and made that request, he would be sucker-punched, kicked in the balls, and left on the floor to feel a lot more “Fuzzy” than “Buzzy.” But under the Tenet/Krongard stewardship, the Agency has hemorrhaged experienced case officers with the language ability, street-sense, grit, and moxie necessary to spot, assess, recruit, train, and run foreign assets. So, the zero-defect, politically correct computer nerds, intel squirrels, and assorted dweebs Buzzy accosts in the Langley corridors won’t do him any harm, because they just don’t think that way.
According to R, a case officer with 21 years of experience in the Middle East, Africa, and several former Soviet republics, there are few if any Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, or Dari-speaking case officers out in the field anymore. Instead, R says, CIA stations from Riyadh and Damascus to Dushanbe and Islamabad are filled with straitlaced former reports officers, bookish intelligence analysts, and worthless EEO hires who shun agent recruitments and rely on liaison with the local intelligence services or English-language newspapers to get their information. Adequate language training and – equally as important – the proper mentoring of greenhorn case officers by experienced field hands, says R. His view is seconded by E, a retired supergrade who ran paramilitary activities on three continents over his thirty-year career.
"George is always claiming that CIA's language capabilities are improving,” says R. “And he said right from the beginning of his tenure – in 1997 – that terrorism is one of CIA’s top priorities. By 1997 and 1998 we certainly knew about al-Qaeda, But I bet if you were able to dig out the number of case officers who studied Pashto and Dari between 1998 and now, the number would be maybe one or two – if that many.” And that number, R reminds us, is for case officers. Not for the young, energetic, patriotic, but inadequately trained paramilitary officers like Johnny Spann.
Palace Revolt
Which brings us back to Qala-i-Jangi on the morning of 25 November 2001, where Johnny Spann and Dave were about to interview the Taliban prisoners. In 1991, at the end of the Gulf War, a small coterie of streetwise, Arab-speaking case officers, experienced in dealing with agents, suggested that they all be detailed to Saudi Arabia, where they would interrogate Iraqi POWs to identify those who might be suitable for recruitment. The officers’ requests were denied by a timid and misguided CIA leadership that was more worried about offending the Saudis than it was spotting and recruiting agents who could be sent home to work inside Iraq. But the example is valuable, because it illustrates one basic fact about intelligence gathering: successful interrogations and the resulting recruitments can be best carried out by experienced case officers, who understand their subjects. A seasoned case officer tries to learn about his target – everything from language subtleties, vulnerabilities, quirks, even family history, if that’s what it takes. The seasoned pro not only reads body language as if it was a McGuffey Primer, he knows how to push the right psychological and cultural buttons in order to elicit information. Through his years of real-world experience the veteran also has an active and sensitive bullshit detector, which can help determine whether or not the subject is fabricating.
But remember: Johnny Spann and Dave were not case officers. They had military training, and Dave appears to have had language capabilities. But they lacked many of the subtle “people skills” that can be developed only after years of being mentored by competent, seasoned case officers. Were they too eager to do their jobs? We do not know. What we do know is that they did not insist – as they should have – that the prisoners be brought to them in a secure location, one by one. Instead, they allowed themselves to be put in the midst of a group of potentially deadly hostiles.
Had they even been taught the correct procedures in the first place? We do not know that, either. What is known, is that former military officers like Johnny Spann who are admitted to the CIA's paramilitary division do not generally go through the six-month-long case officer training course at Camp Peary, the CIA’S spy school near Williamsburg, Virginia. Instead, they take an accelerated course in the Washington area. The course includes quick overviews of such subjects as “debriefing,” which is the CIA’S current and politically correct term for interrogation, covert communications, and reports writing. At the end of that ¿ course, Spann and his fellow students would have been equipped With the a rudimentary capabilities to gather intelligence, assess it, and communicate what they had learned back to headquarters. Probably, says a seasoned clandestine service operative, not much more than that,
But whatever Johnny Spann learned wasn’t enough. Because, according to one former DO operator with long-term experience in the counterterrorism area, Johnny Spann and his partner Dave “broke all the rules” on the morning of Sunday, 25 November.
“If my people had been there,” the DO veteran says, “those prisoners would all have had their balls showing, because we were taught to take nothing for granted. We’d take ’em one by one and have ’em stripped, to make sure they weren’t carrying any weapons –and as a way to intimidate them, Then, once we were sure our people were secure, we’d interrogate ’em – singly.”
That did not happen. According to various press accounts, as well as video tape shot by an Afghan crew at Qala-i-Jangi, what happened next was that dozens of the estimated 600 Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners were brought up from their basement holding cells to the huge, flat southwestern quadrant of the fortress. There, under a brilliant blue sky they were interrogated by the pair of CIA paramilitary officers. Both Johnny Spann and Dave are visible in the pictures. Spann is wearing blue jeans and a black jumper. An AK-47 is slung over his shoulder. Dave, bearded, is dressed in a long black tunic worn over light trousers. The interviewees included the Marin County, California turncoat-cum-Talib, John Walker.
From the video, parts of which were made public on the Newsweek Magazine web site, as well as Newsweek’s transcript, it is unclear whether or not Johnny Spann realized he was talking to an American.
The video shows the young CIA officer hunkering down to face the filthy, barefooted Walker, whose arms are bound behind his back, “Where are you from?” Spann asks. Where are you from? You believe in what you’re doing here that much, you're willing to be killed here? How were you recruited to come here? Who brought you here?...Hel-lo!”
When Walker remains silent, Spann takes his picture with a pocket-sized digital camera. Then he stands up and talks to Dave. Their conversation is picked up by the cameraman’s mike.
Dave says, "The problem is, he's got to decide whether he wants to live or die and die here. we're just going to leave him and he’s going to fucking sit in prison the rest of his fucking short life. It's his decision, man.”
Shortly afterward, at some point after the camera was turned off, the situation event south. At press time, the precise timeline of the events was still unclear. But what happened is not. Somehow, prisoners in the subterranean cell area overpowered their captors. They ascended to the southwestern quadrant, where they attacked the northern Alliance guards, as well as the two CIA officers. (It was not known at press time whether the two CIA officers ever went down into the basement area, something that has been suggested in some press reports.
According to other published accounts, Johnny Spann drew his pistol and shot one of his attackers dead. Dave also drew his weapon and fired, killing more. But there were too many Taliban, and too few guards, and it didn't take more than a few seconds for both Americans to be overpowered.
Dave was able to grab an AK-47 – perhaps the same one Spann had been holding – and, after shooting a number of the prisoners, he escaped, sprint-ed roughly 300 yards to the fort’s northernmost tower. There, breathless, he found refuge with a German television crew. His partner was not so lucky. According to various published accounts, Johnny Spann was either shot or beaten to death by the Taliban prisoners, who then raided Qala-i-Jangi’s two armories, and stood off a combined force of Northern Alliance, U.S. Special Forces, and British SAS troops until the rebellion divas finally quelled on Tuesday, 27 November. When Johnny Spann’s body was finally retrieved, it divas discovered that the Taliban prisoners had booby-trapped it.
Johnny Micheal Spann was the 79th CIA officer to have died in the line of duty since the Agency was founded in 1947. He went to his grave exemplifying the best traditions of the United States Marine Corps. He died as he had lived: believing in Duty, Honor, Country.
But his brave death was cynically exploited by DCI George Tenet. Tenet himself identified Spann as an Agency operative during a 28 November closed-circuit television address to CIA employees. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said Tenet had decided that confirming Spann’s activities was “fitting and appropriate.”
Such a rapid identification is unprecedented. When Fred Woodward, the acting T’bilisi, Georgia, station chief was murdered in August of 1983, even though James Woolsey, the then-DCI, flew back to the United States with the body, the CIA refused to acknowledge that Woodward was a CIA officer. Of the 79 stars that are etched on the Agency’s memorial wall at Langley, Woodward’s remains that one of the 36 that are unidentified.
Moreover, Tenet persisted in identifying Spann, even though by doing so the C1A director helped America’s enemies to identify the people with whom Johnny Micheal Spann worked. There is no doubt in this writer’s mind that those to whom President George W. Bush refers as “the evil ones" are sorting through hours of video tape avail-able through commercial and news media sources to see if there are any images of Spann and his colleagues so that other CIA paramilitary officers can be identified and targeted. Doing so is basic intelligence-gathering tradecraft.
But when George Tenet made our adversaries' work easier, he had whore important things on his mind than the mere lives of the people who worked for him, There appears to be a political motive behind this rash act that is similar to the leaks behind Bob Woodward’s November 18th Washing-ton Post story about SAD’s activities in Afghanistan. Releasing Johnny Micheal Spann’s name and the circumstances of his heroic death was the second dramatic, effective gambit in less than two weeks that was aimed at garnering immediate and positive publicity for an Agency that some critics have called dysfunctional, and a DCI who some critics have advocated firing.
Americans should be outraged that Johnny Micheal Spann’s loyalty, patriotism, and dedication were sacrificed by cynical CIA executives more interested in advancing their careers and expanding their empires than in protecting their troops.
A memorial fund has been established at the Citizens Bank in Winfield, Alabama. Contributions can be sent to the Johnny Micheal Spann Memorial Trust Fund, PO Box 550, Winfield, Alabama, 35594.
Weisman is the author of the New York Times best-selling Rogue Warrior counterterrorism novels. He is currently researching a nonfiction book about U.S. intelligence activities in the Middle East.