A review of Gary Berntsen and Ralph Pezzullo, Jawbreaker, The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA’s Key Field Commander. New York: Crown, 2005. 328 pp; $25.95 cloth.
Gary Berntsen has not lived a dull life. The future case officer and director of the ground war in Afghanistan grew up in a working-class town on Long Island, where in the mid-seventies he tried to quit school and join the military. Unable to get his father’s approval, he waited until graduation before entering the Air Force, where he put his hell-raising youth behind him, trained to be a fireman, and became an avid reader of history. He completed a college degree while in the military and was set to enter officer training in the Marine Corps when the CIA’s clandestine Directorate of Operations lured him.
Berntsen’s journey to Tora Bora and the pursuit of Osama bin Laden began with the bombings of US Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August of 1998. Initially thought the work of Hezbollah, the attacks were soon traced to al Qaeda, which was then ensconced in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. The CIA soon professed to make counter-terrorism a high priority, but after so many experienced officers had been shown the door and so much faith placed in electronic intelligence, little came of it. Even al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in October of 2000 had little effect. We were at war, he felt, but few seemed to realize it.
However, the CIA did see fit to send Berntsen into Afghanistan in early 2000 to gather intelligence, establish ties with the Northern Alliance, and seize al Qaeda personnel for interrogation. There, he encountered Iranian intelligence officers (Iran despised the Taliban), Russian mercenaries (flying Northern Alliance aircraft), and a number of armies comprising various ethnic groups with dubious loyalties, some of which had once fought for the Russians, the Mujahideen, and the Taliban as the fortunes of war and finances of employers shifted. His was an important and risky assignment, one whose pursuit – with more than a little good luck, of course – could have yielded information on what al Qaeda had in mind for the US. But fearful that his mission had been compromised (no elaboration is given), the CIA pulled the plug on his mission, leaving many Northern Alliance leaders even more mistrustful of the US than they had been after we lost interest in Afghanistan following the Soviet Union’s withdrawal.
September 11, 2001 found Berntsen assigned to a Latin American country, the name of which the Langley censors feel must remain classified, as is the case in many passages of this heavily redacted book. Certain that his experience in Afghanistan were invaluable, he insisted on a transfer, and after some red tape got an assignment with the CIA’s counter-terrorism center. Only a month after 9/11, he was back with the Northern Alliance, this time teamed with a handful of Agency and Special Forces personnel. His main, if not only, communications link to the US military and Langley was a satellite phone.
The Northern Alliance was essentially the same collection of Hazara, Uzbek, and Tajik forces he had left a year and a half earlier, but they now faced an imminent offensive from numerically superior Taliban and al Qaeda forces. The first order of business was to pay the leaders of the Northern Alliance, none of whom, of course, fought in the name of freedom or in remembrance of the World Trade Center. At least one warlord’s demands caused Gen. Tommy Franks, who had come in for the negotiations, to storm out angrily. The dispute was attributed to a translator’s error in order to mollify the warlord’s ego and Franks’s ire, and a mutually agreeable price was found. Second, the matter of allocating military supplies had to be dealt with, the details of which are completely censored, as are all similar arrangements later drawn up with other groups. Third was the crucial matter of inserting Special Forces personnel into Northern Alliance units to provide tactical advice and direct airstrikes with GPS and laser markers.
The ensuing defeat of Taliban and al Qaeda forces as well as the rapid drives on Mazar-e-Sharif and Kabul were brought about by an odd combination of venerable tribal tactics and high technology, with a smattering of a mid-level technology provided by the Toyota pick-up truck, whose ubiquity in news reports of the campaigns almost suggested product placement in film. Enemy positions were systematically overwhelmed by marking bunkers with laser systems, destroying them from the air with precision munitions, then swiftly assaulting them with ground troops, sometimes on horseback. Enemy forces attempted to counter by positioning themselves close enough to Northern Alliance lines to make airstrikes risky (a N. Vietnamese tactic, this) and by moving from position to position at night. Neither tactic was particularly effective. Tired and dispirited after years of stalemate, Northern Alliance troops were buoyed by relatively easy advances and warm greetings in towns they took.
In one curious and illustrative passage, Berntsen received a call from a CIA colleague who was in contact with a Taliban commander’s brother in California. Through his satellite phone, not far from Berntsen’s position, the commander told his brother half a world away that he wished to surrender along with his troops – for the right price. After some haggling, the leader brought over his 730 soldiers, who had just executed the al Qaeda troops with them, in exchange for a payment, which is (needless to say) redacted. The former Taliban troops were readily assimilated into the Northern Alliance for whom switching sides bore no opprobrium.
In full retreat, enemy convoys were torn apart by US airpower, leaving many major cities, including Kabul, to the Northern Alliance. Berntsen’s intelligence indicated that bin Laden was heading for his old redoubt near Tora Bora along the Pakistani border, from which he had staged attacks on the Red Army. Berntsen pursued aggressively, coordinating his CIA and Special Forces personnel with a new array of local forces – the Eastern Alliance. Several factors conspired to prevent a timely assault on Tora Bora, which might have led to the capture or death of bin Laden. With Ramadan at hand, Eastern Alliance troops fasted and often left their posts at night to spend time with their families, sometimes giving up positions to the enemy in doing so. Some took American money and disappeared; others took al Qaeda money and did the same. Al Qaeda requests to parley with the Eastern Alliance also stalled the attack, as bin Laden had likely hoped.
Appalled at the prospect of bin Laden slipping across the rugged Pakistani frontier, Berntsen urged Gen. Franks to immediately send 800 US Rangers to finish the job. But they were not forthcoming. Franks maintained that there were not yet enough US forces available and that even if there were, it would insult the Afghanis and thereby endanger future relations. Berntsen was puzzled by Franks’s reply and irate over its implications for getting bin Laden. He could only repeat his request and direct relentless massive airstrikes onto the cave-riddled valleys of Tora Bora, which he knew couldn’t accomplish what a ground assault by disciplined troops would. As the operation neared its dismal conclusion, with bin Laden and many of his fighters escaping, Berntsen was inexplicably removed from the field and ordered back to Latin America.
Jawbreaker, like many recent books by former case officers (eg, Robert Baer’s See No Evil), is peppered with complaints of the Agency’s meddling and rigidity. Abuses brought to light by the Church Hearings of the seventies resulted in layers of management and a risk-averse culture. The “Lawrence of Arabia Days,” when talented officers were given considerable discretion in the field, were largely gone. Agency concerns over credentialism prevented many talented and eager Arab-Americans from getting appropriate positions. Headquarters expressed concerns over the firearms certifications of CIA personnel in Afghanistan. Wild Bill Donovan likely made no such inquiries of his OSS agents.
An intriguing passage states that interference from afar almost brought his entire operation in Afghanistan to collapse, and the reader naturally wants to learn more. However, the relevant text is completely blacked out. One might suspect that the censors were protecting the Company’s image more than they were national security. His complaints of meddling and rigidity notwithstanding, Berntsen’s account describes countless personal innovations and judgment calls that led to swift victory over the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Had Berntsen been allowed to remain in Afghanistan, his knowledge of the various ethnic groups and warlords might have led him to express concern over Washington’s policy of building a modernizing central state – one with little legitimacy or precedent – upon a tribal society. A man of his experience might have urged a more practical policy of seeking simply to maintain good relations with key regional power-holders rather than supporting a dominant one in Kabul, who would antagonize many if not most of the others. But then again, Berntsen could have assessed as well as anyone the power of doctrinaire forces in Washington vis-à-vis that of pragmatists with experience in the region.