The Secret Sentry by Matthew M. Aid

Author:Matthew M. Aid
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2009-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 13

A Mountain out of a Molehill

NSA and the Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction Scandal

The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so.

—LOUIS PASTEUR

The Hiatus

After the Battle of Tora Bora, there followed a six-month hiatus where the attention of the White House, the U.S. military, and the entire U.S. intelligence community, including NSA, were largely focused on the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the remainder of his al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But while the U.S. military and intelligence community were focused on finding and killing bin Laden, they ignored a new threat that was once again rearing its ugly head—the Taliban. Within a matter of weeks of the end of the Battle of Tora Bora, the Taliban had managed to resurrect themselves across the border in northern Pakistan. After the fall of Kandahar in December 2001, between one thousand and fifteen hundred hard-core Taliban guerrillas, including their one-eyed leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and virtually all of his senior commanders, slipped across the border to the safety of northern Pakistan. No attempt was made by the U.S. Army or the Pakistani military to prevent their exodus from Afghanistan. Thousands more Taliban fighters disappeared into remote mountain hiding places in southern Afghanistan, or returned to their villages to wait to fight another day.1

A few weeks later, in mid-January 2002, SIGINT reporting coming out of NSA revealed that a relatively small number of Taliban military commanders had returned to Afghanistan and were operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border. The intercepts showed that the Taliban had reestablished a crude but effective communications system using satellite telephones, which allowed its field commanders inside Afghanistan to communicate with their superiors in northern Pakistan. Within days of this discovery, small teams of Taliban fighters began launching sporadic mortar and rocket attacks against U.S. military outposts in southern and southeastern Afghanistan, as well as ambushing U.S. Army patrols operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border. By the end of January 2002, U.S. intelligence reporting, including SIGINT, had confirmed that Taliban guerrillas were operating in seven Afghan provinces.2

Unfortunately, the reappearance of the Taliban was ignored by the Bush White House, which had already set its sights on Iraq. So beginning in February 2002, and continuing without letup through the summer of 2002, just as Taliban guerrilla attacks were on the rise inside Afghanistan, virtually all CIA and U.S. military intelligence assets (including SIGINT) were withdrawn and sent back to the United States to prepare for the invasion of Iraq. Only a few tactical SIGINT collectors assigned to the small army and marine contingents in Afghanistan remained to keep track of the Taliban and al Qaeda.3

Operation Anaconda

The precipitous withdrawal of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence assets could not have come at a worse time. In February 2002, just as the withdrawal of intelligence commenced, a force of three hundred Afghan militiamen plus CIA and Green Beret personnel left the sleepy town of Gardez in southeastern Afghanistan to reconnoiter reported al Qaeda positions in the nearby Shah-i-Kot Valley.

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