The Mission, The Men, and Me by Pete Blaber

Author:Pete Blaber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

11

IMAGINE HOW TO SEEK OUT THE GUY ON THE GROUND

The next night I went back to work on the phones. One of my first calls was to an old military intelligence operative who worked out of Washington, D.C. Frosty was a fiftysomething spook who was one of those guys who never told anyone anything about who he actually worked for or what his actual job was. To this day, I still don’t know. He was an enigma, operating on the fringes of all of the three-letter spook clubs, but not part of the social fabric of any of them. I figured that he and his vastly networked web of contacts might be able to connect me or at least point me in the right direction in my search. I told him I was trying to better understand the on-the-ground perspective of the Al Qaeda fighters inside Afghanistan. He warned me that none of the three-letter clubs knew much about Al Qaeda. Then anecdotally he added that he had bumped into a friend of his from one of those clubs at breakfast that morning, and the friend mentioned an imprisoned Al Qaeda operative who had offered to cooperate in whatever way needed.1

“What’s he in prison for?” I asked.

“For the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassy bombings. UBL sent him there to oversee the planning. Supposedly he also trained UBL’s security detail,” he added dismissively.2

“Has anyone taken him up on his offer?” I asked incredulously.

“No,” he answered. “He’s been in prison since 1998 so you have to understand that he has only limited value as a real-time intelligence source.”

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” I replied. “If he trained UBL’s bodyguards, he might be able to tell us how they operate. This guy could know things like how often they move UBL, or where they prefer to hide UBL, or how they communicate with other members of the terror network. If we understand how UBL’s bodyguards think and make decisions, we can adapt to them, and anticipate what they’ll do next.”

“Okay, okay,” he responded, “I get it.” Frosty agreed to follow up with his friend and get back to me as soon as he had something.

Two days later Frosty called me and told me he had a document written by the “Al Qaeda guy” with some of what he termed “his ramblings” on the current situation in Afghanistan.

“Great” I said. “What kind of file is it?”

“It’s a handwritten document on eleven-by-fourteen legal paper,” he replied.

I asked him to scan it as a PDF file and send it to me ASAP. A few hours later, I had the document in my hands. After stapling it together, I settled down on my cot to check it out. Two paragraphs in, I jumped back up to get my Hi-Liter and colored stick-on tabs. Within minutes, I wasn’t just highlighting anymore, I was coloring it in. These weren’t just idle musings of an imprisoned madman, this was a dissertation on how to find, infiltrate, and defeat Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

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