True Spies: Classic - Team Alpha
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This is True Spies. I was in Iraq, in Baghdad, in the journalist's hotel, and somebody, another reporter said to me, did you ever see the footage of that CIA officer running for his life in the fort in Mazar-e-Sharif? I'm Vanessa Kirby, and this is True Spies, Team Alpha. In 2004, journalist Toby Harnden became fascinated with the story of Team Alpha.

A group of eight CIA officers working in Afghanistan in the wake of the 9-11 attacks. Toby was working in Washington, D.C. when 9-11 happened. He covered the U.S. response as it unfolded. But it wasn't until three years later that his curiosity about Team Alpha was piqued. It all began with a video of one of the eight men running desperately for his life.

I went onto YouTube or wherever and watched it. And it was footage of this CIA officer dressed in sort of an amalgam of Afghan and American gear running across this fort.

clutching Kalashnikov in one hand and a pistol in the other. And then he bursts into a room on the northern end of the fort, and all of a sudden he's on camera. He's basically sort of bumped into a German TV crew. And I remember looking at this man's eyes, like a thousand-yard stare, these staring, unblinking eyes,

And just thinking, wondering, you know, what had he just been through? He doesn't know whether he's going to live for another few more minutes, another few hours, or what is going to happen. And so I was fascinated by that person and how he got to the fort, what he went through, and also how he dealt with the subsequent years. In this week's True Spies, the story behind that video. The story of the man with the thousand-yard stare.

The one Toby Harnden spent years trying to talk to, hoping to hear the full, unclassified details. My name is David Tyson. I'm a retired CIA officer. I spent 25 years in the agency. And many years ago, some 20 years ago, I joined Team Alpha and went into Afghanistan soon after 9-11.

David and Toby have come together for this special two-part True Spies series to tell the story of Team Alpha, the story of America's first casualty of the war in Afghanistan. Let's go back to the video that first captured Toby's attention, to the man, David, running across the fort of Mazar-e-Sharif, looking for all the world like a grizzled veteran of close-hand conflict.

You might be surprised to learn that the man clutching a Kalashnikov in one hand and a pistol in the other was not an experienced fighter. David's background was in linguistics, but true spies listeners know sometimes a hidden skill lands you in a place you'd never imagined. Well, I started with Russian as a young man out of the army in college, and I chose Russian simply because...

It had strange letters, you know, an odd alphabet. I had not taken a language before that. And I went to graduate school at Indiana University, and there I started Uzbek language and studied Turkmen language, Farsi, and so forth. And this is when the Soviet Union still existed.

So although Russian and Uzbek are not related linguistically, they certainly are in terms of sort of the politics of that time when Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union. And over time, I understood that the agency was hiring people, namely linguists, people to do foreign language things, translations, interpretation, and so forth.

I submitted an application and was selected to be a linguist. An Uzbek speaker like David would be a strong asset for intelligence services operating in Afghanistan, a country with such a diverse population of ethnic groups. Some argue it can hardly be called a country at all. And well before 9-11, America had already established a covert presence in the region. I'll let Toby explain.

The CIA had been involved in Afghanistan pretty intensively since the 1980s. So the period of the Soviet occupation, the CIA had been working with the Mujahideen that were fighting the Soviets, supplying them with Stinger missiles.

Once the Soviets left Afghanistan and subsequently there was the collapse of the Soviet Union, the US decided that Afghanistan didn't matter anymore. Strategically, it was a backwater. But a small number of CIA officers maintained contact with the country and their connections with the Mujahideen. One of those officers was David Tyson, who was posted to Uzbekistan, Afghanistan's neighbour to the north.

regionally, Afghanistan was still important. And so being located in Uzbekistan at the time, and my chief in Uzbekistan asked me to focus on Afghanistan, which was easy to do in the sense that there were plenty of Afghans around and I had a great interest in the area and region. And it soon became clear that the ethnic Uzbeks in Afghanistan were an important factor in the regional issues.

And they, in fact, were fighting against the Taliban that had come to the fore. And they were also fighting against the forces of al-Qaeda, which had sort of moved into Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Before September the 11th, 2001, al-Qaeda hadn't managed to stage an attack on American soil. But they had already targeted the U.S. elsewhere in the world.

In 1998, the group set off simultaneous truck bombs at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. 224 people died and more than 4,500 were injured. In 2000, Al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole, a Navy destroyer docked in a port in Yemen, killing 17 more. Now, of course, since 1996, when Osama bin Laden was expelled from Sudan,

He'd been given refuge inside Afghanistan. And so with the rise of the Taliban and the Taliban's relationship with al-Qaeda and its hosting of bin Laden, you had a convergence of al-Qaeda and Afghanistan. I mean, it's almost like ripple effects inside the National Security Council. There was a growing sense that Afghanistan mattered again.

On September 11, 2001, when four commercial airliners crashed into major landmarks of American power, those ripple effects became crushing waves. American intelligence officials had long been on alert. And yet, though it may come as a surprise, the Pentagon didn't have a plan for how to respond.

General Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command, believed that it would take many weeks to orchestrate an invasion and that it would require many, many boots on the ground. Not an appealing prospect. But Kofa Black, the director of the CTC, the CIA's counterterrorism center, had another idea. His plan would incorporate American intelligence, indigenous resistance groups,

and the Northern Alliance, a multi-ethnic group of Afghan militias united against the Taliban.

There had been CIA missions into Afghanistan over the previous two years, and they were called Jawbreaker missions. And David Tyson had been on the first one of those in 1999. And so there was a relationship between the CIA and the Northern Alliance. And it was this that Kofa Black built on in his plan that he presented to President Bush.

Kofa Black's concept of small teams of eight or so Americans, CIA pathfinders, alongside Green Berets, 12-man ODA, Operation Detachment Alphas, would go into Afghanistan and fight alongside the indigenous resistance. The mission? To gather intelligence on al-Qaeda with an aim to prevent another 9-11.

Each of the eight-man Alphabet CIA teams, from Alpha to Juliet, had been assigned to a different region of focus. And the very first one to enter Taliban territory, of course, was Team Alpha.

Team Alpha was put together very rapidly. It was very improvised. The nucleus of the team was four paramilitaries from the Special Activities Division. But one of the things I found fascinating about them was they were not all elite warriors. It was an eclectic bunch of men.

led by J.R. Seeger, who was a case officer, a diary speaker who'd worked out of Islamabad with the Mujahideen in the 1980s. The deputy chief was Alex Hernandez, who was a paramilitary officer. Scott Spellmeyer, who was the number three on the team. He was a former ranger, another CIA paramilitary. He'd been wounded in the Black Hawk Down incident in the Battle of Mogadishu. You had Andy, who was a Special Forces reservist.

Mark Rausenberger, he was the medic. Justin Sapp was a Green Beret, 29 years old, so the youngest member of the team. And he was the only one of the eight who was not actually in the CIA. Justin was added to be the link man with the Green Berets. And also because the CIA had a limited number of paramilitaries at that time, and so they needed...

military personnel to sort of augment the CIA teams. And of course, there was Mike Spann. Mike Spann was a 32-year-old former Marine Corps officer. He joined the CIA just two years prior. And by all accounts, he was eager to further his career. Mike had been to Uzbekistan previously, and we had been working in an effort to gather intelligence on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

So Mike had been there as a trainer, training local forces. And I had met him several times in that process prior to 9-11. And my early impressions of Mike were sort of the lasting ones in the sense that Mike made an impression and those impressions didn't really change over time, even when you got to know Mike fairly well. He was a very focused person.

professional. He was fairly quiet and observant. Personally, he had a great sense of humor, but his focus and sort of attention to the mission at hand was something that sort of separated him just a little bit from other people. Mike was unambiguous in terms of his opinions, his beliefs, his sort of integrity and so forth. There was no doubt when you were talking to Mike where he stood on things.

And I always feel that Mike was, in a way, the personification of America after 9-11. He was very black and white in his outlook, good and evil, with us or against us. And Mike had this burning desire to get to Afghanistan and get to the people who had perpetrated 9-11. Mike was a family man, recently remarried and the father of a new baby boy. His son was only a few months old when he left for Afghanistan.

Mike also had two young daughters from his previous marriage. So Mike was at a pivotal point in his personal life. He had every reason and every justification to put his hand up and say, you know, well, you know, it's just too much at the moment. I need to sort of take care of the home front.

But not only did Mike not do that, he sort of did the opposite. He fought to get on the team. He had to be on the tip of the spear, as he described it, with the CIA in Afghanistan. And really, there was no question in his mind that he was going to be on one of those CIA teams. Mike's wife, Shannon, was a CIA case officer herself. She understood as well as anyone Mike's commitment to his career, to the agency, and to his country.

So she knew exactly sort of what he was. He strongly identified as a Marine. And in fact, one of the reasons why he'd left the Marines was because he hadn't experienced enough action. And he thought that the CIA would be more at the forefront of fighting for America and what it stood for.

I think it briefly went through her mind to say, well, maybe this isn't the best time. But she knew Mike well enough to know that that was sort of at the core of his being. Mike's view, and Shannon shared it, was that if you were in the CIA and you were a paramilitary, this is what you joined for. And the way Mike explained it to his daughter, Alison...

was that what if every daddy decided they had to stay at home? Then there would be nobody to protect you and all of us. And so Mike felt that fighting for his country was the same as fighting for his family. And he was not the sort of person to take a back seat on any of this. The eighth member of Team Alpha, and the last to be added to the team, was, of course, David Tyson. On September 11th, I was...

in the air flying from Uzbekistan to London, where there was a gathering, a CIA gathering on Stinger missile issues. When I landed in London, I learned very quickly that the World Trade Center had been attacked and the other locations in the United States, the Pentagon and so forth, had been attacked. And the conference was canceled and I returned back to Uzbekistan.

He had much, much more experience of Central Asia than anybody else on the team, with the possible exception of J.R. Seeger, who'd spent time in the region. But David had lived for years in Central Asia, and his command of the Uzbek language

was almost native. Now, he had limited military experience. He'd had two stints in the US Army, and he joked this first stint, he played basketball in Germany. He later got an ROTC commission as an intelligence officer, but he was no elite warrior, and this was many, many years before. And so he had less of a military mindset than the other members of the team whose military experience was either a lot more recent or more high level or more extensive.

Let's put it this way. David had never killed anyone. Alex Hernandez, who was the deputy chief, was sceptical of David and said, you know, like, what have you done? And after David told him that he'd been an academic, Alex would refer to him as the professor or sometimes as the tourist. There was a sense, I think, that David, because he had limited military experience and no combat experience, and because he was so comfortable with the Afghans,

that he was willing to take more risks and had maybe less of a perception of danger than some of the other team members. But David was the CIA's sole Uzbek linguist, and his background gave him a significant cultural advantage. He could communicate with America's indigenous allies with an ease that no one else on the team could match.

They'd talk about how American men sort of stand up to urinate and Afghan men crouch down. He would talk about sex and food and wives and every aspect of life, often with a lot of humor. And so that gave him this rapport with the Afghans that the rest of the team didn't have.

My father worked in a paper mill. So I grew up with that sort of working class culture and it's something I deeply respect and really appreciate, but I really knew it wasn't for me. At least as a young man, I understood that I needed to sort of

Try something else, let's put it that way. I always had a natural curiosity about other people who sort of looked and acted differently, and especially those who spoke different languages. I don't know how I ended up where I did, but it was certainly a sort of progression based on my interest and curiosity. Team Alpha's work in Afghanistan would put David face-to-face with a key figure in the resistance, someone willing to go to drastic lengths to stamp out the Taliban.

Abdul Rashid Dostum was the leader of the Uzbek minority in Afghanistan and he was

very much against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. And one of the things we were doing, we were trying to collect or buy back Stinger missiles that had been passed on to the Afghans during that Soviet-Afghan war in the 1980s. And it became clear to us that it was a good idea to get these missiles back, the ones that remained.

And that's what we were doing. And one of the people who were involved was Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was assisting in the acquisition of these missiles and passing them on to the United States indirectly. A helpful guy to have around, if you don't mind mingling with an alleged war criminal. Abdul Rashid Dostum was an ethnic Uzbek warlord, a fearsome military commander,

with political aspirations for the Uzbek people in northern Afghanistan. His hands were soaked in blood. He had this fearsome reputation as a warrior who gave no quarter on the battlefield. He has this sort of scrubby moustache and usually unshaven and prickly hair. He's powerfully built. I mean, he's like a warlord from central casting.

He was notorious for switching sides. So he fought alongside the Soviets against the Mujahideen who were backed by the CIA in the United States in the 1980s. He switched over to the Mujahideen and back again. And so he was viewed by the State Department as

and the US government more broadly as somebody not to be trusted, somebody with an atrocious human rights record, and somebody that really the US should have nothing to do with. Well, never say never.

That was the view before 9-11. But of course, you know, as with so many things, it changed completely on that day. He had the troops, he had horse-mounted fighters, kind of like a 19th century almost way of fighting where they would conduct cavalry charges and fire RPGs and Kalashnikovs from horseback. He loathed the Taliban. He was already fighting against them.

And so Dostum was one of the men of the moment and the United States wanted him to be alongside them. But as Toby said, Dostum was notorious for switching allegiances. Could a man like that truly be trusted? Even as Team Alpha entered the region in mid-October 2001, its members were uncertain about what was in store for them.

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Hello, listeners. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. This is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast, What Should I Read Next?

They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years, and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page-turner to help them escape the stresses of work, or a book that they've been reading for years.

school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for What Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more. It was October the 17th, 2001.

The eight-man Team Alpha was about to meet its unlikely ally, the ferocious Uzbek warlord, Abdul Rashid Dostum. There was a lot of trepidation going in. Here's this guy who's a warlord, who's notorious for switching sides. We don't know what the situation's going to be on the ground. Is this going to be a double cross? Is he going to sort of turn his weapons on us? And so there was this real sense as they flew in on the two Blackhawks that they just didn't know what they were going to face.

Once they landed, Dostum and his men sort of swarmed around the helicopters, carried the CIA officers' gear, and Dostum turned to J.R. Seeger, the T-Mouth chief, and said, welcome to Afghanistan. We must have some tea. That's the funny thing about Dostum. He might have butchered his opponents and tortured his adversaries, but he still managed to maintain a sense of decorum.

They went into a sort of decrepit abode that had been chosen for the purpose. Some carpets had been put down on the floor. There was debate about whether they should take weapons inside the building because there was a lot of suspicion. But they sat down and Dostum outlined his plan for recapturing Mazar-i-Sharif, fighting through the Dariusu Valley, linking up with the Tajik forces of Atta and Mohammed Noor,

and defeating the Taliban with US help. Of course, the city the Americans most wanted to take was Kabul, the capital. But to get there, they had to take a strategic route. Mazar-e-Sharif was the fourth largest city in Afghanistan. If the city could be captured, Dostan believed, the Northern Alliance could gain control of the six provinces surrounding it. That would be the beginning of the end for the Taliban.

It was a strategic city that had formerly been on important trade routes. It was on the main ring road that connected it to Kabul. And the strategic importance of the city was once you controlled Mazar-e-Sharif, that was the key to unlocking control of the rest of northern Afghanistan. Solid plan. But in order to carry it out, Dostum would need the help of Atta Mohammed Noor, his sometime rival.

Atta's forces would be crucial for the successful capture of Mazar-e-Sharif, and Dostum also wanted to have American equipment and weaponry on his side. In particular, Dostum recognized that he needed U.S. air power to bomb the Taliban forces and then have his Uzbek cavalry ride through and kill the remnants.

But Dostum immediately struck the Americans as a man who was serious, whose interests aligned exactly with the United States' aims at that time. And so they decided that, yeah, this was the guy that they could work with. A powerful combination. Dostum's cavalry equipped with American firepower. Of course, Dostum's men wouldn't be the only ones on horseback.

Much to Team Alpha's surprise, the rocky terrain left the CIA officers with little choice but to saddle up. How to ride a horse was one thing they hadn't learned in training. How to ride up and down steep mountainous terrain whilst firing your weapon and fending for your life. Well, that's a horse of a different color. We had a 14-hour horse ride, I think, on the fourth or fifth day, and it was just terrible.

The horses were terrible. The kit was terrible. And, you know, to be honest, I was afraid and scared all the time on horseback. I could never get the horse to do what I wanted to. The Afghans would laugh at us, and we would sort of entertain them with our incompetence on horseback. But, you know, riding horses up and down mountainsides and sometimes in combat situations was very unnerving.

It was a real sort of shock to their systems to realize that they'd have to be moving and sometimes fighting on horseback. Eight days into the mission, David got a taste of something even more unnerving.

What we did periodically was split up into smaller teams and groups. And depending on the mission, we went off and worked with our Afghan partners, meeting Afghan leaders, talking to prisoners, getting supplies, doing the airdrops and so forth. And one of the things we did was move up with...

certain Afghan cavalry commanders on horseback and go out to see what was going on, to see the front lines, and on occasion to call in airstrikes against the enemy. And on one occasion, we noticed Taliban or Al-Qaeda forces, and that was the time where I shot my weapon for the first time at someone and, you know, shooting at the enemy.

David was accompanied by one of Dostum's lieutenants and 30 men on horseback. And the lieutenant had spotted Al-Qaeda forces in the distance through binoculars. Rather than pick a fight, they opted to retreat. But not before the Al-Qaeda fighters caught sight of them and began to advance. Suddenly, for the very first time, David found himself taking aim at the enemy, shooting and killing. Just imagine for a moment what it's like to be in David's shoes.

You did your time in the military, sure, but by your own admission, you spent a lot of that time playing basketball. Then you returned home and made a life for a time in the world of academia. Your greatest weapon is your intellect. You speak five languages fluently and a conversant and three more. And you're an asset in conflict zones because of your ability to connect with people. How does it feel to be here on the battlefield? How does it feel to be the one taking a life?

During my time in Afghanistan, I didn't think about that kind of thing very much. Each day we had a new set of priorities and things to do. And each day you were challenged in terms of, you know, not only sort of intellectually trying to figure things out, but also physically and then mentally dealing with, you know, concerns and fears and so forth. It didn't leave much of an impression on me at the time, but certainly later on it did.

But it was a very easy thing to do. You know, the things you were trained in the military to do to get a good sight picture on the target and squeeze the trigger was something that was very obvious and easy to do at the time.

Throughout the years, did I sort of grapple or just reminisce, so to speak, about some of the things that I had done, which included, you know, shooting people, shooting the enemy and killing the enemy. And every once in a while, it sort of hits you and you deal with it a little bit and then move on. And it's something that sort of follows you around forever. Not a single one of the Al-Qaeda fighters survived that day on the front lines.

David went to get a closer look at the first person he had shot and killed. He wouldn't process what had happened until later, but he did walk away with a young man's gun. A week and a half into their mission, Dostum told Team Alpha that his forces had captured 40 Taliban prisoners. On the 26th of October, the CIA officers were to pay them a visit to stop by the dank sandstone caves where they were held in custody and have a little chat.

I wouldn't call them interrogations, more or less sitting down with prisoners that were captured on the battlefield and trying to quickly understand and gather information from them. Naturally, David was one of the men selected for the job, and his colleague Mike, always eager to develop a new skill, was keen to join in. When we first received word that we had some prisoners, it was my task to meet with them based on the fact that I spoke some of the languages they spoke.

And when Mike found this out, he immediately came to me and asked to be part of this process. And I said, sure, I would be happy to have his help. But he went back and instead of sort of catching some sleep, Mike came to me when it was still dark.

And he had written in a very, very tiny, his tiny handwriting, just dozens and dozens of questions that we should ask the prisoners and sort of questions that he had for me. And we spent the next few hours before we got on the horses, he spent that time sort of talking to me and trying to understand what I understood about what we were going to do and who we were going to see.

The next morning, they rode off on horseback to see these prisoners. And they were being held in caves that had been dug out of the mountainside that had been used over the years for prisoners of different types. And the door swung open and Mike and David were confronted by the sight of these emaciated, stinking prisoners.

dirty prisoners who were absolutely terrified. They sort of flinched when the door opened, not just because of the lights, but because, I mean, David's conclusion was they clearly thought that they were going to be executed. They were just going to be dragged out and shot. The CIA wasn't naive to the inhumane conditions in which Dostum held his captives. These men were regularly beaten, sometimes to the point of disfigurement. When Toby says the men were stinking, he means it.

One round of questioning ended early because the stench of a prisoner's wounds was too overpowering for the men to endure. As he spoke with the prisoners, David began to recognize them for what they were, primarily Turkmen farmers, largely illiterate, men who'd been forced into fighting under threat of the Taliban. He believed they could be released and sent back to work on their farms. They offered little in the way of useful intelligence.

Mike was extremely dogged, extremely thorough, and he always wanted to get to the truth. He was very suspicious of the prisoner stories. And he said to David, well, how do you know this? How can you tell this is just a Turkman and he's just a farmer? He could be lying. He sort of wanted and received a crash course on, you know, how to deal with these or who these prisoners were. And that sort of...

reaffirmed Mike's sort of, I guess you say, credo of sorts that he wanted to be the pointy end of the spear. He wanted to be on the front line and he wanted to see up close and personal the people we were fighting against. Mike, eager to grow in the agency, was hungry for insight that would improve his ability to serve.

It not only impressed me, but it sort of made me like him even that much more. By Team Alpha's fourth week in Afghanistan, there were signs that a tide was beginning to turn. Remember how each CIA team was assigned a different region of focus? For Alpha, that included Mazar-e-Sharif.

Mazar-e-Sharif is a city that had been back and forth between Taliban and Northern Alliance control. And so there was this sense that it was the first domino, that once that domino was toppled, the other dominoes in northern Afghanistan and then in the rest of the country toppled.

would fall, and that's what happened. The liberation of Mazar-e-Sharif in the first two weeks of November in 2001 was not something we were really planning for in the sense that we had been in combat and we had some sort of serious resistance to our movement to Mazar-e-Sharif.

in the days just before its liberation. We were told that the al-Qaeda and Taliban forces had left the city, but like everything in combat or in Afghanistan or in many other situations, you can't believe necessarily or you can't plan for that kind of thing. You have to go into these situations with your eyes wide open and be ready for what you've been doing the whole time.

time prior to that, you know, getting under fire and so forth and fighting your way through. So as we got closer to the city, people started to come out and started to wave at us and smile and ask us questions and so forth. And it was clear that there were no enemy left in these areas around the city.

Mazar-e-Sharif fell on November the 10th, 2001. And the CIA and the Green Berets rode in on trucks and horses alongside Dostum's men and Atta's men. The Taliban, a lot of them had been killed, but many more had fled. The people lining the streets, cheering and smiling. Some of them had shaved off their beards the day before.

And for the Americans, it was, I mean, several of them compared it to the liberation of Europe in 1945, of being greeted by like liberators and heroes. In Washington, President Bush and other White House officials were elated. In his speech to the United Nations, Bush claimed that the Taliban's days were numbered, but for Team Alpha, on the ground in Afghanistan...

That sense of victory was short-lived.

The problem was that although the city had been abandoned by the Taliban, many of the Taliban had just melted away, gone to fight elsewhere and fight another day. And there was a new situation in which Atta, Moakek and Dostum were fighting for control of the city. So it was a different phase. Rather than it just being the Americans and the Northern Alliance alongside each other with one aim, which was to recapture Mazar-e-Sharif, things sort of splintered somewhat.

That day we did arrive in the Mazar, I got word that there was one group of so-called Al-Qaeda, well, they called them Chechens, remained in a school complex and that they would not surrender. Chechens being a term used to describe foreign fighters from all over the world. As it happened, these fighters weren't from Chechnya or Eastern Europe, but from Pakistan. And they weren't all terrifying warriors. Some were just 12-year-old boys.

And we had to basically destroy the school and fight, assault our way into the school complex to kill the rest of the enemy that remained. So even that day of sort of liberation in Mazar, it ended with a fairly serious fight. You know, we had to call in airstrikes and so forth. But I think that's sort of symbolic or symbolic.

Indicative of the whole process, you have certain feelings and emotions and they can be wiped out very quickly by the turn of events. Back in Washington, there was a sense that Mazar-e-Sharif had fallen. That was it. There was nothing more to see there. But there was a sort of ambiguity about the city and the surrounding areas.

that not only continued but became sort of more heightened in the two weeks or so after Mazar-i-Sharif had fallen. So some villages that had capitulated were suddenly not safe to go to. There were groups of prisoners being held and bartered and David had this sense that everything was not quite as it seemed and there was still a lot of danger. That danger was headquartered in the west of Mazar-i-Sharif

in a fortress perched high above the city called Kalajangi. Rough translation, house of war. On the 24th of November, David and Mike drove out to the fort to meet their Afghan allies and speak with Al-Qaeda prisoners. There was no electricity in Kalajangi and in the darkness, the security risk was high.

It was not clear what was going on, but it was clear that we had no business there on the evening of 24 November. There were two explosions. I think two suicide bombers blew themselves up. And at the time, it was not clear what they were doing because we had not had, up to that point, any suicide bombers take any of that action. David and his colleague had driven out to the fort to meet their Afghan allies and interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners. But the explosions sent them back.

Now, the next morning, they're heading back in. But even when you're a CIA officer working in the far reaches of the globe, the globe keeps spinning. Life back home carries on. And every so often, David's colleague Mike Spann would get a reminder when he dialed home to Virginia to speak with his wife, Shannon.

Throughout Team Alpha's time in Afghanistan, Shannon and Mike would speak whenever they could via satellite phone. Shannon was another CIA officer, so she was also following events from CIA headquarters. She would go in sometimes, or she had colleagues who were able to tell her more than most spouses would be able to be told about what was going on. So she knew what Mike was doing. After the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, as Team Alpha were preparing for their next task,

Shannon Spann was getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving. Shannon was in Yosemite in a cabin where she'd gone with her parents and sisters every Thanksgiving since she'd been a child. And Mike said that T-Mouth was due to be relieved in early December, so he'd be back for Christmas. They talked about getting bikes for Mike's daughters and

And they talked about having a period of calm and stability at home that they'd been unable to have certainly since 9-11 and even before that. But it was a difficult phone call for Shannon and she couldn't quite put her finger on exactly what it was, but some sort of sense of foreboding. And when the call ended and she put the phone down, she burst into tears and she couldn't understand quite why.

Back in the United States, intelligence reports warned of another attack on US soil. Five Americans were killed and 17 more were infected by letters delivered by the US Postal Service that had been laced with a dangerous chemical commonly known as anthrax. Some feared that another 9/11 was around the corner. And on the ground in Afghanistan, Team Alpha was keen to stop an attack before it could happen.

After the fall of Mazar-e-Sharif, the next big battle, in fact, the Taliban's expected last stand in northern Afghanistan was in Kunduz, which was about 100 miles to the east of Mazar-e-Sharif. Before what's expected to be a big battle in Kunduz, Dostum met with Mullah Fazl and Mullah Nouri, who were two top Taliban commanders in northern Afghanistan. Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and Mullah Fazl led the negotiations.

Dostum had been an unlikely but indispensable ally to the United States. Fazl was not the sort of guy you want to tango with.

Mullah Fazl had a reputation of being a sort of fearless slayer of Hazaras who'd been taking part in ethnic cleansing, the burning of Hazara villages. He was feared and loathed by every non-Pashtun in northern Afghanistan. But the Afghan sort of way of war is to negotiate surrenders, even with your sworn enemy, and that would often also involve sometimes switching sides.

Remember, even Dostum himself had a tendency to switch sides when it was advantageous. Vasil might have been despised, but he also presented an opportunity. If the Northern Alliance leaders could negotiate a surrender, they could potentially avoid the bloody battle that lay ahead in Kunduz.

Dostum and Fasel negotiated for hours and at the end of their negotiations they announced that there'd been a deal. But it was always extremely murky exactly what this deal would entail. The Americans were adamant that no al-Qaeda forces or foreign fighters would be allowed to escape the area. But the American government's belief was that this should be an Afghan deal.

for all its sort of murkiness and ambiguity. But American forces were not there to fight this war. For the Afghans, they were there to sort of advise, but it needed an Afghan solution. And so the deal between Dostum and Faisal was that Taliban forces would surrender. And that's what Dostum believed had been agreed and that they would give up their fight. And that will be the end of it.

The Americans were now stationed in Kalajangi, the fortress in the west of Mazar-i-Sharif, along with their indigenous allies. It was a symbolic piece of real estate, and one that had seen quite a few tenants over the course of its history.

Qala Jangi, which translates roughly as house of war, was this medieval-looking fort. It looks like something out of the Arabian Nights, just dominating the landscape. And it's an incredibly imposing place that every commander in Mazar-i-Sharif would always make his headquarters. And so once Mazar-i-Sharif fell and the Taliban abandoned Qala,

Kalajangi, and it was the natural initial base for the Americans to set up. And in the southern compound was an old Soviet-built schoolhouse known as the Pink House. In the Pink House, there was a cellar which had been fortified to store weapons. It was like a bunker. At the time, the Pink House held something else too. Hundreds and hundreds of prisoners.

On 24 November, we had received word that a large number of al-Qaeda prisoners had surrendered and would be coming to the city. So when we got word about the prisoners coming back, sort of the skeleton crew at Mazar, we just understood that we would have to deal with these prisoners along with our Afghan allies.

And given the fact that they were al-Qaeda members, it was clear to us that we needed to go out and sort of figure out who these guys were, gather the basic intelligence as to their identity and their documents and so forth, and start the process of doing what we sort of do best is collect intelligence. A significant opportunity for Team Alpha, if perhaps a sizable task.

Mike and I were basically the only two agency officers in Mazar at the time. There was a couple others, but they were moving about doing other things. So people have always asked, how did you deal with this and what did you think and so forth? Well, I just saw it and Mike just saw it as another day. So on 25 November, we went out in the early morning. And by that time, it was a little more clear that

This was a big deal in the sense that we indeed had four to five hundred al-Qaeda prisoners. And this was the first time since 9/11 that such a number of al-Qaeda forces were in our hands, so to speak, and that we would have access to them. And I don't mean us, just our team, but I'm talking the U.S. government writ large. And I'll never forget, Mike was extremely eager to go, extremely eager to get out there.

These men were different from the other prisoners David had interrogated before. For one thing, he gathered, they'd all given an oath of allegiance to al-Qaeda and its founder, Osama bin Laden. They were also all foreigners. What we understood very quickly is we did not have the wherewithal to gather the information that we needed to gather. The rest of the eight-man team were needed to work elsewhere that day.

They had discussed whether American military backup might be needed at the fort that day. But ultimately, it was up to Dostum's men to provide security for the CIA men. Because of his skills as a linguist, David shouldered much of the burden of speaking with prisoners. Mike did not speak a foreign language. We had great Afghan helpers, Afghans who were more or less trained intelligence personnel as well,

But what we didn't have were the facilities and the manpower and the ability to record the information. We're just sort of writing things down in notebooks. And so it quickly became clear to all of us that we would need to be spending days and have other kinds of help. Other kinds of help, meaning a doctor, for example. Many of those prisoners had wounds that were badly in need of treatment.

Wounds that would lead to infection, or worse, without timely attention. So by mid-morning on the 25th of November, it was clear that David and Mike were out of their depth. They'd need additional support to handle all of the prisoners in their midst.

Shortly after 11am, most of the prisoners were out. There were perhaps 18 or so still in the cellar. And Syed Kamal had said to David that he thought that there were ethnic Uzbeks who were still in the cellar and some of them were hardcore senior guys. David trusted Syed Kamal to know. He was Dostum's intelligence chief. Kamal warned that some of the prisoners had dangerous weapons and that some of them likely felt betrayed that Fazil had handed them over.

Just as David and Mike were preparing to finish for the morning, the last prisoners were being brought out. I was at the time taking prisoners and sort of isolating them so that I could speak to them in private.

And that was a distance away from where Mike was. And during that process, when we understood that there were about 30 to 40 prisoners left for us to sort of talk to and take pictures of, shouts, screams, and explosions and gunfire began in the building, which was very, very close to where Mike was located at the time.

David Tyson is in the middle of questioning the hundreds of prisoners at the fortress Kalajangi, when suddenly there's a flurry of activity in the distance. Gunshots, explosions, screams. It's an uprising.

What had happened was that a number of those last prisoners had ascended the metal stairs from the cellar into the pink house and overcome the guards. Now, some of the prisoners hadn't been searched properly. Some of them had grenades and weapons on them, and they were able to overcome the guards, seize weapons from the guards, kill them, and rush out into the southern compound. Which is where they encountered Mike.

Mike swung around towards where this commotion was happening. His Kalashnikov was on his back. He pulled it round into the firing position and shot dead prisoners that were rushing towards him who were clearly intent on staging an uprising. As he did, though, some of the prisoners were rushing him from behind. All of a sudden, he had people jumping on his back and trying to pull him to the ground.

pulled out his Glock pistol and shot some of them. But he disappeared basically between a pile of bodies of these prisoners who were trying to wrestle his weapons from him. Meanwhile, David is far from the action, trying to piece together what's taken place.

I quickly obviously understood something was going on, but I did not know at the time what to do. And I remember grabbing or taking my pistol out of my holster and

And just standing there, observing and staring at the area where all this was coming from, which is about 150 meters from my location. And that's when everything started. So I had these couple seconds of not really knowing, you know, what was going on, obviously, and not knowing as well what to do. But that feeling of confusion quickly dissipated when I heard Mike's voice yelling my name out.

And he did so twice to three times, and I heard that. And as soon as I heard that, I moved, started to run towards Mike. As David ran, he realized he'd begun to perceive his surroundings differently. I want to stress that these were not normal sort of decisions that one makes, you know, every day. I was very quickly sort of transported to a different plane where things that I did were automatic.

I was not thinking normally, but that was something that I almost immediately felt that things had changed fundamentally for me mentally. I was in a place where I'd never been before or since. I immediately understood that something was very, very strange. For David, time has warped. Moments pass like hours. But it's only been a matter of seconds since Mike disappeared under the pile of bodies.

David is still making his way in the direction of his voice. During this process, as I'm running, or I don't know if I'm running, but I'm moving very quickly. With a sense of purpose, I might be sort of jogging. I have my pistol drawn, and a young man runs towards me. And he's at a distance at first, but quickly becoming closer. And he's running towards me.

And I look at the kid's face and I say kid because, you know, he was in his 20s probably, you know, a young man. And I realize and I think to myself, I've seen this kid before. And why is he over here? Why is he running towards me? And then on top of that, he has something in his hand and he's holding what he has in his hand out.

And as I focus on the hand, I see he has a pistol. And on top of that, I see that he's shooting the pistol at me. When I realized he was shooting at me, it was like irking me. It was an irksome irritation. Like, why do you want to do this? The whole experience is, for David, a rather curious set of events.

It's not so much terrifying or enraging or invigorating as it is puzzling, fascinating even.

Things were happening sort of in a slow motion way, but I was thinking very, very quickly. And I was thinking not only thoughts like this, like, here's this kid, what's he doing? But also sort of superfluous thoughts like, man, this is odd. This is strange. What's going on here? I feel like I'm floating. I can't hear anything. What's going on? This is crazy. I talked to myself.

make comments to myself of how strange this is. But in that process with the kid, I remember telling myself, "Shoot that guy." And that's what I did. I shot him twice. He crumbled to the ground, and I jumped over him sort of and continued on to Mike. - The feeling that time has slowed down is one that's common to people in crisis situations.

Faced with such an extreme threat, the body and mind go into overdrive, doing everything they can to keep a person alive, and in David's case, to keep Mike alive as well. When I did reach where Mike was, there were four men on top of him, and I remember very clearly shooting each one of them twice, one at a time, and then backwards again a second time.

and one of the men had Mike's rifle in his hands and was trying to get that rifle or secure that rifle, if you will. I don't know if Mike had it in his hands or it was somewhere else, but this man was pulling at the rifle. And so when I shot the man...

I grabbed Mike's rifle and in this process, and I don't know which came first or second, I saw Mike's body there and I began to kick him very hard in the leg, yelling his name. At the same time, fully understanding that I could not hear myself yell his name and wondering again why this was happening. Why couldn't I hear my voice yell Mike's name?

And as I kicked him very, very hard in the leg several times, yelling his name, then I saw that he had been shot in the head. And I didn't bend down. I didn't, you know, do anything else. I moved onwards. Remember the video that Toby saw years later of David running for his life, clutching a pistol in one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other? That was the moment David was living now.

as he bolted towards the northern compound, hoping to survive long enough to make it to the headquarters building. He's seen his comrade killed. He's nearly been killed himself. A miraculous escape. He's killed many, many, probably dozens of Al-Qaeda fighters. And he's still not safe. David is surrounded by men, Al-Qaeda recruits, who want to kill him. Remember, they're prisoners. Many of them still have their hands tied behind their backs.

But that doesn't stop them throwing themselves at David, trying to knock him down. It caused me so much, you know, consternation, if you will. And I'll use that word because I think that's the best way to describe it. I was just agitated by these guys and upset that they were trying to kill me as if, you know, they shouldn't be doing this because I had nothing against them. I didn't want to shoot them, but they were coming at me. So I was feeling like I had to.

David picked up an AK-47 loaded with its final rounds of ammunition. When he felt a thud against his back, he turned round to see a prisoner, his hands tied, ramming his head against him. David fired at the man.

It's not like, do you want to do this? Do you want to do that? Or is this good? Or is this bad? You know, are you afraid or not? There's no fear. There's no courage. There's no bravery. There's nothing but just doing this thing on a different plane. And then a couple of the guys later on, and I'm talking a few seconds later, I had this one encounter with a man.

who had a rifle and he was shooting his rifle at me and we were very, very close to each other and he was behind a tree trunk and a wall sort of jumping out, shooting at me and then hiding again. I was shooting at him. I remember understanding at the time this was ridiculous, utterly ridiculous to be doing this because I was going to get killed or he was going to get killed and it served no purpose.

It reminded me of playing cops and robbers as a kid. Something that was just so odd and bizarre. At one point, he pulled a wounded Northern Alliance member over to the side of a vehicle, out of harm's way. He has no memory of this. He was told about it later, but he probably saved that man's life. Finally, after, I think it's pretty clear now, about 18 minutes, 17 to 18 minutes, I made my way to another part of this fortress...

where I came into, you know, sort of a safe zone, relative safety. So I had escaped. That's when things started moving at normal speed again. And that's when David began to process everything he'd just been through. When I got up to this area of safety, relative safety, I squatted down and I remember very clearly now just saying, you know, what the hell just happened? And just sort of breathing out.

and shaking a little bit, and I had my rifle, and just sort of looking around saying, okay, you're really here. You're not anywhere else. This is real. This just happened, and now let's get on with it. Imagine you've just lived through the most harrowing experience of your life. You've fatally shot many people in order to defend yourself. You've made your way across a treacherous battlefield, and you've finally arrived to safety.

And yet, the battle that nearly killed you rages on. No time to sit back and rest on your laurels. Your mission still isn't complete. I'll let Toby fill you in on what happened next.

These al-Qaeda members were there to fight to the death. And there were containers, shipping containers inside the fort that contained a lot of weapons, which the prisoners were able to get hold of. And they fought back tenaciously. So November the 26th on that morning,

The Americans tried to end the whole thing by dropping a 2,000-pound bomb on the Pink House. There was a mistake by a pilot of the F-18s overhead, and that 2,000-pound bomb actually was dropped onto the northeast tower of the fort, which was a friendly position, wounded five Americans, flipped over a Northern Alliance tank and killed a number of Northern Alliance fighters. After that, it was deemed too dangerous for the Americans to drop weapons on the fort.

This war would now be fought by Dostum and the rest of the Northern Alliance. Their US allies would take a back seat. David and Mike had been the only ones questioning prisoners in Mazar-i-Sharif on the 25th of November. Now, Team Alpha's mission, for all seven of its surviving members, was to recover the body of Mike Spann. But that meant David, having endured so much already, had to return to the fortress.

He'd been the last one to see Mike. He had the best chance of helping the team locate his body. I was extremely reluctant to go back. I was scared in a way that I had never been afraid before, to the point of shaking, violent shaking. You know, I had not been sleeping at all through this process.

And I was coaxed into going back by my teammates because I spoke the language. I knew where Mike's body was and so forth. And each day that I went back, I was, you know, for lack of a better word, scared shitless. David had just endured the most traumatic experience of his life. And for three days after, Team Alpha still had to return to the site.

But each day I went back and they told me, let's go up here and let's do this. And I would say, no, no, I'll sit down here. I'll wait down here. And you hear the bullets whiz over your head or, you know, it's not that dangerous from a certain standpoint, but I was still scared. I remember very clearly crouching, uh,

One day next to a tank, we had also, the Afghans had tanks and they brought one of these old Soviet tanks in. I remember crouching next to it and hearing this rattling noise and just looking over to my arm and seeing my, you know, my rifle beating into this tank tread, you know, because I was shaking so much. It was the morning of November the 28th, early in the morning. The Northern Alliance fighters had done a sweep through the southern compound and

And all the al-Qaeda fighters, they were back inside the pink house cellar and the southern compound more broadly was under control of the Northern Alliance and it was strewn with bodies. The Northern Alliance had used a tank to clear the area.

Then they conducted a search near the place where David had last seen Mike. And Commander Fakir, who was one of the commanders that David had fought with in the mountains, came to David and said, was Mike wearing cowboys? Cowboys. That was the term that Afghans used for blue jeans. Sure enough, Mike had been wearing a pair during the uprising on November the 25th.

So a group of Afghans picked up the body, which was very close to where David had last seen Mike, just next to the pink house, and brought the body through the gateway into the northern compound. Turned out to be two gunshot wounds to the head.

which had been what had killed him. One of the Green Berets, Mario Vigil, who's a Mercer sergeant, he'd carried a flag into Kuwait during the Gulf War in 1991 and had brought the flag with him. And so Mike's body was draped in this American flag and Team Alpha members carried him out of the northern compound and into a van that was waiting and they drove the body back to the Turkish school in Mazar-i-Sharif.

Mike's span had become the very first American casualty of the war in Afghanistan. 2,400 more would follow. And many, many non-Americans would die too, as a result of the war on terror. A war that would soon spiral outwards, beyond Afghanistan, to claim an estimated 900,000 lives. That number includes thousands of civilians, thousands of children. And the conflict continues to take its toll.

But what happened later was not something Team Alpha foresaw in those first days and months after 9-11. Once their colleague was confirmed dead at Kalajangi, their mission had ended. Mourning, Mike, is something that didn't happen and is over. It's something that

you know, sort of happens frequently for me. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing at all. You know, Mike is part of who I am now. And he's like a shadow to me.

lurking over me. And he was a serious guy. You know, he's a Marine, he's a patriot. So I sometimes wonder, you know, what he's thinking, so to speak. So Mike is never far away. And that's one thing. And he left a hole in the CIA as well because it's clear to me and clear to many other people who know things better than I that Mike would have been a very senior leader in the agency had he survived.

If there was one place on 25 November 2001 where Mike wanted to be professionally, it was right where he was. Now, obviously, personally, all of us would prefer to be with our families and so forth. But professionally, there was no other place that Mike wanted to be on 25 November 2001 than where he was that day. And in spite of the death of one of their own, Team Alpha's mission had been a success.

There was this formula of hundreds of Americans, not the 100,000 that we later had in Afghanistan, but hundreds of Americans working as advisors alongside the indigenous allies of the Northern Alliance against the foreign invaders of al-Qaeda. And that was a formula that worked. After a review of the Battle of Kalajengi, the CIA awarded David his highest honor.

The Distinguished Intelligence Cross for Extraordinary Heroism. David went on to serve the agency for another two decades. He retired in 2020. But of course, that wasn't the end of this story. You remember how it happened. Crowds clamoring onto the airport tarmac, clinging to cargo planes as they lifted off the runway. Thousands of interpreters left stranded, facing an uncertain future under a vengeful regime.

It was history made painfully before our eyes, and it happened not even a year ago, when the United States finally withdrew from Afghanistan. In August of 2021, Toby and David were watching, along with the rest of the world.

One of the tragic ironies about Team Alpha's mission and the CIA mission after 9/11, I think, is that it was so successful so quickly. Despite the success, you could see the seeds of a number of things that would really bedevil the American effort for the next two decades. Difficulties of handling prisoners, difficulties of coordinating airstrikes and friendly fire instances.

the sort of murkiness of Afghan tribal and ethnic politics, of unreliable allies, of deals that are not everything they seemed. I think it led to a sense of, I don't know whether it's hubris or arrogance, but a sense of we, America, can do anything. We toppled the Taliban in a matter of a few weeks.

So, you know, let's shoot for the moon here. Let's try to build a democracy, a functioning sort of nation state that will be our ally for decades to come. That was classic mission creep, really, but that sucked America into a much broader, a more ambitious project. Afghanistan, the US learned all too late, is not a place that Americans could just drop into and easily understand.

As much as their early successes might have made it seem that way, David, who understood the locals better than anyone else on his team, is still quick to credit America's allies and careful to point out the other ways they've been shortchanged. A lot of times Americans and other people say, wow, that was great what you guys did. That was hard stuff. And that's all true. But you have to remember there were Afghans then and now

who were fighting this sort of war against the bad guys, against Al-Qaeda and so forth for years and decades. They did put up a fight, especially the men we were fighting with back in 2001. Those who did survive continued to serve in the Afghan government in the sort of the military and intelligence structure and continued to fight the enemy until the end.

This is something that has so many layers and so many different nuances that an American, a Westerner can't come to terms with all of this and work it out. But I think rather than listening to those voices from the people who knew the most about Afghanistan in those early days and had experienced those first few weeks, which had ended in success,

The policymakers in Washington decided that a much bigger mission could be undertaken and the rest of it literally became history. I continue to stay in contact with some Afghans and it doesn't take a lot of work to understand that those Afghans who were on our side have been left and abandoned fully and that there's no amnesty for these men anymore.

and their families. Everything that was promised to them by our government has been, you know, sort of abandoned. As the United States does, from time to time we forget. We very quickly forget. You can learn more about Team Alpha in Toby Harnden's new book, First Casualty, the untold story of the CIA mission to avenge 9-11. Available in print and as an e-book now.

Thank you so much for tuning in to True Spies: The Classics from SpyScape Studios. Next time on True Spies: San Francisco, 2003. A nail bomb explodes outside the San Francisco offices of a nutrition company. The next morning, a group called the Revolutionary Cells Animal Liberation Brigade claims responsibility for the attack.

The FBI came and said that the ALF are the number one domestic terrorist threat in the United States. And the man who planted both bombs?

The Bureau eventually get an ID. Daniel Andreas San Diego. His actions mark a watershed in American law enforcement. He was the first domestic terrorist to ever be on the top 10 FBI list. I think everybody thinks, well, these little vegans are just saving the world. But the truth was they were burning things down and doing $50 million worth of damage.

True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.