The Triple Agent

“One of the factions knew we were coming, and then all the others found out,” said one American officer who was present. “It was early in the morning, and no one had had their tea. So the grenades came out.”

One of the CIA officers quickly stepped up and began lavishing praise on the Afghans for their hospitality and bravery. Uncle Sam’s pockets are deep, the man assured the group, a rough-looking assemblage of bandoliers and craggy, bearded faces that reminded some of the Americans of the cantina bar scene in Star Wars. The fighters drifted off, the crisis temporarily defused. Relieved, the weary officers proceeded to pick their way through the town in the darkness, with some of them bunking down at an abandoned elementary school that would serve as temporary outpost.

It was a poor choice for a fort. The school building was on a major thoroughfare and nearly impossible to defend against suicide bombers or rocket attacks. Nearby houses and trees offered hideouts for snipers. There was no running water or electricity. The town itself was dirty and sinister, overrun by armed gangs from as many as seven different clans, whose allegiances seemed to shift by the day. Random gunfire at odd hours kept the men on edge, never completely sure if the shots portended an attack or if it was just another Afghan wedding celebration.

The darkest moment came on January 4, 2002. After a meeting with elders in a nearby village, a gun-toting Afghan suddenly opened fire on the Khost team. One of the CIA paramilitary officers collapsed, struck by a bullet that pierced his chest through a gap in his body armor. Also hit was an energetic Green Beret sergeant named Nathan Chapman, a communications specialist and Desert Storm veteran who had been detailed to the CIA team at Khost. Chapman, thirty-one, had been shot through his thigh, and his wound was deemed less serious than that of the CIA officer.

Within minutes the two wounded men were in the air on their way back to Khost, where the CIA officer with the chest wound was eventually stabilized. Chapman meanwhile was rapidly losing blood from what turned out to be a severed femoral artery. By the time the helicopter touched down in Khost, the young soldier was dead. He was the first American GI from any service to die in combat in Afghanistan.

Soon afterward the CIA moved its headquarters to the grounds of the airfield outside town. Though abandoned for years, it offered ample space for sleeping and working, including a fully intact control tower with a roof that provided sweeping fields of fire for a machine gunner. The runway was salvageable, if littered with broken and bombed-out aircraft from the time of the Soviet occupation. The Americans got to work shoveling dirt into HESCO barriers to begin the fortification of what was to become the first CIA base in Afghanistan outside Kabul.

Someone suggested a name for the new facility: Forward Operating Base Chapman, after the Special Forces officer killed a few days earlier. It became the official name for the base, though most of the CIA inhabitants referred to it by its shorter handle, Khost.

The first order of business was deciding how to deal with the region’s largest militant group. Local warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani had spent years on the CIA’s payroll when he served as an Afghan rebel commander during the war against the Soviets, and he now controlled thousands of fighters along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. He had nominally allied himself with the Taliban after that group’s rise to power in the 1990s. But Haqqani was a free agent, more interested in perpetuating his own smuggling empire and protection rackets than in theology or conquest.

Haqqani also was loyal to his friends, including his former comrade-in-arms Osama bin Laden. The two men had cemented their reputations in the 1980s fighting the Soviets in the mountains around Khost, a region that repeatedly proved impervious to Russian assaults. Bin Laden, the son of a wealthy construction magnate, used Saudi money and engineering connections to help the mujahideen guerrillas build a complex of tunnels and cave fortresses in the hills. Haqqani became a legendary military commander, personally leading his fighters into improbable David and Goliath victories against Soviet commandos and helicopter gunships. The Soviets occupied and expanded the airfield at Khost mainly in a failed attempt to bomb Haqqani and his allies out of their mountain redoubts.

Thus, when SAD teams and pro-U.S. Afghan forces closed in on bin Laden in late 2001, the al-Qaeda leader sought the protection of the tall, bushy-bearded warlord who had fought with him against the Soviets. Haqqani offered his friend sanctuary in a house outside Khost until it was safe to cross back into Pakistan to rejoin his followers.