Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton Read Free Book Online

Afghan bodyguards. The CIA team had been given money to hire a thousand or so local fighters when they got near their destination point in the southern Logar Province. They then planned to rendezvous with Special Forces Operation Detachment Alpha (ODA) 594, who would train the new hires for combat and support operations. Special Forces ODA 594 comprised a twelve-man team, plus an air force TAC-P controller to coordinate air strikes. One of Billy’s tasks was to make sure the SF team did not mix targets and hit Afghan friendlies by mistake.
    Once a target was identified, there was a check for any friendlies or civilians in the area, then deconfliction with other units, and finally the okay to kill was granted. Air strikes using JDAMs, or smart bombs, were called in by using GPS coordinates, laser designator binoculars called SOFLAMs (Special Operations Forces Laser Marker), or by “talking in the pilots”—just giving a series of visual indicators that gave the pilot an accurate visual sighting. Hellfire missiles were mounted on the Predator UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), giving remote-control kill authority to operators using joysticks and firing buttons, as in a video game. It was all done over the radio, and the man actually pushing the Fire button was sitting in an air-conditioned trailer thousands of miles away.
    Even though they were prepared to give effective coordination for surgical air strikes, Billy still did not feel like they had sufficient support, since the bulk of American air power was concentrated around the battle of Tora Bora at that time. “We moved from Kabul to Paktia Province. We stayed there for about twenty days, and then blasted into Gardez. The Taliban had no idea what was happening. We didn’t get the air we wanted. The air [assets] were up in Tora Bora. We couldn’t do the combat that we wanted.”
    Heavy combat was thankfully not necessary, since the Taliban was quickly folding up across the country with little resistance. They had already fled Gardez when Billy and his team rolled up in a twenty-five-vehicle convoy on January 4, 2002, and began to settle into a compound east of town. Their job was to create a conveniently titled “Eastern Alliance” mercenary force, even though no such thing existed. The other function was to gather as much intelligence as quickly as possible—essentially setting up a network of intelligence assets, as well as arresting and shaking down Taliban supporters fingered by paid informants. Billy’s group set up shop in a large mud-walled compound, and he gave orders to a local strongman to have his Afghans threaten any media that came within three kilometers.
    The mountain pass between Gardez and Khost crawled with Taliban, and Billy’s team began hunting down groups of fighters. They used phone intercepts, Predators with night vision, old-fashioned turncoats, and night surveillance using the latest in infrared imagery. ODA 594 spent their days training the Afghans in weapons use, as well as infantry and small unit tactics. They all spent much downtime listening to Billy tell war stories about Cambodia and Laos—the good old days when the CIA worked directly with Special Forces and when hunting down enemies and killing them with mercenary armies was standard operating procedure.
    By January 15, the Afghan proxy forces were up to three hundred Afghans. General Lodin, a Pashtun commander who had worked with the CIA in the 1980s, had volunteered his son, who showed up with thirty friends. “It’s hard to get good information out of these lying-ass Afghan warlords. We worked with a bunch of lying bastards. The old man [General] Lodin was in charge and his son Zia Lodin worked as a captain for us. He was straight up about it: ‘I am here for the money. I don’t like those people in the Panjshir and I only like my people.’”
    The elders in Gardez had supplied about a hundred local men, and two