Very quickly after the conference, the JIATF took its place at Bagram in a tent next to others originally erected for Operation Winter Strike but now permanent fixtures at the old Soviet air base. The goodwill and camaraderie that brimmed in the room in Tampa undersold just how big a challenge it would be to get the agencies—through their representatives in that tent—to work together. And while the day-to-day leadership inside the JIATF tent fell to our most deft TF 714 members, much of my next four and a half years was consumed with shoring up support at the top levels by keeping participation in the JIATF and our wider task force a top priority.
No alliance could be as infuriating or as productive as my relationship with the CIA. We worked more closely with it than with any other agency, and the effort tried the patience of both sides. Some of my closest friendships at the end of the fight were with CIA partners. In a frame on my wall at home I have a note, written on a page torn from a small notebook while in the back of a helicopter flying over Kunar in 2005. The man who scratched the note was a CIA officer who became a close comrade and friend. The note reads: “I don’t know the Ranger Creed. But you can bet your sweet ass I won’t leave you!”
And yet more than once, my most trusted subordinates had to stop me, in moments of utter frustration, from severing all ties with our “Agency brothers,” repeating back to me my own guidance to preserve our relationships through specific conflicts. I knew my Agency partners had equally mixed sentiments about me, and I admired them for their tolerance. On my initial October tour, I had visited the CIA headquarters at Langley, as well as the posts downrange where we had liaisons. Depending on the locale and the personalities, special operations and the CIA worked together only marginally better than they had during Operation Eagle Claw in 1980. At best, we were fighting parallel, fractured campaigns against Al Qaeda; ours had to be a unified fight.
Not everyone in the CIA agreed. For those people, the relationship with us was good because it was limited. Their hesitance was understandable. Many of them were skittish as the military—led by TF 714—began to take a more active role in the counterterror effort. The entire CIA had about as many people as a single military division, and some feared that when the Department of Defense directed its immense resources toward counterterrorism, it would overwhelm the CIA, reducing their role. Some maintained a legitimate concern that our proposal ran contrary to how the Agency operated, as Langley had been the furnace of their intelligence work, while security concerns meant that they maintained a light footprint forward. Others had a more instinctive cultural aversion that fueled their intense professional territoriality. As the junior varsity, thundering in loud and large, TF 714 was liable to muck up their careful spy work, and we would have leaks. I had to clench my teeth at one meeting when a not particularly impressive ex-military CIA officer smugly said, “Welcome to the war on terror.” Building a durable relationship was an exercise of persistence and patience more than brilliance.
Government agencies signaled their feeling toward TF 714’s expanding presence in their community through the caliber of representatives they sent to the JIATF and the orders they gave them. Some sent their best talent; others deployed people they wouldn’t miss. They deployed some talented people with instructions to be polite, but narrowly limited their cooperation; a few others came fully committed to the team.
With this mixed influx of people, the JIATF was an early step in expanding TF 714 beyond its traditional core elements, and the diversity brought its ups and its downs. Participants came with fascinating stories or created them by their actions. A young navy lieutenant told me of her Afghan birth and how she’d fled the Soviet invasion with her family as a young child, riding on the back of a donkey through the Khyber Pass. Now an American citizen, she was back, and her determination carried a buzz felt by those she worked alongside. Another officer, gifted in intelligence analysis but less so in weapons, accidentally discharged his M16 rifle inside the JIATF tent. No one was hurt, but the bullet pierced a fire extinguisher, and out of the gaping “wound” white foam spewed into the NGA’s computer servers, which stored all of the map data for the task force, ruining one of our key databases of information. Although it became a much-loved anecdote within the command, it wasn’t funny at the time.