Chapter 99
FROM EARLY MARCH 2003 through April 2006, while the world’s attention was largely focused on the invasion of Iraq, the chaotic aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the rise of the radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, Cobb’s team ran ad hoc missions in some of the most dangerous country in Afghanistan.
“At first, Cobb and his men stuck to the general’s playbook,” Carpenter said. “They worked to break up networks developing between poppy growers and Taliban fighters demanding tribute from the heroin manufacturers. In return for security, the growers paid the Taliban, who used the cash to fund their war.”
“At first?” Del Rio said.
“At first,” Carpenter replied. “Spring of 2004, things slipped off the rails while Cobb and his men were on a mission north-west of Tarin Kot. The general had a heart attack and died, having destroyed virtually all records regarding the secret JSOC team. They were, shall we say, left to their own devices.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
“They became a ghost team,” Carpenter said. “They didn’t exist. So they were never extracted. Left out there, in country.”
“Until you went in after them?” Del Rio asked.
“I was the third to try to bring them in,” Carpenter said.
He said that in the summer of 2004, US Defense intelligence began getting reports of a rogue unit operating in the rugged massif north of Kandahar. Cobb and his men were said to be turning the tables on the Taliban, demanding their own tribute from the poppy growers and executing anyone or anything suspected of supporting Al Qaeda and the insurgency.
“Men, women, children, dogs, horses,” Carpenter said quietly. “You name it, they killed it if their demands weren’t met.”
“So Cobb kind of went Colonel Kurtz?” I asked.
“You could say he found his own way to the heart of darkness,” Carpenter agreed. “You could also say that he led a thirteen-month reign of terror that quite frankly worked.”
“How so?” Del Rio asked.
“The Taliban lost ground or died out everywhere Cobb’s team went,” Carpenter replied. “Poppy growers paid up or died too. And there was ample evidence that Cobb and his men amassed a small fortune in gold and black tar heroin that they managed to stash across the border in Pakistan.”
By late fall of 2004, the evidence of a secret JSOC team was overwhelming. Two senior CIA Special Activities Division, or SAD, operators were sent in to convince Cobb to come out of the hills and report his activities.
“We lost contact with both men, and they were and are presumed dead,” Carpenter said. “You two flew me into their area when the snow started thawing in the spring of oh-five.”
That sounded right, and I nodded.
Carpenter said it took him two weeks to find Cobb’s team, but he did, living in a box canyon deep in the mountains. He delivered an ultimatum. Cobb and his men could continue their lawless activities, be branded renegades, hunted, captured, court-martialed, and sent to Leavenworth for execution.
“Or?” Del Rio asked.
“Or they could leave the mountains with me, quietly, without anyone knowing,” Carpenter said.
“And in return?”
Carpenter cleared his throat. “They got immunity for their actions.”
“They took the deal?” Del Rio asked.
Carpenter nodded. “You two had crashed in the meantime, so you weren’t the ones to extract us. I brought Cobb’s team back to Kabul, where they were debriefed about their activities. The intelligence officers were horrified by what they learned. But Cobb and his men had immunity and no legal action could be taken. Illegal action was something else again.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
Carpenter pinched the bridge of his nose. “The way I heard it, secretly and at the highest levels of the US military and intelligence apparatus, a decision was made to punish Cobb’s team, to turn them into pariahs.”
“How?”
“By making them what they had become in Afghanistan, a team of savages that no longer existed,” Carpenter said. “Literally over the course of two days, the records of all six men were permanently expunged from all government databases. Their money was seized, their bank accounts erased. Their pensions were nullified and evaporated. All credit lines vanished as well. Their next of kin were notified of their deaths in combat, given generous bulk death payments and weighted coffins to bury.
“Then Cobb and his men were flown back into the mountains north of Kandahar and dumped, weaponless, deep inside Taliban-controlled country. Until you sent that set of fingerprints to me, Cobb, Johnson, and the others had not been heard from since. Everyone had assumed they were long dead.”