Gary Schroen was, in John Kiriakou’s description, a very senior CIA officer and a legendary one. He wrote a book called First In, about how he and a small team of CIA special operations officers were the first CIA group into Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. [1]
The date
Kiriakou raised him to correct an interviewer’s timeline. They went in, he says, on something like September 12 — so there was a CIA presence in Afghanistan from the days immediately following the attacks. [1] They were in the north, with the people of the commander Kiriakou could not name in the moment, describing him only as the one who was killed in the bombing the day before September 11, and later with Dostum’s people. [1]
What came next
The correction was a preface to Kiriakou’s own judgement about what the agency then did. There is an old saying about Afghan warlords, he said: that you cannot buy an Afghan warlord, but you can certainly rent one. And that is the CIA way — to throw massive amounts of money at a problem and hope that some of it sticks. Some of it stuck. [2]
Was it a success? Probably not in the long run, he says, but at least it bought some time. What he means by not a success is specific: instead of these warlords capturing senior al-Qaeda leaders and turning them over, Guantánamo and other places were filled with largely innocent nobodies who had been turned in by their neighbours for a bounty, or by people settling scores. It did, he allows, put the Taliban on the run. [3]
Kiriakou also notes that the bombing did not begin for almost a month, because the United States wanted to give Mullah Omar a chance to hand over Osama bin Laden — and says he really believes that had Omar done so, al-Qaeda would have imploded as an organisation and there would never have been any reason to go to war in Afghanistan. [4]