Mike Spann — Johnny Michael Spann — was a Central Intelligence Agency officer assigned to the Counterterrorism Center and the first American killed in combat in Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks. He was killed in the Qala-i-Jangi prison uprising of approximately November 25, 2001. John Kiriakou, who worked roughly ten feet from him in the CTC bullpen, describes him as “a good guy. Nice guy. Good family man.”[1][2][3][4]
Death
Spann and a small number of other CIA and military personnel were interrogating recently captured Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners — including the American John Walker Lindh — at a fortress in northern Afghanistan when the prisoners revolted. Spann and his colleagues were rapidly overwhelmed. “They ended up just opening fire on these guys and they ran out of bullets. And then he was stomped to death. That’s how he died. They stomped him to death.”[1][2][5][6]
The fuller telling gives the arithmetic of the moment. The prisoners worked themselves into a frenzy and rushed the officers holding them all at once; there were only half a dozen guards. The CIA officers opened fire and were overrun. Many prisoners were shot and killed. Spann ran out of ammunition, and when the Taliban prisoners reached him “they stomped him to death, jumping up and down on him, smashing him.”[7][8]
The first to fall
John Kiriakou worked ten feet from Spann in the Counterterrorism Center bullpen. On the morning of September 11, the director of the CTC stood on a desk and told the room: “Today we are at war. We’re all going to have to play our part, and not all of us are going to make it home. If you don’t want to fight that fight, leave now and no one will think less of you.” Nobody left. Spann was among the first to deploy to Afghanistan.[9][10][11]
Kiriakou returns to that speech whenever he tells the story, because of who was standing in the room. Of the group listening to Cofer Black that morning, two were later killed: Helge Boes and Johnny Michael Spann.[11] Spann was the first. “He was the first one of my colleagues to be killed after 9/11 in the line of duty. Others were killed later, but Mike was the first one. Just as Cofer Black had predicted, that we’re all going to have to fight this war and not all of us are going to come back. He was correct.”[8]
Boes and Spann are the two names Kiriakou gives when he is asked what the job actually costs — the two men he worked with in the Counterterrorism Center who were killed in the line of duty, alongside the woman he sat next to as chief of the counterintelligence branch in the Osama bin Laden group, who was blown up with six colleagues by a suicide bomber in Afghanistan.[12][13][14]
He has a star on the CIA’s Wall of Honor. His children were small at the time.[10][15]
The grave, and the story that displaced
Spann is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Kiriakou lives within walking distance and goes every so often to visit him, along with the CIA station chief from Athens and Bill Buckley.[3]
The other half of the story is what the uprising crowded out of the news. Qala-i-Jangi happened the same day as the “box-up” at Dasht-i-Leili — which is how Kiriakou knew CIA officers were within twenty miles of it, and why he wanted to know whether any had been present.[16] The coverage was almost exclusively about the fort. “I remember in the Washington Post news about the box-up at Dasht-i-Leili, it was literally four lines long. That was it. Nobody cared.”[8][17]