48. CIA, Afghanistan, and The Rest Is Classified

0:06Hello and welcome. Today, Anthony and I want to tell you about a brand new podcast from Goal hanger. The rest is classified, which will tell the best stories from the world of espionage. It's hosted by my friend and colleague, National Security Journalist Gordon Carrera, and the man we are joined by now, the former CIA analyst turned spy novelist David McCloskey. David, I'm so excited about this. I was literally waiting for the first episode. And when it dropped, I listened on the day it came out. It's such a great idea. There are so many incredible stories in the world of espionage that we don't know about.

0:43And you are in such a good position to tell them. So what are you trying to do with the podcast? Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. And thank you, Katty, for that wonderful endorsement of the show. Hey, listen, any episode that starts with a character called Kermit has me at Kermit. It's going to be a good one. That's right. We are trying to tell authentic and really entertaining stories about the world of espionage. And I think most of all, I mean, of course, we're trying to entertain, but we're also trying to give listeners insight into a world that I think is pretty opaque from the outside, pretty framed by Hollywood or by leaks to the media.

1:19I think it is difficult when you're sort of outside that world to really grasp how it functions, like the nuts and bolts of it. And that's what we're trying to do. So we're going to tell stories from the past. I mean, we started with stories about Iran in 1953. We're doing a series now on the CIA in Afghanistan immediately after September the 11th. And so we're going to do sort of all across history, and we're going to tell spy stories from all over the world. David, first of all, congratulations on the show. And Katty and I want to help you in any way possible. But I don't really think you're going to need a lot of help because the narration is so fantastic.

1:56And both of us find what you're doing gripping. But my quick question to you is if I didn't know anything about spying and espionage, why would I tune into this? Well, I think that's exactly the reason to tune in if you don't know anything about it, because we're going to tell you how it actually works, truly. And we're going to do it, I think, in a way that will help you understand, for example, how does an intelligence operation to recruit and run a human asset in the Soviet Union of the 1980s, like practically, how does that work? How did it actually function for CIA paramilitary teams to pair up with Afghan warlords, you know, in the weeks after September 11, to overthrow the Taliban and to try to hunt down bin Laden, like, we're going to give you not the Hollywood version of this, we're going to actually explain how these things work and give you a lot of, I think, interesting insight into the characters that make this world so colorful.

2:57David, you write novels, but of course, you also did work at the CIA. Are you going to be telling secrets? Are we going to get like, you know, inside information? You are going to get inside information. I mean, I'm not going to be irresponsibly saying things that will put anyone in danger, imperil any sort of, you know, national security imperatives. I'm not going to do anything like that. But I think, I mean, look, my novels, I try to do this as well. Like there is a lot of realism and authenticity that you can bring to a spy novel, you can bring to a podcast, like the rest is classified, that is not irresponsible.

3:33And that sheds light on, frankly, a really misunderstood business that I think is really important to our national security, Western national security. And we're going to really try to shed light on it in that way. Do you want to tell us a bit about this week's episode? Yeah, so we are doing a series on the CIA in Afghanistan immediately after September the 11th. And it is a really fascinating period because, you know, you think about sort of Afghanistan of 2020, 2021, and you have Taliban insurgents opposing us and sort of a Western-backed government. Well, this is the exact opposite. This is small, I mean, literally like CIA paired military teams of eight people who have paired up with a really colorful and insane cast of Afghan warlords to be the insurgents to overthrow the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan in 2001, right after the September 11th attack.

4:32So it is going to be a story that has everything from gun battles on horseback, bags of cash being dumped off with Afghan warlords, and really, I think, a sense maybe most of all of a path not taken in the war in Afghanistan. It's such a great idea. So many great stories. David, thank you for joining us today to tell us what it's all about. And now, as a treat for listeners, we've got a clip from this week's The Rest is Classified.

5:09The CIA guys, David Tyson and the paramilitary officer Mike Spann, who are going to go into Khalid Jangi to do this questioning, they have been operating over this month. They've been a country. They are making basically one phone call to CIA headquarters every day to kind of report in on what's going on, they are the ones making decisions. The CIA has pushed decision making down, and I think quite rightly, to the lowest possible level here, acknowledging that you can't run this kind of conflict from CIA headquarters. These guys have to make decisions on the ground. And so they go into Kali Ajangi on the morning of November 25th, 2001, knowing that they've got the first big group of Al-Qaeda prisoners that has been detained since September 11th.

5:55And that many of these guys might know about active plots. Many of these guys know bin Laden potentially, and some of them might know where he is. So you can see why they want to interrogate them, but it does look extraordinary when you see some of these videos, because there is video of this, because there was a German, I think, TV crew. Yeah, there's journalists there at this fort. And it's just, you know, Mike Spam wearing kind of his jeans and a fleece, you know, and he's got a gun on him, but with just hundreds of Al-Qaeda prisoners just sat in front of him and very little else around him.

6:28That's right. And all these prisoners are let out of the pink house that morning. They actually, because they don't have restraints or flex cuffs, they take pieces of their clothing and turbans and things like that and actually use it to bind the prisoners. They spread them out in rows in this southern compound of the fort outside the pink house. And they're trying, You see in the videos, you know, Mike Spann and David Tyson are trying to question them, to figure out. You're trying to sort through 400 people, you know, who's important, who's not. The prisoners, there's this back and forth. Many of them, of course, don't have documentation.

7:03It smells terrible because no one of any of these people, including the Americans, has taken showers in weeks, right? They're collecting weapons from the prisoners as they come up from the pink house, including in one case, there's brass knuckles, you know, taken. there's grenades, there's rifles, there's pistols. And they get the full 400 of them kind of in these five lines, kneeling in this massive Southern compound just outside the pink house. And I think David Tyson and Mike Spann start to realize they need to call, they need proper interrogators brought in to manage this because it's just going to be too much.

7:41But mid-morning, all of a sudden there are sort of shouts. You can see in the videos, there's explosions, and a group of Al-Qaeda fighters come rushing out of the pink house straight at Mike Spann, who's interrogating some prisoners out of that field. And this is a point where there's essentially a scrum, a melee. Mike Spann probably shoots a couple of them with his rifle and pistol, gets off a few shots, and then he's just overwhelmed because there's so many prisoners out in that field. Now, David Tyson is watching all of this from 40 or 50 yards away as he'd been dealing with another group of prisoners.

8:20And Tyson's going to talk later about how just time starts to slow down. He can't hear all of the explosions and the chaos around him, but he can hear Mike Spann calling out his name. He's saying, Dave, Dave, Dave. And the prisoners now, it turns into a full revolt chaos. A prisoner revolt. Yeah. They're on the rampage and they're grabbing weapons and going for weapons, which are just lying around effectively in various parts of the complex. There's weapons everywhere. There's weapons everywhere. So they can just grab them. And Dave Tyson himself, I think grabs a weapon. I mean, he runs initially, then there's shooting.

8:53He looks bewildered. I mean, he looks, you know - He's in shock. He's in shock because his colleague has just been jumped on and, you know, he assumes probably killed. That's right. In fact, later, the CIA will establish that he probably died in the - Mike Spann, yeah. Right away. Mike Spann And then dies. You know, again, it's chaos and sort of all comers coming at him. Because I mean, frankly, some of these prisoners, they also just want to escape the fort too. Yeah. You know, but there is this sort of hardcore group that are trying, you know, to instigate this revolt. So David Tyson, you know, picture him, he's in the southern compound.

9:22Again, you picture this sort of star cut in half, right? He needs to run away, right? So he's trying to run into the northern part of the fort. And he has prisoners coming at him. He actually, a couple grenades, he'll say later, bounce off of him and don't detonate because, of course, a lot of the weaponry there is very old. He, on his way in this run north, probably kills at least 12 Al-Qaeda fighters and maybe 40 more. The numbers, we don't know. But he just runs down this massive street up away from the fighting in the south up toward this northern courtyard. And over the course of 11 minutes, that's it.

10:0211 minutes finally gets away and gets into some safety in a massive sort of building in the northern part of the compound if you want to hear the full episode search the rest is classified wherever you get your podcasts