Free Not a Good Day to Die by Sean Naylor Page B

Dailey should have placed Delta’s commander, Colonel Jim Schwitters, or Captain Joe Kernan, the Team 6 commander, in charge of TF 11, depending on whether it was the turn of TF Green or TF Blue to take the lead in the task force. Dailey knew Trebon lacked boots-on-the-ground experience, but he believed he had an obligation to develop his deputy by giving Trebon responsibility. Dailey also knew that Tommy Franks preferred to work through generals whenever possible, and that Trebon was the protégé of Air Force General Charlie Holland, who as commander of U.S. Special Operations Command was Dailey’s boss.
    In contrast with Trebon, there was one general in Bagram who knew all about how to chase down and kill “bad guys,” as the U.S. military liked to refer to its enemies. That was Brigadier General Gary Harrell. A barrel-chested man with a viselike handshake his aides felt compelled to warn visitors about, Harrell was a legendary special operator. He had spent all but eighteen months between December 1985 and July 2000 in a variety of jobs in Delta and JSOC, rising to command Delta between 1998 and 2000. Harrell was no stranger to manhunts. As Delta’s C Squadron commander, he had tracked drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in Colombia and warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia. Later, in the 1990s, he helped locate and capture war criminals in the Balkans.
    Despite his background, Harrell was not in charge of any “door-kickers” in Afghanistan. Since July 2000 he had headed CENTCOM’s Joint Security Directorate, which oversaw the protection of U.S. forces across CENTCOM’s slice of the globe. But in November 2001 Franks ordered him to Afghanistan to command an intelligence “fusion cell” that would take all the intelligence being produced by U.S. assets in—or over—Afghanistan and fuse it together to be “stovepiped” back to Franks. The CENTCOM commander placed a lot of faith in Harrell, whom he referred to as his “quarterback,” and sent him to Afghanistan to bring more focus to the intel collection process. The burly one-star showed up in Bagram on November 25. Staffed with personnel from the military, the CIA, and other agencies, his fusion cell’s task was to sift through the reams of information the United States was gathering on the movements of high-value targets and decide what constituted “actionable” intelligence. The cell started off small, but after Harrell arrived it expanded to a force of fifty or sixty people. Like TF 11, Harrell’s new organization, which he named Task Force Bowie, worked directly for Franks, with no requirement to report to Mikolashek. Unlike TF 11, however, Bowie was located in Bagram, which was fast becoming the dominant military headquarters in Afghanistan. Harrell was also in charge of Bagram’s detention facility, a large multistory gray building where Taliban and Al Qaida prisoners were held and interrogated by U.S. intelligence personnel. In the opinion of special operators in Afghanistan, Harrell’s location gave him a substantial advantage over anyone back in Masirah.
    Those on the ground in Bagram realized Harrell was more than an intelligence conduit. He was Franks’s personal representative at Bagram. “He [Franks] wanted his guy on the ground to make sure that things were going the right way,” said an officer who worked close to Harrell. Harrell not only brought a general’s star to bear, but also an intimidating weight of experience that few, if any, at Bagram, could match.
    Nested inside Bowie, but reporting to TF 11, was a small organization that would soon have a major impact on the war. Called Advance Force Operations, or AFO, its mission was to conduct high-risk reconnaissance missions deep into enemy territory. AFO was not a standing organization back in the States, but rather a concept coordinated by a JSOC headquarters cell that could draw personnel from any special operations unit to meet a particular mission’s requirements. Troops attached