Gary C. Schroen's astonishing new book tells the story of how a handful of CIA agents like Hal led the initial post-Sept. 11 charge against al Qaeda and its Taliban patrons, far outstripping the agency's lumbering competitor, the U.S. military. The CIA, which had been working with Afghan assets since the 1980s jihad against the Soviet occupation, was quick out of the blocks after the 2001 terrorist attacks; the U.S. military, despite having bombed al Qaeda camps in August 1998, had no off-the-shelf invasion plans and had to scurry to the drawing board. The Pentagon's Special Operations units would hook up with their CIA counterparts weeks later. By underscoring that gap, the pointedly named First In will make Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grind his teeth.

Schroen, the strong-willed son of a union electrician from East St. Louis, Ill., had been the CIA's station chief in Islamabad from 1996-99. By Sept. 2001, he was on a glide path to retirement, having spent time in the agency's senior management ranks as deputy chief of the Directorate of Operations' Middle East and South Asia division. Two days after the attack, Cofer Black of the Counterterrorist Center asked Schroen to lead a small team of CIA officers to lash up with the Northern Alliance; he accepted on the spot. Osama bin Laden and his deputies were not to be merely captured or "rendered" to justice, Black ordered: "I want to see photos of their heads on pikes. I want bin Laden's head shipped back in a box filled with dry ice. I want to be able to show bin Laden's head to the president."

The resultant CIA campaign has been described in such books as Dana Priest's The Mission (which recounts the above story about Hal) and Bob Woodward's Bush at War (for which Schroen was clearly a source), but never with such authority or specificity. Schroen's seven-member team -- codenamed JAWBREAKER -- flew from Washington to Germany, then Uzbekistan, then choppered over the Hindu Kush into northern Afghanistan on Sept. 26. They winged it from there, enduring bumpy rides across the Panjshir and peeling off wads of cash, including an initial payment to the Northern Alliance of $500,000. During Schroen's 40 days in the valley, he spent a cool $5 million, "the vast majority passed to our Afghan allies" -- a sum Schroen considers a bargain for renting the local fighters who would work with U.S. spies and soldiers to end al Qaeda's Afghan haven. His team, working with the Northern Alliance, also cajoled more than 400 intelligence reports out of co-opted Taliban soldiers or Afghan civilians behind Taliban lines, enabling U.S. bombs to hit al Qaeda and Taliban targets far more precisely.

One might suspect that the CIA let this book, with its astounding detail, survive the prepublication-review gauntlet because the agency relished the chance to relive a brief, shining moment: The triumph of toppling the Taliban, after all, was sandwiched between those unconnected pre-Sept. 11 dots and that disastrously mistaken post-Sept. 11 assessment of Iraq's WMD programs. Still, First In is likely to cause headaches at Langley. Schroen's heroes are his fellow JAWBREAKER operatives, as well as a few senior CIA officials such as Black and his deputy, known here only as "Hank"; beyond that, Schroen grimly sets about settling bureaucratic scores.

His particular bête noire is the Defense Department, which he excoriates as ponderous and timid. JAWBREAKER's men raged at the delays in the arrival of Special Operations forces, and when U.S. bombing finally began on Oct. 7, a disgusted Schroen warned Hank that the first forays "could best be described as modest." Schroen reports that the Pentagon got repeatedly rebuked back in Washington for its sluggish pace, including what seems to have been a cabinet-level spanking for Rumsfeld on Oct. 15. But he also takes swipes at clueless stateside officials from his own agency, snarling over a secure phone that one CIA scold "might like the job out here" instead.

Schroen is also still fuming at the policymakers who flung his team into harm's way before the Bush administration was willing "to fight a winning war in Afghanistan." In particular, he holds a grudge against the State Department, Pentagon and NSC officials who hesitated to aid the Northern Alliance before Sept. 11 and continued dithering afterward. According to Schroen, they worried that providing the concentrated, northern-front bombardment necessary to help the alliance defeat the Taliban would also let its Tajik leaders take over Kabul, Afghanistan's capital, and start settling scores with the country's more numerous ethnic Pashtuns. The alliance's leaders felt the mistrust keenly, and so did their JAWBREAKER patron. Schroen came to bitterly resent the "strong anti-Tajik lobby within the ranks of senior U.S. policymakers," including Gen. Tommy Franks of the Joint Chiefs and a State Department official whose name Schroen does not provide but whose resumé is spelled out with venomous precision. Ultimately, events on the ground made U.S. policymakers' decisions for them; as the war cabinet debated, one alliance general told his CIA liaison, "I am going into Kabul regardless of what your NSC decides."

Schroen's hard feelings were probably exacerbated by at least two spectacular episodes in which "friendly fire" almost killed some of his men. On Oct. 10, he got an urgent call from a military officer back home supervising the flights of remotely piloted Predator drones -- the high-tech tool that, in the fall of 2000, had spotted a "man in white" widely thought to be bin Laden before being grounded until after Sept. 11 as Bush administration policymakers argued about whether to delay reconnaissance-only missions until armed planes were readied. The mission manager now reported that a Predator was currently looking in real time at two non-Afghan men in Western garb on a newly built airfield on the Shomali Plains. "One of the men is very tall and thin and may be bin Laden himself," the voice on the line reported, asking permission to launch an anti-tank missile at them. "You're not going to believe this," Schroen told a comrade after checking the coordinates, "but I think the Predator is looking at Chris and Ed, and this guy thinks Ed is bin Laden. They want to hit them with a Hellfire." The other CIA man yelped, "My God, they're going to kill Chris and Ed!" Later, an equally confused B-52 bomber crew dropped a 2,000-pound bomb not on the coordinates of a Taliban troop position but on those of the CIA team nearby; one of Schroen's men was blown to the floor of a mud building, bruised, scared and scraped -- along with the Afghan leader he was briefing, future president Hamid Karzai.

The author is relatively laconic about battlefield blunders, but he is far less forgiving about what he sees as a massive strategic error: the Bush administration's shift of its focus to Iraq at the expense of the country he helped liberate from the Taliban. The only way to get bin Laden's head on that pike, Schroen warns, is to win full cooperation from Pakistan's balky military, beef up the CIA presence in the region, bring back the indispensable Special Operations units that had been pulled out "as early as March 2002" to prepare for the Iraq invasion, and launch a relentless, coordinated manhunt on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani frontier. This is deeply informed advice, ignored at American civilians' peril.

The staggering detail in these pages -- operational, geopolitical, even gastrointestinal -- makes First In unlike any other CIA memoir. Other recent offerings in the genre have come from disgruntled former operatives far from the action (Melissa Boyle Mahle's Denial and Deception) or comically detached from it (Lindsay Moran's breezy, chick-lit-influenced Blowing My Cover). Schroen's book isn't perfect; his writing is often flat, we learn far too much about the team's digestive woes, and a life in government has left him acronym-happy. First In is also seriously weakened by several lengthy passages in which Schroen, instead of summarizing exchanges heard by his compatriots, offers purportedly verbatim recreations of dialogue he never heard. But this is still a stunning book -- both an essential document about the strange and oft-forgotten war against the Taliban, a withering policy critique and a proud memoir from an aging man who risked life and limb to try to kill al Qaeda's masterminds. Readers expecting just a rip-snorting yarn will find themselves surprisingly moved when Schroen's team repaints their rickety old Russian helicopter's tail boom with a new registration number: 9-11-01.

Reviewed by Warren Bass
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