Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda Read Online Free PDF

attacked.”
    Even as Stratcom was rehearsing for old-school threats, the military’s elite counterterrorism force, the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was preparing to conduct an exercise against the growing threat of a nuclear, chemical, or biological terrorist attack against the United States or against American interests. On September 11, about 1,800 Special Operations forces and a handful of other secret government operators were preparing to launch a sixteen-day exercise in six European and Mediterranean countries and on a ship at sea. The goal of the classified drill was to find and thwart terrorists who had captured an unconventional weapon and threatened to use it against the United States. The exercise, overseen by the U.S. European Command and code-named Ellipse Charlie, was called off that day during its final planning stages, and the commandos rushed back to their real-world bases.
    The European Command and the Special Operations forces had identified the right kind of threat. Because they were trained in hostage-rescue operations and counterterrorism missions, it also made sense that the Special Operations troops were rehearsing a complicated mock attack from a foe like Al Qaeda. But the American commandos and the rest of the U.S. government were still several steps behind Al Qaeda in piecing together the critical intelligence and threat information that could have helped prevent the attacks. Now the race was on to learn everything possible about Al Qaeda before it could strike the homeland again.
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    On Monday, October 15, Jeff Schloesser steered his dark green BMW onto Interstate 95 and started the thirty-minute trip from his home in Springfield, Virginia, to the Pentagon. At 5:30 a.m., the crushing Washington morning commute had not yet turned the eight-lane freeway into a parking lot, and Schloesser made good time on this crisp morning, the first day of his new job and a world away from the Middle East.
    In the five weeks since 9/11, Schloesser had returned from his fifteen-month assignment in Kuwait, expecting to go to Washington to punch the next ticket in his climb up the Army’s leadership ladder: a stint working European policy issues on the military’s Joint Staff. Schloesser had served in Kosovo in the late 1990s, giving him some exposure to the bedeviling intricacies of Balkan politics. But Schloesser’s boss, Lieutenant General John Abizaid, had other ideas for him. Abizaid directed political-military affairs for the Joint Staff and was one of the Army’s most intelligent officers. A Lebanese American with small-town roots in northern California—and the only Arabic speaker to advance to four-star rank in the Army (he would get his fourth star in 2003)—Abizaid had served in Jordan and had spent a year as a member of a UN observer force in southern Lebanon. In between those assignments, Abizaid had commanded a 120-man Ranger company that parachuted into Grenada as part of the 1983 invasion. At one point in the operation, Abizaid ordered a soldier to hot-wire a bulldozer at the airfield and charge at Cuban troops with blade raised, giving cover to himself and his men (an incident that was immortalized in the 1986 Clint Eastwood film Heartbreak Ridge ). Schloesser reported to Abizaid’s office early that morning, not knowing exactly what was in store for him. “Forget Europe,” Abizaid said. “You’re going to stand up a brand-new office here, the Strategic Planning Cell for the War on Terror.”
    In wartime, the responsibility for planning and waging specific campaigns falls to the regional military commander assigned to oversee that slice of the globe. In this case, responsibility for Afghanistan fell to the U.S. Central Command, based in Tampa, Florida, and led by General Tommy R. Franks. The broader strategic military planning that cuts across different regional commands is the domain of the Joint Staff. On September 11, the Joint Staff