Chapter One
It was dusk, rain sweeping in from the north as we made our way through downtown Jalalabad. My Japanese charges were in their armored SUV just ahead; I was the chase vehicle tucked in tight behind them. Conventional wisdom in 2008 would have been that we were in grave danger. We commuted to work at the same time and on the same route every day. My Japanese charges were not flexible in this regard at all. Virtually every security expert, government intelligence officer, military man or government contractor would have told me the eventually we would be targeted by the Taliban. I could have cared less, their conventional wisdom about Afghanistan was wrong and I knew it. We were safer in Jalalabad than we would have been driving though sketchy areas of Chicago, Baltimore or even Washington D.C. In 2008 the Taliban were not operating in Jalalabad City but that would change soon enough.
We hit the Afghan National Police (ANP) checkpoint outside the Provincial police headquarters. There was a man-camp across the street from the HQ that was manned by Dyncorp contractors and some American Army troops. The checkpoint was there to stop all traffic and face outboard, weapons at the ready, while the American crossed the street, their rifles at the ready, scanning the locals like they were Germans in Stalingrad, to return to their elaborately protected living quarters. I thought this to be ridiculous, the locals thought it funny at first and then annoying, In the Afghans eyes this marked the American contractors and the army troops with them as cowards and the Afghans hate cowards more than anything.
As we pulled up to the checkpoint the police on duty broke into a wide smiles as they always did when I came through. I stopped and rolled down the window, my faithful driver Haji–jan, who had already been with me for the last four years, exchanged greetings. I placed my right hand over my heart and bantered with the police using my limited ability to speak Pashto. When the weather was warmer I often gave them bottles of water or Gatorade I had lifted from the local Army DFAC (the current term for chow halls) but it was cold now so they asked us to pullover and drink chai with them. We politely declined and drove on, the police were certain of one thing about me and that was I was no coward. Everybody in Jalalabad knew that which is why we could safely travel anywhere in the city. Not because I was a bad ass but because I shared the risks they shared and I shared them with good-natured humor, which is the Afghan way. When it came to safety in Afghanistan for the outside the wire contractor weapon number one was a big smile and the ability to get through the elaborate greetings in the local tongue.
Stories travel fast in rural, clannish societies and will linger for a long time. My story was that I was one of the few foreigners who lived among the locals and one who had brought in a team of Japanese agriculture experts to teach the local farmers how toincrease their rice yields. Technically it was the other way around, I had come to Jalalabad because our client, the Japan International Cooperative Agency (JICA) wanted to open a project down here and I was the only person in our small company who would leave the comfortable confines of Kabul. JICA was Japans equivalent of our own USAID but unlike USAID their experts would not confine themselves to secure bases or insist on military escorts. They had an office within the ministry of agriculture, they traveled into neighboring districts to inspect and work on rice paddies, but they did conform to the UN security standards* for their living quarters and travel so we were stuck in a moderately well protected compound and they traveled in big, brand new armored SUV’s. I didn’t like the SUV’s, they were identical to State Department and Afghan government SUV’s which meant they could be mistakenly targeted by the Taliban but rules were rules and I had to live with the damn white elephant SUV’s.
I was worried that night, not by the prospect of Taliban attack because we had more fundamental problems, the UN contractors who had rented us rooms in their compound were gone. This was the first night I’d be returning to the Taj with its three massive houses with just my two Japanese charges. I had agreed with the owner to try and keep the place open as a guesthouse. We had a nice outside bar that was very popular on Thursday nights with the local expatriate community, We had a good cook, and we also had a really nice pool that was also popular with the Expats in during the hot summer months. I thought it was a no brainer that the reconstruction effort would pick up in the Eastern Afghanistan; Jalalabad was a safe place for internationals to work, there were already several dozen NGO types, most of them women, sprinkled around the city. The international community felt it was a matter of time before more joined us and when they did I was hoping to rent out rooms at the Taj so I could at least make the monthly nut if not a few extra dollars.
I pulled into the parking lot, grabbed my rifle and go bag and headed towards my room. The party lights in the bar were on and there was music blasting from sound system. I headed that way and found two Americans at the bar helping themselves to the beer stock. Both had long hair, one had a pretty decent beard; one was super skinny, the other not, they smiled widely when they saw meand asked if I was Baba Tim. I said I was and the not skinny one stuck out his hand and introduced himself as Dr. Dave, he said he was from the government and here to help. The skinny one burst out laughing at this and introduced himself a Baba Ken. Baba is the Afghan name for Grandfather and could be used as a term of affection for grey beards like Ken and I. It is also a term for men who enjoy hashish. Ken asked me where if my driver Hajijan was around for Haji was one of the most prolific hash smugglers in all of Afghanistan. I didn’t know Ken and Dave and suspected they were connected with the CIA or something similar but this request ruled that out. Hajijan (the jan literally means Dear) didn’t know them either and was doing what came naturally to him which was hiding in the shadows with a shotgun until I told him everything was good. I called out to him and asked him to go cook up aTali for our friends. A tali is a slab of hash about the size of a mans hand and Haji cooked these up for a stash of dry hashish he had smuggled down from Mazar-e-Sharif during our last road trip to the north. Haji smiled, put his right hand over his heart and bowed to our guests and head off to his room to hook us up.
Ken and Dave smiled at me - Ken pulling out a bottle of Capt Morgan they had smuggled in from Dubai and asked if we had some Coke and some ice. Coke we had – ice not so much so Ken poured out a generous amount into three glasses and the three of us toasted a new start to a great adventure. We weren’t sure what the adventure would be and I wasn’t sure who the hell Dave and Ken even were so I started to press them for answers.
Are you guys from the CIA? They laughed at that because it was a stupid question. CIA agents, at this point in our “War on Terror” rarely traveled outside their fortified bases for any reason and when they did they surrounded by Blackwater bodyguards with rifles at the ready. Dr Dave fired up his computer and showed me a video he had taken at last years Burning Man depicting the crowds reaction to the explosion that happened when the big burning man was lit. He pointed to individuals in the crowd noting that some reacted with fear while others were clearly excited and claimed that it was the key to developing software that could scan crowds and select individuals who were embedded in the crowd preparing to do dastardly deeds.
At least I think that was the point. Dr Dave is both a medical doctor and the holder of a PhD in some sort of archaic psychiatric discipline and like most people with that level of education very hard to follow or understand. I would see him give this exact same pitch using the same footage dozens of times over the coming years and never once understood what it was he was trying to say.
Turns out that Dave and Ken were not intelligence agents but entrepreneurs who had formed The Synergy Strike Group, a non profit loosely affiliated with the San Diego Sister City Program(that’s right Jalalabad and San Diego, California are sister cities) and they were part of the main effort of the sister city program which was a medical training/education capacity building program administer by the La Jolla Rotary Club.
Now let me pause to explain the nature of this tale. I would ultimately spend 8 years in Afghanistan. I was soon to become one of the most popular bloggers in that conflict with myblog Free Range International. I appeared in many TV and radio interviews, had a readership in the hundreds of thousands range and not a small degree of influence. I would become part of the most successful reconstruction program in the history of that war. Myself and a very few other internationals from Canada, Scotland, South Africa and Australia would become what the Canadian media called ‘Ghost Team” executing successful projects in the most contested Provinces of Afghanistan. We never failed to finish the projects we submitted, not once. We were the only USAID contractors to accomplish this. I would also become part of what the New York Times would call “ A Private Spy Ring”. That description was misleading, we were a legitimate operation funded by Department of Defense dollars and we delivered the most accurate and plentiful atmospherics of the conflict.
In the series of New York Times articles that ruined our program and in the best seller (The Way of the Knife), written by the reported who uncovered us, I am described as a “commercial Jason Bourne”. I’m no Jason Bourne. I’m a retired Marine Corps infantry officer who understood fourth generation warfare. Like any man who would spend 11 out of 12 months outside the United States I was in the midst of a disastrous second marriage. At this point of the war I understood what most world-class intelligence agencies had once known and that is it was a distinct advantage to being in league with men who could not stand the central government and hated the Taliban. Haji was one of those men. In ten months another of those men would deliver not only the location of Osama bin Laden but the plans for his compound which were on file in the Abottabad land deed office. Those plans would be sent up the chain; I am certain they contributed to the eventual attack on that compound. I am also certain that fact will never be uncovered because the CIAS will never admit we had done in a few months what they couldn’t do in a decade. There is no way they’ll pay us the promised 25 million dollar reward for doing a job they were supposed to do. But that’s not the point; the point is we were that good and this is our story.
* United Nations Minimum Occupational Safety Standards (UNMOSS) stipulated fence heightsand other mandatory gear like a working radio connection and adequate safe room.
Chapter 2
The long cold winter months of 2008 passed comfortably enough. At that time in the conflict internationals moved freely between the Kabul and Jalalabad. We were able to rent rooms mostly to construction contractors and their security crews often enough to meet our monthly bills. The Thursday night happy hour at our tiki bar was rocking and keeping the beer and wine stocks replenished a problem. When I had first arrived in Afghanistan there were several European logisticcompanies who running supermarkets that featured the two things you could not buy anywhere else in Afghanistan; booze and pork. By the spring of 2008 they had stopped selling booze but you could sill find pork. Soon they would all close their doors to focus on their stores located on the large Forward Operating Bases (FOB’s) around the country because the Karazi government made it too hard for them to stay in business outside the wire of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) bases.
The ISAF base in Kandahar was already famous for having huge stores from every international contingent but also a Timmy Horton’s coffeehouse; sit down restaurants like TGIF Fridays, and a boardwalk with dozens of fast food shops to include a Burger King. But the best base in Afghanistan didn’t become famous because it was a European logistics base without a permanent American presence. Camp Warehouse, located at the eastern end of the Kabul plain not only had great restaurants it had tons of beer and wine sold at multiple big box stores. If you had the proper credentials you could access the base and literally buy beer and wine by the truckload.
As a general rule contractors who had a US Military issued Combined Access Card (CAC) could get on any ISAF base. I had an expired CAC card from my time as the Project Manager for the American Embassy security contract. The expired card worked because the contingents pulling guard duty at Camp Warehouse came from countries like Romania, Bulgaria, and Macedonia. They couldn’t read English and I looked the part of a high speed US Gov contractor. What should have gave me away was the fact that I arrived alone and, as I pulled up to the first vehicle checkpoint, would be frantically pulling off my ShawarKhamese tunic and putting on a baseball cap and sunglasses. I didn’t like driving between Jalalabad and Kabul by myself but being a mission-oriented dude I did it to accomplish the mission if keeping the Taj stocked with beer and wine.
On a Thursday evening in early Spring one of the few people in Afghanistan who could aid me in that mission rucked up to the Tiki Bar. “G’day mate” he said by way of introduction, “Shem Klimiuk..you Baba Tim mate?’ I said I was and he proceeded to warn me about the client he was with. “Don’t give too much piss mate or he’ll become a belligerent asshole”. Shem’s client was an American construction type, probably a project manager who worked for a fly by night Logistics Company that was ran by a Lebanese syndicate. He was short, beer bellied and seem to be a pleasant guy. Judging what was or was not too much piss was difficult with internationals in Afghanistan. We tended to drink a lot on Thursday nights and, given the communal nature of our Tiki bar I wasn’t always the one behind the bar dispensing beer anyway. By nights end Shem’s client had managed to enrage the girls from DAI, an American big box NGO company that was the backbone of our clientele at the Tiki bar and really decent crew of attractive women too boot.
I stepped and calmly told our newest guest he was 86’d for the bar and need to head up to his room immediately. He complied and that was that but the next morning as I headed down early to make the beer run to Warehouse I saw Shem putting his charge into an SUV and instructing the driver, in not too bad Dari mind you, to take him back to Kabul.
He turned to me and said “Look mate, I’m a good bloke down on me luck at the moment”. OK I said, we’ve all been there. Then he stopped and asked where I was going so early on a Friday morning. Friday’s are the day of rest in the Islamic world and most expats slept in because it was our only day off. I told him I had to make to beer run to Warehouse and Friday morning were the best chance of making the run without running into a huge traffic accident or Taliban ambush or, even worse, getting stuck behind an American or French army convoy. The Taliban frequently ambushed fuel tankers on the road between Jalalabad and Kabul but fuel tankers didn’t run on Fridays. Military convoys were another matter, they weren’t common but given their habit of driving slow and keeping all civilian traffic away from them they could add hours onto a trip that we could make in 90 minutes if the roads were clear.
Having chit chatted over the logistics of making a beer run Shem got back on topic.