Foxtrot in Kandahar, Part 2: Showdown in Takhteh-Pol | CIA
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content warning this episode contains violent scenes from the outset this is true spies the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time week by week you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in you'll meet the people who live life undercover

What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Foxtrot in Kandahar Part 2 Showdown in Tactical November 2001

Team Foxtrot and the forces of Gul Aga Sherzai have just arrived in the small village of Taktapal in southern Afghanistan.

The village sits beside a highway frequently used by local al-Qaeda forces. And Dwayne Evans, the CIA officer leading this operation, has a plan. Once we got there, I talked to Shirzai and said, "You've got to get roadblocks up because they may not know we're here. This is going to be our first chance to maybe encounter some al-Qaeda." Because we knew they used that road going back and forth. Shirzai's men quickly established two heavily armed checkpoints at either end of the village.

Any passing traffic will have to go past them. And then if it was just legitimate people, some of the farmers, all these old trucks and stuff, they would let them go through. But for any Taliban or al-Qaeda, the choice will be surrender or death. Once the checkpoints are up and running, the waiting game begins.

I was actually back in this little command post, if you want to call it that, that we had in the village of Toctipool. Khaled came over to me and said, hey, they've captured an AQ guy at the roadblock. They need somebody over there. Dwayne follows Khaled into the quiet village. As they walk through the scattered houses, they begin to hear an approaching hubbub. I was in this open piece of ground there in Toctipool. I was in this mob of people.

Afghan fighters comes around the corner and they were all agitated. You know, it was really a kind of a blurting scene. I knew they were friendlies, but I just instinctively knew something's wrong about this picture. And then when I looked, it took me a couple seconds, but they had the prisoner with them. They were just dragging him along. One guy had him by the scruff of the neck kind of thing, just pulling him along. He wasn't secured in any way.

And by the time I figured out who's who in this and see this guy in the middle of this little mob of guys, he's looking right at me. For the first time, Dwayne looks directly into the enemy's eyes. What he sees staring back at him is white-hot hate.

And he immediately reaches down and just tries to yank the AK-47 out of the guy beside him, his hands. And a struggle ensues between them over this gun. Instantly, Dwayne knows that the man intends to kill him. Everything slowed down. Everything went into slow motion. You know, these guys are struggling for the gun, but the guy is really fighting hard and at one point loses his grip. As he reaches for the gun again, the man's hands close around its barrel.

And when he did that, the Afghan fighter just shot a burst right into him. And right at the same time, another Afghan fighter from behind him fired a burst right into him too. And this guy went down like, you know, a proverbial ton of bricks. From his vantage point just meters away, Dwayne watches all that hate drain from the fighter's eyes. I knew he was dead, you know, before he hit the ground. This face-to-face meeting with death is his first close call since he's arrived in Afghanistan.

But it will not be his last. In the first part of True Spies: Foxtrot in Kandahar, you met CIA officer Dwayne Evans as he watched the Twin Towers collapse on 9/11. Instantly, he knew that he would do everything he could to join America's response to the attack. As the US scrambled to mount that response, Dwayne thrust himself into the heart of the action.

eventually winning a place as leader of one of the highly skilled units being sent into Afghanistan to weed out al-Qaeda with the help of local forces. When we last saw him, Duane and the team he was leading, Team Foxtrot, had just arrived at the base camp of Gul Agha Shirzai, where they had immediately been spotted by local Taliban forces, their cover blown.

His first priority, in such dangerous conditions, was to secure the arrival of a special forces unit, who would only join the mission once they deemed Shirzai's forces substantial enough to make a difference. Our first task the following day after meeting up with Shirzai and his lieutenants

was to basically survey their force of fighters and determine how many there are and how well equipped they are and this kind of thing. So Hank, the Special Forces Detachment Commander, he went in one vehicle to do his own survey. We only had two opinions on it. So I went with Shirzai in his vehicle to what we were really going out to, these outer areas where these guys were assembled in little camps.

At each camp, Duane saw groups of different sizes, men bearded and robed, with AK-47s casually slung over a shoulder or resting against the wall of a mud hut. So it was very much just a rough estimate of how many guys around there that we were seeing. And then we came back to the base camp and we compared notes and I think I had a little bit higher total. Hank's total was less, but it was still above 500 fighters.

the magic number for Special Forces to commit a full 12-man team. So that meant we could call in for the rest of the team to come in, and that's what happened. With the imminent arrival of the Special Forces team, Duane could begin plotting out Foxtrot's next move. Their ultimate destination was the city of Kandahar, a tactically crucial Al-Qaeda stronghold to the north.

But traversing the 60 or so miles that led to the city would be no easy feat. During our planning phase back in Jacobabad, we had actually been planning to go down the Shin Narae to the city of Spimboldak.

which sits on Highway 4. Highway 4 from Spinn-Bulldock goes kind of to the northwest, and it goes to Kandahar. And that's the main route, actually, between Kandahar City and the Pact border. So our plan was to go to Spinn-Bulldock, and then there were going to be fighters there. We knew we had to kind of fight our way through and get to the point we needed to be and get on the highway and then work our way up Highway 4 to Kandahar.

As far as approaches go, this would be like banging on the enemy's front door. And we had been told during our briefing in Chakobot there were still thousands of Taliban in al-Qaeda and Spinbola. But now that Foxtrot were on the ground in Afghanistan, Shirzai, with his knowledge of the terrain, had an alternative plan. Because he pointed out, well, one, we're going to have to fight through the garrison that's just right down here at the mouth of the Shinrae, the Taliban garrison. He said, why don't we just avoid all that?

And let's go cross country and go to Toctepool, which is a little village that sat right on top of Highway 4. Highway 4 had to go right by it. It's roughly halfway between Spimboldak and Kandahar. And, you know, we looked at that and said, that makes a lot of sense. Cutting out the inevitable skirmishes in Spimboldak meant reaching their all-important destination quicker. It was a no-brainer.

Within a couple of days, Team Foxtrot was on the move. It takes about two days to drive over from the Shinri Valley to get to the vicinity of Toctipool. The Taliban is still there. In fact, the night before we entered Toctipool, we pulled into a defensive perimeter and sent our recon team and Afghans to go reconnoiter near Toctipool to see what they could find out about it. So they went in there and turned out they got in a firefight.

When the recon team returned, they reported that the village was lousy with Taliban and that they wouldn't go down without a fight. So the next morning, we rolled out of our little defensive position and we were up on this plateau overlooking this long stretch that led straight to Toctipul. And we just sat there on this plateau overlooking this wide stretch of land and the SF team got out their gear and started calling in airstrikes on the Taliban positions.

This was Duane's first up-close encounter with the full muscle of the U.S. Air Force. It left quite the impression. It was a beautiful day, so we sat there and just watched the airstrikes hitting the positions there. Under the bright sun, Duane watched clouds of dust rise and settle in the village below. When the strikes were over, an eerie quiet fell.

Then we sent in a couple trucks of Afghan fighters in to do a recon, see how it looked. And they came back and basically the Taliban had left. So we all loaded up, came off that plateau, went racing across the flatland and rolled into Takht-e-Qul.

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Go to rula.com slash truespies and take the first step towards better mental health today. You deserve quality care from someone who cares. The now secured village of Tactable would serve as Foxtrot's base as they plotted their advance towards Kandahar.

It was here that Duane ordered the roadblocks that would deliver the hair-raising first encounter with Al Qaeda that you heard at the beginning of this episode. So that was our first capture, and unfortunately it didn't go well because we needed to talk to these people. Our goal was collecting intel, and a dead guy didn't talk too much. So at that point we realized we've got to train these guys on how to handle a prisoner so this kind of thing doesn't happen again.

And that's what we did. The SF guys and our guys, my guys, all trainees' guys, we gave them some flex-a-cuffs type things to put on them, and he gave them some instruction on how to handle a captured prisoner. That training would quickly pay dividends...

Well, shortly thereafter, we captured two others. They brought them in, and this time they had them bound, actually in chains. One of the guys, one of the vehicles that he was driving, the trunk was full of SA-7 missiles. And we didn't know it at the time, but the individual driving that that we'd captured was a guy named Saleh Hamdan. And Saleh Hamdan, it turned out, he had been a personal bodyguard and driver for bin Laden at one point.

The capture of Osama bin Laden's personal bodyguard would turn out to be a milestone in this new war. Hamdan would eventually end up being sent to Guantanamo, and his case would become the first case that was actually tried under this military tribunal system. A story that would find its conclusion years later when Hamdan appealed his conviction in the Supreme Court, a case he ultimately won. But all of that was still in the distant future.

For now, Duane and Team Foxtrot were busy with the continuous flow of al-Qaeda along Highway 4. Quite quickly, a grim pattern emerged. Over the coming next couple of days, before word fully got out that we were in Toctopol, we had other al-Qaeda that came into our roadblock situation who chose not to give up, and they were killed, but they chose martyrdom over giving up. So several were killed, I think seven or eight.

In Taktapal, these shocking moments of violence quickly became routine, and the casualties weren't only falling on the enemy's side. That first day, we were the first guy we captured, and he tried to take the rifle. Well, as soon as that was over, I got back to the command post, and the Afghans brought another one of their guys in, who turned out to be the cousin to Shirzai, who had been shot twice in the head.

at a robot shootout. And he was in terrible condition. They didn't think he was going to live. The medics were working, and the SF medics were doing their best they could. And also, a little girl was brought in by her father, who we'd actually seen the father when we had rolled into Toctipool earlier in the day. He actually tried to wave us into his house.

And someone had joked, oh, he wants to invite us for tea, you know, and we thought that was really funny. Well, he shows up at our command post later in the day with his little girl, she's about eight years old, who'd been wounded by one of the airstrikes. She had a very severe cut in her face, so deep you could see her cheekbone. The special forces medics did their best to patch the girl up, and Duane gave the father money to hire a car to get to the nearest hospital.

Meanwhile, he requested a medical evacuation for Sherzai's critically wounded cousin. Taktapal had been chosen as the path of least resistance, but already it was clear that there was no such thing as an easy route to Kandahar. So all this happened that first day and, you know, you came home that, hey, there's a lot that can happen here.

a sentiment that was confirmed the very next day. I got a call from our headquarters. One of the officers back in CTCSO who was supporting our efforts there in Afghanistan gave me the sad news about Mike Spann.

Mike Spann was a CIA paramilitary officer who was attached to the Northern Alliance liaison team, fighting in the north of the country. The same team that Duane had very nearly deployed with. He was missing and suspected to be dead.

If true, that would make him the first American killed in Afghanistan. I didn't know Mike. I knew some of the other people up there who were working with Mike, but I'd never met Mike. But still, I was like really psychologically, because he was the first guy we lost. I was just thinking how up there, what those teams must be thinking at that moment in time and how rough it must be for them and, of course, the family and all that. It was a very, very sad moment.

It was also another reminder, as if he needed one, that the enemy in Afghanistan would not roll over without a fight. And that's what we ran into at the airport as well. Outside of Toctepul, probably about a half an hour drive down this really rough road, Highway 4, was the Kandahar airport. And it was occupied by al-Qaeda and Taliban, and it stood in our way of getting into Kandahar city.

To get to Kandahar, Foxtrot would first need to deal with the stronghold at the airport, a situation that could easily escalate into a dogfight. So what we decided to do instead of just trying an all-out assault with sure-size guys, which would have probably cost a lot of casualties, we decided to call in airstrikes.

Meanwhile, Team Foxtrot would buy their time in Taktapul.

So while we're waiting to take over the airfield and knock down the defenses to the point where we can move in there, we're in Toctipool. The routine was kind of a boring routine in a way. Obviously, we're getting reporting coming in and we're writing reports and that sort of thing, staying on top of what's going on around us. You know, at night, one rule we made was that there would always be an American awake.

No matter what, we would have at least one American awake in our command post. And we'd sit there and listen to the airstrikes going on. We'd listen to the air comms that we had access to. And we kept up with that and listened to the chatter on that. In this holding pattern, the days began to blur. The one in particular still stands out in Duane's memory. At this point, John and Pat had joined us. They were two paramilitary officers that joined us in Takhtapur.

And John and I were out sitting there on some basically camp chairs right there in the command post in the middle of the afternoon. It was actually a very pleasant day. And suddenly I hear this little noise. It sounded strange. It was a little like fizzing sort of sound almost. And I thought, hmm, I've never heard that before. And then within seconds, there's this series of explosions right very close to us.

Six explosions tear through the air, just a couple of hundred meters from where they sit. So we jumped up out of our chairs, look at each other, you know, our eyes wide open. And then I hear the sound again. So I know there's some more on the way. We didn't have foxholes or anything like that. We just look at each other wondering, is this it? The ground shakes once again. Another six explosions rattle the camp.

They had adjusted fire, but they went over us this time. The good news was no one in the village had been hit. The other good news was one of the outposts, that security outpost out there, had spotted where the rockets had been fired from. They knew it was off in this little valley. And so the SF guys jumped on the radio to call in a strike on it. And it just so happened, just by chance, a B-52 was en route to Kandahar, to a target in Kandahar.

They diverted it and the B-52 dumped its load on this missile launcher in this little valley and just, you know, that was the last we heard of it. Just days into his deployment in Afghanistan, Dwayne Evans was starting to understand that the only thing separating him from a missile or the business end of an Al-Qaeda rifle was a healthy dose of good fortune.

He realized that for his team to stand the best chances of survival, they would need to keep as low a profile as possible. One thing that had happened was that the Special Forces wanted to bring in a command and control element to join up with us in Shearer's Eyes Forces. Initially it was going to be 70 people, but then it got cut down to 30 people. I can't remember exactly how many it was going to be. But the point was both Hank, the SF leader, and myself thought this makes no sense.

Bringing dozens more American troops into the tiny village would only multiply the possibility of casualties. Already, they were sitting ducks. Right now, we're kind of in a hold pattern anyway. It's just going to increase the number of people that are basically in harm's way. It just didn't make sense to do that. And so...

With my support, you know, Hank pushed back against it and said, hey, we don't think it makes sense to come here. And so they ended up going and joining Echo Team that was up further to the north of Kandahar. You'll recall from the first part of this story that Duane himself was supposed to deploy with Echo Team and the Afghan forces of Hamid Karzai before being devastated by the last minute bombshell that he would need to stay behind.

Now, Echo Team and Foxtrot were both pushing towards the same destination of Kandahar from different positions. That Duane found himself attached to Foxtrot and not Echo had been just another random twist of fate. One morning we get word that...

Echo Team had been hit by what was reported at the time as a car bomb. There were fatalities and lots of casualties. Turned out that three SF personnel were killed, and there were many Afghans killed and many Afghans wounded. Amazingly, Echo Team itself, the CIA component, did not suffer a casualty, but almost did. They were in a little building just apparently down from where this explosion occurred.

Karzai himself was lucky to escape the attack with just a small injury from a shattered window, but the scale of loss was enormous. Knowing Team Echo, Dwayne struggled to understand how they could let a car bomb slip through their fingers, but that was the thing. He would soon discover that they hadn't. I wasn't there, so I'm a little reluctant to talk about this, but I did talk to Echo Team, and they told me what happened.

After Duane and Hank had pushed back against a command and control center being set up in Tactical, they had gone to join Echo Team further north instead. So it turned out that what had happened on that incident was the command and control guys, when they came in, took over. They decided to take over also to give some relief, I guess, to the SF guys who had been there all along, landing the observation post and prepared to call in airstrikes.

After command and control arrived, they relieved special forces of their airstrike duties. They hadn't needed to call any in so far anyway. But one of the officers involved from the command and control decided he wanted to call in some airstrikes on some caves he could see off in the far distance.

One of the command and control guys who took over the task of actually calling in the strike and using the laser device that they were using for this, he made some kind of technical error. And again, I wasn't there. I'm only getting this from people who were there. And he made a technical error, and instead of calling the strike in on the caves, he actually was calling in on his position. In other words, it was no Al-Qaeda car bomb that tore through Team Echo's camp.

In fact, the Air Force challenged them like three or four times and said, are you sure you want to drop? We have you here at that location. And they said, drop, drop, drop. And they dropped a JDAM right on top of them. And so it was a horrible, horrible incident that, you know, completely wiped out that ODA and was a disaster we hoped never would have happened.

When Duane learned of the accident, it was impossible not to think about how close he had come to sharing in this cruel twist of fate. If I'd been with them, who knows, I could have been up there and just maybe wandered over to the OP at the same time they were doing this. So, you know, that's one thing I learned about, you know, this kind of situation. It's very impersonal, very random. As the old saying goes, there but for the grace of God go I.

It was thoughts like that that could drive a person crazy. But Dwayne Evans had no time to dwell, because finally, at the Kandahar airport, progress had been made. It took some days, took over a week. We could move into and take over the airport, and the SiriusXS guys occupied the airport, and we were able to roll into Kandahar at that point. With the airport finally secured,

Team Foxtrot knew they would need to get to Kandahar as quickly as possible. They could not afford to give the enemy time to cover their tracks.

From an intel standpoint, what we were hoping to find is one more al-Qaeda to capture or if necessary kill, but also to capture documentation, that kind of thing, records, anything like that that we could find. So that's why we wanted to get in there and wanted to get in there as quick as we could because we knew that they were trying to get out of town. We knew that they were trying to melt in the population, all these kinds of things. And so we knew the faster we got in there, the better. The more likely we were going to either find al-Qaeda or find intelligence from al-Qaeda.

The very same day that the airport fell, Duane's team prepared to make their move.

A recon element had gone in there the night before. Pat from our team, he went in with Afghans, you know, in Afghan disguise. He went in with them, scouted out the governor's palace, which is in downtown Kandahar, which is where the Al-Qaeda and Taliban had been holding out as a kind of headquarters there. They reported that it was all clear and they actually stayed there. I could keep a presence there. And then we mounted up in convoy, pickup trucks rolled in there.

The road to Kandahar was littered with the evidence of the previous week's fighting. There was a lot of destroyed vehicles along the way. There were, you know, bodies scattered around. No one had cleaned up the bodies or anything like that. An ominous entrance. But as they drew closer to the city...

Duane saw that life had carried on. As we got closer and closer to the city, we started seeing more people on the street. Oddly, when we were going in, for the most part, they didn't even look at us as we rolled through there. There was one incident where one guy did. He was some kind of shopkeeper. As we went by, he pulled out a knife and held up his knife, like threatening us with his knife. I thought that was interesting. He's threatening this convoy of heavily armed people. But anyway, so we rolled past him.

Foxtrot's first order of business was to get into the compound that Al-Qaeda had been using as its operational base, though this would need to be done with the utmost care. We moved into the governor's compound and immediately began checking the compound for booby traps, basically. We figured...

They knew that we would probably occupy that when they left it, and they probably left us a surprise, you know. So we did the best we could, searching the best we could for any kind of explosives. Didn't find anything. There was one little incident. I think it was a detonator cap popped, and an Afghan had his thumb damaged by it. But we couldn't find any significant stuff. With the compound secured, Duane had his team set up their secure communication line.

And I sent my first message from Kandahar city to headquarters and it was very brief. The subject line was Foxtrot in Kandahar and the text was basically when we arrived and all personnel accounted for. The import of this message was not lost on him. Since 9/11, he had been doggedly working towards this moment. Finally, he had led his team to Kandahar and without suffering any casualties.

But now was no time to congratulate himself for a job well done. In many ways, Foxtrot's work was only just beginning. Really, the main reason we were in Kandahar was to find as much intel as we could. So we started doing raids. It was a combined thing because SF, they also wanted to hit some safe houses too. They had some lists that they had been given. So we just kind of combined efforts and started working together on that. As Duane's team worked through the city...

they found an abundance of materials hastily left behind by Al-Qaeda. Much of it was, naturally, impenetrable to American eyes.

One of my biggest memories of going to one of the safe houses was we get in there and we start going through the stuff. There's a lot of material there, and it was partially damaged and been hit, as I recall. We found a magazine, and I think I was the one who found it. It was a magazine, you know, English-language technical magazine of some sort. And on the cover of it, it was going to be an article inside about different flight simulators. As they continued to search...

a picture began to reveal itself. - We found some cartons that had contained flight simulators, trainers that they had had. And I had to think at that moment, my God, were the guys who carried off the 9/11 attacks, were they here at one point? Did they start on this? - The very thought of it sent chills down his spine and the fines didn't stop there.

Probably our biggest intel find in Kandahar, no doubt, in fact. And we didn't find it ourselves. It was brought to us by a volunteer, an Afghan. He wasn't al-Qaeda. He claimed that he had actually taken these documents he brought us, claims he'd taken them at gunpoint from an al-Qaeda member who was in the rubble of a safe house and was trying to leave. I don't know if that's true or not, but it didn't matter because the documents he gave us were gold.

And basically, they were a plan for an al-Qaeda cell in Southeast Asia to attack the USS Carl Vinson in Singapore. Laid out in these documents was a meticulous plan to once again strike an American target, to end more American lives. And the plan was mostly targeting the crew. They knew when the crew would get off the boat. They knew when it was going to be coming in.

They knew how they normally traveled, when they came into shore, and where they'd stayed. And so the plan seemed to involve, we're mostly going to go after the crew. They had videos, they had sketches, they had maps. And most importantly, perhaps, is they also had a list of phone numbers, which would prove critical to actually identifying and arresting members of this al-Qaeda cell.

Even with the language barrier, the importance of this discovery was clear to see. The team hastily pulled together an intelligence report and fired it off. Later, I would hear that it was the first intel that was taken in Afghanistan that led to neutralizing a terrorist plot in another country. So we felt good about that. She's made up her mind, get pretty smart.

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It was in Kandahar that Dwayne Evans would also finally reconnect with Echo Team and Hamid Karzai. He'd last seen them only a few weeks before, as they prepared to fly out of Jacobabad. But so much had happened in between, it may as well have been a lifetime. We got in on the 7th of December. I think the first element of Echo got in on the 8th. Team Echo set up shop in another compound, in another part of the city.

So Duane would have to wait a few days for his reunion. Karzai wanted to have a meeting with all the local Pashtun elders in the region.

and he wanted Shirzai to be there, of course. So we went over with Shirzai for this meeting, and I was going to use it for the opportunity to hook up with the Echo team for the first time. But we couldn't find him. We didn't know exactly where to go. And by this time, it was amazing to me. I had no idea so many people had come to Kandahar at that point in terms of the press. There was now press in Kandahar on the streets. With hostile forces now cleared from the city...

global media had shown up to document Kandahar's liberation. And so we had all this media around, which was not... I wasn't comfortable, but I had to find Echo Team. And, you know, I'm walking around, obviously a foreigner, an American with, you know, armed AK-47 and all that, with all this press around. So we go in there and there's already some Afghans around a huge carpet, seated, and there's like three rows of...

of news reporters waiting for Karzai's arrival. And I spot one of the guys I remember from back in Jacobabad, one of Karzai's guys. So I went over there to ask him as best I could where the team was, Team Echo was. He managed to get across and managed to tell me where to go. And as I'm leaving, that's when Karzai enters the room. Duane looked up to see the gentle and considered man that he had come to know so well over the course of his days in Jacobabad. And he sees me

And he yells and he calls out my name, my first name, you know, Dwayne. And he walks over to me and here, you know, the room is full of press. And this is not the norm for a CIA officer. And he comes up to me and he gives me this big hug, you know, right in the middle of all this. So I'm like, great to see you. And listen, we'll talk afterwards. And so I kind of beat feet out of there as quick as I could. But it was a moment I'll never forget.

After his brief reunion with Karzai, Dwayne finally tracked down Echo Team, who filled him in on their own treacherous path to Kandahar. That's where I got the story from them on what had happened at the errant bombing that they'd experienced. For the final phase of the operation, Echo and Foxtrot were combined into one team and moved into a new compound in Kandahar. From there, they would continue sweeping any sites of interest for intelligence...

We had gotten a group of CIA explosive specialists, flew into Kandahar one night, middle of the night, really in the morning, like 3 in the morning. They had been picked up at the airfield, at the airport, brought them to our compound and given the police a room, and they were crashed. Anyway, so that morning, they're still racked out asleep. I'm up and down in the courtyard, I'm brushing my teeth there in the outdoor water fountain thing, and Khalid comes up to me and says, hey, there's an Afghan there.

Apparently, this same man had tried to speak to someone the previous day and had been turned away. Duane decided to hear him out.

I said, great. I said, search him and bring him in. I'll talk to him. When the man was brought in, he began speaking in a frenzy. With his hands, he gestured towards a building on the compound. I should point this out. This day, this was Eid al-Fitr. It's the final day of Ramadan. And that night...

There's going to be breaking of the fast and a big banquet. Shirzai had already invited all the elders in the area. You know, some of us were invited to go to this big bash that was going to happen to celebrate the breaking of the fast in his headquarters there in that building. And he points to that building and he says, that roof is loaded with explosives. Suddenly, the texture of the morning changed drastically.

When Team Foxtrot had taken over the compound, days before, they had swept for any traps left behind by Al-Qaeda. Surely they couldn't have missed anything. And yet Dwayne knew that Shirzai himself was in the building at this very moment, convening with his elders. If what this panic-stricken man told him was true, then his life was in grave danger. Dwayne told the man to wait for him.

I went and woke up the team leader for the bomb techs. They were all crashed out, like I said. And I woke up and I said, hey, we got a guy here, so we got some bombs here. And so woke him up pretty good. Dwayne brought the red-eyed bomb tech to his walk-in and the translator so he could mine the pair of them for more information on this supposed payload. It was decided they would go and investigate the building in question, but they would need to do so with the utmost secrecy.

The guys going up on the roof had to stay low because if there were bombs up there and if they knew how they were going to detonate them, if they were seen, they might go ahead and just detonate it. While the bomb tech and the volunteer climbed into the rafters of the building, Duane made sure the room below was clear. And so I go and kick Shirzai and all those guys out of his office and make them wait till we do a search. Before long, Duane watched the bomb tech emerge from the building.

Any trace of sleepiness well and truly erased from his face. Sure enough, they were able to establish, yeah, that room was chock full of explosives. It was set for command detonation. Which meant Dwayne's fear had been justified. If a mole was somehow watching this scene unfold, they could cut their losses and detonate at any moment.

As calmly as possible, the bomb tech roused more members of his team to begin the delicate process of neutralizing the payload. So the team, the explosive ordnance team, they did a little charge that cut the line. It was only with news of their success that Duane allowed himself to finally exhale, his heart still raced with adrenaline.

He could scarcely allow himself to imagine what would have happened if the volunteer had been turned away once again, or had never bothered to bring the information in the first place. This had been Al Qaeda's master plan. They were going to command detonate those explosives in the roof that was right above the banquet hall.

And it turned out to be 2,500 pounds of Russian landmines and 122-millimeter artillery that was double-ring charged. These guys who were experts in explosives said that building would have disappeared. So that guy saved our lives, no question about it. It would have been no more than just saving our lives. It would have been almost a fatal blow to what we had been doing in the South. It would have killed all the Afghan leadership.

Shirzai would have been killed for sure. All his lieutenants, all the elders, a bunch of the American intel and special forces presence to include the command and control team, all that would have been taken out. All of which begs the question, how on earth do you reward a man for a tip like that? Well, that was a question, of course, that arose and...

you obviously want to reward the guy. But, you know, and I'd had this experience earlier in my career where I had rewarded a guy, I had to pay the guy some money. But I knew that if he was found with this money, it could be bad for him. So I said, you can't let anyone know you have this money. And if anyone finds out this money, you have to have a reason you have it. But this particular guy, you know, it had a bad ending for him.

The last thing Dwayne wanted was a repeat of that scenario. I talked to some of the guys on the team. I said, what do you guys think? And I said, this guy probably saved all our lives. One guy said, he said, give him $300. That's a lot of money for these guys. But I thought, no, we've got to give him more. So I ended up giving the guy $2,500. And I told him, I preached the same message to him.

That, again, this is all through an interpreter. I preached the same message to him, that he had to protect this money. He couldn't be known to suddenly have an influx of money. So that's what I did. I gave him $2,500, and that was it. Whether, I don't know, right or wrong, I don't know. With that final near-death experience hanging over him, Duane began to think about the inevitable. He knew his time in Kandahar was drawing to a close. Turns out my day to leave was still a couple weeks away when all of a sudden...

I get a word that, oh, there's an aircraft that's going to be at the airfield tonight. You know, that's your ticket home. Get on that. They'll take you to first to Jacobabad, then I make my way to Islamabad, and then I get back home. And it's tonight. Dwayne had been counting on another two weeks to say his farewells to the country. All of a sudden, he wasn't sure he was ready to say goodbye at all. Honestly, I enjoyed my time in Afghanistan. I enjoyed the experience.

It was, you know, honestly the biggest adventure I'd ever been on. I mean, I enjoyed it in the sense that it was very satisfying. I was really questioning whether I should even leave. Because I knew this is not over. This is just, this is really the beginning of the beginning. When Duane looked at the battle-scarred city around him, he knew, beyond doubt, that there was still so much work to be done before Afghanistan could truly know peace. Maybe his place was here.

But seriously, the one thing that I decided, no, I've got to go, was I told my wife, I said, I will come home the first opportunity I have. And this was the first opportunity I had. And so that's what I did. Duane would have to leave the rebuilding to Karzai and Sherzai, the Afghan leaders that he had helped to establish in the Taliban's wake.

There was no saying how that process would go, but Duane knew that they had as good a chance as anyone of healing this embattled region. I was optimistic. I was so happy that Karzai was taken over. He was the right man for the job, the right time and place. That's when we were still in Kandahar. They started flying kites again. They had not been able to fly kites under the Taliban. You know, you started hearing music again.

They had not been able to listen to music. You could hear that in the streets. You know, things were changing, and that was so positive. In fact, the last thing I said to Karzai was, I think God's smiling on Afghanistan. And he said, yeah, I think it is too. With a heavy heart, Dwayne Evans departed Kandahar and made his circuitous way back home, stopping briefly in Jacobabad, where he encountered another CIA team preparing to deploy in Afghanistan.

He felt as though he were handing them a baton. I helped them load their gear back into the plane, all this kind of stuff. And I had breakfast one morning with this detailee who was detailed from Army Special Forces, a guy named Nathan Chapman, Sergeant Nathan Chapman. I met him and we went up to the Air Force mess hall, went over there and had breakfast, he and myself and the CIA team leader. And he was talking about his family and his family.

His children, his kids, just like we all did. He was just like a force of nature, this guy, just talking, cracking jokes. He just made an impression on me. I mean, I really liked him. Before Dwayne left for Islamabad, he wished Nathan Chapman luck on his deployment. And I said, well, listen, you guys get in there and be careful. This is a dangerous place. Dwayne's own dance with danger was finally over. He arrived back in the USA in the midst of the festive season.

and experienced the most pronounced culture shock of his long career. It was like the week before Christmas, and I'm adjusting to everything. I don't even go into work right away. I spend a couple days at home with my family, but when I finally do go into headquarters, while I'm there, they have a television that's up somewhere near my view, and I happen to glance at it, and there's a picture of Nathan Chapman on the television, and it's saying, "'Killed in Afghanistan.'"

Dwayne could scarcely believe the image on the screen in front of him. How could the vibrant, charismatic man he had eaten with not two weeks before be dead? It was just really a sad moment. It turned out that they had gone back into Afghanistan and had some kind of a roadblock by some kind of militia and there was some incident there in which he was shot and killed. So that was a tough homecoming there.

Over the years that followed, Duane would carry a piece of Afghanistan with him, somewhere deep. It pained him to see the way things would pan out eventually. I feel like we got really off track on Afghanistan, and this is my own personal opinion here, when we invaded Iraq. It made no sense to me at the time. My own belief is it significantly impacted what happened in Afghanistan. By the time he finally sat down to write his memoir...

He could already see the way things were going. At that point, I did believe that we weren't going to win in there militarily. It just wasn't going to happen. It was going to have to be a diplomatic solution. My thought was that the Afghan government had to be a government that included the Taliban. We're just not going to destroy the Taliban movement ever.

And so, when news arrived in 2021 that the Taliban had once again seized control of Afghanistan, he was not surprised, but he was still deeply saddened. I hated the way it ended. Obviously, I hated it. To me, it was a disastrous end. And I wasn't involved, but I think it could have ended better, I'll just say that.

For a full account of Dwayne Evans' remarkable journey to Afghanistan, you can turn to Foxtrot in Kandahar. His experiences would also provide inspiration for a novel called North from Calcutta. And to hear an exclusive new interview with Dwayne, diving deep into the details of the Taliban's re-emergence and current ruling in Afghanistan, subscribe to Spyscape Plus and keep an eye out for the latest True Spies Members Only debrief.

Tune in next week for another close encounter with true spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend? Can you hear the encryption button on the drive?

And you were trying to correct the record. Absolutely. I think it's a lesson. The first version of the story is often the one that's believed. So British government pretty soon got out the message in the early days. It's all okay. It's going to be all okay. British Airways Flight 149 had landed and they had been handed all of these people to use as potential pawns. I got a call from a contact and he said, look,

You should look into this. What they're saying about this plane is just an outrageous perversion of the truth. True Spies, The Debrief, from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.