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Just a week earlier, John (who talked to TIME on the condition that his real name not be used) had been studying at a language school in Virginia, preparing for an entirely different assignment overseas. (What language and what posting, he would not say.) The agency yanked him out to join the first U.S. team going into Afghanistan. That was typical for a CIA paramilitary officer, who at a moment's notice may be thrown into what John calls a pickup team. John's team included four CIA officers fluent in Farsi or Dari who for years had been sneaking into Afghanistan, recruiting spies for the agency. Their mission now was to hook up with those contacts, collect intelligence for the impending U.S. aerial attack and hunt for bin Laden. Along with the light arms, radios and rations they had packed into the Mi-17 were two suitcases stuffed with $3 million. It was used for bribing Afghan warlords to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
WHO JOINS UP?
Like all the SOG's other paramilitary operatives, John had spent years in the U.S. military before joining the CIA; five years is the minimum requirement. CIA recruiters regularly prowl clubs like those at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the Army's Special Operations Command has its headquarters, looking for Green Berets interested in even more unconventional work and higher pay (a starting SOG officer can earn more than $50,000 a year; a sergeant in the Green Berets begins at about $41,000). Special-forces soldiers, Navy seals and Air Force commandos are routinely dispatched to the agency on a temporary basis to provide special military skills that the CIA needs for specific missions. If a soldier is assigned highly clandestine work, his records are changed to make it appear as if he resigned from the military or was given civilian status; the process is called sheep dipping, after the practice of bathing sheep before they are sheared.
Military commandos who join the CIA full time are sent to the "farm," the agency's Camp Peary training center, located on 9,000 heavily wooded acres surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped fence near Williamsburg, Va. There the soldiers go through the yearlong course that all new CIA case officers must take to learn such skills of the trade as infiltrating hostile countries, communicating in codes, retrieving messages from dead drops and recruiting foreign agents to spy for the U.S. The CIA wants its paramilitary officers to be able to steal secrets as well as blow up bridges. John proudly recalls overhearing an Afghan commander tell a comrade, "Yes, I have these Americans with me, and, yes, they have rifles, but I don't think they're soldiers. They spend all their time with laptops." Says John: "We wrote hundreds and hundreds of intelligence reports."
At Camp Peary, new SOG recruits also hone their paramilitary skills, like sharpshooting with various kinds of weapons, setting up landing zones in remote areas for agency aircraft and attacking enemy sites with a small force. Some are sent to Delta Force's secret compound at Fort Bragg to learn highly specialized counterterrorism techniques, such as how to rescue a fellow agent held hostage.