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First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11 Hardcover – September 7, 2021
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An award-winning journalist reveals the dramatic true story of the CIA's Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11.
America is reeling; Al-Qaeda has struck and thousands are dead. The country scrambles to respond, but the Pentagon has no plan for Afghanistan—where Osama bin Laden masterminded the attack and is protected by the Taliban. Instead, the CIA steps forward to spearhead the war. Eight CIA officers are dropped into the mountains of northern Afghanistan on October 17, 2001. They are Team Alpha, an eclectic band of linguists, tribal experts, and elite warriors: the first Americans to operate inside Taliban territory. Their covert mission is to track down Al- Qaeda and stop the terrorists from infiltrating the United States again.
First Casualty places you with Team Alpha as the CIA rides into battle on horseback alongside the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum. In Washington, DC, few trust that the CIA men, the Green Berets, and the Americans’ outnumbered Afghan allies can prevail before winter sets in. On the ground, Team Alpha is undeterred. The Taliban is routed but hatches a plot with Al-Qaeda to hit back. Hundreds of suicidal fighters, many hiding weapons, fake a surrender and are transported to Qala-i Jangi—the “Fort of War.”
Team Alpha’s Mike Spann, an ex-Marine, and David Tyson, a polyglot former Central Asian studies academic, seize America’s initial opportunity to extract intelligence from men trained by bin Laden—among them a young Muslim convert from California. The prisoners revolt and one CIA officer falls—the first casualty in America’s longest war, which will last two decades. The other CIA man shoots dead the Al-Qaeda jihadists attacking his comrade. To survive, he must fight his way out against overwhelming odds.
Award-winning author Toby Harnden gained unprecedented access to all living Team Alpha members and every level of the CIA. Superbly researched, First Casualty draws on extensive interviews, secret documents, and deep reporting inside Afghanistan. As gripping as any adventure novel, yet intimate and profoundly moving, it tells how America found a winning strategy only to abandon it. Harnden reveals that the lessons of early victory and the haunting foretelling it contained—unreliable allies, ethnic rivalries, suicide attacks, and errant US bombs—were ignored, tragically fueling a twenty-year conflict.
"Masterful, complex, and heartfelt, from the deeply personal to the critically strategic. Captures many lessons on many levels." —Ambassador Hank Crumpton, former senior CIA officer
- Print length432 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateSeptember 7, 2021
- Dimensions6.55 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
- ISBN-100316540951
- ISBN-13978-0316540957
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Run, don’t walk to pick this up. Toby Harnden has done a masterful job...What a powerful read."―James Gagliano, former senior FBI agent
"This is Afghanistan's Black Hawk Down...Harnden’s account is both well-informed and panoramic." ―Daily Telegraph (UK)
"The hard-to-imagine drama, in the hands of another narrator, could easily turn overwrought; in this book, it is not. First Casualty is rife with heroic moments. But it is the variety of the human reactions in those moments, and afterward, that separates this book from others. Fear, combat fatigue, and sadness appear often in the narrative...This book is compelling, sometimes disturbing, but in a necessary way." ―Philip Mudd, former senior CIA officer, The Cipher Brief
"Storytelling at its best—educational and inspirational. A unique, important, and enduring history captured for all who want to learn." ―Ambassador Hank Crumpton, former senior CIA officer
"Harnden...secured a coup by persuading the CIA to give him access...a terrific action narrative."
―Max Hastings, The Sunday Times of London“First Casualty reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, yet every word is true, and painstakingly researched. This is modern warfare close-up and raw: the pity, the heroism, the cruelty, and very occasionally some moments of glory too, as human beings are pushed to their furthest limits of endurance, and beyond. Harnden tells the extraordinary story of the battle of Qala-i-Jangi with verve, intelligence, acute analysis and flashes of ironic wit. It would make a terrific movie.”―Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
"Vividly describes the rollicking adventures Langley’s men enjoyed amid the blood, dust and tribesmen." ―Bloomberg News
"An absolutely gripping read"―Brad Thor
"This is an amazing book - highly recommended." ―Marc Ambinder
"Harnden’s scoop is to have convinced the CIA to give him access to its key men from those early days.” ―The Spectator
"First Casualty is the closest most readers will come to really knowing a spy; Harnden intimately portrays who these men were and are as America attempts to extract itself from its longest war."―James Pekoll, Booklist
"Harnden skillfully interweaves dramatic action sequences with the backstories of the book’s central figures, and briskly highlights the failures of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Readers will be swept up in this little-known chapter of America’s 'forever war.'"―Publishers Weekly
“The heart of Harnden’s readable book is the Battle of Qala-i Jangi, a bloody, six-day revolt of around 400 al Qaeda prisoners in a 19th-century fortress designed by British engineers during earlier imperial adventures in northern Afghanistan…Harnden’s scoop is to have convinced the CIA to give him access to its key men from those early days.”―Justin Marozzi, The Spectator
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company (September 7, 2021)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 432 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316540951
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316540957
- Item Weight : 1.52 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.55 x 1.6 x 9.6 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #320,853 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #13 in Military Travel Guides
- #142 in Afghan War Military History
- #314 in Intelligence & Espionage History
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Toby Harnden, author of First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11, is a winner of the Orwell Prize for Books. A former foreign correspondent for the Sunday Times of London and the Daily Telegraph who reported from thirty-three countries, he specializes in terrorism and war. Born in Portsmouth, England, Harnden was imprisoned in Zimbabwe, prosecuted in Britain for protecting confidential sources, and vindicated by a $23 million public inquiry in Ireland. A dual British and US citizen, he spent a decade as a Royal Navy officer before becoming a journalist. He holds a First Class degree in modern history from Oxford and is the author of Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh and Dead Men Risen: An Epic Story of War and Heroism in Afghanistan. Previously based in London, Belfast, Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Washington, DC, he lives in Virginia.
Harnden was Washington bureau chief of The Sunday Times of London from 2013 to 2018. In 2013, he was reporter and presenter of the BBC Panorama Special documentary "Broken by Battle," dealing with suicide and PTSD among British soldiers. The program was shortlisted for a Royal Television Society award, won the Mind Media Award for Speaking Out, and was the closing film of Prix Bayeux.
Previously, Harnden worked in a variety of roles for the Telegraph over the course of 17 years, based in London, Belfast, Washington, Jerusalem, and Baghdad, finishing as US Editor from 2006 to 2011. Harnden was US Executive Editor of Mail Online and US Editor of The Daily Mail during the 2012 US presidential election campaign. He has reported from all 50 US states and traveled from coast to coast four times. He made several reporting trips to Afghanistan from 2006 to 2010, culminating in his second book Dead Men Risen, about the Welsh Guards in Helmand, Afghanistan, which won the 2012 Orwell Prize for books, Britain's most prestigious award for political writing.
Harnden was The Sunday Telegraph’s Chief Foreign Correspondent from 2005 to 2006. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Bahrain, Syria, Jordan, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Austria, Italy, Estonia, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, United States, Colombia, and Thailand. In 2005, he was imprisoned in Zimbabwe for 14 days after being arrested and charged with "practicing journalism without accreditation." He was subsequently acquitted, deported, and banned from Zimbabwe.
Harnden was Middle East Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph from 2003, based in Jerusalem but traveling throughout the region. He spent much of 2004 and 2005 covering the war in Iraq. He was a "unilateral" reporter during the siege of Najaf in August 2004 and three months later was embedded with the US Army's Task Force 2-2 during the battle of Fallujah.
From 1999 to 2003, Harnden was The Daily Telegraph's Washington bureau chief. He was in Washington on September 11th 2001 and reported extensively on the aftermath of 9/11. He joined The Daily Telegraph in 1994 as a home news reporter before being posted to Belfast as the newspaper's Ireland Correspondent in 1996. He subsequently covered the Good Friday Agreement and the Omagh bombing of 1998 as well as numerous explosions, ceasefires, shootings, riots, marches and political crises.
The culmination of Harnden's work in Northern Ireland was the publication of Bandit Country: The IRA & South Armagh (Hodder & Stoughton 1999), which sold more than 100,000 copies worldwide and is considered essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the Irish Troubles. Harnden was held to be in contempt of the Bloody Sunday tribunal for refusing to identify two confidential sources he had quoted in a 1999 article. He faced prosecution and was threatened with jail but declined to break his promise to grant anonymity to his sources. The case against him was dropped in 2004 after a five-year legal battle. In 2013, the Smithwick Tribunal concluded that controversial allegations contained in Bandit Country were true. In Bandit Country, Harnden had alleged that collusion with the IRA by an Irish police had been behind the 1989 killings of Chief Superintendent Harry Breen and Superintendent Bob Buchanan, the two most senior RUC officers murdered during the Troubles. The tribunal's verdict, reached after an eight-year inquiry costing €15 million ($23 million), 'absolutely vindicated" Harnden's allegations 14 years after they had been made.
Harnden was born in Portsmouth in 1966 and grew up in Marple, Cheshire and Rusholme, Manchester. After leaving St Bede’s College, Manchester in 1984, he was commissioned into the Royal Navy and attended Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He then went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he was elected president of the Junior Common Room in 1987 and awarded a First in Modern History from Oxford University in 1988. He received a College Prize for academic work and the Miles Clauson Prize for contribution to college life. Harnden retired from the Navy in 1994 as a Lieutenant after service ashore in Rosyth and Plymouth naval bases and at sea in the assault ships HMS Fearless, and HMS Intrepid, the minesweeper HMS Itchen, the destroyers HMS Manchester and HMS Edinburgh and the frigate HMS Cornwall. During his training he was an exchange officer with the Royal Norwegian Navy, helping transport reindeer on troop landing craft. His final naval appointment was in the Ministry of Defence as Flag Lieutenant to the Second Sea Lord.
He began in journalism as a theatre reviewer at the Edinburgh Fringe and as an obituary writer before becoming a full-time news reporter with The Daily Telegraph, based at its headquarters in London. Harnden has also worked for the Leith Leader, The Scotsman, the Western Morning News (Plymouth) and The Independent. He has been published in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Sun, Evening Standard, The Spectator, Literary Review, Naval Review, East End Life, Oxford Student, Conde Nast Traveller, Grazia, the American Spectator, Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Zoo and Men's Health.
Harnden has appeared on CNN, PBS, Fox, MSNBC, CNBC, C-SPAN, BBC, Sky, GMTV, Channel 4 News and the Radio 4 Today program as well as outlets in the Republic of Ireland, Canada and Australia. He has spoken at Harvard and Oxford Universities, Shrivenham Royal Military College, the British-American Business Association and the Hay, Lichfield and Dartington literary festivals.
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Toby clearly understands the writing craft and has managed to bring their history alive with very believable characters explaining fast-paced action through their compelling accounts. His accuracy even included an account of Justin Sapp’s attraction to his adventurous profession in Special Forces that began with a childhood evacuation from Beirut where his father, Kenneth, was assigned as a CIA officer. It is this level of detail that brings the entire history in which small CIA and Special Forces teams were able to achieve surprising results into the minds of readers instead of being a dry, historical account of the paramilitary campaign in Afghanistan resulting in capturing the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in November 2001 and Kabul, itself, four days later. There are few accounts of similar successes of irregular warfare in the history of warfare.
Toby Harndens provides excellent Insights into the primary characters in his excellent book, such as Mike Spann, David Tyson, Justin Sapp, Alex Hernandez, and Team Leader JR Seeger, but he also explains the enduring dangers faced by all of CIA’s paramilitary officers. For example, Team Alpha’s medic, Mark Rausenberger, continued to volunteer for hazardous assignments in Iraq and died from a heart condition while on an operation in the Philippines in 2016 --to be memorialized as a 121st star that was carved into the CIA’s memorial wall that contained thirty-five stars prior to 2001. Glenn R., Team Bravo’s medic, was the only CIA officer on the team that attempted to rescue Mike Spann and his photograph in the book is obscured with the usual “black redaction.”
Following Mike Spann’s death in 2001, an additional fifty-six stars were added by 2021 and the stories of each of these memorial stars are unlikely to ever be told due to security considerations. Toby’s account of Team Alpha also helps us to understand these undocumented losses.
Buy this book. The tribal, ethnic, and religious dynamics of a nearly unexplainable population documented in this account will be very useful in understanding the anti-Taliban resistance that is forming and is likely to become violently active in 2022. The key indigenous leaders in Toby’s account are now involved in the National Resistance Front that opposes the Pashtun-based Taliban.
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2021
Toby clearly understands the writing craft and has managed to bring their history alive with very believable characters explaining fast-paced action through their compelling accounts. His accuracy even included an account of Justin Sapp’s attraction to his adventurous profession in Special Forces that began with a childhood evacuation from Beirut where his father, Kenneth, was assigned as a CIA officer. It is this level of detail that brings the entire history in which small CIA and Special Forces teams were able to achieve surprising results into the minds of readers instead of being a dry, historical account of the paramilitary campaign in Afghanistan resulting in capturing the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif in November 2001 and Kabul, itself, four days later. There are few accounts of similar successes of irregular warfare in the history of warfare.
Toby Harndens provides excellent Insights into the primary characters in his excellent book, such as Mike Spann, David Tyson, Justin Sapp, Alex Hernandez, and Team Leader JR Seeger, but he also explains the enduring dangers faced by all of CIA’s paramilitary officers. For example, Team Alpha’s medic, Mark Rausenberger, continued to volunteer for hazardous assignments in Iraq and died from a heart condition while on an operation in the Philippines in 2016 --to be memorialized as a 121st star that was carved into the CIA’s memorial wall that contained thirty-five stars prior to 2001. Glenn R., Team Bravo’s medic, was the only CIA officer on the team that attempted to rescue Mike Spann and his photograph in the book is obscured with the usual “black redaction.”
Following Mike Spann’s death in 2001, an additional fifty-six stars were added by 2021 and the stories of each of these memorial stars are unlikely to ever be told due to security considerations. Toby’s account of Team Alpha also helps us to understand these undocumented losses.
Buy this book. The tribal, ethnic, and religious dynamics of a nearly unexplainable population documented in this account will be very useful in understanding the anti-Taliban resistance that is forming and is likely to become violently active in 2022. The key indigenous leaders in Toby’s account are now involved in the National Resistance Front that opposes the Pashtun-based Taliban.
I worked with Dave for several months here in Ashgabat in 2004. He wrote the Turkmen course that I attended at the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. Once I arrived, I met my "linguistic guru".
This book opened my eyes to many things that I previously had not known about the battle. But - more importantly - it gave me a much better insight into a very incredible colleague - Dave.
But that's why I found it to be a book that I couldn't put down (I read it in four marathon sessions). You'll find wonderful development and acquaintance with EVERY person in the book. You'll snicker at their silly humor ("the Green Berets quickly figured out that the DIA guys were useless" - I used to be a DIA guy). You'll feel their patriotism and pain. Their anguish when a higher headquarters refuses to do the right and sensible thing (I was in the USAF for 26 years, but never saw anything on a scale of THIS).
Toby Harnden brings you INTO the entire situation. He makes YOU part of it. It is an incredible book about amazing people. I am so happy to have read it.
Thanks, Toby!
After reading the book, I suggest watching "The House of War" on YouTube. It is a 50 minute documentary by the German TV journalist mentioned in the book. It will put faces, places and storylines in perspective! It also has recorded footage of David Tyson, Mike Spann and John Walker Lindh and some of the SF ODA members.
I suggest future editions include some panoramic photos of Qala-i-Jangi fortress. It would help the reader realize just how huge it is!
The brutally transparent way that you managed to portray all these brave men ( OGA or ODA) who were the first to jump into a conflict that it would take us lots of years to understand all the complexities of.
From the different point of views, from the tribal warfare, to the regional influences, to the ancient feuds and strange customs of that far away strange land. You successfully painted the picture of what i imagine it must have been a really exciting mission in a strange land, very much like explorers, conquistadors or even the first green berets with the Montagnard in the jungle on 'Nam.
Even subtle little facts like David Tyson, not armed in the picture because the only took a Browning Hi Power from the Embassy and later equipped himself with an AK from a supply to Dostum's men.