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Inside a U.S. hostage rescue

The American businessman lay in a mud hut 8,000 feet up a remote mountainside in Afghanistan, armed captors posted inside and outside to prevent any escape attempt.

Earlier in his captivity, he had made a run for it, but — barefoot and much older than the insurgents who held him — he was snatched back before he could get far.

After nearly two months in captivity, the hostage reviewed what his fate might hold — whether ransom negotiations or rescue efforts or a miracle might bring him freedom.

“One option was for the money to arrive and be ransomed,” the 61-year-old engineer from Ohio told Army Times, speaking on the condition that he remain anonymous. “In my mind, I’d given a military intervention a one out of a hundred chance. Not that they couldn’t do it, but they’re busy, and I’m not that important a fellow.”

However, on an airstrip many miles away, twin sets of Chinook helicopter rotor blades were starting to turn as about 60 of America’s most elite troops prepared to prove him wrong. Members of a task force that Army Times agreed not to name, the commandos had been hunting for the businessman since soon after he went missing. Now they were ready to act.

This is the story of one of the most daring and successful U.S. hostage-rescue missions in years.

Stopped on the road

The American businessman and his Afghan partner in an engineering firm that employed 15 locals were driving home Aug. 20 from a funeral in Wardak province when they were stopped on the road by an armed man.

“That happens fairly often in Afghanistan,” said the businessman, who had worked in the country for nine years. “I didn’t think too much about it ... Then he wanted to see my papers.”

After the gunman took an inordinate time examining his documents, the American realized something was wrong. “Things weren’t going the way they normally went,” he said. “We were taken to a local hiding place” and then to a more remote location.

The hostage-takers were no mere criminals, but members of the Hezb-i-Islami (Party of Islam) militant group of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, said a special operations officer familiar with the mission.

A radical Islamist warlord, Hekmatyar was a principal beneficiary of U.S. covert aid during the war fought by Afghan mujahedeen against Soviet and Afghan communist forces in the 1980s, but is now relentlessly hunted by U.S. forces along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

The American’s wife, who worked with him in Afghanistan, realized something had happened to her husband when he failed to return home. At first she and others close to him tried to negotiate through third parties with the kidnappers. Within about five days, the engineer’s Afghan partner was released when the duo’s company paid a ransom, but the kidnappers didn’t seem interested in exchanging the American for cash.

“I’m an American and America’s been bombing them and they can’t get back, so if they get hold of an American they’d like to get back at him,” the engineer said. “We’ve taken a lot of Afghan blood,” the engineer said, “so they wanted mine.”

In captivity

the task force was notified almost immediately of the kidnapping, which was kept quiet out of concern that publicizing it might place the hostage’s life in jeopardy and make locating him more difficult, the special operations officer said.

For five days, the kidnappers frequently moved their prisoners around the mountains. Then, after releasing the Afghan hostage, they kept the American in an open-air location for about 45 to 50 days, the businessman said. The kidnappers treated him “reasonably well,” he said, though feeding him only bread and water.

Most of the time, two kidnappers were present.

At first they allowed the hostage to keep his hands and feet free, but then they put a chain and two padlocks around his legs. One day when his captors had left him alone, the engineer broke the padlocks and tried to escape. He made it partway to the nearest house when one kidnapper saw him.

“The guy finally showed up and saw me going down across the valley, and his being about 21 years old and I’m 61, he kind of gained on me,” the engineer said. “I was barefoot, too ... After that, they tied me up a lot more.”

The kidnappers eventually demanded a ransom for the engineer’s release that far exceeded what had been paid to secure his partner’s freedom. After about 30 days, frustrated with the slow pace of negotiations, they let the engineer use a cell phone to call his wife. He did so four times, which allowed him to pass information to her in English, a language his captors did not understand.

The kidnappers moved the engineer for the last time around Oct. 9 or 10, when they put him in a one-room mud hut on a mountainside in Wardak’s Nirkh district, about 30 miles west of Kabul. Roughly a day later, he made the final call to his wife.

Those searching for him at last had a bead on where he was being held.

“The task force was able to locate [the hostage] using a variety of information collection measures,” the special operations officer said. He declined to be more specific, other than to say that human intelligence gathered mostly by Afghan security forces was a key factor, while the FBI also “played a very important role.”

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.

Planning the rescue

Meanwhile, at a base in Afghanistan, the task force was planning an operation to free the American captive.

“Although these men are combat-tested and have executed literally hundreds of kill/capture missions, hostage rescue is completely different,” the special operations officer said. “The ‘pucker factor’ is significantly higher.”

Surrounded by “treacherous terrain,” the kidnappers’ location represented the most challenging aspect of the rescue mission, he said.

But the kidnappers underestimated the capabilities of potential rescuers.

“He had captors who thought we wouldn’t be able to deal with that terrain,” the special operations officer said.

That, the officer added, was a mistake.

Nevertheless, the kidnappers apparently felt secure enough in their mountain lair to stay put for an extended period, rather than move their captive every day or two.

The ‘gold nugget’

This meant that the “gold nugget of information” about the hostage’s whereabouts remained current.

The element of surprise would prove critical.

As night fell Oct. 14, three Chinook helicopters flew into the mountains and inserted roughly 24 to 30 special operators — most of them Navy SEALs — about three miles from the kidnappers’ hideout.

As midnight came and went, the commandos slowly worked toward the objective, ascending 2,000 feet over 4½ hours. They paused roughly 275 yards from the target. There, they established an objective rally point, or ORP — typically, the site where a spec ops force stows unnecessary gear and puts security teams out while those making the final approach to the target transform into “pure assault mode,” said a source familiar with such missions.

From the ORP, an assault force of seven operators — all or almost all SEALs, according to the special operations officer — crept toward the objective.

Swift and sure

One of the commandos tossed a pebble against the hut’s tin door — a traditional way visitors announce their arrival in rural Afghanistan.

The rattle of the stone against the door failed to rouse the guards. “They were both zipped up inside their sleeping bags, sleeping,” one lying behind the hostage on the floor of the darkened hut and the other outside, the businessman said. But their prisoner was awake and suddenly alert.

“I heard the latch rattling and somebody came in,” he said. “The first guy came in with an LED light, and I just presumed that somebody was coming to visit. I didn’t think of it anymore until the second guy came in and I saw the silhouette of the first fellow. Then I knew it was U.S. [military] that was coming in. I don’t know how many guys actually came into the room, but it was soon filled up and it was soon obvious that I was being rescued.

“I don’t know what I said in English, but whatever I said, I said it rather loudly, evidently, because they said, ‘Quiet!’ ”

The hostage’s aim was to quickly let the operators know who he was, but “They knew who was who,” he said. the SEALs quickly demonstrated that, aiming their silencer-equipped weapons to shoot and kill the kidnapper in the room before he could fire a round. The engineer said he heard the sounds of the operators shooting and killing a guard posted outside.

The SEALs turned to the now former hostage and told him they were there to take him out.

“I was in favor of that, 100 percent,” he said. “I was very surprised, very amazed and very happy.”

It was about 3 a.m. The operators and the newly liberated hostage began walking to the pick-up zone.

“Because of not having much exercise, I was doing OK, but I wasn’t doing good by their standards,” the engineer said.

“They saw a place that was wide enough to come down in with a helicopter and drop a cable down for me,” the engineer said.

But, the special operations officer said, bringing a Chinook to a hover at 8,000 feet at night in blackout conditions was “not an easy task” and was a testament to the aircrew’s skill.

the rescued hostage soon was safely back at the task force’s main base.

Those in the task force were elated. The operation had been a spectacular success. The hostage was rescued unharmed and no friendly forces or noncombatants were hurt.

“It was a huge, huge win,” said the special operations officer, who described the rescue as “a perfect example of interagency cooperation across the board.”

While the special operations forces had performed superbly, other organizations deserved to share the credit for the mission’s success, he said, adding that the operators “would never have gotten there or have been able to finish this without a whole lot of other people playing a key role.”

Although the task force viewed the mission as “an overwhelming success,” as the special operations officer put it, military sources said U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan William Wood did not want to publicize the operation after it was over, in the belief that doing so would embolden “bad guys” to conduct more kidnappings.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment.

But to the special operators, the Oct. 15 rescue “sends a very clear message to any extremist groups that [kidnapping Americans] will be handled with vigilance and unrelenting persecution,” said the special operations officer.

The kidnappers, he said, “paid a pretty heavy price for trying to pull in some money.”