Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi by Kenneth R. Timmerman Page B

ceremony at CIA Headquarters on June 24 to honor the men and women who had participated in the thirteen-year manhunt of bin Laden, then CIA director Leon Panetta disclosed the name of the specific unit that had carried out the raid and its commander, even though a producer of the Hollywood film Zero Dark Thirty was present. The event was classified top secret, as were Panetta’s remarks. Needless to say, filmmaker Mark Boal did not have security clearance. 10 The White House was pushing for full cooperation with the filmmakers in the hope of using the movie as a prop for the president’s reelection campaign the following year. Security be damned.
    Just one week after Biden’s initial disclosure, U.S. military intelligence reported that a force of more than one hundred Taliban fighters were making their way into the Tangi Valley in Afghanistan, where they knew U.S. Special Forces teams were operating. “The Taliban’s goal was to shoot down a NATO helicopter in retaliation for the bin Laden raid,” Karen Vaughn told me, summarizing what she had learned from a 1,300-page after-action report by Army Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt.
    When Aaron Vaughn came back for home leave that summer, “something was different,” Karen remembers. “He had a haunted look, as if he knew something was about to happen.”
    Twenty-five-year-old Navy cryptologist Michael Strange also came home that summer on leave. “Usually it was, see you in three months, make sure the beer is cold,” said his father, Charles Strange. “This time, my son grabbed me by the biceps and said, ‘Dad, I got to make out a will.’ ”
    The call sign of the helicopter that flew them to their death on the night of August 6, 2011, was Extortion 17 . The after-action investigation, stamped SECRET, was declassified for the families, who made it available to me. Despite an extraordinary level of detail, it left many key questions unanswered.
    For starters, the mission itself made little sense. Earlier in the day, a team of U.S. Army Rangers had choppered into the Tangi Valley seeking out “Objective LEFTY GROVE,” the code name for Taliban commander Qari Tahir. During the fighting, a force of nine or ten suspected Taliban escaped and moved deeper into the valley. The Rangers initially requested that an AC-130 Spectre gunship take them out, but the Task Force commander “was unable to determine whether the group was armed and therefore could not authorize the strike,” wrote Brigadier General Jeffrey Colt. 11 Why the Task Force commander was unable to determine that the men were armed when the Rangers reported that they were walking in single file, carrying AK-47s and RPG-7 tubes, went unexplained in the report.
    At half-past midnight, the Task Force commander issued a warning order for SEALs to deploy an IRF (Immediate Reaction Force) in support of the Rangers, to capture or kill Qari Tahir and his men. As the situation on the ground evolved, he decided to expand the mission from seventeen to thirty-two men, figuring there could be more Taliban, and because of the probability the SEALs would have to fight their way out of the valley during daylight hours. When Extortion 17 took off, thirty-eight men were on board: seventeen Navy SEALs, five U.S. Navy special operations support personnel, three U.S. Air Force special tactics airmen, five U.S. Army Reserve airmen (who flew the aircraft), seven Afghan commandos, an Afghan civilian interpreter, and a working military dog. None of them would survive.
    Instead of dropping the thirty-eight-man IRF at a known landing zone a mile or so from the fighting, the mission commander chose a hot site with a fifty-foot qalat (tower) at one end, and groups of Taliban on two sides. The shooters were waiting in the qalat . According to other pilots on the mission that night, they fired two, possibly three projectiles at the lumbering chopper when it was two hundred meters away. The second one hit Extortion 17 in the aft rotor, just