Original subtitles

You want to know everything they're doing inside the CIA, right?

Because a lot of people see the movies, you want to know how it works, but

there's a reason the CIA does things that they do.

Working in this secretive world of terrorist groups, bad things happen.

So when you're planning an operation, you're building off of information

been gathered over a long period of time where you feel like you know.

the target you know what's going on in their minds we still don't know how they

did it and they will want to keep that quiet because you want to do it again

there was a raid against our top taliban target he was very smart he was very

crafty but he was just as evil how they tracked him is a very secretive

operation

To be pulled into this world, seeing the level of hatred and killing and damage

that I was being inflicted, it was very dangerous.

And at the end of the day, these people will take your life.

I have only once ever celebrated the demise of a human being.

Being a CIA case officer operating in a foreign land always has a little bit of

loneliness to it.

Taking my family to this part of the world in the terrorism fight that I was

fighting, it wasn't an option.

So, yeah, it was lonely.

My name is Darrell Blocker. I spent 32 years as an intelligence officer, four

the military as an analyst, and 28 at the Central Intelligence Agency as an

operations officer.

Five years after 9 -11, I was serving as a station chief in East

Africa when I got the notice that you're going to the war zone in the Pakistan

-Afghanistan theater.

In the 2006 -2007 time frame, we were losing in Iraq. We were losing

in Afghanistan, and the terrorists were gaining ground.

After the Taliban were hosted in December 2001, most of the Taliban

ran away into hiding.

So Pakistanis provided them safe havens. and they kept their families and

themselves hidden from the U .S. forces.

I am Lieutenant General Sami Sadat. I served as commander of Joint Special

Operations Forces Afghanistan, which was the main counterpart for the U .S.

Special Forces.

By 2006, slowly the Taliban had surfaced in small pockets, attacking U .S. and

Afghan forces and scaring the population.

At that time, there was little al -Qaeda left to fight, so the U .S.

immediately shifted focus on to going after the Taliban.

The top Taliban leadership all were based in Pakistan, and that was an area

where they could rest and refit, but also be largely immune from attack.

My name is Mike Vickers. I'm a former CIA operations officer and former

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

So when they spent a lot of time in Pakistan, they had sanctuary.

But then also when you go into Afghanistan to fight and lead forces,

Afghanistan's a big country. It's the size of Texas. It's mountainous.

And there weren't a lot of forces to counter them.

So given the terrain, given some support in the country enabled them to

operate. So the idea that you'd come in for a wild fight and then go back to

Pakistan where it was more secure allowed these folks to survive for a

time. The country of Pakistan became a safe haven for the Taliban because the U

.S. military wasn't based in Pakistan.

What a lot of them did is they lived in Pakistan under false identity, and

that's how they're able to blend in.

I'm Sarah Adams.

I was the targeter for the top three of the Taliban, both in Afghanistan and in

Pakistan. So a targeter is really one of those professions that came out of post

-9 -11 world.

finding new ways to track down terrorists.

And the Taliban paid attention to where the U .S. government was able to do

operations. And so they're very smart and savvy to basically stay in what we

call the subtle areas of Pakistan where it would be harder to track and locate

them.

That was like the big shift where the CIA started targeting like the top 10 of

the Taliban.

So the mission was to stop the fighters from coming outside of the region who

wanted to join their terrorist buddies in the fight.

My job was to stop them at the source, to capture them, and stop them from

crossing back and forth across the Pakistan -Afghanistan borders.

But at the end of the day, the main guy we wanted, our top Taliban target, was

Mueller de la Lange, also known as MDL.

Mullah Dadullah Lang was basically operating as like the number two, number

three of the Taliban.

Mullah Dadullah Lang was one of the Afghan Mujahideen.

He was violent.

He was heartless.

He had lost his leg in fighting against the Soviets.

There's stories of Mullah Dadiyallah running into the villages, killing older

men, shooting women.

In one instance, a Taliban fighter had saw Mullah Dadiyallah entering a house

where everyone was dead and a baby was crying and the Taliban fighters didn't

know what to do. So he grabs the baby and, you know...

throws him into the wall where the baby dies instantly.

And the other fighters say, why are you doing this? And he says that this is the

son of a snake.

A son of a snake will become a snake.

He had a propensity to just be very, very brutal. He fought against the

so he had the credentials of fighting jihad against foreigners.

And he turned that same attention against the Americans and the UN allies

were in there.

Daidula was responsible for all the beheadings that have gone in

is behind all the suicide bombings in Afghanistan. He has beheaded people

himself. Mullah Daidula is one of the commanders who brought suicide bombers

into the South, strapping up young teenage boys with explosives and having

detonated.

Today, a suicide bomber struck near the Pakistani border.

Violence across the country is at its worst since it started the war,

to the United Nations.

In 2004, I think there was like six suicide attacks in the country. But in

it was Mullah Dadu Daleng who started the big southern offensive, which

basically reinvigorated the Taliban.

At 8 .15 on Saturday morning, another strike.

And in that year, there was like 140 suicide attacks.

And that's when the Taliban then started gaining momentum and really getting

involved and like, hey, we can win this. Like, we didn't actually lose in 2001.

MDL was known within Taliban circles as the butcher.

You don't earn that title easily amongst killers, so you can just imagine he was

the worst of the worst.

There was a video of him essentially forcing a very young boy, 10 to 12 years

old, to behead a man that MDL claimed was responsible for this kid's

father's death. And all I could think about was, this child is never going to

the same.

My son was in his senior year of high school during the year that I was away,

I missed my own kid.

in his final year of high school, and all I could think about were my own two

kids. And if they had been exposed to this level of depravity, how would they

be? So for me, after seeing this video and after recognizing that MDL was

already on the top of my list, he was a person that I wanted to come into my

area so that I could be responsible for taking him down.

Operationally, end of 2006, beginning of 2007, MDL was probably the number one

target in Afghanistan due to how many deaths were being caused.

He was the top of the food chain planning those operations.

And so he knew he was at the top of the hit list for the CIA, for our partners

in the region.

But the operation targeting MDL became really complex because he moved around.

A lot. He got to the point where he would only start giving commands or

to his commanders face to face.

It was rare to hear his voice on internal Taliban comms or

on an open line because he knew he was being tracked.

So there's a lot of different places you can get information to track and locate

them.

You rely very heavily on human intelligence.

But then also this newer generation, they actually post to social media, as

can imagine, and that's very helpful when you're trying to locate someone.

They also use a lot of signals intelligence, like just tracking phones,

example. In the old days, signals intelligence was largely about airwaves

people talking to each other over the radio.

It now expands, obviously, to the Internet and to getting into the

the bad guys, as well as still intercepting communications.

over mobile telephones.

My name is Michael Smith.

I spent a decade in British military intelligence before becoming a

Even when you're not talking on it, your cell phone will stay in contact with

the antennae as you travel around.

Frequency can be accessed to actually not just listen to your telephone

conversations, they can listen into you.

So that's the capabilities of signals intelligence.

So we found out that MDL is in country and he is in this specific location, in

my area of operations, and we came up with a plan.

which was this raid directed at MDL.

And what you're planning is not just the capture of this guy, but getting out

safely.

And that could be the difference between success or someone

losing life.

Unfortunately, turns out that the actual location MDL might be in was a mosque.

So I had to make a decision whether to hit a mosque or not.

When it comes to like a mosque or madrasa, terrorists use these as covers.

Some really aren't even used as a mosque at all.

They put the sign on the building and then obviously if anything is done

it, you know, it can become a human rights violation.

And so it's almost impossible to do a CIA operation against them.

And remember, in these villages, there's people who are armed. Just like in

America, everyone has a gun, and there is some, you know, sympathizers to the

mullah, some sympathizers to the mosque.

There's a lot of risk that you need to consider.

Out of respect for the religion, out of respect for the actual physical location

of this place of worship, we were ready to walk away.

Our foreign partners, however, said we don't have the same concerns.

We're also Muslim.

He is making our religion look bad.

We're going to do this on our own if you guys don't join us.

Well, we know how it was going to end if they let it.

They were going to kill him, but we needed to capture him to gather more

intelligence.

In counterterrorism capture operations, the goal is to isolate this person.

stop them from doing more harm, and then pick their brain and gather as much

information as you possibly can.

So we needed to capture MDL and talk about things.

These raids, they're always different every day. You can plan them for as long

as you want, but things almost never go as they're planned, which is why you

plan for contingencies.

All day, every day.

As the senior CIA guy on the particular raid, I would be in the command vehicle

in touch with all the parties that were actually moving.

Our officers were armed.

Our foreign intelligence service partners were armed.

We were flanking from two different sides.

We put somebody on a rooftop, so we were ready for all possibilities.

It was time to execute.

We launched the raiding party into the objective.

These are very fast.

From the time they launch to when they're coming out with whoever they

could be as short as two or three minutes.

So you're not waiting a long time, but you're amped up as high as you can get.

The fact that a mosque was involved, to know that there are armed people moving

around inside who might meet resistance and might have to pull a trigger that

I'm responsible for, even though this operation is being completely led by our

local partners.

I've compared it to like waiting for your kid to come home from a date and

you're the parent at home late at night and you don't know what's going to

happen.

It's kind of like that. It's a little unnerving to not know what's going

on or what's happening.

Eventually, the team members, they came back, and I was disappointed when I

recognized that the three people that they were walking out, none of them had

prosthetic leg or was limping in a way that might suggest that they had a

prosthetic leg.

MDL didn't look anything like the people that were captured.

And then the third person, I thought it was a girl at first, but it was a very

effeminate young kid.

15, 16 years old, somewhere in that range, who I thought was odd

that they would capture a child because to that date we never had.

And after three people were taken into custody, the team that did the assault

came running back to the vehicle like someone was chasing them.

And it was weird because they typically didn't run.

I could tell something was different. And I said, well, what's wrong? And I

said, well, do you hear the voices coming from the loudspeakers?

I said, yeah, it's time for, you know, midday prayers.

No, sir, that's them saying the service is here. They've taken someone from a

mosque and get out in the street and stop any vehicle that they're traveling

right this second.

And this kind of tactic was used time and time again when we went into the

into these villages.

The way to get their attention is to use the mosque's loudspeaker and call the

men. It's like, hey, foreign forces are here. If anyone wants to, you know, kill

them, this is your moment. Come out and fight.

I know what they do to people that they capture. So I went from being completely

relaxed to chaos is about to happen.

They're describing us.

They're describing our vehicle.

If those guys stop us from leaving, we're going to be captured or killed.

But pre -planning and knowing the roads in and out was our job.

So we were able to get everybody out safely with zero shots fired.

Unfortunately, the main guy we wanted, MDL, was not there.

I think for a person like Muladadela to race through the ranks and survive so

many wars, he must have been very smart.

He was someone who knew how to hide than how to survive for so long.

He could be anywhere.

So we were crestfallen.

We were like... We can't catch this guy. The U .S. has been chasing him for four

or five years. We're never going to catch this guy.

But as it turns out, we captured three people who were significant to him.

So once someone is taken into custody, they're in the care of our foreign

partners.

Fed, house.

and then brought to debriefing sessions.

I've seen debriefings probably be the best type of intelligence, right?

at the end of the day, we're still just humans talking to humans. And you have

to have that level of humanity because the debriefing isn't to sit there and

say, I know everything about you and you're a bad guy. It is a fact -finding

mission.

So I started a series of debriefings to get information.

People call it interrogation. Interrogation just has a negative

with each debriefing, my approach was to make sure I was kind to everyone, even

people that I knew were mass murderers.

And there were some that were mass murderers, but I knew they were better

the worst thing they ever did. So that was typically my mindset when I was

to sit across from someone that...

would look at me and say, I want to kill you and everything that you stand for.

And it's really difficult to not allow those people to impact you in a way

that's going to make you come down to their level. But they're not really

directing that at me.

I'm not really the focus of their animus or their hatred. My system, my

government, my country might be, but if I can get them on a one -to -one.

then you can start to break down those barriers.

I always felt it was important to treat people with respect, no matter what

they've done.

Growing up, that was always my thinking.

I grew up in the hill of the boot, Italy, Okinawa, Japan, and Texas, before

moved to Georgia when I was 11.

My father was an intelligence NCO in the Air Force.

My interest in foreign relations really is born out of the fact that I grew up

in other cultures.

And then I was this black kid moving to Georgia a couple years after

desegregation. And it was weird because growing up on military bases,

everybody's together.

I get to Augusta, Georgia, and big groups of black kids here, big groups of

white kids here, but only a little bit of groups in the middle. And I always

felt like I was in the middle, not trapped, just a bridge.

So I studied things at...

Most people didn't want to talk about it. I studied the Klan. I wanted to know

about the KKK. I'd heard about it. I knew that people were afraid of it. I

studied the mafia, and I studied Hitler.

I think it's important to study people because you need to understand what

positions are.

Why did they come to this?

What is ultimately their goal?

And once you have an understanding of not just what their position is, but

it's so much more powerful in terms of actually reaching out and understanding

situation.

So with each debriefing, with each session where you're talking to them,

a little bit more granularity. And turns out we had captured two of MDL's

lieutenants.

and what is known as a bacha bazi, which is,

let's just say he was a sex toy, and he was MDL sex toy.

Bacha is a boy, and bazi means play.

Bacha bazi is playboy.

It actually surprised me that he had a bacha.

It's not allowed in the religion of Islam to keep young boys as your sex

partner. It's very important to understand the culture.

Older men take young boys for entertainment. They have them

dance. But there's also a sexual dimension to it as well. They're sort of

slaves. The Taliban officially banned it, and so...

Their practice is frowned upon, but it's also widely practiced by Taliban

leaders. You know, so there's an element of hypocrisy there as well.

It's a part of the world where you don't acknowledge their wives, their sisters,

their mothers, or their daughters.

And so they are more comfortable being physical, intimate, and sexual with a

young boy than they would with a young girl because that would get them killed.

The homosexual aspect has somehow been separated from their Islamic thought and

preaching because this is cultural, not religious.

That's probably the dichotomy that they're dealing with, and it's the

two evils.

So for me, I wanted to talk with this young man and understand.

everything that's going on, but also maybe he would be able to find some

in me.

So it's super valuable to get someone that close to your target. Even when you

collect intelligence from assets, they might be one step, two steps away from

the individual, right?

When you have someone captured who is close to the person you're looking for

travels with them all the time or lives with them all the time, they're going to

have insights that you were never even aware of.

They're going to know things that help you target that you just weren't going

be able to collect.

So my approach was always, please take the chains off. I can't talk to somebody

chained up like an animal. I'm just not going to do it out of principle.

And I knew if I was able to connect with them as a human being.

then you could find something that you could talk about.

MDL did become to me a very personal thing. My kid, who I was away from,

this kid who he had co -opted and abused, the other child in the video.

I hated the fact that I was away from my son for a senior year of high school.

I hated the fact that my family was still in East Africa and I was, you

another part of the world without them.

So MDL did become personal.

When I first sat across from this young man, my heart was broken because he was

just a scared, frightened child.

Maybe I saw a little bit of my son.

in him. And maybe I even saw a little bit of my daughter in him. And well,

because he, he wore makeup.

He more presented as a female than a male, but he was putting on the

facade of I'm tough.

I've chosen this life. You're the person who's wrong in this. So I knew that

this kid was scared because he was absolutely under the 100 % control of

mdl so being kind is a kind of a mechanism that you use but it was

also authentic to me because that's who i am and that's who i was and so i

believe we were able to disarm this young man by treating him with respect

eventually he shifted and changed a little bit we started talking to one

about history and poems and music and all this other stuff

Music was my first love. I would ask them about their favorite singer.

I always made sure that the music of that particular artist that he liked was

playing in the background. We started talking about art and turned out that

kid was a gifted artist.

I don't know what it's like for your child to be a bachabazi. I don't know if

that's a good thing or a shameful thing or what it is. So I don't know how long

he had been living in that life, but I knew that at the end of the day, he

didn't know anything different.

He knew he was in custody. He knew he was probably in trouble.

But for us, he wasn't in trouble.

We hopefully removed him from the trouble.

When the young boy was arrested and kind of irritated MDL into using more

technology to finding out what's happening.

Not having access to his bachibazi made him lose his mind.

He got sloppy and he became a little more active on the radio.

Once it became apparent that we had someone that mattered very much to

Dadela Lange, we knew that we had maybe that next piece of the puzzle to track

his movement.

He started making phone calls. He started making demands.

He wanted to know who was responsible for the raid.

And then radio communication was used to find his footprint.

And having that was significant because ultimately as an intelligence service,

what you're trying to project is what that person is going to do next.

It's quite ironic to think that a person so sophisticated like Mullah Dadiyala

will fall into the trap.

But that's the miscalculation on Mullah Dadiyala's part.

While this was happening,

There were a number of very significant operations that were going on.

Some of them included and involved Mullah Daddala Lange.

An Italian journalist with an Afghan journalist and their interpreter came to

conduct an interview with him, and he had given them permission to come and

conduct an interview with Mullah Daddala.

When they arrived, they were arrested.

Daddala released a video of them blindfolded.

on their knees with Taliban pointing guns at them.

The Taliban frequently kidnapped people and they did it to get

ransoms or to get prisoners out.

Mullah Sharma's Mansur, who was the Dulla's brother,

had been captured by the Afghan forces.

So Abdullah saw this kidnapping as a way of a getting money from the Italians

and b getting his brother out of jail.

The local Helmandi facilitator was beheaded in front of the Italian

The Italian journalist was kept as a prisoner.

The Italian government paid a large sum of money to Mulla Daddiela, asking him

not to kill the journalist.

And later, Mulla Daddiela exchanged the Italian journalist with five prisoners.

And one of them included his brother, Mansour Daddiela, who was then released.

So those five Taliban were handed over, and now he had money.

And now he had the resolve, and his resolve was focusing on how to get this

young kid sprung from the local authorities.

It was certainly seen by Abdullah as a great victory.

But at some point during the negotiations, there was a realization

was a way to turn this on its head.

When Abdullah's brother is released, someone decided...

We put a tracking device on him.

And so the minute he's back with Dadula, they know where Dadula is.

That was the clever bit, really.

We literally followed him from city to city, village to village,

until he made the mistake of moving in a part of Afghanistan where he

felt comfortable.

He is from Helmand province, where he was hiding, and Helmandis are very loyal

to each other.

So he used his local network, his brothers, his family, and his former

friends to go into Helmand and found a refuge for himself.

So it's not easy to catch someone who is moving around in their own backyard,

but also once he was...

ensconced within the southern provinces in Afghanistan. That operational control

is no longer mine. It shifted to the international security forces that were

there.

In terms of the alliance in Afghanistan, Helmand was controlled by the British.

The special operations force there is the SBS, the Special Boat Service.

It's the UK equivalent of Steel Team 6.

They were tasked to go to Brahmacharya and take out Dadula and get what

intelligence they could.

But a lot of the planning, of course, was based on CIA intelligence and

of that intelligence with those partners.

The level of planning and the rehearsal that goes into this is crazy.

Especially the tactical troops that are going to be deployed and conducting this

raid, they need to simulate a similar situation or an area.

They plan how many people should go, how should they attack it, how many enemies

there, what kind of weaponry they need.

It's very intense.

There's a lot of pressure on your mind. There's a lot of rest involved.

Landmines, booby traps, and there will be the enemy using women and children.

And they're using shelters that are full of civilians.

This is where leadership is tested to their bones.

SBS.

We sent in a supercat 6x6.

One went in to do reconnaissance. Saw where it was, got a picture of what it

was, so they could plan the raid.

Finally, we were ready.

We knew where he was.

We knew the defenses of the area in which he was.

He felt like, this is my ancestral home. I'm probably safer here than anywhere

that I've ever been.

May 2007, the British SBS went in three dozen guys in

Chinook helicopters.

The problem was that Chinook helicopters are a very noisy beast.

So Dadula and his men worked out what was going on, so they were prepared.

And so you had what was essentially an old -fashioned infantry battle with the

SPS and their Afghan colleagues attacking a building.

It took time, but they got there.

The special forces shot a bunch of Taliban running away, and one of the

was Malad Adela.

He was shot beside a canal.

He didn't die instantly. He was injured.

He threw himself into the canal, only to be drowned by water.

And later he was identified that this is MBL.

The hunt for Malad Adela Lange was...

Over eight to ten months for me personally.

For me, watching him in a video forcing a child to behead a grown man

was something that I still can't get out of my mind's eye.

And so I celebrated that evening with a cigar on the balcony, but I

didn't let it linger.

A man who died, and I always would remind my officers that even the people

killing have mothers and fathers and family and friends that love them. So I

don't think we should be cheering, you know, someone's death, but cheering the

fact that this guy can no longer cause additional death.

I don't know if I'm proud of that, but I did celebrate, and I never celebrated

another death.

Not since and not before.

The thing is, a lot of these terrorists get reported as killed numerous times

and they don't actually die, right? Or people don't believe they die.

If you're the public and you're not really believing that they killed MDL,

only way to prove it, as you can imagine, is through the media of it.

His body was brought back into Kandahar. The governor of Kandahar at the time

decided to display his body for public and for the media and to take pictures

and see it. This is not a typical situation in Afghanistan.

Usually it's not good to display bodies.

according to our traditions. But because of the significance of who he was and

how brutal of a man he was, it was important for people to know and also to

learn that bad people die in a terrible way. And Mullah al -Dawla is really

dead.

We needed the Taliban to know definitively that one of their top

now been eliminated.

Of course, the Taliban is used to losing its leaders, but Dodolo was,

he was a legend and a very successful leader of the Taliban.

It was a huge, huge impact on the Taliban at the time, on the morale, on

other top leaders starting to turn against each other.

That's how important he was.

All he wanted was his prized boy back.

And ultimately his ego, his desire to get this child back in his custody, I

believe led to his demise.

Our foreign intelligence partners, at this point, they thought that this kid

15, 16 years old. Let's return him to his family.

My argument was, you realize this is the same family that sold him into this

life, so how about we not?

returned him to his family.

As a father of a kid along the same age of this young man, there was no way that

I was going to hand over this child back to his abusers.

I took every measure that I could within the CIA to make sure that this kid

didn't have to return to this life. I knew that this kid was a gifted artist.

If you've seen the trucks in the Pakistan -Afghanistan area, they're all

brightly colored with words and symbols.

We were able to find someone within that community where you can teach this kid

a trade so he wouldn't have to go back to selling his body for, you know,

feeding his family.

And again, this was me as a dad, as a humanitarian, as someone who cared about

this particular child.

Saving that boy from MDL, I wouldn't put that on my list of achievements of

success, but as a human being, as a father, that was probably the one

that I felt was the most significant.

I knew at the end of the day MDL was either going to be captured or killed.

That's the goal. That's the intent.

But being faced with it and being a part of it.

On the day -to -day, on the ground, I know that I was getting to the point

I needed to not see the hatred and killing and damage that was being

And so I went back to my family, went back and, you know, reengaged and just

kind of decompressed as a family.

There's nothing that I did at CIA that I would do differently.

I loved everything about it.

The ride in between the 1990 and 2018 took me to West Africa and North Africa

and Europe, the Pakistan -Afghanistan Theater.

It was a joy for me to allow my children to kind of grow up in different

cultures and learn different languages. My son graduated high school in Uganda.

My daughter graduated high school in Switzerland.

They're children of the world, and if I did anything right on this planet, I

think. Having my kids grow up recognizing that as great as the United

there are a lot of great countries in the world, and I needed them to be

to those.

I'm proud of my record. I'm proud of the institution.

I fought a lot of fights, but I fought them because...

it was the right thing to do.

I would always make sure that people understood that there was life at the

end of every decision and every discussion that we had.

The CIA has some really dedicated officers who care about human life, who

lot of integrity, who actually does a lot of good things around the world.

The really funny thing is, is when someone finds out you're CIA, they're

surprised, right? Really, a CIA is just like normal people who can kind of go to

any country and talk to any person and like form a relationship. Like that's

key, right? We're like the best in the world at getting to know you.

CIA makes sure that our world is safer because we have people who are out in

field. speaking the languages, talking to the people at the ground roots level,

if we can fight these battles abroad, then they're not brought to our

At the end of the day, that is why we do what we do. There's a large part that

you're never going to know or see because we're protecting something.

We're protecting our advanced technology.

We're protecting this well -placed source. We're protecting you.