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.
Masterful, complex, and heartfelt, from the deeply personal to the cri.
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.
As gripping as any adventure novel, yet intimate and profoundly moving, it tells how America found a winning strategy only to abandon it.
Superbly researched, First Casualty draws on extensive interviews, secret documents, and deep reporting inside Afghanistan.
Award-winning author Toby Harnden gained unprecedented access to all living Team Alpha members and every level of the CIA.
To survive, he must fight his way out against overwhelming odds.
The other CIA man shoots dead the Al-Qaeda jihadists attacking his comrade.
The prisoners revolt and one CIA officer falls--the First casualty in America\'s longest war, which will last two decades.
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.
Hundreds of suicidal fighters, many hiding weapons, fake a surrender and are transported to Qala-i Jangi--the Fort of War.
The Taliban is routed but hatches a plot with Al-Qaeda to hit back.
On the ground, Team Alpha is undeterred.
In Washington, DC, few trust that the CIA men, the Green Berets, and the Americans\' outnumbered Afghan allies can prevail before winter sets in.
First Casualty places you with Team Alpha as the CIA rides into battle on horseback alongside the warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Their covert Mission is to track down Al- Qaeda and stop the terrorists from infiltrating the United States again.
They are Team Alpha, an eclectic band of linguists, tribal experts, and elite warriors: the First Americans to operate inside Taliban territory.
Eight CIA officers are dropped into the mountains of northern Afghanistan on October 17, 2001.
Instead, the CIA steps forward to spearhead the war.
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.
America is reeling
Al-Qaeda has struck and thousands are dead.
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
