Today in Manhunting History -- March 28, 1886: Geronimo Reneges

After the March 27 conference, General Crook left the Apaches under Lieutenant Maus’s supervision so he could hurry back to Fort Bowie to wire Sheridan the good news. His diary entry for March 28 reads: “Left camp early in the morning for San Bernardino. Met Geronimo and [Naiche] and other Chiricahuas coming from the San Bernardino direction quite drunk.”

Crook should have taken this as a sign of trouble, but in an uncharacteristic lapse of judgment, continued riding north for the border.

Depressed about their surrender and apprehensive regarding their impending exile, Geronimo, Naiche, and most of their band got drunk off of mescal purchased from Godfrey Tribolet, a trader contracted to sell beef to the Army. From the army camp two ravines away, Crook’s soldiers heard gunshots through the night. In the morning, Kaytennae reported that Naiche was so drunk he could not stand, and Bourke found Geronimo and four other warriors riding aimlessly – five men on a pair of mules – “all drunk as lords.” In their state of intoxication, the Apaches were only able to march a few miles toward the border on the 28th.

That night, in a cold, drizzly rain, the Chiricahuas drank again. This time not only did Tribolet sell them mescal, he filled their heads with horror stories of how they would be murdered as soon as they crossed the border. The Apaches argued amongst themselves, and when almost everyone else had fallen asleep, Geronimo, Naiche, 19 warriors, and 19 women and children quietly slipped away into the night.

Maus did not realize they had fled until the next morning. He immediately set out with his mounted scouts to catch Geronimo, whose band had only taken two horses with them. They followed Geronimo’s trail for 60 miles through “the most impassable mountains,” finding only one horse that had been stabbed to death en route. The old warrior used his usual tricks, changing direction abruptly when his trail vanished on solid rock. With little food, the fugitives ran and walked 60 miles without stopping. At last, his horses worn out and his rations dwindling, Maus gave up the chase and departed for Fort Bowie with Chihuahua and the 77 Apaches who had refused to join the new outbreak.

Geronimo and Naiche on horseback at Canon de los Embudos, prior to their surrender, drinking binge, and reneging.

Today in Manhunting History -- March 27, 1886: Geronimo's "Surrender"

Following the battles at The Devil's Backbone, General Crook could do nothing but await the passage of “two moons.” Finally, on March 16 Lieutenant Maus – who was encamped near the border – reported that four Chiricahua warriors had visited him and told him Geronimo and the renegades were ready to meet Crook at Canon de los Embudos, a short distance across the border in Mexico. Crook departed immediately. As agreed, he was escorted only by his aide Captain John G. Bourke, seven men who could serve as interpreters, and the newly reformed Kaytennae, recently released from Alcatraz.

When they arrived at Canon de los Embudos, they found Geronimo had set up his rancheria “in a lava bed, on top of a small conical hill surrounded by steep ravines, not five hundred yards in direct line from Maus, but having between the two positions two or three steep and rugged gulches which served as scarps and counter-scarps.” Bourke marveled that “A full brigade could not drive out that little garrison,” and Crook noted that Geronimo had selected such an impregnable defensive position “that a thousand men could not have surrounded them with any possibility of catching them.”

On March 25 Geronimo, Chihuahua, Naiche, and a few other Chiricahua approached the American camp. The rest of the warriors cautiously fanned out around them, watching for any sign of treachery. After Crook finished his lunch, they met under a stand of large cottonwood and sycamore trees, on the bank of a stream just west of the largest funnel. Geronimo sat across from Crook, wearing a simple shirt, vest, and breechcloth, with a bandanna about his head. Twenty-four warriors sat just beyond the inner circle. Crook observed that Geronimo and his men “were in superb physical condition, armed to the teeth, with all the ammunition they could carry.”

Crook opened the conference, tersely asking: “What have you to say? I have come all the way down from Bowie.” Geronimo responded by stating a long list of grievances to explain why he left the reservation. Crook had decided to assume a hard line in the negotiations, and listened quietly. His face betrayed no clue about his thoughts, and throughout Geronimo’s hour-long speech he stared at the ground, refusing to even look at the old warrior.

Crook’s intransigence was having its intended effect. Bourke observed that as Geronimo spoke, “perspiration, in great beads, rolled down his temples and over his hands; and he clutched from time to time at a buckskin thong which he held tightly in one hand.” The general and the warrior went over the same topics repeatedly, neither willing to yield, when finally Crook delivered his ultimatum: “You must make up your own mind whether you will stay out on the warpath or surrender unconditionally. If you stay out, I’ll keep after you and kill the last one, if it takes fifty years.”

In a sense, Crook was bluffing, as he knew Geronimo could escape into the mountains again at any time, and that the Americans would have to pay a high price to catch him by force. Thus he moderated his terms, shifting from unconditional surrender to confinement in the East with their families for two years, followed by a return to the reservation.

C.S. Fly's iconic photo of the Canon de los Embudos conference. 
Geronimo is seated, third from the left; General Crook is seated second from the right.

Crook and Geronimo agreed to adjourn for two days so the Apaches could debate the American offer amongst themselves. Upon returning to his tent, Crook summoned Alchise – another son of Cochise – and Kaytennae to him. Alchise was Crook’s staunch friend and supporter, and Kaytannae’s incarceration and tour of San Francisco had converted him to a pro-American outlook. No formal session was held the next day, but Crook sent these two men into Geronimo’s camp to stir dissent among the renegades and to influence them to thoughts of surrender if possible.

Crook’s gambit appeared to have paid off when on the morning of the 27th he received word from Chihuahua that he was willing to surrender his own band, regardless of what Geronimo did. But Crook wanted to bring in all the Chiricahuas, and recognized that Chihuahua’s submission could be used to demoralize Geronimo. At last, in the afternoon the conference continued. Sensing a change in mood, Geronimo kept to himself, sitting with another warrior under a mulberry tree, blackening his face with pounded galena while the others once again convened under the sycamores.

Chihuahua, whose speech to Lieutenant Davis ten months ago harkened the beginning of the outbreak, surrendered by declaring: “If you don’t let me go back to the Reservation, I would like you to send my family with me wherever you send me.”

Naiche followed: “What Chihuahua says I say. I surrender just the same as he did. . . . I throw myself at your feet. You now order and I obey. What you tell me to do I do.”

Finally, Geronimo rose to speak. “Two or three words are enough,” he said. “I have little to say. I surrender myself to you.” He paused to shake hands with Crook, then continued. “We are all comrades, all one family, all one band. What the others say I say also. I give myself up to you. Do with me what you please. I surrender. Once I moved about like the wind. Now I surrender to you and that is all.”

The Man Behind the Drone War

Editor's Note: My apologies for the extremely light posting of late.  I've been hit by the perfect storm of a major crisis in my day job, and the apparent death of my home computer.  Hopefully at least one of the two will be resolved in the near future to allow for the resumption of more regular postings.

In the meantime, over the weekend The Washington Post published an interesting account of "Roger," the head of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center (CTC) and architect of the Drone War.  Among the more interesting pieces of information (which are naturally limited given the sensitivity of the subject) is that while posted abroad, "Roger" fell in love with a Muslim woman and converted to Islam in order to marry her. 

Ah, the crazy things we do for love . . . although it apparently hasn't inhibited him from blowing al-Qa'ida operatives and other militants to smithereens at an impressive rate.

Biden's Diminishing Confidence in Abbottabad

I try strenuously to avoid political issues here, but Vice President Joseph Biden told a whopper about the Abbottabad raid at a New Jersey fundraiser last night that bears noting. 

According to The Huffington Post, the Vice President declared:

You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.

This provokes head-scratching on two levels.  First, with all due respect to the SEAL and SOCOM planners who actually developed the plan for the raid, I think that the 1970 Son Tay raid to rescue POWs in North Vietnam, the 1950 Inchon landing, Operation Overlord/D-Day, to name a few, were equally audacious, perhaps even greater given the consequences of failure.

Second, this is part of a pattern I expect we'll see repeatedly over the course of the election year as Administration officials consistently understate the probability of bin Laden's presence at Abbottabad.  According to Eric Schmidle's report in the New Yorker:

[CIA Director Leon] Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent.” [Emphasis added]

Similarly, in "The Man Who Hunted Osama bin Laden," the Associated Press reported: "Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is bin Laden?  John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent." [Emphasis added]

Finally, in September a White House insider told Newsweek that some intelligence officers "thought that it was high as 80 or 90 percent."  That insider?  President Obama.

Again, the President deserves full credit for ordering the Abbottabad raid, but I don't think there is anybody who doesn't believe that President Bush would have ordered the raid under similar circumstances.  (Whether Clinton would have or not is a more interesting question, although I think ultimately he would have given the green light had he been President post-9/11).  I also think it is unseemly for Administration officials to try to inflate the fortitude it took to authorize the operation for political purposes.

Today in Manhunting History -- March 19, 2003: The Dora Farms Mission

After months of steady military buildup in the Persian Gulf region and Sisyphean diplomacy at the United Nations, on March 17, 2003, President George W. Bush announced that Saddam could avoid war under one condition: if he and his sons left Iraq within 48 hours. Speaking from the White House following a meeting abroad with allied leaders, Bush declared: “The decades of deceit and cruelty have now reached an end,” and that if Saddam and his sons did not accept this final offer, their refusal “will result in military conflict.” The intricately planned military timetable for “D-Day” – which involved commando raids, the beginning of the “Shock and Awe” air strikes, and the ground invasion led by the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force and the Army’s V Corps – was synchronized with the expiration of President Bush’s deadline.

The next day on March 18, however, a CIA source learned of a possible meeting that night at Dora Farms, an estate owned by Saddam’s wife southeast of Baghdad on the bank of the Tigris River. Although it was unclear who would be present, indications were that Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay, and perhaps the entire family, might be planning a meeting there to discuss what to do if the Coalition invaded. “At that point,” CIA Director George Tenet recalled, “we ordered U.S. overhead reconnaissance to examine the site closely. What we saw was a large contingent of security vehicles, precisely the kinds that would typically precede and accompany Saddam’s movements, hidden under trees at the farm.” Sometime after 12:30 PM (8:30PM Baghdad time) the CIA’s source on the scene reported Uday and Qusay were definitely at the farm, that he had actually seen Saddam, and that the dictator would be returning to spend the night with his sons sometime between 3-3:30 AM Baghdad time. Tenet told the President’s war cabinet: “It’s as good as it gets. I can’t give you 100 percent assurance, but this is as good as it gets.”

Given CENTCOM’s elaborate plan of attack, attempting to strike Dora Farms posed a significant risk. If Saddam was not present, the United States would be telegraphing that a major air and ground attack was forthcoming, thereby forfeiting strategic surprise. Yet when President Bush met with his war cabinet that afternoon, all of Bush’s advisors recommended the strike, with Secretary of State Colin Powell saying: “If we’ve got a chance to decapitate them, it’s worth it.” 

The latest information indicated that while at Dora Farms Saddam would be staying in a manzul, an Arabic word that could be translated either as “place of refuge” or “basement/bunker.” If there were a bunker at Dora Farms, cruise missiles would not be able to take it out. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Meyers called CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks on a secure phone. Could a stealth fighter be loaded with EGBU-27 bunker busting bombs in time for the attack? 

“Absolutely not,” Franks replied. “We don’t have the F-117 ready to go.” Franks checked further, however, and learned that the Air Force been following the intelligence and had prepared the planes at Al Udeid airbase in Qatar. Franks sent word to the White House that an attack would indeed be possible.

There was one important tactical problem, however. To execute the mission the F-117s would have to fly into the heart of Iraq’s air defenses, which surrounded the capital with surface-to-air missile sites and antiaircraft artillery. Although F-117s are virtually invisible to radar and ground observers while flying at night at high altitude, in daylight they become relatively slow, defenseless targets. According to the weather and light data, first twilight – when aircraft become visible from the ground – would be at 5:39 AM. 

General Meyers called again, asking how long the President had to make a final decision on the attack. “Tom, I need your drop-dead, no-shit decision time.”

In order to get the planes in and out of Iraqi airspace before dawn, Franks said, “Time on target must be no later than 0530 Iraq time, Dick, with takeoff from Al Udeid no later than 0330. . . . I need the President’s decision by 0315, so the jets can start engines and taxi.”

It was already 2:27 AM.

Time passed slowly in CENTCOM’s headquarters. At 2:59 AM Franks received word that the aircraft were armed, and the pilots were briefed and sitting on the runway in their planes.

Finally, at 3:12 AM, the phone rang. “The mission is a go, Tom,” General Meyers said. “Please execute.”

At 3:38 Qatari time, Lieutenant Colonel Dave Toomey and Major Mark Hoehn were airborne, flying north towards Baghdad in a race with the dawn. An hour later, 45 Tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAMs) were fired from surface vessels and submarines in the North Arabian Gulf. Each TLAM carried a 1,000-pound warhead, and once launched was impossible to recall. 

The campaign to kill Saddam Hussein was under way.

As Toomey and Hoehn neared Baghdad, the GPS on one of Toomey’s bombs went dead. The EGBU-27’s had never been used in combat, and had only arrived in Qatar the day before the mission. So Toomey, a combat veteran and the squadron’s director of operations, literally pulled out the instruction manual, rebooted the computerized guidance system, and hoped for the best. As Toomey and Hoehn approached Dora Farms along oval flight paths from the east and west, the sun was almost above the horizon. Clouds shielded them from ground observation, but also hid the target complex. At the last moment, however, the pilots found a break in the clouds that gave them six seconds to visually identify the targets and drop the bombs at 5:36 AM Baghdad time.

Although Toomey and Hoehn could not know if they had gotten Saddam, reconnaissance photos showed all four bombs hit their target squarely. When the first intelligence reports from the scene started coming in, the CIA’s source reported that someone who looked to be Saddam was pulled from the rubble, looking blue and receiving oxygen. He had been put on a stretcher and loaded into the back of an ambulance, which did not move for half an hour before leaving the complex. Around 4:30 AM Tenet called the White House Situation Room and told the duty officer: “Tell the President we got the son of a bitch!”

Several hours later, however, Saddam appeared on Iraqi television. He was wearing an army uniform, a beret, and glasses. For seven minutes he read from a notepad, denouncing the American attack. It was not clear to U.S. analysts whether the address was live or taped, whether it was Saddam or a body double.

The remains of Saddam's alleged bunker at Dora Farms.

Today in Manhunting History -- March 10, 1916: Wilson Orders the Villa Manhunt

The Columbus raid was not the first time the Mexican Revolution had spilled over the border. During the second half of 1915 and early 1916 the pace of violence along the Mexican-U.S. border increased dramatically. A series of raids, marked by theft, robbery, kidnapping, and murder in the lower Rio Grande valley began in the summer of 1915. In September alone, attacks occurred on Brownsville, Red House Ferry, Progresso Post Office, and Las Paladas. In October a passenger train was wrecked by bandits, killing several people, north of Brownsville. During the two-and-a-half month siege of Naco, Sonora, at least 54 Americans in neighboring Naco, Arizona were killed or wounded by stray fire from Mexican forces. As one Army officer noted, the frontier was in “a state of constant apprehension and turmoil because of the frequent and sudden incursions into American territory and depredations and murders on American soil by Mexican bandits.”

Despite his violent depredations as part of the Mexican Revolution, Pancho Villa’s flamboyance and reputation for helping the poor made him a popular figure with the American press and the public, and even the staid New York Times referred to Villa as “the Robin Hood of Mexico.” Villa’s popularity extended to U.S. policymakers in the Wilson administration. General Hugh Scott, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, had commanded the Southern Department for five years and was close friends with the revolutionary. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan gave Villa credit for “valuable services” in “restoring order in Sonora,” adding: “Your patient labors in this matter are greatly appreciated by the State Department and the President.” President Woodrow Wilson himself declared that Villa was “not so bad as he had been painted,” and that amidst the turmoil of the Revolution, “Villa was perhaps the safest man to tie to.”

Shortly after overthrowing the Huerta regime, however, in mid-1914 Villa broke off relations with the political leader of the revolution, Venustiano Carranza, and soon the former allies were fighting against one another. In 1915 Carranza’s military commander, General Alvaro Obregon, defeated Villa in four major battles. By the fall of 1915 the Wilson administration understood Villa’s power was waning, and on October 19 officially recognized the Carranza government. Yet Villa continued fighting and on November 1 attacked Carrancista forces at the border town of Agua Prieta. The United States allowed the Carrancistas to rush reinforcements via rail through U.S. territory, and supplied the electricity that allowed searchlights to illuminate the Villistas during the battle. By the end of 1915, only a few hundred followers remained from Villa’s army that had once numbered between 30-50,000 men.
Villa blamed the Wilson administration for his defeat at Agua Prieta which, with American recognition of the Carranza government, led him to swear revenge on the United States. Villa and his remaining men, mostly his elite guard of Dorados, started a campaign of harassment of both Carrancistas and Americans. On January 10, 1916, Villa’s forces stopped a train of the Mexican North Western Railway Company near Santa Ysabel, Chihuahua. They dragged 17 American miners off the train, and amid cries of “Viva Villa,” they stripped and shot the Americans in cold blood. News of the massacre “set off violent agitation in Congress,” and a “wild anger and excitement greater than any since the sinking of the Lusitania surged through part of the American people.”
Because an Associated Press correspondent was staying in the Columbus Hotel during the March 9 attack, President Wilson learned of the raid only three hours after Villa had recrossed the border into Mexico. Wilson immediately summoned his private secretary and personal friend, Joseph P. Tumulty, and told him to convene a Cabinet meeting early the next morning.

Despite the calls for retaliation after Santa Ysabel, the Wilson administration insisted it was an internal matter for Carranza to deal with. Yet after the Columbus attack the clamor for intervention was irresistible, and even U.S. officials who had been close to Villa recognized the threat he posed. Wilson now regarded Villa as little more than a bandit who threatened the security of the southwestern United States. The American consul in Torreon wrote to General Scott: “This is a different man than we knew. All the brutality of his nature has come to the front, and he should be killed like a dog.” Scott’s successor as Commander of the Southern Department, Major General Frederick Funston, delivered his assessment to the War Department the day after the Columbus raid: “Unless Villa is relentlessly pursued and his forces scattered he will continue raids. As troops of the Mexican Government are accomplishing nothing and as he can make his preparations undisturbed, he can strike at any point on the border.”

On March 10 Wilson’s cabinet unanimously agreed to use military force against Villa lest Congress adopt a resolution calling for armed intervention and forcing the President’s hand. Yet Wilson adamantly told Tumulty: “There won’t be any war with Mexico if I can prevent it.” To guard against this danger, the President announced: “An adequate force be sent at once in pursuit of Villa with the single object of capturing him and putting a stop to his forays.”

President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Punitive Expedition to launch its manhunt for Pancho Villa on this day in 1916

Today in Manhunting History -- March 9, 1916: Villa Attacks the United States

In 1916, Columbus, New Mexico was little more than “a cluster of adobe houses, a hotel, a few stores and streets knee deep in sand” filled with cactus, mesquite and rattlesnakes. Only about 300 people lived in this desolate town three miles from the Mexican border, and if not for Camp Furlong, home to a 350-man detachment of the 13th U.S. Cavalry in Columbus’ southeast quadrant, the town would have little more significance than the desert that surrounded it.

Columbus, New Mexico's business district before March  9, 1916. 

The night was still on March 9, and the moon had nearly disappeared over the horizon when First Lieutenant John P. Lucas was awoken at 4:30AM by the sound of hoofbeats outside his adobe hut. Columbus’ streets were unlit, causing sentries to complain they could not see twenty feet in front of them. Yet through the darkness Lucas discerned the shadowy figures of several mounted men wearing sombreros, and instinctively knew Columbus was under attack. He retrieved his .45 pistol from its holster and, wearing only his underwear, quietly slipped into the center of the room facing the door, “determined to get a few of them before they got me” when they stormed the hut.

The eerie silence was broken by a shout. Private Fred Griffin, on guard duty outside the regiment’s headquarters a few hundred feet away, had spied the invaders outside Lucas’ hut. Griffin issued a challenge, but was answered by a rifle shot that hit him in the stomach. Griffin fired as he reeled backwards, killing his assailant and two other Mexicans before slumping to the ground and dying.

Lucas did not hesitate. Taking advantage of the sudden confusion, he put on his pants and raced barefoot out of his hut toward the barracks of the Machine Gun Troop he commanded. All hell was about to break loose in Columbus.

The legendary Mexican revolutionary and bandit Pancho Villa was leading 500 men in a cross-border raid on Columbus. Villa had divided his men into two columns: one column struck Camp Furlong simultaneously from the east and west, while the other moved to attack Columbus’ business district from the west. Panic erupted among the residents when the Villistas rode into Columbus shouting “Viva Villa! Viva Mexico!,” wildly shooting into houses and at any civilians in their path.

At Camp Furlong, Villa’s men mistook the stables for the sleeping quarters of the garrison, and directed most of their fire at horses rather than soldiers. Lieutenant Lucas was able to marshal his men and his machine guns. Deciding the first priority should be the defense of Camp Furlong, he set up the guns where they could cover the railroad crossing leading into camp. Yet because of the darkness, Lucas and his men could only aim bursts of fire in the direction of the Villistas’ muzzle flashes.

Meanwhile, Lieutenant James P. Castleman, serving on staff duty, heard the gunfire and ran out of his hut. As he turned the corner of the building he collided with a dismounted Mexican, whom he promptly shot and killed. By the time he reached his unit’s barracks, his sergeant had already rallied F Troop. Castleman led his men towards the regiment’s headquarters, advancing under heavy fire from nearby Villistas. As soon as the fire slackened, Castleman ordered the troop into Columbus, where the Mexicans had penetrated as far as the Commercial Hotel. There the raiders dragged civilian men into the street, robbing and murdering them. Others were killed on the stairs and in the lobby. The Mexicans made a serious tactical error, however, by setting fire to the hotel. Lucas and Castleman’s troops had linked up and took up firing positions on Main Street. The conflagration from the hotel illuminated the streets and allowed the cavalrymen to distinguish Americans from the Villistas. The U.S. forces trapped the enemy in a crossfire, and within 90 minutes Lucas’ four machine guns fired close to 20,000 rounds.

Finally, at 7:30AM a Villista bugler signaled retreat.

As soon as Columbus was clear of invaders, Major Frank Tompkins left his family’s house in town and ran to the only high ground, Cootes Hill. The 13th Cavalry’s commander, Colonel Frank Slocum, was directing the efforts of a group of riflemen firing at the retreating Mexicans, now clearly visible in the breaking dawn. “Realizing that the Mexicans were whipped,” Tompkins asked Slocum for permission to mount up a troop and pursue. Slocum assented, and Tompkins – who 16 years earlier had led then-Company H up the cliffs at Tirad Pass – organized H Troop for a counterattack. Within twenty minutes 32 men were riding after Villa’s force, soon to be joined by the 27 men of Castleman’s F Troop.

Tompkins’ detachment overtook the Mexicans 300 yards south of the border, where Villa’s rearguard waited, occupying the top of a ridge. Tompkins’ ordered a mounted pistol charge that drove the Villistas from the hill. Upon gaining the ridge’s crest, Tompkins’ men opened fire on the retreating Mexicans with their rifles, killing 32 men before Tompkins gave the order to cease fire. The Villistas galloped to a ridge a mile further south.

Tompkins continued the chase, and his detachment charged the Villistas three more times that morning, driving the bandits 15 miles into Mexico. Finally, the main body of 300 Villistas turned to attack the Americans. Heavily outnumbered, short on ammunition and water, and riding exhausted mounts, Tompkins withdrew. Although he had not lost a single man, on the way back to Columbus he counted nearly 100 dead Villistas.

Back in Columbus, the corpses of 67 raiders had been dragged to the outskirts of town, doused in kerosene, and set ablaze, “adding to the stench of smoldering wood from the gutted area along Main Street.” Seventeen Americans were killed during the fighting, including nine civilians. Four troopers, two officers, and one civilian were wounded as well. Captured Mexicans and copies of correspondence from Villa to other revolutionary commanders found on the body of a Villa aide confirmed that Pancho Villa had led the attack.

Mass burial of Villistas killed during the March 9, 1916 raid.

In three brief hours, Columbus was transformed from a poor, desolate desert town to the sight of the deadliest attack on U.S. soil by a foreign military force between the War of 1812 and Pearl Harbor.

The ruins of the Commerical Hotel and "downtown" Columbus after Villa's raid.

Attention Tucson Readers

If anybody lives in the greater Tucson area, I will be appearing at the Tucson Festival of Books this weekend. 

I will be participating on two panels: 1) "Manhunts" at 1130 on Saturday, and 2) "Nasty Nazis and Other Vicious Villains" at 1000 on Sunday.  (The Saturday panel is self-explanatory, and on the Sunday panel I'll be discussing the hunt for Adolph Eichmann and the romanticization of manhunt targets such as Geronimo, Pancho Villa, Sandino, and Che Guevara).

I hope to see you there!

Ilyas Kashmiri: Not as Dead as Previously Thought?

The Long War Journal, citing reporting by the Daily Times of Pakistan, reports that senior al-Qa'ida leader Ilyas Kashmiri recently met with Hakeemullah Mehsud in North Waziristan.  This is significant because -- for those who don't remember -- U.S. intelligence officials claimed that Kashmiri was killed in a Predator strike in Pakistan on June 3, 2011. 

Well, damn!

As I noted at the time, Kashmiri's death was (or would have been) significant given his effectiveness as an operational commander and the importance of taking out al-Qa'ida's broader network in addition to killing bin Laden. 

Sadly, it turns out Ilyas Kashmiri was only mostly dead, and as Miracle Max can attest, "There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead!"

Bin Laden's Wives Charged . . .

. . . with violating Pakistan's immigration laws.  No, really.

Speaking of Social Media . . .

I am not on Twitter in any way, shape, or form, but apparently while I was linking to the State Department's social media manhunt on March 31, two human rights groups were launching an online campaign against Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony that went viral, and the groups' video was viewed roughly 17 million times (8 million on Vimeo, 9 million on YouTube) as of yesterday afternoon.  Kony is the target of an ongoing manhunt in which 100 U.S. Special Forces troops are advising and assisting Ugandan and other local forces conducting operations against the LRA, a campaign I've blogged about before.

Despite the success of the Twitter campaign in raising awareness, there are some dissenting voices regarding the campaign.  In the AP story above, London School of Economics professor Tim Allen questions the long-term significance of capturing Kony:

Even if Kony is removed tomorrow the problems are not going to go away.  There is a chronic wide-spread failure of governance in parts of Central Africa.  This is a part of the world in which hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people have been killed since the late 1990s in ongoing wars, and the Lord's Resistance Army and Joseph Kony himself is responsible for very, very few of those deaths.

Similarly, on Foreign Policy.com, Michael Wilkerson notes the video's inaccuracies, and says "it is unclear how millions of well-meaning but misinformed people are going to help deal with the more complicated reality" of Uganda's problems.  Writing in the Toronto Globe and Mail, Salvator Cusimano and Sima Atri agree, arguing that "the Kony 2012 campaign's stated goals are simplistic at best and misleading at worst," and reaching a conclusion similar to my finding in Wanted Dead or Alive that "silencing one man doesn't silence the movement behind him."

Again, nobody is saying Kony isn't an evil man, and that he shouldn't face justice as soon as possible, whether before the International Criminal Court or at the business end of a rifle.  But is is far from clear that his apprehension will significantly affect the humanitarian nightmares springing from Central Africa's wars.

LRA Commander Joseph Kony: An evil man and quickly catching up to Ashton Kutcher on Twitter.

Social Networking and Manhunting

I missed this last week, but the invaluable Noah Shachtman reported at Wired.com's Danger Room about a State Department-sponsored competition that basically consists of using social media to track down five "fugitives" in a worldwide manhunt.  The reward/prize is $5,000 for finding the fugitive within twelve hours of the release of his/her photo on March 31 in one of five international cities: New York, London, Washington, Stockholm, and Bratislava (wait . . . Bratislava?!?  Huh?). 

As regular readers of this blog well know, I'm nowhere near tech-savvy enough to be of much use in this competition.  But if anybody in the greater DC-area is going to form a team, I'd be very interested in hearing about how you plan on approaching the search.

Michael Yon, incidentally, wrote on geotags and social networking back in December 2010, a post which Glenn "Instapundit Reynolds linked to under the title "How to Get Tracked Down and Killed." 

Osama bin Laden is in Maryland?!?

Well, at least his body is, according to a theory expounded in internal Stratfor emails published by WikiLeaks.

According to the emails (obtained via hacker group Anonymous), Stratfor's vice president believed the Saudi's corpse was not buried at sea as reported, but rather transferred to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Bethesda, Maryland. 

Why would the Obama administration do this, you ask?  Well, Stratfor executives offer no explanation, but say that "The US Govt needs to make body pics available like the MX's do, with OBL's pants pulled down, to shout down the lunatics like Alex Jones and Glenn Beck."

Yeah, because they're the conspiracy theorists here . . .

Note: I strongly condemn both 9/11 conspiracists such as Alex Jones and Wikileaks, but will never criticize Anonymous because I'm deathly afraid they'll screw with the iTunes playlists I've spent years meticulously constructing.

Today in Manhunting History -- March 4, 1905: "Hooray for Geronimo!"

In the years after his 1886 surrender, Geronimo began the transformation from monster to legend. During the relocation to Fort Sill crowds gathered at whistle-stops to cheer the celebrated warrior. Geronimo responded with savvy pragmatism, selling his block-lettered autograph for 25 cents a copy. With special permission from the War Department, Geronimo was allowed to travel as a side-show attraction. He attended the Omaha and Buffalo expositions (and was at the Pan-American Exposition in 1901 when President McKinley was assassinated) and the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. He spent a year with a “Wild West” show, and cashed in on his reputation by selling souvenir bows and arrows, autographed pictures of himself, even the buttons off his coat.

At the request of Theodore Roosevelt, Geronimo was brought to Washington to ride in the President’s inaugural parade on March 4, 1905 along with chieftains from other tribes. As Geronimo galloped down Pennyslvania Avenue, people in the dense crowd hollered “Hooray for Geronimo!” and tossed their hats in the air.

Geronimo (2nd from right) passing in review at Teddy Roosevelt Inauguration on March 4, 1905

Saif al-Adel Captured! (Or Not)

Yesterday, as I was preparing to board a plane to Boston for a book talk at MIT, I caught a glimpse of a BBC headline proclaiming that senior al-Qa'ida commander Saif al-Adel had been arrested after taking a plane from Pakistan back to his native Egypt.
I was unable to get to a computer for the rest of the day, and was surprised that I didn't see a headline about the capture of the terror network's former military commander in any of the bars I occupied while waiting for my flight delays to end.

Finally, this morning I was greeted by the news that the arrest may have been a case of mistaken identity, and that Egyptian authorities likely had arrested the wrong man.

Well, it did seem a little odd that al-Adel, a former Egyptian Army colonel with a $5 million bounty on his head, would be so foolish as to fly from Pakistan to Egypt under what U.S. officials believe to be his real name, Mohammed Ibrahim Makkawi. 

Saif al-Adel: Apparently, not a complete idiot after all.