Today in Manhunting History -- November 19, 1865: Frederick Funston's Birthday

Of all the fascinating military figures I encountered while researching Wanted Dead or Alive, my personal favorite was Frederick Funston, the 5'4" 120-pound general who in 1901 lead a daring mission 100 miles behind enemy lines to capture Filipino insurgent leader General Emilio Aguinaldo.

On this day in 1865 in New Carlisle, Ohio, Funston was born to an artilleryman in the Union Army who after the war moved the family to Kansas and eventually was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. When Funston graduated from high school he tried to follow in his father’s footsteps by entering the military, but was denied an appointment to West Point because of poor grades, a weak competitive exam score, and his height. He subsequently enrolled at Kansas State University, but after two desultory years dropped out and took jobs as a court reporter for a West Arkansas newspaper and a ticket collector on the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe railway. In 1890 he passed a civil service examination and became a botanist serving on expeditions to such forbidding locations as the just-pacified Bad Lands, the hellish Death Valley, and the frigid Yukon territory, where he completed a 1,400 mile solo trip down the Yukon River.

Funston was in New York City trying to sell rights to a memoir of his adventures, when out of curiosity on a spring evening in 1896 he followed a crowd into Madison Square Garden. There, he found a political rally in progress promoting the cause of the Cuban Revolution against Spain, with the former Union General Daniel E. Sickles the featured speaker. The event implanted martial images in Funston’s mind that kept him awake with excitement, and before dawn arrived the next morning he had decided to volunteer for his first war. During a visit to the Cuban junta, the Cubans said they particularly needed artillery officers. Although Funston’s experience with artillery was limited to once “having seen a salute fired to President Hayes at a county fair in Kansas,” he signed on with that designation and proceeded to teach himself the art of gunnery with a Hotchkiss twelve-pounder he found at an arms dealer. Thus, knowing no conversational Spanish and lacking any formal military training, Funston became an artillery officer in the Cuban insurrecto army.

Over the course of a year’s fighting in 1897, he was shot or hit by shrapnel three times – including a Mauser bullet that passed through both lungs in June – and had his horse shot out from underneath him on another occasion that crushed his legs and impaled his thigh upon a dry stick. In addition to the persistent hunger he shared with his revolutionary comrades, Funston contracted malaria and was subject to periodic fevers and chills, and contracted typhoid fever during one of his many hospital confinements. On 12 December 1897, while about to go on leave, Funston was captured by a Spanish patrol. Looking directly into the barrel of Spanish rifles, knowing he could be shot at any moment, Funston quickly invented a story about how he was actually deserting from the insurrecto army and had been looking for Spaniards to whom he could surrender. As he spun his tale, he subtly slid his hand in to his pocket, placed the incriminating leave papers in his handkerchief, pulled the handkerchief out to swab the perspiration on his face, and managed to slip the papers into his mouth and swallow them without being noticed. The Spaniards subsequently conveyed Funston to Havana, where he was soon placed upon the first available ship for New York.

To the average man, the series of wounds and diseases Funston suffered in Cuba would be enough to dissuade them from ever again volunteering for war in a tropical climate. But such was Funston’s passion for adventure – and perhaps his sense of invulnerability – that when the Spanish-American War erupted the following spring he leaped at the opportunity to serve as the colonel of the 20th Kansas Volunteer Infantry, one of three regiments the Jayhawk State was raising in response to President McKinley’s call for 125,000 volunteers to augment the meager regular army. While training his regiment and awaiting deployment in San Francisco, Funston undertook what may have been his most daring venture yet – in two weeks he met, wooed, and proposed to Ms. Eda Blankart. They were married on October 25, 1898. Two days later, Colonel Funston left his bride and sailed with the second and third battalions of the 20th Kansas on the transport Indiana, bound for Manila.

Frederick Funston, 5'4", 120 pounds, in the uniform of the 20th Kansas

The bantam colonel quickly made a name for himself for his personal courage and aggressive tactics. Funston’s Kansans were always in the lead of the American offensives. During the fighting of 5 February 1899, Funston led his regiment up the coast so swiftly that he came under fire from the U.S.S. Charleston and had to stop. “There goes Kansas,” exclaimed General Arthur MacArthur as the regiment swarmed, yelling and shooting, toward Caloocan during 1899’s spring campaign, “and all Hell can’t stop here.” MacArthur wired back to headquarters: “CALOOCAN TAKEN. KANSAS A MILE IN ADVANCE OF THE LINE. WILL STOP THEM IF I CAN.”



On 27 April, 1899, MacArthur and General Lloyd Wheaton’s combined brigades found themselves halted at the banks of the Rio Grande de la Pampanga by a formidable entrenchment of 4,000 Filipinos backed by artillery and a Maxim machine gun. The only way of establishing a beachhead on the enemy bank seemed to be by a combined artillery assault to cover the activities of a small unit in the river. After two Kansas privates swam across with a long coil of rope, Funston personally took seven men across on the a raft and, ordering the rest of his troops across in stages, he dashed with a half-dozen men into the trenches. “I realized perfectly well that according to the rules of the game a colonel should not leave the bulk of his regiment on one side of a stream and accompany a detachment smaller than a company in size,” Funston recalled, but he “knew mighty well that if I should send a small force across and sacrifice it I would be damned in my home State all the rest of my life, and held up to scorn by all the corner-grocery tacticians in the country.”

Although they only found dead and wounded Filipinos remaining in the trenches, they soon came under fire from the Filipino Maxim gun positioned across a stream 300 yards a way. An American soldier yelled out, “It’s the Maxim – we’re goners,” only to receive a kick from Funston, who told him to be quiet. Funston stood up, saw that the gun was beneath a railroad culvert, and ordered his prone men to rise. “Under that culvert, rapid fire,” he yelled, and the gun was silenced. Funston was later awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the crossing of the Rio Grande.

When the war devolved into a grinding counterinsurgency campaign, Funston was given command of the Fourth District of the army's Department of Northern Luzon, where because of his previous experience as an insurgent, he was one of the army's more effective counterinsurgency commanders.  He was still serving in this position on February 4, 1901, when news arrived that a courier bearing dispatches from Aguinaldo had been captured. But that is another story . . .

Seif al-Islam Captured!

The AP reported this morning that Moammar Qaddafi's son Seif al-Islam, the last at-large family member of the deposed dictator, was captured after a firefight this morning in Southern Libya while trying to flee to Niger. (Qaddafi's former intelligence chief Abdullah al-Senoussi is the last member of the regime's inner circle still at-large).

CNN has a video report on the capture here.

Seif al-Islam was reportedly in on-and-off negotiations to surrender himself to the International Criminal Court for prosecution for war crimes, a fate that likely became more enticing after witnessing what became his father.  My friend David Bosco wrote an interesting piece on Foreign Policy.com last month analyzing the difficulties of actually trying the Colonel's son.

Image from Libyan television of the recently captured Seif al-Islam

Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam, no longer worried about a dangerous case of mistaken identity.

A Positively Reviewed Bin Laden Book

No, not Chuck Pfarrer's book, but rather John Weisman's new thriller, Kill Bin Laden, which the Washington Post apparently loves.  The novel is a reimagining of the Abbottabad raid, adding purely fictional (in theory?) characters and suppositions about real events. 

It sounds pretty interesting, to be honest, although I wonder if the publisher's decision to give it the same name as "Dalton Fury"'s memoir of the battle at Tora Bora was intentional.

Today in Manhunting History -- November 18, 2001: Jawbreaker Deploys to Tora Bora

On October 7, 2001, the U.S. air campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban began as bombers, strike aircraft, and cruise missiles pounded targets. Measurable progress was difficult to discern at first, but by November 10 the first major objective of the campaign – the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif – was taken, and within the next few days the Taliban’s hold on the country began to rapidly disintegrate in the face of U.S. precision guided munitions and the Northern Alliance’s ground assault.

Despite the quality and volume of intelligence the Northern Alliance procured for Team Jawbreaker, there was little reliable information on Osama bin Laden. On November 10, London’s Sunday Times reported that the Saudi was seen entering Jalalabad in a convoy of white Toyota trucks surrounded by 60 commandos in green battle fatigues, armed with shiny new Kalishnikovs. He addressed a gathering of about 1,000 Afghan and Pakistani tribal leaders at the Islamic Studies Institute, and the next day was spotted by Jalalabad residents standing outside a mosque, holding hands with the local Taliban governor. He barked orders to his bodyguards and left in a convoy of four-wheel-drive vehicles.

Gary Berntsen, the new leader of Jawbreaker, received reports of bin Laden’s exodus shortly after Northern Alliance forces entered Kabul on November 12. Berntsen, a bear-sized man with a Long Island accent, learned two days later of a convoy of 200 Toyotas and Land Cruisers passing through the village of Agam two hours south of Kabul. A quick plotting of all the accounts received from Afghan agents indicated a steady movement south and east towards the Pakistan border.


Gary Berntsen, leader of the CIA's "Jawbreaker" team in November 2001.

 Bin Laden’s flight towards Afghanistan’s southeastern mountains made sense. His destination was Tora Bora (Pashto for “black dust”), a series of cave-filled valleys in the White Mountains whose ridgelines rose from wooded foothills to jagged, snow-covered peaks separated by deep ravines. The Tora Bora complex covered an area roughly six miles wide and six miles long, and during the 1980s had been the object of multiple Soviet offensives. The Red Army had attacked with thousands of infantrymen supported by helicopter gunships and MiGs, yet the fortifications were so solid that the Soviets were held off by a force of 130 Afghans.

Moreover, bin Laden was intimately familiar with the terrain at Tora Bora. In 1987 he used bulldozers from his family’s construction company to build a road through the mountains. Later, at the village of Jaji, bin Laden fought his first battle against the Soviets. During the years before September 11, bin Laden kept a house in a settlement near Tora Bora called Milawa. Tora Bora offered easy access to Parachinar, a region of Pakistan that juts into Afghanistan like a parrot’s beak on the southern slope of Tora Bora. Bin Laden’s son Omar recalled that his father would routinely hike from Tora Bora into Pakistan on excursions that could take from 7-14 hours. “My brothers and I all loathed those grueling treks,” Omar said, but they “seemed the most pleasant outings to our father.”

Locals reported scores of vehicles loaded with al Qaeda fighters and supplies moving towards Tora Bora. Estimates from Afghans who had traveled inside to meet with the Arabs put the number of fighters between 1,600-2,000. Villagers in the area said that bin Laden’s core bodyguard was supported by a 400-man force acting as pickets on the flanks as the terrorist leader moved back and forth between the Milewa Valley in the west and Tora Bora in the east. Another force of 400 Chechens – highly regarded for their alpine fighting skills – guarded the perimeter of the Tora Bora complex.

Thus, Tora Bora afforded bin Laden option of fighting or fleeing.

In addition to the formidable terrain, Berntsen faced another problem. The Northern Alliance, which had served as the proxy ground force thus far in the campaign, had neither the capacity nor the desire to push as far south as Jalalabad. Consequently, Berntsen was forced to turn to the local warlords of the “Eastern Alliance” who had not been fully vetted. Hazaret Ali was a Pashai tribal leader who despite being “physically small, quiet, and unassuming,” had distinguished himself as a field commander in the war against the Soviets. Although he seemed reliable, he led “a gang of skinny mountain boys in rags,” and because his translator only spoke limited English, communicating the complexities of a rapidly evolving battlefield would be difficult. Conversely, Haji Zaman was well-educated and spoke English. But he had only just returned from exile in France and commanded men who “could well have passed themselves off as a band of 18th-century cutthroats.”


Hazeret Ali and Haji Zaman, the local warlords U.S. forces were
dependent upon as the hunt for bin Laden moved to Tora Bora.

 Berntsen’s sources continued to tell him bin Laden was in the area, so several days after arriving in Jalalabad Jawbreaker moved into a schoolhouse in the foothills near Tora Bora and established a command center. Because satellite imagery and photos from high-flying reconnaissance planes showed deep snow was stacking up in Tora Bora’s valleys and passes, it was concluded that with these passageways closed bin Laden would not be able to leave the mountains anytime soon. Radio intercepts further suggested that al Qaeda wanted a fight in the mountains where their prepared positions appeared to give them a tactical advantage. Finally, as the Delta Force commander noted, based on his constant praise over the years for the virtues of martyrdom, “We had no reason to doubt that bin Laden wouldn’t fight to the death.”

Consequently, the plan for Tora Bora closely resembled the operations that had broken the Taliban lines north of Kabul. CIA paramilitary operatives and U.S. Special Forces would infiltrate Tora Bora to identify targets for bombing, which would clear the way for the Afghan militias. Ali and Zaman, already fierce rivals, were given separate parallel axes of advance into the mountains: Ali’s forces would take the center of the range, Zaman’s men the western half of the base with both attacking south. U.S. forces would coordinate their movements and provide massive air support, while Pakistani forces would seal the border to the south and east.

While Special Forces units worked with the Afghans to prepare for the assault on Tora Bora, on November 18 Berntsen sent an eight-man team to pursue bin Laden.  The battle for Tora Bora, and what appeared to the climax of the hunt for Osama bin Laden, was about to begin.

"My Fond Memories of Bin Laden"

ABC News reports al-Qa'ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri has just released a new video dedicated to remembering the "human side of Osama bin Laden."

No, really.

The two great quotes from the story are Zawahiri recalling: "People probably don't know, they remember the lion of Islam threatening America and Bush, but people don't know that he was a very delicate, nice, shy man."  And later: "He was known for crying and tearing up very easily."

Zawahiri: "The Osama I knew loved kittens as much as mass murder, and after the all the Zionist/Crusaders were dispatched to hell he wanted to start a ranch on which he could rescue orphaned baby pandas."

"Act of Valor" Sneak Preview

Last night I had the honor of attending a special advance screening here in DC of the movie Act of Valor, an action-thriller starring active-duty SEALs.  Either later today or sometime tomorrow I'll post a full review.  Given that I'm not a professional film critic, I need to figure out how to write it without giving away any spoilers.  (Also, I made the mistake of not turning off my cell before the movie, and got slightly distracted by a friend's texts during the film). 

But for now, one word suffices as a summary: Wow.

Today in Manhunting History -- November 16, 2004: The Fall of Fallujah

During the April 2004 Marine offensive, the CIA determined the torture studio in which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi murdered Nicholas Berg was located in Fallujah’s Jolan District. Major General James Mattis proposed joint U.S.-Iraqi patrols in Jolan to pursue Zarqawi, but the ineffectual commander of the “Fallujah Brigade” declined. In June, U.S. aircraft began dropping pamphlets over Fallujah urging residents to turn in Zarqawi, who had a $10 million bounty on his head. But this effort also produced no tangible results.

U.S. forces began kinetic action against Zarqawi’s network in Fallujah through the only means available to them, killing 18 Iraqis in an airstrike against a suspected safe house on June 19. On July 1 the reward for Zarqawi’s capture was raised to $25 million, the same amount as for Osama bin Laden. In August, U.S. forces began conducting almost nightly airstrikes against targets in Fallujah believed to be affiliated with the terrorist. Although Zarqawi himself was never touched, his organization suffered significant losses, including the deaths of Abu Anas al-Shami, his spiritual advisor, and Abu Muhammad al-Lubnani, a Palestinian advisor described as his right-hand man.

On October 14, the Iraqi Interim Government raised the stakes when Interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi warned insurgents: “If Zarqawi and his group are not handed over to us, we are ready for major operations in Fallujah.” When the leaders of Fallujah’s insurgents refused, U.S. forces launched a massive offensive to retake the city. For over a week, U.S. forces engaged in intense house-to-house fighting against heavily fortified positions defended by approximately 3,000 insurgents, destroying much of the city in the process. Major combat in Fallujah effectively ended with the destruction of Zarqawi’s command center on November 16. Although U.S. commanders determined that Zarqawi had fled the city before the offensive, Zarqawi later released an audiotape condemning Sunni clerics for abandoning him in Fallujah. While the offensive deprived Zarqawi of a key base of operations, his influence and prominence, as well as the levels of violence in Iraq, only increased.