The Kill List

People cope with grief in different ways. For some, only wailing hysteria will prove sincerity. For others, a quiet collapse into weeping helplessness in public is the response. But there are those who take their hurt away to a private place, like an animal his injury.

They grieve alone, unless there is another relative or companion to hold close, and share their tears with the wall. Kit Carson visited his father at his retirement home, but his posting was at Lejeune and he could not stay long.

Alone in his empty house on base, he threw himself into his work and drove his body to the limit with lonely cross-country runs and sessions of gymnasium workout until the physical pain blunted the inner hurt, until even the base medical officer told him to ease up.

He was one of the founder thinkers of the Combat Hunter program, whereby Marines would go on a course to teach them tracking and manhunting techniques in wilderness, rural and urban environments. The theme was: Never become the hunted, always stay the hunter. But while he was at Portsmouth and Lejeune, great events were taking place.

Nine/eleven had triggered a sea change in the American armed forces, and governmental attitudes to any even remotely conceivable possible threat to the U.S. and national alertness inched its way toward paranoia. The result was an explosive enlargement of the world of “intelligence.” The original sixteen intel-gathering agencies of the U.S. ballooned to over a thousand.

By 2012, accurate estimates put the number of Americans with top secret clearance at 850,000. Over 1,200 government organizations and 2,000 private companies were working on top secret projects related to counterterrorism and homeland security at over 10,000 locations across the country.

The aim back in 2001 was that never again would the basic intel agencies refuse to share what they had with one another, and thus let nineteen fanatics bent on mass slaughter slip through the cracks. But the outcome a decade later, at a cost that broke the economy, was much the same as the situation of 2001. The sheer size and complexity of the self-defense machine created some fifty thousand top secret reports a year, far too many for anyone to read, let alone understand, analyze, synthesize or collate. So they were just filed.

The most fundamental increase was in Joint Special Ops Command, or J-SOC. This body had existed for years before 9/11, but as a low-profile and principally defensive structure. Two men would convert it into the largest, most aggressive and most lethal private army in the world.

The word “private” is justified because it is the personal instrument of the President and of no other. It can conduct covert war without seeking any sanction from Congress; its multibillion-dollar budget is acquired without ever disturbing the Appropriations Committee, and it can kill you without ruffling the even tenor of the Attorney General’s office. It is all top secret.

The first transformer of J-SOC was Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. This ruthless Washington insider was resentful of the power and privileges of the CIA. Under its charter, the Agency needed to be answerable only to the President, not Congress. With its SAD units, it could conduct covert and lethal operations abroad on the Director’s say-so. That was power, real power, and Secretary Rumsfeld was determined to have it. But the Pentagon is very much subject to Congress and its limitless capacity for interference.

Rumsfeld needed a weapon outside congressional oversight if he was ever to rival George Tenet, Director of the CIA. A completely transformed J-SOC became that weapon.

With the agreement of President George W. Bush, J-SOC expanded and expanded, in size, budget and powers. It absorbed all the Special Forces of the state. They included Team 6 of the SEALs (who would later kill Osama bin Laden); the Delta Force, or D boys, drawn from the Green Berets; the 75th Ranger Regiment; the Air Force’s Special Ops Aviation Regiment (the Night Stalkers’ long-range helicopters) and others. It also gobbled up TOSA.

In the summer of 2003, while Iraq was still blazing from end to end and few were looking elsewhere, two things happened that completed the reinvention of J-SOC. A new commander was appointed, in the person of General Stanley McChrystal. If anyone thought J-SOC would continue to play a largely domestic Homeland role, that was the end of that. And in September 2003, Secretary Rumsfeld secured the President’s agreement and signed the EXORD.

The Executive Order was an eighty-page document, and within its pages, buried deep, was something like a huge Presidential Finding, the highest decree in America, but without specific terms. The EXORD virtually said do what you want.

About that time, a limping Ranger colonel named Dale Curtis was finishing his one-year, post-injury paid sabbatical and convalescence. He had mastered the prosthetic on his left stump with such skill that the limp was virtually undetectable. But the 75th Ranger Regiment was not for men on prosthetics. His career appeared over.

But like the SEALs, a Ranger does not leave another Ranger in the lurch. Gen. McChrystal was also a Ranger, from the 75th, and he heard of Col. Curtis. He had just taken command of the entire J-SOC and that included TOSA, whose commander was retiring. The post of commanding officer did not have a field-action posting. It could be a desk job. It was a very short meeting, and Col. Curtis jumped at the chance.

There is an old saying in the covert world that if you want to keep something secret, do not try to hide it because some reptile from the press will sniff it out. Give it a harmless name and a thoroughly boring job description. TOSA stands for Technical Operations Support Activity.

Not even “Agency” or “Administration” or “Authority.” A support activity could mean changing the lightbulbs or eliminating tiresome Third World politicians. In this case it is more likely to mean the second.

TOSA existe

d long before 9/11. It hunted down, among others, the Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar. That is what it does. It is the manhunter arm called upon when everyone else is baffled. It has only two hundred and fifty staff and lives in a compound in northern Virginia disguised as a toxic-chemical research facility. No one visits.

To keep it even more secret, it keeps changing its name. It has been simply the Activity, but also Grantor Shadow, Centra Spike, Torn Victor, Cemetery Wind and Gray Fox. The last title was liked enough to be retained only as the code name of the commander. Upon his appointment, Col. Dale Curtis vanished and became Gray Fox. Later, it became Intelligence Support Activity, but when the word “Intelligence” began to attract attention, it changed again—to TOSA.

Gray Fox had held his post for six years when, in 2009, his chief manhunter retired, took a headful of really top secrets and went off to a log cabin in Montana to hunt steelhead trout. Col. Curtis could hunt only from behind a desk, but a computer and every access code in the U.S. defense machine is quite a head start. After a week, a face came up on the screen that jolted him. Lt. Col. Christopher “Kit” Carson—the man who had carried him out of the Shah-i-Kot.

He checked the career list. Combat soldier, scholar, Arabist, linguist, manhunter. He reached for his desk phone.

Kit Carson did not want to leave the Corps for the second time, but for the second time the argument was fought and won over his head.

A week later, he walked into the office of Gray Fox in the low-rise office block in the center of a woods in northern Virginia. He noted the man who limped as he walked to greet him, the cane propped in the corner, the 75th Ranger tabs.

“Remember me?” said the colonel. Kit Carson thought back to the freezing winds, the boulders beneath the combat boots, the gut-tearing weight on his back, the let-me-die-here-and-now exhaustion.

“Been a long time,” he said.

“I know you don’t want to leave the Corps,” said Gray Fox, “but I need you. By the by, inside this building we use only first names. For the rest, Lt. Col. Carson has ceased to exist. For the entire world outside this complex, you are simply the Tracker.”

• • •

Over the years the Tracker was alone or instrumental in tracing half a dozen of his country’s most wanted enemies. Baitullah Mehsud, Pakistani Taliban, dispatched by a drone strike in a farmhouse, South Waziristan, 2009; Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda founder, financier of 9/11, taken out by another drone strike in Pakistan 2010.