Toby Harnden

First Casualty Toby Harnden

This dramatic true story reveals the secret mission of the eight members of the CIA's Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11.

America has been struck by Al-Qaeda on 9/11 and more than 3,000 people are dead. The country scrambles to respond but there is no U. S. military plan to topple the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden had safe haven to plan the attack. Instead, the CIA is chosen to spearhead the war. Eight CIA operatives are dropped into the mountains of Afghanistan on October 17, 2001. They are Team Alpha, an eclectic band of linguists, tribal experts, and elite warriors: the first Americans behind enemy lines after 9/11. Their mission is to track down Al-Qaeda and prevent further attacks on America. First Casualty drops you inside Team Alpha as they ride into battle on horseback alongside the fearsome Afghan warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum and the Green Berets. The Taliban is swiftly defeated, but Al-Qaeda hatches a Trojan Horse plot to reverse the American-led victory. Some 400 foreign fighters, many hiding weapons, stage a surrender and are taken to Qala-i Jangi--the fort of war. Mike Spann, an ex-Marine, and David Tyson, a former professor of Central Asian Studies, enter the 19th century mud citadel. It is the CIA's first opportunity to extract intelligence from men trained by bin Laden, among them an American, John Walker Lindh. Spann is killed in the opening moments of an uprising, America's first casualty on the battlefield in a global war that will last two decades. Tyson shoots dead the men who killed his comrade. Now, he has to fight his way out. Award-winning author Toby Harnden draws on unprecedented access Team Alpha and every level of the CIA, more than 300 hours of interviews, extensive reporting in Afghanistan, and previously unseen classified documents. The result is an intimate and ground-breaking portrayal of the reality of a new war and the strategy behind it. First Casualty shows how America's early victory was a haunting foretelling: unreliable allies, warlord rivalries, prisoner abuse, suicide attacks, and errant U. S. bombs would fuel a forever war.