First Casualty

4:35 p.m. (GMT +5), September 11, 2001;
Tashkent International Airport, Uzbekistan

Settling in for the journey from Tashkent to Heathrow, the burly, broad-shouldered man traveling alone blended in among the passengers on board Uzbekistan Airways Flight 201. His thick, graying hair framed a friendly, open face with rough-hewn features. He was six feet two and looked like he worked in perhaps engineering or agriculture—hands on rather than in an office. A plaid shirt hung loosely over canvas pants. David Tyson was certainly not one of the sharp-suited businessmen flying from the former Soviet republic in the hope of closing a deal in London.

The Boeing 757, painted in the powder blue, yellow, and green of the national airline, took off on schedule for a flight of seven hours. At precisely the same moment some 6,000 miles and nine time zones away, Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, was about to board American Airlines Flight 11 at Boston Logan Airport with four subordinates. There it was 7:35 a.m. and the azure sky was cloudless. Atta was the leader of nineteen hijackers from Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda on four planes who were about to launch the most devastating attack on the United States in history. An Al-Qaeda commander had referred to the day of the coordinated terrorist strikes as “zero hour.”

To anyone on Flight 201 giving David a second thought, it might have been a surprise to learn that he was an American—especially given his ease with the vernacular of various dialects of the Uzbek language. David spoke fluent Russian, Turkish, and Turkmen, and could converse in Kazakh, Tatar, and Azerbaijani. But it was his Uzbek, honed during four years of living in Uzbekistan as a student, that could pass as native. Never seen in a tie, David, as a graduate student in Tashkent, had at one time possessed no shoes. His friends would quip that he had been an Uzbek peasant in another life. By David’s own admission, he had once teetered on the verge of going native. The business cards now in his wallet, however, identified him as not just an American but a diplomat, a second secretary serving with the Department of State in the Political-Military section of the US Embassy in Tashkent.

In truth, David was a spy. Aged forty and under diplomatic cover, he was a clandestine operative working at the Central Intelligence Agency’s Tashkent station, housed inside the embassy. More specifically, he was a case officer, a member of the CIA’s Central Eurasian Division, within its Directorate of Operations. The DO, as it was known, was the CIA’s elite clandestine arm. The CIA’s analysts, technicians, and support staff were housed in separate directorates and worked overtly. In the DO, by contrast, CIA officers worked undercover, the majority as State Department employees, using aliases in all communications. Their true affiliation was classified and kept secret, often even from their families. Though booked on the flight in his true name, in all diplomatic and intelligence traffic he was referred to by an operational pseudonym. Monitoring bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan had been one of David’s principal responsibilities since being stationed in Uzbekistan in 1998. He was traveling to London to discuss his efforts to keep armaments in Afghanistan from falling into terrorist hands.

David was not a typical CIA officer. Agency colleagues may have viewed Uzbekistan as the ass-end of nowhere, but David loved the place. He had joined the CIA in 1996—Tashkent was his first posting—at the age of thirty-five, from graduate school at Indiana University, where he had been lecturing and working toward a PhD. There, he had gained a master’s degree with a thesis on “Literacy in Turkistan Prior to Soviet Rule” and become an expert on shrine pilgrimage among the Turkmens.

CIA colleagues had nicknamed him “the Professor.” When leaving academia, however, he had known that he was crossing over to what many regarded as the dark side. For well over a year, he had been talking to a middle-aged CIA officer who had identified herself as Sandy Baker—not her real name—about what he had gleaned from his travels in the former Soviet Union. Latterly, she had broached whether he might become a spy. The turning point had been in a freezing parking lot in Bloomington with his wife, Rosann. She hailed from the same small town in Pennsylvania, and they had met when they were undergraduates. The couple had two young children and were struggling to make ends meet. David told her that he had received a job offer from the CIA and they wanted an answer. “Do we leave this life here behind?” he asked. “We need to make a decision.” He was entrenched in the small world of Central Asian studies and considered part of his department’s family. They had stood looking at each other in the snow and then agreed that he should make the leap. David had strong bonds with his professors, and he knew that joining the CIA would cause some of his colleagues to cut him off. There would be no going back. It had been a close call, with government health insurance tipping the balance.

So far, life as a spy seemed like an endless adventure. David had been on missions in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan, often operating alone, armed, using his languages, and employing his newly learned intelligence tradecraft. He had become part of a close-knit band of CIA officers on the edge of what was for most Americans a forgotten Cold War frontier. Though it was a time of peace for the United States, the region where David lived was wracked by war. David had been pushing the CIA for more money and more weapons for US allies, and to take more risks. It was a time before he had a surfeit of all three. It was a time when he had not killed a man, or kicked a bloodied body to check if a friend was still alive. It was a time when he had not run, and shot, and fought for his life. It was a time when he had not lain in the dust beside the staring eyes of a corpse. It was a time when he had no nightmares of being chased by men determined to kill him. It was a time when he could not conceive of any of those things happening.

At age seventeen, David’s wanderlust was such that he had written a letter to the French Foreign Legion—he found the address in a school library book—asking if he could join. To his surprise, he received a reply suggesting he report to a recruiting depot outside Marseilles; alas, he had no means of raising the airfare. Instead, David enlisted in the US Army straight out of high school, without telling his parents, rather than take a job in the paper or steel mills surrounding his home in Downingtown, Pennsylvania. After two uneventful years in the field artillery, when he was mostly based in West Germany and played a lot of basketball, he had become a student. David had enrolled at Westchester State University and discovered a talent for languages, beginning with Russian because it seemed the most exotic. During a semester at Columbia University, he had been so short of money that he had started going to a New York homeless shelter to get free soup. Before long, he had become a helper there; then, for free board and a modest paycheck, he worked as a live-in supervisor. Some of the men took him around the New York subway system, introducing him to underground tribes of homeless. David had become so involved in the lives of the men at the shelter, many of them alcoholics or drug addicts, that Rosann had fretted it was distracting him from his studies.

He quit Columbia and moved to a doctoral program at Indiana University, at the same time securing an ROTC commission as an intelligence officer. His second stint in the Army enabled him to use the G.I. Bill to fund his student life. Central Asian studies was a niche area of academia that offered more opportunities than Russian, which was dominated by émigrés. David had grown up in a family with an ethos of modesty, thrift, teetotalism, and staunch Christianity drawn from the Mennonite tradition. Having discovered his aptitude for languages and a fascination with other cultures, he was drawn from these simple roots to explore the obscure and the esoteric.

David’s patriotism was understated but deep. His father had served in the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid during World War II and survived Japanese kamikaze attacks. Although post-traumatic stress had never been discussed, after the war his father had seemed a changed man and had struggled to stay in jobs, working variously as a carpenter, janitor, preacher, and security guard. David had studied in Leningrad from 1985 to 1986, before the collapse of the Soviet Union, fueling his belief in personal freedom, the rights of the individual versus the state, and America’s role as a force for good in the world. He had experienced communism again as a student in Tashkent beginning in 1989, when he was arrested regularly by the Uzbek secret police; he used his time being held, sometimes overnight in the cells, to hone his tenses and bolster his vocabulary.

David’s first job at the Agency in 1996 was not glamorous: translating “open source” material such as the Russian newspapers Izvestia and Pravda. He joked that rather than being recruited as a clandestine operative, as he initially hoped, he had been captured by the nerds. His department, the Agency’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, occupied a nondescript office block seven miles from CIA headquarters in Langley, northern Virginia, just outside Washington, DC. But David’s facility with languages meant he was soon plucked from this backwater. After an accelerated course at “The Farm,” the Agency’s training facility near Williamsburg, Virginia, he was bound for his old stomping ground of Tashkent.

In Uzbekistan, David had impressed his CIA superiors with his thirst for every aspect of his job, barring bureaucracy. A case officer in Pakistan destined for the highest ranks of the CIA had taken him under his wing, teaching him the art of hands-on spying, recruiting assets, and navigating the intrigue of ethnic rivalries. David was not fazed by danger and was happy to take risks. He seemed to be the kind of eccentric who was a perfect fit for the CIA. Colleagues loved to tell the tale of how the Tyson family, with Rosann’s parents in the back of the car, had stopped at a gas station in rural Uzbekistan. When Rosann had looked around as the gas was being pumped, her husband had disappeared. Some considerable time later—the exact period depended on who was recounting the story—he returned, puzzled by the fuss over his absence. David had seen an elderly farmer working in a field and walked over to talk to him. The old man had invited David to his home for tea; it would have been rude to refuse.

David had no sense of self-importance and would help anyone. He was also uninterested in professional advancement. It was received wisdom that any new case officer, and especially one who had joined the Agency late, should take a job in headquarters after their first tour. Instead, David had signed up for a second stint in Tashkent. He was where he wanted to be. Having left academia behind, David was now all in with the CIA. He had found his new tribe.

On September 11, David’s destination was a hotel close to Grosvenor Square in London’s well-heeled Mayfair district. Although he had been in the CIA just three years, David’s age, expertise in his region, and air of quiet self-assurance meant that he was being treated as an operative with greater experience. The following day, he was to meet fellow CIA officers inside the Agency’s vast London station, where the subject would be Afghanistan.