Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man [Hardcover]

Dalton Fury (Author), Col.(R) David Hunt (Foreword)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312384394 | ISBN-13: 978-0312384395 | Publication Date: October 6, 2008 | Edition: 1st

The mission was to kill the most wanted man in the world--an operation of such magnitude that it couldn’t be handled by just any military or intelligence force. The best America had to offer was needed. As such, the task was handed to roughly forty members of America’s supersecret counterterrorist unit formerly known as 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment-Delta; more popularly, the elite and mysterious unit Delta Force.
The American generals were flexible. A swatch of hair, a drop of blood, or simply a severed finger wrapped in plastic would be sufficient. Delta's orders were to go into harm's way and prove to the world bin Laden had been terminated.
These Delta warriors had help: a dozen of the British Queen’s elite commandos, another dozen or so Army Green Berets, and six intelligence operatives from the CIA who laid the groundwork by providing cash, guns, bullets, intelligence, and interrogation skills to this clandestine military force. Together, this team waged modern siege of epic proportions against bin Laden and his seemingly impenetrable cave sanctuary burrowed deep inside the Spin Ghar Mountain range in eastern Afghanistan.
Over the years, since the battle ended, scores of news stories have surfaced offering tidbits of information about what actually happened in Tora Bora. Most of it is conjecture and speculation.
This is the real story of the operation, the first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora, and the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers. Lastly, this is an extremely rare inside look at the shadowy world of Delta Force and a detailed account of these warriors in battle.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Mr. President if you had let these guys run this war it would have been over by now. Read this book now, all of you. [Kill Bin Laden is] the best book ever written by a special operations insider. This guy Fury’s men are the real-deal Delta Force operators. You need to know what happened at Tora Bora, and this great book will tell you." --Colonel David Hunt, U.S. Army (Ret.), New York Times bestselling author of They Just Don’t Get It and On The Hunt, and FOX News Special Ops and Counterterrorism Analyst

 

"Special Forces Operational Detachment - Delta is without doubt one of the most fearsome military units ever assembled, with many camp followers seeking with only limited success to record its deeds. There is only one way to know what really happened in any Delta mission, and that is to be there. Delta officer Dalton Fury didn't just take part in the battle of Tora Bora, he commanded all the special operations troops, both U.S. and British, who were there. Kill Bin Laden is a proud, riveting, warts-and-all account of that battle, one of the most important special operations missions of all time." --Michael Smith, author of KILLER ELITE: The Inside Story of America’s Most Secret Special Operations Team

 

“An important, must-read book about real warriors. A story that so positively reflects what on-the-ground decision making, professional acceptance of risk, and maximizing interagency cooperation can do. Dalton Fury shows us with amazing detail and insight what highly trained and motivated special operators can accomplish successfully in combat out of all proportion to their numbers.” --Cofer Black, former chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's Counter Terrorist Center

From the Back Cover

“A riveting account of one of the most important—but also least understood—battles in the war on terror.” —Time

The mission was to kill the most wanted man in the world—one of such magnitude that it couldn’t be handled by just any military or intelligence force. The best America had to offer was needed. The task was handed to roughly forty members of America’s supersecret counterterrorist unit: the elite and mysterious unit Delta Force. This is the true story of one Delta Force commander’s hunt to

KILL BIN LADEN

The first eyewitness account of the Battle of Tora Bora, this is also the first book to detail just how close Delta Force came to capturing bin Laden, how close U.S. bombers and fighter aircraft came to killing him, and exactly why he slipped through our fingers. With KILL BIN LADEN, Dalton Fury offers an extremely rare inside look at one of the most important special operations missions of all time.

--This text refers to the Mass Market Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (October 6, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312384394
• ISBN-13: 978-0312384395
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (109 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #133,291 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #73 in Books > History > Military > United States > Veterans
  • #99 in Books > History > Asia > Afghanistan

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An exceptional, superb, first hand account by the team leader of US Army Special Forces Detachment Delta, October 7, 2008

By 

DEG (Pennsylvania USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

It is rare that readers are provided a first hand, accurate, contemporary, non politically constrained account of a major special operation by US Army Special Forces Detachment Delta. Many organizations claim the title, "special operations;" it takes more than a title. Major Dalton Fury's book explains in complete detail what real special operations are about. Readers may pound the book on the table as they learn that Fury, the team leader, was given the mission but not provided the total command dexterity needed to get bin Laden. Higher echelons unexplainably constrained his alternatives. When will we learn? Nevertheless, Fury writes a lucid description of this most special operation. The understandably unanswered question is why were other alternatives requested by Fury not permitted? Our nation is privileged to have leaders, men, and a unit like this in its military. The continued strong relationship between SAS and Delta is obvious. The book is a great read for active and retired military of all ranks and services, civilians, and academic readers alike. It will be a case history for future generations of special operators. Thank you to Major Fury and your team for trying and for writing the book.

82 of 97 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening read that should make you angry., October 7, 2008

By 

Robert Busko (North Carolina) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

I thought we'd learned some expensive lessons in Vietnam. Apparently I'm wrong, and the proof of that is the book Kill bin laden (lower case intentional) by Dalton Fury (not the real name) and Col. David Hunt. In Vietnam there was constant interference by Washington in the conducting of operations in the field. I thought we'd learned to turn command of combat operations over to field commanders, define, in advance, the rules of engagement and then step out of the way and let them go. I also thought we'd learned that international borders couldn't always be respected, especially when those borders provide aid and comfort to foreign fighters. This is especially true when the host government knows they are providing cover for these fighters and takes no steps, or weak ones at best, to put an end to that cover. Boy, was I wrong. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong.

Fury was the leader of an elite Delta Force unit inserted into Afghanistan with the sole mission of finding bin laden and then killing him. Not an easy mission but certainly clear enough. No ambiguity here. As Dalton and Hunt point out, not only was there interference from up the chain of command in disallowing mission options, but the Delta Force was paired with Afghan fighters that were very thin in their commitment of finding bin laden. It is a paradox that the mission seemed doomed almost from the start and yet came very close to succeeding. Dalton maintains that they may have come within a few meters of actually killing b. l. The cave the team thought b. l. was in was targeted and successfully bombed. Later, teams searched the area for b.l. body parts but none was ever found. After reading Kill bin laden, one has to wonder whether our leaders really wanted b. l. found and dispensed with.

Kill bin laden is well written. Why shouldn't it be? The man who wrote it was there.

As a veteran, I've never doubted that the U. S. military is the finest in the world. There's not another soldier in the world that can stand toe to toe with the American fighting man. Our combined forces are simply the best. However, it seems clear that even after the hard lessons learned in the past, we seem doomed to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Will we ever learn?

Dalton and Hunt deliver a masterfully written inside story about the failed attempt to get b. l. Kill bin laden is not a partisan read but it is one that should make you angry.

I highly recommend.

Semper Fi

59 of 75 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Over-Hyped by Marketing, Excellent for Students of SOF, October 15, 2008

By 

Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander's Account of the Hunt for the World's Most Wanted Man (Hardcover)

This book has been very heavily over-sold by the publisher and will disappoint those who are expecting something other than a professional account of a professional mission with all its warts.

This is a very fine first person account with ample detail that I for one found very rewarding and worthy of both my time and money (the book is very reasonably priced). The reader will benefit from first reading the reviews of the books I list at the end--one would never know from this account that Rumsfeld gave the Pakistani's an air corridor to evacuate 3000 Taliban overnight from Tora Bora, that the Navy was certain they killed Bin Laden, or that General Franks refused to put a battalion of Rangers on the back door (the author does tell us of his understanding that President Bush personally ruled that the back door belonged to the "trusted" Pakistanis).

The author tries hard to be nice to intelligence, but his true bottom line is captured in his description of what they had for him:

1) It's winter in Afghanistan
2) Bin Laden can ride a horse

We all know they had more than that--even with a US Senator blowing the fact that we were listening to Bin Laden's cell phones and satellite phones--but the reality is that CIA could meet with the warlords but did not have actual people within the tribes and on the ground as the Pakistani ISI did.

The author also makes clear that it was just as hard to figure out the friendly situation as it was the enemy situation. From where I sit, "total battlefield awareness" is a pipe dream--a fraud--and it's time we started refocusing on humans that can live up to the Gunny Poole "Tiger's Way."

Here I my notes, ending with my conclusions and ten books I recommend in partnership with this one.

Early on the role of snipers, and the possible uses of snipers if we could get bureaucrats and politicians out of the way, impress me.

Small teams with a forward air controller that can go deep and stay for days impress me, very much. Unfortunately, we don't field them often enough (I only have read of use in Colombia, not generally, but SOF operates in over 150 countries so who knows).

Author reinforces the concept of Irregular Warfare as bottom-up thinking in which every person has a say, but takes pains to distinguish this from leadership, with the self-effacing comment that the leaders will decide after the enlisted personnel tell the leaders what they need to know.

Early on he laments to misplacing of the Special Operations "truths," the first one being "Humans are more important than hardware." Today privates are being selected for special operations right out of boot camp, and between private military contractors being allowed to loot the public treasury of both money and skilled manpower, and the complete dismissal of all standards, one can sense the author's thoughts between the lines: DELTA is the last vestige of "true" special forces (although I would include SEALs and some special air).

Air Force air strikes were not great--1 out of 3 hit the target, and the so-called super bomb, the BLU-82, did not explode as advertised.

Bin Laden's "order of battle" was surmised to be an inner circle of Saudis, Yemenis, and Egyptians, with an outer circle of Afghans, Algerians, Jordanians, Chechnyans, and Pakistanis.

Taliban liked to wear black on black...I could not help being reminded of the Viet-Cong.

Terrain blocked our radios. General Clark and others have made it clear that we are not trained, EQUIPPED, or organized for mountain operations, and between this point, and the personal knowledge I have of how few special Chinooks we have that can operate above 12,000 feet--and only because their CWO pilots have learned to fart into the fuel--it's clear the US is not serious about mountain or jungle warfare, and marginally competent as urban warfare.

After seven days they were out of batteries and water.

There was a "surrender" gambit when they got close, the primary purpose being to keep an Afghan warlord between Bin Laden and the Americans.

We still have total disconnect between ground troop use of grids on a map, and Air Force demand for latitude and longitude. The $150 GPS conversion is great, Navy and Air Force still not joint.

Lovely account of how they did a field hire of a seeming gift from heaven, a second translator who spoke English, only to learn later he also spoke Arabic and had been sent as a penetration. Sidebar on Pakistani penetration of the Afghan group they were with.

No mules. Very very tough to resupply in the mountains in winter. Even without loads, four kilometers on one occasion took five hours.

Bin Laden evidently wrote his will on the 14th of December, coincident with his rather desperate sounding call over the radio to all to arm their women and children.

We dropped 1100 "precision" bombs and $550 "dumb" bombs on Tora Bora, plus tens of thousands of rounds of other artillery and ammunition. I am so reminded of Viet-Nam, where what we paid for artillery shells being fired could have bought every Vietnamese a two-story cinderblock house with electricity and running water.

Author concludes that the CIA model of buying warlords DOES NOT WORK for specific objectives.

I learn for the first time that a visit was made to Tora Bora after the fact, a forensic visit. [He know from Bin Laden's later emergence that he did get out.]

The author is scathingly critical of the Army Center for Army Lessons Learned, which has exactly one hit on Tora Bora against thousands of documents visible via the web.

What I learned from this:

DELTA is over-trained and under-utilized.
Conventional Army leaders have no idea how to use special forces in advance of operations or deep behind enemy lines--they simply do not have the mind-set.
CIA paramilitary and some clandestine needs to be transferred into a new Active Measures Command that is the dark and dirty side of Irregular Warfare.

Fine book! See also:
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Delta Force: The Army's Elite Counterterrorist Unit
About Face: Odyssey of an American Warrior
Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars
The Tunnels of Cu Chi
War Without Windows: A True Accout of a a Young Army Officer Trapped in an Intelligence Cover-Up in Vietnam.