Any spy will tell you the best intelligence sources are always “walk-ins,” people who just show up at the embassy and offer you secrets. And the manhunt for Mir Aimal Kasi was no exception. The CIA had been desperately searching for Kasi for almost four years after he walked up to the Agency’s headquarters in suburban McLean, Virginia and began spraying rounds at cars with an AK-47, killing two CIA employees before vanishing into the vast border areas between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. The hunt proved fruitless until an ethnic Baluch man strolled into the US consulate in Karachi, Pakistan and just gave them Kasi’s whereabouts.

But by then the Agency’s Counterterrorist Center had been running a family of about 30 agents, grizzled veterans of the Soviet Occupation. Codenamed FD/TRODPINT, the bearded former mujahedin used SUVs, motorcycles, assault rifles, land minds, and secret communications equipment courtesy of the DO to scour the region fruitlessly looking for Kasi. What would become of the TRODPINT team? It was practically the Agency’s only asset in Afghanistan because cutbacks and regulations had eviscerated the CIA’s human intelligence capabilities in the Mideast and Central Asia since the early 1990s.

Except for the hunt for Kasi, the Agency had very little reason to maintain a presence in the country that had proven a trap for two empires. Then in the spring of 1996, everything changed. The Sudanese government expelled a young terrorist financier from Saudi Arabia named Osama Bin Laden. The Agency created a special unit devoted just to Bin Laden but had very little HUMINT on the man. They wanted a group to get close to Bin Laden, monitor him, and capture him if necessary.

The CIA authorized the TRODPINT team to stage a raid on Bin Laden’s hideout, Tarnak Farm, a mud-walled complex of 80 buildings in the desert just outside Kandahar airport. Their plan was bold and daring: a main raiding party would walk through the desert in the dead of night on a path that avoided the area’s minefields and dipped into deep gullies to keep them out of sight, and then they’d crawl through a drainage ditch to breach the outer wall of the base. Bursting into the huts where Bin Laden and his wives slept, the muj would cuff the terrorist leader and race him toward the main gate where a second group of TRODPINT agents had already used silenced pistols to neutralize the guards so they could position a Land Cruiser to make their escape.

They would then race off into the desert and stash Bin Laden in a cave 30 miles away while the US intelligence community found a way to try Bin Laden in either a US or foreign court. A team of US Special Forces would land at a nearby point that had already been secretly vetted for aircraft and spirit Bin Laden out of the country. Top White House and CIA officials sharply criticized the plan, saying it would result in a bloodbath, and it was never attempted.

Two months later, Bin Laden’s agents launched a series of attacks, beginning with the bombings of two American embassies in Africa, which killed more than 200 people and injured 4,000, and continued with the devastating bombing of a Navy ship in Yemen. Meanwhile, Bin Laden himself would issue declarations of war against the US and ultimately back the attacks of 9/11.