Taliban Hostage Heard Drone, 'And Then - Boom!'

By James Gordon Meek

On Friday, President Obama made it clear he has no intention on letting up on the CIA offensive inside Pakistan’s tribal areas begun by ex-President Bush last spring. Missiles fired by unmanned drones struck two targets inside North Waziristan. We reported in the New York Daily News' Mouth of the Potomac Blog on Jan. 18 (and mirrored here on the CT Blog) that missile strikes by unmanned Predator drones have killed eight senior Al Qaeda leaders, including some plotting attacks against the West.

While Pakistanis still occasionally mount anti-American demonstrations, there have been relatively few howls of protest despite more than 30 strikes near the Afghanistan border. One reason is that the targets have mostly been foreigners, and almost all the victims were Arabs - not Pakistanis, sources say.

So what’s it like to live in the tribal areas with U.S. drones zipping around in the skies overhead, launching death at any moment?

“It flies so often, they’re completely relaxed about it. Everyone’s off their guard,” British filmmaker Sean Langan told The News recently in a lengthy exclusive interview.

Langan has a unique perspective. The BBC man was double-crossed last spring on his way into Pakistan to interview top Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, and was taken hostage by the Taliban for three months. His “hosts” kept him locked up with his terrified Afghan interpreter in a small house in Bajaur Agency, which was wedged between four active Al Qaeda training camps near the border.

Besides the sound of constant training gunfire around him, Langan heard the hum of drones “pretty much every day.” On May 14, he heard a drone fire its Hellfire missiles.

“During my captivity, I heard a Predator flying overhead and then - boom!” Langan recalled.

He turned on a radio the Taliban had provided and soon the BBC reported the missile strike in nearby Damadola - where the CIA tried to kill Al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri in January 2006. The May strike reportedly killed a senior Al Qaeda operative.

Rank and file spooks inside the newly unleashed CIA have gotten a huge morale boost from the offensive, since Bush - and apparently now Obama - have given them considerable freedom to strike any targets they find, sources say. There also was this humorous moment at a recent CIA reception for the agency’s departing director Michael Hayden, when he was roasted a bit for…well, roasting the evildoers.

According to one well-placed source, Mike Sulick - director of CIA’s covert operations - read aloud a mock “leadership profile” of Hayden, which said that after taking the helm at Langley in 2006, the spy chief “almost immediately reneged on his pledge to the CIA workforce not to ‘blow anything up’ by destroying dozens of Al Qaeda safehouses.”

Just a little joke…right?