First Casualty tells the story of the first CIA mission in Afghanistan after 9/11 and reveals how Mike Spann, America's first casualty of the war, was killed in a prisoner revolt. It is published by Little Brown on Tuesday
The mystery of how Mike Spann, the CIA officer who was America's first casualty on the battlefield after 9/11, was killed in Afghanistan has finally been solved nearly 20 years after his death.
Spann, 32, a former Marine Corps officer and CIA paramilitary, died on November 25, 2001, during a prisoner uprising at Qala-i Jangi, a remote fort outside Mazar-i Sharif in northern Afghanistan.
He and David Tyson, a CIA case officer, had gone into the fort to question the first Al Qaeda members to have been captured.
More than 400 fighters had been detained in a cellar in the Pink House, a building inside the fort.
At the time, it was reported that Spann had been beaten, kicked, and bitten to death.
A Random House book, which was subsequently discredited, later claimed that Spann had been captured and tortured horrifically before being shot in both legs and then the neck.
Some members of the Spann family feared that the CIA officer might have been killed by US airstrikes on the fort after the uprising.
In his new book First Casualty: The Untold Story of the CIA Mission to Avenge 9/11, however, author Toby Harnden reveals that a military pathologist concluded that Mike Spann was killed by two gunshot wounds to the head, almost certainly in the first seconds of the uprising.
Mike Spann (left) and Justin Sapp, a Green Beret detailed to the CIA, were members of Team Alpha that arrived in Afghanistan in October 2001. Spann would become the first American casualty of the war days after this photograph was taken in Bamiyan province
Team Alpha posed for a photograph in front of the Black Hawk helicopter that would carry them from K2 air base in Uzbekistan to Afghanistan on October 15, 2001. Spann is pictured on the far right of the back row
Spann led interrogations of captured Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters at Qala-i Jangi fort near Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan. In this video grab from November 2001 he can be seen singling out a prisoner nicknamed 'the Irishman' by the US team
One was a 'contact wound', indicating a gun had been held to Spann's right temple and a bullet fired through his head, exiting on the left.
The other was 'intermediate range,' meaning that the shot had been fired close enough to the head to leave powder marks; it had entered the right side of his forehead and exited from the back.
The two gunshot wounds caused 'severe, rapidly fatal injury to the brain,' according to the autopsy report.
There were no broken bones or marks to the knuckles to indicate Spann had been able to resist.
His back had been peppered with shrapnel after death, probably from huge explosions from JDAM bombs or fire from AC-130 Spectres as a beleaguered team of American and British troops called in air support to put down the uprising.
The book tells the story of the first U.S. moves against the Taliban after 9/11, with the insertion of a CIA team to coordinate with Afghan warlords of the Northern Alliance in ousting the country's brutal rulers.
It focuses on Team Alpha, which included linguists and tribal experts along with elite warriors.
Spann ends up at Qala-i Jangi fort after hundreds of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters apparently surrendered in November 2001.
It turns out to
