CIA deaths rise in secret Afghan war
The New York Times
WASHINGTON — On a sweltering day this summer, operatives with the Central Intelligence Agency gathered at Arlington National Cemetery to bury two of their own. Brian Ray Hoke and Nathaniel Patrick Delemarre, elite gunslingers who worked for the CIA’s paramilitary force, were laid to rest after a firefight with the Islamic State group near Jalalabad in Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan.
There had been scant mention of Mr. Hoke’s death in local news reports in Leesburg, Va., his home, and nothing at all about Mr. Delemarre in news accounts in the Florida Panhandle, where his family lives. Their deaths in October 2016 were never acknowledged by the CIA, beyond two memorial stars chiseled in a marble wall at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va.
Today at least 18 stars are on that wall representing the number of CIA personnel killed in Afghanistan — a tally that has not been previously reported and one that rivals the number of CIA operatives killed in the wars in Vietnam and Laos nearly a half century ago.
The deaths are a reflection of the heavy price the agency has paid in a secret, nearly 16-year-old war, where thousands of CIA operatives have served since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The deaths of Mr. Hoke, 42, and Mr. Delemarre, 47, show how the CIA continues to move from traditional espionage to the front lines and underscore the pressure the agency faces now that President Donald Trump has pledged to keep the United States in Afghanistan with no end in sight.
“We are going to be fighting this war for a very long time,” said Ken Stiles, a former CIA counterterr o r i s m analyst who worked closely with paramilitary officers in Afghanistan and who lost three friends in the war.
Since 2001, as thousands of CIA officers and contractors have cycled in and out of Afghanistan targeting terrorists and running sources, operatives from the Special Activities Division have been part of some of the most dangerous missions. Overall, the division numbers in the low hundreds and also operates in Somalia, Iraq, the Philippines and other areas of conflict.
CIA paramilitary officers from the division were the first Americans in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, and they later spirited Hamid Karzai, the future president, into the country.