CIA operative deaths rise in covert Afghan war
Agency’s losses reflect shift from traditional espionage to front lines
On a sweltering day earlier 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 Islamic State militants near Jalalabad in Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan.
There had been scant mention of Hoke’s death in local news reports in Leesburg, Va., his home, and nothing at all about Delemarre in news accounts in the Florida Panhandle, where his family lives. Their deaths in October were never acknowledged by the CIA, beyond two memorial stars chiseled in a marble wall at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Va.
Today there are at least 18 stars 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 Hoke, 42, and 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.
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. Greg Vogle, an agency operative who took Karzai into Afghanistan, went on to run the paramilitary division and became the top spy at the CIA.
The first American killed in the country, Johnny Micheal Spann, was a CIA officer assigned to the Special Activities Division. He died in November 2001 during a prison uprising.
In the years since, paramilitary officers from the Special Activities Division have trained and advised a small army of Afghan militias known as counterterrorism pursuit teams. The militias took on greater importance under President Barack Obama, who embraced covert operations because of their small footprint and deniability.
The militias, and their CIA handlers, were at times accused by Afghan officials and others of acting as a law unto themselves, running roughshod over civilians and killing innocents. Raids by CIA paramilitary officers and militia fighters also resulted in airstrikes that killed Afghan civilians. In 2009, in the worst loss for the agency in Afghanistan, a suicide bomber detonated an explosives vest and killed seven CIA employees at a forward operating base on the Pakistan border.
On Oct. 21, Hoke and Delemarre were shot in an assault on an Islamic State compound in Jalalabad, where the militant group has made inroads in recent years.
Details are sparse. Friends say that as Hoke made his way around a wall, a militant shot him. Hoke radioed that he was down, Delemarre heard his friend’s voice, left his position of safety and ran to Hoke’s aid, but Hoke soon died. Delemarre was shot as he tried to help and was evacuated to Germany, where he died shortly after his wife arrived.
The two were awarded stars at the CIA in May, when the agency held its annual memorial for officers who died in the line of duty. A third CIA paramilitary officer, George A. Whitney, 38, who was killed in December in the Jalalabad area, also received a star.
Other CIA operatives killed in Afghanistan since 2001 include Dario Lorenzetti, a West Point graduate and former Ranger, who died in 2012 after a member of the Afghan intelligence service detonated a suicide vest in an insider attack; Jay Henigan, 61, a contractor and plumber who was gunned down in Kabul in 2011 during an attack; a pair of paramilitary officers killed in 2003 while tracking terrorists in southeastern Afghanistan; and Nathan Ross Chapman, a Green Beret who was detailed to a CIA paramilitary team in Afghanistan when he was shot to death hunting al-Qaida in January 2002.
The ranks of CIA operatives are not easily replaced, said Stiles, the former counterterrorism analyst.
“That’s going to be one of the challenges for the government,” he said. “How do we maintain the level of experience and expertise in a war that is going to last for another 20 or 30 years or longer?”
At the Arlington funeral of Hoke and Delemarre on July 14 — long delays before interment are common — heavily muscled men with beards and sunglasses sweated through their suit jackets as a Navy honor guard played taps and performed a rifle salute. Vogle, the CIA operative who took Karzai into Afghanistan, stood among the mourners.
A program from the service shows a smiling Hoke in a tuxedo and a grinning Delemarre on the beach. On the back of the program is a quote from Adm. Chester W. Nimitz: “They fought together as brothers in arms; they died together and now they sleep side by side.”