Knocking on Osama's Cave Door

In Berntsen's view, the Afghan militia that Franks relied on was "unreliable" and "cobbled together at the last minute" -- certainly not the army to trust with nabbing the man who had ordered the 9/11 attacks. "I'd made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al-Qaeda in Tora Bora," he writes. But his superiors at Langley told him it wasn't the CIA's call to make.

This account seems to jibe with Sen. John Kerry's charge during the 2004 campaign that President Bush had wrongly "outsourced" the job of getting bin Laden to Afghan warlords. Franks, in a New York Times op-ed piece in October 2004, defended Bush, saying: "I can tell you that the senator's understanding of events doesn't square with reality. . . . We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001."

Berntsen writes that Franks "was either badly misinformed by his own people or blinded by the fog of war," but his critique stops there.

"I am a Republican," he says, staunchly supporting the president and his approach to the war on terrorism. "It doesn't help to be beating up on George Bush. I could be saying savage things about a lot of people, but it doesn't help. I don't want to diminish the president's ability to fight this war."

Berntsen prefers to call the Afghan campaign a "flawed masterpiece" -- the flaw being that bin Laden escaped.

Learning to Fly Straight

The son of an aerospace engineer, Berntsen misspent his youth in the teenage wastelands of Long Island in the mid-1970s. "Dope wasn't my thing," he writes, "but I drank beer by the six-pack from the age of thirteen." He graduated one from the bottom of his high school class of 300 -- a "functional illiterate with a 65.6 grade point average."

He straightened himself up by joining the Air Force, where he was a firefighter for four years. Crises, explosions, people dying around him: "I learned to function under high levels of stress. I actually kind of like it."

He parachuted out of airplanes for sport. He was studying political science and Russian at the University of New Mexico when the CIA recruited him.

The agency's Middle Eastern division was in mourning when he arrived in 1983. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists had blown up the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 17 Americans, several CIA employees among them. "Almost the entire station was wiped out," Berntsen says.

Station chief William Buckley -- whom Berntsen had gotten to know in Washington -- was later kidnapped, tortured and killed by a group of Hezbollah jihadists. "There was no way I couldn't volunteer to go to the Middle East," he says. "I felt a personal obligation. I figured, if I don't step up, who's gonna do it?"

He eventually would learn Farsi, head operations against Hezbollah and spend three years with the Iran unit in Europe, "deployed all over the world against assassins," he says.

He also served in Sri Lanka, Nepal, the Balkans and South America. He won't discuss the details but says, "Every time there was a difficult job to do, I got sent." Berntsen generically describes being in the middle of gun battles and directing combat and air strikes, but says he, personally, never had to kill anyone.