Early May 2011, in a dramatic late-night appearance at the White House, President Obama declared that "justice has been done" as he announced that Osama bin Laden was dead. After more than a decade of military operations across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Al Qaida leader who orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks was finally killed in a firefight with U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan. Although this daring raid marked the end of the longest strategic manhunt in American history, bin Laden was not the first individual targeted as the objective of a military campaign. From Geronimo to Pancho Villa, to Manuel Noriega, to Saddam Hussein, the United States has deployed military forces to kill or capture a single person nearly a dozen times since 1885. Part military history, part action thriller, and part strategic policy analysis, Wanted Dead or Alive chronicles the extraordinary efforts of the military and intelligence agencies to bring America's enemies to justice.
Early May 2011, in a dramatic late-night appearance at the White House, President Obama declared that "justice has been done" as he announced that Osama bin Laden was dead. After more than a decade of military operations across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Al Qaida leader who orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks was finally killed in a firefight with U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan. Although this daring raid marked the end of the longest strategic manhunt in American history, bin Laden was not the first individual targeted as the objective of a military campaign. From Geronimo to Pancho Villa, to Manuel Noriega, to Saddam Hussein, the United States has deployed military forces to kill or capture a single person nearly a dozen times since 1885. Part military history, part action thriller, and part strategic policy analysis, Wanted Dead or Alive chronicles the extraordinary efforts of the military and intelligence agencies to bring America's enemies to justice.
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Overview
Early May 2011, in a dramatic late-night appearance at the White House, President Obama declared that "justice has been done" as he announced that Osama bin Laden was dead. After more than a decade of military operations across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Al Qaida leader who orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks was finally killed in a firefight with U.S. Navy SEALs in Pakistan. Although this daring raid marked the end of the longest strategic manhunt in American history, bin Laden was not the first individual targeted as the objective of a military campaign. From Geronimo to Pancho Villa, to Manuel Noriega, to Saddam Hussein, the United States has deployed military forces to kill or capture a single person nearly a dozen times since 1885. Part military history, part action thriller, and part strategic policy analysis, Wanted Dead or Alive chronicles the extraordinary efforts of the military and intelligence agencies to bring America's enemies to justice.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780230338913 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 05/21/2025 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 289 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Benjamin Runkle is a former paratrooper and presidential speechwriter with a Harvard PhD and a Bronze Star from Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has worked in the Department of Defense and the National Security Council, and is currently a Professional Staff Member on the House Armed Services Committee. He lives in Virginia.
Read an Excerpt
Wanted Dead Or Alive
Manhunts from Geronimo to Bin Laden
By Benjamin Runkle
Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © 2011 Benjamin RunkleAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-230-33891-3
CHAPTER 1
THE GERONIMO CAMPAIGN
The American Southwest, in the words of an army officer stationed there in the nineteenth century, is "a region in which not only purgatory and hell, but heaven likewise, had combined to produce a bewildering kaleidoscope of all that is wonderful, weird, terrible, and awe-inspiring, with not a little that was beautiful and romantic."
The sun had barely risen over this Dantesque landscape on May 15, 1885, when Lieutenant Britton Davis realized his day would be closer to the inferno than to paradise.
As he stepped out of his tent at Turkey Creek on the San Carlos Reservation, home to five thousand Apache Indians, the dawn illuminated the stern faces of all the major Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apache chieftains: Naiche—son of the legendary Cochise—Mangus, Chihuahua, Loco, and the aged Nana. Most ominously, Davis saw Geronimo, whom he knew as "a thoroughly vicious, intractable, and treacherous man" whose "word, no matter how earnestly pledged, was worthless." Geronimo stood only five foot eight but was still powerfully built at age sixty-one, and his countenance bespoke "a look of unspeakable savagery, or fierceness." Thirty warriors, all armed, stood behind the chiefs. Worse, not a single woman or child was in sight, "a sure sign of something serious in the air."
They said they wanted to talk. Davis sent for his interpreter, then invited the leaders into his tent. Once inside, the chiefs squatted in a semicircle. Loco began to speak, but he was interrupted by a visibly agitated Chihuahua.
We are not children, Chihuahua said. When the Apaches had agreed to return to the reservation after the last outbreak in 1883, he argued: We agreed on a peace with Americans, Mexicans, and other Indian tribes. We said nothing about conduct among ourselves.
The Apaches had many reasons to be discontented with their life at San Carlos. No Apaches were more independent or warlike than the Chiricahuas and Warm Springs under Davis's supervision. While some Apaches made great strides in their new life as farmers, none of the Chiricahua "were making anything more than a bluff at farming," letting their women tend the fields while the warriors scoffed at performing such unmanly tasks. San Carlos itself was a perpetually hot and dry, gravelly flat between the Gila and San Carlos rivers that earned the appellation of "Hell's Forty Acres" from the officers who served there. In addition to facing the slow encroachment upon their lands by miners and farmers, the Apaches were subjected to an extraordinary level of corruption at the hands of the civilian Indian agents assigned to San Carlos through patronage politics. Davis noted that the weekly ration of flour "would hardly suffice for one day," and the beef cows issued to the Indians were little more than walking skeletons.
On this day, however, Chihuahua was referring to the regulations regarding the treatment of women and the consumption of tizwin (a fermented corn mash). The Apaches claimed the right of a husband to beat his wife as an ancient and accepted tribal custom, as well as the right of a husband to cut off the nose of an adulterous squaw, often by biting it off. Among the Indians of the reservation, there were "about a score of women so disfigured," and some of the beatings, typically with a heavy stick, were too brutal for the US Army officers in charge of the reservation to ignore. Consequently, General Crook had prohibited these practices.
Additionally, the brewing and drinking of tizwin was banned due to the Apaches' proclivity for violence when intoxicated. One such drinking spree the previous year had led to a failed ambush of Lieutenant Davis. The leader of the assassination plot, the warrior-chief Kaytennae, was subsequently arrested, exiled, and imprisoned in Alcatraz.
Davis had served in the Arizona Territory for seven years and understood his wards as well as any American officer. He tried to placate the chiefs, but they responded with jeers and veiled threats. Chihuahua taunted Davis through the interpreter: "Tell Fat Boy that I and all the other chiefs and their men have been drinking tizwin the night before and now we want to know what he is going to do about it—whether or not he is going to put us all in jail." He added that he did not think the soldiers had a jail big enough to hold all the Indians who violated the prohibition.
Davis had no option but to play for time. He explained that a problem this serious must be submitted to General Crook for a decision and that he would telegram Crook and notify them as soon as he received a reply. Davis made sure they understood an answer might take several days before riding to Fort Apache to send the message.
The telegram from Fort Apache to Crook's headquarters at Fort Bowie had to pass through civilian hands. In order to avoid leaks, messages were kept simple and cryptic. Moreover, before reaching the general, Davis's telegram also had to pass through Captain Francis E. Pierce. Pierce had been in Arizona for only two months and so decided to wake the veteran Chief of Scouts Al Sieber for advice. Unfortunately, Sieber was sleeping off his own whiskey drunk. Through bleary eyes and an addled mind, he read the telegram.
"It's nothing but a tizwin drink," Sieber muttered. "Don't pay any attention to it. Davis will handle it."
As Sieber returned to sleeping off his hangover, Pierce filed away the seemingly inconsequential note.
The next two days went by without word from Crook. The Apaches grew increasingly apprehensive, assuming the worst as each hour passed.
On Sunday, May 17, Lieutenant Davis was umpiring a baseball game at Fort Apache while awaiting Crook's response. At about four PM, his interpreter and a scout interrupted to report that Geronimo and an unknown number of Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches had fled the reservation in the middle of the night. Davis again attempted to contact Crook but was unable to get a message through. It was not until noon the next day that a break in the line was discovered—the fleeing Apaches had cut the line where it passed through the foliage of a tree and cleverly tied the ends tautly together with a leather thong to hide the break.
Once higher headquarters was informed of the Apaches' flight, Davis began preparing his scouts for the pursuit. Speed was essential, for if Geronimo and his band made it to the Mexican frontier, he would be nearly impossible to corner. They left with a detachment of regular troops from Fort Apache in the afternoon, but as daylight faded and dusk transformed the desert sky into darkness, the advance slowed to a crawl lest they stumble into an ambush while following an uncertain trail.
They marched through the night. At dawn the detachment reached a ridge above the valley of Eagle Creek. The scouts pointed to the opposite side of the valley, and looking through their field glasses, Davis and the other officers could see the dust raised by the fugitives' ponies ascending a ridge some fifteen to twenty miles ahead.
Geronimo had escaped.
Realizing that further pursuit was useless, Lieutenant Davis turned back. Another long campaign in Mexico lay ahead, and he needed to wire General Crook for instructions.
* * *
AS NEWS SPREAD THAT 120 APACHES under Geronimo were on the loose, "something like mass hysteria gripped the citizens of Arizona and New Mexico." This reaction was not wholly irrational. As one American officer who was sympathetic to the Indians noted, "Contact with others meant war, for war was [the Apaches'] business." The traditional Apache economy was partially dependent upon the periodic raid of settlements, for which they were trained with Spartan-like severity from childhood. The first major Apache rebellion against the settlement of the Southwest in 1870 prompted as hardened a soldier as General William Tecumseh Sherman to recommend abandoning Arizona altogether. In the 1880 outbreak, warriors led by Victorio—seldom more than seventy-five strong—had "fairly deluged New Mexico and Chihuahua [province] with blood," killing more than one thousand Americans and Mexicans over a fourteen-month period, all while being unsuccessfully pursued by three American cavalry regiments, two infantry regiments, a substantial number of Mexican troops, and a contingent of Texas Rangers.
That Geronimo was leading this outbreak only heightened the sense of fear in the Southwest. Geronimo was neither a chief nor subchief, and until the 1880s had been overshadowed by more prominent Apache leaders such as Cochise, Mangus Colorado, and Victorio. However, he had risen to the leadership of a significant faction of warriors through his courage, determination, and skill as a war captain, as well as his mysterious talent as a medicine man. Geronimo's previous outbreaks in 1876 and 1881 established his reputation for brutal savagery. During the 1881 breakout, his biographer Angie Debo notes, "the fugitives killed everyone they encountered" en route to the Mexican border while evading a posse that included Wyatt Earp and his brothers. Another historian notes that Geronimo's path in April 1882 "seems to have been strewn in blood." One officer recorded that "the greatest terror prevailed in Chihuahua at the mere mention of the name 'Hieronymo,' whom the peasantry believed to be the devil sent to punish them for their sins."
The citizenry's panic appeared justified by the renegades' actions as they fled to the border in May 1885. Before reaching Mexico, they killed at least seventeen settlers and stole about 150 horses. Near Silver City, New Mexico, shocked civilians came upon the carnage of a raid they attributed to Geronimo in which the Apaches had killed a rancher, his wife, and their three-year-old daughter. A five-year-old girl was found still alive but hanging from a meat hook that entered the back of her head. She died a few hours later.
* * *
IF NO INDIAN TERRIFIED AMERICANS and Mexicans more than Geronimo, no American inspired greater respect in the Apaches than General George Crook. Although his visage was "manly and strong," Crook was not physically imposing. He stood just over six feet tall, with a stocky, powerful frame. His blue-gray eyes were framed by his light brown hair and beard, the latter of which appeared to part in the middle due to his enormous, bushy sideburns. In uniform, Crook "looked the soldier to the very core," but rarely wore one when in the field, disdaining the dash and ostentation that garnered many of his military peers more public attention. Moreover, "there was no private soldier, no packer, no teamster, who could 'down the ole man' in any work, or outlast him on a march or a climb over the rugged peaks of Arizona; they knew that, and they also knew that in the hour of danger Crook would be found on the skirmish line, and not in the telegraph offices."
Crook was Commander of the Department of Arizona from 1871 to 1875, and had established himself as arguably the army's most brilliant Indian fighter. He planned and led the devastating Tonto Basin campaign against the Apaches in 1872–73, which successfully ended the first major round of the Apache Wars. In the face of another catastrophic Apache outbreak, Crook was returned to command of the department in September 1882. Again, he led an expedition into the previously unassailable Apache fortress in the Sierra Madres Mountains and was able to harry the Apaches into surrender, returning more than four hundred Chiricahua men, women, and children to the San Carlos reservation.
* * *
"I AM FIRMLY CONVINCED," Crook would later write, "that, had I known of the occurrences reported in Lieutenant Davis's telegram of May 15, 1885, which I did not see until months afterwards, the outbreak of Mangus and Geronimo a few days later would not have occurred." Having missed the chance to deter the outbreak, Crook set in motion a three-tier strategy to track down Geronimo. First, acting under the provisions of the July 1882 agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed the troops of one country to cross into the other "if in close pursuit of a band of savage Indians," he deployed two columns south of the border. The first, a combined force of ninety-two scouts and Troop A of the Sixth Cavalry under Captain Emmet Crawford, was to go down the western flank of the Sierra Madres in Sonora province. This force would be paralleled on the eastern flank in Chihuahua by a troop of the Fourth Cavalry under Major Wirt Davis. While these commanders were flushing out the hostiles, another hundred scouts were sent eastward to patrol the Mogollon and Black Mountains, after which they were to report to Fort Apache.
Once it was clear there were no Chiricahuas lagging behind north of the border, Crook intended to seal the border to catch any renegades trying to return to the United States. Altogether, roughly three thousand soldiers, three-quarters of them cavalry, patrolled the border region. To monitor the campaign, Crook moved his own headquarters forward to Fort Bowie in strategic Apache Pass at the northern end of the Chiricahua Mountains.
Although Crook's strategy centered on the pursuit of the renegades into their sanctuaries in Mexico, the campaign's initial clashes occurred north of the border. As two companies of the Fourth Cavalry approached the settlements near the San Francisco River and the New Mexico border, they found signs that Geronimo had begun killing settlers. On May 22, the scouts found a trail believed to be Geronimo's and followed it twenty-five miles to Devil's River, where they were ambushed. A swift counterattack into the hail of fire from the steep canyon walls, led by First Lieutenants Charles B. Gatewood and James Parker, quickly dispersed the Apaches. Gatewood and Parker captured the enemy position at the crest of the canyon, and five hundred yards farther they took the renegades' now-abandoned camp. Seventeen fires were still either burning or filled with live or hot coals, and the hostiles left behind horses, various items of clothing and equipment, and a lot of beef. These possessions were gained at the cost of two soldiers and an Indian scout wounded.
Less than a month later, on June 8, another company of the Fourth Cavalry was camped in Guadalupe Canyon when a courier arrived with news that the Apaches were heading in the direction of Cloverdale and Skeleton Canyon, and with instructions to proceed at once to intercept them. As the nine-man detail left behind to guard the camp and supply train gathered for lunch, they "were surprised by a thundering volley from the hills nearby." One sergeant was immediately felled by a bullet in his forehead as he ate his biscuit and bacon. Four more soldiers were killed, their bodies desecrated, and the Apaches made off with the camp stores the soldiers were guarding.
On June 11, Crook ordered Crawford's command to enter Mexico, to be followed a month later by Major Davis's expedition. The two detachments endured extreme conditions as they combed the Sierra Madres for the hostile Apaches. One officer recalled: "The command had been subject to every possible hardship ... excessive heat, very little water, poor rations, bacon made rancid by unusual heat, and at night were pestered not only by mosquitos [sic], but by ants, large and small, with an occasional centipede," some up to eight inches long. Major Davis's surgeon recorded 128 degrees in the shade one afternoon.
In addition to the blazing heat, it rained almost constantly throughout July and into August. This hindered the campaign by making travel an ordeal, impeding the mobility of the US forces, making "the country through which we passed ... so soft that our mules with even their light loads sank to their knees in mud, and riding at times was out of the question." It also made Geronimo's band almost impossible to track, as the rain obliterated their trail almost as soon as they made it.
Despite struggling through these conditions, Crawford's and Wirt Davis's commands managed to score some limited successes. At about nine AM on June 23, Crawford's scouts found Chihuahua's camp in the Bavispe Mountains northeast of Opunto. The leader of his scouts deemed it impossible to surround the camp without being seen, thus making it impossible to capture any of the hostiles. Once the scouts moved into the best position possible, they opened fire. Again, rather than hold their position to defend their supplies, the renegades fled, escaping with their women and children through several deep canyons that joined near the camp. The scouts pursued them as quickly as the rough terrain would allow, and for several miles a running battle continued between the scouts and the fleeing braves. Although all eight warriors of the hostile band escaped—along with four boys and three women—Crawford's scouts returned to camp with fifteen women and children captured, including Chihuahua's entire family.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Wanted Dead Or Alive by Benjamin Runkle. Copyright © 2011 Benjamin Runkle. Excerpted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments,INTRODUCTION When the Man Is the Mission,
CHAPTER ONE The Geronimo Campaign,
CHAPTER TWO The Capture of Emilio Aguinaldo,
CHAPTER THREE Pancho Villa and the Punitive Expedition, 1916–1917,
CHAPTER FOUR The Pope, Heavy Metal, and the Voodoo Child: The Hunt for Manuel Noriega,
CHAPTER FIVE The Warlord's Revenge: Task Force Ranger and the Search for Mohammed Farah Aideed,
CHAPTER SIX The Hunt for Osama bin Laden, Part I,
CHAPTER SEVEN Strategic Manhunts in Mesopotamia: Saddam Hussein and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,
CHAPTER EIGHT The Hunt for Osama bin Laden, Part II: Tora Bora Reconsidered, Abbottabad, and Manhunting Lessons Learned,
CONCLUSION Beyond bin Laden: The Future of Strategic Manhunts,
Notes,
Index,