Word: spann
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TIME's Alex Perry was the only journalist at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress when Taliban prisoners staged a bloody uprising. He was the first to report the initial American casualty of the war, CIA officer Johnny Micheal Spann, and filed riveting daily updates of the situation to TIME.com throughout the three-day affair...
...easy to sort out the most wanted from the thousands of POWs in Northern Alliance hands. Interrogating prisoners can be deadly dangerous; it was in just such circumstances that CIA agent Johnny Micheal Spann died two Sundays ago. "They are people who don't walk up and volunteer their names and identification numbers with a sample of DNA," noted Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "They blend into the other prisoners. It's a messy business...
...strangest culture clash of the war in Afghanistan took place on a bright Sunday morning in late November. In the Qala-i-Jangi prison fortress, a few miles west of Mazar-i-Sharif, CIA agent Johnny ("Mike") Spann was sorting through 300 surrendered Taliban soldiers in an attempt to determine which of them were al-Qaeda members. Dressed in blue jeans, with an AK-47 strapped across the back of his black sweater, Spann passed through several rows of Taliban before crouching in front of a prisoner who had been separated from the rest, a mass of tangled hair...
...Walker didn't answer. In a bit of CIA showmanship, Spann and his partner, known only as Dave, held a conversation within obvious hearing distance of Walker. "I explained to him what the deal is," Spann told Dave. Dave played the bad cop: "He needs to decide if he wants to live or die. If he wants to die, he's just going to die here. He can die here if he wants. He can f_____g die here. Or he's going to be f_____g spending the rest of his f_____g short life in prison...
...hours later, Spann became the first American casualty in Afghanistan, when dozens of surrendered Taliban soldiers overwhelmed their guards and staged a revolt. During the uprising, John Walker escaped, delaying the world's discovery of an American Taliban, but only temporarily. After a week spent starving in a basement deep below the prison, Walker and 85 comrades were flushed out when their dungeon was flooded with ice-cold water. Spann was gone, but his questions for John Walker remained: Who brought you here? How did you get here...