First Casualty

An award-winning journalist reveals the dramatic true story of the CIA’s Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11.

“Masterful, complex, and heartfelt, from the deeply personal to the critically strategic. Captures many lessons on many levels.” —Ambassador Hank Crumpton, former senior CIA officer

• "Run, don’t walk to pick this up. Toby Harnden has done a masterful job...What a powerful read." 
  James Gagliano, former senior FBI officer
• "This is Afghanistan's Black Hawk Down...Harnden’s account is both well-informed and panoramic." 
  Daily Telegraph
• "The hard-to-imagine drama, in the hands of another narrator, could easily turn overwrought; in this book, it is not. First Casualty is rife with heroic moments.  But it is the variety of the human reactions in those moments, and afterward, that separates this book from others. Fear, combat fatigue, and sadness appear often in the narrative...This book is compelling, sometimes disturbing, but in a necessary way." 
  Philip Mudd, former senior CIA officer, The Cipher Brief
• "Harnden...secured a coup by persuading the CIA to give him access...a terrific action narrative"
  Max Hastings, Sunday Times of London
• “First Casualty reads like a Tom Clancy thriller, yet every word is true, and painstakingly researched. This is modern warfare close-up and raw: the pity, the heroism, the cruelty, and very occasionally some moments of glory too, as human beings are pushed to their furthest limits of endurance, and beyond. Harnden tells the extraordinary story of the battle of Qala-i-Jangi with verve, intelligence, acute analysis and flashes of ironic wit. It would make a terrific movie.”
  Andrew Roberts, author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny
• "Vividly describes the rollicking adventures Langley’s men enjoyed amid the blood, dust and tribesmen." 
  Bloomberg News
• "An absolutely gripping read."
  Brad Thor, thriller writer
• "This is an amazing book - highly recommended." 
  Marc Ambinder
• "Harnden’s scoop is to have convinced the CIA to give him access to its key men from those early days.” 
  The Spectator
• "First Casualty is the closest most readers will come to really knowing a spy; Harnden intimately portrays who these men were and are as America attempts to extract itself from its longest war."
  James Pekoll, Booklist
• "A riveting history of the first months of the war in Afghanistan...Harnden skillfully interweaves dramatic action sequences with the backstories of the book’s central figures, and briskly highlights the failures of U.S. policy in Afghanistan. Readers will be swept up in this little-known chapter of America’s 'forever war.'” 
  Publishers Weekly