Field Notes: Finding the Signal in the Noise
When I first deployed to Afghanistan I was assigned to a conventional unit. Being the junior officer meant I got the glamorous job of running the planning room, and the snack fridge. I spent most of my time buried in maps and PowerPoints, planning, briefing, and then re-planning when something inevitably changed. The real missions went to the senior guys.
Every now and then somebody would throw me a bone and let me fly a ring route, six or eight hours of moving people and gear from Kandahar to Herat to Mazar-i-Sharif and back. It was long, repetitive, and not exactly exciting, but at least I was flying something other than a desk.
Then a call came down. Another unit needed extra planners, and my commander was sure I was the guy for it. I was told to pack a bag. No details on where or for how long. A few weeks, maybe a few months.
I ended up on a short flight from Kandahar Airfield in the back of an old Russian Mi-17 helicopter. We landed at a compound, Gecko, on the edge of the city that I later learned had once belonged to Mullah Omar, one of the founders of the Taliban. The walls were crumbling, the place had clearly seen its share of battles, but now it was home to a task force run by the Agency and supported by Delta. The food was somehow the best I had eaten in country, and the original gardener was still there, keeping a small oasis alive inside the walls.
My First Look at Signals Intelligence
Up until then “intelligence” to me meant a few words on a slide during a briefing, usually cut and paste from the last one. At this compound though it meant sitting in front of a wall of raw feeds. Cell phone intercepts, handheld radio chatter, internet messages, WhatsApp traffic. Add in UAV video, satellite imagery, and reports from human sources on the ground and it felt like standing in the middle of a storm.
Most of it looked like gibberish at first. Static, half-sentences, fragments in dialects I didn’t understand. It was like trying to listen to every radio station in the country at once while someone kept twisting the dial.
When the Static Became Clear
One night we were pouring over handheld radio intercepts. At first it felt like nonsense, just call signs and coordinates. But then a phrase kept repeating. It stood out because it did not match the usual background chatter.
We pulled UAV footage that showed trucks forming up outside a village. Then another intercept came in, this time from a cell phone pinging in the same area. Piece by piece it started to line up. The noise turned into something real. They were staging an attack.
Because of that, forces were shifted, air support was moved, and the plan was disrupted before it became something worse.
For me that was the first time I felt clarity in the middle of chaos. You do not need to know everything. You just need to know how to separate what matters from what does not.
Why It Still Matters
That experience shaped how I think about investigations today. In this line of work you gather mountains of information: surveillance footage, financial records, background checks, hours of social media. Ninety percent of it is clutter. But hidden in that clutter is always the piece that matters.
In Afghanistan that difference could mean whether your friends make it back or not. Now it might mean a parent understanding who is really watching their kids, or a business owner finally seeing where the money has been going. The stakes are different, but the lesson is the same. Find the signal in the noise.
