Gary C Schroen

Gary C. Schroen, a veteran C.I.A. operative who, just weeks after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, led the first team of agents into Afghanistan to prepare for an invasion and begin the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, died at his home in Alexandria, Va., on Aug. 1 2022, one day after an American missile killed one of the last of those men, Ayman al-Zawahri. He was 80. His wife, Anne McFadden, said the cause was complications of a fall. Mr. Schroen spent more than 30 years with the C.I.A. He was 11 days into the agency’s mandatory three-month retirement transition program when terrorists under bin Laden’s command attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Cofer Black, the director of the agency’s counterterrorist center asked him to take a small team of C.I.A. officers into Afghanistan. They got to Afghanistan on Sept. 26, 2001 carrying laptops, satellite phones, instant coffee and $3 million in cash. Mr. Schroen joined the military after high school and served with the Army Security Agency, an intelligence unit, for three years. He later attended Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in the St. Louis suburbs, where he studied English, and where the C.I.A. first approached him. He graduated in 1968 and became a case officer a year later. He spent his entire career in the Directorate of Operations, shuffling between assignments in the Middle East and at C.I.A. headquarters in Virginia, By the late 1980s, Mr. Schroen had risen to the top ranks of the agency’s Middle East operations. He served as station chief for Kabul, though for security reasons he had to work out of Pakistan. Mr. Schroen returned to the region in the mid-1990s as the station chief in Islamabad. Mr. Schroen came back to Washington in 1999 to become the deputy chief for the Near East in the Directorate of Operations. Gary Charles Schroen was born on Nov. 6, 1941, in East St. Louis, Illinois. Mr. Schroen was married and divorced twice before marrying Ms. McFadden in 2009. In addition to her, he is survived by his daughters, Kate Cowell and Jennifer Schroen. His son, Christopher, died in 2017. His sister, Donna Naylor, died in 2020.