[Washington Examiner] The last time Alison Spann saw her father, she was 9 years old. "My family drove to CIA," she recalls. "I was the only one who cried. The last memory I have of my dad is him walking away from us in the dark with all his bags."
That was shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Johnny "Mike" Spann was 32, a CIA paramilitary officer and former Marine who knew he was bound for northern Afghanistan and might never return. Less than two months later ‐ and moments after he had been questioning a bedraggled Taliban detainee named John Walker Lindh ‐ he was killed by a mob of prisoners attempting to escape from the remote fortress of Qala-i-Jangi.
In a cruel twist of fate, Alison Spann's mother died of cancer a month later. Suddenly, the young girl became the first orphan of what was already known as the War on Terror.
Now 27, Alison Spann is a television reporter working in Biloxi, Mississippi. After her father was killed, Lindh, now 38, was recaptured and it was discovered he was an American who had grown up in California, converted to Islam at age 16, and at 20, traveled to Afghanistan, joining the Taliban before 9/11 and attending al Qaeda training camps. After being captured by Northern Alliance fighters on Nov. 25, 2001, he was taken to Qala-i-Jangi. 
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