Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  Or so I hoped. I figured with this information and a logical argument, I could overcome the politics. ** **** ***** ***

  “Look, gentlemen, this is not my choice.” I handed Mr. Pink the written instructions. “This is what we’ve been told to do.”

  One minute left, and I needed 30 seconds to make the run to the bird.

  “I’ll take one of you with me. You can come back and make the case to Keller and McChrystal. But the rest of you stay.”

  Mr. White was the man. He gave final instructions to Mr. Pink, and we were off, with me in the lead, running across the field. Hunched over, my ammunition vest slamming against my chest, I fought to catch a breath.

  The options weren’t good. Run or take the chance of getting aired out by a sniper.

  By the time we hit the chopper, the rotors were screaming and the ramp was just barely kissing the ground. The crew wanted to get the hell out of there. Bullet holes spattered the hull, but the fire hadn’t made it past the Kevlar lining within the airframe.

  Even before we threw ourselves on the floor, I heard the whine of the motors increase, and the push on my shoulders as the copter lifted off.

  Next stop was the assault. The 10th Mountain troops were going to set up blocking positions in and around the target village, and the Rangers would do the actual assault. The plan called for the CSAR to land to the south of the village, to stay out of firing range, and for the crew to move in on foot if a fight broke out and there were casualties. I’d stand by. Black Hawks would be overhead to protect us. Seemed simple.

  Like hell.

  2

  THE “DARK SIDE”

  I always wanted to be a spook. “Black ops”—the most top-secret class of clandestine operations—became my specialty for sixteen of my twenty-five years as an intelligence officer. ****** ** **** ** *** ****** * *** **** **** ***** ********* ******** * ***** ** * ********* ** **** ******* * ******* *** ************* ***** ** * ******** *** ** **** * **** ** ***** ***** **** *** ***** *** * *** ***** *********** ************ ** *** *********** * *** **** ********* ***********

  I was part of the “dark side of the force”—the shadowy elements of the Department of Defense and the rest of the U.S. government that function outside the bounds of the normal system. Our job was to protect the country through subterfuge and deception. Hide the truth to get the truth, as we say.

  It is effective, seductive—and dangerous to those who are a part of it. It is easy to exploit our methods and abilities to advance our own personal interests rather than use them for the greater good of the country. I have seen men lie, cheat, and manipulate others simply to advance their careers.

  Looking back on my upbringing, I guess you could say it would have been easy for me to slip over onto that path.

  I never knew my real dad. He left my mom before I was born and, while it may sound strange, I’ve never been curious as to who my dad was or what motivated him to not know me. I’m grateful just to be here.

  After I was born, for the first seven years of my life, I spent a great deal of time with my relatives in Kansas—in a small town named Cherryvale. It was a simple and wonderful existence for a child.

  My mom eventually married an Air Force captain and we moved to Wichita, Kansas. I was not happy about being pulled out of my comfortable life in a sleepy hamlet and I started to rebel.

  I tended to stir up trouble everywhere I went, learning early how to survive and find my own path and—always—push the envelope.

  On Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines in the 1970s, I bought World War II hand grenades—the explosives were mostly hollowed out—and old Japanese helmets from kids outside the fence. The Explosive Ordnance Disposal folks came out and confiscated the grenades. By the age of fourteen, when we were living in Lisbon, Portugal, I was bartending in the marine house for the embassy marine guard. I was drinking as much as I was serving. I went to the American international school, and on Friday evenings we’d go to the Bacaso bar in Cascais to have five shots—each—of Bagaso (Portuguese white lightning) with a beer chaser. Then we’d run two miles on the boardwalk to Estoril to go to a movie there, and whoever didn’t throw up on the way got his movie paid for by the rest of the group.

  Our school administrator called me the “happy-go-lucky rebel,” and I lived up to the name.

  Once, I found a key to the school chemistry lab and asked our chemistry teacher what was the most corrosive acid that could be made. He told me it was a combination of hydrochloric acid and sulfuric acid. So, during gym class when no one was around, I ducked into the chemistry lab and tried to mix them up. They blew up. Highly toxic plumes of smoke came from the beaker. I poured the brew out. It ate through solid concrete. Fortunately, I had the brains to get the hell out of there before it killed me.

  Maybe, if I was really smart, I wouldn’t have tried the experiment the first time. Maybe.

  I actually got the entire high school drunk when I was a sophomore. The school was getting a tour of the Lancer’s wine factory just outside Lisbon, and I talked a teacher into letting us buy wine to “take home to our parents.” We all bought two bottles for $1 each and learned the art of punching corks in. Hank Sanders got so sick he threw up in the headmaster’s car. Every kid’s parents were called except mine. The next day, the headmaster called me in and asked me if I was responsible for what had happened. I was straight about it. “I gotta tell you, sir, I was.” He never called my parents. He appreciated that I didn’t lie, I guess, and I learned that telling the truth isn’t that bad. It’s a lesson I’ve applied many times in my life when something I did ran me into trouble.

  I still have my high school yearbook. He wrote, “You have mucho talento. Use it wisely.” I tried to keep that in mind, but I haven’t always been successful.

  I may have been the happy-go-lucky rebel, but I was painfully shy around girls. Underneath the bravado, I was drinking because I thought it would make me feel more cool with them—but it didn’t. So I drank more. I just didn’t know what to say to women or how to act around them. I guess that’s the reason I remained a virgin until I was twenty.

  I had always wanted to become a spy—I just didn’t know what that meant until I got to high school. In Lisbon, the American community was small, so everyone knew who the intelligence people were. I was periodically debriefed by the embassy attaché about the international students at school—what they were doing and saying. That’s how I really became interested in the spy world. I saw all these games going on. Also, I wanted to help people. This may be the logic of a sixteen-year-old, but I figured a really good intelligence officer could save more lives than a doctor. If you were able to get information that could enable your side to save thousands of people, well, that was better than medicine.

  I started at the bottom. When my family had moved to Ohio during my senior year in high school, I enlisted in the National Guard as a telecommunications center operator—basically a teletype operator for the army. I did my basic training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, where I was a super straight arrow—no drinking, no nothin’. I got several letters of commendation there and worked my way up to assistant platoon sergeant.

  During my first year in the Guard, while I was a freshman at Wright State College, I started working with the recruiters who had recruited me. For every individual I recruited, I got an extra $25 (which in 1981 dollars wasn’t bad), and I managed to land more than one hundred people. I also became public affairs director for the local Guard. Those activities got me inducted into the Ohio Army National Guard Recruiter Hall of Fame. Actually, I’ve never seen the Recruiter Hall of Fame and have no idea if it actually exists, but I have a plaque that says I’m in it.

  Because of my work there, the commander of my unit—Col. Chuck Conner—told me that if I wanted to go into Officer Candidate School, he would give me any job in the command when I got back. I said I wanted the counterintelligence position he had open. He looked at me like I was crazy.

  “I have an aviation slot I’v
e kept open for you. You could become a pilot,” he said.

  I said, no, I appreciated that, but that I wanted to become an intelligence officer. It was a special agent billet and, technically, you had to be twenty-one to do it. I was only going to be nineteen when I graduated, but I got it anyway—Chuck had that much confidence in me.

  While at Wright State, I took time off to get all the training to become an intelligence officer. My basic intelligence officer training was conducted at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where I was the youngest person in my class. I resumed my mantle as the heavy-drinking, happy-go-lucky rebel. On Friday afternoons, three of my friends and I would hop in a car and drive the 100 miles to Tucson, drinking a fifth—or two—of vodka along the way.

  Soon, I was working counterterrorism missions in the United States and Europe while still in the army reserves and having the time of my life. This was the height of the Cold War, and the military’s entire DNA was built around opposing the Russians. I got involved in Return of Forces in Germany (REFORGER), which tested the military’s ability to rapidly move massive amounts of troops and equipment over to Germany in case the Russians invaded. I started doing counterterrorism work on the ground there—what we call low-level source operations. These are cases where you go into a community undercover and set up nets of agents in local villages. I’d go talk to the burgermeister. I’d go into bars and restaurants and recruit. I’d ask people to call me if anything happens. Lotsa free beer there, too.

  I loved that kind of work (not just the free beer). In the United States, I did an operational security survey of West Point in ’85 to see how a terrorist might attack a target, and I was acting special agent in charge of the New York City Resident Office when we thought that Libya would attack the Statue of Liberty during its grand reopening in ’86.

  People were impressed with my efforts. I was invited into a course called Key Personnel Program that looks for talent in the reserves to bring into the army.

  My drinking hadn’t abated, though. I was guzzling booze like a freakin’ fish. I thought my generation would die in a conflagration in Europe when the Russians swept through, so I figured I would be dead by the time I was twenty-nine. I lived life like that; it justified being wild. My motto was “live fast, die young, and wear clean underwear—or none at all.”

  Looking back on it, I don’t know how I survived. I started having blackouts: I would start drinking in one place, wake up in another place, and not know how I got there. The “good” Tony, who was working hard and earning commendations and promotions, was starting to get further and further away from the “bad” Tony, who got drunk and said and did stupid things. I drank everything: pitchers of beer, Jack Daniel’s with Heineken, Foster’s Lager. I went through my white Zinfandel days, drinking a bottle a day. I kept a bottle of vodka in the freezer for times when nothing else was around. So far, at least, it didn’t affect my job. In fact, some of my bosses drank as much as I did.

  As I moved further into intelligence work, I recognized that a higher level of intelligence collection was being a spook—going undercover. There, I would be working to penetrate foreign governments, as well as terrorist groups, drug cartels, and other criminal organizations. I would identify, assess, and recruit foreign intelligence “assets” (the military’s term for foreign informants who work full time for the U.S. government doing espionage work). As well, I would work in intelligence “technical collection”—that is, surveillance technology.

  In all, these are the most protected programs in the U.S. government. It could be dangerous work—on many operations, I would need to hide my identity, my organization’s identity, and many aspects of my background.

  Moving to Washington, D.C., in November ’87, I joined the *** ***** *********** ******** *** ***** ******* ********** ****** ******** I went through training at the “Farm” ** **** *****—the six-month CIA course that turns you into an operative—and finished at the top of my class. While in Richmond, Virginia, doing surveillance training, we convinced the hotel staff that we were the advance team scouting locations for the TV show Miami Vice. One of my classmates was the producer, another came in as the lawyer. I was Don Johnson’s driver’s stunt double. People believed us—often because they wanted to believe us. We were also damned convincing.

  Aside from those shenanigans, mentally and emotionally, it turned out to be the toughest *** ****** I’ve ever spent. Right before you enter, the instructors call you into a room and tell you that if you want to quit now, this is your last chance because, after this, you will never look at people the same way again.

  It was true. They teach you to detect, evaluate, and categorize the darkest components of human nature and manipulate them for the purposes of good—for intelligence collection. They teach you how to not only screw with people’s minds, but also how to manipulate them so they will do things that are clearly dangerous for them and dangerous for their families.

  I gotta tell you, when I got out and began using those skills, I found out they worked. I call them the Dark Arts. A group of us who were there at the time called ourselves the Jedi Knights—we still do. We tried to use the Dark Arts we had learned for the right reasons and vowed not to use our skills against our friends, families, or colleagues. Yeah, it sounds corny, but we recognized the danger of allowing those skills to go unchecked. Yet I know that a lot of other people spent their entire careers engaged in office politics, using their skills to better themselves to get to higher positions.

  I came out with strong ratings, but I was so drunk at graduation I didn’t even know who the graduation speaker was. It turned out to be Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf, who went on to command the coalition forces in the Gulf War of 1991.

  I was young, and I was brash. I was the youngest person in my Officer Candidate School class in 1982, and I was also the youngest in my class at the Farm in 1988.

  After the Farm, I worked for the air force** *********** ***** ***** ** **** ******* ** ********* as a civilian. ** **** ** **** ***** * ***** ** * ***** ***** ******* ** *** * *********** ******* ***** ** ********** *********** ***** **** *** ********* ******* ***** ********** *** *** ****** ****** ** **** **** *** ********** *** **** *********** ** ****** *** ********* ****** *** ********** ** ********

  * **** *** ******** ** ******* ******* *********** ******** ******* *** *** ****** ****** **** *** ********** ******* ******* ******** ** *** ****** ****** ** *** ** ******* **** *** ** ** *********** ****** **** **** ** ***** * *** *** *** ******* ***** ********** *********** ** **** ********

  At the same time, I also served in the U.S. Army Reserve. (While I was a civilian senior intelligence officer, we all had to maintain dual status as uniformed reservists—so we could go into combat if needed.) As one of my army reserve assignments, I went down to Alabama, assigned to a team with the FBI to monitor the Soviets who wanted to defect when they came here during negotiations to eliminate the Pershing missiles as part of the INF treaty in ’89.

  Since I was now an undercover agent, I could not be exposed to foreign nationals. As it happened, ***** *** * ***** **** ***** ******* *** *** ***** ******** *** ****** *** ***** ***** *** *** **** *** ** ** *** ***** **** ** ** ***** staying in the same hotel as the Soviets. There I was, helping out the stunt crew, drinking at the hotel bar, and keeping my ear to the ground, looking for Soviets who wanted to make a run for it.

  Over the years, I did a lot of top-secret operations where I can reveal only a few details—the blackest of black. Counterterrorism, counterdrug, supersecret high-tech penetration of foreign nations. Some of my operations were so clandestine that I was only allowed to brief agency leadership verbally about them. They were too clandestine to be put into a memo or a database. No paper trail.

  **** * *********** **** *** ********* **** * *** **** * *** ***** ** *********** ********** *** *** **** **** ********** **** **** ***** ****** At one point, there were only eleven people in the Department of Defense who knew about it.

  Other operations I handled myself by going und
ercover. ****** ** * ********* ********** ** *** ***** ****** * ********* * ************ **** ******** ******* ** *** **** *** ***** ***** ** **** ** ******** ** ******* ** ********* ******* *** ****** **** *** ****** ***** ** ***** *** ********* ** *** *******.

  In another operation, * ****** ********** ** *** *** ** * ***** ******* ** ********* *** ** ** **** **** * ******* ******** ******* ********* ********* ** ***** *********. Whatever they wanted, we got for them, but we were actually selling them stuff that we could use to spy on them—and it worked. We were able to penetrate a rogue nuclear-power country to the top leadership level.

  All this time, though, I was drinking heavily. There were problems with my behavior, but not enough to revoke my security clearance. In fact, I was promoted. I moved from the air force to the army full time and, in the fall of ’91, * ***** ********** *** ****** *********** ***** ************ ******* *********

  I hit bottom with my drinking in ’92. It’s a long story, but suffice it to say, I was living with one woman and sleeping with a colonel’s secretary. Things got ugly—but they also got me sober, and I’ve stayed sober ever since. I got married and, in 1994, we had a son, Alexander.

  ** *** ** **** ** *** ****** *********** ****** ******* ***** in ’95 when the Defense Intelligence Agency took over all clandestine human intelligence-collection assignments from the General Defense Intelligence Program. That resulted in the transfer of thousands of intelligence civilian billets to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)—including the army human intelligence program that I headed.

  It was a “hostile takeover,” as it was described at the time, and I was one of the ones who was pretty vocal about it being a bad idea. The DIA is at heart an analytical organization, and its intellectual/academia-rooted culture was never comfortable with the set of skills unique to operational intelligence on the battlefield. Those skills were radically different from those required to either count Soviet missiles or for military attachés to function in their duties in embassies in urban settings under peacetime conditions. Those of us who came in as part of the takeover were not liked. We were seen as dangerous men—knuckle draggers who shouldn’t be in the intellectual mecca that was the DIA.