Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  As I lugged the bags through Manas, I glanced down at my luggage tags, where I’d scrawled ***** ***** ******** *** ** *********** ********* *********** *** ******* The blue ink was partially smeared.

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

  I picked up the name ******* from a **** ***** movie, *** ***** ** *** ***** ***** ****** ******** ******** * ********** ****** ******** who molds his company into a combat-ready fighting machine. ** * ******* ** ******* ** ***** *** ******* * *** ******** *** ********** ***** ***** ** *** ***** ******* ****** *** *** ** *** *** ******* ***** ******* ******** ** ** *** ********* ** *** ***** *** *** ***** ************** ***** *** **** ***** ****** ** ***** **** **** ******** ******* * *** **** ****** ** ***** ** ** **** ** ********* ****** **** ****** **** **** **** ***** *****

  * *** ** ******* * *** **** *** ***** ******* ******** *** *** *** **** *** ** ***** * *** ***** ** ** *** *** ******* ******* ** *** **** **** ****** **** ****** *********** *** **** ** ** **** ** ******** **** **** ****** **** **** ***** ********* ** ******* **** ** **** ********* the unique chronicle, mostly in your head, which you maintain. Then you feel like Eleanor Rigby in that Beatles’s song who keeps “her face in a jar by the door.” We are taught that it’s best to keep everything as close as possible to the real you so you won’t trip yourself up.

  My face prickled. I had grown a goatee at the recommendation of the folks who had already been to Afghanistan. Most men in Afghanistan wear beards, and facial hair can buy you time in a tense situation because you kind of blend in with the men there. The belief was that in that split second, as the bad guy tried to place you, you could escape. I’d never grown a beard before, so I wasn’t used to the facial hair. Even though I’d spent much of my time in the military in undercover operations, where I could have had a beard since I didn’t want to look like I worked for the government, I’d pretty much just gone with long hair. I had a ponytail during my years of running operations in support of DoD’s counterdrug mission. I kinda missed it.

  I wasn’t expecting gunfire until we got to Bagram, but we got an early taste of it at a base in northern Afghanistan where we stopped to let some folks off before heading into Bagram. The back of the C-130 dropped down, and an air force enlisted guy on the ground drove up in an ATV and piled on some of their luggage. Small puffs of dust popped up around the ATV as he worked, but he coolly ignored it.

  Somebody asked him if he was being shot at. “Yes, sir, they’re shooting at us,” he shouted over the roar of the propellers. As soon as those folks and their stuff were off, the pilot swung the plane around and we were outta there. No sense hanging around getting shot at, I guess he figured. I wasn’t going to argue.

  We flew the nap of the earth, following the land’s contours for the next three hours into Bagram. We jerked and swayed in our seats as the plane skimmed over the mountainous Afghanistan terrain and miles and miles of desert.

  To distract myself, I thought back to a conversation I’d had in May with Michael Hawk, my operations officer on Operating Base Alpha. In the process of closing it down, Michael had called me.

  “They’ve been going through all your stuff since you’ve been in command,” he told me, referring to the DIA bureaucrats—specifically a weasel of a man named Phil. Michael told me they were reviewing my financial records, my telephone logs—ripping through everything I’d done. They were going to push the DIA Inspector General Jimral for an investigation. “Don’t worry about it,” I told Michael. “I may have taken some shortcuts, but I didn’t do anything wrong. I played it totally by the book. They can’t get me on anything.”

  Michael gave a grim laugh. “C’mon, Tony. ‘Don’t worry about it?’ They’ll make something up if they don’t find anything.”

  I put it out of my mind as I stared over my shoulder and out the porthole of the C-130. All I could see was tan desert and low mountains.

  We’d come halfway around the world to deal with an enemy that cared about nothing but their narrow interpretation of God. They wanted to kill us simply because we did not think like they did. They could have continued to push the country even further backward in time had they had the sense to leave us alone. But they hadn’t, and so, after 9/11, we’d gone after them.

  The plane banked hard, and I gripped my bag tighter so it wouldn’t slip away as we made our final turn to line up for landing on the Bagram Air Base runway. I could just make out the rows of CH-47s and Marine Corps Harrier AV-8 attack jets as we taxied to the terminal.

  Tepid dishwater. That was my thought as I came out of the plane. Lukewarm, moist air, heavy with latent heat, with dirty brown drapes of dust that obscured the jagged mountains that surrounded Bagram for 360 degrees, literally making them shadows of their former selves. The dust just sat there, like a big damp blanket, waiting to be ripped away by the heat of the day. The kind of day that you’d just like to kick back, drive to the beach, and lay in the sun.

  But no such luck. No beach here. Just a war.

  In all, Bagram was serving as home to more than 7,000 U.S. and multinational armed servicemen. Used by the Soviet military during its doomed occupation of Afghanistan, the Americans and multinational armed services took over Bagram after the crap was beaten out of it during the country’s civil war that raged after the Russians withdrew in 1989 and the fight waged by the United States and the Afghan Northern Alliance to oust the Taliban in 2001. We’d sunk a lot of change into fixing it up since then, but it still was no beauty. A beaten-up control tower. One patched runway. Smashed aircraft lying around. Hidden land mines. A number of newly erected structures on site but everything—and everybody—else were in tents.

  As soon as I got off the plane into the 105-degree heat, my new boss, Bill Wilson, helped me load my luggage—two B-4 nylon bags full of military gear, two pelican cases, a field pack, body armor, and my bulletproof briefcase (Level IIA bulletproof inserts)—into the Toyota Tacoma (“surfs,” they were called here). He took me over to my new offices, located in the heavily guarded SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) in the Combined Joint Task Force 180 compound.

  CJTF 180 was a hybrid organization, consisting of 18th Airborne Corps staff, with combat power provided by the Army 10th Mountain Division and 82nd Airborne Division, and some special operations (Special Forces, Psychological Operations, and Civil Affairs) with some level of logistical backing from the 1st Corps Support Command.

  Our facility was in a set of interconnected tents. The largest was the Joint Operations Center for CJTF 180. The SCIF—the most highly classified area—was attached to that.

  The entire complex for CJTF 180 was surrounded by a twelve-foot wall—parts of it mud walls that had been on site and the rest constructed out of tall Hescos—wire mesh containers with heavy fabric liners filled with dirt and rocks similar to old-fashioned gabions. The entire wall was topped with triple concertina wire.

  As we entered through the guarded entrance of the SCIF, we came into a large domed area, with huge mercury lights and dust dancing in their beams. There was a big, U-shaped conference table and various openings to other tents/offices off the main area.

  The tents were insulated, air-conditioned, and heated, but still hot as hell in the summer and, I was to discover, damned cold in the winter. On windy days—which was most days in Bagram—the wind sucked and blew at the tent walls, flapping them with such force and volume that we often had to pause in meetings and wait for the gales to die down before resuming
.

  One of the first people we ran into was Lt. Gen. John Vines, commander of the U.S. and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Vines had assumed command of the Afghanistan operation in May, although he had been in country for nine months as commander of the 82nd Airborne Division. He was leaving the SCIF after his daily morning situation brief when Bill introduced us. Vines grabbed my hand for a swift, firm shake.

  “Good to meet you, ***** ********” he said. “Glad to have you here.” My first impression was of a direct, no-nonsense leader.

  Inside the SCIF, I started to meet members of the team I would be fighting this war with, starting with Navy Lt. Cmdr. David Christenson, a Senior Naval Intelligence Officer in Afghanistan.

  “Welcome aboard, shipmate,” he said, extending a hand. With satellites, bugs, receivers, antennas, and a bunch of other equipment ******* ************ *** ******** Dave and his people kept an ear out for the bad guys from the air and from the ground. Lean and compact, blond and blue-eyed, Dave was the resident “lib” who became—despite his politics—one of my closest allies.

  Because Dave had the appropriate clearances and background, I was able to tell him I’d worked with *** on previous assignments, including a recent one in which ** *** *** was embedded in my unit to *** ***** ********* Dave looked impressed and said he wanted to learn more about that operation.

  The human intelligence tent where I would be working had a kind of a submarine feel to it—long and narrow, with a plywood floor and computers slapped down on long tables along the perimeter. Dust was everywhere. Chairs were mostly the folding kind. Kind of primitive, I thought, but then this was a war zone. Just inside the entrance sat the 10th Mountain tactical human intelligence team. Bill introduced me all around, while I struggled to remember names. I was fighting fatigue and was still trying to get used to answering to the name of Tony.

  They were all in uniform—a young-looking group. I got a quick handshake from everyone, but my attention was drawn briefly to the NCO in charge of the night shift. She reminded me of somebody I knew, or thought I had known. I searched my memory banks. That was it—she looked like Natalie Portman: high cheekbones, dark eyes, and the widest smile I’d ever seen. I glanced at her computer. There was a photo of her, smiling, hand in hand with a guy. She was wearing shorts. Man, I thought. Gorgeous legs.

  Back to the task at hand, Tony, I told myself.

  In the rear of the HUMINT tent, Bill grabbed a chair and motioned me to do the same. As my boss, Bill knew I was in alias and he knew my background.

  “Tony, you’ve got a strong reputation, and I’m really going to need you to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get our mission focused with Task Force 180,” he said as I sat down. “But, be aware, there is some kind of drama going on about you.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Look, Bill, I’m here to do my job. That’s the only thing I want to do. I’ve done some very interesting ops and, for better or worse, I have a reputation for getting things done. I’m here to do that and to make sure the mission runs smoothly.”

  Bill ticked off my priorities. First, do a better job than my predecessor and repair DIA’s relations with the other units. At one point, Bill said, our senior officer, Lt. Col. Ray Moretti in Kandahar, a city to the south that was the birthplace of the Taliban, had passed along to my predecessor great intel that Taliban leader Mullah Omar would be passing by a certain point. Well, my predecessor didn’t bother to tell anyone until it was too late. Omar’s entourage ended up beating up our Afghan informant, taking his phone, and driving away.

  It was a low ebb in DIA’s relationship with, well, just about everybody.

  Second, since I was an army guy, Bill wanted me to get into the army planning process, because I was trained in it. Bill felt that we—as Defense HUMINT in DIA—were not playing a big enough role in the war and that our intelligence wasn’t making it into the combat operations enough. Finally, Bill told me, I was to be DIA’s representative to the Leadership Targeting Cell (LTC).

  “I saw their tent here in the SCIF,” I said. “What’s their focus?”

  As Bill explained it, the LTC was directly responsible for the coordination and prosecution of killing or capturing High Value Targets, or Tier 1 targets—like Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and others like them. The LTC was also responsible for Tier 2 targets, such as their lieutenants and their action guys.

  Sitting on the LTC were representatives of Combined Joint Task Force 180 and other agencies—*** **** the CIA, the FBI—as well as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA; it’s now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), the J2 ( joint staff chief of intelligence), and other agencies in country. I would be the DIA representative. It was run by Col. Juan Negro, former Army Special Forces who had worked mostly in South America before joining the Special Forces Command in Tampa.

  “Let’s go over and meet him,” Bill said, “but first, let’s take care of your weapons.”

  He brought me back out into the main area of the SCIF and over to a large black foot locker near the video teleconferencing (VTC) room. With a quick twirl of the combination lock, he opened it up. It contained an array of M-4A3 assault rifles and M-11 (SIG SAUER P228) semiautomatic pistols and ammunition.

  “Generally speaking, we issue M-4s when we go out on convoys or under enhanced threat conditions and carry M-11s when we’re inside the perimeter,” said Bill, giving me the combination of the locker. “We usually carry three magazines per M-11.”

  “The policy is you’re supposed to keep the weapon unloaded while you’re inside the perimeter,” he added, “but, frankly, my weapon always has a round in the chamber.”

  “I got it,” I said.

  I picked out an M-11, racked it to make sure there were no stray shells in the chamber, slid the rack forward and slipped it into the holster on my right hip, then quickly scooped up three 13-round mags and a box of ammo. I loaded the bullets into the magazines and put the magazines onto the carrier on my left side. I slid a magazine into the gun but didn’t chamber it until later.

  “All set?” Bill said. “Let’s go talk LTC.”

  In the LTC tent, it was cooler than the HUMINT tent, almost comfortable. Tim Loudermilk, Colonel Negro’s operations officer, stood up and introduced himself, telling us that Colonel Negro would be back in a minute. In the meantime, I met John Hays, the rep from NIMA—lanky and sandy haired—who gave me a friendly greeting. John was in charge of pictures and maps and responsible for the toughest question of the day: figuring out where the ever-changing Afghan-Pakistan border was. Next up was FBI special agent John Kirkland, a big bear of a guy with a full beard and a massive grin, as well as Dan, another FBI agent.

  John and I talked about my work on a project with the FBI—********* * ***** ********* ***** ****** *** **** ********. He said the FBI’s job in Afghanistan was to monitor the debriefings of detainees to look for information relating to domestic law enforcement and to look for leads on possible future attacks. It also did sensitive site exploitation.

  “So anytime a major raid takes place, you guys go out and look at the scene?” I said.

  “Yep,” said John. “We try to evaluate anything they left behind—computers, books, notes, magazines—anything that might be useful to tip us off and help prevent a new attack.”

  I heard a shuffle behind me and turned around to face a calm-eyed colonel with a thick mustache, slightly taller than me, wearing DCUs with no markings other than the U.S. Army and his rank. “Sir,” said Bill. This must be Colonel Negro. ***** ** ***** ******** “He just arrived today. He’s going to be our representative to the LTC.”

  For a moment, Negro stared at me, expressionless.

  We sat down and talked about some of my predeployment training and about the LTC. I could sense some coolness toward me. He reminded me in some ways of Lieutenant Castillo from that ’80s TV show, Miami Vice. Soft-spoken, quiet, but there was a lot going on behind those eyes.

  Then Negro asked me a
bout a particular case officer, and I said that I knew him.

  “My dealings with him were never good,” Colonel Negro said bluntly. Turns out the colonel had some run-ins with particular case officers and other undercover personnel, including this guy.

  “My experience is that people with your background are prima donnas—high on talk and low on delivery,” Negro continued.

  Man. The guy sure could throw a punch.

  Negro continued. He believed that DIA didn’t participate enough in operations and didn’t produce enough. Generally, we’d just phone it in and leave the difficult, mundane—but necessary—work to the white-world guys, and our clandestine operations didn’t produce enough to justify the attitude or expense.

  “Well, sir, I’m sorry you’ve had run-ins with some individuals,” I said. “I’ve had problems with some of those individuals as well. I’d like to believe I’m not like them, and I’d like you to give me a chance to prove myself.”

  Negro nodded. “Clearly, you’re going to have your chance to do that.”

  Wow, I thought, he’s gonna be a tough one.

  Afterward, back at the eight-man tent that I would be sharing with other members of the DIA team, I glanced warily at the barrier separating us from the ancient village of Bagram, home to several thousand Afghans. The wall was made up of Hescos about 15 meters from our tent. On the other side of the barrier were some people who seemed to have a problem with our presence here. They would chip explosives out of old Soviet mortars, I was told, insert them into cans or any other container, and wrap a bike chain around the whole package to serve as shrapnel. Voilà. Instant improvised explosive device (IED). Then they’d toss the thing over the barrier at us. Entertaining way to pass the time, I guessed. It made us real careful about getting too close to those Hescos.