Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  I lowered my rifle, slumped back in my seat, and let out my breath that I had instinctively held for the past few seconds. The kid was fading back into the crowd, but I caught his eye and stared at him. He looked to be about the same age as Alexander.

  Clearly, he had been trained to pull that kind of stunt. The idea would be to create bad press if we shot him, or it would lower our threshold of concern so that after we had dealt with kids tossing juice boxes a few times, we would relax our vigilance. This kid didn’t get it. He was being used and had almost ended up dead.

  Only the wind gusting at that very second had saved this boy’s life. I hoped he wouldn’t try that again. Inshallah. God willing.

  What a place. I thought back on my past training. I’d been schooled as a spy to take on a First World adversary, like the Russians or the Chinese. The way I had been trained, intelligence—even clandestine intelligence—was a gentleman’s game. The idea of using a weapon or ending up in combat … well, we didn’t go there. I’d been told by an old-school instructor at the Farm in one of my first training sessions that spies didn’t need guns because if you couldn’t talk your way out of a situation, then you weren’t worth your salt.

  Apparently, he’d never been in combat.

  Even in the 1990s, the armed forces hadn’t faced the fact that war had changed. Our enemies were just as deadly, but different. Now I was fighting an enemy that used children as a method of weapons delivery. This was alien.

  Nevertheless we all had to damned well get used to it. We were facing an adversary that hid behind the innocent and targeted those who could not hope to defend themselves. I realized we had to get back on the offensive. George Patton’s rule: The best defense is a good offense. We had to take the war to the enemy because if our adversaries were more worried about survival, about waking up to see the sun the next morning than about planning ops against us, they wouldn’t have the will to attack us.

  The realization was like a hard slap across the face.

  I called the first vehicle on the Motorola gray brick.

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “Yeah … what the fuck! We had our hands on the door ready to bail! Did you see the kid?”

  “Yeah,” I answered back into the radio. “I saw him,” and I glanced over to Julie, “and he nearly died.” There would have been no way I would have missed at that range.

  After another thirty minutes, we finished the mission and went back to the ****** to collect the third vehicle. After we arrived, Dave and I were speechless. Dave, in particular, loved kids and, being a liberal in uniform, he in particular took to heart the plight of children in this environment. We just sat across from each other on the front stoop of the Ariana and stared out into space. I could see how the stress was going to add up quickly.

  “We need to bring an extra vehicle back to Bagram,” Dave broke the silence. “I’d like you to drive it.”

  “What?” I said. I’d had combat driving training back in the States, but this was taking some getting used to.

  “I know how you’re feeling,” said Dave, now with some of his sense of humor and smile returning. “This is overwhelming, but I’m telling you it’s not going to get any better by putting it off.”

  I figured there was no way out of it, so I focused on the mission. We went out to the parking lot, and Dave handed over the keys.

  “Any questions?” asked Dave.

  “Nope,” I said. I looked at the dashboard. At least the truck had a cool stereo. This was starting to grow on me. Good music and a chance to drive like a bat out of hell.

  “Where do you want me in order of march?” I asked him.

  “Stay behind, you’ll be fine.” With that, Dave slapped me on the shoulder and walked to his vehicle.

  As we pulled out past the guards and into the dusty sea of white and yellow Taliban taxis, animals, jingle trucks, and military vehicles, my senses were now hyperalert and focused. We cleared the last traffic circle of Kabul and headed north on the new Russian Road toward Bagram. It was late. The shadows had turned the light tans and browns of the dried mountain faces into muted grays and taupes, with growing blankets of purple.

  As we hit 90 miles an hour, I punched my first song up. The Psychedelic Furs’s “Love My Way”:

  There’s an army

  On the dance floor …

  I was an experienced intelligence officer, but it was clear that Afghanistan was going to push me to the limits of my endurance—physically and emotionally. Just when I thought I’d reached my max, it would push me some more.

  5

  “WE WILL KILL THE INFIDELS”

  “IS this the Babylon 5 rerun?” I joked as I walked into the video conference tent in the SCIF. Dave Christensen and Tim Loudermilk, Colonel Negro’s operations officer, were watching a grainy video on the plasma screen on the wall. Dave, as always, was scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad.

  “Nope,” said Tim. “We’re watching the Taliban.”

  At the morning meeting, Maj. Ted Smith, one of my colleagues at DIA who ran the Document Exploitation Detachment, had announced that a video of a Taliban operation was available. It had been captured about three weeks earlier and after it had been translated, it was handed over to us. The videotape was the raw footage that the Taliban intended for recruiting and fund-raising—two critical tasks of any terrorist organization. The Taliban’s targets for recruitment were young students in the Pakistan madrassas, religious schools across the border that had helped to spawn the Taliban movement. They were also using the videos to raise money from their partner, al Qaeda and from rich Arabs who sympathized with their cause. Our intel told us that al Qaeda was getting impatient with their partners-in-crime and wanted to see a little more action for the cash they were sinking into the movement.

  “What are they doing now? Are they holding services?” I asked.

  “Only for the guys they killed,” Dave answered as he eyeballed the screen.

  I settled in to watch, put my feet up on the table, and leaned back on two legs of the chair, taking out my notebook. Watching this clearly amateur video was a bit of a chore, but I had to admit that while it wasn’t Hollywood, they knew what they were doing.

  It had been shot with a small Sony camera in documentary style, with the constant movement of the camera and the subject to enhance the feeling of action. One guy had shot the footage and had narrated. Interesting. They made the sacrifice of an armed, able-bodied guerrilla just to play combat cameraman. If they could free up someone for that job, it meant they were thinking about information operations and how to use that against their adversary—us. That indicated a robust level of thinking and a complex concept of operations. One thing I’d learned about terrorists was that they are very adaptive. They aren’t part of a large bureaucracy with a lot of rules and regulations. They don’t have any oversight—or moral compass, for that matter.

  These guys are changing and adapting, I thought, learning to use propaganda and videos to find fresh recruits and raise money for their weapons and training bases.

  I grabbed a thick translation transcript.

  Dave said the videotape had started in Pakistan in the training camps. A team of a dozen guys seemed to be in on this operation. We watched them take target practice with their AK-47s in a camp that appeared to hold maybe forty or fifty men. Smiling, they’d shoot off their Kalashnikovs into the air to celebrate. They talked to some elders—older men in black turbans—who were wishing them well. There were shots of them praying, probably to show off their Islamic devotion to their funders. As each Talib spoke into the camera, I skimmed the transcript. They were making some kind of religious statements or oaths: They were doing this for Allah. Should they die, they would go to heaven. This was to bring praise upon their family. The blood of the infidel will flow.

  These guys were hams—but they were hams with guns.

  In the bleak mountainous landscape—dusty, rocky, and brown, dotted with scrubby pine and some sorry-l
ooking juniper—we watched as they moved across the mountains, over smugglers’ trails into Afghanistan. They made camp, cooking food along the way. As they went, the narrator explained their mission: how important the war was, and how they planned to return Afghanistan to the Taliban, expel the infidels from the country, and give it to Allah. Conquering Kandahar was the first step in retaking Afghanistan. The fighters talked a lot of Mullah Omar. They wanted to take back the land for their brother Mullah Omar, the one-eyed leader of the Taliban who had led them to dominance over the warring tribes in Afghanistan in 1995 and had eluded capture since then, so that he could walk freely and give them the benefit of his wisdom. They thanked Allah for their weapons and the good weather.

  After twenty minutes of tape showing what appeared to be several days, they reached their quarry in the late afternoon: a small cement police station in a tiny village. An Afghan flag was fluttering above it. A dozen or so mud huts blended almost seamlessly into the surrounding landscape, with a thin, rocky road running through the settlement. From the looks of the terrain, they were near Khowst, a province on the border of Pakistan about 100 miles southeast of Kabul.

  Outside the police station, in the sunshine of the waning day, two policemen in khaki uniforms and boxy caps were hanging around smoking, their AK-47s up against the building, under a worn poster of Ahmad Shah Massoud. Massoud—the “Lion of Panjshir”—was the leader of the Northern Alliance and fought the Soviets and then the Taliban, until the Taliban or al Qaeda finally succeeded in assassinating him on September 9, 2001. His poster was all over downtown Kabul, too, and at every AMF-controlled checkpoint I’d seen since I’d been in country. His leadership was greatly missed by Afghans, and frankly the more I learned about him, the more I recognized how much we’d screwed up by not supporting him during the dark post-Soviet-occupation days.

  The filming was at a distance from the police station in the village, so the picture was shaky, but I could imagine that the policemen were talking about the day, going home to the wife—or wives—and kids, and so on. These police outposts were the closest thing to centralized government control that most Afghans ever saw—and the police were often as corrupt as Casablanca’s Captain Renault, also ill-trained. Still, they frequently were all that stood between the Taliban and central government control of a village and, in many instances, entire provinces.

  In the video, the attackers moved closer and closer, scrambling down the mountainside, the narrator explaining in whispers. The transcript laid out in chilling detail their plan of attack. We will kill the infidels. This will be part of a string of victories over them. Inshallah.

  They checked their weapons, then one guy gave the word and they moved down the hill, firing as they went, the camera bobbing as the video guy scrambled to keep up. Both policemen turned to look, expressions of shock on their faces. One tossed his cigarette aside and was shot and killed almost immediately. The other guy was hit and knocked down. The attackers were shouting and firing, the gunshot sounds distorted into something unrecognizable by the cheap microphone on the video camera.

  The second policemen struggled to get to his feet, speaking pleadingly to the attackers. He tried to pull something from his breast pocket.

  They shot him in the head.

  I leaned forward. “Whoa,” I said.

  Not much of a fair fight—twelve to two in this encounter—and this sort of thing was being repeated dozens of times per week as the Taliban’s ambitions became real and their minions were on the move.

  After the murders, the attackers celebrated, mugging for the cameraman, smiling and dancing around, weapons above their heads. They rifled the pockets of the dead policemen.

  If these deadly teams gained control of police stations, they pretty much had control of the village as long as they could cut a deal with the elders. The message to the elders was unequivocal: Play ball with us or die. A persuasive approach. It didn’t take much in these remote areas to grab control over enough villages to give you effective control of the province. Newly elected president Karzai was weak—he was known sardonically in Afghanistan as the “mayor of Kabul”—with little control outside the capital. The Taliban were taking full advantage of that lack of strong central control.

  They were also replacing their disorganized hit-and-run attacks against U.S. forces with better-coordinated assaults, and more sophisticated ambushes on softer targets: police officers, foreign and Afghan aid workers, and contractors.

  The body count, as well as the intimidation, was rising.

  In March 2003, an International Red Cross water engineer was grabbed by a member of the Taliban in Oruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan, the home province of Taliban chief Mullah Omar. The Talib who captured the engineer called up Taliban commander Mullah Dadullah and, on orders from Dadullah, shot him to death.

  In May, two engineers working for a German aid agency were critically wounded by remote-controlled bombs that exploded near Jalalabad in eastern Afghanistan. Two members of a foreign ****** team were also murdered that month when a suicide bomber in a car pulled up next to their bus as they were headed for Kabul Airport and then detonated himself. Dave was spared being caught in the blast, but came upon the scene just seconds later.

  In June, four German peacekeepers were killed when a car bomb detonated in Kabul, and six guards working for a U.S. contractor overseeing the reconstruction of the road between Kabul and Kandahar were killed by gunmen in August.

  Leaflets or “night letters” were also appearing in towns and villages. They showed up more often than not nailed to a village’s central “bulletin board,” and where no board existed, they were nailed to schools, offices, and other community locations—all done under the cover of darkness. They’d creep into these villages overnight to prove the point of their invincibility. The night letters gave the Taliban credit for the attacks and called for jihad—or holy war—against the Americans and Karzai’s new government. They compared the American “infidel” presence to the Soviet occupation in 1970s and ’80s.

  What was it that Rumsfeld had said a couple of months ago? War’s over, boys. Major combat operations in Afghanistan were complete and the focus would now be on reconstruction. Right.

  I’d once met the SecDef right after 9/11. I ran into him just outside the Pentagon at the end of a workout. He asked me why the highly accessible, unguarded “runner’s entrance” to the Pentagon Athletic Club had been closed permanently. Hmm, I thought at the time, this is a bad sign. Pentagon attacked, security increased … and still the question about the entrance from the man who should know why it had been closed down. There was a pattern developing here.

  Tim, Dave, and I watched the end of the video, as the Taliban celebrated the deaths of the police officers, in grim silence. “What does this mean?” I asked Dave.

  He put down his pen. “Between their religious diatribes, they’re giving indications of what they’re up to and where they’re going.”

  This was more than just a propaganda video. The info on the videotape fit into the intelligence Dave and his folks had been getting—that this operation was a small part of a much larger plan by the Taliban to retake Afghanistan. They had started by overrunning police outposts, but their ambitions were much, much larger. There were signs of coordination between the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the guerrilla group Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was on the LTC’s list. A Taliban rival in the 1990s, Hekmatyar had formed an alliance with them in recent years. One of our theories was that the HIG, as Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin was known, had become the de facto bodyguards of bin Laden when he was in Afghanistan. If you could find the HIG, the thinking went, it could lead you to him.

  Our sources indicated that more than 1,000 ACM (anticoalition militia) combat fighters were moving into Afghanistan, which meant you had thousands more on the Pak side helping plan, equip, train, and organize.

  “In other words,” I said, “they’re coming back, and they have a very detailed plan on
how to do it.”

  Dave nodded. “This isn’t just about taking down checkpoints along the border.” Intelligence pointed to a chilling goal: retake Kandahar—second largest city in Afghanistan with more than 300,000 residents—and the surrounding Kandahar province by Ramadan, two months from now. “They are very patient, and they know what they want to do.”

  “Can’t we chase ’em back across the border into Pakistan and let the Paks deal with them?” I asked.

  Dave shook his head impatiently. “Tony, you’re naïve. You think that if we just do that, they’re going to stay there.”

  “I understand that,” I answered, “but my impression is that we are trying to seal off the border.”

  Dave rose and strode over to a wall-size map of Afghanistan and ran his hand along the bumpy eastern border with Pakistan—1,500 miles of mountains, canyons, caverns, and remote smugglers’ trails. “Do you really believe we can close off that?” he asked.

  “I guess not,” I said. Not without the Pakistanis’ help, and I was to learn that we couldn’t rely on them. This was getting kind of alarming. “So what the hell do we do?”

  Our combat forces were strung out all over a country the size of Texas. If these guys wanted to pour over the border, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do to stop them just with conventional warfare. The intel was indicating that 1,000 battle-hardened Taliban insurgents, coming in from the Pakistani border towns of Wana and Quetta, were moving with haste into the interior of Afghanistan. The U.S. and Afghan forces couldn’t shut down that entire border and, under agreements with the Paks, we couldn’t pursue them into Pakistan. We had to be smarter, quicker, more cunning.

  Dave leaned forward again. Clearly, he’d been thinking about this for a while. “I understand that we’re focusing on leadership targeting, but I’d like us to work together to provide actionable intelligence to the 10th Mountain so they can more effectively counter the offensive.”

  “What do you have in mind?” I asked, now sitting with all four chair legs on the floor and paying close attention.