Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  I was mentally and physically spent. After waiting to see if any of the Taliban mortars got any closer (they didn’t), I went back to the tent and crawled under my poncho liner. Periodically, a mortar went off, then the 10th Mountain sent up a flare that lit up the sky with a bright white light that cast long shadows for a few minutes while they returned fire.

  I figured, given the choice between sleeping in a cramped bunker or risking getting mortared on a marginally more comfortable cot, I would pick my cot. If they got me, they got me. I ended up sleeping through the night despite the constant—and loud—cat-and-mouse game outside.

  The next morning, John had heard back from Washington. Ghaffari’s account of his immigration to the **** and his international travel listings were accurate. They also hadn’t found any association between Arash or his circle of acquaintances and any known terrorist group in the FBI database. DIA had done checks on him, too, and so far the guy was checking out. So far, so good.

  Still, he knew a lot more about his cousin and the operation in ****** than he was telling us. We didn’t know the extent of the Iranians’ involvement in Afghanistan or whether they were involved in a sleeper cell in the ****** *******

  We moved in for the second full day of interrogation.

  I decided to open up by bringing up *********** again. I told him that I had talked to my family back in *********** the previous night and pointed out that he hadn’t. He gave me a carefully vacant look. He was trying to be cool.

  “It’s a real shame that you, as a **** *******, can’t call your family right now,” I said, “and you will not have the privilege of talking or spending time with your family until you open up. We feel we made some progress yesterday, and you gave us some good information, but there is a lot more you need to share with us.”

  There, I thought, I’ve given him a little bit of carrot, but the message is that we’ve got a long way to go, my cousin.

  “Tell us about your life growing up in Iran,” John said.

  We followed with an intense line of questioning on Ali and Arash’s upbringing in Tehran. How his cousin had made arrangements to send him to school there and how his cousin had watched out for him and raised the money to send him to the ****** ******* That sent off alarm bells, but Arash Ghaffari seemed very open about it. If we started talking about his cousin currently, Arash got more vague, so we stuck hard with their days in Iran, and some useful information started to emerge. Arash finally admitted that after the Shah of Iran had been deposed in January 1979, shortly before the Ghaffari family arrived in Iran, Ali had had “contact” with the ****—the immensely powerful ************* ******* ****** ************ service. He had found work with them.

  It was slowly becoming clear that Ali was, at some level, a player with the ****, probably as an intelligence officer. I knew from my work in other operations that the **** was the self-appointed generator of chaos and evil for the Iranian people.

  Ali Ghaffari was a bigger fish than we thought.

  We cut the interrogation off at that point so we could discuss our strategy. This new point was an important one, and we needed to push hard on it. We rewarded him with a bottle of cold water.

  We ended the session by telling him we appreciated that he was remembering more helpful information. We reminded him that the more information he remembered, the better the chances he had of going back to the ****** ******* The idea was to reintroduce hope—for the moment.

  After lunch, John and I strategized and tried to figure out what the hell was going on. Maybe there was an Iranian cell operating here, not an al Qaeda cell, not a Taliban cell, and not a *** cell. If Ali was linked to the ****, then this was no shoestring operation.

  At the break, we noticed a lot of activity around the base. Straightening up the mess hall. Stacking up supplies. Lining up vehicles. Some of the Special Forces guys were clean shaven and wearing crisp desert camo.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “General Schoomaker is visiting tomorrow, sir,” one of them told me. “He’s doing a visit to the front and we need to get things in order.” Must be serious. They had started calling me “sir” again.

  Gen. Peter Schoomaker was chief of staff of the army. He’d been appointed a few months previously to replace Gen. Eric Shinseki, who’d pissed off Rumsfeld by predicting (accurately, as it turned out) that the United States would need many more troops to keep the peace in Iraq than Rumsfeld wanted to send. I knew and respected General Schoomaker from my work with Able Danger, but I had no interest in running into him here with an ******** prisoner under my wing. If General Schoomaker was coming, so was the press, which would snoop around. We had to finish up with Ghaffari and make him—and us—disappear by the next day … but disappear in the “right” way.

  At the same time, though, we didn’t want to take shortcuts. We had to proceed carefully and methodically through the minefield of Arash Ghaffari’s fevered brain. We didn’t want to become his enemy.

  We wanted his own mind to become his enemy.

  John sent back a cable ** *** *** ************ ** ***** saying we believed that Ali Ghaffari had some level of contact with the **** and was probably an ************ ******** and that we were going to explore the possibility that there might be an ******* terrorism cell in ************ We had gotten additional intel from the Special Forces that they were convinced that the ***** was there during the raid and that it was supposed to be distributed that evening.

  Our strategy with Arash Ghaffari was to build up his hope at the beginning of the afternoon and then crush it just before we broke for the night, no matter what he said.

  “While we’ve verified that you’re from ***********,” John told him after lunch, “you have not told us what you’ve been doing for your cousin in the ****** ********

  Ghaffari leaned forward again and spoke urgently. “I am shocked by what you say. I’ve done nothing for my cousin. He sent me there to live. * **** *******.”

  I jumped in. “It’s very clear from our morning discussion that your cousin has connections with ******* ************. Our question is very simple: What, if anything, have you done to promote your cousin’s activities in the ****** *******”

  ** **** ********” Ghaffari repeated. “I would never do anything to hurt *******. It is my obligation to be a good ********”

  “You are 100 percent correct,” I said. “You are obligated to tell us everything you know if you are a good ********* You must tell us about your cousin’s activities and what he asked you to do.”

  “By everything I hold holy, I’m telling you I have had no contact with my cousin other than correspondence.”

  “You’re telling me you’ve never received any *****? You’ve not gotten any guidance on activities in the ****** *******”

  “On my honor, I’m a good ********* I want nothing to do with my cousin’s activities.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  Ghaffari looked frustrated. “Family. You must understand. Family obligation. When my cousin asked me to come back for a visit, I came.”

  Now, there was something new. His cousin had asked him to come back.

  “I understand you are very close to your cousin and you honor him,” I said, “but you are not honoring your country you now call your home and, therefore, you are not fulfilling your obligation to the ****** ****** by telling us something that is not true. I don’t know how to make this clearer to you.”

  I brought back my ace. “You have to understand that the only place you’re going to go is someplace warm in the Caribbean, and it ain’t Puerto Rico, unless you come completely clean with us,” I said. “So if you value your wife, your children, your life in ************ you’re going to have to tell us all that you know of what your cousin has been up to.”

  You could almost see the wind going out of his sails, and we could almost hear him thinking: Oh God, we’re back at that.

  John and I looked at each other and then looked at him. Clearly and concisely, w
e’d laid out his options—and choices—and a path to the future. He had to choose between his life back home and his cousin.

  Some details started to come out. Arash told us more about his family leaving Afghanistan and going to ****** and their life there. About his ******* attending university in ****** and being recruited into the ****. About how his cousin had sent him to ********

  “So you’re telling us that your cousin paid to send you to ******* because he was ******* ************?” I asked.

  “No, on my honor, I have had no contact with my cousin other than mail since I have been here ********* *** * **** ** ** ** ** **** ** ********

  Then came the break we were looking for.

  He leaned forward again. “My cousin and I—we traveled to Iran together while I was here,” he said suddenly. John and I glanced at each other.

  Arash leaned back and closed his eyes.

  He was obviously struggling with his dilemma: His cousin ********

  “Why?” I asked.

  The answers got vague again. They had traveled through Herat, the Afghan town closest to the ******* ******* on the bus. Then more vagueness.

  We pushed him.

  “You’ve given us a great deal of information, but you haven’t given us everything,” said John. “You have to give us the rest of the story. We have no authority to let you go unless we believe you’ve told us the whole truth—and you are obligated by your **** ** * ******* ** *** ****** ****** to do so.”

  “We’re nowhere near that at this point,” I added.

  We took a five-minute break.

  “What do you think?” John asked.

  “He’s given us more, but still not everything.”

  John wasn’t getting anything back from Washington on this guy that indicated he was bad. His associates were checking out, but he wasn’t coming clean on his activities, or the activities of his cousin, in Afghanistan. Checks are great—but not everything—and there was still more here.

  We were frustrated. He was frustrated. It had been a long day. We went back in.

  “Tonight, when the sun goes down, will be your last night in ****** and where you end up tomorrow is totally in your control,” I told him, remaining propped up against the desk that I’d been leaning on for two days. “If you cooperate and tell us the complete truth about your cousin and what he has been doing, chances are excellent you will be released and able to make your flight back to the ****** ******. On the other hand, if you choose to continue to be less than truthful with us, then you will leave ****** in handcuffs. You will move to Bagram, and from Bagram to Guantanamo. That trip will start tomorrow.”

  I never moved close enough to physically intimidate him. I didn’t want him to be distracted by fear for his own safety. I wanted him to focus on my words so his mind could start gnawing away at them.

  He was getting desperate, repeating almost to himself, “I love ******** I love my life there. It is important for me to be with my family—my wife and my children. I am a loyal *********”

  “Let’s go back to your trip with your cousin,” I said quietly.

  He knew that all the cards were on the table now. There was nothing standing between him and Guantanamo except us.

  “Who gave your cousin the *****?” I asked.

  “The ******* ************ ******** He has worked for them since *** ******* **** ***********”

  There. That was it.

  The rest of the truth started to flow—never more than a trickle—but it was flowing.

  He then went back to his life with his cousin ****** before Ali had sent him ** *** ******, and admitted that his cousin had become an ************ ******* for the ******** who worked against the ******** He revised his story with the ********* real work now the focus. It made sense.

  Over an hour, it became clear that Arash had been called back by his cousin to be recruited into the fold. Payback time, in other words, for big cousin’s “generosity” in sending ****** **** to the ****** *******

  Arash was going to become his cousin’s operative.

  “How did your cousin get the ***** ****** *** *******” John asked.

  “I carried it for him,” he said. His eyes filled with tears. He was finally starting to break down at the knowledge of his betrayal of his cousin.

  “How did you do it?”

  “In my luggage. My cousin felt it would be best since I was an ********* He believed that they would leave me alone coming into Afghanistan.”

  “How did you keep your passport from being stamped when you crossed into Iran?”

  “My cousin arranged it.”

  “When did you give the ***** back to your cousin?”

  “Right after we crossed the border, and he brought it to the compound.”

  “You do know that the ******* was involved in the meeting with the other men in the compound,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I had nothing to do with my cousin business. I was asleep at the time of the meeting.” That was true. The Special Forces had confirmed that.

  By the end of that day, we had much more detail about what had gone down in the days prior to the meeting and his cousin’s role in it, but we weren’t letting him off the hook. We stuck to our plan to come down hard.

  “You’ve done much better today,” I told him. “We appreciate that you are a good ********. I do feel that what you’ve said today helps us understand you and your cousin.”

  He let out a breath.

  “But,” I added, “I don’t think it’s enough to let you go home.”

  He put his head down.

  “We’re going to talk to you again in the morning. It’s time for all of us to take a break. We’ll have some food brought in to you.”

  “I must leave for Kabul tomorrow if I am going to make my plane home.” He was pleading with us.

  “Frankly, you aren’t going to make any plane unless it’s to Guantanamo,” I said.

  We left, and John got back on the computer while I smoked a cigar. The time was 2100. The 10th Mountain guys were still pushing back the insurgents with aggressive combat patrols in the foothills of the nearby mountains in preparation for General Schoomaker’s visit. It seemed to work. There was only sporadic mortar and gunfire that night.

  We were making progress, but running out of time. Clearly, if any info came back that Arash Ghaffari was associated with terrorists in the ****** ******, he was done, but it didn’t appear to be going in that direction.

  Even so, we needed to know what, if anything, his cousin had been instructing him to do ****** ******. We needed more information on what was going down in Afghanistan with the ********* What was the ******* really for? What other associates did his cousin have? Who were the men who had been rolled up with Ali Ghaffari?

  The next morning, we found all of the Special Forces guys—even our two intel contacts—were now clean shaven and in clean desert camo. John razzed the guys about how good they looked. John and I pressed Tim about flights back. He figured that after General Schoomaker arrived, there would be helicopters we could hop on and get a ride to Bagram. Time was ticking down.

  John and I discussed our final approach with Ghaffari. We decided to ask the same set of questions as yesterday and see if we could inch forward with that method.

  When we got in there, however, the plan didn’t work that way. Ghaffari looked awful. He was bleary-eyed and drawn. If he’d slept, it sure hadn’t been for very long.

  “We need to continue talking about your cousin and all of his activities to the point where we feel comfortable you have given us everything you can on him,” I told him, presenting him with the stark choice we’d been laying out to him for the last two days. “You better make a choice between your life in ******* and your cousin because, right now, unless you give us all the information you have on him and his activities, you will be loyal to your cousin, but you will end up at Guantanamo. If that is your choice, we can stop this discussion right now.”

  “No,” he said.
His voice cracked. “I will give you everything I have—anything you want to know about my cousin. As God is my witness.”

  “Tell us what your cousin was doing the night of the raid.”

  He admitted that his cousin had been instructed by ******* ************ to conduct terrorist attacks against **** ******** ** ****** and create chaos for the U.S. Army and the ISAF in eastern Afghanistan. He told us that his cousin had been traveling between **** *** ******, reporting on **** ********** to ******* ************ back in ******. He gave us the names of the men who had gathered at the meeting.

  By this admission, he was leaving himself open for death if his cousin ever found out. He had crossed the line. He had made his choice.

  “What were the specific tasks your cousin gave them that night?” I asked.

  “My cousin never shared with me the specific tasks or targets he was working on, but he had put together a number of groups to conduct terrorist attacks in eastern Afghanistan.”

  Interesting. The Recon could follow up to track these cells down.

  “What did your cousin ask you to do?” asked John.

  “Nothing,” Ghaffari insisted. “He asked me to do nothing. I moved the ***** for him into Afghanistan … that was it.”

  We believed him. At this point, he was pouring out his guts. I figured his cousin probably really did love him like a son, and was easing him into the family business.

  “What happened to the ********” I asked.

  He stopped for a moment. “You know my nephew was present at my cousins house?” he said.

  “Yes, we do.” We really did, we were briefed by the Recon guys on how the raid went down.

  “One of your ****** sergeants walked him out of the room,” he said, as if that explained it.

  “So?” John and I were baffled.

  “My cousin—he gave the money to him, and *he put it in his medical bag ***** *** ********* ** ** ********. Your ****** sergeant walked him out of the raid to keep him from harm.”