Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  John and I rolled our eyes.

  “Can you tell us where *he went?”

  He said he didn’t know but gave us the names of associates in ****** where *he might have gone.

  We moved back to his visit to ****** with his cousin, and he gave us a detailed accounting of his cousin activities there and the people whom he believed were ************ ****** who met with his cousin. He methodically worked his way through the details.

  I moved in to solidify our gains. We had to get him to understand that if he wanted his life ** *** ****** ****** back, he had to do something to prove it.

  “Are you willing to work against your cousin?” I asked.

  He looked up at me as if he had just been asked to kill his best friend.

  “You’ve got to make a choice right now,” I said.

  “No, no, no, I understand,” he said. He had no fight left in him. “My life ** ******* is more important than my cousin, and I am willing to do whatever you need me to do.”

  He was looking down with what appeared to be shame, then he took a deep breath and looked up at us with new determination.

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

  He was now John’s cat. It would be his job to take this guy on as an asset since he would be back ** *** ****** ******, and it would then be a ******** *** *********** ****** John took over the questioning at that point, asking him a dozen questions, running through what we’d already asked him, and got clear and concise answers that were consistent with his previous ones. At the conclusion, John took a deep breath.

  When John started the questioning, my thoughts were already gone. I had already started to think about our return to Bagram and getting back on the task of targeting the ******* in ********* This was good stuff but as far as I was concerned it was now history. We needed to keep moving forward, and I did not see a big threat to *********** here, so it was time to keep pressing on the bad guys.

  We learned what we needed to know. It appeared that Arash Ghaffari was not part of a sleeper cell in the ****** ******, but he had a front-row seat on some nasty stuff in Afghanistan. He’d given us the intel we needed to determine that the Iranians were, indeed, getting involved in the war here and were relying on an intelligence agent—Ali Ghaffari—to do their dirty work. They had given him ******* to form terrorist cells and begin conducting operations against the ********* in Afghanistan. By getting to Ali Ghaffari early on, we were able to stop him in his tracks and to stop the Iranians—cut out the cancer before it had a chance to grow.

  John and I were getting ready to leave when Arash stopped us. “Wait,” he said. “I feel very strongly that there is something I have to admit to you so that you understand that I am a good ********.”

  John and I looked at each other as we stopped in our tracks. We had thought he had told us everything.

  “I must admit to you something that is very, very important … to clear my honor.”

  John and I just stared at him. What had we missed?

  “I must admit that my wife and I had traveled to Iran before,” he said.

  “Yeah, you told us that,” said John, puzzled.

  “I did a terrible thing.” He was speaking rapidly, and John and I tensed. Shit. Maybe this was about nukes.

  “In my religion, there are specific things one can do to help ensure his children are right in the eyes of God.”

  Oh, boy, I thought, this was about to go into any number of directions—all of them very bad.

  “Well, I’m not sure how to say this.” He looked up at John and me, seeking an affirming look—or something.

  “Consummation of our child is very important in our faith,” he said, staring at us fixedly.

  “OK …” John said. Where in the hell was this going?

  “I must admit to you that in one of our trips to Iran, we visited a special mosque.”

  “And …?” I said. What did this have to do with nukes or terrorists? We knew, of course, that terrorists used mosques as staging grounds. “We’re listening.”

  “I must admit to you … I am so ashamed of this … my wife and I had sex in this mosque to conceive our son.”

  Whoa … sex in a mosque—now that is ballsy!

  “Was that it?” I said to him, still waiting for info of military value. Maybe I’d misunderstood.

  “We conceived our child in a mosque in Iran.” Ghaffari looked back at us, surprised. “This isn’t important to you?”

  The tension in the room evaporated. I was fighting hard not to break out laughing, and I glanced at John. He was, too.

  “We’re Americans. We don’t care about things like that,” I told him.

  Ghaffari looked disappointed. It was clear it meant a great deal to get that off his shoulders. He’d expected a bigger reaction from us.

  “Don’t worry about it,” John said, “no big deal. You are good to go.”

  As we left we recognized it for what it was: What it showed us was how much we’d broken this guy. No one admits having sex in a mosque to the U.S. government. To Penthouse Forum, maybe, but not to Uncle Sam.

  With that, we were out of there.

  John and I went to the Tactical Operations Center and gave them a detailed verbal dump of everything we’d learned. By now, the Recon intel guys had an inkling that the nephew had been involved in evacuating the ***** and there was a full-blown search under way for him ** ****** *** *** *********

  They were confident they would chase down the nephew for the **** and go after any other remnants of Iranian activity in the area.

  We told the Recon guys to let the guy loose. They gave him back his belongings and took him into ******, where he could get transportation to Kabul to catch his plane. It would be up to the *** ** ***** ** **** *** ** *********** *** *** *** ** ***** ** ****** ** *** ******* ** ***** ** **** ********* *** ****** **** *** ******* *** *******

  We grabbed our kit, and the Special Forces drove us out in armored Humvees to the landing area.

  Within minutes, we heard the whoop-whoop-whoop of a flight of Chinooks and watched them lumber in with an ever-present two-bird Apache escort.

  We had finished just in time.

  A huge backwash of dust hit our faces as the two Chinooks landed while the Apache orbited above looking for bad guys. General Schoomaker and his staff came off the 47 closest to us. He looked over at us, but knew better than to come over and talk to us. He knew undercover intelligence folks when he saw them.

  The two Chinooks lumbered slowly into the air, whipping us with dust and debris as they clawed the clear blue sky for altitude.

  Before the Chinooks were gone from the horizon, we could hear the whop-whop-whop of a single Air Force UH-60 Black Hawk with an Apache escort arriving over the same stretch of weathered asphalt road.

  As it touched down, Tim shouted at us.

  “This is the one we’re supposed to get on,” said Tim.

  With my kit and a still aching knee from my bad exit from the Chinook three nights back, I moved toward the door of the now stationary Black Hawk.

  As the door opened, out came Christiane Amanpour of CNN in a bright yellow nylon jacket, cameraman in tow.

  She stopped and stared at us, clearly surprised but intrigued. She seemed on the verge of speaking to us, but I motioned to John and Tim, and we quickly moved past her without a word and onto the chopper.

  I gave her a thin smile and helped the crew chief slide the door closed behind me.

  Within two minutes we were back in the sky and rolling. A short Japanese journalist, whose Kevlar vest appeared ten sizes too big for him, sat to my immediate right and directly across from John. Tim and I sat against the starboard door and its window.

  We flew near the nap of the earth back to Bagram, never rising higher than 2,000 feet above sea level but mostly staying below 1,000 feet. The terrain varied from scarred desert—areas pockmarked with craters from past artillery barrages—to jagged rifts of rocky mountain terrain in which the striations showed la
yer after layer of the Earth’s history now open to the sky. At times, the jagged mountains towered over the chopper. It was a roller-coaster ride.

  Having been on similar types of flights years ago, I’d had the wisdom not to eat lunch before the flight. Tim had apparently not been so savvy. He had been grazing all morning on his supply of beef jerky and, on the flight, kept offering the bag to John and myself.

  I never had taken any jerky from Tim to this point, and neither had John, but I think John was to the point that he was going to take a piece just to be polite. At that moment, the Black Hawk went into a swooping dive. I felt my stomach go up into my throat. Just as John started to reach for a piece of jerky, Tim pulled the bag away and forcefully replaced all the jerky he had eaten earlier in the day into the bag.

  He finished puking, calmly closed the bag, and put it back in his cargo pocket.… Cryin’ shame. He’d ruined a perfectly good bag of beef jerky.

  The mountain ranges were connected by long stretches of open desert—stark, empty, completely lifeless rolling dry mud baked to a light tan. By my count, we passed five separate mountain ranges. About 5 miles out, when we reached the John Wayne Pass at the last mountain range before Bagram, our Apache escort faded back and entered a separate approach pattern to Bagram.

  After having run through my mental “things to do” list, my thoughts turned to Kate. I had some planning to do for her, too.

  10

  IMPROVISED RAID

  SO much for plans. A short time after my return from ******, I was holding a gun in the lobby of Afghanistan’s Post Telephone and Telegraph Company (PTT), while a little old lady chattered away in Pashtu on one side of me and an ominous crowd of men gathered on the other. If we didn’t get out of here within a couple of minutes, it was going to get very, very ugly.

  I took another glance at the growing group of men and tried to look as if I were actually listening to the old lady, while I carefully moved the selector switch on my M-4 from SAFE all the way to AUTO. Why the hell were John and Lisa taking so long?

  This episode had started with a fairly innocuous request from ***** Sgt. Lisa Werman, who came up to me after one of the morning stand-ups shortly after I got back from *******

  *** *** **** ***** **** *** ****** *********** *************** **** ***** **** ****** * ********* ***** *** ***** **** ***** ****** * **** **** ******* **** *** Can you come over to my office and take a look at it?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Let me finish a couple of things and I’ll be over.”

  I’d acquired a reputation as kind of a tech head. I’m not sure it was deserved, but I was willing to give it a try. The phone had been captured off a bad guy killed in Khowst. ****** *** ****** ** **** ** ****** The phone might hold key information on his network of associates. There was a big problem, though: Lisa and her folks couldn’t break in to it.

  I headed over to the ***** office in the BCP (Bagram Collection Point), or prison—a handmade sign by one of the troops over the entrance proclaimed it to be HOTEL CALIFORNIA. Frankly, I had been avoiding the place. There were problems over how prisoners were being interrogated. Suspicious deaths had been reported, and there were ongoing investigations. I wanted nothing to do with it. Despite my reputation as a troublemaker, I really don’t go looking for trouble, and as long as I was operations chief for our HUMINT projects in Afghanistan, my people were not going to do anything that would remotely show up on the radar as improper or illegal without good reason. No matter what, I did not allow abuse.

  The BCP was an old hangar converted for the task—large, dark, and foreboding. Painted the typical Bagram tan outside, its windows were painted black. I turned in my weapon, was issued a badge, and went inside for the first time. Inside, the PUCs (persons under control) wore what looked like bright orange scrubs. A few shuffled by me, being taken, blindfolded and shackled, to interrogation rooms located off a walkway that ran along the wall above the first floor. There was constant noise—banging against cell bars by prisoners, yelling by guards, which had the effect, by design or happenstance, of never allowing the detainees to feel at ease.

  The ***** office was on the second floor in a secure area off the walkway. It wasn’t much bigger than the area where I worked in the 180 HUMINT tent and was crowded with enough technological equipment to put a man on Mars. Computers, a few radios, wires, antennas, a digital camera with a giant telephoto lens, *** *************** *** ***** **** **** ****** **** ********* ******** ******** ************ **** ***** ******** ***** ****** **** ********* *** ***** ***** ** **** ** *** ******** were crammed onto the desk. It looked more like a high-tech workshop than an office.

  “What’s up?” I asked Lisa, a petite brunette with a spunky attitude—kinda like Katie Couric in combat. Lisa had been unable to unlock the captured phone. It was a blue Nokia, fairly typical for the era, but Lisa said there seemed to be some kind of *********** ******** ** code that wouldn’t let us unlock the phone *** *****

  She handed it to me. “You see?” she said. “We get a signal, but I can’t even make a call.”

  I turned it over in my hand. “What options do we have?” I asked her.

  “Well, we could send it back to Washington ** *********, but the value of the info would be degraded by the time they got to it,” she said.

  “Do you want to stop by the new GSM (Group Spécial Mobile—the most popular standard for cell phones) store right next to that Internet café in Kabul?” I asked. “We can see if they can get into it.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Great idea. That’s a brand-new telecommunications provider. They’re selling phones to the Afghans like hotcakes.”

  “Which is interesting,” I said, “since most Afghans don’t make more than $300 a year.”

  “They’re pretty much dirt cheap,” said Lisa, “and the plans are better than those in the United States. When is the next convoy going to Kabul?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Let’s do it,” she said.

  The next day, we performed our typical 80 to 100-mile-per-hour run from Bagram into Kabul without incident, and the FBI vehicle didn’t even blow a tire as it was apt to do every hundred miles or so. We brought with us five 10th Mountain troops, mostly tactical intel types who never get out of the wire, so they could shop at the weekly ISAF bazaar.

  We took the phone to one of the commercial telephone ventures popping up in Afghanistan that we figured might be compatible to their network. The idea being to see if they could open it for us. We had John with us and another guy from the FBI, along with a translator. With the FBI providing security outside, Lisa, Dave, and I took the phone into the vendor to have him take a look at it. The rest of the troops set up a secure perimeter around the parked vehicles outside.

  The vendor was polite, but openly skeptical about his ability to do anything with a phone from another network. After hooking it up to a computer, he fiddled around for a few minutes but soon gave up, shaking his head. “No, I cannot open it,” he said in passable English.

  “What’s going on?” said John as we emerged from the store.

  “He couldn’t get it open,” said Lisa.

  “Is there anywhere else in Afghanistan where we could get help to break into the phone?” I asked Lisa.

  “I think it’s part of an older GSM system run by the Afghanistan Telephone and Telegraph Company,” she said.

  “The telecommunications center?” I asked.

  She nodded. “That’s where I think we would find the help to break into this phone. Plus,” she said, “we might be able to download 100 percent of the entire country’s phone infrastructure—all of the technical data and all of the phone numbers in the system.” That would include the database containing the names and addresses of the phone users *** *********** ** *** **** ******* *** *** *********** *** ******* *** ********** *** *** ********** **** *** *** **** ***** **************

  Basically, it would be the Rosetta Stone. It would give us the information we needed to better eavesdrop on the te
rrorists—** ****** ******** ******** ***** ****** **** **** ****** *** *** **** **** ******** A lot of people knew this information was there but it was difficult, politically and logistically, to get at, and the Afghans never would have volunteered it.

  “Wow,” I said. “But that’s Indian territory.” I gave them the street location. “It’s the heart of where the bad guys are hanging out these days.” The Taliban were infiltrating the phone companies and putting their trusted personnel into jobs within the companies to protect their interests.

  John shrugged. “I’ve been down there before. Doesn’t seem that bad to me.”

  “Yeah, but you were not trying to steal something that is potentially important to the Taliban.”

  Dave looked at John and me and said, “There is a bookstore that I’ve wanted to check out again.” Dave collected rare books and on missions he liked to visit the small bookshops scattered around the city and had used them as cover stops in the past. Despite the risks, he’d stopped by the bookshop next to the building.

  “Oh, now there’s justification for us to go there,” I responded.

  “Just what are we after?” asked John.

  “We’re apparently after a ton of shit,” I said. “We want the data to break into this phone and, while we’re at it, we’d like to download all the data for every phone on the system. But we don’t know where this data is kept in this place.” I glanced over at Lisa, who kinda shrugged.

  “So …?” said John.

  “John, we don’t even have a floor plan for the building, and we can’t just walk in and take the place over.”

  “So …?” repeated John.

  I was getting a little exasperated. “We do not have enough folks to set up a perimeter, and we haven’t done a rehearsal.”

  John was still undeterred. “Tony, we don’t need a rehearsal. We can just go in.”

  Dave chimed in. “Yeah, and we could use my stopping at the book cart as cover.” Great. Now my navy friend had become an expert on clandestine operations.