Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  “You know that Patrice Sullivan is our desk officer,” Dave said after she left. “Patrice used to work for you, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, she did, and I spent a lot of time trying to keep her on task,” I said. “When she was with Stratus Ivy, she was a constant, though enthusiastic, pain in my ass. She once slugged an FBI special agent in the face during an exercise where she was playing ‘terrorist.’ ”

  Dave grinned. “I don’t think we would be asking her to do anything operationally. We really need her to come up with a good suite of technology for us.”

  I realized that Dave was thinking two jumps ahead in the chess game, already planning to do an operation.

  “I suspect Patrice is still tied into Doug V.,” he said. Doug was one of the most brilliant minds in the intelligence community.

  “I think you’re right about that,” I said. “If we limit her to the technology, we should probably be OK. This will mean buying local stuff to use.”

  “You need money for that?”

  “No, we’ve got enough cash,” I said. “I just need to see if I can get Jim to send his crew into there.”

  “How soon?” Dave asked. He really wanted to get this under way before he left.

  “I can see Jim the day after tomorrow at the Ariana, and we can talk about it,” I said.

  “Can I go with you?” Dave asked.

  “Absolutely,” I said. I was starting to turn over what I’d heard in my head.

  “Then it’s a date,” Dave said. “You want me to do the convoy clearance or do you want to do it?”

  “Why don’t you do it and put me down as commander,” I said. I wanted to focus. “I’d like to think about this. I think I have a concept.”

  With that, I returned to the HUMINT tent. I had a lot of work to do.

  As I settled in front of my computer in my office, my brain began to wrestle with the concept of exploiting the Al Qaeda Hotel as an intelligence target but, more important, how to reduce its effectiveness as a command and control headquarters—and perhaps even capture a major HVT there.

  I wondered how we could best leverage and take advantage of this information. We had broken the back of the Taliban offensive; their attempt to come across the border and engage us militarily had failed. Nevertheless, the Taliban and al Qaeda were shrewd and ruthless adversaries. They would come back at us, though probably not in a similar fashion.

  OK, so we knew that, but rather than waiting to see what they dreamed up in the Al Qaeda Hotel, we needed to launch an intelligent, effective, offensive operation. As George Patton, my hero, said, “In war, the only sure defense is offense, and the efficiency of the offense depends on the warlike souls of those conducting it.” That was gospel for me.

  The intel that Captain Knowles had brought us gave us a clear advantage. We now knew of a safe haven in Pakistan that was a beehive of activity. The key was how to plan with precision to identify specific HVTs who frequented the hotel and to destroy their ability to resupply, rearm, and recruit. We needed to go there in order to stop them from coming here.

  That’s when I thought back to the movie Apocalypse Now and going up the river.

  13

  THE “HEART OF DARKNESS”

  I’M a big fan of movies. One of my top ten favorites is Apocalypse Now, based on the novel by Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness. The movie, set in Vietnam, tells the story of Army Capt. Benjamin Willard, played by Martin Sheen, who is sent into the jungle to assassinate Special Forces Col. Walter Kurtz, played by Marlon Brando. Kurtz has gone AWOL and is believed to be insane.

  I first saw it in Lisbon and, while I didn’t get it as a kid—other than the fact that it was a realistic and visually stunning war movie—it stuck with me.

  I got it now.

  In the movie, the mood darkens as Willard’s boat navigates up the fictional Nung River, and Willard’s obsession with Kurtz deepens. The movie chronicles Willard’s travel through a surreal world of war and revelation, much like I was finding myself in the middle of Afghanistan. There were a growing number of parallels between the Vietnam War and our efforts in Afghanistan. Scary parallels.

  I thought about the stunning stuff the foreign analyst had shown us. The Al Qaeda Hotel. I thought about Willard’s journey up the river and into the “heart of darkness.” Maybe we were going to have to do something to get at these guys where they lived; the remote area where Kurtz called his home was as remote as Wana was to us.

  Operation Dark Heart. That’s what this would be.

  Over the next twenty-four hours, I mapped it out: a long-term operation to destabilize the Taliban and al Qaeda and reduce their ability to reconstitute and train. ** *** **** ***** * *** ********** ** ***** *** ****** ********** *** ***** **** ** ** *** ****** ****** **** ** ******** ********* ********** ******* **** ** ***** *** **** ****** I can’t go into too much detail, except to say that we would know everything that was going on there.

  I’d learned a lot about the Taliban since being in country. They were vulnerable—and not just militarily. They were focused on reestablishing their extreme form of sharia, or Islamic law, across Afghanistan, but their partners in crime, al Qaeda, had a broader, more global agenda—fighting the United States and its allies and overthrowing Western-friendly regimes in the Middle East.

  We could use that against them.

  I was typing furiously at this point. We needed to accomplish three goals.

  First, enhance the intelligence from the Al Qaeda Hotel in Wana by conducting tactical operations. ************ *** ***** ************ ***** *** *** *** **** ** **** ******* **** ******** ******* * ******* ***** ** ************* ***** ************ ******* ***** ** * ********

  Second, understand everything going on there in such a detailed way that we could plan bold psychological operations. Exploit the differing ambitions of the Taliban and al Qaeda and their allied terrorist organizations. Sow confusion and hostility among their leaderships by posting anonymous night letters in Pakistani villages known to be Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds. To intimidate and influence them, we needed to move like shadows to disrupt them and make them fear for their own mortal existence. We had to stop seeing their actions through the prism of our culture and, instead, view it through their eyes, and we had to take it to their level. Turn them against each other. Use their mysticism, their fear of bad omens, their obsession with anything related to Allah, and their profound fear that Allah would be displeased with them—and try to find a way to feed into that. Kill one and then melt away. Kill another, then disappear. The idea was to make them so worried about their own survival in Pakistan that they wouldn’t have the time or ability to focus on Afghanistan.

  Third, once we had struck fear into their hearts and had gained sufficient intel from the Al Qaeda Hotel, destroy it, and move onto the next known Taliban safe haven. There were two more—one to the north and one to the south. Continue that strategy until there was no longer any viability for al Qaeda or the Taliban to reconstitute or rearm. We would have achieved “functional defeat.”

  To do that, however, we had to be willing to do cross-border operations into Pakistan using black special-mission capabilities. The Pakistan government couldn’t know about this. Because once the Paks knew, the Taliban would find out. Plus, the Paks were very sensitive about U.S. incursions into their country, and technically we were allowed over the Pak border only if we were in “hot pursuit” of a target.

  So we needed to be creative with the authority we did have, and do what was tactically and strategically necessary to keep up our momentum from the victory we had achieved in Mountain Viper.

  We had beaten the Taliban in the south before they could retake Kandahar, and we had beaten them badly, but we also knew as long as they had a safe haven they could retreat to in Pakistan, they would regenerate, get stronger, and come back. We had to strike at their heart of darkness. Get them where they live. Take away their security, their ability to plan and conduct operations.

  Twenty-fou
r hours later I had a plan. I leaned back in my chair and read it over again.

  This just might work. No, it would work.

  If politics didn’t get in the way.

  Dave and I headed out on a convoy for Kabul. Once there, the ***** folks went to do their thing, while Dave and I met Jim Brady ** *** ****** to discuss the operation and get his buy-in before we went to General Vines and pitched it to him.

  I’d known Jim for years. He was the single most effective operator Defense HUMINT had. Jim was a close friend that I had known since my days at INSCOM in the late 1980s. He had been a coconspirator on many of my past black operations—official and unofficial ones. He was very good at getting information out of people and somehow did things that didn’t piss off leadership. He got away with shit that I would never get away with.

  Also, he was a good friend. The last time I’d seen Jim was on my supposed wedding day three months ago when Rina and I had broken up. He was going to be my best man and had walked into an emotional scene at our house. His magic had worked on me then.

  A small room had been set up for the meeting at the ******. In the hotel’s heyday, it was probably the reception area for the second floor of the hotel. High-backed chairs like those in an eighteenth-century English manor were scattered around—a touch of the British colonies that still remained in this wrecked capital. I had spoken to Jim on the phone, pushing a button to get it on the secret level, giving him an idea of what we wanted to talk to him about. He sounded excited about zeroing in on a known center of gravity since they hadn’t made much progress on their own, **** ***** * but he hadn’t heard the details yet.

  He was waiting for us. “Hey, brother, good to see you,” he said as we came in, and we gave each other a hug. “I like the goatee.”

  “Your face is like a baby’s ass,” I told him. “Where is your freakin’ beard?” With hair slicked back and smooth features, he looked like Alec Baldwin from The Departed, where Baldwin played a Boston police captain.

  “It always comes out like baby fuzz,” he said with a grin.

  “Maybe when your testicles drop, the problem will solve itself,” I joked.

  “Hey, the last time I saw you, your testicles were pretty far up there.” He laughed.

  “You got me there,” I said. “Speaking of testicles, here is Dave Christenson. He is an intelligence officer ** ** ***** ** *** here in country.” Dave shot me an annoyed look as he shook Jim’s hand.

  “Tony speaks highly of you,” Dave told Jim.

  “Yeah, well, I know where his desk is in Clarendon. He knows I’ll Super Glue everything down if he doesn’t say nice things,” Jim said.

  We each grabbed a chair and gathered in a semicircle.

  “We’ve got a concept I want to talk to you about,” I told Jim.

  “And I want to talk to you about some things we want to do at Bagram that’ll need your approval,” he said.

  “OK, you first,” I said.

  “We want to get into the BCP,” he said. “We think one of the detainees had access to one of the HVTs we’re after ** **** ***** ***

  Since I was head of HUMINT ops in Afghanistan, he had to go through me to get into the BCP.

  “I don’t hang out there much, but I can get you access,” I said. “Whatever you need, we’ll get you. What do you have in mind?”

  Jim briefed me on a creative concept for gaining intelligence on bad guys. ** ******** ******* ********* *** ****** **** ****** ***************** **** ** ** **** *** *** ** *** *** ***** Almost like counterintelligence operations.

  I was impressed. It was sound, and it was legal.

  “It’s great,” I said. “I’ll get Lisa, our operator there, to get you in.”

  Favor done. Now it was my turn.

  “What do you have for me?” he wanted to know.

  I leaned back in my chair, hands on the back of my head, and looked him square in the eyes.

  “Operation Dark Heart.”

  He gave a high-pitched laugh. “Really? Did Jeff Murphy go rogue and create his own army of tribesman? He was going native the last time I saw him.”

  “Something like that,” I said, leaving the joke about Murphy—one of my favorite colonels—alone for now. “You familiar with Wana?”

  “My guys have been through it. Not a pleasant place.”

  “We need to go back there.” I briefed him on the intel, then on the concept of operations.

  Jim leaned forward, hands on knees, and listened intently. When I finished, he thought for a moment. Here goes, I thought. Our first hurdle.

  “Excellent,” he said finally. “We’re on board. This’ll give us access to the HVTs that we want to get. Even if our specific guys aren’t in Wana, it’s a promising start to gain insight into their comings and goings.”

  This was a win-win for both of us. It was a win *** **** ***** * because it gave them a path to exchanging information on the HVTs as well as a viable shot at killing or capturing them, and it gave **** ***** *** a real opportunity to reduce the effectiveness of the safe havens to regenerate forces and plan operations. It got to the very heart of both issues.

  Jim promised to dispatch one of his teams within twenty-four hours to do an initial recon of Wana, and he recommended we get together at the Safe House in Kabul for a briefing on what they found and to discuss the way ahead.

  “Jim, I’ll leave this intel for you to study,” Dave said as he handed over a package of paper—copies of the key information.

  “Good luck with that.” I looked at Dave. “He’ll have to learn to read first.”

  “Hey, there are pictures in there, too,” Jim said, leafing through the packet. “I’ll figure it out.” He suggested that we both brief Randy “Big Red” Hoover on the concept, and I agreed. Hoover was chief of the DIA *********** detachment in Kabul and ran the Safe House there. It also gave us an opportunity to watch cable TV and sleep—at least for one night—in real beds.

  Jim dispatched his guy to rent a room in Wana with a visual line of site of the Al Qaeda Hotel. Within ten days, we had a detailed report on the first recon.

  This was gonna be a complicated, multifaceted operation. We would be using imagery from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. ** ***** *** ***** ************ ** *** ** ***** ******* *** ******* ** ***** **** ** ************ ******* **** ******** ********* *** ***** ******* ** **** **** ****** ** **** *** ** ***********

  The recon, to determine operational feasibility, would go on for thirty days. So far, it looked good, but we still had to get operational approval ultimately from General Vines, the commander of Joint Task Force 180.

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

  I was drawing on my experience in running a black DoD special-mission unit that involved offensive operations aimed at strategic targets, such as certain countries, as well as transnational targets like al Qaeda. Some of these operations were so sensitive and successful, and the intelligence take so unique, that we could not put it into any database or transmit it electronically. I had briefed CIA Director George Tenet about them. The first time, he was in shock. He looked over at my bosses—Lt. Gen. Pat Hughes, director of DIA, and DIA director for operations Maj. Gen. Bob Harding—and said, “Holy shit. You guys are doing this?”

  They grinned their asses off. It isn’t every day you catch the DCI off guard—in a good way.

  Then again, that was all half a world away and many years past.

  After our meeting, Randy and a two-vehicle convoy showed up in front ** *** ******. He would take u
s to the Safe House. Dave and I put on our “Hajji hats”—flat-topped Afghan hats worn by the local men—so we could look, in profile, like any other van loaded with locals.

  DIA operators conducted *********** operations the old-fashioned way. They fanned out over Afghanistan building up Afghan spy networks that provided us with crucial intel on the movements of the Taliban and al Qaeda. They were presided over by Lt. Col. Randy “Big Red” Hoover.

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

  Bill Wilson said he’d gotten word that DIA wanted me kept away from the house. There was always this fear by DIA leadership that I would somehow “take charge” and go off in my own direction if given half a chance. Or something like that. Rich and Randy totally disagreed, and I had an open invitation to visit whenever.

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

  There was a debate over whether the Safe House ** **** ***** * would do the ***** ****** operation—and how long we could keep this from the CIA, because they couldn’t be trusted not to pass the intel along to their sources in Pakistan since the CIA considered the country their personal territory. We were going to do this as a Title 10 operation, which legally did not require CIA coordination, but, as a courtesy, we’d have to notify them at some point. Randy happened to be meeting with station chief Jacob Walker every day.