Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  Not to be deterred, Schoomaker directed the establishment of a replica of the LIWA technology and the project was revived and expanded.

  In the meantime, SOCOM still wasn’t allowing any action to be taken on the suspected terrorists with the Post-it Notes on their photographs. I decided that if we couldn’t use the data on those individuals, then maybe the FBI could since these guys were operating in the United States. I set up a meeting between SOCOM and the Washington field office of the FBI, where I had some contacts, but, at the last minute, SOCOM canceled it. I tried again—and again. Each time, I would get a call from my baffled FBI friends wanting to know where the hell SOCOM was.

  I called Scott. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Why aren’t you guys showing up for these meetings?”

  It turned out, he told me, that SOCOM had been advised by their lawyers not to go. He told me that SOCOM lawyers had forced them not to show up for the FBI meetings because they feared controversy if Able Danger were portrayed as a military operation that had violated the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States on green cards or valid entry visas.

  Never mind that they were freakin’ terrorists.

  The first week of October 2000, while sorting through data and looking for al Qaeda centers of gravity, a surprising location showed up on the radar: Yemen.

  During an update to General Schoomaker, just prior to his retirement, one of the analysts assigned to the project told the general that al Qaeda’s activities were the second highest in Yemen. This was significant. Schoomaker noted it and suggested that the intel be forwarded to Central Command to make them knowledgeable of the threat.

  The threat information on Yemen was passed to the CENTCOM representative assigned to Able Danger, but the information was never passed on, and Lt. Commander Kirk Lippold sailed his ship into the Port of Aden with no knowledge of what had been discovered about al Qaeda half a world away in a SCIF in Garland, Texas. On October 12, 2000, he and his crew fought valiantly to save their ship after al-Qaeda militants in Yemen bombed his destroyer, the USS Cole, in a suicide attack that killed seventeen U.S. servicemen.

  After General Schoomaker retired in October 2000, his successor, air force General Charles Holland, didn’t seem to understand the Able Danger concept. From Schoomaker’s retirement on, Able Danger struggled to survive. Holland ordered Able Danger to terminate its activities sometime in late January 2001, and directed that it become a SOCOM J2/intelligence analysis project. It was rolled into the Special Operations Joint Intelligence Center and was consumed in the dark waters of the river of bureaucracy.

  Ironically, it was clear that higher-ups wanted projects like this. When I was with Vice Adm. Tom Wilson, then director of DIA, briefing General Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in early 2001 on a parallel clandestine operation, I explained to him that the Internet tools, techniques, and procedures we were using derived from Able Danger. Shelton nodded and said he remembered Able Danger and approved our new project immediately.

  “The people of this country think we are doing things like this,” he told us. “We should be doing things like this.”

  Shortly after the meeting with General Shelton, my work with Able Danger ended. Maj. Gen. Rod Isler came in the winter of 2000 to replace Maj. Gen. Bob Harding who, as deputy director for operations overseeing Defense HUMINT, was one of Able Danger’s few supporters at DIA.

  Isler, who didn’t want anything to go wrong on his watch, though, was no fan of Able Danger or other projects that I was working on. Every operation Stratus Ivy was running was high risk/high gain—and all too high risk for him. Isler ordered me to “cease all support” to Able Danger.

  The old arguments about DIA being more for analysis than operations came up again.

  “It’s not your job to provide direct support to SOCOM or chase terrorists,” Isler told me. By this point, we were practically shouting at each other. “You shouldn’t be involved in operations.” I was as close to hitting an officer as I had ever been.

  “Sir, if we don’t do this, who will?” I argued. “The objective of Able Danger is to penetrate al Qaeda leaders to the point where we know what they’re doing so well we can prevent attacks. That was the ultimate objective.”

  “Well, it’s not your job,” he said.

  I was stunned. “Sir, if it’s not our job, whose job is it?”

  “I don’t know,” he repeated, “but it’s not yours.”

  I stormed out of his fourteenth floor office in disgust. It was the beginning of the end of Stratus Ivy, and I knew it. Shortly after that, one of his deputies started making preparations to move me to Latin America, where I had no background or interest—anyway, salsa makes me break out in hives.

  Then the September 11 attacks happened. It was devastating: To know we were right, and the critics were wrong.…

  Shortly after that, Eileen Preisser, who had run a good portion of the Information Dominance Center at LIWA, called me to have coffee and told me she had something to show me. Eileen was the brilliant scientist who put together the core technologies at LIWA and had managed the effort that had identified Atta. Over coffee at a bagel shop in Springfield, she showed me one of the charts produced by LIWA back in January 2000 that Scott and I had looked at. She pointed out the Brooklyn cell.

  “Look,” she said.

  I was confused at first. What was I supposed to be looking for?

  “Look,” she repeated, gesturing to the photographs in the cell.

  I was getting annoyed. “What’s your point?” I said.

  She was even more emphatic. “Look at the chart,” she said.

  OK. OK, I thought. I’ll look at the chart again.

  It took a while, but I found him. Mohamed Atta. The same sculpted face and strange eyes that had been plastered across every television in America. It was the man I had seen more than a year before when Scott and I had stared down at him in the SOCOM conference room.

  Mohamed Atta. Mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Hijacker in control of American Airlines Flight 11 that was the first plane to strike the World Trade Center.

  I had a sinking feeling at the pit of my stomach. We had been on the right track. Hell, we were even on the right train. Despite that, because of the bureaucracy, we had been stopped. Otherwise, we might have played a role in stopping the 9/11 attacks.

  I asked Eileen what she planned to do with the information.

  “I don’t know,” she said grimly, “but I plan to do something.”

  I knew she would. She was a woman of action.

  On a warm September day, about two weeks after 9/11, I was on my normal afternoon run from the Pentagon to the Lincoln Memorial, when I got a call on my cell from Eileen.

  “You’ll never guess where I am,” she told me. She was sitting in the outer office of Scooter Libby, then assistant to Vice President Cheney, with Rep. Curt Weldon, Rep. Chris Shays, and Rep. Dan Burton. They were going in to brief Steven Hadley, assistant national security adviser to the White House.

  I was surprised, but relieved. The Atta information, and our work on Able Danger, was being provided to the right government leadership. I really expected that the Able Danger team might even be reconstituted.

  I moved on then. I was confident that the information was in the right hands.

  To this day, I don’t know who finally pulled the plug on Able Danger—or why—but I do know that a lot of people were more concerned about their careers and getting that next promotion than they were about protecting their country. The army and SOCOM were ahead of their time in doing something about global terror. It was not a “failure of imagination” that resulted in the 9/11 attacks. It was pure bureaucratic bumbling and intellectual corruption.

  In the end, being right and ahead of our time had gone nowhere. The people who had failed their country had been promoted and had moved up the military hierarchy rather than being fired and moved out.

  I stared at my computer. It was time to tell the 9/11 Co
mmission what I knew. It was the right thing to do. I had gotten an e-mail that I was on the agenda for the next morning.

  Members of the commission and their staff had gathered in the large command dining hall behind the two-story stucco command building in the CJTF 180 building and had set themselves up around folding tables. There were six people when I came in, including General Bagby, all clustered at one end of the table. Some of them didn’t look too interested. Clearly, they were wondering why they’d ended up in a war zone.

  Until this point, I hadn’t paid much attention to the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. It had set up shop the previous year, in November 2002. Its mandate: “to prepare a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the September 11, 2001, attacks,” and to provide recommendations to safeguard against future attacks. I had figured that after Eileen had passed the information on Able Danger to the National Security Council, everything was taken care of. I was wrong. I didn’t know that at the time.

  I was part of the first group of witnesses who would talk about pre–9/11 intel and intelligence failures. Commission executive director Philip Zelikow—a rather gaunt figure with a long face, glasses, and a subdued demeanor—greeted us and settled into his seat. I felt kind of awkward in my golf shirt and baggy pants. This wasn’t something I looked forward to, but I just wanted to make sure they knew about Able Danger. It was important.

  My turn took about an hour. I followed the bulleted points I’d made on my memo to myself. I outlined everything from *** *** to General Schoomaker’s ordering me into Able Danger to the data mining to the actionable options to be taken against al Qaeda, which we’d outlined in January 2001. That got people’s attention.

  All listened intently as I walked through my narrative, hitting bullet after bullet, but the kicker came when I mentioned that Able Danger was successful in “discovering two of the three cells that were successful in conducting the 9/11 attacks—to include Atta.” There was a shuffling of people in their chairs, and the commission staff appeared to be all of a sudden uncomfortable.

  I listed the bureaucratic roadblocks that had been thrown up in front of Able Danger, how LIWA had been pulled from the project, and how I’d tried to alert the FBI to this finding before the 9/11 attacks and how the SOCOM lawyers had shut me down. In the end, I explained how, despite multiple and strenuous attempts to revive it, Able Danger was finally shut down, and its work had been sucked into the gullet of the military bureaucracy.

  There was a stunned silence when I was finished. General Bagby finally spoke. “Very compelling report, Major Shaffer,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir,” I replied.

  The commission then moved on to the next witness, and I stayed to listen. After the commission stopped for a break, I was getting ready to leave when Zelikow came up to me.

  “What you said today is very important,” he told me, handing over his business card. “We need to continue this dialogue when you return to the United States. Please contact me when you return so we can continue this discussion.”

  My next thought was instantaneous. This was going to be trouble. DIA did not like us talking to anyone outside the organization, but this was damned important.

  “I’d love to do that, but I’m not back stateside until late December or January,” I told him.

  “That’s fine,” he said.

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

  I left the room to go back to work, shoving the whole episode into the back of my mind. I had to go back to the war.

  15

  TIPPING POINT

  WINTER had come to Bagram, I had set the briefing to the 9/11 Commission aside, and Operation Dark Heart was now in motion. *** ********** *** *** ** **** * ******** **** **** * **** ** ***** ** *** ** ***** ****** ** *** * ****** ** ************* *** ******** ** *** ** ** ***** ** *** **** ******* *** ********** ** ** **** ** *** **** ***** ******** **** * ******* **** ******** ************ ********* *** ***** ***** ** *** **** *** ****** **** *** ************ ** **** ****** *** *** ******** ** ** ** * **********

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  Just as we started to cook, we were hit by some stunning news one morning late in October. General Vines had been absent from the general’s briefing, which was unusual for him. General Bagby announced after the briefing that the general had left the country. A medical issue, General Bagby said. The general had been evacuated out. He was gone.

  Wow, what kind of medical condition would cause someone to instantly vanish? Vines didn’t strike us as the kind of general who would just up and leave without some kind of thank-you to the troops and staff—especially since the recent battles had gone well.

  But just like that, he had vanished.

  We found out later it was a medical ailment that was resolved, and he eventually returned to duty. It’s funny how often small, seemingly minor twists of fate that appear to have little importance at the moment prove to have huge consequences later. It wasn’t until later that I realized this was one for me.

  Usually generals leaving a post will overlap their successor by a few days and have a change-of-command ceremony—a tangible transfer of authority and command from one leader to another. If they have to leave quickly, they will at least do a walk-through of the troops, but as far as we knew, even a walk-through hadn’t occurred.

  We respected and appreciated General Vines. He knew how to fight a war, and he let us do our jobs. He understood how to establish and assign objectives that were clear and achievable.

  Plus he didn’t buy this Pentagon charade that the war was over and that we were in peacekeeping mode. He realized that battle wasn’t over—not by a long shot.

  Maybe that was the problem. It was clear that the White House party line was that the war was finished—move along, folks, nothing to see here—and we were supposed to just rebuild the country. OK, so we hadn’t gotten bin Laden yet. That was no big deal. He was just around the corner, on his last legs.

  Sure.

  General Vines knew the score, understood the intel and, in Patton-like style, wanted to take the war to the enemy—to show him no quarter. The Taliban was still there and was a threat to the long-term stability and economic programs that were just then taking root in Afghanistan. General Vines knew that he had to break the back of the counteroffensive before the Taliban could come back and take the country again.

  Privately, we assumed, he’d had to push back against Rumsfeld’s aggressive effort to turn activities in Afghanistan into a reconstruction-focused, postcombat, “permissive” environment, and to declare that the large-scale combat was over. After all, the focus of the main effort was Iraq. We wouldn’t want any bad news to tarnish the brilliant victory achieved in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan.

  General Vines had been the first top U.S. military commander to publicly confirm the Taliban resurgence out of Pakistan into Afghanistan at the beginning of Mountain Viper. Also Mountain Viper had proven that the war was not over, and that a committ
ed enemy was willing to mount major operations. It would take a leader of General Vines’s focus and wisdom to keep up the effort, to aggressively seek to engage the enemy, and to keep him off balance while the civil-military programs could take hold.

  We assumed his relief would be cut from the same cloth.

  With Vines’s departure, that moved up the arrival of Lt. Gen. David Barno who, unlike Vines, would be commander of the combined forces in Afghanistan—the first overall commander of NATO and U.S. forces. (NATO had assumed command of ISAF in mid-August 2003.)

  Combined Forces Command (CFC) became headquarters to the two military elements in country—NATO/ISAF and CTJF-180—which General Barno would command. Brigadier Gen. Lloyd James Austin III arrived within weeks to assume the takeover of CJTF 180.

  Eventually, General Barno would need to endorse Operation Dark Heart, but we weren’t too worried. Vines had been sold on it, and General Bagby was behind it as well, so we expected General Barno to display the same degree of enthusiasm.

  Only a few days after General Barno arrived, one of General Bagby’s staff officers summoned us. Grab your armor and weapons and go, he told us. General Bagby wanted us to helo to Kabul with him right then to meet with General Barno. I was asked to brief on the successful use of HUMINT in the recent combat operations. After running to the hooch to grab my body armor, we sprinted from the 180 compound to a waiting Black Hawk, rotors spinning, with General Bagby on board.

  I had deposited the slides and notes for my presentation on Dark Heart in an envelope and stuffed them in a pocket of my cargo pants. We were also going to pitch the Dark Heart operational concept on behalf of the Leadership Targeting Cell. Col. John Ritchie, the new 180 senior intelligence officer, would introduce us at the briefing. Bill Wilson had left, and Maj. Chris Medford had assumed the duties of chief of the HUMINT support cell at 180.

  General Bagby, Colonel Ritchie, and Colonel Howard were all big supporters of Dark Heart—and all knew what was at stake.