Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  “Gentlemen,” Tim called out. “It’s time for the awards.”

  While Colonel Negro had told me he had nominated me for the Bronze Star, I didn’t know it had been approved. I figured it would eventually be awarded when I got back to Clarendon.

  Then he called me forward.

  After I came up, I turned to face the group to the right of the colonel. He smiled and nodded at Tim, who read off the citation. Phrases stuck in my mind: “commitment to mission accomplishment in the most extreme circumstance … performance in a combat zone.” As I stood there, all the things that I’d seen and been part of in the last four months came rushing back: the 105-degree arrival, the combat convoys, the ****** interrogation, the away missions, the raid on the telecommunications center, the IED and near ambush, Mountain Viper and Dark Heart … all rolling around in my head as the words were read. The emotions were raw and settled at the same time. I was grateful to be alive and to be doing what I’d always wanted to do. Everything was happening for a reason. It was a strange dichotomy of being in a crazy situation but also doing what I had been trained to do in the most challenging of operational environments.

  As Tim completed reading, I stood at attention as Colonel Negro pinned the medal on the left side of my chest. Medals are always pinned on the left over the heart. The Bronze Star—awarded to service members in combat—was a one-and-a-half-inch star suspended from a red, white, and blue ribbon. On the reverse, it read HEROIC OR MERITORIOUS ACHIEVEMENT along with a place to have my name engraved, although no one I knew got their medals engraved.

  * **** *** **** ** **** ** ** ***** **** ** ***** ***** ********* ***** * ******** ** *** ****** ** **** ***** **** *** ******* ************ **** **** ***** The text describing my actions that led to the Bronze Star would also have to be sanitized to take out the top-secret info.

  Colonel Negro said a few words, telling the group what he’d told me at dinner—that I had restored his faith in spooks and how I had effectively integrated the clandestine HUMINT capabilities into the operations of the command. Then I said a few words, noting that I believed that this war, not the Iraq war, was the real war because this was where 9/11 had started and we had to make sure that another 9/11 didn’t come from this region of the world.

  “Thanks to all of you for helping me accomplish the missions. My main job is to make you all successful,” I told them. I turned to Negro. “And, sir, I appreciate every opportunity you have provided me to fight the war and to serve you and the cell—it’s truly been an honor.”

  There was scattered applause from the group, and I nodded thanks to them.

  “Tony, thank you,” Negro said and then turned to the group. “OK, let’s go finish those hamburgers.” With that, the award ceremony was over.

  I looked around at the group I’d been working with. This medal ceremony was just a brief pause for me—for us.

  I had the feeling that the eye of a hurricane had just passed over.

  18

  MADRASSAH

  IT quickly became clear that 1099 was under enormous pressure to produce quick results. Within the first forty-eight hours of its official arrival, even before it had a chance to move into the “Death Star,” it was already being pressed to make progress, even though its forces weren’t ready. They hadn’t even assembled their helicopters. They were still all lined up on the tarmac in large pieces, and the task force was still operating out of **** ***** *** old Russian-built structure. Though they were supposed to instantaneously come up with bin Laden.

  It was not pleasant to watch.

  I had wrapped working in our 180 space and had just sent the final CONOPs off to Clarendon at about 2300, shortly after 1099 hit town. I decided to go over and check in with Colonel Keller to see how their efforts were progressing. It was the last week of October; there was a crispness in the air that comes with autumn, and the moon was just over half full as I walked the quarter mile from the 180 compound to the growing 1099 compound. I showed my badge to one of the Rangers who was pulling guard duty at the outer perimeter. He looked at it with a penlight and waved me through.

  I had never seen the **** ***** * building so full. It was packed with people in constant motion, all scurrying around like ants, with purpose and diligence. I moved through the crowd as if I were invisible to them all, making my way to the Ops Center and a huge 10-foot-by-8-foot display screen that showed the current intel. That night, there was feed from a Predator drone orbiting around a fixed spot of interest.

  I stopped for a minute to try to figure out what the hell the Predator was looking at.

  Colonel Keller came over. “We’ve got some information from the CIA that Hekmatyar and his deputies are meeting in this madrassah right now,” he said, looking up at the screen, and then turning his gaze back to me. “Can you get someone up there right now to check it out?” He gave me the location.

  Jesus. There? Not in a hurry.

  “It’ll take two to three days to get one of our clandestine teams up there,” I said.

  Colonel Keller looked unhappy. Clearly, the geography of Afghanistan hadn’t sunk in with him yet. “We’d like to get your guys to confirm the meeting. We’re uncomfortable with a single source. There is no way to get there tonight?”

  “I don’t trust single sources, either.” I paused for a moment to phrase my words carefully. “Colonel, my best guess is three days,” I said, “and I don’t recommend you guys do anything against that target at this point because we just don’t know. I think we should stand down.”

  He relented. “I agree. We can’t do an air assault. Our assault helos are still being off-loaded from the C-17s. The only option is to bomb it, and I’m not going to recommend that we do that.”

  “Great,” I said. “Let me go over and call the house from my desk at 180. I’ll give this to Randy and have him confirm the time it will take to get the guys in there.”

  Colonel Keller looked relieved. “Let me know tonight what the bottom-line estimate is to get your folks to put eyes on target at this location. And I still need the list of your assets in country.”

  “Sir, will do. I’ll be back at oh two hundred with an update.” That was settled. I left to go back to the 180 tent, get the estimate for Keller, and grab a cigar with Kate.

  I got Randy on the phone, and we spoke at the secret level about the location. He said he could get one of the Afghan teams there in probably two days. I requested that he start planning to dispatch them, and that I’d be seeing Colonel Keller to get final confirmation to send them.

  Other than the constant growl of A-10s and C-130s taking off every twenty minutes, the Bagram night was fairly peaceful. I used a small LED flashlight to avoid obstacles in the pitch-blackness after the moon had set and arrived back at 1099 HQ at about 0200.

  They still had the damned drone focused on the madrassah.

  I found Keller. “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We’ve been directed to bomb it,” he said grimly. “George Tenet got involved. He feels that their information is solid. He called General Abizaid and told him it was solid intel and that he needed to take action on it.” (General Abizaid was commander of CENTCOM.)

  Colonel Keller looked really pissed. “So we’ve been directed to do something. I said we could have some people there within two or three days to verify the presence of an HVT. I was told no, that we needed to get going without it.”

  I looked up at the madrassah. Its time left to exist was now measured in seconds, and I was horrified. Shit. They were in a rush—and recklessly so. Why? What if we were wrong?

  I stood next to Colonel Keller as the screen suddenly went white with the impact of the precision bombs that had come off a B-1 bomber some 38,000 feet up and many miles away. No sound. The white flash was then followed for about five minutes by white and gray smoke—an optical trick from the infrared sensor seeing the flash. Its aftereffects were limited to a monochromatic palette.

  I was stunned. This was some friggin’ grand entr
ance into country.

  “Sir, we need to know what was there—if we got the target or not,” I said.

  Colonel Keller agreed.

  “The 10th Mountain can chopper in a sensitive-site exploitation team in there within a day. I’d like to send in the FBI to see what they can get—if that was an actual terrorist command and control node.” Again, Keller agreed. Over the next day, I worked to coordinate the team going in, and made sure an FBI agent was included for the site forensics analysis. FBI agent Brad Daniels went in with them.

  The team got there about a day later via helicopters since stealth was no longer a requirement. I had asked Brad to call me immediately when they arrived and had loaned him one of our Iridium satellite phones.

  Brad reached me after lunch at CJTF 180.

  “Brad, what do you have?”

  There was a brief silence. That wasn’t good.

  “Tony, there are no bad guys here. No males at all. Looks like all the victims were women and kids. There is nothing for me to do here … nothing.”

  So much for the CIA’s single source.

  I instantly thought this was a tribal issue—that someone had gotten smart and played us against them to do their dirty work. Some of these rivalries went back hundreds of years.

  We’d been suckered.

  Part of my job was to make sure we had the right people at the right place at the right time to conduct operations. I had to try to prevent instances where we didn’t have the right folks to gain ground truth—that is, tell us what was really happening. We needed to be more precise in our use of lethal force.

  Shortly after, I was called in to a meeting in Brig. Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s office with Colonel Keller.

  General McChrystal had plenty of experience in Special Operations, most of it classified. I knew he had served as a Ranger in the 1980s and as commander of the 75th Ranger Regiment in the late 1990s. He was an impressive officer. He was lean from an obsessive running habit; a driven workaholic, he operated on just a single meal per day and few hours of sleep per night. His reputation was that of an aggressive, but imaginative, commander.

  General McChrystal stood up. “Tony, good to meet you,” he said, before immediately launching into the reason for our visit. The guy wasn’t much for small talk. “We’re doing some new things with the Rangers that have never been done before. I want you to understand that it’s very important to me that the Rangers get priority support.”

  Ordinarily the Rangers, a flexible, highly trained, and rapid light infantry specializing in surprise and stealth, would operate as commandos, sneaking into villages, taking out the bad guys, and moving on. But, General McChrystal said, that approach just intimidated ordinary Afghans and resulted in little actionable intelligence. This time, they were going to go openly from village to village in the Afghan mountains, guided by native scouts, courting elders, establishing relationships, and seeing what intelligence they could draw out that way.

  The strategy was to see if they could flush these guys out with the Ranger Recon mission and native scouts, and then send assault teams in to nail them where they tried to move next. General McChrystal wanted to keep the enemy hopping from safe haven to safe haven, with assault teams of Rangers or SEALs ready to either grab them in transit or nail them at their next stop.

  A little like jumping in the water and making enough noise that you scare the fish out of their nooks and crannies. You get ’em as they flee the scene.

  Plus he wanted my case officers and their locally recruited Afghan scouts embedded with the troops to open doors for the Rangers and get the flow of information going. Our case officers would also run clandestine assets and look to recruit new ones in areas outside of the Rangers’ advance of movement. Then info from the indigenous scouts and assets could help the Rangers guide our combat forces into the right targets.

  I was kind of skeptical. American commandos being used in a form of outreach? Yet I did understand the concept of stirring up the pot in one place and then jumping ahead to nab the bad guy somewhere else, so I was certainly willing to give it a try. I’d heard good things about General McChrystal.

  “Can you work with us on this?” asked General McChrystal.

  I looked at General McChrystal and Colonel Keller. “Absolutely.” It was clear to me that the Rangers were extremely important to General McChrystal, and our work with them would take precedence.

  We got rolling. The Safe House had recruited a source from a province near the Pakistan-Afghan border in the Hindu Kush Mountains. Great guy. Tall (for an Afghan), good humored, talkative, and sneaky. One problem we had faced in recent days was trying to deal with guys who were former Taliban. That fella had not, as far as we could discern, been in their ranks and appeared to have sat out the conflict between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance in the decade-long fighting that broke out after the Russians bailed out of the country.

  With the help of the rest of the house, it had taken ***** *** **** **** *********** **** ******** ******* ***** ** ****** *** ******* *** ******** He was going to provide great intel on the goings-on in his province and northeastern Afghanistan, but he could also be a nice mobile guide for Winter Strike.

  He had been boxed (polygraphed) to make sure he was working our side of the street and had passed, although previous experience told us you could never be 100 percent sure of these guys. He was good for now, but there would be more vetting to come.

  His new mission was to lead the Rangers through the mountains and to obtain actionable intel on known and suspected HVTs. We believed—hoped?—that he could help smooth things over as the Rangers moved through the villages to flush the bad guys out so they could be killed or captured … hopefully captured. Our source would introduce the Rangers all around and vouch for them.

  Our source accepted the mission, a sign that he was either brave—or dumb—enough to endure some hardship and take some risk in working with us.

  I helped set him up and outfit him so he would meld into *** **** ** ***** **** ******** *** * ********* **** the DIA team of operators who were embedded with the Army Ranger Regimental Recon unit.

  The Ranger’s senior intelligence officer, Ranger 2, helped me to track down a set of desert camo from the Rangers. The guy seemed to get a real kick out of being given a uniform. He still wore a full black beard, but then again so did two of our case officers who were going forward on the mission. We gave him so much kit he needed a pack, so I loaned him my Army-issued olive drab ALICE (All-purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment) backpack (which I never got back).

  There was a moment of panic when he sat in the convoy to depart from Bagram with the Rangers. We had overlooked one very key, necessary item for him to blend in with the Rangers—otherwise the whole mission would have been in jeopardy: super-cool sunglasses to wear so he could look like the other “operators.”

  It just so happened I had bought an extra pair of action-guy Bolle sunglasses. I ran the quarter mile to my tent and back to retrieve the brand-new glasses still in the box. Our source beamed like a ten-year-old getting his first BB gun when I handed them to him through the window of the truck that was just moments from departing Bagram.

  Granted, even on a cursory examination, he would never pass for American, but in this role and outfit, he would function as a kind of scout for the Americans. He would help make the appropriate contact with village elders in order to get a friendly reception and to clear a path for enhanced intelligence gathering.

  He gave me a big grin and a thumbs-up from the truck as he was dispatched with the Ranger Recon on their mission. We’d been tipped that the senior bad guys were hanging out in the villages north of Asadabad, a city of about 50,000 only five miles from the Pakistani border. Remote, mountainous … and an easy escape into a welcoming next-door nation. Al-Zawahiri, Hekmatyar—that ilk. Maybe our warlord, with his connections, could find out what village the bad guys were hiding in. Then, with these lieutenants in custody, maybe they could lead us to our top
targets.

  White Toyota Tacoma 4x4s, loaded with storm troopers, driving through the mountains struck me as kind of conspicuous, but there were no other vehicles in the U.S. military inventory that could drive those pencil-thin, single-lane mountain roads above 12,000 feet. As the convoy went along, they would fan out through the valleys and into villages to cover a lot of territory.

  Just as we got rolling, the CIA entered the picture, and everything went sideways.

  19

  ABORT MISSION

  OUR source spotted them at the Forward Operating Base in Asadabad when he arrived there with the Rangers’ Recon unit: two Afghan strangers from a different tribe in native dress from Kabul, hanging around with the Rangers on the base.

  He went bat shit.

  The CIA had recruited two assets in Kabul who didn’t even know the mountains, but never mind that friggin’ inconvenient fact. When the Ranger Recon team that our case officers and warlord scout were traveling with stopped at the Ranger Forward Operating Base in Asadabad, we discovered that the CIA scouts had somehow gotten the Ranger combat company there to go with their source of intel instead of our warlord’s.

  In this country, tribal rivalry trumps everything, and it could be very bad news for this guy if he was recognized by the Afghan CIA assets. They would have shot him. Afghans have made the shoot-first-ask-questions-later cliché into a national creed.

  Which meant that the operation, with a qualified scout who knew the mountains, with great local contacts within them, was thrown under the bus so that two Afghan CIA assets, who weren’t even from the area, could “lead” the Rangers into the winter safe havens of the senior al Qaeda and HIG leadership that our warlord knew so well.

  Hours of phone calls between myself and various Klingons yielded nothing but disingenuous “Gee, Tony, I don’t know what happened.” Even the CIA rep to 1099 told me he’d been “caught off guard” by the situation.