Operation Dark Heart

by Anthony Shaffer

  I heard that General McChrystal was opposed to this policy, but he couldn’t budge General Barno, either. Not that he wasn’t trying, but Barno had authority since he was commander of forces in Afghanistan. Along with the border ops, General McChrystal was also stationing snipers at very long ranges to aim at border hot spots. It gave me hope that at least some people in the military got the picture.

  You see, the way I figure it, there are soldiers and there are warriors in the military. Soldiers do everything by the book. They just follow orders. Warriors … well, warriors understand that their job is to win. Their primary objective is to adapt and achieve victory over the enemy by adjusting and changing their tactics and procedures as necessary to stay one step ahead of them. I figured General McChrystal, like General Vines, was a warrior. He was trying to win the war. He lived like a warrior, he had the warrior ethos, and that carried over to everything that he did.

  On the other hand, I saw General Barno as a soldier—a bureaucrat in uniform. He did everything by the book. He was toeing the party line and didn’t want anything to go wrong on his watch.

  The Taliban were on the attack again, but they were smart enough not to take us head-on. Instead, they were now moving to asymmetric warfare methods—hitting soft targets and trying to use our strength against us. There was a string of attacks on foreign and Afghan aid workers, including one 40 miles northeast of Kabul in February that killed five Afghan workers and wounded two others. The shooters had jeered at the aid workers for “living in luxury while our friends are in prison in Cuba.”

  Then Rumsfeld showed up in Kabul and appeared to be seriously delusional. He and Karzai claimed that the Taliban were no danger to the country.

  “I’ve not seen any indication that the Taliban pose any military threat to the security of Afghanistan,” Rumsfeld told reporters.

  Wow, I remember thinking. We must have just spent the last eight months chasing ghosts.…

  Karzai had drunk the Kool-Aid, too.

  “The Taliban doesn’t exist anymore,” he claimed. “They’re defeated. They’re gone.”

  Yeah, right.

  It was clear that the United States was conducting foreign policy by wishful thinking. Wish it and it would happen. Our intelligence was telling us they were coming back. We knew they were going to come again, but U.S. and Afghan officials were trying to wish them away.

  Good freakin’ luck.

  At another level, though, the U.S. military was involved in some bad stuff. For weeks, Jack Foster had been bugging me to come over *** *** ***** ******** ******* ********** ** ****** to show me how they’d converted the former ***** **** ***** *** HQ **** **** ******* clearly set up for the “enhanced interrogation” program, and offered me a tour.

  I knew what he was trying to do, and so I kept putting him off. I had known that there was a “special” system for handling HVT prisoners that the Pentagon leadership didn’t want going to the BCP. They also had to be kept from the FBI since the agents who weren’t told that an “enhanced interrogation” program had been authorized at the highest level of the U.S. government were legally required to report any prison abuses they witnessed. The interrogation program, ****** ****** ****** was authorized, but a lot of us felt it wasn’t appropriate and just wasn’t right. We also all knew that the CIA had a separate secret prison at Bagram. We just stayed away from it.

  The 1099 facility was an “enhanced interrogation program,” Jack told me. “You ought to come over and see it.”

  I just kept putting him off because I knew this was more than a tour. Jack wanted me to get involved. Finally I said I’d take a look.

  I was blown away—and not in a good way—by what I saw. The building had been completely gutted. Rooms had been converted into holding cells or open areas, framed in wood and steel, that Jack told me were for interrogation. These were nothing like the interrogation areas I was familiar with, which were small rooms with a small table and three chairs (for the interrogator, the translator, and the detainee) and a window for observers. These interrogation areas, it was clear, had holding points for a prisoner’s arms and legs. They were designed for prisoners to be shackled and held in stress positions to maximize discomfort and pain.

  Standing in the giant facility, I could feel a sense of tension in the air—palpable and raw—like walking on a beach before a hurricane is about to hit.

  I had a reputation for rushing in and taking missions that others viewed as too politically risky, but I always weighed the potential good that a successful mission would bring to the country against the risk of undertaking it. Here, there was no potential good. From my perspective—and I had run some of the blackest operations in the last decade of the twentieth century—this would only be bad.

  At the end of the tour Jack, clearly proud of his work in planning and setting up the facility, smiled at me. “What do you think?” he asked.

  My stomach was in a knot. “It’s quite a change to the building,” I said lamely. Jesus. This was bad juju. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  Jack leaned forward eagerly. “You know,” he gestured at the interrogation areas, “you could help me with this.”

  “Jack, don’t ever bring me back here,” I snapped. “I have no desire to get involved in this.” I turned around and walked out. I thought back to the interrogation that John Kirkland and I had conducted of the American citizen. We’d questioned him by using our own format and techniques. We’d broken him without using any methods that weren’t approved by the army. No funny stuff.

  Let me be clear here. I’m not saying torture should never be used. I’d torture someone if, say, I believed they had information that would prevent a nuclear weapon from going off or would likely prevent a massive loss of life. Albeit those kinds of situations are exceedingly rare. In fact, they usually only occur in the movies, not in real life. In the vast majority of cases, I don’t believe torture works—nor should it be used.

  The intent here by DoD was to “regularize” enhanced interrogation. Turn it into a cottage industry. It was just not a good idea, and the “results” do not justify the means, since there is no clear evidence torture ever directly contributed to saving a single life.

  I headed back to the compound to focus on planning missions that I believed would net us real intelligence information.

  It was only later, after all the publicity, that I realized the full scope of what was going on. I’d been led into the top-secret interrogation “system” authorized by my boss at the time, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well as Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence, permitting highly coercive interrogation techniques on detained personnel in Afghanistan. It was later moved to Iraq, according to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, where the methods were used against Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

  24

  UNSAFE AT ANY SPEED

  WEEKS later, I was still feeling uneasy about what I’d seen at the new prison. What the hell was going on here?

  This second tour of Afghanistan was taking on the feel of a bad Twilight Zone episode. I could just hear Rod Serling speaking in the wings: “Little did Tony Shaffer know that he was no longer in the U.S. Army. He had slipped into … the Twilight Zone.”

  One morning in early March, I got an e-mail in my secret-level box from George Anderson, who oversaw the Defense HUMINT collections operations in Iraq, asking me to give him a call. Interesting, I thought. George and I had worked together supporting a black special-mission unit that had gone well, and I respected him, but why would he be contacting me now?

  George had recently been involved in a decision to combine the Afghan and Iraqi case officers into a single task force. George wasn’t happy about it and, personally, I felt it would have been smarter to combine Afghanistan and Pakistan desks. That wasn’t what the brass wanted. The feeling was that there was a lot of redundancy, with staffs in Afghanistan and Iraq involved in active combat zones, and efficiencies could be achieved by combining
the management of the two units.

  I called George on the secure phone. He came right to the point. “I know you weren’t in favor of combining the two task forces, but now that it’s been done, I’d like you to come over and be the operations officer for the combined Afghan-Iraq task force.”

  I was surprised. I had no experience in Iraq, but George told me I had a reputation for getting things done and, since I had already commanded an operating base, I had the leadership experience. I would have an overall staff of about forty people, with about a dozen direct reports. Most would be from Iraq. The job would involve supervising everything from money spent to ensuring everyone was trained, to issuing them gear and material; then, once the guys were on the ground, monitoring all activities and giving guidance and support. Word out of Iraq was that things weren’t going well. Defense HUMINT had played a major role in trying to help the Special Forces find those weapons of mass destruction that President Bush had promised.

  That had gone badly, of course.

  I thought about it for a couple of days and talked it over with some folks whose opinions I respected. I had planned, after I returned stateside, to spend the remainder of my recall to active duty as an instructor at the farm, I had been approached about it and had passed my interview to become one. It would mean long hours of role-playing for the trainees, reading and grading reports, but it would be a reprieve. There would be no politics or intrigue from HQ to deal with—just the pure duty of training new kids.

  After concluding that Bill’s offer was a good one, I e-mailed him that I would take the Iraq-Afghanistan job as long as I could stay until May or June in Afghanistan and finish up my mission there. My active duty would have to be extended two years. I was fine with that because I felt this was the right war to be fighting. It was clear to me that we could well lose our victory there, and I wanted to stay with the mission.

  George wrote back, welcoming me aboard and saying he would talk to my Reserve officer about getting my orders extended. I was pleased. I had a plan that would keep me doing something useful but not too dangerous.

  Next came a call from Mike Anderson. He had bad news: Somebody was complaining that I was running unsafe convoys. I was stunned. I had been running convoys through some tough stuff for months. I clicked through my mind: no loss of life or material, no one injured, no damage to vehicles. My Bronze Star had even cited me for running convoys. What the hell was going on?

  “What’s this based on?” I demanded.

  I could tell that Captain Anderson was uncomfortable. “Well, they felt unsafe.”

  “Who felt unsafe?” I asked. Turned out “they” were two individuals from the Safe House. I groaned. “What did they complain about?”

  “They complained you were running an unsafe convoy.”

  I was getting frustrated. “How was it unsafe?”

  “Well, they couldn’t say.”

  This was bullshit. “Captain, you do understand how we run convoys here, right?”

  Captain Anderson was getting exasperated, too. “I know how convoys are run, but they felt you were running them in an unsafe manner.”

  “Captain, all convoys are fundamentally unsafe,” I said. “You know how we run them—at what would be considered unsafe speeds, even through traffic. But we have unarmored vehicles here, and that’s the way it’s done for security and survivability. Sir, you know that. You also know I’ve run over forty combat convoys.”

  I could almost feel Captain Anderson pulling at his collar. He didn’t like this conversation at all.

  “Chris, I understand that, but they still complained.”

  “What exactly am I supposed to do about it?” I said. “This is bullshit. Total bullshit. What exactly are you asking me to do? Unless you can define for me what ‘unsafe’ is, I don’t know what to do.”

  “Well, I don’t know, either.” Captain Anderson shifted gears. His voice got lower and more urgent. “Tony, it seems to me that they’re gunning for you. They want to have something on you.”

  “Who’s ‘they,’ sir? What’s going on?”

  “I can’t get into that,” Anderson said, “but they’re pretty unhappy with you. It’s one more thing that they’re going to try to use against you.”

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked.

  “You need to quit driving,” Anderson said. It was clear he was trying to help me out.

  “That’s kinda hard to do,” I said. “I’m one of the few who is qualified to drive.” By this time, my voice was raised, and I could feel everyone in the SCIF looking at me, including a sergeant with ******

  “I’m not telling you not to go on convoys. Just don’t drive.” He was trying to warn me. “Tony they’re looking for something on you. They are looking to kill you.”

  “I got it,” I said as reality started to sink in. There was something unseen here.

  “I’m serious,” said Captain Anderson. “They’re really gunning for you. You need to take this seriously.”

  “I got it,” I said and hung up. I sat back and put my hands on my forehead.

  “What are you going to do?” asked the sergeant. He’d heard enough to figure out what was going on.

  “I don’t know,” I said. What the hell had I done?

  “That’s bullshit,” the ***** sergeant said. “You’ve run convoys the same for the past six months. Are you going to stop driving?”

  I thought for a moment. “Hell, no. If they’re going to fire me over driving convoys, there’s no hope.”

  I continued driving convoys. There were no problems—and no more complaints. I made sure that those on the missions were folks who were loyal to me.

  Shortly after that, at the end of March, I got a terse e-mail from George Anderson. It was about the Iraq-Afghanistan job. “Tony, I’m sorry. I can’t offer you the job. Best wishes.”

  And that was that.

  What the hell? I felt helpless. I just couldn’t put my finger on anything I had done to draw this level of angst from DIA leadership. This went beyond their usual annoyance with me. It haunted me to the point of distraction.

  I tried to shrug it off and keep going, but I was damned confused. Something was going on back in Clarendon, which involved me, but nobody was clueing me in.

  First, there were the warnings from Anderson when I was in Washington, and from Jack Foster when I had returned here. Then I had gotten this unbelievable call about my driving. Then this job offer had mysteriously been pulled back.

  On top of that, I had refused to provide to the Pakistanis the intel we had on Wana serving as the Taliban and al Qaeda base of operations, but someone on the U.S. side had passed it to them. I suspected either General Barno or his staff.

  Apparently, there had been a demand then that the Paks take action—and they did. Kind of.

  Amid much fanfare, several thousand Pakistani army troops had attacked heavily fortified compounds just outside Wana. It looked at first like they’d surrounded al Qaeda fighters and possibly al-Zawahiri, but suddenly, whoever was there just happened to melt away. Most, if not all, of the al Qaeda–allied foreign militants fighting alongside local tribesmen escaped. Goddamnit, I thought. We had it right. We had suspected a Tier 1 HVT—someone at the level of al-Zawahiri—because of the patterns of activity *** ************** in Wana. If we were right about Wana, I was betting we were also right about the identification of ****** *** ******** ** *** ***** *** key safe havens. The Paks had let him escape. Probably deliberately.

  I tried to focus on my job. ADVON was wrapping up, but I wanted to stay and go forward with the Rangers, as they had requested. Jack Foster offered to send a note to Phil Trent, the DoD HUMINT operations chief in Clarendon, seeking to extend my stay—an offer that I gratefully accepted.

  As Foster told me later, Trent told him that was fine, that he could have whomever he wanted.

  By the way, Trent asked, who is Tony Shaffer, Trent was a senior operations guy, so he was above the level where he kept track of ********
* ****** ******** **** **** ******* *** **** ********

  Get him on a plane, Trent told him. I want him back here within a week.

  At about the same time, I walked into the SCIF to find a message that Anderson had called me. He had asked for me to call him on the Iridium immediately.

  I went outside the tent for some privacy and phoned him.

  “Sir, what’s up?”

  He got right to the point. “Tony, I think you need to get back here as soon as possible. When will you have things wrapped up?”

  I thought it through, trying to keep my mind off the odd stuff of the last several weeks. “We’ve got the progress review on the status of ADVON, the handoff of our activities to the main body, and then we have a briefing to General Ennis at the end of next week when he comes in for a visit. I could come back after that.” (General Ennis was the global head of DIA HUMINT and Trent’s boss.)

  “Right after that, I need you to get on a plane,” Anderson said.

  “What about the spring surge?” I asked.

  “Tony,” Anderson said, “you need to get on a plane and come back.”

  So much for the Rangers, I thought.

  “OK,” I said. “I got it. As soon as I finish briefing Ennis.”

  This was strange. They were allowing me to brief General Ennis. So whatever was going on had nothing to do with security or my leadership abilities.

  I got my staff together, and we organized our PowerPoint presentation. As we do in the military, we color-coded our progress: red—stalled; amber—broken; and green—on track. I gave my presentation, proud that everything was green except the telecommunications issues. I’d had to fire the guy who was doing that because of his lack of expertise, but, aside from that, all of my stated operations objectives were met, and General Ennis seemed pleased. He didn’t hint at any problem, and I had the impression he didn’t know I’d been called back.