Operation Dark Heart (14 page)

“No,” I said. I paused for a moment and then said, “We’re not really here.”

I’ve always wanted to use that line.

He and I smiled—he finally got it.

“Destination?” he asked with a grin.

*********

He walked away to put our names on the manifest and leave our unit affiliation blank.

Once the crew was done with the loading and preflight, we hopped on the cavernous choppers.

Truth be told, I’d always had a fear of flying in CH-47s. When I was a kid in high school in Portugal, I saw a photo of a crashed CH-47 and a headline that read
1
7
DIE IN CHINOOK ACCIDENT
in the local
Stars and Stripes
. In the picture, you could see someone trying to get out, and that image always stuck with me. Then I sat down center cabin and thought about Alexander, and said a small prayer.

As the rotors on the 47 started, we all put on ear protection; Tim and I put on eye protection as well to try to keep the grit out. The crew chief moved around the cabin checking all manner of hydraulics and gauges. He also served as one of the two gunners who manned the large frame openings near the front of the aircraft. The top part of the loading ramp at the rear of the aircraft also remained open—I’d never seen them closed—so it was breezy even before we were in flight.

The other three aircraft, in turn, started their engines, and the flight began to taxi. There was an ethereal moment as the dust kicked up around our helicopter in the inky darkness of the taxiway and sparked as it hit the rotors. Fairy dust, John said. From the inside, it looked like a swirl of golden magical dust was picking up the aircraft and carrying us off into the blustery, dusty Afghan night.

There was no light in the cabin and the two door gunners wore night-vision goggles. You could see the two glowing points over their eyes and nothing else as they moved around like ghosts hovering in the great pool of black that filled the cabin.

We arrived at the ****** Forward Operating Base on or about 0200. The landing approach was fast—I could just make out the frame of the horizon coming closer, noting our rapid descent as we hit the LZ.

As fast as we could, we cleared the chopper with our gear and moved to the vehicles close to the strip, which was nothing more than a stretch of asphalt road in an open desert field. I limped. In the inky darkness, I couldn’t make out where the ground was as we evacuated the chopper. With my heavy body armor, pack, and weapon, I had landed hard on one knee and twisted it as I came off the back of the deck. It hurt like hell.

As the two Chinooks started to lift off into the night, we were pummeled by a searing blast of hot exhaust and dust.

The choppers were going on to the last stop on the Ring. The trip down to Kabul and back to ****** would take them about an hour. That’s all the time we had to conduct the initial interrogation of Arash. Then we had to make a decision: stay and do an in-depth grilling, which meant being stuck in ******* and the end of civilization, until mission accomplished, or let the guy go and hop back on the 47 and return to Bagram. John and I agreed we’d make the call together after our initial contact. We had no real idea what we were going to find.

We headed in armored Humvees for the heavily guarded fort that I later would see resembled a small castle in the light of day. ****** was a nasty neck of the woods. This had been, and remained, one of the areas most contested for control between us and the Taliban. Because of that, the fort was under sporadic mortar and rocket attacks from the enemy hidden in the hills.

The firebase was divided into two separate compounds that were within tens of meters of each other. One was manned by a Reconnaissance (Recon) element and the other a small security element of the 10th Mountain—a reinforced company from what I could tell. When the 10th Mountain soldiers comingled with the Recon guys, it was easy to tell them apart. The Recon all had some manner of facial hair and mostly opted out of wearing the normal desert camo uniform. Instead, they tended to dress in a motley combination of desert camo pants, T-shirts, keffiyeh scarves, and civilian baseball caps (from some distant U.S. university, bait shop, or favorite NASCAR driver).

The 10th Mountain had the short haircuts and the regulation uniforms. Their demeanor was stiffer and more formal—and tense. Their missions were very different. The Recon members were to engage the hearts and minds of the locals by day and do the rough work at night—recon missions, hitting suspect compounds, seizing weapons and explosives, trying to pluck out pockets of Taliban and al Qaeda. The 10th Mountain soldiers were “regular” army and fought using conventional small unit tactics. Their job was to provide security: counterbattery fire (to counter the Taliban shelling), combat power to ensure the base’s security, and to go after any bad guys who showed up in the area.

In the darkness, I peered down at my Sunnto watch’s altimeter. We were at nearly 7,000 feet above sea level. After the dust cleared, we were received by two ******* ****** guys who looked like a combination of the bearded mobster in the movie
Goodfellas
and Dennis Hopper’s crazed photojournalist character in
Apocalypse Now
. When we arrived at the Recon portion of the compound, I almost expected to find a fat bald guy slowly pouring water over his head in a cave. Marlon Brando at his best.

While the Recon guys had continued to interrogate Arash Ghaffari throughout the day, they still did not have a good handle on what he was doing and planning. We knew little more than the fact that he was the cousin of an HVT, and we knew that terrorists tended to do things as families. They trust each other, blood being much thicker than water.

“Has anything changed?” I asked the Recon intelligence guy.

He shook his head. “He won’t talk to us.”

We got a short briefing. Members of Ali Ghaffari’s family had been in the compound, among them, ***** ***** ********** ********* *** *** *** ********* **** *** *** **** ********* Six men had been captured and were being detained at ******* It didn’t appear that any of Arash’s immediate family members, like a wife or kids, were there. Aside from the mystery of what the hell, if anything, Arash and family members had been planning for Afghanistan and the ****** ****** was the puzzle of what had happened to the ******** Disbursed among the enemy, it could buy a lot of dangerous stuff. Arash Ghaffari had denied knowing anything about the ******* and said he had a plane ticket back ** *** ****** ****** in four days—which by now had slipped to three. He wanted to go back to his family.

“You know, you’ve got about forty minutes until the helicopter gets back if you plan to leave tonight,” the ******* ****** Recon intelligence guy told us.

Tim, John, and I looked at each other. “We’ll decide what to do after we see Ghaffari,” I said.

Two members of the Recon led us to Arash Ghaffari. He was being held in a small office, the door to which was actually on the outside of the compound’s main walls. The rest of the prisoners, including Ali Ghaffari, were being held as detainees outside of the compound—bound with black covers over their heads—under a long wall that had an overhead shelter. Harsh conditions compared to his cousin, Arash.

We entered the office where Arash Ghaffari was being detained, and one Special Forces guy flipped on the light switch while the other gave Ghaffari a shake. He had been sound asleep, and he sat bolt upright. His hands were bound in front of him with zip ties—similar to ties used to hold electrical cables together, only larger and more durable. He had one fastened around each wrist and then one looped through both of the wrist ties. He stared up at us from the mat on which he had been sleeping.

He was very thin, dressed in typical gossamer fabric Afghan shirt, casual pants, and sandals. My impression was that he was very frightened. I guess I would be, too. He knew that this guy in camo, plus two grim-faced ones in civilian clothes, hadn’t just popped by to pay their respects. I can only imagine what he was thinking would happen next.

The truth was, violence wasn’t on our agenda. John and I hadn’t talked about our approach in great detail. We needed to get a feel for the guy first, but we knew that neither of us had any intent to use “enhanced” techniques. In any case, Arash didn’t have to know this.

We all knew that harsher-than-normal interrogation techniques had been approved, and if you really wanted to do something, you could probably get approval to do it, but I didn’t—and still don’t—believe such methods work. John and I were trained interrogators, and that wasn’t the way we operated. In fact, the FBI was on the lookout for cases of harsh interrogations in Afghanistan, and there were some prosecutions that came out of their limited effort to curtail abuse even in these early days of the war.

Later in my deployment to Afghanistan, I came face-to-face with the program of enhanced methods of interrogation—if you want to call that “interrogation.”

We knew we were up against the clock. The helicopter was now due back for us in thirty-five minutes, if we could squeeze enough useful information out of the prisoner.

We introduced ourselves. I announced myself as Tony, an intelligence officer from the Department of Defense. John said he was from the FBI. Tim said nothing and stayed in the background, working his way through a bag of beef jerky.

We each leaned against a desk in the room and stared down at him for an uncomfortable minute. Then John asked the obvious question, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to visit my cousin,” he said.

“We understand you are here to visit your cousin,” John said, “but, obviously, your cousin has been arrested based on his activities. So what are you doing here?”

“I assumed it was safe here since the Americans were here,” he answered. He spoke English well, with only a slight accent. That lent credence to his story that he was well educated.

“Sir, this is a war zone. People are dying every day,” I said.

“I wanted to come visit my family. Yes, I know there is a war on, but it is not so bad in *******”

We weren’t getting very far. It was a freakin’
war zone
in ******—this was the front line of the war. Who was he kidding?

“You were captured with your cousin. Your cousin is a known operative—he is going to Guantanamo—you are now on the same path,” I said after he repeated several more times that he was just here for a visit.

“I cannot tell you things that I do not know.”

OK, so he was sticking to his story. I decided to lay on the threats.

“If you do not tell us what you know, you will be going to Guantanamo.”

He didn’t much like that. “But I’m ** ******** *******; I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“You did do something wrong.” I pointed out what should have become obvious to him by now. “You were with your cousin when he was captured. That makes you a combatant under the current rules of engagement.”

Ghaffari persisted in saying that he was just here to visit his family. OK, fine. We would use that against him.

“If you value your family,” I said, “you’ll need to provide us information on your cousin.”

We could just begin to make out the
whoop-whoop-whoop
of the approaching helicopter. We’d gotten nowhere. John and I glanced at each other. We read our mutual decision by the expressions on our faces.

We were staying.

John turned to Ghaffari. “We’re done for now, but we’re going to come back to talk to you again.”

He nodded, still gazing at us with this innocent deer-in-the-headlights look.

Visiting his family, my ass, I thought. He knows what is going on with his cousin at minimum and possibly even more.

We left the room and conferred.

“We’re not leaving,” John told Tim.

Tim went into the * Team’s headquarters room and asked them to radio the helicopter to direct it not to land and to proceed back to Bagram. As we walked past the entrance of the room, we could hear someone tell the helicopter, “The packages are staying. No need to land; you can return to base.”

We agreed we had done enough for tonight. The Recon Team walked us to their “visitor” tents—a permanent set of GP Medium (general purpose) tents stuck between the wall of the fort and their makeshift bunkers, showed us where our cots were, and we pulled out our ponchos.

This was not going to be a cakewalk.

9

THE INTERROGATION

WE managed to sleep about three hours before the unforgiving Afghan sun awoke us as its heat bled through the roof of the tent. It was still near pitch-black in the tent, yet you could feel the heat just as if you were under a sun lamp.

The two Recon intel guys who were our hosts were already up and about—with as little sleep as us—working their sources to obtain information that might help us in our interrogation. One of the main focuses was the status and location of the missing **** that was one of the primary objectives of their raid that had netted Ali.

The sky was clear and a brilliant blue as we sat down on a berm of sandbags, near the fleet of Humvees, to eat our breakfast of eggs, waffles, and bacon. Food was generally good—even at the front.

After the first bite of bacon and a quick sip of coffee, John and I were already sweating as we started to go over our strategy. We came up with a master list of questions. ** ****** ** *** ** * ******** ** **** *** *** *** ******** ***** ******* ***** ***** ** * ********** *** ******* *********** ** *** *** *** ***** ** ******* *** *******. *** ******* ***** ******** ** *** *** ***** ******** ** **** *** ***** *** ******* ****** **** ** ***** **** ** ** ********** ********* *** ****** ****** ***** ** ***** * **** ***.