Operation Dark Heart (21 page)

Wana, I found in researching it later, was a Pakistani city about twenty miles from the Afghan border and the main town in South Waziristan, the largest of the seven tribal areas in the FATA. South Waziristan was the perfect lair for terrorists—towering mountains, deep forests, steep ravines—and Wana was its administrative capital: a market town with a resident population of about 50,000, and thousands more coming in to do business each day.

“Captain, Dave mentioned something about an ‘Al Qaeda Hotel,’ ” I said to Captain Knowles.

“Absolutely,” she said. “Let me show you on the Wana map.”

We headed back to the table where she showed us a higher-resolution map of the central city of Wana, including a U-shaped building that she said was used by transients and visitors.

****** ******* ******* ** ******** ** *** **** **** ********* They’re linked to activities that occurred during Mountain Viper,” she told us.

Dave expanded on Captain Knowles’s comments. “There are significant indications that they are using Wana to regroup and come back.”

“You mean the insurgency,” I said as the light went on.

“That is a very unpopular word,” Dave said, looking up at Captain Knowles, who was still standing over the map of Wana.
Oh, yeah, right,
I remembered.
We were supposed to be in rebuilding mode. There wasn’t supposed to be an insurgency in Afghanistan. Silly me.

“Yes, we mean an insurgency,” said Captain Knowles. “In the case of Wana, there are indications that this is a major command-and-control node that is not simply a terrorist-training facility, but a full-blown military headquarters. It is clear that this location is involved in the Taliban’s effort to retake southern Afghanistan.”

“All well and good,” I said with a tick of impatience, “but what specifically do you believe we can get in this hotel?”

“We believe that a dozen dedicated rooms are being used by the Taliban,” she said serenely.

“And we are talking about al Qaeda senior leadership,” Dave added.

That was a shock.

“Really?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Well, nothing we can pin down, but the ************* pattern is similar to those we know to occur around known al Qaeda leadership,” said Dave.

“You mean there could be Tier 1 HVTs there?”

Dave and Captain Knowles looked at each other. “Precisely,” said Captain Knowles.

I looked at Dave. “Why don’t we just bomb it when we think one of the al Qaeda guys is visiting?”

He shook his head. “It’s a location with a lot of civilians. Attacking it would result in a lot of civilian casualties, plus a degradation of intelligence ** *** ******* ** ********** ***** ******* ****** **** **** **** this target.”

I put my hands in my lap, stared down at them, and started to think. “What do you need from us?” I asked him. I looked down at the table and recognized that it was built in the same U-shape as the Al Qaeda Hotel.

“I thought we should partner on this,” said Dave. “Can you get some folks in to put eyeballs on the facility? I figured you might have some good ideas based on your previous life on how to enhance our information from the location.” I instantly thought of my friend, Lt. Col. Jim Brady, *** **** ***** *, where he was the DIA rep. The initial part of any operation wouldn’t be hard because we could do those cross-border intelligence-collection operations, but to do anything “active”—such as raids, renditions, or any other offensive operations—would be a whole different ballgame.

“The first thing we need to do is verify what’s going on at Wana,” said Dave.

“I’m with you,” I said. “How soon do you need this?”

“I’d like to get this started before I leave country in three weeks,” Dave said.

“I think we can do that,” I said. “But if we’re going to do anything to support ********* operations, we’ll need to get Washington started on it immediately.”

“Agreed,” said Dave. “I can have you talk to Washington directly to lay out what you think we’ll need.”

He stood up. “Colonel Negro has some thoughts on this, too.”

“Have you talked to him specifically about this?” I asked.

“No, not about Wana, but he’s talked about doing the night-letter thing.” That was where we planned to influence operations to intimidate the Taliban where they lived in Pakistan. Night letters—a centuries-old tradition—had been co-opted by the Taliban into something more sinister. Colonel Negro figured we could return the favor by putting night letters in their safe havens in Pakistan. I had volunteered to be on the first mission in. Night letters are a throwback to earlier centuries. The Taliban posted threatening letters on the village bulletin boards and on doors to intimidate local populations. We wanted to do the very same thing to them: post letters on the doors of Taliban leaders residing in Pakistan threatening them with harm, death, and all manner of bad things if they crossed the border and did anything in Afghanistan.

“I’m aware of the night-letter idea, and I think it’s a good one,” I said.

“This would be a good location to consider it for.”

We finished our coffee. I wondered what kind of amenities the Al Qaeda Hotel offered. Frequent Jihad Stay Points for every visit, maybe.

Captain Knowles gathered up her papers. “I’m going to go back and finish my tasks and leave you to think,” she said. She knew we would be talking about matters she couldn’t be a part of. While she had a top-secret SCI clearance, we still did not share some intel******* ** ***** ********* details with her.

“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.