Operation Dark Heart (27 page)

He also had no background in Afghanistan. Not that I was any expert—but within a few months of arriving in country, I had known enough to understand that the problem wasn’t just in Afghanistan. It was also in Pakistan, and that any long-term solution had to be based on resolving the insurgency in the Pakistani tribal areas and stabilizing Afghanistan. That’s what our intelligence was telling us. That was what my gut was telling me.

General Barno was sitting in a chair behind his desk as I entered his office, following General Bagby, Colonel Ritchie, and Colonel Howard. His office was Spartan, with the light of the late afternoon sun spilling into the window, causing the dust in the air to almost glisten.

General Barno was a tall man, probably six foot two—and thin, with sharp features and a flat effect. General Bagby introduced us, and General Barno, wearing a crisp, pressed Desert Camouflage Uniform, moved out from behind the desk to shake our hands. It was a wet-fish handshake. His movements were almost robotic. I thought I sensed a slight grimace of disapproval when he shook hands with Major Howard and me, but I could have been imagining it. We were the only officers in the room not in military uniform, and I always felt a bit self-conscious with my goatee, too.

We all found seats, and General Barno returned to sit behind the desk. “Gentlemen, it is good to meet you all. What will be the focus of this briefing?” he asked.

As we began, General Bagby spoke in glowing terms of the work performed by the Defense HUMINT team in country. I was surprised and impressed at the clarity and detail of the information he presented, all without notes. He had been paying attention. He walked through the Mountain Viper success and the other successes by the Safe House in Kabul and Ray Moretti in Kandahar.

Colonel Ritchie followed, pointing out that while he had only been in country for about a month, he was impressed with the HUMINT effort and that, in addition to the combat operations, Defense HUMINT was playing a key role in the Leadership Targeting Cell effort based at Bagram. Colonel Ritchie explained to General Barno the specific mission of the LTC.

General Barno sat back in his chair, not commenting or asking any questions, but soon after I began my briefing, I sensed trouble. General Barno folded his arms and squinted at us, expressionless. I gave a half-hour review of the intelligence and walked him through Dark Heart, listing significant assets, their access, and placement.

I got the feeling from General Barno’s expression—or lack of it—that the information was not resonating. Like when you are talking to your mother-in-law about a great episode of
Saturday Night Live
 … just not getting through.

I explained about identifying three primary centers of gravity within Pakistan that were serving as the recruiting, training, planning, and command/control locations for the Taliban and al Qaeda recovery. I told him about the ****** **** ****** *** ***** layer of the intelligence driving the operation. The desired operational end state, I briefed him, would mean the reduction of Wana and the destruction of the Al Qaeda Hotel and we would accomplish the mission objectives through its three phases—then go to the next and do the same thing. Wash, rinse, repeat. Through a combination of precision strikes and assassinations, destroy the whole of the Al Qaeda Hotel and create the appearance of tribal rivalries as the source of the violence.

I then sat back, hoping that by some miracle General Barno was a great poker player, and he was holding back his enthusiasm.

There was silence.

“And so, the overall idea is to keep the Taliban off balance—and do so with surgical precision using **** CJTF 180 *** **** ***** * assets.…” I added in the awkward quiet.

General Barno finally spoke up.

“I appreciate what you’re saying, but I don’t agree,” he said abruptly. “I don’t believe we should be going into Pakistan. What if we get caught?”

I tried to reassure him. “Sir, the chances of that happening are very slight.” My temper flared a bit. “We’ve been doing this for more than a day or two, and we’re good at it.”

General Barno smiled thinly. “I can’t accept that. It’s my job to use all the resources available to me. Therefore, I think it’s important that the Pakistanis pull their own weight.”

John Ritchie and I glanced at each other.
This guy just wasn’t getting it.

I tried to talk him down. “Sir, with all due respect, the Pakistanis aren’t pulling their own weight and they’re not going to pull their own weight. They’re part of the problem.”

“How do you know that?” he shot back.

“Because we’ve caught a female ISI operative participating with the Taliban in a Taliban raid.”

“How do you know that?” he persisted.

“Sir?” His question came as a shock. His lack of understanding knocked the wind out of me.

“How do you know she was ISI? What raid are you talking about?”

I told him about the female ISI operative we’d rolled up during the Taliban offensive against one of our outposts in Khowst and that her link to the ISI had been proven through *** ******* analysis ** *** *************** She was now being processed to move to Guantanamo.

He shrugged it off. “Well, I believe that to be an exception. She was probably a rogue.”

Ritchie and I glanced at each other again.
Where the hell was he getting this shit from?

I tried again. “Sir, it’s clear from all intel that the Pakistani intelligence service is actively supporting the Taliban.”

Ritchie took a turn on the merry-go-round.

“Sir,” he said, “what Major Shaffer is telling you is absolutely true. There is clear and compelling evidence—solid intelligence—that the Pakistani Intelligence Service is at best compromised and, at worst, a coconspirator with the Taliban. Operation Dark Heart would probably give us a better picture of what is actually going on between the ISI and the Taliban.”

Unbelievably, General Barno shrugged it off. “I don’t care. We’ve got to give the Pakistanis a chance to pull their own weight.” His chest seemed to puff up as he sat forward to emphasize his point. “I see myself as a General MacArthur–type of commander. It is my job to use all the capabilities I have as the combined forces chief.”

What the hell? MacArthur? What a flippin’ ego, I thought.

Then he dropped his bombshell. “Give the Pakistanis the intelligence you’ve gathered so far. They’ve got to take action against the Taliban themselves.”

I almost fell out of my chair. “Excuse me, sir?”

He enunciated his words more slowly, as if I were a kindergartner using scissors for the first time. “I need you to pass your information to them.”

I leaned forward. This guy couldn’t be serious. “Sir, this information was obtained through a number of clandestine methods and sources. To provide the Pakistanis with it is to reveal to them sources and capabilities. We can’t do that.”

“Major Shaffer you need to find a way to do it,” he said impatiently. “I don’t support the risk you are proposing here to conduct operations in Pakistan.”

I wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Sir, if we don’t do this, there will be a full-blown insurgency within a year. We know from intel that these guys want to come back in and capture whole pieces of Afghanistan. They attempted to do that in their fall offensive, and we were able to prevent them. But they are going to keep coming.”

Now General Barno was getting pissed. “Major Shaffer,
I don’t care
. I will not support any cross-border operations into Pakistan. You need to understand that. Find a way to pass the intel to the Pakistanis.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. We all sat and stared at each other. I was quietly seething and trying to figure a way out of this.
OK, fine, the guy’s new. We’ll find a way to convince him. I’m not giving up on this.

Ritchie finally looked around the silent room. “We need to get back to Bagram,” he said. I got up gratefully.

“Absolutely.” I turned to General Barno, struggling to keep from speaking from between clenched teeth. “Sir, is there anything else?”

“No, gentlemen,” he said. “You have my guidance.”

This guy was a royal ass.

As we walked out of the room, Colonel Ritchie put his hand on my shoulder. “Tony, stay focused,” he said quietly after we’d gotten out of the room. “We can revisit this later and I’ll support you. Let it go for now. I give you my word, this isn’t over yet. Let me work to try to get his mind changed. We don’t want to let it go.”

General Barno hadn’t been listening to the facts. He had notions that were misguided at best and dangerous at worst.

As we climbed into the up-armored Suburbans to head for Kabul International, Colonel Ritchie told General Bagby that he believed the intel collection should be maintained as long as possible, and that there was no way to easily or quickly pass the intel to the Pakistanis. General Bagby nodded in agreement and suggested we all meet at Bagram within a couple of days to discuss all this.

My mind, however, was still back in the briefing—running the tapes—trying to figure out how I could have adjusted my briefing to be more compelling or clearer in order to convince General Barno of the urgency of Dark Heart.

General Bagby looked at me. “I’m very sorry that General Barno didn’t better accept what you had to say.”

“Sir, this is really important,” I said as he listened in silent sympathy. “We have to find a way to do this.”

It was one of the worst times of my life. Déjà vu all over again. Was everything I had done wasted? Had we wasted our freakin’ time? In some ways, I felt like I did after the September 11 attacks. Through Able Danger, my team and I had done everything in our power to prevent a disaster, but others had made bad decisions that resulted in our failure to help prevent those attacks. Now, this time again, my team had done everything we could to be successful in identifying the source and location of the hard-core bad guys. Now we were being told to give away the intel we had on them to more bad guys.

Colonel Ritchie gave me a pep talk. Don’t give up, he said. We’ll get this back on track. Right now, we needed to focus on the new operation he had just been briefed on—to go into the winter mountain safe havens of the enemy. A new task force, Task Force 1099, was coming in to run it. But Colonel Ritchie guaranteed me that we would get back to Dark Heart. We were not going to walk away from it.

I stared out the window, looking at the throngs of people, carts, and bikes, and the shanty buildings as we flew by, wondering what this all would mean for them. Kabul had seen its first real period of stability and relative lack of violence in years, but how long would it last? How long before a determined adversary, with many thousands of followers—radicals who would die for their cause—overwhelmed the 10,000 troops we had in Afghanistan, a country of 25 million people? Tough odds.

There was no way we were turning over our intel to the Pakistanis. No freakin’ way.

Then again, I also knew I didn’t have much control over the situation.

16

THE “DEATH STAR”

“HEY, airborne,” Colonel Negro said from across the tent as he walked my way. “Someone here I want you to meet.” I was writing a dispatch home on one of the LTC’s unclassified Internet computers.

It was evening at Bagram. In my report home, I was trying to put the best face on what happened after the General Barno disaster, and the words were just not coming quickly. The Negro interruption was welcome.

He came over with a tall colonel I’d never seen before. Looking up at him, I thought he kinda looked like a military version of Ed McMahon—silvery hair, bulbous nose—but with shrewd eyes and none of the jokiness.

It was Col. Brian Keller, the senior intelligence officer for a top-secret operation ramping up, Task Force 1099, under the command of Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal. As Colonel Negro and Colonel Keller explained it, ** *** *** ********* ** **** ***** ** ** its replacement, TF 1099 would continue the same black operations mission, but because of a new Washington emphasis on getting the big HVTs (Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein) the task force would operate simultaneously in Afghanistan and Iraq. The goal was: capture or kill both bin Laden and Hussein by the end of spring ’04.

In Afghanistan, TF 1099 was beginning to set up for Operation Winter Strike—to go after al Qaeda and HIG leadership, known to have their winter headquarters high in the Hindu Kush Mountains in Afghanistan and, in the process, to hunt down bin Laden. The thinking was to be bold and dynamic, and to go where no other army had been.

They were talking my language.

Colonel Keller and Colonel Negro took seats across from me. They were bringing in all the clandestine big boys, they explained. It included four major, top-secret elements: **** **** * ********** ************ ***** ** **** ******* **** *********** ** ************ *************** an elite SEAL Team; the CIA Special Activities Division; and the “Night Stalkers,” the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which provides aviation support ** ***** ******* *** ******

The spearhead of the effort would be the 75th Rangers. Colonel Keller, a Ranger, made that abundantly clear.

Colonel Keller told me he had ideas on how he wanted to use HUMINT to support their forward battle area operations. He wanted to create a “scout” unit—obtaining a number of local indigs to serve as ground guides and scouts. It’s something that the U.S. Army has used throughout its history, going back to the U.S. Cavalry in the nineteenth century. It really hadn’t been used so far in Afghanistan. We had relied on paid informants who stayed undercover, but now that we were headed into more remote locations, they would need native scouts to lead them through there and work with the indigenous population.