Operation Dark Heart (30 page)

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 entrance 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.

Yeah, right.

We had to pull our warlord before the CIA’s assets ran into him. Although he had seen them, they hadn’t spied him—yet—because he stayed at a distance and was in a Ranger uniform. Because of that, he was indistinguishable from the Rangers at a distance. “We have to get our scout out,” I told Colonel Keller, “and it has to be immediately.”

He looked at me as if I had a third eye growing from my forehead. “We can’t. We planned for your guy to guide the Rangers.”

“CIA has co-opted the Ranger company you forward-based in Asadabad. They have decided to go with the two scouts the CIA sent forward. Our guy’s in trouble.”

Colonel Keller was annoyed.

“Have you spoken to the Ranger 2?” he asked. **** ** ******** *** *** ******** ************ ********

“Sir, I just came from there,” I said. “There is nothing he can do at this point.”

“Before you do anything, Tony, let me make a call and get to the bottom of this,” he said.

“No problem,” I lied. My blood pressure had reached Olympian heights.

Colonel Keller made several calls and finally ended up talking to the Ranger element forward. I was sitting with my feet up on a desk and my chair back on two legs, when Colonel Keller finally looked over at me.

“They want to stick with the CIA assets.” He wasn’t thrilled. “So there is nothing your guy can do?” Colonel Keller was an intelligence guy, but more of a generalist. He didn’t get HUMINT operations very well—the slow and delicate work of burrowing into the human psyche until you unearth vulnerabilities that can be exploited to your advantage. Still he at least realized the warlord needed to be handled carefully. Getting him machine-gunned by a rival tribe during his first week on the job was not good business. Tribal rivalries go back thousands of years, and they are not to be trifled with. “No,” I said. “As much as we hate to throw away a week of planning and coordination, there is nothing we can do. We need to protect our warlord’s identity from them. He can be used to shut the back door, using his personal army, as the Rangers push through the mountains.”