Operation Dark Heart (36 page)

Oh, wonderful, I thought. The creepy stuff continues.

Clarendon had gotten a by-name request for me signed by Colonel Keller, Jack told me. Jack knew that because he was the one who had drafted the request. Regardless of that the fourteenth floor had delayed and hemmed and hawed and finally said that Task Force 1099 couldn’t use me through the spring. They could rely on me only while I was running the ADVON, and I could only stay through April. No reason was given. That had made Jack suspicious. Usually the ***** ******* ********** ******* ****** got whatever they wanted. **** ** *** element that has been tasked consistently to be on the cutting edge of war. It wasn’t a security issue because DIA would have taken me off duty immediately. That’s what made it even more suspicious. Jack couldn’t get to the bottom of it.

So while Jack and I recognized the strangeness coming from Clarendon to be important, we were halfway around the world from them and we had to deal with the war in Bagram.

The first thing I did was track down Hank the Cowboy and give him hell. I’m not sure it helped much. I do not, as a rule, yell. Also I hardly ever use rank to “lock people’s heels”—but in the case of Hank, I did both.

He insisted he was doing the right thing by going out to track down HVTs. I pointed out that he’d been doing such a lousy job that I was going to have to essentially take over his shop just to get everything back on track. He said that was fine by him. He wanted to keep running around hunting bad guys.

So I had to reconstitute the ***** ********** program, which Hank had singlehandedly shut down, pissing off **** *** **** *** *** in one boneheaded move.

At the Safe House, Randy’s replacement was putting up a fight about sending his case officers out into the field. *** **** *** *** ******* ********** ******* ** *** *** **** ******** *** ****** ******* *** ** ****** ** ****** ******* ** *** ******** *** ***** ******* He didn’t want them to be anyplace dangerous. It got ugly. He lost and the case officers went forward.

In the meantime, Jack was trying to get to the bottom of the situation with Clarendon. He kept telling them what a great job I was doing. I wasn’t sure that was helping matters a hell of a lot.

One day Jack came to my computer grinning.

“I really pissed them off this time,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked. That was usually my job. I felt jealous.

He gestured toward his computer. “C’mon over and look at this.”

He showed me an e-mail he’d sent back to Clarendon. It was a photo of me getting the Bronze Star.

“Oh my God, Jack,” I said. “You must have spun them right out of the room.”

Jack laughed. “Oh yeah, I did. I won’t show you the responses. They were pretty pointed.”

A bigger issue at the time, though, was getting ready for Shadow Matrix. General Barno was adamant about the issue of American troops crossing the border in Pakistan for any operations. He said that American and Pakistani forces were cooperating to create a “hammer and anvil” strategy, in which forces on one side of the border would drive al Qaeda members across the border to troops waiting on the other side, a tactic that was supposed to crush the al Qaeda elements between the Pakistani and the coalition forces. He now restricted everyone from even going into Pakistan in hot pursuit. To do it, you had to get approval from top Afghani and Pakistani leaders. Well, a hell of a lot of good that did when you were closing in on bad guys. We knew they would disappear as soon as they hit Pakistan.

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.