Operation Dark Heart (9 page)

Tim, Dave, and I watched the end of the video, as the Taliban celebrated the deaths of the police officers, in grim silence. “What does this mean?” I asked Dave.

He put down his pen. “Between their religious diatribes, they’re giving indications of what they’re up to and where they’re going.”

This was more than just a propaganda video. The info on the videotape fit into the intelligence Dave and his folks had been getting—that this operation was a small part of a much larger plan by the Taliban to retake Afghanistan. They had started by overrunning police outposts, but their ambitions were much, much larger. There were signs of coordination between the Taliban, al Qaeda, and the guerrilla group Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, headed by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was on the LTC’s list. A Taliban rival in the 1990s, Hekmatyar had formed an alliance with them in recent years. One of our theories was that the HIG, as Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin was known, had become the de facto bodyguards of bin Laden when he was in Afghanistan. If you could find the HIG, the thinking went, it could lead you to him.

Our sources indicated that more than 1,000 ACM (anticoalition militia) combat fighters were moving into Afghanistan, which meant you had thousands more on the Pak side helping plan, equip, train, and organize.

“In other words,” I said, “they’re coming back, and they have a very detailed plan on how to do it.”

Dave nodded. “This isn’t just about taking down checkpoints along the border.” Intelligence pointed to a chilling goal: retake Kandahar—second largest city in Afghanistan with more than 300,000 residents—and the surrounding Kandahar province by Ramadan, two months from now. “They are very patient, and they know what they want to do.”

“Can’t we chase ’em back across the border into Pakistan and let the Paks deal with them?” I asked.

Dave shook his head impatiently. “Tony, you’re naïve. You think that if we just do that, they’re going to stay there.”

“I understand that,” I answered, “but my impression is that we are trying to seal off the border.”

Dave rose and strode over to a wall-size map of Afghanistan and ran his hand along the bumpy eastern border with Pakistan—1,500 miles of mountains, canyons, caverns, and remote smugglers’ trails. “Do you really believe we can close off that?” he asked.

“I guess not,” I said. Not without the Pakistanis’ help, and I was to learn that we couldn’t rely on them. This was getting kind of alarming. “So what the hell do we do?”

Our combat forces were strung out all over a country the size of Texas. If these guys wanted to pour over the border, there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot we could do to stop them just with conventional warfare. The intel was indicating that 1,000 battle-hardened Taliban insurgents, coming in from the Pakistani border towns of Wana and Quetta, were moving with haste into the interior of Afghanistan. The U.S. and Afghan forces couldn’t shut down that entire border and, under agreements with the Paks, we couldn’t pursue them into Pakistan. We had to be smarter, quicker, more cunning.

Dave leaned forward again. Clearly, he’d been thinking about this for a while. “I understand that we’re focusing on leadership targeting, but I’d like us to work together to provide actionable intelligence to the 10th Mountain so they can more effectively counter the offensive.”

“What do you have in mind?” I asked, now sitting with all four chair legs on the floor and paying close attention.

“I’d like us to combine intel for the effort,” said Dave.

Whoa. This was radical. There are huge ownership issues over intel. Intelligence agencies like to keep their info in silos, send it in for analysis, and treat it as proprietary. In Washington ******** ** **** ****** ********** analysts normally do triage and give you back what they think you need—and you never get everything.

“You want our raw source info?” I wanted to make sure I knew what he was requesting.

“Well,” Dave said carefully, “it would be useful. We could infuse the data for any known terrorist, warlord, or enabler—anything you have.”

I thought hard, putting my hand to my forehead. “I don’t think the people in my organization are gonna like that very much.”
No kidding,
I thought.
They’ll go ballistic.

Our reports were written without the exact source of the info to protect that source. We separated out the chaff and gave out just the kernel. However, the details related to sourcing were hugely important to understanding the big picture.

“It would have to stay within the holdings of the LTC. No foreigners” I said. Foreign troops were providing ************* as well as combat support, as part of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops in the country.

Dave nodded. “In exchange, I will make sure you get immediate coverage or answers we can pull directly from our data ***. We would use the combined data to put together a package on each guy. Then decisions could be made jointly.” For Dave, that meant details of what the bad guys were doing ****** *** ***** **** **** ******* ***** * ***** ******** *** ******* ******* *** *********** *** ***** ******* **** **** ****** **** ******** **** *** ****** ****, were hugely important to understanding the operational environment—the “spiderweb” of the terrorist infrastructure that we had to understand so we could act in a smart, cohesive fashion.

For Dave to offer to distribute raw data intelligence even though it would remain within the top secret security network, was also a radical move. Normally, Washington ********** ***** *** **** **** gave people like Dave what they thought he needed in the form of finished or near finished reports, but Dave had cut a deal with them. He was getting everything so that his hybrid team of *** ******* *** **** ****** specialists could parse it and review it to establish their own intel. In promising me access to their data, Dave was stepping way, way, way out on a limb.

In my mind, I could just hear the screaming in Washington ********** ******* ******* *** ** *** **** ***** ****** ********* *** *** if they knew about this level of information exchange.

“Where do you propose to keep it?” I asked. The fact was, our computer systems were incompatible, so we had no way to create a shared database. We would literally have to print out everything.

“I’m going to put them on my door,” Dave said.

I rolled my eyes. “Oh
, that’s
secure.”

“We’re in a SCIF. We’re fine,” Dave said, “and we need to have one central location that has one hard copy of all the information on any single target. When we decide to take action, we pull the target package down and we start looking at it as a team. Together, we make a decision on a course of action: kill, capture, or do nothing.”

Kill, capture, or spy: that was the accepted equation of the new math that we dealt with every day. The temptation was always to kill, but actually it’s better first to spy. **** ** ****** **** ****** ***** ******* ** *****, so you had to perform a gain-loss evaluation of potentially losing that intel. If you spy on a bad guy and he gives you good intel, the benefit of having him out there telling you what’s going on may be greater than the single victory of taking him out or bringing him in. So sometimes it’s better to leave him hanging out there until he outlives his usefulness or it becomes clear he’s planning some imminent action that could hurt somebody.

We would have to hold nothing back. I would even have to tell him who DIA’s sources were, our subsources, how they were recruited, their tribal leanings—all the atmospherics in the ops traffic that often got scrubbed from reports. Then Washington could verify ******* *** ********* ****** *********** *** ******** **** **** ************* ** *** ******** **** ***** ****** *** *** ***** **** **** ******* *** **** **** **** *******

“What do you think Colonel Negro, will think of this approach?” I asked Dave. We both looked at Tim Loudermilk.

“We haven’t really come up with a methodology for the Tier 2 targets that will be of use in going after Tier 1,” he said. “He could go for it. I think it’ll help us on Tier 2 targets, which are mostly in Afghanistan and, when we focus on Tier 2, that will help us focus on operational objectives.”

“You mean Mountain Viper?” asked Dave. That was CJTF 180’s upcoming operation.

“Precisely,” I said. I was ready to jump in.

“You’ve got my buy-in,” I said. “We’ll give you information from our sources in real time as it comes in.”

Dave smiled. “That’s great, shipmate. I really appreciate it. I think that will make us all more effective.”

“We probably also need to get the buy-in of Colonel Boardman,” I said.

We both looked at Tim.

Col. Robert Boardman was the senior intelligence officer (J2) of CTJF 180. He believed that all intelligence should be coming to him—not to the LTC—and that too much of the three-letter agencies’ time and effort were going to support Colonel Negro and his folks rather than what Boardman thought was his job, which was to produce intelligence reports. Although we knew the intel would just sit on Boardman’s desk.

There was a short silence.

“Why don’t we just get Colonel Negro buy-in,” Dave finally said. We knew Boardman would just hoard the information.

Later, after some raised eyebrows and a quick think, Negro did, indeed, buy in. So did my boss, Bill Wilson.

A showdown was brewing. I did sincerely believe our fighting forces were the best in the world, but after years of training for the Cold War “Fulda Gap Scenario”—where Russian troops were expected to flood through the Fulda Gap in Germany—I had my doubts. The Army, and really the whole of DoD, had trained to anticipate the expected force-on-force conflagration in central Europe in which a large Soviet combined-arms army would invade West Germany and push toward the Atlantic. The whole of U.S. military doctrine was based on training to counter and defeat the Soviet monolith, and things like Vietnam, Korea, etc. were nothing more than “proxy warfare”—with Vietnam being the most notable counterinsurgency we had faced … and lost.

In theory, small counterterrorism “mop-up” operations were all that would be needed to ensure favorable conditions for the Afghan people. This was an incorrect assumption by those rocket scientists at the Pentagon who would translate wishful thinking into policy.

General Vines had made it clear in his morning meetings that the war was not over, and it was his intent to take the war to the enemy. My kind of guy.

Despite that, the focus of the U.S. effort was 1,400 miles away in Iraq. Dave had even gotten a call from CENTCOM—U.S. Central Command that was responsible for Mideast and Central Asia. The essence of the message was: “Chill out. Why don’t you guys just hold the line and not engage?” The funny thing was, there was no panic, no sense of doom, no concept in the Pentagon of how dire things were about to get here. Yet there was every indication that something wicked this way comes. Time to make some changes.

I got some pushback from my DIA staff, mostly from the reports officer, “Special Ed,” who didn’t see the benefit in sharing operational data.

“We have no process for transmitting that type of info to outside organizations,” Special Ed said solemnly as we met in the SCIF to discuss the new arrangement. The source admin guy then chimed in to explain the proper procedure to report and forward source information.

“Yeah, so?” I said.

Ed added, “Well, Tony, it is a closed system—information goes in and we hold it.”

I took a deep breath. As usual, process over progress.

“To quote a general I once worked for, ‘Don’t tell me how to suck eggs,’ ” I said. I looked over at Bill Wilson who was listening without emotion, propped up against the table next to the weapons locker.

“We need to do it,” he snapped and got up and walked away.

I looked over at Ed. “Give me hard copy on Ray’s net and speak to the Safe House about the sources they want to make sure do not get inadvertently whacked ***** ******* ** *** ******” **** *** *** ******** **** ******* and his “net” was his collection of Afghan agents and their informants.) *** **** ***** *** *** ***** ************** ****** ************ ** *** **** *** *** ********** **** ******** *** ****** **** **** ** ****** *********** ***** ****** **** ******** **** ***** ** *** ******

Within the hour, Dave taped ten manila envelopes to his door, one for each of our top ten targets that we could stick our data in. He created unclassified code names for them, using the names of cities so we could refer to the targets on open lines and protect their true identity: OMAHA, MEDFORD, COLUMBUS, and so on. Then, if one of these guys was *********** ** *** ***** and tracked down by one of our informants or linked to an event—a raid, a cross-border operation, a planning meeting that we found out about—we could just pull his file off the door. We could have a full eyeball on him, maybe send a JSTAR in for a real-time look at him. We would get the LTC involved. Dave would talk to everyone, including the lawyers. Should we monitor? Disrupt? Capture? Kill? We were trying to make them uncomfortable, anticipate what they were doing, then degrade and disrupt their activities.

Our technique was a derivative of Information Operations known as Effects Based Operations (EBO). The idea behind EBO is to maximize your strengths and apply them directly to your adversary’s weaknesses, monitor the effects of your effort and adjust accordingly to make sure you maintain the advantage. The trend in the army had been to establish standards, train to those standards, and conduct operations to meet those standards. The problem had become that achieving victory had been lost in the process—measures of performance became the measure to which one’s military success was held. What got dropped was the focus on measures of effectiveness—or achieving victory. The military tends to worship mediocrity. Achieving and maintaining standards—even if those standards do not achieve victory—is the safest course of action. Follow process, no matter what.