Operation Dark Heart (6 page)

Back to the task at hand, Tony,
I told myself.

In the rear of the HUMINT tent, Bill grabbed a chair and motioned me to do the same. As my boss, Bill knew I was in alias and he knew my background.

“Tony, you’ve got a strong reputation, and I’m really going to need you to do a lot of the heavy lifting to get our mission focused with Task Force 180,” he said as I sat down. “But, be aware, there is some kind of drama going on about you.”

I rolled my eyes. “Look, Bill, I’m here to do my job. That’s the only thing I want to do. I’ve done some very interesting ops and, for better or worse, I have a reputation for getting things done. I’m here to do that and to make sure the mission runs smoothly.”

Bill ticked off my priorities. First, do a better job than my predecessor and repair DIA’s relations with the other units. At one point, Bill said, our senior officer, Lt. Col. Ray Moretti in Kandahar, a city to the south that was the birthplace of the Taliban, had passed along to my predecessor great intel that Taliban leader Mullah Omar would be passing by a certain point. Well, my predecessor didn’t bother to tell anyone until it was too late. Omar’s entourage ended up beating up our Afghan informant, taking his phone, and driving away.

It was a low ebb in DIA’s relationship with, well, just about everybody.

Second, since I was an army guy, Bill wanted me to get into the army planning process, because I was trained in it. Bill felt that we—as Defense HUMINT in DIA—were not playing a big enough role in the war and that our intelligence wasn’t making it into the combat operations enough. Finally, Bill told me, I was to be DIA’s representative to the Leadership Targeting Cell (LTC).

“I saw their tent here in the SCIF,” I said. “What’s their focus?”

As Bill explained it, the LTC was directly responsible for the coordination and prosecution of killing or capturing High Value Targets, or Tier 1 targets—like Osama bin Laden, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mullah Omar, and others like them. The LTC was also responsible for Tier 2 targets, such as their lieutenants and their action guys.

Sitting on the LTC were representatives of Combined Joint Task Force 180 and other agencies—*** **** the CIA, the FBI—as well as the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA; it’s now called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency), the J2 ( joint staff chief of intelligence), and other agencies in country. I would be the DIA representative. It was run by Col. Juan Negro, former Army Special Forces who had worked mostly in South America before joining the Special Forces Command in Tampa.

“Let’s go over and meet him,” Bill said, “but first, let’s take care of your weapons.”

He brought me back out into the main area of the SCIF and over to a large black foot locker near the video teleconferencing (VTC) room. With a quick twirl of the combination lock, he opened it up. It contained an array of M-4A3 assault rifles and M-11 (SIG SAUER P228) semiautomatic pistols and ammunition.

“Generally speaking, we issue M-4s when we go out on convoys or under enhanced threat conditions and carry M-11s when we’re inside the perimeter,” said Bill, giving me the combination of the locker. “We usually carry three magazines per M-11.”

“The policy is you’re supposed to keep the weapon unloaded while you’re inside the perimeter,” he added, “but, frankly, my weapon always has a round in the chamber.”

“I got it,” I said.

I picked out an M-11, racked it to make sure there were no stray shells in the chamber, slid the rack forward and slipped it into the holster on my right hip, then quickly scooped up three 13-round mags and a box of ammo. I loaded the bullets into the magazines and put the magazines onto the carrier on my left side. I slid a magazine into the gun but didn’t chamber it until later.

“All set?” Bill said. “Let’s go talk LTC.”

In the LTC tent, it was cooler than the HUMINT tent, almost comfortable. Tim Loudermilk, Colonel Negro’s operations officer, stood up and introduced himself, telling us that Colonel Negro would be back in a minute. In the meantime, I met John Hays, the rep from NIMA—lanky and sandy haired—who gave me a friendly greeting. John was in charge of pictures and maps and responsible for the toughest question of the day: figuring out where the ever-changing Afghan-Pakistan border was. Next up was FBI special agent John Kirkland, a big bear of a guy with a full beard and a massive grin, as well as Dan, another FBI agent.

John and I talked about my work on a project with the FBI—********* * ***** ********* ***** ****** *** **** ********. He said the FBI’s job in Afghanistan was to monitor the debriefings of detainees to look for information relating to domestic law enforcement and to look for leads on possible future attacks. It also did sensitive site exploitation.

“So anytime a major raid takes place, you guys go out and look at the scene?” I said.

“Yep,” said John. “We try to evaluate anything they left behind—computers, books, notes, magazines—anything that might be useful to tip us off and help prevent a new attack.”

I heard a shuffle behind me and turned around to face a calm-eyed colonel with a thick mustache, slightly taller than me, wearing DCUs with no markings other than the U.S. Army and his rank. “Sir,” said Bill. This must be Colonel Negro. ***** ** ***** ******** “He just arrived today. He’s going to be our representative to the LTC.”

For a moment, Negro stared at me, expressionless.

We sat down and talked about some of my predeployment training and about the LTC. I could sense some coolness toward me. He reminded me in some ways of Lieutenant Castillo from that ’80s TV show,
Miami Vice.
Soft-spoken, quiet, but there was a lot going on behind those eyes.

Then Negro asked me about a particular case officer, and I said that I knew him.

“My dealings with him were never good,” Colonel Negro said bluntly. Turns out the colonel had some run-ins with particular case officers and other undercover personnel, including this guy.

“My experience is that people with your background are prima donnas—high on talk and low on delivery,” Negro continued.

Man. The guy sure could throw a punch.

Negro continued. He believed that DIA didn’t participate enough in operations and didn’t produce enough. Generally, we’d just phone it in and leave the difficult, mundane—but necessary—work to the white-world guys, and our clandestine operations didn’t produce enough to justify the attitude or expense.

“Well, sir, I’m sorry you’ve had run-ins with some individuals,” I said. “I’ve had problems with some of those individuals as well. I’d like to believe I’m not like them, and I’d like you to give me a chance to prove myself.”

Negro nodded. “Clearly, you’re going to have your chance to do that.”

Wow,
I thought,
he’s gonna be a tough one.

Afterward, back at the eight-man tent that I would be sharing with other members of the DIA team, I glanced warily at the barrier separating us from the ancient village of Bagram, home to several thousand Afghans. The wall was made up of Hescos about 15 meters from our tent. On the other side of the barrier were some people who seemed to have a problem with our presence here. They would chip explosives out of old Soviet mortars, I was told, insert them into cans or any other container, and wrap a bike chain around the whole package to serve as shrapnel. Voilà. Instant improvised explosive device (IED). Then they’d toss the thing over the barrier at us. Entertaining way to pass the time, I guessed. It made us real careful about getting too close to those Hescos.

Needless to say, for those reasons and plenty of others, security was extremely tight at Bagram. We had to carry our M-11 sidearms with us at all times. Even when sleeping or showering, we had to keep them within easy reach.

The showers were pretty good, I had been told, but the Porta-Johns were a long trudge from the tents, they cooked you in the heat—hitting 150 degrees in the summer—and froze your balls off in the winter. Dust and grit were everywhere from the ever-present wind that would die down to a slight breeze and then whip up to the speed and force of a freight train. It felt like a blast furnace in the summer and, I learned, an ice-covered knife in the winter. I’d been informed that the dust it carried contained high levels of fecal matter.

Great,
I thought.
I’ll be breathing shit for the next several months.

4

THE BOY AND THE BOMB

SWEATING under my forty pounds of vest and ammo, I swung the M-4 up from my seat in the Toyota 4 × 4, thumbed the safety off, and aimed it through the windshield at the young boy. In the swirling dust and mayhem of Kabul, I had spotted him running full speed into the street, a metallic object in his hand, arm stretched out toward Dave Christenson’s truck in front of ours.

A bomb.

We were near the end of a clandestine recon in Kabul, and everything was going to hell.

Moving like a blur, the kid tossed the metal item toward Dave’s truck. My M-4 was up, now clearing the truck’s firewall, barrel lined up, and I was just putting pressure on the trigger. Time seemed to go into slow motion.

I just got here,
I thought
, and I’m gonna shoot a freakin’ kid.

*   *   *

It had been a wild trip into Kabul from Bagram. Along the patched blacktop of the “new” Russian Road as it was called—one sorry excuse for a roadway that was barely two lanes wide—we roared into Kabul in a Toyota 4 × 4 at up to 100 miles per hour, airborne over the many bumps and bouncing over the potholes as we passed other U.S. and ISAF convoys of heavy military vehicles. Because we were in a soft-skinned vehicle, we were more vulnerable to grenades, RPGs, and IEDs than they were, and so we had to build survivability into our movements with speed and maneuverability.

To make ourselves an even tougher target, our driver, Sgt. Julie Tate, zigzagged down the road. She passed vans packed with people (some of whom were even hanging off the sides and clinging to the top), camels loaded down with all the worldly possessions of the nomadic tribes that roamed the Afghan mountains, military convoys, bicycles, herds of sheep—you name it. Shouting over the loud music she was playing and the road noise, she told me to watch for newly patched pavement—a sign of a possible IED. We also had to stay off the shoulders. There was a danger of IEDs, of course, but also, farmers often picked up unexploded ordnance from their fields (they were skilled at it), such as land mines left over from the Soviet occupation and unexploded cluster bombs from the Soviets and the Americans, and dropped them by the sides of the road. There, a fully loaded vehicle, like ours, could set them off.

“Don’t worry, sir,” Julie yelled. “I won’t let you die.”

I looked at her as we weaved down the road, the landscape flashing past. “Oh,
that
is very reassuring.”

Much of the terrain between Bagram and Kabul was barren desert, a valley with a few settlements and compounds along the way. I could also see the occasional smoke-belching brick factory. Parts of it reminded me of Arizona: small rises, dry river beds, all manner of shallow ravines between the soaring mountain ranges. Brackish dust devils, tall as tornadoes, slowly waltzed across the valley in front of the far range of mountains. Harsh country, I thought, but with a subtle beauty.

The Russians had built the road in the 1980s after they got tired of getting blown up going through the villages connecting Bagram to Kabul to the east. The older route to the east was still open. It was shorter, but even more dangerous than this one.

We sped by Afghan army checkpoints—forlorn cement buildings in the middle of nowhere with the Afghan flag flying and a bed outside. Sometimes the road had speed bumps in front of the checkpoints, which we sailed over. Later, when I commanded convoys, I always told my drivers that if they didn’t get airborne during the trip to and from Kabul, then they weren’t driving fast enough.

As the landscape got more desolate, the foot traffic thinned out, but we occasionally saw people walking along the shoulder. Out in the middle of freakin’ nowhere. God knows how they didn’t get blown up by landmines. Maybe they did and we just hadn’t seen it.

Dave had approached me the day I had arrived about conducting convoys with ***** ******* ************** an Army unit that does intelligence collection to support ***** ********* ****** mission. I used to work next to the chief of ***** ** ****** before I came to Afghanistan, so I was familiar with ******* operations. Its people go out and collect intelligence that isn’t available through ******** ********* means, **** *********** ********* ****** ***** ******* *** ** *** You can only get so much from far-off technical devices and if you need to be closer in to get information, you also need people—to take photographs, for example, ** ** ***** *********************** ******* *** **** ******** ****. That’s what ***** ***** ** **** in close. As far as I was concerned, they were the unsung heroes of the intelligence community. Small in number, but creative and adaptive. In Bagram, ***** only had a few people—at most three—so they depended on Washington and the DIA for mission support.

***** *** conducting covert missions around Afghanistan, although mostly in Kabul. To hide their missions, they would go in as part of convoys that ran regularly between Kabul and Bagram, break off in Kabul, do their job, and then join back up with the regular convoys to return to Bagram.