Operation Dark Heart (24 page)

I could feel her almost shiver as she took a breath.

“Everything,” she answered. I tried not to be obvious as I swallowed hard.

She finished her cigar and pushed off my leg as she got up and put her hand on my shoulder.

“You’d better be good,” she murmured.

“I’ll try.”

So the next morning, I waited in the empty tent for her to come off her shift. Even though it was October and the nights were cool, the morning sun had already warmed up the tent to the comfortable midseventies.

The door opened and in walked Kate. I stood up and, in a split second, that high school awkwardness reduced my age from forty-one to seventeen.

“Hey, how are you?” I asked.

She smiled as she touched her hair with both hands. “Great, and about to get better. Just came from the shower.”

She walked over and stood about six inches from me. I didn’t move.

She smelled heavenly—like roasted almonds with vanilla—and her black hair was still damp from the shower. She looked me right in the eye.

“How are you?” she said with a wide grin.

“Uh, fine …” I mumbled. What a time to lose my ability to come up with glib comebacks.

I put in an audio disk of ’80s music. The Psychedelic Furs’ “Love My Way” started to play. OK, here we go …

The massage soon transitioned into cuddling—and to other things. After it all, I held her, both of us sweating from the exertion and passion, and both of us starting to drift toward sleep.

“Do you ever think of death?” Her question came out of the blue and as not much more than a whisper.

I had thought about death—about how I’d considered suicide when I hit bottom before I joined Alcoholics Anonymous—but had tried to put death out of my mind since my deployment.

“Yes, sometimes.”

“What do you think heaven will be like?”

“I don’t know.” And I didn’t. I thought for the moment. “Perhaps it’s what we believe it to be. Maybe God allows us to pick our heaven.”

“I had never thought of that,” Kate said. “That would be nice.”

“What do
you
think heaven is?” I asked. I started to stroke her black hair.

“Feeling safe …” she said as she faded off into sleep in my arms.

Not able to sleep, but enjoying the energy circulating between us, I lay there and felt her breathing as I held her.

Safe. What a concept.

14

ABLE DANGER

THE event that would change my military career started innocuously enough with an announcement by General Bagby at the morning meeting. Members of the 9/11 Commission investigating the September 11 attacks were at Bagram, he said, and if anyone had any information for them, we could meet with them.

Two words immediately leaped to my mind: Able Danger.

I hadn’t thought much about it since coming to Afghanistan. To tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it much for a while. I’d forced myself to stop thinking about it. The frustration was too great.

I approached Colonel Negro after the meeting. “Sir, I have some information that the 9/11 Commission might be interested in. It’s about an operation I was working on called Able Danger. I’ve mentioned aspects of it to you because we used some technical operations there that I’m proposing for Dark Heart. What do you think?”

“Write up a talking points memo, send it to me, and I’ll send it along to General Bagby,” Negro said. “I’ll see what he says to do.”

I went back to my office and, in front of the computer, the memories of that operation came flooding back. Christ. We
had
those guys, and we blew it. We all freakin’ blew it.

I started typing, bulleting points to talk from if I was asked to brief, to show the 9/11 Commission what we knew more than a year before the attacks: the basic details of *** *** **** *********** *********** ** *** ** ** ******* the concept of operations and notable details; of Able Danger, and the notable and numerous problems. The commission had to know the whole story—or as much as I could give them in one session.

In 2000, while targeting al Qaeda, our Able Danger task force had discovered two of the three cells that later conducted the 9/11 attacks. Including Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker.

I figured someone had already clued in the 9/11 Commission since I was not the only one who knew. By my count, ten folks in all of DoD had that information. We—actually, the army—had found evidence of al Qaeda cells operating in the U.S. in 1999 through its data mining program. Within DoD, there was knowledge of al Qaeda operating for the better part of two years before September 11, 2001. We had known, for example, about the threat that al Qaeda posed to U.S. interests based on the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi. I assumed the commissioners were aware of some of that, but I wanted to walk them through the entire operation just in case. It was important for them to learn the whole story—or as much as I could give them in one session.

Able Danger. Where would I start?

Suddenly, I was out of this combat zone in a godforsaken country halfway around the world, and it was 1999 in Tampa, Florida, again.

** *** ***** * *** ********** **** ***** ******* **** * ****** *************** ******** *** **** ******* ** ***** ** ********* ****** ******* ** *********** *** ***** *** ********** *** *** ******* *********** **** ***** ****** ** ***** * *** ******* *** ****** ********* ******** *********** ** ***** ******* *** ******* ***** ** ***** ** *** ** **** *** *********** ** *********** ***** ******* ** *** ********* ****** ** ***** ** **** *** ***** *** ****** ********** ********* ** *** **** ****** we took cutting-edge, “out-of-the-box” technological concepts and developed them into real intelligence operations. Much of it was so black that we couldn’t talk about the existence of the operations on any computer network, even at the top-secret level, so I had to keep a lot of records in hard copy only and work on stand-alone computers. I often briefed higher-ups in person rather than sending an online memo.

I got involved in Able Danger in September 1999, when I was at SOCOM headquarters in Tampa for my annual reserve training. Because of my work on Stratus Ivy, I was brought in to brief Gen. Peter Schoomaker, then SOCOM commander.

Schoomaker, a stout officer with graying short hair, decisive eyes, and a low, deliberate voice, stopped me in the middle of my PowerPoint briefing. He asked me a key question about one of the black operations that involved the penetration of a major transnational state. I gave him a key phrase that was code for the exact nature of the capability. Schoomaker got it. “I need you for a special project,” he said.

He turned to one of the colonels in the room. “I want you to read Major Shaffer into Able Danger ASAP.” He left no room for negotiation. It was a done deal.

The next day, navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, who managed the project, took me to the Special Technical Operations office, presented me with a three-inch-thick briefing book, and said with a big smile, “Here ya go. You’re going to like this.”

I remember opening the briefing book, starting to read, and then stopping.

Oh my God. This is the A ticket.
The ultimate mission.

We were taking the gloves off and going after al Qaeda.

At that point, in 1999, it was clear that al Qaeda was a formidable and deadly opponent. In 1993, a car bomb was detonated below the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The 1,500-pound device was supposed to bring down the towers, but it didn’t. Still, it killed six people and injured more than 1,000. According to the narratives of the event that I respect, this was al Qaeda’s first decisive, though not entirely successful, strike on U.S. soil.

Then there were the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam orchestrated by al Qaeda. Truck bombs killed hundreds of people and injured thousands.

Schoomaker’s concept was to bring together the best and the brightest military operators, technicians, planners, and intelligence officers from the army, the DIA, and SOCOM. They would combine cutting-edge technology with traditional human intelligence operations and link both directly into military planning.

It was like bringing the best minds from Apple, Hewlett-Packard, and Microsoft together to focus on a single challenge. The mission here was to discover the global “body” of al Qaeda and, with this information, prepare offensive operations options. Those options could include everything from raids to highly complex psychological operations to manipulate, degrade, and destroy al Qaeda.

In other words, gather the intelligence to kill the largest and most dangerous terrorist operation in the world.

Gen. Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had directed that SOCOM have the lead command on Able Danger. This was the first time that SOCOM was the lead command. Usually the regional commands—CENTCOM, EUCOM, SOUTHCOM, or PACOM—would be the lead command with SOCOM supporting their operations, but in this case, the rationale was that al Qaeda was a global transnational threat that didn’t have one particular regional focus. It was a huge departure from tradition, however. SOCOM would be telling the regional commands what it needed, not the other way around.

With the approval of the DIA director of operations, Maj. Gen. Bob Harding, I put several folks to work on a herculean effort to try to assist SOCOM in several key areas of its mission.

The first was to map something that had never been mapped before, using a clean-sheet approach in which no existing methodology existed.

My staff coordinated—almost as a concierge for SOCOM—the operational requirements and documents. Our task included getting copies of the large, classified “corporate” databases of DIA and ***—terabytes of data. The patterns found in open-source data would confirm, or be refuted, by comparing them to information and patterns contained in classified databases.

We would follow the data wherever it took us and build a global map of al Qaeda. Since we were not terrorism experts, we had no preconceived notions or bad habits. We were “pure” in our drive.

Still, it wasn’t just about the data.

We would find ways to support the military operationally when it started to act against al Qaeda. **** ** ** *** *** ** **** **** *** **** ***** ***** ** ****** *** *********** ********** ** ******* *** ********* ** ************* *** ********* ****** ***** **** ** ******* **** **** ******* ********* ********** **** ******* ** *********** ** ******

*** ** *** *** ****** *** * ******* ****** ******* **** ** ***** ** ** *** ********* **** ******* **** *** ***** **** **** ***** ** *** ************ ******* **** ********* *** *** was a key, vetted asset, with solid access to the Taliban and al Qaeda, whom we’d had on the books for years, and he was our ticket into the heart of al Qaeda. Using the knowledge we would amass through Able Danger, ** *** *** ******* ** ****** ***** ***** ************ ******* ***** ** *** *** ******** **** ** ** *** ******* ** ** ** **** ****** **** **** ****** ** ***** *** ******* ***** **** ********* ************ **** ***** ***** ** ** ********** *** ******* ******* ** **************** ***** ** ************

For the first four months of the project, our SOCOM Able Danger team floundered because it lacked operational methodology and usable intel. The “clean sheet” approach was more like a sterile one.

I had used the U.S. Army’s Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) unit to support two other black operations that Stratus Ivy was running: LIWA had provided key data that had helped us plan operations, and I was impressed with its results. So I recommended to SOCOM that it look at LIWA and its massive database and data-crunching ability. One of the lead organizations on Able Danger was LIWA, which had begun to adapt to the information age and was considered the army’s lead data-mining center. Its idea was to use high-powered software to bore into just about everything: any data that was available—and I mean anything. Open-source Internet data, e-mails believed to be terrorist-related, nonsecret government data, commercial records, information on foreign companies, logs of visitors to mosques obtained from an outside researcher, and much, much more.

Even before moving in to assist Able Danger, LIWA had begun looking at global terrorist infrastructures. Over six months in 1999, it had acquired a vast four-terabyte database and had assembled all these scattered pieces of information about al Qaeda into a comprehensive global picture.

Its researchers did huge sweeps of the Internet and used highly advanced algorithms to compare and amalgamate data. It was a powerful way to link individuals and organizations and make sense of disparate streams of data. It was like Google on steroids.

Within two months, LIWA had produced some impressive results in establishing a global map of al Qaeda using only open-source data. Its model was based on targeting methodology developed by J. D. Smith, an analyst for Orion Scientific Systems (a LIWA contractor), who deconstructed every individual involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing into basis data points—the year they were born, their associates, tribal affiliation, mosque memberships, and so on—and built an algorithm. It was then used to examine immense amounts of publicly available data and identify other potential terrorists by comparing them to the original ’93 World Trade Center terrorists. As we identified individuals who matched those characteristics, we looked at their associations with other like individuals and started to create a map of a worldwide organization and its direct links with al Qaeda leadership.