Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Operations on the Front Lines of Afghanistan by Shaffer Anthony

Author:Shaffer Anthony [Anthony, Shaffer]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 2011-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

♦ 12 ♦

AL QAEDA HOTEL

“I’VE got something for you, shipmate.”

With a slight grin, Dave was standing, sentinel-like, just outside our HUMINT tent getting printouts off the network printer, as I was passing by.

“I hope it’s some of that Starbucks coffee you just got,” I joked. Starbucks was the coin of the realm in Bagram. In all of Afghanistan, for that matter. Elixir of the gods compared with the tree bark the military poured. I always donated the Starbucks I got in care packages to Dave’s mess—and we all shared in the booty.

“Even better,” said Dave, a glint in his eye. “My foreign analyst has found some significant intel you’d be very interested in. She’s found a spot where there is real potential. I’d like her to brief you on it.”

“Sounds promising,” I said. “When?”

“How about right now?” He paused. “There’s a spot she’s calling the ‘Al Qaeda Hotel.’”

Whoa, I thought. This must be good.

“Let me grab my mug, and I’ll meet you at your tent.”

I met Captain Knowles and Dave at his office tent. She had gathered her briefing materials, and the three of us went into the big briefing room of the main tent.

Dave and I sat down, while Captain Knowles put some maps on the table and then positioned herself by our big map of Afghanistan on the wall, which also showed its eastern border area with Pakistan—often called Pakistan’s “lawless territories”—and for good reason. The FATA, or Federally Administered Tribal Area, was where bin Laden had escaped to in 2001. It was an area that Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the Taliban and al Qaeda, would later call a “multilayered terrorist cake.”

“Based on ███████ analysis, we’ve identified three primary centers of gravity for known and suspected al Qaeda and Taliban operatives in Pakistan,” Captain Knowles told us in her flat foreign accent. Attractive, with bright, intelligent eyes, she was a waif-thin brunette who bicycled everywhere in Bagram. More important from our perspective, she was extraordinarily gifted in her intelligence work. ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████ and I had the distinct impression that most of the █████ at Bagram had figured out by now who I was. The ████ military was a small world.

Captain Knowles pointed at the wall map and moved her hand down. “The three known centers of gravity are ██████ to the south . . .” She moved her hand up slightly. “Wana, here in the center of the Pakistani territories . . .” She pointed farther up. “And ████████ up here.”

I had a feeling this was leading up to something very interesting.

“We have the best intelligence,” she said as she turned and gestured toward the map on the table, “on Wana.”

I squinted to focus on the very small spot on the map.

“Wana?” I had heard of it, but it never really stood out in the jumble of facts, locations, and events that I had been trying to familiarize myself with since coming to Afghanistan.

Wana, I found in researching it later, was a Pakistani city about twenty

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