“On their face, these DIA cuts come as ham-handed throwbacks to the Cold War,” Shaffer tells me during our first interview for this piece. “But now that I’ve had a few months to assess, it appears they were much more worried about what the book has come to represent concerning the way the Afghan war has been fought.”
Since 9/11 there has been a running battle—for the most part far from the public eye—between desk jockeys who would conceal mistakes made during the war on terror and field operatives who seek to reveal the truth in hope of fixing a broken intelligence system. For a few extraordinary weeks this struggle finally burst onto the main stage, even if the reasons for the book’s butchering were obscured by the blundering desperation of the DIA. Now, thanks to my relationship with Shaffer, we are—for the first time—able to show exactly what had the DIA running scared.
Shaffer’s book rips the lid off several stories the bureaucrats wanted to suppress: the role of a program named Able Danger in yielding information that could have uncovered the 9/11 plot; Operation Dark Heart, which could have nabbed Al Qaeda’s number two leader; and early indications that Pakistan’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, actively supported the Taliban. These are the incendiary bombs the censors tried to defuse. And this is the real story of Tony Shaffer’s book.
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