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Karzai’s chief of staff—money designed to
“drive a wedge between the Afghans and
their American and NATO benefactors.”
Still, despite the best efforts of the Pentagon
to edit Shaffer’s story, the most
damaging incident in his Afghan tour comes
through with shocking clarity: the meeting
he had at Bagram Airfield in fall 2003 with
Philip Zelikow, executive director of the 9/11
Commission. It was an encounter that would
prove to be Shaffer’s undoing.
•
In 1999 General Peter Schoonmaker, head of
the U.S. Special Operations Command, had
asked that Shaffer be “read into” Able Danger,
a groundbreaking data-mining project aimed
at collecting global intelligence on Al Qaeda.
“Able Danger had a dual purpose,” says Shaffer.
“After the African embassy bombings, it
was clear to the Pentagon that Al Qaeda was
our new enemy and that eventually we would
have boots on the ground against them. So
the idea was to identify their members and
to take them out. The operation wasn’t called
Able Fun or Able Picnic. It was Able Danger
because we needed to get these guys before
they could get us again.”
Based at Fort Belvoir, Virginia (known as
“spook central”), the operations officer was
a decorated U.S. Navy captain named Scott
Phillpott. “You would ask them to look at
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” says Shaffer,
“and these search engines would scour the
Internet, looking for any number of opensource
databases, from credit-reporting
agencies to court records and news stories.
Once a known KSM associate was found,
they’d go through the same process for
him.” One analyst later describes it to me as
“Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon on steroids.”
Told to “start with the words Al Qaeda
and go,” the data crunchers began an initial
harvest in December 1999. The data grew
fast and exponentially, and before long it
amounted to two and a half terabytes—equal
to about 12 percent of all printed pages held
in the Library of Congress. Within months,
Shaffer says, Able Danger had uncovered
some astonishing information. “We identified
lead 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta, in
addition to Marwan al-Shehhi, who flew UA
175 into the south tower of the Trade Center,
and two of the muscle hijackers aboard
AA 77, which hit the Pentagon.”
The Able Danger data was so significant
that ex–FBI director Louis Freeh later wrote
that if shared with other agencies, the findings
“could have potentially prevented 9/11.”
But by April 2000 Department of Defense
lawyers told personnel involved with the
Able Danger project that this vast amount
of open-source data may have violated Executive
Order 12333, designed to prevent the
Pentagon from indefinitely storing files on
American citizens. As a result, the 2.5 terabytes
were ordered destroyed.
“Imagine,” said then-congressman Curt
Weldon of Pennsylvania, the number-tworanking
Republican on the House Armed
Services Committee, in 2006. “You’ve got the
names of four of the hijackers in the spring of
2000, almost a year and a half before the 9/11
attacks, and then it gets destroyed. Well, there
was no legal justification for it whatsoever.”
As the DIA liaison to Able Danger, Shaffer
had pushed hard in 2000 to share what had
been found on the four hijackers. However,
lawyers from the Special Operations Command
canceled three scheduled meetings
he had set up with the FBI.
Once Zelikow and the 9/11 Commission
staff showed up in Afghanistan in 2003, Shaffer
was anxious to share his experience with
them. “I wanted to make sure that what was
broken in the system got fixed,” he says. “So
I talked for a little more than an hour, going
through the operation: who was involved, how
we executed it, our intent to talk to the FBI
and the destruction of the data. After I got
done, there was stunned silence in the room.
It was pretty clear that these 9/11 investigators
had never heard about Able Danger.”
After the briefing Zelikow gave Shaffer
his business card and urged him to contact
his staff for a follow-up meeting once he got
back stateside. In early January 2004, Shaffer
called one of Zelikow’s assistants.
“I told him I had copies of the Able Danger
documents. I had tracked them down at my
DIA office: two boxes of material, a leather
briefcase where I kept the most sensitive docs,
three large charts, including one with a photo
of Mohamed Atta, and smaller charts rolled
up in a tube. I told him I was willing to bring it
“The report trashes the
reputations of officers who
had the courage to describe
important work they were
doing to track Al Qaeda
prior to 9/11.”
all over if he wanted it.” The assistant thanked
Shaffer and told him they’d get back to him.
As Shaffer later tells it in Dark Heart, “I had no
way of knowing what I’d just unleashed.”
•
Within months Shaffer, to his surprise, found
himself as the object of a DIA investigation.
First it was alleged that Shaffer, who had
been awarded a Bronze Star in Afghanistan
for his service against the Taliban, had
unduly received a Defense Meritorious Service
Medal for the Able Danger operation,
among other work.
“The second allegation was that I misused
a government phone to the tune of $67 and
some odd cents,” says Shaffer. The third
charge seemed even more specious. “They
said I filed a false voucher claiming local
mileage to go to a staff college course at Fort
Dix, New Jersey. But the records showed
that I did go to the course and I graduated,”
says Shaffer. “The total cost was $180.”
In point of fact, Shaffer is so scrupulous that
he hired a former Washington Post reporter to
make sure every intelligence reference in
Dark Heart could be found in the open-source
media. But those three petty charges were
indicative of just how far forces in the Pentagon
seemed willing to go to discredit him.
In spring 2004, after returning from
Afghanistan, Shaffer walked back into
DIA headquarters in Clarendon, Virginia,
expecting to get back to work. But when he
met with an Army sergeant at the front door
to exchange his “Chris Stryker” credentials
for his security pass, he was stopped. Minutes
later, after being led into a sixth-floor
office, Shaffer was summarily fired.
Stripped of his security clearance, he was
escorted out of the building and denied access
to his office, where he’d left those volatile Able
Danger files. “It was all over,” writes Shaffer
in Dark Heart, “My career and my days as a
clandestine officer were finished. Even if the
accusations didn’t match the severity of the
punishment.… This was a death sentence.”
It wasn’t until July 2005 that Shaffer
began to suspect why he’d lost his clearance.
“When I talked to Congress about our Able
Danger findings,” says Shaffer, “they heard
back from DIA that all my files—the link
charts, the documents confirming what we’d
found—were now missing. There wasn’t
a word about the operation in the entire
604-page 9/11 Commission Report. As far
as Zelikow and company were concerned,
Able Danger didn’t exist.” From then on the
DIA did whatever it could to turn Shaffer
from Jack Bauer into Fox Mulder.
•
A month later, in August 2005, the story of
the Army’s secret data-mining operation, the
rejection of its findings by the 9/11 Commission
and Shaffer’s involvement broke in a
spectacular series of stories in The New York
Times. A month after that the Pentagon prevented
Shaffer, Navy captain Phillpott and
other Able Danger operatives from testifying
before a Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing. That prompted then–committee
chair Senator Arlen Specter to charge that
the muzzling might have amounted to an
“obstruction of the committee’s activities.”
A year later the Department of Defense’s
inspector general issued a report telling the
Able Danger story a different way. “We concluded
that prior to September 11, 2001,
Able Danger team members did not identify
Mohamed Atta or any other 9/11 hijackers,”
the report stated. It concluded that “DIA officials
did not reprise against LTC Shaffer, in
either his civilian or military capacity, for making
disclosures regarding Able Danger.”
Reaction from former representative Weldon
was swift: “The Department of Defense
IG cherry-picked testimony from witnesses
in an effort to minimize the historical
importance of the Able Danger effort,” said
Weldon. “The report trashes the reputations
of military officers who had the courage to
step forward and put their necks on the line
to describe important work they were doing
to track Al Qaeda prior to 9/11.”
But soon, Weldon himself would pay a
price for his unbridled support of Able Danger.
On October 13, 2006, while facing the first
serious challenge to his congressional seat in
years, word leaked to the media that Weldon, a
Republican, was being investigated by the Bush
Department of Justice for allegedly trading his
political influence for lucrative lobbying and
consulting contracts for his daughter Karen.
Three days later FBI agents raided Karen’s
home and five other locations of Weldon