Censored book masks sensitive operations - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times: "The Defense Department’s 11th-hour effort to censor an intelligence officer’s memoir of his tours in Afghanistan has removed much, but not all, of the book’s most eye-catching previously unreported material.
The book, “Operation Dark Heart” by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, includes descriptions of promising missions canceled because of bureaucratic intransigence, but also discussions of intelligence and counterintelligence successes. However, rather than brag about the latter missions, the Defense Department chose to try to keep information about them from the public.
Among the items the Pentagon would rather you not know about are how U.S. forces foiled an Iranian intelligence plot in the eastern Afghan town of Gardez, and that at the turn of the century U.S. intelligence retained the services of a retired Afghan general who was “our ticket into the heart of al-Qaida.”
These and other revelations are contained in the first edition of Shaffer’s book, an account of the Army Reserve officer’s 2003 and 2004 deployments to Afghanistan, where he ran the Defense Intelligence Agency’s operations out of Bagram Airfield.
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