On Sunday the world collectively sighed when news broke the most wanted terrorist and brainchild of 9/11 was finally killed. Osama bin Laden was hiding in plain sight-in a Pakistan town with major military bases, academies and neighbors.
After nearly 10 years of searching for bin Laden, U.S. intelligence agencies finally put the puzzle pieces together and it doesn’t reflect well on Pakistan.
According to the Obama Administration, higher-up boots on the ground in Afghanistan determined last summer that Pakistanis may not be helping U.S. and NATO forces, but instead assisting the Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists by providing safe havens and tipping them off to planned missions led by the Coalition forces.
However, to make that statement plausible, means someone in the military or intelligence didn’t do their homework, because in 2003/04, a plan was hatched by Army Lt. COL Anthony Shaffer entitled “Operation Dark Heart.” He reported that Pakistan officials were not friends of the U.S., and they were playing both sides of the war efforts.
In the midst of Intel gathering, COL Shaffer, who was running the Defense Intelligence Agency in Afghanistan, discovered credible intelligence that Pakistan was home to the “al Qaeda Hotel.” Multiple intelligence officers pin-pointed the town of Wana, located in Pakistan about 20 miles from Afghanistan, as a base where the Afghan insurgency would hold-up and re-group.
COL Shaffer and others determined the “al Qaeda Hotel” was much more than a resting point, “it was a full-blown military headquarters for insurgents.” The problem was the facility was located in Pakistan and the U.S. respected their sovereignty too much to cross the border without permission. And permission would have meant the insurgents would be tipped off to the U.S. raid.
Armed with this new information, COL Shaffer decided to draw up a mission- that became known as “Operation Dark Heart.” “I was hopeful that my superiors would give me a thumbs up to implement Dark Heart, especially since there was strong likelihood the site housed a high value target (HVT).” COL Shaffer said that HVT was al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian-born doctor who adheres to the radical Islam theology and most likely contender for the al Qaeda top job.