Anthony Shaffer
Anthony Shaffer’s new book is called “Operation Dark Heart,” but it could be called Operation Blabbermouth. In his memoir, Shaffer, who once served as a Defense Intelligence Agency officer, describes many of the once-secret missions that he was involved in during his tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2003 as he and other members of his unit fought against the Taliban. It may seem surprising that a military officer would reveal these kinds of secrets, but in fact he is following in a long tradition of kill-and-tell memoirs by ex-officers who describe their exploits in the military’s black operations.
Other examples include “Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man,” which was written by an ex-Delta Force officer under the psydonymn of Dalton Fury; in addition, Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin, another former Delta Force officer who once served as deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Pentagon, wrote a memoir entitled “Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom,” that also pulled the official curtains away and exposed some of the inner workings of the military’s secret units. And in his memoir, “Courting Disaster: How the CIA Kept America Safe and How Barack Obama Is Inviting the Next Attack,” Marc Thiessen, a former White House speechwriter, described details about CIA detention policies that, as one former White House official told me, belonged to a category that she once believed would never be revealed to the public.
Unlike these books, though, Shaffer’s memoir has attained a special status: It has been heavily redacted by Pentagon reviewers and, as a result, Amazon.com was forced to post a notice to potential buyers that they would receive a version of the book that had passages expunged. The differences between the un-redacted version and the redacted version sheds light on the uneven process of official censorship. The offensive material, as The New York Times has reported, includes such non-earth-shattering information such as the fact that the National Security Agency is often referred to as the Fort. In this way, the Pentagon reviewers appear to be diligent and tone-deaf — at least when it comes to what constitutes a state secret — and consequently they undermine their own work. Close readers can now compare the two versions of Shaffer’s book and identify where state secrets may have actually appeared in the original text — and they have an advantage in trying to ferret out any secrets that the text once contained.
The Pentagon reviewers may have done more harm than good when it comes to protecting national secrets, particularly since much of the material in the book that has been expunged is available through Wikipedia and other online sites, but the reviewers have done wonders for sales. Last week, as The Times reported, “Operation Dark Heart” was No. 4 on the Amazon bestseller list.
