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OPERATION DARK HEART, Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin's Press, New York, 2010, 299 pages, $25.99.
St. Martin's Press has printed two versions of Anthony Shaffer 's Operation Dark Heart: the original and a redacted version acceptable for public release. The Department of Defense (DOD) contacted the publisher only days before the planned release of the book, maintaining that Shaffer's memoir posed a threat to national security. Shortly after that contact, DOD bought 10,000 copies of the book, its entire first run, and burned them all. The author then met with government officials and agreed to remove material deemed classified. The end result was a redacted version complete with distractingly large blocks of text blacked out. Still, several copies of the original version escaped the flames; in fact, at the time of this writing a couple of eBay "buy it now" prices are near $6,000 for the original version, which one could compare to the redacted version and gain insight regarding the type of information the government considers potentially compromising.
Anyone who has ever read a redacted investigation report has a great start toward understanding the frustrations of sorting through this version of Operation Dark Heart. At most, this book only hints at the story Shaffer would like to tell. For example, he provides some basic biographical information...