Since the release of "No Easy Day," former Navy SEAL team 6 member Matt Bissonnette's account of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, the Pentagon looks to be on red alert scanning for potential intelligence leaks. Now, "My Share of the Task" a memoir of the Afghanistan war by General Stanley McChrystal, which was supposed to be available on Nov. 12, looks to have entered the Pentagon's cross-hairs as well. The book's release date is currently delayed while the Department of Defense reviews the book for any classified information.
According to The Washington Post, the Pentagon security clearance office has delayed publication of "My Share of the Task" until check it for intelligence leaks again. The Pentagon has not commented on how long the process will take.
McChrystal apparently wrote about a lot of special operations actions, former WP writer Tom Ricks says, which "wasn't a problem until 'No Easy Day' [Former Navy Seal Matt Bissonnette's account of the operation that got Osama bin Laden] came out and freaked out everybody in officialdom."
Ricks wrote on his blog for Foreign Policy magazine that the book's publisher, Portfolio, sent him a statement saying that McChrystal "has spent 22 months working closely with military officials to make sure he follows all the rules for writing about the armed forces, including special operations."
"The clearance process has been detailed and time consuming," the statement said, and "McChrystal was extremely careful not to include information that would endanger any military personnel or their mission, and he's confident the book does not do so."
McChrystal is the former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. Before President Obama put him in charge of the war in Afghanistan, he spent five years running the Pentagon's most secretive black ops.
President Obama fired McChrystal in June 2010 for making some crass comments about top administration officials in a revealing Rolling Stone article.
"Although McChrystal [had] been in charge of the war for only a year, in that short time he [had] managed to piss off almost everyone with a stake in the conflict. [In fall 2009], during the question-and-answer session following a speech he gave in London, McChrystal dismissed the counterterrorism strategy being advocated by Vice President Joe Biden as "shortsighted," saying it would lead to a state of 'Chaos-istan.' The remarks earned him a smackdown from the president himself, who summoned the general to a terse private meeting aboard Air Force One," said the Rolling Stone article.
No new date has been set for the release of "My Share of the Task."
"We have decided to delay the publication date of General McChrystal's book, 'My Share of the Task,' as the book continues to undergo a security review by the Department of Defense. The new publication date has not been confirmed yet," said Will Weisser of Portfolio publishers in a statement to ForeignPolicy.com.
"The clearance process has been detailed and time consuming," Weisser continued. "General McChrystal was extremely careful not to include information that would endanger any military personnel or their mission, and he's confident the book does not do so. Even so, he remains committed to securing official clearance from DOD."
McChrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general in the U.S. Army. His last assignment was as the commander of the International Security Assistance Force and as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. He had previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and as the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. He is currently a senior fellow at Yale University's Jackson Institute for Global Affairs and the cofounder of the McChrystal Group, a leadership consulting firm.
"General McChrystal is a legendary warrior with a fine eye for enduring lessons about leadership, courage, and consequence. He took me inside the command bunker, on nighttime raids, and through the fog of war, political and military. My Share of the Task is an important, riveting, and instructive account of the triumphs and trials of America's two longest wars," said Tom Brokaw.
Portfolio is an imprint of Penguin. Dutton, another imprint, released "No Easy Day" on Sept. 4 to equal parts acclaim and controversy. Recently, the Pentagon warned the author, Bissonnette, of the book's possible intelligence leaks, and is now claiming his book does in fact contain classified information, according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
Bissonnette retired from the SEALs over the summer. He wrote the book under the pseudonym Mark Owen.
The Department of Defense is none too happy with "No Easy Day," though they haven't taken action against the author as of yet, other than writing him a letter on Aug. 30 to notify him he was "in material breach and violation of the non-disclosure agreements he'd signed," and that he never submitted the manuscript for a security review. It warned him the government was considering "all [legal] remedies" against him.
According to the Sept. 20 memo The Washington Post received from Department of Defense security director Timothy Davis, Pentagon spokesman George Little said recently that "No Easy Day," which goes by the acronym NED, "contains classified and sensitive unclassified information."