Pentagon May Buy 10K Copies of Book to Protect Secrets

The Pentagon plans to buy—and destroy—the entire first run of an Afghanistan war memoir that officials say contains classified information, the New York Times reports. Operation Dark Heart, by former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Anthony Shaffer, got approved by Army reviewers in January and sent to the presses. But when the DIA got wind of the book in July, it says it found more than 200 instances of the disclosure of classified material.

Problem: 10,000 copies had already been printed, with some sent out to reviewers and online retailers. (The Times, in fact, bought a copy.) The Pentagon has already approved a new edition—with redacted passages—but is negotiating to buy the first 10,000 now sitting in a warehouse. “It’s an awkward set of circumstances,” says the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “The government is going to make this book famous.” (It's currently No. 4 on Amazon's best-seller list.)