The Way of the Knife Read online

  Scared of either prospect, Pakistani military officers in mid-2006 quietly began discussing a peace deal in North Waziristan, similar to the one already in place in South Waziristan. Keller and his CIA colleagues warned their ISI counterparts that the deal could have disastrous consequences. Their views, though, had little impact. Pakistan’s government brokered a cease-fire agreement in North Waziristan in September 2006. And it came about because of the secret negotiations of a familiar figure to many in Washington, Lt. General Ali Jan Aurakzai, the man President Musharraf had appointed as military commander in the tribal areas after the September 11 attacks and who had long believed that the hunt for al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan was a fool’s errand.

  Aurakzai had since retired from the military, and Musharraf had appointed him as the governor of the North-West Frontier Province, which gave him oversight over the tribal areas. Aurakzai believed that appeasing militant groups in the tribal areas was the only way to halt the spread of militancy into the settled areas of Pakistan. And he used his influence with Musharraf to convince the president on the merits of a peace deal in North Waziristan.

  But Washington still needed to be convinced. President Musharraf decided to bring Aurakzai on a trip to sell the Bush White House on the cease-fire. Both men sat in the Oval Office and made a case to President Bush about the benefits of a peace deal, and Aurakzai told Bush that the North Waziristan peace agreement should even be replicated in parts of Afghanistan and would allow American troops to withdraw from the country sooner than expected.

  Bush administration officials were divided. Some considered Aurakzai a spineless appeaser—the Neville Chamberlain of the tribal areas. But few saw any hope of trying to stop the North Waziristan peace deal. And Bush, whose style of diplomacy was intensely personal, worried even in 2006 about putting too many demands on President Musharraf. Bush still admired Musharraf for his decision in the early days after the September 11 attacks to assist the United States in the hunt for al Qaeda. Even after White House officials set up regular phone calls between Bush and Musharraf designed to apply pressure on the Pakistani leader to keep up military operations in the tribal areas, they usually were disappointed by the outcome: Bush rarely made specific demands on Musharraf during the calls. He would thank Musharraf for his contributions to the war on terrorism and pledge that American financial support to Pakistan would continue.

  The prevailing view among the president’s top advisers in late 2006 was that too much American pressure on Musharraf could bring about a nightmarish scenario: a popular uprising against the Pakistan government that could usher in a radical Islamist government. The frustration of doing business with Musharraf was matched only by the fear of life without him. It was a fear that Musharraf himself stoked, warning American officials frequently about his tenuous grip on power and citing his narrow escape from several assassination attempts. The assassination attempts were quite real, but Musharraf’s strategy was also quite effective in maintaining a steady flow of American aid and keeping at bay demands from Washington for democratic reforms.

  The North Waziristan peace deal turned out to be a disaster both for Bush and Musharraf. Miranshah was, in effect, taken over by the Haqqani Network as the group consolidated its criminal empire along the eastern edge of the Afghanistan border. As part of the agreement, the Haqqanis and other militant groups pledged to cease attacks in Afghanistan, but in the months after the deal was signed cross-border incursions from the tribal areas into Afghanistan aimed at Western troops rose by 300 percent. During a press conference in the fall of 2006, President Bush declared that al Qaeda was “on the run.” In fact, the opposite was the case. The group had a safe home, and there was no reason to run anywhere.

  —

  ART KELLER LEFT PAKISTAN just before the North Waziristan deal took effect, his five-month tour of duty having ended. Before he left, he took care of one last piece of unfinished business: buying a gift for his best Pakistani agent in South Waziristan, a man he had never met. The man was an avid sportsman, and he wrote to Keller that surely the CIA could find a way to buy some American sports equipment for one of its few human sources in the tribal areas. After a flurry of cables between Wana, Islamabad, and Langley about the propriety of the request, the CIA finally relented and put the sports equipment on a flight to Pakistan, stored in the cargo hull with other sensitive material bound for the American embassy in Islamabad.

  Two years later, after President Bush signed a secret order to escalate the CIA’s covert war in Pakistan, Abu Khabab al-Masri was killed in a CIA drone strike, just twelve miles from the CIA base in Wana. Three months later, a missile fired from a CIA drone killed Khalid Habib as he sat in a parked Toyota station wagon in the village of Taparghai in South Waziristan. When the strikes occurred, Art Keller was back in the United States, retired from the CIA and living in Albuquerque. When he heard the news he had no idea whether any of the work he did in Pakistan in 2006—from spying at the Wana bazaar to sifting through bits of information at a schoolhouse in Miranshah—was at all helpful in bringing about the deaths of the two men.

  Likely, he would never know.

  10: GAMES WITHOUT FRONTIERS

  “A Mighty Wurlitzer”

  —Frank Wisner

  For all the public’s fascination with the coups, assassination attempts, and gunrunning that the CIA carried out during the first four decades of its existence, a far larger fraction of the spy agency’s budget for covert-action programs during the Cold War was devoted to subtler tools of warfare. Black propaganda and psychological operations had once been a cornerstone of CIA covert action: from spreading money around Europe after World War II to sway elections to setting up CIA-funded radio stations in the Eastern Bloc and Southeast Asia. Frank Wisner, an OSS veteran who rose to become head of CIA clandestine operations, said that propaganda missions needed to be run by a deft, mature organization that could conduct several different influence campaigns at once—what he called a “mighty Wurlitzer” playing the martial music in a war of ideas. When the Cold War ended, the CIA no longer saw a need to invest heavily in black propaganda, or to train its officers in psychological warfare, and the programs became victims of the drastic budget cuts of the 1990s.

  But it wasn’t just about money. The advent of the Internet and the globalization of information had made all propaganda campaigns legally dicey for the CIA. United States law prohibits the spy agency from carrying out propaganda operations against American media outlets and from running influence campaigns against American citizens. Before the Internet the CIA could put foreign journalists on its payroll and plant phony stories in newspapers without worrying about the potential for these operations infiltrating the American media. But by the midnineties, Web surfers in New York and Atlanta could read news Web sites from Pakistan and Dubai. American news outlets began paying greater attention to foreign news, and citing the foreign press in their reports. As a result, it became harder for the CIA to convince congressional overseers, who have final approval for all covert actions by the agency, that a planned propaganda campaign wouldn’t “blow back” to the United States.

  But when the CIA let its propaganda efforts atrophy, the Pentagon sought to fill the void. The military faces similar restrictions against conducting propaganda operations on American citizens, but Congress has generally given the Defense Department wide latitude to carry out psychological-operations missions as long as they can be shown—however tangentially—to be supporting American troops in combat. The Pentagon’s leash grew even longer after the September 11 attacks, when Congress in effect defined the world as a battlefield, and military leaders were confronted with the disorienting reality that America’s enemies mostly lived in countries where the Army and Marine Corps couldn’t go. The Defense Department assumed control of the “mighty Wurlitzer,” spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence opinion in the Muslim world, far from the shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  Which is how, in the spring of
2005, a beefy man with a box of Marlboros tucked into his breast pocket came to be walking among the booths set up by technology vendors at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. He was posing as an office-supplies salesman, but it was a thin cover for a onetime Army psychological-operations officer who had spent a decade thinking of ways to wage warfare inside other people’s heads.

  It was good that Michael Furlong thrived on mental combat, because he was no longer cut out for the physical kind. He was built like a Russian matryoshka doll, with a wide frame that narrowed only slightly into his neck and head. He was diabetic and moved slowly, and yet he was a mound of nervous energy and tended to sweat profusely. He spoke in rapid bursts, fusing strings of sentences together while barely taking a breath. During meetings, he often buried his audience beneath a blizzard of military jargon, which often worked to his advantage. “Mike is supersmart,” said one military officer who worked closely with Furlong. “But he speaks in such gibberish, and nobody would ask any questions because they didn’t want to appear dumb and admit that they didn’t know what he was talking about.” At meeting’s end, Furlong often left the room unchallenged, convinced he had just received approval for whatever exotic scheme he had just presented.

  A Miami native, Furlong was drafted into the Army in 1972, just months before President Richard Nixon abolished the draft, but he deferred his service to earn a journalism and business degree from Loyola University, in New Orleans. After college, he spent his first four years of military service learning the basics of infantry combat at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and then rose to command a mechanized infantry unit based in the California desert at Fort Irwin, where he excelled. One escarpment there still bears the name Furlong Ridge for his success in the desert war games. He became a military instructor during the mideighties, first at West Point and later at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, England. After the Gulf War of 1991, Furlong returned to Fort Bragg as an Army major in the 4th Psychological Operations Group.

  Like many officers, Furlong was paranoid about being left out of any overseas adventure in which the U.S. military was engaged and would sometimes joke to colleagues that his greatest fear was that the Pentagon would sideline him by assigning him to do something like “blowing up basketballs in North Dakota.” In fact, he managed to stay near the center of the action. After the warring factions in the Balkans signed a peace treaty in Dayton, Ohio, Furlong was one of the first Americans to deploy to Bosnia, commanding a psychological-operations battalion assigned the mission of maintaining a fragile peace by using leaflet drops and radio and television propaganda to convince locals to cooperate with the foreign peacekeeping troops.

  During the 1990s, psychological-operations missions were still something of a sideshow within the U.S. military. They were dismissed as a fringe component to the shooting wars, carried out by strange people who had probably failed to cut it in other, more respected military specialties like infantry or artillery. It wasn’t like the heyday of military psychological operations during the Vietnam War, when Special Forces teams worked with CIA teams to carry out sustained psychological warfare against leaders in Hanoi and the broader population in North Vietnam. Robert Andrews, the former Green Beret who became Donald Rumsfeld’s civilian adviser and guide through the special-operations world, had participated in these missions, trying to sow confusion with phony mail campaigns and forged documents.

  The operations were sometimes far more elaborate, like when Andrews and the rest of his unit created a fake resistance movement in North Vietnam—the Sacred Sword of the Patriots League—to propagate the fiction that there was an armed opposition to the Vietnamese Communist Party north of the demilitarized zone. In addition to letters and leaflet drops, American operatives kidnapped North Vietnamese fishermen using unmarked gunboats, blindfolded them, and brought them to the island of Cu Lao Cham, off the coast of Da Nang. The phantom group had built a “headquarters” there where detainees were told about extensive guerrilla operations to undermine the government in Hanoi. Some of the fishermen were even asked to join the “resistance.” After several weeks the captives were given gift bags with radios tuned to the Voice of the SSPL radio station and were returned to North Vietnam, where they could tell everyone about the shadowy organization. Between 1964 and 1968, according to The Secret War Against Hanoi, by Tufts University professor Richard H. Shultz Jr., more than a thousand detainees were brought to Cu Lao Cham and indoctrinated into the ways of the Sacred Sword of the Patriots League.

  Andrews and his small group dreamt up other ideas, like floating a dead body off the coast of North Vietnam with fake coded messages in the dead man’s pocket. North Vietnamese intelligence analysts would decipher the codes and pass the false information to their commanders, the planners figured. But the idea was shot down in Washington; Andrews never learned by whom. Washington was “that mysterious place that said ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to our great ideas. And we all cursed it.”

  By September 11, 2001, Michael Furlong had retired from active duty and was working for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Beltway contractor soon to be awash in money from classified U.S. government contracts. Furlong had spent years studying ways to spread pro-American messages to hostile audiences overseas, and suddenly he found himself at the center of a war to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the fall of 2001 he worked with Donald Rumsfeld’s staff to develop information-operations strategies—earning a Defense Department civilian medal for his work—and occasionally sat in the White House Situation Room as Bush officials flailed about in search of ways to communicate White House talking points to Muslims.

  Less than two years later, SAIC got an infusion of cash when the military parceled out new contracts to try to rebuild a shattered Iraq. Furlong traveled to Baghdad to lead a $15 million project the Pentagon awarded to SAIC to create a television station, the Iraqi Media Network. The network was envisioned as a counterweight to Al Jazeera and other Arabic networks that Washington perceived as having an anti-American bias. But the project was soon beset by problems. The Iraqi employees quit after they weren’t paid, and the network had technical problems reaching Iraqi homes. Within months, SAIC had burned through $80 million of Pentagon money, and the endeavor was on the verge of collapse. Furlong was removed from the project in June 2003, although former colleagues said he was hardly the only one to blame for the network’s difficulties. But he could be a showboat: He insisted on driving around Baghdad in a white Hummer—still bearing Maryland dealer plates—that he had had shipped to Iraq.

  Yet while his behavior alienated some colleagues, Furlong’s mastery of the Pentagon’s byzantine contracting system made him invaluable to defense companies. Information-operations projects cost just a small fraction of what it cost to build a tank or a fighter jet, and what Furlong knew better than most was that inside multibillion-dollar enterprises like the Pentagon, smart and ambitious people can sometimes secure millions of dollars by identifying untapped pools of money in obscure corners of the bureaucracy. In doing so, they can build small empires.

  When he arrived at the Las Vegas convention in the spring of 2005, he was about to take a senior civilian job within the psychological-operations division of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). He was carrying a stack of business cards identifying him as an office-supplies salesman to deflect questions about his real business: finding small companies with the right technology to help the Pentagon conduct propaganda and intelligence-gathering campaigns in the Middle East.

  Over two days, Furlong spent hours at the booth of U-Turn Media, a small Czech firm that had been developing ways to stream video to mobile phones. The team from U-Turn had figured out almost immediately that Furlong was not selling office supplies, as some of them recognized the Special Operations Command’s Tampa address listed on Furlong’s business card. The chance meeting with Michael Furlong, it turned out, was a windfall for a struggling company that had come to Las Vegas to drum up
new business.

  U-Turn was run by Jan Obrman, a Czech national whose family had fled Prague during the Soviet crackdown in the late 1960s. His childhood experiences had made Obrman staunchly pro-American and a fierce champion of spreading Western ideas of democracy throughout the world. He worked for a pro-American think tank during the 1980s and later became an executive at Radio Free Europe. The prospect of making money in the growing Internet and mobile-phone market, and the financial backing of a wealthy German investor, led him to create U-Turn Media in 2001. The company had difficulty during its early years, before smartphones turned the mobile industry into a behemoth.

  Back then, U-Turn was relying on somewhat clunky technology to make money. The company signed agreements with content providers and set up a marketing campaign to drive consumer traffic to Web sites owned by their clients. From there, customers could download an icon to their mobile phone that would act as a “portal” to the Internet. But during this paleolithic era of mobile phones, U-Turn found few clients ready to take advantage of its service.

  U-Turn widened its hunt for clients by teaming up with pornography companies to figure out ways to stream video porn to cell phones. One of its partnerships was with a business producing a low-budget program called Czech My Tits, which featured a man walking the streets of Prague, giving women five hundred Czech koruna if they exposed their breasts to the camera. U-Turn was hired to help stream the pictures and audio to mobile phones. Bill Eldridge, a former company executive, recalls that the flesh business seemed like a path to riches. “In building a business like that, you want to target either the porn industry or the intelligence world,” he said. “Those are the only people who have the money to pay for that kind of stuff.”