The Way of the Knife Read online

  So, two years later, when the two businessmen pitched General McKiernan on their proposal to collect information inside Pakistan and feed it to the American military command in Kabul, the general was immediately intrigued. The men making the pitch—Eason Jordan, a suave former CNN executive, and Robert Young Pelton, an iconoclastic Canadian writer who had written a series of books helping travelers navigate the world’s danger spots—had worked together before. During the bloodiest days of the Iraq war, Jordan and Pelton had launched IraqSlogger, a Web site devoted to fact, rumor, and on-the-ground reports by local Iraqi journalists. The site had a small but devoted following, but it struggled financially, and Pelton and Jordan had to shut it down. They wanted to replicate the project in Afghanistan and had put together a network of local stringers in Afghanistan and Pakistan for a new Web site, which they had named AfPax Insider. This time, however, they hoped to get the Pentagon to finance their new endeavor.

  But General McKiernan wasn’t going to pay for a startup news service. When he met with Jordan in Kabul in July 2008, he said he wanted regular reports from places where his troops couldn’t go, and where the CIA wasn’t giving him any reliable information. McKiernan’s relationship with the agency’s station chief in Kabul was dismal; the two men barely communicated. McKiernan would openly disparage the CIA during staff meetings, and within weeks of his arrival in Kabul he concluded that the spy agency had few sources in Pakistan’s tribal areas who could warn American commanders about plots that were being hatched there. Just a day before he met with Jordan, Taliban gunmen had ambushed an American military outpost at Wanat, in eastern Afghanistan, killing nine soldiers and wounding twenty-seven.

  In a previous meeting, McKiernan had been impressed that Jordan had given military officials a sheet of phone numbers of militant suspects in Pakistan that had been collected by his team of stringers. According to Jordan, he only gave phone numbers of Taliban “spokesmen” that were widely available to journalists. The phone numbers had been fed into a classified database maintained by military officers at Bagram Air Base, and a handful of them matched numbers that the military had already been monitoring. This raised expectations among McKiernan’s staff that the team could deliver actual, real-time information. Eventually, McKiernan approved $22 million for AfPax Insider, and he ordered Michael Furlong to make sure that the money came through.

  As always, Furlong had shown his ability to insinuate himself into the center of American war operations, and during the second half of 2008 he frequently attended meetings about propaganda and information-operations campaigns in Afghanistan. McKiernan would often forget his name, referring to him as “the fat sweaty guy” to other members of his staff.

  But if McKiernan underestimated Furlong, he miscalculated. The general may have given little thought to the implications of approving Jordan and Pelton’s information-gathering project, but putting Michael Furlong in charge of the operation set into motion one of the more bizarre episodes of the secret wars since 2001. Many of the elements that had been developing in the laboratory—the military’s rivalry with the CIA, the expanding universe of government spying, the creeping privatization of war—mixed together into a volatile compound. Later, after finger-pointing and investigations, Michael Furlong would be dealt a fate worse than anything he had feared. He wasn’t sent to “blow up basketballs in North Dakota.” He was out of the game entirely.

  For his part, an angry McKiernan would discover after approving the AfPax Insider project that even having four stars on your shoulders was no guarantee for getting what you wanted. His efforts to get funding for the project had run into obstacles, most of them set up by the CIA.

  On September 5, 2008, Furlong had driven out to Langley with a group of top Defense Department officials to present the information-gathering plan to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center. Accompanying him was Brigadier-General Robert Holmes, the deputy operations officer at U.S. Central Command, and Austin Branch, a civilian official working for the Pentagon intelligence office that Donald Rumsfeld had set up several years earlier.

  Because of the Prague episode just months earlier, CIA officials were already wary of Furlong, and Furlong knew well how prickly the spy agency could be when it sensed the Pentagon encroaching on its turf. At the meeting, he chose his language carefully when discussing the proposed operation. His contractors weren’t “spying” or even “intelligence gathering,” he said. They were merely collecting “atmospheric information” to inform commanders in Kabul and to help protect American troops. As Furlong would later describe it, “I had to come up with a euphemism for what we were doing.”

  Seven years after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon had gone so deep into the spying game that an entirely new language had been created. Just as U.S. troops had been sent into countries where America was not at war, on the grounds that they were “preparing the battlefield,” collecting “atmospherics” became the new catchphrase used by the military to avoid raising the hackles of the CIA. At the September meeting at Langley, Furlong tried to assure CIA officers that the operations would be coordinated with the agency’s stations in Kabul and Islamabad, but the mood darkened quickly. The dozens of CIA officers who had come to listen to Furlong were immediately suspicious that the operation amounted to a back-door spying operation.

  It was even worse three months later, when Furlong flew back to Afghanistan and briefed a group of CIA officers in Kabul, including the station chief, on the project. The meeting disintegrated into a shouting match, and the station chief accused Furlong of trying to gather intelligence for lethal missions inside Pakistan. “One of the CIA guys was literally spitting, and Furlong started shouting back,” recalls one military officer who attended the meeting. Weeks later, a lawyer at CIA headquarters wrote a memorandum to the Pentagon, officially lodging the CIA’s protest about a program the agency thought was unsupervised and potentially dangerous.

  Furlong had expected the resistance, and to him it was the hidebound CIA at its worst: protecting its equities at all costs, ignoring the fact that the CIA had been unable to prevent the attacks from Pakistan that were killing American troops each day. He was convinced that the CIA had made a Faustian bargain with Pakistan. In exchange for getting access for drone flights inside Pakistan, he believed the agency was looking the other way as the ISI quietly supported the Taliban and Haqqani Network. Gathering information to protect American troops, Furlong argued to the CIA officers, was perfectly in line with the Pentagon’s authorities under Title 10, no matter where it was taking place.

  As the CIA tried to block approval for AfPax Insider, and military lawyers at U.S. Central Command pored over the details of the proposed operation, Furlong decided he didn’t need to wait for Washington’s approval. In late 2008, he arranged for the project to get $1 million in seed money from a military emergency fund and maneuvered around another thorny bureaucratic issue—the fact that neither Eason Jordan nor Robert Young Pelton was an approved government vendor. He devised a simple solution: putting the project under the control of a company he knew well, Jan Obrman’s International Media Ventures, in St. Petersburg, Florida. By April 2009, Furlong had secured another $2.9 million for the project, all of it flowing through the Florida-based business. Furlong, the master at wheeling and dealing with government contracts, was taking advantage of a system that was ripe for exploitation. Congress had approved billions for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there was little congressional oversight about how the money was spent.

  But Pelton and Jordan saw little of it and began to suspect that Furlong had other designs for the money that General McKiernan had ordered for AfPax Insider. Regardless, the two continued to work, and Pelton was regularly sent around Afghanistan to gather information from tribal elders, Taliban operatives, and warlords. He traveled with a team of military officers dressed as civilians, driving east for hours over washed-out roads to gather information at the Pakistan border. Pelton also took a plane in the opposite direction, to Afg
hanistan’s border with Iran, where he met the powerful warlord of the city of Herat, Ismail Khan, to assess his support for America’s war in the country.

  All this time, General McKiernan’s attentions were directed elsewhere. Rumors began swirling that President Barack Obama, who came into office in January 2009, was dissatisfied with the strategy in Afghanistan and planned to overhaul the war staff. In May, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flew to Kabul to break the news to McKiernan: He was out, and President Obama had decided to replace him with Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command. The leadership transition turned out to be a boon for Furlong; when he met with top members of McChrystal’s staff he presented the information-gathering project as a fait accompli. During a meeting with Major General Michael Flynn, the senior intelligence officer in Afghanistan, he said that he had teams of contractors operating around Pakistan and Afghanistan, and their information reports were being “pushed” into classified military-intelligence databases.

  But Jordan and Pelton’s suspicions that they were being shunted to the side proved to be correct, and as they badgered Furlong for money, he began sending them e-mails about how he had found other contractors with better sources of information. In early July, Furlong returned from a trip outside Afghanistan and fired off an e-mail to Jordan and Pelton:

  “The two guys who met me in Dubai last weekend are as close to the real, commercial version of Jason Bourne that I have seen. Both fluent in Dari, Pashtu and Arabic and building the networks on the ground every day,” he wrote. General McKiernan was gone, Furlong said, and the new commanders in Afghanistan had little interest in paying for AfPax Insider. “Let’s be honest guys,” Furlong wrote, “you are asking the government to pay to start-up your service. The other guys have already made their investment in establishing their network over the past 4.5 years.”

  Who exactly were these mysterious new contractors, these “Jason Bournes”? Furlong didn’t say in the e-mails. He spoke only of a network of former special-operations troops and CIA officers who refused to work with the spy agency because it was too risk-averse and too dependent on foreign intelligence services like the ISI.

  They had formed what he called a “shadow CIA” and were willing to gather intelligence that might be used for special-operations missions. As for the person running this shadow CIA, Furlong referred to him only as “the old man.”

  —

  DUANE “DEWEY” CLARRIDGE, age seventy-seven, never passed quietly into retirement. It wasn’t his style; and besides, there were too many old scores to be settled. He had left the CIA amid the fallout from the Iran–Contra affair, convinced that his bosses had made him a scapegoat. He considered his indictment two years later for lying to Congress about his role in Iran–Contra as the work of a partisan witch hunt.

  When President George H. W. Bush pardoned Clarridge and other Iran–Contra figures—including former defense secretary Caspar Weinberger—during the waning days of his presidency on Christmas Eve 1992, Clarridge felt some degree of vindication. He had the presidential pardon framed, and he displayed it in a hallway of his home. It was the first thing that visitors saw when they entered.

  He wrote a memoir in the late 1990s, A Spy for All Seasons, offering vivid details about many of his Cold War exploits, and he stayed committed to Republican causes. As a private consultant in 1998, he worked with retired general Wayne Downing—the former head of Joint Special Operations Command—on a plan to insert thousands of Iraqi exiles and American commandos into Iraq to bring down Saddam Hussein’s regime. The proposal had the endorsement of Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress and a favorite of Republicans advocating a war in Iraq, but it was dismissed by the commander of U.S. Central Command as fantasy. The commander, General Anthony Zinni, referred to the Downing–Clarridge plan as “Bay of Goats.”

  When the United States did finally get around to overthrowing Saddam Hussein, in 2003, Clarridge raised money for various private efforts to prove, against all evidence, that the Iraqi dictator had stashes of chemical and biological weapons around the country. All the while, he remained an unflinching cheerleader for American intervention overseas. In one exchange during a 2007 interview, he angrily defended many of the CIA’s most notorious operations, saying it was the duty of the United States to exert its will overseas.

  “We’ll intervene whenever we decide it’s in our national-security interests to intervene,” Clarridge told a reporter. “And if you don’t like it, lump it.

  “Get used to it, world, we’re not going to put up with nonsense.”

  But he had also soured on the CIA. That same year he gave a speech in Arkansas about how much the CIA’s human-intelligence operations had atrophied over the years. The spy agency couldn’t get reliable information about the regimes in Iran and North Korea, he said, because it had become too dependent on spy satellites and electronic eavesdropping. He believed the problem was that nervous lawyers held too much sway at Langley and routinely scuttled proposals for risky intelligence-collection missions. He began dreaming of a new model for espionage, something smaller and leaner than the CIA and beholden to no foreign government. It would be like the Office of Strategic Services but updated for the world of the twenty-first century—a world dominated by corporations, loose international criminal and terror networks, and multinational institutions.

  Private spying was not an entirely new idea. After World War II, OSS founder William Donovan was so despondent that President Truman had not named him the first director of central intelligence he decided to set up an intelligence operation of his own. During business trips to Europe he collected information about Soviet activities from American ambassadors and journalists and scouted for possible undercover agents. He showered CIA officials with ideas for covert operations. But Truman, when he learned of Donovan’s activities, was furious, calling him a “prying S.O.B.” In the years since, the CIA has generally had success snuffing out other, similar efforts at private spying.

  Clarridge had damaged most of his relationships at Langley in the years since his retirement. But he remained close to a fraternity of retired special-operations officers who maintained ties to active-duty commandos at Fort Bragg and at forward bases in Afghanistan and Iraq. His criticism of the CIA as bumbling and amateurish made him popular with some of them, and he turned to a small cadre of retired special-operations troops as he built up a network of agents for operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

  Teaming up with Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret and sometime business partner who ran a private security firm based in Boston called American International Security Corporation, Clarridge put together a network of Westerners, Afghans, and Pakistanis who he believed could operate in the region without drawing suspicions about their activities. They got their first job when Clarridge was hired to assist in helping free New York Times reporter David Rohde, whom the Haqqani Network had kidnapped in eastern Afghanistan and brought over the border to Miranshah, the large town in North Waziristan. During the months-long ordeal, Clarridge told members of Rohde’s family that his agents in the Pakistani tribal areas would be able to find out where the reporter was being held and either feed the information to the military for a rescue operation or negotiate for Rohde’s release.

  In the dark of night in June 2009, Rohde and his Afghan translator hopped over the wall of the compound where they were being held and found their way to a Pakistani military outpost. Clarridge’s agents hadn’t helped in the escape, but the exact circumstances of the dramatic episode were murky enough during the summer of 2009 that Clarridge saw an opportunity to market his role in the Rohde case to win new business. Working private kidnapping cases in Afghanistan was not a business model promising explosive growth, and Clarridge was aiming much higher. If he could get the government to hire his network, he figured, he would be back in the spying game.

  That opportunity came within weeks, with American troops searching for another missing pe
rson in Afghanistan, this time a young soldier from Idaho named Bowe Bergdahl. Private Bergdahl had vanished in June 2009 under mysterious circumstances in Afghanistan’s Paktika Province, and conflicting reports suggested that he had either been captured while on patrol or simply gone AWOL. When he failed to show up for morning roll call at his base, military commanders dispatched Predator drones and spy planes to scour the area.

  Within hours, the planes intercepted a conversation between Taliban fighters, crackling over two handheld radios. The fighters were discussing plans to ambush the search party looking for Bergdahl:

  “We are waiting for them.”

  “They know where he is, but they keep going to the wrong area.”

  “OK, set up the work for them.”

  “Yes, we have a lot of IEDs on the road.”

  “God willing, we will do it.”

  But the Americans didn’t in fact know where Bergdahl was. He had become a prisoner of war, given the military label DUSTWUN: short for “duty status: whereabouts unknown.” Furlong jumped into the operation to locate Bergdahl, and he soon found himself in Dubai meeting with members of Clarridge’s team who had contacted him claiming they had information about the location of the missing soldier. Furlong was enthralled, in no small part because he had a chance to work with the legendary Dewey Clarridge, whom he affectionately called “the old man.”

  Even though he was still working to pry loose the original $22 million first requested by General McKiernan, Furlong had far grander ambitions for his spying operation. He had found his “Jason Bournes,” and he no longer needed what he considered the pedestrian service originally pitched by Eason Jordan and Robert Young Pelton. In an e-mail marbled with spy jargon, he explained that the Clarridge men he had met in Dubai—one who went by the handle “WILLI 1”—were “wired like none I have ever seen” and have “moved an operative in close to the package” inside Pakistan. The “package” was Bowe Bergdahl. But Furlong knew that running a covert spy network inside Pakistan was far beyond his brief, and he was certain that his enemies at the CIA would try to kill the operation if they learned about what he was up to. He wrote that he would “need top cover to keep from getting in hot water w/ our nemesis,” meaning the CIA.