The Way of the Knife Read online

  Until Furlong could get money for the operation, Clarridge and his team were working pro bono for the military. With no system in place to get the Clarridge team’s reports into the military-intelligence system, Furlong used back channels to get the dispatches to friends at U.S. Central Command and Special Operations Command in Tampa. But the ad hoc arrangement caused confusion, and soon the deputy commander of Bergdahl’s unit sent an angry e-mail to Kabul asking who, exactly, were these intelligence agents running around the tribal areas of Pakistan? “I am not comfortable with this arrangement,” he wrote. “Request you provide direct contact information for these ‘sources’ so I can get an experienced human intelligence officer and analytical team involved. Otherwise, there is huge potential for mistakes and missed opportunities.”

  Through the summer of 2009, Clarridge and his team steadily expanded the scope of the information they passed to military officers. A detailed dossier that Clarridge produced about the purported locations inside Pakistan of senior leaders of the Haqqani Network was fed into classified intelligence channels and used by special-operations troops to monitor the network’s activities.

  Clarridge was running all of this from thousands of miles away, from his modest home in the San Diego suburbs. Inside his house in Escondido, California, he had created a nerve center for the operation and kept up with his agents using a computer and a cell phone. Some special-operations officers in Tampa and in Kabul began jokingly referring to his command post as “Escondido 1.” He padded around the house at all hours of the night, answering e-mails from members of his team twelve time zones ahead of him. Sometimes, he spoke to agents while lounging next to his pool.

  By late September 2009, Furlong had finally secured a contract for the private spying operation, a $22 million deal overseen by Lockheed Martin. It was to last for six months, with an option for renewal. The extraordinary new arrangement established procedures for how Clarridge could get his reports—a mash-up of rumors about the whereabouts of Taliban and al Qaeda leaders, gossip at village bazaars, and some very precise information about plots being hatched against American troops in Afghanistan—into intelligence databases used by military commanders.

  Clarridge acted as a clearinghouse, taking the information from the field and digesting it into analytical “situation reports.” The reports were then sent by Hushmail, an encrypted commercial e-mail service, to a small team of contractors whom Furlong had arranged to sit inside a military command post in Kabul. Some of the contractors worked for International Media Ventures, which had recently undergone a management shakeup. Jan Obrman had fired most of the senior leadership and brought in a group of gray-haired retired special-operations officers to run the company. Richard Pack, the company’s new CEO, had been one of the planners for the botched 1980 mission to rescue the hostages in Tehran. Robert Holmes, another member of the new executive team, was a retired Air Force general who just a year earlier had been an operations officer at U.S. Central Command and had traveled to Langley with Michael Furlong to pitch the plan for intelligence collection in Afghanistan. When the team of contractors in Kabul received the Hushmail messages from Clarridge and other intelligence teams that Furlong was overseeing at the time, they entered the reports into classified military databases.

  Once the reports entered the intelligence bloodstream, it was virtually impossible to distinguish the information from the private spies from that of CIA case officers and military-intelligence operatives. Some of Clarridge’s reports, according to a Pentagon investigation, contained specific longitude and latitude coordinates of militant outposts in Pakistan, and of the movement of Taliban fighters in the poppy-growing regions of southern Afghanistan. The reports sometimes led to action. Based at least partly on Clarridge’s intelligence, Army Apache gunships on at least one occasion shot up Taliban fighters massing near an American base east of Kandahar, and Joint Special Operations Command fired high-altitude artillery rounds into a suspected militant compound inside Pakistan. Furlong was thrilled and would frequently brag to colleagues that the information gathered by his contractor network had embarrassed the CIA.

  Dewey Clarridge lived to embarrass the agency, too, and his network was at times drawn into the internecine warfare between the military and the CIA that resembled something of a cross between a Graham Greene novel and Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. In one case, Clarridge’s group began trying to dig up dirt to discredit Ahmed Wali Karzai, the Afghan president’s half brother, the most important power broker in southern Afghanistan and one of the CIA’s top informants in the country.

  Karzai had been collecting millions of dollars from the agency since the beginning of the war, and by 2009 he was recruiting gunmen for a CIA-trained army of Afghans called the Kandahar Strike Force. But senior American generals, including McKiernan and McChrystal, saw “AWK” as a corrosive influence in southern Afghanistan and the man at the center of widespread corruption that was turning Afghans toward the Taliban.

  Clarridge compiled a dossier of allegations against Karzai, including connections to the heroin trade, land grabs, and murder accusations, and passed it along to military commanders in Kabul. The officers used the document in a campaign to get Ahmed Wali Karzai removed from power in Kandahar, but the CIA fought back and prevailed. He stayed in his post.

  Ultimately, though, Ahmed Wali Karzai couldn’t escape his many enemies. He was murdered coming out of his bathroom in his palace in Kandahar. The assassin was his longtime bodyguard, who fired two bullets into his head and chest.

  —

  IN SETTING UP the private spying network, Michael Furlong had violated a Pentagon regulation that prohibits the Defense Department from hiring contractors to conduct human-spying operations. But Furlong knew that the lines separating the work of soldiers and spies had blurred so much that it was relatively easy to find justification for his work. When American officials in Kabul asked Furlong who had authorized his operation, and when Furlong’s bosses back in San Antonio began to get angry calls from the CIA accusing Furlong of running a rogue spying operation, he fired back with ammunition of his own.

  Just as the Defense Department was approving the Lockheed Martin contract for the private intelligence operation, U.S. Central Command issued a sweeping secret directive that expanded military spying activities throughout the Muslim world, from Saudi Arabia to Yemen to Iran to Pakistan. The directive, signed by CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus, ordered new missions to “prepare the environment” for future combat operations throughout the Middle East and to ready the military for missions that the CIA couldn’t accomplish. The order gave permission for highly classified units like Task Force Orange—the human-intelligence-gathering teams connected to Joint Special Operations Command formerly called Gray Fox—as well as private contractors to “develop clandestine operational infrastructure that can be tasked to locate, identify, isolate, disrupt/destroy” extremist networks and individual leaders of terror groups.

  The directive, called the Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force Execute Order, was part of a broader initiative during the first year of the Obama administration to define the role of the American military in countries beyond declared war zones. The new administration was hoping to bring some order to the chaotic world of secret military and intelligence operations that had expanded dramatically since 2001, and to tie together some of the threads that had unspooled in the years since Donald Rumsfeld initially pushed the military to become more involved in human spying.

  But if anything, the new guidelines that emerged—including General Petraeus’s secret order—had the effect of reinforcing most of what had been done during the Bush administration. Special-operations officers now had even broader authorities to run spying missions across the globe. These orders became a new blueprint for the secret wars that President Obama would come to embrace.

  General Petraeus’s directive came as the Obama administration was ramping up its clandestine war in Yemen, and much of the order was directed
at bolstering special-operations personnel and equipment around Sana’a. But when Michael Furlong read the Petraeus directive, he saw it as nothing short of an endorsement for exactly what he was already doing in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And the endorsement had come from General David Petraeus, who was perhaps the most influential general of his generation. It was, Furlong figured, like getting a blessing from the pope.

  But the CIA did not consider Furlong so anointed and decided he needed to be shut down for good. On December 2, 2009, the CIA’s station chief in Kabul sent a withering cable to Washington laying out a detailed case against him. The bill of particulars included allegations that Furlong was running an off-the-books spy ring and lying to his superiors about the nature of his operation. It even made reference to the Prague episode of the previous year, providing details about why Furlong left the Czech Republic in a hurry during the summer of 2008.

  The station chief’s memo argued that having a bunch of private contractors running around Pakistan spying for the Pentagon, without coordinating their operations with the CIA, could have disastrous consequences. What the cable didn’t mention, but some senior officials believed, was that intelligence from Furlong’s private spies had led directly to a drone strike on a suspected al Qaeda safe house in North Waziristan in late 2009 that killed more than a dozen Arab men, including several who were working as double agents for Pakistan’s ISI. ISI leaders were furious that the agents had been killed, and they complained to the CIA. The agency, in turn, complained to the military and blamed Furlong’s spying operation.

  The CIA was now in open warfare with Furlong, and even his supporters could no longer protect him. The station chief’s cable launched a wave of investigations into Furlong’s activities. By the spring of 2010 security officers at San Antonio’s Lackland Air Force Base had cut off his access to classified computer networks and barred him from his office.

  He was in limbo—not charged with any crimes but not able to defend himself, because he could not get access to any of his classified records. He spent nearly all of his time inside his sparsely furnished condominium, in a bland apartment complex in San Antonio, trying to prepare his defense and hiding from the television reporters who had gathered outside of his gate when news of the spying operation broke.

  The Pentagon’s final report on the matter pinned almost all the blame on Furlong, calling his spying operation “unauthorized” and accusing him of misleading top American commanders about the legality of the work of the contractors. But he avoided any criminal charges and quietly retired from the Defense Department.

  Furlong had certainly cut corners, and his attempts to evade standard bureaucratic procedures created confusion up and down the military’s chain of command. But in Furlong’s view of the world, these were small matters when American troops were dying and the CIA was not helping the military win the war in Afghanistan. His spying operation was essential, he said later, “when there are lives at stake and the CIA is relying on foreign services for all its information.”

  And Furlong wasn’t exactly a rogue operator. The entire episode was born from the frustrations of an American general in Afghanistan who didn’t trust the CIA and who set Michael Furlong loose. If, as the Pentagon investigation into the operation concluded, nobody “connected the dots” about what Furlong was doing, it was because nobody wanted to.

  “My bosses wanted all of this,” Furlong said, smoking the fifth cigarette of a lengthy interview. “And I made it happen.”

  —

  THE LOCKHEED MARTIN CONTRACT that Michael Furlong had secured expired at the end of May 2010, and the money funding Dewey Clarridge’s network of agents in Pakistan and Afghanistan ran dry. Clarridge was angry that the military had chosen not to renew the contract, and even angrier that the CIA seemed to be the reason that the operation had been shut down. He had sent hundreds of intelligence reports to military commanders in Afghanistan, and he sent a message to Kabul on May 15 that he would stop sending the reports so he could “prepare approximately 200 local personnel to cease work.”

  But Clarridge had no intention of dismantling his network. The very next day, he set up a password-protected Web site that would allow military officers to continue viewing his dispatches, and he leaned on some wealthy friends to help keep his network afloat. He set up a front company for his operation, the Eclipse Group, and on his Web site he posted the same types of intelligence reports he had once given to the military. There were specific reports about how Pakistan’s ISI was training gunmen to launch attacks into Afghanistan, and about how Pakistani spies were secretly keeping Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar under house arrest so they could later install him as their puppet in southern Afghanistan once American troops left the country. Another report speculated that Mullah Omar had suffered a heart attack and was rushed to the hospital by ISI operatives.

  He dreamt up ever more exotic schemes to bring down those he thought were trying to undermine the American war effort. For instance, he was convinced that Afghan president Hamid Karzai was secretly negotiating with Iran as part of a desperate attempt to sell out the Americans and remain in power in Kabul, so Clarridge cooked up a plan to dig up hard evidence to prove long-standing rumors that Karzai was a heroin addict.

  The plan was straight from the old CIA playbook of dirty tricks: He would insert an agent into the presidential palace in Kabul to collect Karzai’s beard trimmings, run drug tests, and then give the proof to American commanders in Kabul, who could confront Karzai with the incriminating evidence and turn the Afghan president into a more pliable ally. He dropped the plan after the Obama administration signaled it was committed to bolstering the Karzai government, not pushing the Afghan president out of power.

  Even when news of the private spying operation went public and military officials grew worried about accepting information from Clarridge’s network, he found other ways to get his information to the public. Clarridge’s friends sent the reports to pro-military writers like Brad Thor, a successful author of spy thrillers, who dispensed some of Clarridge’s information on blog posts. He even pushed information to Oliver North, his old compatriot from the Iran–Contra days, now an on-air personality on Fox News.

  It was just like the old days, when Dewey and Ollie were doing the work they thought nobody else had the guts to do.

  12: THE SCALPEL’S EDGE

  “We’ll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours.”

  —President Ali Abdullah Saleh

  The meeting was set up for a surrender, a symbolic gesture of peace timed to the holy month of Ramadan. The Saudi minister had even sent his personal jet to pick up the frail young man and deliver him to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia’s second city built along the shores of the Red Sea. There, Prince Muhammad bin Nayef was conducting the Ramadan custom of greeting well-wishers at his home, and he gave an order to his coterie of aides that Abdullah al-Asiri be allowed to bypass normal security procedures and not be searched as he entered the palace.

  Al-Asiri had contacted Prince bin Nayef, the assistant interior minister and a member of the Saudi ruling family, days earlier, announcing his intention to surrender to the Saudi spy service and provide information about the group he had joined two years earlier, an offshoot of Osama bin Laden’s terror network that had recently rebranded itself al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The group considered Prince bin Nayef its bête noire, a man committed to crushing Sunni extremism in both Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the country’s impoverished neighbor to the south. In 2003, when militants in Yemen launched a twenty-month campaign of violence inside Saudi Arabia—blowing up Saudi government buildings and oil facilities, bombing residential compounds used by foreigners, and beheading Westerners—bin Nayef ordered a bloody crackdown involving arresting and torturing thousands of suspects rounded up inside the country. He posted informants inside mosques he believed had been infiltrated by extremists.

  Bin Nayef’s aggression against al Qaeda had made him a friend of the Bush administration,
and by the summer of 2009 a new American president and his aides already considered the prince an indispensable ally. He regularly received dignitaries from Washington, including a visit in May 2009 from a veteran diplomat whom President Obama had just charged with trying to manage an acceptable end to the war in Afghanistan. But when Richard Holbrooke met the prince in Riyadh to solicit the kingdom’s help with a war America was losing, the prince warned that the United States might have a far greater worry than the spiraling violence in Afghanistan. “We have a problem called Yemen,” bin Nayef told Holbrooke.

  The prince ticked off a list of worries to the American envoy. Yemen’s tribes were more sympathetic to al Qaeda than were Afghans, and Yemen was closer to al Qaeda’s targets in Saudi Arabia than was Afghanistan. Yemen was a failed state, he said, with a weak and corrupt leader in President Ali Abdullah Saleh, whose vision for the country had “shrunk to Sana’a”—keeping the capital, and his base, secure. Saleh had always managed to keep Yemen’s tribes in check, he said, but the president was losing control and passing more power over to his son, who didn’t have close ties to the tribes. Cash payments to Saleh’s government were useless, the Saudi said, because the president and those around him move the money out of the country as soon as it arrives.