The Way of the Knife

by Mark Mazzetti

  Having dabbled in porn, Obrman got his opportunity to tap the intelligence market when he ran into Furlong in Las Vegas. The two actually had met in the Balkans in the 1990s and they spent hours swapping stories about the Cold War and the bloody ethnic conflicts that came after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They shared identical views about the importance of spreading American ideals abroad, especially in the Muslim world. But Furlong also represented a tremendous business opportunity for U-Turn.

  Once Furlong began his job at SOCOM, he talked to Obrman and other U-Turn executives about developing video games that people throughout the Middle East could download to their mobile phones. For SOCOM, the games could address two problems at once: that a great many people in the Muslim world disliked the United States and that the United States knew very little about who those people were. Furlong was interested in building games that could influence the user’s perceptions of the United States and also collect information about who was playing the games. It was a potential intelligence bonanza: Thousands of people would be sending their mobile-phone numbers and other identifying information to U-Turn, and that information could be stored in military databases and used for complex data-mining operations carried out by the National Security Agency and other intelligence agencies. The spies wouldn’t have to go hunting for information; it would come to them.

  It was just one aspect of a web of programs that had escalated in the years since the September 11 attacks to feed information into sophisticated computer databases to hunt for patterns of activity that could be evidence of future terrorist plots. If large quantities of personal information could be poured into the databases, the thinking went, computer algorithms could sift through the data and make connections that human-intelligence analysts couldn’t.

  But the laws governing these activities were murky at best. One Special Operations Command initiative that would eventually become controversial involved collecting information about American citizens suspected of having ties to militant groups. The data was stored in computer servers in Virginia, and some military officials began to worry that they might be breaking laws that regulate how the Defense Department can collect information about citizens. Looking to move the databases offshore, officers overseeing the program for SOCOM would eventually ask Michael Furlong to house the databases at U-Turn’s headquarters, in Prague, a move that would lead to a dramatic fight between Furlong and the CIA.

  By the middle of 2006, U-Turn had put together a glossy, twenty-seven-page presentation for a pilot program for the Pentagon to use in countries throughout the Muslim world. The proposal’s opening paragraphs emphasized the power of cell phones as a tool to reach a mass audience:

  “What do a soccer mom in Atlanta, a Bedouin trader, a Chinese businessman, a U.S. military family, a Kuwaiti civil servant, a well-connected oil company executive, an Al Qaeda martyr, a peacefully devout Iranian Muslim, and a Serbian rebel all have in common with youth throughout the U.S., Asia, Europe, and the Middle East?

  “Every one of these people, adults and teenagers around the world, probably has a mobile phone in his possession almost every waking minute of every day.”

  In the proposal, U-Turn was offering the military a menu of options to clandestinely broadcast messages around the world. The proposal offered “compelling news, political, and religious content mixed with USSOCOM’s message” that could “target teenagers in high risk/unfriendly areas.” And over time the Pentagon’s message could be integrated “into the lifestyle of these targets.” The proposal promised that all of this could be delivered without the “Made in America” label—a “covertly branded” campaign that appeared to be led by a European entertainment company.

  U-Turn won the competition for the program in August 2006, a contract worth just $250,000. But its symbolic value was far greater. The obscure telecommunications company from Prague that until recently had been peddling newscasts and soft-core pornography for mobile phones had won its first contract from one of the most secretive—and fastest-growing—corners of the military bureaucracy. As Michael Furlong’s partnership with U-Turn Media was budding, his division inside U.S. Special Operations Command was in the midst of awarding large classified contracts to communications firms for propaganda campaigns in the Middle East and Central Asia. SOCOM was doling out hundreds of millions of dollars for the effort, and a rush was on. Small companies with little or no experience in the propaganda world began rebranding themselves as “strategic communications” firms to win the new business. For U-Turn, it would be the first contract of many, and the beginning of a new era for a company that had stumbled upon a patron with a seemingly limitless budget. U-Turn had found its golden goose.

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  THE PURVEYORS OF PROPAGANDA working at Special Operations Command in Tampa knew that for campaigns meant to “influence” opinion in the Muslim world to be effective, America’s role had to be hidden. Shortly after he signed up U-Turn Media to set up a pilot program for video games and other digital offerings, Furlong convinced the firm’s executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States. By late 2006, Jan Obrman had established JD Media Transmission Systems LLC, a company incorporated in the Seychelles Islands and set up to receive money transfers from the United States through a foreign bank account.

  With few restrictions about how the Pentagon spent money on clandestine programs, Furlong had nobody looking over his shoulder. He sometimes liked to call himself “the king of the gray areas,” and was using every bit of contract trickery to secure deals for the U-Turn front companies to carry out the propaganda operations. Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americans to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma.

  The first big project that U-Turn developed for SOCOM was a “shooter” game in the style of the popular Call of Duty game series. The game took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks. The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group’s headquarters. The title of the game was Iraqi Hero.

  It was part of a broad Pentagon psychological-operations campaign, with the code name Native Echo, timed to the “surge” of American forces into Iraq that President Bush ordered in 2007. Native Echo’s main focus was on combating the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa. Iraqi Hero was built in a way that it could be easily modified for any number of countries in the Muslim world. A U-Turn presentation to SOCOM listed thirteen countries where the game could be distributed after slight modifications, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan. The game’s graphics, featuring streets lined with mosques, old cars, and palm trees, would not need to be dramatically changed; only the dialogue would have to be altered. For example, a Lebanese version of the game would use dialogue to reflect the political situation there and would be called Maghaweer, named after a Lebanese commando unit.

  U-Turn developed two other games for the Native Echo operation, one called Oil Tycoon, which allowed gamers to build oil pipelines and protect the government’s oil infrastructure in the face of constant terrorist attacks, and City Mayor, which put players in the role of urban planner, deciding how to allocate limited resources to rebuilding a fictional city that had been destroyed by terrorists.

  A team of Czech programmers at U-Turn’s Prague headquarters built the games, and Furlong put the company on an accelerated timetable to finish them as quickly as possible and get them distributed in the Middle East.

  U-Turn worked with SOCOM developing various ways to deliver the games. The easiest was distribution by hand, putting the games on thousands of memory cards and selling them or giving them away in the mark
ets and bazaars. The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This also allowed SOCOM to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it.

  It is hard to assess the extent of SOCOM’s secret gaming operations or to know exactly how many companies like U-Turn the Pentagon contracted to create propaganda targeting young people in the Muslim world. Furlong pushed the Czech company to come up with as many new initiatives as possible, and U-Turn even put together proposals for a clothing brand using popular singers and celebrities in the Middle East as pitchmen. There were even discussions about dropping large flat-screen televisions into remote villages around Central Asia and North Africa, the televisions protected by armor plates so they could not be destroyed. The televisions would have a large antenna that could receive and broadcast pro-American messages beamed from thousands of miles away.

  This far-fetched idea was never approved. But as the Pentagon was expanding its propaganda initiatives around the world in late 2007, U-Turn was hired to support a new SOCOM program to run Web sites focused on Central Asia, North Africa, China, and other regions. The Trans-Regional Web Initiative hired freelance reporters to write up reports and post them on Web sites with names like Central Asia Online, which carried decidedly positive news about the United States and some of its authoritarian allies in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. A controversy erupted when news of the program leaked out, and SOCOM ditched initial plans to keep America’s role in the Web sites hidden, choosing to place a small label at the bottom of each site that identified it as a Defense Department product. But some in Congress and the State Department believed that the Pentagon had crossed a line with the Web sites, the line separating information operations carried out as part of a military campaign and the Pentagon’s more basic requirement to deliver truthful information to the American public.

  In reality, however, this boundary had been blurred years earlier, and companies like U-Turn Media were the beneficiaries. Furlong traveled frequently to Prague to meet with Obrman and the U-Turn programmers, and by early 2008 U-Turn had won more than $5 million in SOCOM contracts, usually working as a subcontractor tied to a larger firm or as a partner with a Native American–owned firm. Obrman created a U.S.–based company, International Media Ventures, with the idea that having a company inside the United States would make it easier to win classified government contracts. He set up IMV’s office next to other CIA and Pentagon contractors in an office park in St. Petersburg, Florida, just across Tampa Bay from the sprawling headquarters of SOCOM and U.S. Central Command, at McDill Air Force Base.

  But some inside the CIA began to raise suspicions about how U-Turn/IMV had managed to win classified government contracts. What exactly was the connection between Furlong, a high-ranking civilian bureaucrat, and an obscure Czech company that had employed a small army of computer programmers to build games and Web sites for the Pentagon? The CIA’s station in Prague began sending cables back to Langley raising questions about the arrangement and how easy it might be for Russian intelligence operatives to penetrate U-Turn’s operation.

  There was an even bigger problem. In 2007, SOCOM had quietly relocated the computer servers housing data it had collected about American citizens to U-Turn’s headquarters in Prague. While military officials figured moving the servers there might bring the Pentagon in line with American eavesdropping laws, the United States had now set up a clandestine computer operation inside of the Czech Republic, an American ally, without notifying the government in Prague. This was chancy even under normal circumstances, because American officials would have to weigh the risk of the allied country’s intelligence service discovering the operation, shutting it down, and extracting payback by refusing to cooperate with the CIA on other operations.

  But this wasn’t a normal period of diplomatic relations between the United States and the Czech Republic. The Bush administration was aggressively courting the Czech government for permission to build a tracking radar southwest of Prague as part of the White House’s missile-defense program. Getting Czech approval had proven difficult, primarily because Vladimir Putin’s government in Moscow had denounced the Bush administration’s missile-defense plans for years and had pressured Eastern European countries to deny the United States’ request to build radar stations in their countries.

  The tension between the CIA and Furlong escalated. By the middle of 2008, Michael Furlong had switched jobs, moving to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, the headquarters of a psychological-operations cell called the Joint Information Operations Warfare Command. But he retained oversight of U-Turn/IMV, and in June 2008 he decided at the last minute to stop in Prague to meet with company employees on his way home to Texas from Afghanistan.

  The CIA’s station chief and other American-embassy officials in Prague had, not long before, learned that the Pentagon had been running the secret database operation out of U-Turn’s offices. The operation had been shut down because of concerns in Washington about the legality of the database, but now Furlong was sitting in the American embassy—without having been given proper clearance to travel to Prague on business—and CIA officers in Prague suspected that he might be trying to resurrect the data-mining program. They worried that the bombastic, chain-smoking man might be planning to spend weeks in the country overseeing his clandestine programs, and could derail months of diplomatic negotiations over the missile-defense pact.

  What followed was a flurry of frantic calls between Prague, Washington, and San Antonio as everyone tried to figure out what to do about the Furlong situation. Everyone agreed the answer was simple: Get him out of the country as quickly as possible. Lt. General John Koziol, Furlong’s boss in San Antonio, reached him in Prague and delivered a blunt message: Check out of your hotel, get to the airport, and take the first flight out of the country. Furlong was effectively kicked out of the Czech Republic. “The CIA came down on him like a ton of bricks,” said one military officer who worked with Furlong in San Antonio.

  Furlong’s ambitions had been blunted, and he was now on the CIA’s blacklist. But he figured that his patrons at the top ranks of the Defense Department would protect him, and he was already redirecting his energies to a new problem: the growing militant violence in Pakistan that was spilling across the border into Afghanistan. Furlong was determined to help American military commanders with the problem, and he was certain that the CIA wasn’t up to the job. And now it was personal. After the Prague episode, he began to refer to the CIA as “my nemesis.”

  Just weeks after Furlong was kicked out of the Czech Republic, a plane carrying Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a gaggle of American diplomats touched down at the airport in Prague. That evening, at a lavish celebratory dinner, Rice clinked champagne glasses with Czech foreign minister Karel Schwarzenberg—a toast to a new missile-defense pact and a new era of warm relations between the United States and the Czech Republic.

  11: THE OLD MAN’S RETURN

  “You remember the first rule of retirement, George? No moonlighting, no fooling with loose ends. No private enterprise, ever.”

  —John le Carré, Smiley’s People

  General David McKiernan had heard enough. It had been months since the top commander in Afghanistan had been told of a plan developed by two businessmen to deliver regular reports from a network of sources throughout the country, and across the border in Pakistan. McKiernan wanted to know why the effort had stalled. He had hoped that it would provide reliable information about Pakistan, in contrast with CIA dispatches that he suspected were spoon-fed by Pakistani spies. Somewhere in the Pentagon bureaucracy, he figured, faceless gnomes were delaying things.

  “Who is the communist I need to kill in order to get this contract?” McKiernan barked to his staff, after learning that the funding for the information program had still not been approved.

  Sitting alongside General McKiernan that day in fall 2008 was Michael
Furlong, who had been shuttling between Kabul and San Antonio hoping to start a variety of information-operations projects for the generals in Afghanistan, from mapping the tribal structure in the south to conducting polls about Afghan attitudes toward the American military. The war was getting worse by the day. The Taliban had reclaimed large swaths of territory in the southern and eastern regions of the country, assassinated Afghan government officials, and set up shadow governments in Kandahar and Helmand provinces. The 2006 peace deals in North and South Waziristan had allowed the Taliban and Haqqani Network to flourish and escalate their attacks from Pakistani villages on American outposts in Afghanistan. By the end of June 2008, the month that McKiernan took command, more American troops had died than during any other month since the war began in 2001.

  When he arrived in Kabul, McKiernan was immediately convinced that he didn’t have enough troops. The Iraq war continued to be the Bush administration’s top priority, ensuring that the neglected conflict in Afghanistan remained what the Pentagon euphemistically called an “economy-of-force operation.” McKiernan’s predecessor, General Dan McNeill, had delivered a stinging indictment of the war strategy on his way out of the country, saying that American commanders needed more ground troops, helicopters, and intelligence units. During a congressional hearing, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, “In Afghanistan, we do what we can. In Iraq, we do what we must.”

  General McNeill had also blamed the government of Pakistan for not doing enough to stem the flow of fighters crossing the border into Afghanistan. Indeed, Pakistan had become a favorite target for American generals complaining about the rise in violence in the country. As far back as September 2006, Lt. General Karl Eikenberry—who preceded McNeill—tried to get the White House’s attention by compiling a dossier on Pakistan’s inaction in the tribal areas. He traveled to Washington with a PowerPoint presentation alleging Pakistani complicity in fostering militancy there, even citing the fact that Jalaluddin Haqqani openly operated his madrassa in Miranshah (the same madrassa that Art Keller and CIA officers had pushed Pakistani troops to raid in the summer of 2006), less than a mile from a large Pakistani military base.