The Way of the Knife (23 page)

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.”

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.