The Way of the Knife (26 page)

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 person 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.

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.