The Merchant of Secrets

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Authors: Caroline Lowther
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of calling, I took the elevator up one floor to
his office on the top floor of our building. During the next hour we discussed
my investigation into Mr. Qureshi including the
surveillance outside of the gym, the oil changes that were too short to be oil
changes, my meeting with Bailey, and the IRS investigation that was stuck for
lack of funding. It was a relief to be able to lay it all out to someone whom I
could trust and, even better, who was in a position to help move the
investigation further.  But Mulally cautioned me against doing any further surveillance by myself as we have other
people within the company who could do it more effectively. He asked me to stop
the surveillance immediately, and I promised that I would. Then Mulally  turned off his laptop and grabbed his coat from hook the back of
the door. He was getting ready to leave for the evening and asked me to join
him for a bite to eat at the place around the corner. This kind of access to
the guy at the top was rare, and it didn’t hurt that he was attractive, and he
wasn’t wearing a wedding band, so I decided to go for it.
     
    After dinner with our Deputy Director, I spent the next
few hours reading a file on David Jones and found that he had worked in
Afghanistan as a contractor for Xcorp International,
and was named in a criminal investigation 5 years earlier for his involvement
in the drug trade and for trafficking in young women and girls. He was a
for-hire cop in Afghanistan; paid a salary of   $ 300,000
per year to train the local police force and to establish order in a war zone.
But while in Afghanistan  Jones and his disciples
 became drug dealers and pimps, pocketing millions from their illicit
ventures and stashing the money away in foreign banks. The lawlessness in
war-torn Afghanistan provided the perfect environment for Jones to assert his
control, becoming the kingpin of a world that dehumanized the enemy.  His
belief that Afghan women and girls belonged to a lesser human order allowed him
to conveniently side-step the question of morality, letting him use them as he
pleased without compassion.  He had convinced himself that they were
simply the spoils of war.  The witness account on record described Jones
“as a man who had no respect for life no matter how young and innocent, and
coveted young girls, kidnapped them and forced them to
perform sex with him and the other men in his unit.” The witness described a
group of men who “perceive children as sexual objects.  With no moral
boundaries whatsoever they used girls as slaves, trading them back and forth,
and rated each young girl’s performance.”
     
    The other members of his gang were convicted and sent to
prison, but mysteriously, David Jones was never convicted and never spent a day
in prison. Instead, flush with cash he acquired in Afghanistan, both legal and
illegal, he started the PFG Corporation which makes the prototype of a new type
of unmanned aircraft that can identify a human target from thousands of feet in
the air, confirm the target’s identity and hit the target all within a matter
of seconds without the need for human involvement on the ground. It moved
faster than Reaper and Predator and could take more pictures.
     
    During the economic downturn, the
Department of Defense decided to cut costs by inviting commercial contractors
to competitively bid against the large defense companies for major aircraft
contracts, including contracts for helicopters and drones. The D.O.D’s theory
was that if commercial enterprises were allowed to compete for the government’s
business and the major defense contractors no longer had exclusive rights, the
defense contractors would be pressured into making more competitive bids and
the prices for armaments would actually go down due to the new competition.
Jones capitalized on the opening in the government bidding process to enter his
company’s design in a proposal which he sent to the Missile Defense Agency for
approval

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