Read Online The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti - Free Book Online
Authors: Mark Mazzetti
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if McKiernan underestimated Furlong, he miscalculated. The general may have given little thought to the implications of approving Jordan and Pelton’s information-gathering project, but putting Michael Furlong in charge of the operation set into motion one of the more bizarre episodes of the secret wars since 2001. Many of the elements that had been developing in the laboratory—the military’s rivalry with the CIA, the expanding universe of government spying, the creeping privatization of war—mixed together into a volatile compound. Later, after finger-pointing and investigations, Michael Furlong would be dealt a fate worse than anything he had feared. He wasn’t sent to “blow up basketballs in North Dakota.” He was out of the game entirely.
For his part, an angry McKiernan would discover after approving the AfPax Insider project that even having four stars on your shoulders was no guarantee for getting what you wanted. His efforts to get funding for the project had run into obstacles, most of them set up by the CIA.
On September 5, 2008, Furlong had driven out to Langley with a group of top Defense Department officials to present the information-gathering plan to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center . Accompanying him was Brigadier-General Robert Holmes, the deputy operations officer at U.S. Central Command, and Austin Branch, a civilian official working for the Pentagon intelligence office that Donald Rumsfeld had set up several years earlier.
Because of the Prague episode just months earlier, CIA officials were already wary of Furlong, and Furlong knew well how prickly the spy agency could be when it sensed the Pentagon encroaching on its turf. At the meeting, he chose his language carefully when discussing the proposed operation. His contractors weren’t “spying” or even “intelligence gathering,” he said. They were merely collecting “atmospheric information” to inform commanders in Kabul and to help protect American troops. As Furlong would later describe it, “ I had to come up with a euphemism for what we were doing.”
Seven years after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon had gone so deep into the spying game that an entirely new language had been created. Just as U.S. troops had been sent into countries where America was not at war, on the grounds that they were “preparing the battlefield,” collecting “atmospherics” became the new catchphrase used by the military to avoid raising the hackles of the CIA. At the September meeting at Langley, Furlong tried to assure CIA officers that the operations would be coordinated with the agency’s stations in Kabul and Islamabad, but the mood darkened quickly. The dozens of CIA officers who had come to listen to Furlong were immediately suspicious that the operation amounted to a back-door spying operation.
It was even worse three months later, when Furlong flew back to Afghanistan and briefed a group of CIA officers in Kabul, including the station chief, on the project. The meeting disintegrated into a shouting match, and the station chief accused Furlong of trying to gather intelligence for lethal missions inside Pakistan. “One of the CIA guys was literally spitting, and Furlong started shouting back,” recalls one military officer who attended the meeting. Weeks later, a lawyer at CIA headquarters wrote a memorandum to the Pentagon, officially lodging the CIA’s protest about a program the agency thought was unsupervised and potentially dangerous.
Furlong had expected the resistance, and to him it was the hidebound CIA at its worst: protecting its equities at all costs, ignoring the fact that the CIA had been unable to prevent the attacks from Pakistan that were killing American troops each day. He was convinced that the CIA had made a Faustian bargain with Pakistan. In exchange for getting access for drone flights inside Pakistan, he believed the agency was looking the other way as the ISI quietly supported the Taliban and Haqqani
For his part, an angry McKiernan would discover after approving the AfPax Insider project that even having four stars on your shoulders was no guarantee for getting what you wanted. His efforts to get funding for the project had run into obstacles, most of them set up by the CIA.
On September 5, 2008, Furlong had driven out to Langley with a group of top Defense Department officials to present the information-gathering plan to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center . Accompanying him was Brigadier-General Robert Holmes, the deputy operations officer at U.S. Central Command, and Austin Branch, a civilian official working for the Pentagon intelligence office that Donald Rumsfeld had set up several years earlier.
Because of the Prague episode just months earlier, CIA officials were already wary of Furlong, and Furlong knew well how prickly the spy agency could be when it sensed the Pentagon encroaching on its turf. At the meeting, he chose his language carefully when discussing the proposed operation. His contractors weren’t “spying” or even “intelligence gathering,” he said. They were merely collecting “atmospheric information” to inform commanders in Kabul and to help protect American troops. As Furlong would later describe it, “ I had to come up with a euphemism for what we were doing.”
Seven years after the September 11 attacks, the Pentagon had gone so deep into the spying game that an entirely new language had been created. Just as U.S. troops had been sent into countries where America was not at war, on the grounds that they were “preparing the battlefield,” collecting “atmospherics” became the new catchphrase used by the military to avoid raising the hackles of the CIA. At the September meeting at Langley, Furlong tried to assure CIA officers that the operations would be coordinated with the agency’s stations in Kabul and Islamabad, but the mood darkened quickly. The dozens of CIA officers who had come to listen to Furlong were immediately suspicious that the operation amounted to a back-door spying operation.
It was even worse three months later, when Furlong flew back to Afghanistan and briefed a group of CIA officers in Kabul, including the station chief, on the project. The meeting disintegrated into a shouting match, and the station chief accused Furlong of trying to gather intelligence for lethal missions inside Pakistan. “One of the CIA guys was literally spitting, and Furlong started shouting back,” recalls one military officer who attended the meeting. Weeks later, a lawyer at CIA headquarters wrote a memorandum to the Pentagon, officially lodging the CIA’s protest about a program the agency thought was unsupervised and potentially dangerous.
Furlong had expected the resistance, and to him it was the hidebound CIA at its worst: protecting its equities at all costs, ignoring the fact that the CIA had been unable to prevent the attacks from Pakistan that were killing American troops each day. He was convinced that the CIA had made a Faustian bargain with Pakistan. In exchange for getting access for drone flights inside Pakistan, he believed the agency was looking the other way as the ISI quietly supported the Taliban and Haqqani
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