Inquiry Finds U.S. Official Set Up Spy Ring in Asia

[maddezmom]

Source: NYT

WASHINGTON — A senior Pentagon official broke Defense Department rules and “deliberately misled” senior generals when he set up a network of private contractors to spy in Afghanistan and Pakistan beginning last year, according to the results of an internal government investigation.

The Pentagon investigation concluded that the official, Michael D. Furlong, set up an “unauthorized” intelligence network to collect information in both countries — some of which was fed to senior generals and used for strikes against militant groups — while masking the entire operation as a more benign information operations campaign.

The inquiry concluded that “further investigation is warranted of the misleading and incorrect statements the individual made” about the legality of the program, according to Col. David Lapan, a Pentagon spokesman.

Reached by telephone on Thursday, Mr. Furlong was angry about the conclusions of the investigation, saying that nobody from the Defense Department ever interviewed him as part of the inquiry.



Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/29/world/asia/29intel.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Contractors Tied to Effort to Track and Kill Militants

KABUL, Afghanistan — Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.


The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.

While it has been widely reported that the C.I.A. and the military are attacking operatives of Al Qaeda and others through unmanned, remote-controlled drone strikes, some American officials say they became troubled that Mr. Furlong seemed to be running an off-the-books spy operation. The officials say they are not sure who condoned and supervised his work.

It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

more: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/world/asia/15contractors.html

[Hubert Flottz]

1. All is "Fair" in love war and republican politics...

"not sure who condoned and supervised his work" but nobody ever gets fired or goes to jail for murder and war crimes.

[BlueMTexpat]

2. This is just another one of the Cheney-Rumsfeld crew run amok -

and here is the information that is published about him on the USAF website: http://www.af.mil/information/bios/bio.asp?bioID=11344

Here's one statement from his bio: "As an on-site contractor for the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Furlong received the Secretary of Defense's Exceptional Public Service Award for his strategic influence work following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Hmmm - if he did start getting operations going, it was probably directly at the behest of the C-R crew so a best guess would be that his work was both condoned and supervised by Bush Admin officials - at least initially. Since February 2008, however, he's been assigned to Lackland AFB in TX. I hope that his activities there are under scrutiny as well - especially his reporting chain of command.

As with many here, I believe that if the Obama Administration really wants to make effective changes, they've got to clear out any leftover B-C staff who were specifically placed by B-C (or Rove) in regular government jobs. They are still rife throughout our government, unfortunately, and just waiting to spring back into operation. IMO, they are more deadly than any so-called foreign terrorist sleeper cell.

[KoKo]

3. Ties to Iran Contra....once again..

Even in a region of the world known for intrigue, Mr. Furlong’s story stands out. At times, his operation featured a mysterious American company run by retired Special Operations officers and an iconic C.I.A. figure who had a role in some of the agency’s most famous episodes, including the Iran-Contra affair.

The allegations that he ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

-snip-

The contractors were supposed to provide only broad information about the political and tribal dynamics in the region — called “atmospherics” — and “force protection” information that might protect American troops from attack, the officials said.

But some Pentagon officials said that over time the operation appeared to transition into traditional spying activities.

Mr. Furlong’s network, composed of a group of small companies that used agents deep inside Afghanistan and Pakistan to collect intelligence on militant groups, operated under a $22 million contract run by Lockheed Martin.

One of the companies used a group of American, Afghan and Pakistani agents overseen by Duane Clarridge, a Central Intelligence Agency veteran best known for his role in the Iran-contra scandal. Mr. Clarridge declined to be interviewed.

Officials said that the contractors delivered their intelligence reports via “Hushmail,” an encrypted e-mail service, to an “information operations fusion cell” at a military base at Kabul International Airport. There, the reports were put into classified military computer networks and used either for future military operations or intelligence reports.

[formercia]

4. Dewey Clarridge is an asshole

We had a mutual dislike for each other. Dewey is one of the boys and is also connected to the GLADIO network. Why that asshole isn't in prison is an amazement to me.

This is the way that Dewey and his crew have always operated.

[soryang]

5. There is no effective oversight of the DOD nor their contractors

40 percent of their budget is black. The oversight committees of Congress are completely impotent. Chalmers Johnson's whole theme in Nemesis, the Last Days of the American Republic, is that the Pentagon and the intelligence community are a state within a state and do whatever they want. They are completely out of control. A second theme he applies is that originated by Hannah Arendt, imperialism is despotic by nature and leads to totalitarianism. There is no room for rules or a repulic in an empire.

The disclosure by the Times is a pretense of lawfulness in the Pentagon and the intel community, as if the inveterate violators of international law give a rats ass about rules.

[Enrique]

6. "now if you ever get caught..."

we're going to say you were "unauthorized".