Free The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti

and journalists and scouted for possible undercover agents. He showered CIA officials with ideas for covert operations. But Truman, when he learned of Donovan’s activities, was furious, calling him a “ prying S.O.B .” In the years since, the CIA has generally had success snuffing out other, similar efforts at private spying.
    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