Free The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti Page A

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