Furlong says commanders authorized spy operations
Published: Mar 20, 2010 00:09 Updated: Mar 20, 2010 00:41
WASHINGTON: The Department of Defense has launched an investigation into whether a $24 million contract to gather information about developments in towns and villages in Afghanistan and Pakistan may have been inappropriately used instead to run an ad hoc spy ring, according to US military officials.
A US official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the case, told The Associated Press this week that Defense Department official by the name of Michael Furlong directed a defense contract to gather information about the region that could be shared with military units.
After military officials suspected he was using Defense Department money for an off-the-books spy operation, defense officials shut down that part of the contract, the official said. Another major part of the controversy involves a territorial dispute between the CIA and military intelligence agencies over who can carry out covert versus clandestine operations.
Furlong, who once served as deputy director of the Joint Military Information Support Command and deputy commander of the Joint Psychological Operations Support, is said to have referred to his stable of contractors that he used to gather intelligence as "my Jason Bournes".
Critics say the incident is perplexing because, although it does indeed sound like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel, the US government has been outsourcing clandestine and covert activities for years.
Furlong told reporters that his now-suspended program prevented the assassination of two Afghan leaders, and that the private, unarmed teams he used to gather intelligence did not go around "kicking in doors" and killing people, and said the program was authorized by military commanders and saved lives.
Furlong served in the army for 25 years, working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and US Special Operations Command, among other assignments, and has numerous military awards. He has been a contractor and in the private sector since 1997 and was stationed at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where he worked as a principal strategist for US Strategic Command.
He told reporters that he has been locked out of his office and no longer has access to documents or e-mails. Furlong said contractors he hired collected information that was openly available, such as banter at markets or bazaars that might contain information about potential attacks on US interests.
Ironically, this story broke not long after the US top spy chief in Afghanistan issued a blistering report of the defense intelligence community that we covered a few months ago in a story entitled "US spy chief calls for cultural overhaul of defense intelligence."
US Army Maj. Gen. Michael Flynn had chastised intel agents for gathering what he called "the wrong types of information" in Afghanistan. He accused them of being incurious of local economics and landowners, ignorant of who the powerbrokers were in the region and thought they were disengaged from those in the best position to find answers, including aid workers and Afghan soldiers.
