DoD Tracking, Killing 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.

Moreover, in Pakistan, where Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.

Officials say Mr. Furlong’s operation seems to have been shut down, and he is now is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Defense Department for a number of possible offenses, including contract fraud.

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.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.

This account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region. They insisted on anonymity in discussing a delicate case that is under investigation.

Col. Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for United States Strategic Command, which oversees Mr. Furlong’s work, declined to make him available for an interview. Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Air Force officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee based at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Network of Informants

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

Government officials said they believed that Mr. Furlong might have channeled money away from a program intended to provide American commanders with information about Afghanistan’s social and tribal landscape, and toward secret efforts to hunt militants on both sides of the country’s porous border with Pakistan.

Some officials said it was unclear whether these operations actually resulted in the deaths of militants, though others involved in the operation said that they did.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would often boast about his network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan to senior military officers, and in one instance said a group of suspected militants carrying rockets by mule over the border had been singled out and killed as a result of his efforts.

In addition, at least one government contractor who worked with Mr. Furlong in Afghanistan last year maintains that he saw evidence that the information was used for attacking militants.

The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them. Recently, the top military intelligence official in Afghanistan publicly said that intelligence collection was skewed too heavily toward hunting terrorists, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of the country.

Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

In one example, Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan.

Among the contractors Mr. Furlong appears to have used to conduct intelligence gathering was International Media Ventures, a private “strategic communication” firm run by several former Special Operations officers. Another was American International Security Corporation, a Boston-based company run by Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret. In a phone interview, Mr. Taylor said that at one point he had employed Duane Clarridge, known as Dewey, a former top C.I.A. official who has been linked to a generation of C.I.A. adventures, including the Iran-Contra scandal.

In an interview, Mr. Clarridge denied that he had worked with Mr. Furlong in any operation in Afghanistan or Pakistan. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said.

Mr. Taylor, who is chief executive of A.I.S.C., said his company gathered information on both sides of the border to give military officials information about possible threats to American forces. He said his company was not specifically hired to provide information to kill insurgents.

Some American officials contend that Mr. Furlong’s efforts amounted to little. Nevertheless, they provoked the ire of the C.I.A.

Last fall, the spy agency’s station chief in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, wrote a memorandum to the Defense Department’s top intelligence official detailing what officials said were serious offenses by Mr. Furlong. The officials would not specify the offenses, but the officer’s cable helped set off the Pentagon investigation.

Afghan Intelligence

In mid-2008, the military put Mr. Furlong in charge of a program to use private companies to gather information about the political and tribal culture of Afghanistan. Some of the approximately $22 million in government money allotted to this effort went to International Media Ventures, with offices in St. Petersburg, Fla., San Antonio and elsewhere. On its Web site, the company describes itself as a public relations company, “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.”

The Web site also shows that several of its senior executives are former members of the military’s Special Operations forces, including former commandos from Delta Force, which has been used extensively since the Sept. 11 attacks to track and kill suspected terrorists.

Until recently, one of the members of International Media’s board of directors was Gen. Dell L. Dailey, former head of Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s covert units.

In an e-mail message, General Dailey said that he had resigned his post on the company’s board, but he did not say when. He did not give details about the company’s work with the American military, and other company executives declined to comment.

In an interview, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, the top military spokesman in Afghanistan, said that the United States military was currently employing nine International Media Ventures civilian employees on routine jobs in guard work and information processing and analysis. Whatever else other International Media employees might be doing in Afghanistan, he said, he did not know and had no responsibility for their actions.

By Mr. Pelton’s account, Mr. Furlong, in conversations with him and his colleagues, referred to his stable of contractors as “my Jason Bournes,” a reference to the fictional American assassin created by the novelist Robert Ludlum and played in movies by the actor Matt Damon.

Military officials said that Mr. Furlong would occasionally brag to his superiors about having Mr. Clarridge’s services at his disposal. Last summer, Mr. Furlong told colleagues that he was working with Mr. Clarridge to secure the release of Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl, a kidnapped soldier who American officials believe is being held by militants in Pakistan.

From December 2008 to mid-June 2009, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Clarridge were hired to assist The New York Times in the case of David Rohde, the Times reporter who was kidnapped by militants in Afghanistan and held for seven months in Pakistan’s tribal areas. The reporter ultimately escaped on his own.

The idea for the government information program was thought up sometime in 2008 by Mr. Jordan, a former CNN news chief, and his partner Mr. Pelton, whose books include “The World’s Most Dangerous Places” and “Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror.”

Top General Approached

They approached Gen. David D. McKiernan, soon to become the top American commander in Afghanistan. Their proposal was to set up a reporting and research network in Afghanistan and Pakistan for the American military and private clients who were trying to understand a complex region that had become vital to Western interests. They already had a similar operation in Iraq — called “Iraq Slogger,” which employed local Iraqis to report and write news stories for their Web site. Mr. Jordan proposed setting up a similar Web site in Afghanistan and Pakistan — except that the operation would be largely financed by the American military. The name of the Web site was Afpax.

Mr. Jordan said that he had gone to the United States military because the business in Iraq was not profitable relying solely on private clients. He described his proposal as essentially a news gathering operation, involving only unclassified materials gathered openly by his employees. “It was all open-source,” he said.

When Mr. Jordan made the pitch to General McKiernan, Mr. Furlong was also present, according to Mr. Jordan. General McKiernan endorsed the proposal, and Mr. Furlong said that he could find financing for Afpax, both Mr. Jordan and Mr. Pelton said. “On that day, they told us to get to work,” Mr. Pelton said.

But Mr. Jordan said that the help from Mr. Furlong ended up being extremely limited. He said he was paid twice — once to help the company with start-up costs and another time for a report his group had written. Mr. Jordan declined to talk about exact figures, but said the amount of money was a “small fraction” of what he had proposed — and what it took to run his news gathering operation.

Whenever he asked for financing, Mr. Jordan said, Mr. Furlong told him that the money was being used for other things, and that the appetite for Mr. Jordan’s services was diminishing.

“He told us that there was less and less money for what we were doing, and less of an appreciation for what we were doing,” he said.

Admiral Smith, the military’s director for strategic communications, said that when he arrived in Kabul a year later, in June 2009, he opposed financing Afpax. He said that he did not need what Mr. Pelton and Mr. Jordan were offering and that the service seemed uncomfortably close to crossing into intelligence gathering — which could have meant making targets of individuals.

“I took the air out of the balloon,” he said.

Admiral Smith said that the C.I.A. was against the proposal for the same reasons. Mr. Furlong persisted in pushing the project, he said.

“I finally had to tell him, ‘Read my lips,’ we’re not interested,’ ” Admiral Smith said.

What happened next is unclear.

Admiral Smith said that when he turned down the Afpax proposal, Mr. Furlong wanted to spend the leftover money elsewhere. That is when Mr. Furlong agreed to provide some of International Media Ventures’ employees to the strategic communications command, which Admiral Smith oversees.

But that still left roughly $15 million unaccounted for, he said.

“I have no idea where the rest of the money is going,” Admiral Smith said.

Dexter Filkins reported from Kabul, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington.

Autonomous Killer Robots Examined

Noel Sharkey of the University of Sheffield said that a push toward more robotic technology used in warfare would put civilian life at grave risk.

Technology capable of distinguishing friend from foe reliably was at least 50 years away, he added.

However, he said that for the first time, US forces mentioned resolving such ethical concerns in their plans.

“Robots that can decide where to kill, who to kill and when to kill is high on all the military agendas,” Professor Sharkey said at a meeting in London.

“The problem is that this is all based on artificial intelligence, and the military have a strange view of artificial intelligence based on science fiction.”

‘Odd way’

Professor Sharkey, a professor of artificial intelligence and robotics, has long drawn attention to the psychological distance from the horrors of war that is maintained by operators who pilot unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), often from thousands of miles away.

“These guys who are driving them sit there all day…they go home and eat dinner with their families at night,” he said.

“It’s kind of a very odd way of fighting a war – it’s changing the character of war dramatically.”

The rise in technology has not helped in terms of limiting collateral damage, Professor Sharkey said, because the military intelligence behind attacks was not keeping pace.

Between January 2006 and April 2009, he estimated, 60 such “drone” attacks were carried out in Pakistan. While 14 al-Qaeda were killed, some 687 civilian deaths also occurred, he said.

That physical distance from the actual theatre of war, he said, led naturally to a far greater concern: the push toward unmanned planes and ground robots that make their decisions without the help of human operators at all.

The problem, he said, was that robots could not fulfil two of the basic tenets of warfare: discriminating friend from foe, and “proportionality”, determining a reasonable amount of force to gain a given military advantage.

“Robots do not have the necessary discriminatory ability,” he explained.

“They’re not bright enough to be called stupid – they can’t discriminate between civilians and non-civilians; it’s hard enough for soldiers to do that.

“And forget about proportionality, there’s no software that can make a robot proportional,” he added.

“There’s no objective calculus of proportionality – it’s just a decision that people make.”

Policy in practise

Current rules of engagement to which the UK subscribes prohibit the use of lethal force without human intervention.

Nigel Mills is aerial technology director at defence contractor QinetiQ, who make a number of UAVs and ground robots for the armed forces.

He told BBC News that building in autonomy to the systems required assurances of the importance of human input.

“The more autonomous a system is, the more effort you have to put into the human/machine interface because of the rules of engagement.

“Complete autonomy – where you send a UAV off on a mission and you don’t interact with it – is not compatible with our current rules of engagement, so we’re not working on such systems.”

The US air force published its “Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan 2009-2047″ in July, predicting the deployment of fully autonomous attack planes.

The document suggests that humans will play more of a role “monitoring the execution of decisions” than actually making the decisions.

“Advances in AI will enable systems to make combat decisions and act within legal and policy constraints without necessarily requiring human input,” says the report.

However, it concedes that “authorising a machine to make lethal combat decisions is contingent upon political and military leaders resolving legal and ethical questions.

“Ethical discussions and policy decisions must take place in the near term in order to guide the development of future UAS capabilities, rather than allowing the development to take its own path apart from this critical guidance,” it continues.

While the US’s plans are vague, Professor Sharkey said the mere mention of ethical issues was significant.

“I’m glad they’ve picked up on that, because if you look at any previous plan, they hadn’t done so,” he told BBC News.

However, he warned that work toward ever more autonomous killing machines is carrying on, noting the deployment of Israel’s Harpy – a fully autonomous UAV that dive-bombs radar systems with no human intervention.

He cautioned that an international debate was necessary before further developments in decision-making robots could unfold.

Iraqi Girl “Suicide Bomber” Interrupted

A 15yr old girl names Rania has been drugged, strapped with explosives, arrested by men she nearly blew up and then put into a detention center.

Iraqi police remove a suicide vest from an Iraqi girl in Baquba in this handout photo from the Iraqi police taken August 24, 2008.

Now she finds herself at the heart of a propaganda war being waged by the Iraqi security forces against the same al Qaeda militants who tried to use her as a remote-controlled bomb.

Police arrested the teenage Iraqi girl on Sunday in Iraq’s violent Diyala province, where the Sunni Arab militants are waging a bitter campaign against U.S. and Iraqi forces.

She was caught with a vest packed with explosives by a local neighborhood patrol in the provincial capital, Baquba. Initial reports said she had turned herself in, although police later said she was searched and they found the vest.

She cannot have been very willing to go through with it in any case or she would have detonated herself at the checkpoint, as many suicide bombers do when they are rumbled by security, police sources told Reuters.

U.S. military officials described her as an “unwilling” suicide bomber, as did the girl herself in a television interview for an Iraqi station obtained by Reuters.

Rania’s ordeal is far from over.

Wise to the potential publicity goldmine she could be as a poster-girl for al Qaeda’s callous tactics, police have paraded her on television and invited journalists to interview her, the first time they have been allowed access to a detainee.

Her interview was filmed under the scrutiny of prison officials after she had already been a captive for days. It was impossible to tell how much of it was her own story or coerced.

If Rania is to be believed, her profile matches that of other female suicide bombers in Iraq. Her father and brother both disappeared in 2006, she says, at the height of Iraq’s vicious sectarian conflict. Their bodies turned up weeks later.

“My father disappeared and my mother found his body in the morgue; they dumped my brother’s body in the river,” she said, as she sat on her cell bed, wrapped in a long black cloak.

Analysts say many female suicide bombers are motivated by a thirst for revenge for family members killed. But Rania says she never wanted to be a martyr. Then, staring blankly into the distance, she recounts how she was nearly blown to pieces.

“My husband took me to see some of his relatives I’d not seen before. I stayed the night. … Then, in the morning, they brought me breakfast with apricot juice. It tasted funny, so I asked what was in it. They told me ‘nothing, just drink’.”

Police said when they arrested her, she seemed drugged by a sedative, though it was not clear.

“I was feeling dizzy and sick for days,” she says.

After breakfast, an older woman who claimed to be a cousin of her husband started to put the vest on her, Rania said. She protested, but they told her not to worry. She must just go to a busy local market, where they would meet her. She was suspicious but they were older and very persuasive.

Her husband was in another room. Rania did as she was told.

Before she left the house, her husband reappeared by the door. He stopped her and asked her: “If we meet in the next life, will you choose me or another man.” She was unnerved by the question, but she joked: “I’d choose another man.”

She hasn’t seen him since.

Rania never got to the market. At a security checkpoint, a local Sunni Arab neighborhood patrol was suspicious of her long robe and searched her, finding wires then the explosive vest.

“I never intended to blow myself up. When stopped at the checkpoint, I wanted to turn myself in, but I was afraid,” she says. “Nobody told me how to use this vest. I don’t know if they meant to blow me up by remote control. I just don’t know.”

Her capture — or rescue — is clearly a victory for U.S. and Iraqi security forces in the propaganda war. It has shown an al Qaeda that looks vulnerable, less competent and increasingly resorting to desperate tactics. Police are seeking her husband.

“The fact he’s not shown up to help me yet shows he must have something to hide,” she says.