The first rule in intelligence is to not get used. This is something Robert Young Pelton and Eason Jordan should have learned before agreeing to become rock-throwers for the Central Intelligence Agency.
As I reported on Tuesday, Pelton and Jordan were upset because they “lost” an intelligence-gathering contract with the Department of Defense. What stuns most people is that a man like Pelton (who thinks Al Qaeda is a myth, that the U.S. Military has killed thousands and thousands of people in Afghanistan and was publicly rebuked by the US Military and taken to task for his unprofessional conduct and reporting in Afghanistan) ever got close to a Department of Defense contract in the first place.
The level of incredulity is only added to by Pelton’s partner, Eason Jordan, a former CNN News exec who was forced to resign from CNN when he stated that American soldiers in Iraq had purposefully been targeting journalists.and that he deliberately covered up news in Iraq so as not to lose his Baghdad bureau.
Simply put, these two should never have been anywhere near the American military, much less a D.O.D. contract. Thankfully at some point in the process, one man seemed to realize this.
That man is Mike Furlong. According to a New York Times story on Monday (believed to have been initiated by Messrs. Pelton and Jordan), Furlong is accused of having steered the Department of Defense away from any further work with them. They allege that they had been hired by the government to create a web site and gather information about Afghanistan, but that:
…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.
If this were the case, we might actually have something to talk about, but that’s not what happened at all. In fact, we’re talking about two separate issues.
After Mike Furlong conducted a thorough review and noted that Pelton and Jordan had “over-promised and under-delievered,” Furlong’s boss, Rear Adm. Gregory Smith decided he no longer wanted their services and that there were groups who were better suited to work in information operations.
As you can imagine, Pelton and Jordan were not pleased. In fact, according to Furlong, Pelton sent him an e-mail threatening that, if he and Jordan weren’t reinstated, he would “blow this whole operation up,” an accusation Pelton has denied.
Contracts come and contracts go. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. Furlong went on to work with other groups who gathered open source information for the U.S. Military in Afghanistan and that might have been the end of it.
Then, in the summer of 2009, he was introduced to an incredibly talented group that, through its extensive human network in Afghanistan and Pakistan, could offer exceptional “force protection” to our troops and provide atmospherics on cultural, tribal, and interrelationships throughout the various districts and provinces the U.S. was engaged in.
It was the game-changer the Department of Defense had been looking for.
Based on the group’s prior accomplishments and deep pool of talent, a minor amount of funds were released to get it up and running as soon as possible. These funds were both legal and legitimate. What’s more, they were significantly less than the tens of millions of dollars Pelton and Jordan had been seeking for their project – a project that was in a completely different field and totally unrelated. The only thing that this group and Pelton/Jordan had in common was Mike Furlong.
This is not about anything but providing the best force protection we can provide all of those 20-somethings in foxholes,” Furlong said. “It’s about saving lives.
In record time, the new force protection organization was doing just that on an almost daily basis.
“I take stuff in open source and throw it in the intelligence pipeline,” Furlong asserted. “I don’t take this information and go directly to a kill. It is not the spot and shoot operation that he (Pelton) is making it sound like.”
Word of the new group’s success quickly spread and eventually, after everyone and his uncle had heard about them, somehow the CIA managed to stumble across their existence.
As you can imagine, Agency personnel in Kabul were not happy. Whoever these new guys were, they were cutting the CIA’s grass and doing a damn good job of it. Too good in fact.
It’s a safe bet that after having their cables sent back for multiple grammatical errors (a well-known and pedantic CIA penchant), someone at Langley finally brought the group to the attention of the powers that be at headquarters. It was an incredible embarrassment. What’s more, it was an outrage! Who at D.O.D. had the temerity to hire some other group to do what, ummmm, the CIA itself should be doing? Who’s that you say? A man named Mike Furlong? Hmmmmmmm. It seems we’ve heard that name before. In fact, aren’t there some anti-military guys running around the area who are mad at Furlong for not wanting to use their services anymore? What are their names? Pelton and Jordan you say?
It’s at this point, with the CIA’s involvement, that things really started to get ugly. As David Ignatius wrote on Thursday in the Washington Post:
The starting point for understanding this covert intrigue is that the U.S. military has long been unhappy about the quality of CIA intelligence in Afghanistan.
And it wasn’t just Afghanistan. For more than two decades, the D.O.D. has been underwhelmed with the quality of intelligence produced by the CIA and has launched a variety of measures aimed at getting the best intelligence possible… even when it meant fielding its own networks.
In essence, this has always been about one thing and one thing only – the CIA’s inability to perform for its national security partners. It is a deadly failure that continues to cost brave Americans’ their lives.
As recently as January 2010, Major General Michael T. Flynn, the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence in Afghanistan; along with his advisor Captain Matt Pottinger; and Paul Batchelor, Senior Advisor for Civilian/Military Integrations at ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) published a scathing critique of American intelligence, arguing:
[T]he United States’ intelligence apparatus still finds itself unable to answer fundamental questions about the environment in which U.S. and allied forces operate in and the people they are trying to protect and persuade.
This may sound incredibly obvious, but it bears clarifying. The Department of Defense depends on timely, actionable intelligence. It simply cannot function without it. It’s critical not only to a successful outcome in Afghanistan, but to our national security overall and to making sure our troops return home alive.
If the truth be told, the Department of Defense would gladly accept intelligence from the CIA if it was of any value, but the CIA (as Bob Baer recently pointed out in GQ Magazine) is so bloated and badly broken, that it is collapsing under its own dysfunctional weight and is incapable of fulfilling its mission.
With an impotent CIA on its hands, the D.O.D. was long ago left with no choice but to look for other means to fulfill its intelligence needs. Afghanistan is just another in a long list of battle spaces where the military has been faced with the fact that no matter how well intentioned the CIA might be, when push comes to shove, they simply can’t move the ball forward, much less get it across the goal line.
It’s no surprise that the New York Times jumped all over this story. Like the lamestream media leaping aboard the faux run-away Prius tale in California, evil private organizations alleged to be swooping in with guns and bravado fits the Times’ liberal narrative to a T.
It also fits the Central Intelligence Agency’s.
The fact that private teams are doing what the CIA should be doing, but can’t, is an incredible embarrassment for Langley. It’s also incredibly demoralizing for the good men and women at the CIA who would like to kick ass and take names, but are hung up in the Agency’s sea of red tape and culture of bureaucratic backside-covering. To many, the Central Intelligence Agency looks more like IBM (with managers only concerned with getting promoted) than the world’s premiere intelligence outfit.
But none of this is surprising, especially in light of the outrageous, irresponsible comments made Wednesday by CIA Director Leon Panetta, who wouldn’t know an Al Qaeda operative if he tripped over one.
According to Panetta, we’ve got Al Qaeda so disrupted and on the run that they’re now ineffectual. Hurray! The system worked!
I’ve got a message for Director Panetta. You haven’t been targeting Al Qaeda, you’ve been targeting the Taliban. Just because the occasional foreign fighter (who has traveled to Afghanistan or Pakistan to fight in the jihad) turns up in the rubble of a drone strike doesn’t mean you get to count him as AQ. And while we’re on the subject of drone strikes, you know darn well where most of the high-quality intel for those strikes is coming from – and it isn’t from the anti-gun, sit-on-the-F.O.B.-and-wait-for-the-intel-to-walk-in-barefooted culture of the CIA.
I know for certain the Director knows this. Everyone at Langley knows it, and that’s why an angry Pelton and Jordan were such easy marks to exploit. Emasculated, the only thing the CIA is capable of these days is sitting by the roadside throwing stones at the brave men and women who pass by on the way to courageously taking the fight to our enemies.
And as these men and women fight, there’s a despicable tactic occasionally employed in the world of espionage. It’s known as graymail. Graymail is when one party threatens to expose a nation’s classified information unless (and until) it gets what it wants. In this case, Pelton and Jordan will keep talking to anyone who’ll listen until they get what they want. And orchestrating everything, like one of the jealous, ugly stepsisters in Cinderella, is the Central Intelligence Agency.
Make no mistake, the CIA badly wants to humiliate the Department of Defense; even if it means destroying a great man like Mike Furlong in the process. Gotta love that graymail.
This is nothing more than a shakedown, plain and simple. It’s also something the CIA should be extremely ashamed of, especially considering that an agency which once so prided itself on tradecraft has, in this case, been so incredibly obvious.
Think about it. What are the odds that at a time when the CIA, Pelton, and Jordan were all upset with the Department of Defense, a memo was magically written and fortuitously leaked by the CIA station chief in Kabul complaining about “Furlong’s activities”? What an incredible coincidence! (And if you indeed believe it was a coincidence, I’ve got some original photos of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid spitting on Lenin’s grave I’d like to sell you.)
Anyone with a modicum of brain power can see what’s going on here. If the Central Intelligence Agency would put half as much effort into repairing its own damaged house as it has into spewing venom at the D.O.D. and besmirching the character of an exceptional and honorable warrior like Mike Furlong, our nation would be a hell of a lot safer (despite what our clueless Leon Panetta says) than it is now.
And as for Pelton and Jordan, let me offer a small piece of advice. You fellas were incredibly lucky to get anywhere near the Department of Defense. I’ve got a strong feeling that’s not going to happen again. In the meantime, since the CIA is so fond of using you, maybe you should ask to be put on the books so at least you’ll get paid for it. Of course, in the immortal words of Dennis Miller, that’s just my opinion; I could be wrong.
Finally, I want to share an email regarding this situation that has been making the rounds in the intelligence community. I think most real Americans will agree with what it says:
Key players are providing intelligence that a legally hamstrung, do-little Agency is unable to provide. Who can blame the military – with lives on the line – for turning to another means to get fresh, valuable “force protection.” They’re not getting it from CIA.
Rather than restructure to provide better intelligence, what do we get? Politics and cries of foul play. And more rules drawn up by lawyers to hamper the Pentagon from hiring these effective “outsiders” who are getting the job done, taking incredible risks, and inadvertently making current Agency officers look ineffective.
Bravo. I couldn’t have said it better myself. The only thing I can add is a deeply heartfelt thank you to Mike Furlong and all of those who risk everything to keep our nation safe. America owes you a debt it can never repay. God bless you.
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