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A military official who allegedly ran a secret spying network in Afghanistan and Pakistan has ties to the Bellevue-based U.S. Strategic Command.
Michael Furlong works as a civilian employee for the Joint Operations Warfare Center, a San Antonio-based center that reports to StratCom.
Furlong is now being criminally investigated by the Pentagon after he reportedly organized a group of private contractors who helped hunt for suspected militants on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
It’s unclear who, if anyone, coordinated or supervised Furlong’s work, which allegedly involved hiring ex-CIA agents and former Special Forces officers to gather intelligence on suspected militants.
A U.S. official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Furlong directed a defense contract to gather information about the region that could be shared with military units. After military officials suspected that 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.
The story was first reported by the New York Times, which quoted unidentified military and business sources as saying that Furlong hired subcontractors who had former U.S. intelligence and special forces operatives on their payrolls. The newspaper said some of the information collected by the contractors was used to track down and attack militants.
“The story makes some serious allegations and raises numerous unanswered questions that warrant further review by the department,” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Monday.
It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies, the New York Times reported, and officials said Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.
Master Sgt. Kevin Allen, public affairs superintendent at StratCom, stressed that any role Furlong had in Afghanistan or Pakistan fell under the supervision of U.S. Central Command and not StratCom.
“At the request of the commander, U.S. Central Command, U.S. StratCom provided one member to assist (Central Command) in their Information Operations efforts, and that member was Mr. Furlong,” he wrote in an e-mail to The World-Herald.
Furlong, a retired Army officer, spent at least six years of his military career working for and then commanding “psychological operations” groups. In military parlance, “psych ops” is the use of information during warfare.
Furlong, now an Air Force civilian employee, never worked at Offutt Air Force Base, which houses StratCom headquarters, according to Furlong’s official Air Force biography.
This report includes material from the Associated Press.
Contact the writer:
444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com
