A US official identified as Michael Furlong organized a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan with the purpose of finding and killing suspected Islamic militants, the New York Times reported yesterday.
Citing unnamed military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the US, the newspaper said Furlong, a retired Air Force officer who is now a senior civilian employee in the US Department of Defense, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former CIA and Special Forces members.
These people gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected Islamic militants and the location of insurgent camps, the report said. After that, the information was sent to military units and intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan for use in possible strikes, the paper said.
The sources requested anonymity, the paper said, because the case is under investigation.
Some US officials said they were concerned that Furlong could be running an unofficial spy operation, adding they were not sure who condoned and supervised his work, the Times said.
“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 US government official told the Times.
Officials told the paper they were not sure who condoned Furlong’s project. It was also possible that Furlong’s network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to gather information about the region, the Times said.
Colonel Kathleen Cook, a spokeswoman for US Strategic Command which oversees Furlong’s work, did not make Furlong available for an interview, the Times said.
Contractor and author Robert Young Pelton told the paper that the US government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan, but 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,” Pelton was quoted as saying.
Some officials told the Times it was unclear whether Furlong’s program resulted in militants’ deaths, but others involved in the operation said it did.
Quoting officials, the paper reported that 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.
Meanwhile, Pakistani fighter jets pounded Taliban hide-outs near the Afghan border on Sunday, killing 17 insurgents, local officials said.
The hideouts were in the village of Mero Bak in the Taliban stronghold of the Lower Orakzai tribal region, said Rasheed Khan, an Orakzai official. The air attack killed nine militants, he said.
One of the bombed houses belonged to a local Taliban commander, Aslam Farooqi, but it was not clear if he was among those killed.
Jabir Gul, another local official, said the bombing in Upper Orakzai killed eight more Taliban fighters.
Orakzai is the base of Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud, who officials believe was killed in a US missile strike early this year. The group insists he is alive, but has not provided any evidence.
Elsewhere in Pakistan, suspected militants tried to blow up a NATO oil tanker on Sunday in Baluchistan, near the Afghan border, police official Zia Mandokhel said.
A bomb, planted in the truck’s undercarriage, misfired, causing just a hole in the tanker and an oil spill, he said. A civilian was injured.
The incident occurred in the border town of Chaman along an important route for NATO supplies heading into Afghanistan.
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