The Way of the Knife by Mark Mazzetti Read Free Book Online Page A

countries throughout the Muslim world. The proposal’s opening paragraphs emphasized the power of cell phones as a tool to reach a mass audience:
    “What do a soccer mom in Atlanta, a Bedouin trader, a Chinese businessman, a U.S. military family, a Kuwaiti civil servant, a well-connected oil company executive, an Al Qaeda martyr, a peacefully devout Iranian Muslim, and a Serbian rebel all have in common with youth throughout the U.S., Asia, Europe, and the Middle East?
    “Every one of these people, adults and teenagers around the world, probably has a mobile phone in his possession almost every waking minute of every day.”
    In the proposal, U-Turn was offering the military a menu of options to clandestinely broadcast messages around the world. The proposal offered “compelling news, political, and religious content mixed with USSOCOM’s message” that could “target teenagers in high risk/unfriendly areas.” And over time the Pentagon’s message could be integrated “into the lifestyle of these targets.” The proposal promised that all of this could be delivered without the “Made in America” label—a “covertly branded” campaign that appeared to be led by a European entertainment company.
    U-Turn won the competition for the program in August 2006, a contract worth just $250,000 . But its symbolic value was far greater. The obscure telecommunications company from Prague that until recently had been peddling newscasts and soft-core pornography for mobile phones had won its first contract from one of the most secretive—and fastest-growing—corners of the military bureaucracy. As Michael Furlong’s partnership with U-Turn Media was budding, his division inside U.S. Special Operations Command was in the midst of awarding large classified contracts to communications firms for propaganda campaigns in the Middle East and Central Asia. SOCOM was doling out hundreds of millions of dollars for the effort, and a rush was on. Small companies with little or no experience in the propaganda world began rebranding themselves as “strategic communications” firms to win the new business. For U-Turn, it would be the first contract of many, and the beginning of a new era for a company that had stumbled upon a patron with a seemingly limitless budget. U-Turn had found its golden goose.
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    THE PURVEYORS OF PROPAGANDA working at Special Operations Command in Tampa knew that for campaigns meant to “influence” opinion in the Muslim world to be effective, America’s role had to be hidden. Shortly after he signed up U-Turn Media to set up a pilot program for video games and other digital offerings, Furlong convinced the firm’s executives to create an offshore company that could receive Pentagon contracts but not be tied directly to the United States. By late 2006, Jan Obrman had established JD Media Transmission Systems LLC, a company incorporated in the Seychelles Islands and set up to receive money transfers from the United States through a foreign bank account.
    With few restrictions about how the Pentagon spent money on clandestine programs, Furlong had nobody looking over his shoulder. He sometimes liked to call himself “the king of the gray areas,” and was using every bit of contract trickery to secure deals for the U-Turn front companies to carry out the propaganda operations. Taking advantage of a law that allows firms owned by Native Americans to get a leg up when bidding on government contracts, Furlong arranged for U-Turn to partner with Wyandotte Net Tel, a firm located on a tiny speck of tribal lands in eastern Oklahoma.
    The first big project that U-Turn developed for SOCOM was a “shooter” game in the style of the popular Call of Duty game series. The game took the player on an odyssey through the streets of Baghdad, shooting up insurgents trying to kill civilians in a wave of terrorist attacks. The goal was to reach an Iraqi police station and deliver the secret plans for an upcoming insurgent