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

attack, plans that had been stolen from a militia group’s headquarters. The title of the game was Iraqi Hero.
    It was part of a broad Pentagon psychological-operations campaign, with the code name Native Echo, timed to the “surge” of American forces into Iraq that President Bush ordered in 2007. Native Echo’s main focus was on combating the flood of foreign fighters entering Iraq from Yemen, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and parts of North Africa. Iraqi Hero was built in a way that it could be easily modified for any number of countries in the Muslim world. A U-Turn presentation to SOCOM listed thirteen countries where the game could be distributed after slight modifications, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Egypt, and Jordan. The game’s graphics, featuring streets lined with mosques, old cars, and palm trees, would not need to be dramatically changed; only the dialogue would have to be altered. For example, a Lebanese version of the game would use dialogue to reflect the political situation there and would be called Maghaweer, named after a Lebanese commando unit .
    U-Turn developed two other games for the Native Echo operation, one called Oil Tycoon, which allowed gamers to build oil pipelines and protect the government’s oil infrastructure in the face of constant terrorist attacks, and City Mayor, which put players in the role of urban planner, deciding how to allocate limited resources to rebuilding a fictional city that had been destroyed by terrorists.
    A team of Czech programmers at U-Turn’s Prague headquarters built the games, and Furlong put the company on an accelerated timetable to finish them as quickly as possible and get them distributed in the Middle East .
    U-Turn worked with SOCOM developing various ways to deliver the games. The easiest was distribution by hand, putting the games on thousands of memory cards and selling them or giving them away in the markets and bazaars. The way to get far wider distribution, however, was to post the games on Web sites and blogs frequented by gamers in the Middle East. This also allowed SOCOM to monitor how many people were downloading the games and, more important, who was doing it.
    It is hard to assess the extent of SOCOM’s secret gaming operations or to know exactly how many companies like U-Turn the Pentagon contracted to create propaganda targeting young people in the Muslim world. Furlong pushed the Czech company to come up with as many new initiatives as possible, and U-Turn even put together proposals for a clothing brand using popular singers and celebrities in the Middle East as pitchmen. There were even discussions about dropping large flat-screen televisions into remote villages around Central Asia and North Africa, the televisions protected by armor plates so they could not be destroyed. The televisions would have a large antenna that could receive and broadcast pro-American messages beamed from thousands of miles away.
    This far-fetched idea was never approved. But as the Pentagon was expanding its propaganda initiatives around the world in late 2007, U-Turn was hired to support a new SOCOM program to run Web sites focused on Central Asia, North Africa, China, and other regions. The Trans-Regional Web Initiative hired freelance reporters to write up reports and post them on Web sites with names like Central Asia Online , which carried decidedly positive news about the United States and some of its authoritarian allies in Uzbekistan and elsewhere. A controversy erupted when news of the program leaked out, and SOCOM ditched initial plans to keep America’s role in the Web sites hidden, choosing to place a small label at the bottom of each site that identified it as a Defense Department product. But some in Congress and the State Department believed that the Pentagon had crossed a line with the Web sites, the line separating information operations carried out as part of a military campaign and the Pentagon’s more basic requirement to deliver truthful