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radio stations in the Eastern Bloc and Southeast Asia. Frank Wisner, an OSS veteran who rose to become head of CIA clandestine operations, said that propaganda missions needed to be run by a deft, mature organization that could conduct several different influence campaigns at once—what he called a “mighty Wurlitzer” playing the martial music in a war of ideas. When the Cold War ended, the CIA no longer saw a need to invest heavily in black propaganda, or to train its officers in psychological warfare, and the programs became victims of the drastic budget cuts of the 1990s.
    But it wasn’t just about money. The advent of the Internet and the globalization of information had made all propaganda campaigns legally dicey for the CIA. United States law prohibits the spy agency from carrying out propaganda operations against American media outlets and from running influence campaigns against American citizens. Before the Internet the CIA could put foreign journalists on its payroll and plant phony stories in newspapers without worrying about the potential for these operations infiltrating the American media. But by the midnineties, Web surfers in New York and Atlanta could read news Web sites from Pakistan and Dubai. American news outlets began paying greater attention to foreign news, and citing the foreign press in their reports. As a result, it became harder for the CIA to convince congressional overseers, who have final approval for all covert actions by the agency, that a planned propaganda campaign wouldn’t “blow back” to the United States.
    But when the CIA let its propaganda efforts atrophy, the Pentagon sought to fill the void. The military faces similar restrictions against conducting propaganda operations on American citizens, but Congress has generally given the Defense Department wide latitude to carry out psychological-operations missions as long as they can be shown—however tangentially—to be supporting American troops in combat. The Pentagon’s leash grew even longer after the September 11 attacks, when Congress in effect defined the world as a battlefield, and military leaders were confronted with the disorienting reality that America’s enemies mostly lived in countries where the Army and Marine Corps couldn’t go. The Defense Department assumed control of the “mighty Wurlitzer,” spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence opinion in the Muslim world, far from the shooting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    Which is how, in the spring of 2005, a beefy man with a box of Marlboros tucked into his breast pocket came to be walking among the booths set up by technology vendors at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas. He was posing as an office-supplies salesman, but it was a thin cover for a onetime Army psychological-operations officer who had spent a decade thinking of ways to wage warfare inside other people’s heads.
    It was good that Michael Furlong thrived on mental combat, because he was no longer cut out for the physical kind. He was built like a Russian matryoshka doll, with a wide frame that narrowed only slightly into his neck and head. He was diabetic and moved slowly, and yet he was a mound of nervous energy and tended to sweat profusely. He spoke in rapid bursts, fusing strings of sentences together while barely taking a breath. During meetings, he often buried his audience beneath a blizzard of military jargon, which often worked to his advantage. “Mike is supersmart,” said one military officer who worked closely with Furlong. “But he speaks in such gibberish, and nobody would ask any questions because they didn’t want to appear dumb and admit that they didn’t know what he was talking about.” At meeting’s end, Furlong often left the room unchallenged, convinced he had just received approval for whatever exotic scheme he had just presented.
    A Miami native, Furlong was drafted into the Army in 1972, just months before President Richard