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    By September 11, 2001, Michael Furlong had retired from active duty and was working for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Beltway contractor soon to be awash in money from classified U.S. government contracts. Furlong had spent years studying ways to spread pro-American messages to hostile audiences overseas, and suddenly he found himself at the center of a war to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the fall of 2001 he worked with Donald Rumsfeld’s staff to develop information-operations strategies—earning a Defense Department civilian medal for his work—and occasionally sat in the White House Situation Room as Bush officials flailed about in search of ways to communicate White House talking points to Muslims.
    Less than two years later, SAIC got an infusion of cash when the military parceled out new contracts to try to rebuild a shattered Iraq. Furlong traveled to Baghdad to lead a $15 million project the Pentagon awarded to SAIC to create a television station, the Iraqi Media Network. The network was envisioned as a counterweight to Al Jazeera and other Arabic networks that Washington perceived as having an anti-American bias. But the project was soon beset by problems. The Iraqi employees quit after they weren’t paid, and the network had technical problems reaching Iraqi homes. Within months, SAIC had burned through $80 million of Pentagon money, and the endeavor was on the verge of collapse. Furlong was removed from the project in June 2003, although former colleagues said he was hardly the only one to blame for the network’s difficulties. But he could be a showboat: He insisted on driving around Baghdad in a white Hummer—still bearing Maryland dealer plates—that he had had shipped to Iraq.
    Yet while his behavior alienated some colleagues, Furlong’s mastery of the Pentagon’s byzantine contracting system made him invaluable to defense companies. Information-operations projects cost just a small fraction of what it cost to build a tank or a fighter jet, and what Furlong knew better than most was that inside multibillion-dollar enterprises like the Pentagon, smart and ambitious people can sometimes secure millions of dollars by identifying untapped pools of money in obscure corners of the bureaucracy. In doing so, they can build small empires.
    When he arrived at the Las Vegas convention in the spring of 2005, he was about to take a senior civilian job within the psychological-operations division of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM). He was carrying a stack of business cards identifying him as an office-supplies salesman to deflect questions about his real business: finding small companies with the right technology to help the Pentagon conduct propaganda and intelligence-gathering campaigns in the Middle East.
    Over two days, Furlong spent hours at the booth of U-Turn Media, a small Czech firm that had been developing ways to stream video to mobile phones. The team from U-Turn had figured out almost immediately that Furlong was not selling office supplies, as some of them recognized the Special Operations Command’s Tampa address listed on Furlong’s business card. The chance meeting with Michael Furlong, it turned out, was a windfall for a struggling company that had come to Las Vegas to drum up new business.
    U-Turn was run by Jan Obrman, a Czech national whose family had fled Prague during the Soviet crackdown in the late 1960s. His childhood experiences had made Obrman staunchly pro-American and a fierce champion of spreading Western ideas of democracy throughout the world. He worked for a pro-American think tank during the 1980s and later became an executive at Radio Free Europe. The prospect of making money in the growing Internet and mobile-phone market, and the financial backing of a wealthy German investor, led him to create U-Turn Media in 2001. The company had difficulty during its early years, before smartphones turned the mobile industry into a