IC SHARKS IN TAMPA

Dear Crew of the USS Tom Clancy, I hope your labor day weekend was as wonderful as mine. Bowe Bergdahl's case has been back in the news, so I thought I'd give you some backstory on the case, a more in-depth look at what I talked about vis-a-vis the Bergdahl case here:https://www.c-span.org/program/book-tv/american-cipher/524249 I interviewed one of the players in the case, this man, years ago: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna44683587 Here's the dispatch -Matt 'Some of those things were so cool,' Mike Furlong says over seafood at IC Sharks in Tampa, Florida. 'The wife wakes up in the morning, the dog is still sleeping over there, and her husband's got a hole in his head with blood trickling down it. Did a hell of a job on all that.' Furlong, an overweight man in his sixties, is eating a lobster roll on a sunny day on a pier overlooking Tampa Bay. He's wearing Crocs and shorts and a wrinkled polo shirt, smoking cigarettes. He doesn't look like a black ops guy or sound like one—he seems more like a guy describing a particularly good show in Vegas than talking about assassination programs he'd helped run—but he'd been in the game a long time. 'I was a Captain, promotable, selected for the Joint Staff's J5 to be an arms control intern, thinking I'd be making coffee,' he remembered of the early 1980s, when he first fell down the rabbit hole of special operations. After working on the arms control problem, he's looking for something else to do in Washington. He's distributed his officer's record brief to a couple offices, he's thinking he might go here or there, but doesn't know. He's waiting and then in 1983 he gets a call from Steve Sitnik. 'Mike, change of plans. You've got a Ranger tab and blah blah, you're going to the special ops agency in the basement of the army.' 'What?' Furlong asks. He doesn't know what Sitnik is talking about, but he knows him from the Arms Control Agency, trusts that the job must be worth it. He gets his answer. The job is totally worth it. There's a secret unit in the Pentagon that's gotten in trouble. Their code name? Yellow Fruit. 'Yellow Fruit. They had to clean the house. People living cover large and spending millions of dollars on Armani suits.' There were other abuses and scandals. Double billing State and Department of Defense for the same travel and pocketing the difference. Buying hot air balloons. Their commander, Lieuteant Colonel Dale Duncan, was being investigated for travel voucher fraud. 'Buying Maseratis for cover and all this kind of shit,' Furlong remembered. 'We don't care what you know or what you don't know,' Sitnik told him. 'We're wiping it out, mostly Green Beret crowd, people under Hoffer that he'd built and handpicked—disband all that.' So Furlong took the red pill. He joined Yellow Fruit. He learned what goes on in the shadow world. 'This is where I picked up all the special missions stuff. All of a sudden you're the JSOC desk officer, you've got all special mission units.' If it were a Jason Bourne movie, he'd be the guy on one end of the phone in an ill-fitting suit, asking for answers or providing them to the man in the field. Please Keep the USS Tom Clancy afloat in these trying times for Naval Vessels