Exposing the Information Operatives, Part One

[See my 30 May 2008 article on Dr. Marilyn Dudley-Flores, written as she started training for the U.S. Army's Human Terrain System program. I had imagined that my article would be the beginning of a series of stories about her experiences during a 13-month tour "downrange," the modern military euphemism for the war zones. For thousands of years young men have marched off to war full of patriotism and a sense of adventure. Marilyn, a middle-age woman, similarly stirred by the call to duty, found that the most immediate enemy was in her own foxhole... and in the Five-Sided Foxhole on the Potomac.  --TG]

copyright © 2014 by Marilyn Dudley-Flores (Dudley-Rowley), PhD

I was in transit to Afghanistan from late October through early November 2008 to take my U.S. Army Human Terrain System (HTS) post on the Human Terrain Analysis Team (HTAT) at Bagram Air Field (BAF). It was during this time that an information operation (IO) was launched against me. From what witnesses have told me, at first it seemed like harmless fact-checking over open sources, to see what kind of background I had. The “information operatives” were high-level 101st Army Airborne Division staff officers answerable to Major General Jeffrey Schloesser of the Combined Joint Task Force (CJTF). At least one of them wanted my job on the team after he completed his military tour-of-duty, wanting to come back as a civilian contractor and earn the higher salary (that I was supposed to be earning) than what he earned as a soldier. (I say “supposed” because to this day I am still owed nearly $40,000 due to me for my work with the U.S. Army’s HTS.) Other stakeholders in the IO against me definitely did not want me co-leading the team when they found out from all that IO’ing that I had the authentic background of a 55-year-old scientist who had been active in Academe, as well as in other professional venues. The other stakeholders were four men on my team with serious developmental and psychological challenges and without the skills, credentials, and/or motivation to do counterinsurgency (COIN) research and analysis and related tasks.

Like a Tony Soprano “no work job” crew, they smoked, joked, and napped their way through their duty day, until my arrival had them and their accessories working 24-7 to get rid of me and the other genuine professionals on our team – by any means necessary. In addition to these stakeholders, also simpatico with the IO against me, was the military contractor company that was supposed to be paying me my salary, but instead was playing fast and loose with HTS’ers’ salaries and other of their workers’ salaries and benefits on other government contracts. And, at the same time, defrauding the American government of over a million dollars on one government war zone contract alone. That company and its principals have been meted out consequences in the recent past and more are likely to come down the pike. Add to those social actors, stakeholders to the IO (and worse) were lazy, bored field-grade staffers close to Schloesser who were all too happy to play blood sport with the lives of the genuine people on my team.

When I was forced to pull the plug on all of this cahooting to keep us genuine teammates safe and so that we could go forward with the prosecution of our team’s mission, events went sideways for me and the story about our HTAT went global over the online media. The story, like many other HTS’ers’ true stories, wasn’t one to inspire the U.S. Congress to pass more funds to a proof-of-concept project that might not be proving itself all that well. The incoming president, Mr. Obama, upon hearing such stories, might not be convinced that the HTS could be the cornerstone of the civilian surge in Afghanistan. Almost immediately, the IO that was homegrown on Bagram continued through the Pentagon think tank, the Office of Net Assessment, structurally close to then-SECDEF, Dr. Robert Gates. The information operatives in the Pentagon seized on features in my very real background and blogged them 180 degrees differently. Clearly, the aim was to spread disinformation about me to discredit my legitimacy and veracity. One of the sock puppets peeping up behind the walls of that digital fortress initially masked himself in one or more cyber stockings, but soon admitted to being Army Ranger Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman, Jr. Research on Bateman proved fruitful.

As discussed in the blog commentary over http://zeroanthropology.net/2009/02/26/some-breaking-news-on-the-human-terrain-system-death-threats/:

Roger Neuman asked on 19 April 2010:

Did you ever hear such an arrogant condescending person as this Bob Bateman? I would be willing to bet that the story of Bob’s life would make good reading. Anyone interested in researching his life?

I answered on 20 April 2010:

Yes, Roger, LTC Bob Bateman, as depicted over the Internet, would be an interesting research project for someone so inclined. Here are some leads since last my supporters and I delved into his background.

He had his own domain name robertbateman.com.

He had a website.

He had a longish Wikipedia article on himself — which he authored.

Bateman has made other inroads on Wikipedia. He tried to revise the history of No Gun Ri to whitewash it. The revision history for that article shed a good bit of light on that activity. The author (murdoch) of the Wikipedia article on the No Gun Ri incident (Korean War) posted a complaint on 15 July 2005 that someone was continually going into his article online and trying to revise the history of a well-documented event. He found the IP address of the person doing it.

Two days earlier, that same someone created the Wikipedia article on Robert Bateman using the same IP address (see the bottom of the revision history on the Wikipedia article “Robert Bateman [historian]”).

Currently, there are still references to Robert Bateman in the No Gun Ri Wikipedia entry, but they are no longer links to the Wikipedia article about him.

Sean McFate was a Facebook friend of LTC Robert Bateman. (Note: Sean McFate is the ex-husband of Dr. Montgomery McFate (aka Montgomery “Mitzy” Carlough.) Carlough/McFate was the chief social scientist manager in the opening years of the HTS.

Shortly after I FOIPA’ed his blog transmissions that referred to me out of his Pentagon computer and verified the details already discovered over this page, Bateman’s website disappeared.

I was surprised today to see that Bateman’s Wikipedia entry on himself has been deleted. It was entertaining reading. It introduced me to the wonderful world of “fake veteran hunting” by Army Rangers and others, which as a daughter of the South reminded me so much of the Ku Klux Klan.

So, it would seem that LTC Bateman is being relegated to the obscurity that he deserves. He would make a great targeting exercise for newbie HTS’ers.

Dr. Maximilian Forte responded on 20 April 2010:

This is very rich, an excellent example of good counter-surveillance. Many thanks.

To continue, among the IO’s disinformative topics, was I had never worked with the late premier Afghanistan expert, Dr. Louis Dupree. Never mind the various “hits” over Internet search engines linking our names in news articles, archives, and in the scholarly record! An example is as follows.

Denker, D., 1983. “The Last Migration of the Kirghiz of Afghanistan?” Central Asian Survey, Taylor & Francis:

... Their cause briefly looked hopeful in early 1982, when through the efforts of anthropologist Dr. Louis Dupree and Marilyn Dudley-Rowley of the Institute of Alaskan Affairs, arrangements were made for Haji Rahman Qul and one of his sons to accompany Dr. Nazif Shahrani to ...

If a feature in my academic and professional background was genuine, the information operatives had to make it over into something false to undercut my veracity and legitimacy.

The IO directed against me was not only outrageous, but illegal. Such un-American activities have been highlighted in the 2011 case of Lieutenant General Caldwell who tried to launch an IO against Senator John McCain and other visiting dignitaries in Afghanistan. Caldwell sought “to manipulate the perceptions and opinions of U.S. senators and representatives through psychological operations (PSYOP).” This, apparently, to hoodoo Members of Congress out of more funding and resources for his mission in Afghanistan (https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/military-may-be-engaged-illegal-psychological-operations-and-propaganda-against-us). Unlike the information operatives who enthusiastically jumped on the smear campaign against me, the Texas National Guard officers in charge of Caldwell’s IO cell reminded the general that such operations against American citizens were illegal. Other stories about this case show that some days later, those dutiful officers were subjected to propaganda against them in order to levy sanctions on them in retaliation (http://www.wired.com/2011/02/did-a-top-general-run-psyops-on-senators/).

The genuine members of my HTAT on BAF and out in the field were targets of several types of crime and misdeeds – none that were criminally investigated. The IO against me has never been criminally investigated. Follow-on reprisal-like events that befell me and my family members and their consequences have never been investigated – at least by a federal agency.

So, I continue to advocate for federal criminal investigations. As I have argued, investigate not only for the victims involved, but for the sake of the Republic and what it, what we, stand for.

Despite these experiences, I urge the continuance, improvement, and restructuring of the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain System and the use and innovation of Human Terrain Analysis (HTA) in matters of criminal justice, the national security, and the Global War on Terror (GWOT).



How Professors Fight
Death Threat Tarnishes US Army Human Terrain System
Fear and Loathing in Afghanistan