Tangled U.S. Objectives Bring Down Spy Firm

The main on-the-ground sleuth for Rosetta was Mike A., now 47, a West Point graduate and Special Forces veteran who had worked in war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq, spoke Arabic and cut a swaggering figure.

For Rosetta, Mike A. met with confidential sources overseas, sometimes secretly taping them while they discussed links among the Taliban, al-Qaeda and drug traffickers, according to highly detailed "Project Rosetta Reports" written by its operatives and later obtained by The Post.

Patrick J., now in his early 50s, unraveled intricate money transactions. He was heavyset and more comfortable behind a computer than playing secret agent. Neither would comment for this article.

Mike A. had friends in the Defense Department, including an aide to then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Mike A. showed his friend some of the information he was turning up on his travels, including purported documents from fugitive Taliban chieftain Mohammad Omar, internal Rosetta e-mails show; the official checked them out, and they could not be authenticated.

Rosetta also had frequent contact with an FBI agent who had a counterterrorism background and was copied on its reports, according to company documents. (An FBI spokesman said the bureau would not comment on the matter.)

The Rosetta people assigned themselves code names to be used in their reports: R1 for Mike A., R2 for Patrick J. and R3 for Brian M., a retired agent for the Immigration and Naturalization Service who had previously worked for an Afghan wireless company. The FBI agent was given the handle "GM."

In hindsight, Rosetta's future took a major turn when an opium grower it was tracking was designated by President Bush in June 2004 as one of the world's most wanted drug kingpins.

Haji Bashir Noorzai was a hulking, 6-foot-4 bearded Afghan in his early 40s who lived in Quetta, Pakistan, with three wives. Noorzai was chief of a million-member familial tribe in the Kandahar province of Afghanistan.

In an affidavit in his criminal case, he traced a history of cooperating with U.S. officials, including the CIA, dating to 1990. In early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Noorzai said he turned over to the U.S. military 15 truckloads of Taliban weapons, including "four hundred anti-aircraft missiles of Russian, American and British manufacture."

From the perspective of the CIA and Defense Department, Noorzai could be a useful intelligence asset. But law enforcement officials continued to consider him a notorious criminal whose drug proceeds supported militants battling U.S. forces. Rosetta's interest seemed purely commercial: to pump him for information that could be reported back to its clients, the Rosetta documents indicate.

In July 2004, Mike A. and Brian M. set out to woo Noorzai. They spread money around to his friends and were able to meet some of them at the J.W. Marriott in Dubai. By August, the Rosetta agents returned to the Marriott for two days of discussions with Noorzai himself, referred to in their reports as HBN.

"His hair and beard were neatly trimmed," they wrote on Aug. 9. "HBN wore a watch with a silver band and gold bezel. HBN was soft-spoken, had a sense of humor and never lost his temper."