The New York Times just posted a story about a Defense Department official running an off-the-books spy operation with private contractors. It’s late and my brain has shut down, but this seems significant.

“While no legitimate intelligence operations got screwed up, it’s generally a bad idea to have freelancers running around a war zone pretending to be James Bond,” one American government official said. But it is still murky whether Mr. Furlong had approval from top commanders or whether he might have been running a rogue operation.