The case of the angry colonel

The Iraq war's top spokesman loves to dash off fiery complaints to bloggers -- unless someone's impersonating him. Do Col. Steven Boylan's claims of identity theft hold water?

Editor's note: This story has been updated since it was first published.

By Farhad Manjoo

Read more: George W. Bush, Politics, News, Farhad Manjoo, Iraq War, Glenn Greenwald, David Petraeus

Oct. 31, 2007 | Is the military's top spokesman in Iraq a loose cannon who routinely fires off angry, impetuous e-mails to bloggers who criticize the war and the spin surrounding it? Or is Col. Steven Boylan, instead, an innocent victim -- an online wallflower whose identity has been hijacked by a pro-war hacker who has managed to break into the most well-fortified space on the planet in order to taunt lefty critics? Neither scenario paints a comforting picture of the situation in Iraq -- and even though the e-mails in question are coming from military servers in Iraq, the military seems strangely uninterested in solving the mystery of who is writing them.

During the past couple of days, variations on these questions have rattled through blogs on the left and the right. The buzz began on Sunday, when Glenn Greenwald, a political blogger here at Salon, received a long, invective-fraught e-mail that bore Boylan's return e-mail address, steven.boylan@iraq.centcom.mil. Boylan serves as chief spokesman for Gen. David Petraeus, who heads all coalition forces in Iraq. Among other things, the e-mail labels Greenwald a "propagandist" who's "too lazy to do the research on the topics to gain the facts." Greenwald posted the letter.

After a few readers asked if the e-mail might be a fake, Greenwald sent an e-mail to Boylan asking if he had written it. Boylan denied it, and he did so again in a letter to Editor and Publisher, as well as to readers who contacted him. He has suggested that someone may have purloined his identity -- and, indeed, there is at least one documented case of a person impersonating Boylan via e-mail (more on that below).

On Tuesday, I spoke to several e-mail experts who have compared the disputed Boylan message with other letters the colonel has sent. The experts tell a clear story: If the message is a fake, as Boylan claims, it is a very well-done fake. Experts say that anyone who forged the e-mail to Greenwald would have had to find a way to get into the military's network, either physically (by having access to Boylan's computer, say) or through some kind of hack.

Every e-mail message includes a trail showing how it was routed through the Internet to get from the sender's computer to the receiver's -- this information is included in what's called an e-mail's "header." Greg Mitchell of Editor and Publisher and Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly provided Salon with e-mail correspondence they've had with Boylan. Headers on those messages, as well as headers on other messages that Boylan has sent to Greenwald and a Salon editor, match the header of the disputed e-mail -- they all show Boylan's messages coming through the military's computers in Iraq.

The header in the disputed Boylan e-mail shows that on its way from the sender to Greenwald, the message was routed through a machine with the address 02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil, a military machine. Peter Boothe, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Oregon, points out that this address is not an "open mail relay" -- a computer that lets anyone send mail through it. Instead, only computers internal to the military's network appear to be able to send mail through this machine.

After Greenwald posted the disputed Boylan letter, he sent an e-mail to Boylan's address asking the colonel whether he'd sent the original e-mail. Boylan responded, "Interesting and no." The headers of that e-mail show that that message, too, was routed through 02exbhizn02.iraq.centcom.mil. And when Boylan wrote to Mitchell that "I am denying writing and sending" the e-mail to Greenwald, that message came through 02exbhizn01.iraq.centcom.mil -- another computer belonging to the same military network. Alan Schwartz, a professor of medical education at the University of Illinois at Chicago who has co-written four books on e-mail administration -- including "Stopping Spam" and "Managing Mailing Lists" -- seconded Boothe's assessment. But he added that if the military's system administrators checked their e-mail logs, they could likely get to the bottom of the story.

I sent Boylan an e-mail asking if he had any idea about how someone might have filched his identity. I also asked about the scope of the problem -- has the fake Boylan sent out e-mails to anyone else? -- and what he and the military are doing to stop it. He did not respond.

What's most bizarre about this story is the military's determined inattention to it -- a man whose job is to be the mouthpiece for the war's top general is claiming that his words are not his own, and authorities are nonchalant. On Tuesday morning I called the Multi-National Force in Iraq, and I got through to Cmdr. Scott Rye of the Navy, the day chief of media operations. Rye had not heard of the controversy. He said that he takes Boylan "at his word" that he was not the author of the message, but added that he's interested in looking into whether someone has been impersonating the colonel. I sent Rye the disputed e-mail. He responded: "I'll share with the IT guys and see what, if anything, they can determine." I have not heard back.

Whatever the status of the e-mail, this much is clear: Boylan is no wallflower. Like any dedicated public affairs officer, he follows the debate surrounding his chosen P.R. field -- the war -- very closely. Less traditionally, he writes columns for the archconservative magazine Human Events, and he is enthusiastic about complaining to all manner of critics, from big-name reporters to bloggers of every stripe.

In 2005, when U.S. military deaths in Iraq hit 2,000, Boylan sent an e-mail to reporters that said 2,000 was not a real milestone. Instead, he said, it's "an artificial mark on the wall set by individuals or groups with specific agendas and ulterior motives." The real milestones, he countered, are "rarely covered or discussed."

In a May 9, 2007, column, Mitchell of Editor and Publisher pointed out that in a session with reporters, Petraeus had characterized a U.S. Army surgeon general report as showing that only "a small number" of troops in Iraq admitted they may have mistreated "detainees." But the report's most shocking stats concerned soldiers' mistreatment of "noncombatants," not "detainees." Ten percent of troops said they had mistreated civilians. Mitchell wrote: "Reporters should also ask Gen. David Petraeus ... why he lied in responding to a reporter's question this week concerning widespread abuse by U.S. troops."

Next page: In the fall of 2004, reporters found Michelle Boylan and three Boylan children manning a Bush-Cheney phone bank in Wisconsin