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![](gif00271.gif) Sunday, Jan. 26,
2003 The CIA's Secret
Army Because of past scandals, the agency had largely dropped its
paramilitary operations. But the war on terrorism has brought it back into
the business By DOUGLAS WALLER
The U.S. is not yet at war with Saddam Hussein. Not officially. But
quietly, over the past few months, some of its savviest warriors have
sneaked into his country. They have been secretly prowling the
Kurdish-controlled enclave in northern Iraq, trying to organize a
guerrilla force that could guide American soldiers invading from the
north, hunting for targets that U.S. warplanes might bomb, setting up
networks to hide U.S. pilots who might be shot down and mapping out escape
routes to get them out. And they are doing the same in southern Iraq with
dissident Shi'ites.
But the biggest surprise of all is that they are not even soldiers;
they are spies, part of the CIA's rough and ready, supersecret Special
Operations Group (SOG). Until fairly recently, the CIA, in an effort to
clean up a reputation sullied by botched overseas coups and imperial
assassination attempts, had shied away from getting its hands dirty. Until
about five years ago, it focused instead on gathering intelligence that
could be used by other parts of the government. Before that, traditional
CIA officers, often working under cover as U.S. diplomats, got most of
their secrets from the embassy cocktail circuit or by bribing foreign
officials. Most did not even have weapons training, and they looked down
on the few SOG commandos who remained out in the field as knuckle
draggers, relics of a bygone era. Now the knuckle draggers are not just
back; they are the new hard edge of the CIA, at the forefront of the war
on terrorism. And, says a U.S. intelligence official, "they know which end
the bullet comes out of."
It was George Tenet who began rebuilding the SOG five years ago when he
took charge of the CIA, but the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, accelerated his
efforts.
Confronted with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, an enemy that has no army,
no fixed assets and no clearly defined territory, the Bush Administration
needed an unconventional military force. It wanted combatants who could
match al-Qaeda for wiliness, adaptability and, up to a point,
ruthlessness. It wanted its own army of James Bonds. So in the past year,
hundreds of millions of additional dollars have been pumped into the CIA
budget by President George W. Bush, a man who may be predisposed to
believe strongly in an agency his father once headed. He has ordered SOG
operatives to join forces with foreign intelligence services. He has even
authorized the CIA to kidnap terrorists in order to break their cells or
kill them.
All of which could make for a more agile, effective intelligence
agency. Or it could also mean a CIA that once again steps beyond the realm
of collecting secrets to intervening forcibly in the affairs of foreign
states. In that area, the agency's history has often been one of blunders
and worse, from Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s through the Bay of Pigs
fiasco under John F. Kennedy to the Nicaraguan war that led to the
Iran-contra debacle in the '80s. Some longtime intelligence watchers are
wondering whether a reinvigorated paramilitary wing of the CIA could be a
mixed blessing for America once again. And the military itself is not too
pleased. It believes its special-ops forces are perfectly equipped to
handle these jobs. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has reacted in part
by planning his own secret unit, which would function much like the SOG
but would answer to him rather than Tenet.
Though tiny by Pentagon standards, the SOG has swelled to several
hundred officers. They are planted in Pakistan, Central Asia, North Africa
and East Asia. "These are people who are operating every day around the
world," Jim Pavitt, the CIA's deputy director of operations, told TIME. "I
can insert a team anywhere quickly and clandestinely." The future may
bring even more ambitious missions. Last May, Bush signed a top-secret
directive authorizing pre-emptive strikes by the Pentagon and the CIA
against nations that are close to acquiring nuclear weapons.
Administration sources tell TIME that the Department of Energy's
nuclear-weapons experts are training SOG operatives on ways to attack
enemy nuclear facilities. In the current crisis with North Korea,
Washington so far is committed to diplomacy as a means of pressuring
Pyongyang to give up its atomic-arms program, but it might well be a SOG
team that gets called to action.
The latest debate over the wisdom of expanding CIA powers in this way
has been confined mostly to a small group of professionals, escaping the
public's notice. That's largely because the evolution of the CIA's mission
has proceeded so quietly. Americans did get a glimpse into the world of
the CIA paramilitary when American Johnny (Mike) Spann, 32, was killed in
Afghanistan in November 2001 after being overpowered by Taliban prisoners
he had been interrogating; uncharacteristically, the CIA confirmed that
Spann was one of its own, a member of the sog. Another peek into the
shadows came last November when it was revealed that the explosion that
had carbonized a carful of alleged al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen was caused
by a Hellfire missile let loose by a CIA Predator drone.
The outlines of this new mission are not new, but TIME has uncovered
enough fresh details to construct the fullest picture yet of the CIA's
secret army. It spoke to past and current intelligence officials,
including an active member of the sog, as well as to detractors within the
Pentagon. Our report:
INTO AFGHANISTAN Officially, the war in Afghanistan began on
Oct. 7, 2001, with the first round of U.S. air attacks. For the SOG,
however, the battle opened on Sept. 26, just 15 days after the attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That was how "John," one of the
SOG's paramilitary officers, unexpectedly found himself peering out the
open window of a Soviet-made Mi-17 helicopter that day as it soared over
the Anjuman Pass and into the Panjshir Valley, northeast of Kabul. Just
ahead on the ground, John spotted a patrol of bearded men in turbans
toting AK-47 rifles.
John tugged the sleeve of the pilot from the rebel Northern Alliance,
who was aboard to guide the aircraft through the treacherous mountains of
northeastern Afghanistan. "They're not ours," the Afghan shouted, letting
John know that the helicopter could be fired on from below. The Taliban
fighters, however, were so stunned by the appearance of the beastly
aircraft roaring above them that they did not have time to shoulder their
weapons and shoot before it flew out of range. "Wonderful," the CIA
officer shouted to his Afghan comrade. Just a week earlier, John (who
talked to TIME on the condition that his real name not be used) had been
studying at a language school in Virginia, preparing for an entirely
different assignment overseas. (What language and what posting, he would
not say.) The agency yanked him out to join the first U.S. team going into
Afghanistan. That was typical for a CIA paramilitary officer, who at a
moment's notice may be thrown into what John calls a pickup team. John's
team included four CIA officers fluent in Farsi or Dari who for years had
been sneaking into Afghanistan, recruiting spies for the agency. Their
mission now was to hook up with those contacts, collect intelligence for
the impending U.S. aerial attack and hunt for bin Laden. Along with the
light arms, radios and rations they had packed into the Mi-17 were two
suitcases stuffed with $3 million. It was used for bribing Afghan warlords
to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
WHO JOINS UP? Like all the SOG's other paramilitary
operatives, John had spent years in the U.S. military before joining the
cia; five years is the minimum requirement. CIA recruiters regularly prowl
clubs like those at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the Army's Special Operations
Command has its headquarters, looking for Green Berets interested in even
more unconventional work and higher pay (a starting SOG officer can earn
more than $50,000 a year; a sergeant in the Green Berets begins at about
$41,000). Special-forces soldiers, Navy seals and Air Force commandos are
routinely dispatched to the agency on a temporary basis to provide special
military skills that the CIA needs for specific missions. If a soldier is
assigned highly clandestine work, his records are changed to make it
appear as if he resigned from the military or was given civilian status;
the process is called sheep dipping, after the practice of bathing sheep
before they are sheared.
Military commandos who join the CIA full time are sent to the "farm,"
the agency's Camp Peary training center, located on 9,000 heavily wooded
acres surrounded by a barbed-wire-topped fence near Williamsburg, Va.
There the soldiers go through the yearlong course that all new CIA case
officers must take to learn such skills of the trade as infiltrating
hostile countries, communicating in codes, retrieving messages from dead
drops and recruiting foreign agents to spy for the U.S. The CIA wants its
paramilitary officers to be able to steal secrets as well as blow up
bridges. John proudly recalls overhearing an Afghan commander tell a
comrade, "Yes, I have these Americans with me, and, yes, they have rifles,
but I don't think they're soldiers. They spend all their time with
laptops." Says John: "We wrote hundreds and hundreds of intelligence
reports."
At Camp Peary, new SOG recruits also hone their paramilitary skills,
like sharpshooting with various kinds of weapons, setting up landing zones
in remote areas for agency aircraft and attacking enemy sites with a small
force. Some are sent to Delta Force's secret compound at Fort Bragg to
learn highly specialized counterterrorism techniques, such as how to
rescue a fellow agent held hostage.
Over the years, the SOG has taken on some of the CIA's most dangerous
work. Paramilitary officers account for almost half the 79 stars chiseled
into the wall in the main foyer of the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters
commemorating all the spies who have died since the cia was founded in
1947. The newest star is dedicated to Spann. But the CIA suffered
additional casualties in Afghanistan and some injuries that the agency has
not yet publicly acknowledged. A CIA officer was wounded by a bullet in
the chest during a fire fight in southern Afghanistan, and one of the U.S.
soldiers confirmed killed was working with a CIA team when he was hit in a
separate skirmish.
IN, OUT AND IN AGAIN The SOG traces its roots to the days of
William (Wild Bill) Donovan, the general in charge of espionage and
clandestine operations during World War II, whose Office of Strategic
Services sent paramilitary commandos behind enemy lines. The CIA, since
its founding after the war, has always had a paramilitary unit, which has
carried various names. At the height of the cold war, the agency had
hundreds of paramilitary operatives fomenting coups around the world. It
was involved in assassination plots against the leaders of Congo, Cuba and
Iraq and was linked by a 1976 Senate inquiry to ousters that resulted in
the deaths of the leaders of the Dominican Republic, Vietnam and Chile.
When Ronald Reagan wanted to roll back communism in the 1980s, the agency
organized paramilitary operations in Central America. These adventures had
checkered results. The governments that the CIA destabilized in Iran,
Guatemala and Chile were replaced by repressive regimes that ended up
doing more damage in the long run to U.S. foreign policy.
By 1990 the SOG had practically been disbanded, the victim of domestic
and international outrage over the agency's lethal meddling in other
countries. Congressional and CIA budget cutters slashed money for the
clandestine force, believing that billion-dollar spy satellites collected
intelligence more efficiently and without embarrassing the U.S. The
pendulum soon began to swing back, however, as intelligence officials
realized that technology has its limitations. Satellites, for instance,
can't see inside buildings; phone taps can't capture an enemy's every
move. When Tenet was installed as CIA director in 1997, he began fielding
more human spies and rebuilding the SOG.
During the Balkan conflicts in the mid- and late 1990s, agency
paramilitary officers slipped into Bosnia and Kosovo to collect
intelligence and hunt for accused war criminals like Bosnian Serb leader
Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic. But the newly formed
teams did not have enough manpower for snatches even when they were able
to pinpoint Serbian targets. "The CIA," complains a former senior Clinton
aide, "didn't have the capability to take down a three- or four-car
motorcade with bodyguards."
Today it does, and the sog's capacities are growing. Its maritime
branch has speedboats to carry commandos to shore, and the agency can rent
cargo ships through its front companies to transport larger equipment. The
air arm, which Pentagon officials have nicknamed the Waffen CIA, has small
passenger jets on alert to fly paramilitary operatives anywhere in the
world on two hours' notice. Other cargo planes, reminiscent of the Air
America fleet that the agency had in Vietnam, can drop supplies to
replenish teams in remote locations. For areas like Afghanistan and
Central Asia, where a Russian-made helicopter stands out less, the agency
uses the large inventory of Soviet-era aircraft that the Pentagon captured
in previous conflicts or bought on the black market.
The part of the air arm that has received the most publicity lately is
the fleet of remote-controlled Predator drones, armed with 5-ft.-long
Hellfire missiles, that the agency bought from the Air Force. In November
2001 the CIA deployed the drone to eliminate bin Laden's lieutenant,
Mohammed Atef. Last November's Predator hit in Yemen killed an al-Qaeda
commander and his entourage of five, though the strike was controversial:
one of the dead men turned out to be a U.S. citizen.
There have possibly been other missteps as well. In February 2002 a cia
Predator fired at a group of Afghan men gathered around a truck, killing
at least three of them. U.S. intelligence insists the men were an al-Qaeda
band, but locals say they were nothing more than scrap dealers or
smugglers. And as the agency tries to pull together rival Iraqi Kurdish
forces into a viable guerrilla force that could take on Saddam, it must
confront its sorry history in that territory. In 1995 it attempted to
organize a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam, but in the end CIA officers
fled their base in northern Iraq, abandoning their Kurdish agents to Iraqi
police, who rounded up and executed hundreds. The Clinton Administration,
fearing the operation would end in disaster, had pulled the plug.
But perhaps the sog's most notable lapse in the field has been its
failure to locate bin Laden. "They're still developing their capability,"
says a Bush Administration official who has worked with the unit. "It
doesn't mean that they won't be a force to be reckoned with. But they're
not there yet."
OPPOSITION AND RIVALS The pentagon is not happy about the
SOG's moving aggressively onto its turf. When aides told Rumsfeld in late
September 2001 that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn't go into
Afghanistan until the CIA contingent there had laid the groundwork with
the local warlords, he erupted, "I have all these guys under arms, and
we've got to wait like a little bird in a nest for the CIA to let us go
in?" What's more, Rumsfeld, according to a Pentagon source, does not like
the idea that the CIA's paramilitary operatives could start fights his
forces might have to finish.
The resentment burns even more because the generals know that when it
comes to special-operations soldiers, they have a deeper bench than the
spooks at Langley. And in Afghanistan, the Pentagon was regularly asked to
supply the CIA with people from that bench. The Defense Department already
has 44,000 Army, Navy and Air Force commandos in its U.S. Special
Operations Command, who are as skilled in covert guerrilla warfare as the
CIA's operatives. In the basement vaults of the command's headquarters at
MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., sit secret contingency plans to send
military special-ops teams to any trouble spot in the world, complete with
infiltration routes, drop zones, intelligence contacts and assault points.
The CIA ended up having about 100 officers roaming in Afghanistan
during the U.S. invasion. But the agency teams were still critically short
of key operatives. "I kept signing more and more deployment orders for
folks to go to the CIA," recalls Robert Andrews, who at the time was a
deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations. "They were
looking for any medics, operational soldiers and even intelligence
specialists that we had."
Even some old agency hands think the CIA should stick to intelligence
and leave the commando work to the military. "Agency operators lack the
experience to be effective military operators," says Larry Johnson, a
former CIA officer and State Department counterterrorism expert. "They
have just enough training to be dangerous to themselves and others." And
there is the historic danger that CIA paramilitary operations, cloaked in
layers of secrecy, can become rogues. "Everybody has seen this movie
before where secret wars have developed into public disasters," warns John
Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and intelligence think
tank. "We're going to wind up doing things that, when the American people
hear of them, they will repudiate."
The CIA responds that its commandos take on the jobs the military can't
or won't handle. The SOG prides itself on being small and agile, capable
of sending teams of 10 operators or fewer anywhere in the world much
faster than the Pentagon can. One reason the agency was the first into
Afghanistan was that the Special Ops Command dragged its feet getting its
soldiers ready for action. Intelligence sources tell Time that the CIA had
requested that commandos from the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force join its
first team going into Afghanistan but that the Pentagon refused to send
them.
Once deployed, CIA operatives have fewer regulations to hamstring them
than their military counterparts do. In Afghanistan, CIA cargo planes were
dropping warm-weather clothing, saddles and bales of hay for allied Afghan
foot soldiers and cavalry. One cable that officers in the field sent back
to Langley read, "Please send boots. The Taliban can hear our flip-flops."
Says Kent Harrington, a former CIA station chief in Asia: "If a military
special-operations soldier parachuted in with $3 million to buy armies,
he'd have to have a C-5 cargo plane flying behind him with all the
paperwork he'd need to dispense the money."
The CIA also has far more contacts than the Pentagon among foreign
intelligence services that can help with clandestine operations overseas,
plus a global network of paid snitches on the ground. The agency "deals
with everything from bottom feeders around the world to their governments
on a routine basis," says a senior U.S. intelligence official. "Name a
country anywhere, and (the CIA) can identify with a couple of telephone
calls four or five people who will have a variety of skills to go into
that country if it becomes a difficult place." Green Berets can operate
covertly in a combat zone, but they would stick out like sore thumbs if
they tried to infiltrate a foreign city, because they don't have the
intelligence network in place to conceal themselves. "We have the ability
to hide in plain sight, get in and get out before anybody figures out who
we are," asserts a CIA source.
CIA officials, leery of being sucked into new scandals, insist that
their covert operations are now subject to layers of oversight. Before an
agency paramilitary team can be launched, the President must sign an
intelligence "finding" that broadly outlines the operation to be
performed. That finding, along with a more detailed description of the
mission, is sent to the congressional intelligence committees. If they
object to an operation, they can cut off its funds the next time the
agency's budget comes up.
After approving a covert operation, Bush leaves the details of when and
how to Tenet and his senior aides. For example, Administration officials
say Bush did not specifically order the Predator attack in Yemen. But
after Sept. 11 he gave the CIA the green light to use lethal force against
al-Qaeda.
Rumsfeld, nevertheless, is intent on building his own covert force. He
recently ordered the Special Operations Command to draw up secret plans to
launch attacks against al-Qaeda around the world, and he intends to put an
extra $1 billion in its budget next year for the job. Elsewhere in the
Defense Department, small, clandestine units, coordinating little with the
CIA, are busy organizing their own future battles. Several hundred Army
agents, with what was originally known as the intelligence support
activity, train to infiltrate foreign countries to scout targets. With
headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va., the unit is so secretive, it changes
its cover name every six months. Delta Force has a platoon of about 100
intelligence operatives trained to sneak into a foreign country and radio
back last-minute intelligence before the force's commandos swoop in for an
attack.
The CIA isn't amused. "Don't replicate what you don't need to
replicate," argues a senior U.S. intelligence officer. So who referees
this dispute? In addition to running the CIA, Tenet, as director of
Central Intelligence, is supposed to oversee all intelligence programs in
the U.S. government. But the Pentagon, which controls more than 80% of the
estimated $35 billion intelligence budget, doesn't want him meddling in
its spying.
Ultimately, the man who chooses between them is the President. Both
Tenet and Rumsfeld report directly to him. And thus far, Bush has been
eager to give Tenet leeway to build up his commando force. With a major
conflict looming in Iraq, units from all branches of the military are
mobilizing to get a piece of the action. The CIA, at least, will have its
own.
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