Pentagon tries to explain secret spy group

Pentagon tries to explain secret spy group

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon yesterday confirmed plans to field new military spy teams to assist battlefield commanders with tasks traditionally carried out by the CIA but denied the move would encroach onto the intelligence agency’s turf.

Two senior Pentagon officials said the military already has forces in Iraq and Afghanistan doing similar work – citing a defense linguist’s efforts in the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003 – but now wants to formalize what has been a largely ad-hoc operation.

“We were fighting a long-term war with basically a pickup team,” said one of the Defense officials, who briefed reporters on condition of anonymity. None of the teams, formally authorized in this year’s budget, have been deployed yet.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon sent its top intelligence official, Stephen Cambone, to Capitol Hill yesterday to explain the new teams which some lawmakers suggested may have skirted congressional oversight and not been fully coordinated with the CIA. Republicans, however, showed little appetite for congressional hearings on the topic.

     At the Pentagon, the officials said the roughly 10-person teams would include linguists, interrogators and case officers focused on gathering “human intelligence.” That is information gathered by spies and other human sources, not through electronic eavesdropping or other technical means.

Such foreign spying traditionally has been under CIA purview, but the officials insisted that the military efforts were designed to augment, not replace, CIA efforts. One official noted that the teams’ funding is controlled by the CIA chief in the foreign intelligence budget.

Still, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has moved aggressively to expand the Pentagon’s own intelligence-gathering activities since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks – moves some in the intelligence community view as an effort to wrest greater control of the effort from the CIA.

Rumsfeld, for instance, had expressed strong reservations about the idea of the national intelligence director overseeing all CIA and Defense Department initiatives, as recommended by the 9/11 commission. And in late 2003, Rumsfeld created a new position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence and named one of his top deputies, Cambone.

But the Defense officials yesterday insisted that the “Strategic Support Teams” would merely provide senior commanders with exactly the kind of on-the-ground information they need to fight the war on terror.

Exactly how these teams will operate remained unclear yesterday, as the senior officials declined to say, for instance, even how many would exist. They will operate in a “clandestine” manner – meaning that their efforts are meant to go undetected – but not as “covert” operators, which would mean that the U.S. government would disavow responsibility for their operation.

The units were first reported Sunday by the Washington Post, but the Pentagon denied a contention in the article that Rumsfeld had sought to reinterpret or “bend” the law to cover these new units. The officials yesterday said the activities of the units can be carried under existing authorities.