Newly revealed espionage team designed to end reliance on CIA
By BARTON GELLMAN
Washington Post
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by the Washington Post.
The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years — in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.
Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, include interrogation of prisoners, scouting of targets in wartime and the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/nation/3004867PARANOIA chez Rumsfeld. JUST who else knows their grubby little secrets that they expunged with Tenet's help from official CIA files?
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