Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
Very quietly, the Pentagon is building a new espionage network to target terrorists
In the second week of December 2003, U.S. Special Forces captured an Iraqi man named Fawzi Rashid, a top insurgent leader in Baghdad. Rashid was carrying a letter from Saddam Hussein, U.S. News has learned, that was less than a week old. It would prove to be the key break in the 10-month manhunt for the Iraqi dictator. Military intelligence specialists, working with the Green Berets, persuaded Rashid to identify the courier who had delivered the letter. Two days later, the courier led U.S. forces to Saddam's grim spider hole. The lightning-fast sequence of events was the result of a decision to have intelligence analysts work side by side with soldiers, known in Pentagon-speak as "collectors." "Analysts were telling the collectors what they needed, and collectors were giving their collections right back to the analysts," says a senior Pentagon official, describing Saddam's capture. "What's new . . . is that you had analysts and collectors all under the same chain of command."
That's precisely the model for the ambitious effort now underway to overhaul the Pentagon's creaky intelligence operations. With the expected confirmation of veteran diplomat John Negroponte as President Bush's new director of national intelligence, the changes at the Pentagon may be just a beginning. A series of government reports detailing the deeply flawed analysis of Iraq's weapons capabilities prior to the U.S.-led invasion prompted Bush not just to create the new intelligence-czar position but to encourage Negroponte to impose sweeping changes on the nation's balkanized $40 billion-a-year intelligence community. The Defense Intelligence Agency, which is the fulcrum of the Pentagon's new espionage effort, was a key actor in the earlier intelligence foul-ups, having failed, to take just one example, to properly vet a duplicitous Iraqi intelligence source appropriately code-named, as it turns out, "Curveball."
Pentagon brass have moved ahead with several fixes since then and say their new espionage plans promise big improvements over past performance. The point man in this new effort is Lt. Gen. William Boykin, the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence. Last year, Boykin landed in hot water because of some remarks he made to religious groups about the war on terrorism, but the Pentagon's inspector general found only minor infractions. It was a rare moment of notoriety for a man who has preferred to work in the shadows for most of his career. A founding member of the military's elite Delta Force counterterrorist unit, Boykin participated in the mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, in the Grenada invasion in 1983, where he was wounded by machine-gun fire, and in the "Black Hawk Down" engagement in Somalia, where he was seriously injured. Boykin was the commander of a Delta squadron that hunted for the Medellin cocaine cartel's Pablo Escobar and later served as deputy director of the CIA's highly secret Special Activities Division. He led the Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., and then, two years ago, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked him to come to the Pentagon to help overhaul its intelligence operations.
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