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.
Covert action. Some of the biggest changes that have been implemented on Boykin's watch have been to increase the Pentagon's human intelligence-gathering capabilities (read more spies) and to organize these individuals into Strategic Support Teams, which are now working with soldiers in fast-moving units like the one that nabbed Saddam. The move is part of a transformation of the Defense Intelligence Agency from a largely analytical entity to one that includes an operational wing. Today, the agency headquarters serves as a clearinghouse for requests from the secretary of defense and the four military services. Under Boykin's direction, the Pentagon is drafting comprehensive campaign plans for collecting intelligence for potential conflicts and threats, replacing the piecemeal plans that the separate intelligence agencies had been tasked to produce in the past. Last June, the Iraq plan was completed, followed by a Korea plan last fall. A plan for the war on terrorism is in the works.
In a rare interview, General Boykin discussed the legal foundation for the restructuring effort. While some news accounts have characterized the Pentagon's effort to increase its espionage capabilities as infringing on the turf of the CIA, Boykin cited the basic intelligence law, known as Title 50, as giving the Pentagon and the CIA responsibility for intelligence collection--including human spying. Some confusion is understandable. Title 50 defines "covert action" as attempts by the U.S. government to influence or overthrow other governments without acknowledging its role. "The [Defense] Department does not do covert action," Boykin said. "If the president so directs, we're prepared to do that, but as you know, [Executive Order] 12333 is very clear that the CIA has the lead responsibility for covert actions."
Under Title 50, "traditional military activities" and those whose primary purpose is to gather intelligence are not defined as covert actions. The legal term of art for activities designed to gather intelligence is clandestine operations. These are actions that are intended to remain secret. They are covered by a different set of congressional reporting requirements. Some lawmakers have challenged what they see as the Pentagon's legal hair-splitting and complain that Pentagon officials are not reporting all military-intelligence activities and are providing insufficient detail on those they do report. Boykin acknowledges the frustrations and the suspicions: "We're in the process right now of trying to develop new reporting procedures. What we're dealing with is, 'Where is that line?' Does all mean every time we send out a recon platoon in Baghdad?"
As the Pentagon becomes more active in human intelligence gathering, other parts of the government, not surprisingly, are pushing back. Eight ambassadors have complained that they were inadequately informed of U.S. military activities in countries where they are formally the top U.S. authority, according to an intelligence source. Defense officials respond that no U.S. military personnel have been deployed to a country without prior clearance from the U.S. ambassador there, but they acknowledge that there have been debates over the timing, size, and nature of some deployments.
The most serious friction, of course, has been with the CIA, which has traditionally been the leader in espionage activities abroad. One retired senior agency operative admitted, however, that "historically the CIA never serviced [the Pentagon's] intelligence requirements that well," spook-speak for saying the agency officials tended to their own agenda first and the Pentagon's if and when it was convenient. A key flashpoint has been the recruitment and handling of sources. For many years, all intelligence sources recruited by U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, were registered and maintained through the CIA's InterSource Registry. Now the Pentagon has begun registering the human sources it uses for military purposes under a separate registry, called J2X. But when DIA officials conduct operations under Title 50's national intelligence program, they must still abide by rules outlined in a CIA directive known as DCID 5/1. This, effectively, gives the CIA control of those DIA sources. Yet such a simple fix doesn't solve the problem because, as one Pentagon official points out, "there's an area of ambiguity between national intelligence and military intelligence. . . . Going after Osama bin Laden is a national intelligence issue, but from the vantage point of a military commander who is conducting operations to capture [him] it's a military intelligence issue."
Negroponte, if confirmed as the new intelligence czar, will no doubt weigh in on this bureaucratic food fight. Meanwhile, Pentagon and CIA brass say they're doing their best to sort things out. A working group is being set up with officials from both agencies to come up with rules for which agency registers a source, pays him, and protects him. There's no clear agreement yet, and given the high stakes, it promises to be quite a wrangle. The reason, says the CIA veteran: "Both sides are right. The CIA says, 'There has to be some order,' but the military is saying, 'We are at war now, thank you very much. We'll do it ourselves.' "
This story appears in the April 25, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.