The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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SOCOM Spies Told To Stand Down
by James Dunnigan
January 4, 2013
The CIA has persuaded Congress to rein in Department of Defense plans to increase the number of its intelligence operatives. With Iraq no longer a major area of intel operations, and Afghanistan headed in the same direction, the CIA fears competition from the growing number of Department of Defense spies. The CIA doesn’t want the military to get out of the spy business entirely, they just don’t want more competition in the coming era of less work. In particular, the CIA wants fewer non-SOCOM (Special Operations Command) spies from the Department of Defense. SOCOM, however, is a different matter.
All this is, for the Department of Defense, a sudden switch. Over the last three years SOCOM and the CIA have convinced Congress to allow the two organizations to merge some of their operations and share personnel and other resources. This is a process that started during World War II and, despite some political ups and downs, never completely stopped. By the time September 11, 2001 rolled around the CIA was routinely requesting Special Forces operators to work directly for them, a custom that goes back to the early days (1950s) of the U.S. Army Special Forces.
In the last decade SOCOM (which controls the Special Forces as well as U.S. Navy SEALs and U.S. Air Force special operations aircraft) increasingly found that they could compete with the CIA in producing quality intelligence. The Department of Defense now allows Special Forces troops to be trained for plain clothes, and uniformed, espionage work in foreign countries. The Special Forces have unofficially been doing this sort of thing for decades, sometimes at the request of the CIA. In 1986, the Special Forces even established an "intelligence operations" school to train a small number of Special Forces troops in the tradecraft of running espionage operations in a foreign country. In practical terms, this means recruiting locals to provide information and supervising these spies, agents, and informants.
By law the CIA controls all overseas espionage operations. But the CIA and Special Forces were both founded by men who had served with the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) during World War II and the relationship continued after the OSS veterans retired from their CIA and Special Forces careers. Since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense has been allowed to expand the number of spies it can deploy, often in cooperation with similar CIA agents.
The army wants to more aggressively use Special Forces troops for espionage so that the "battlefield can be prepared" more quickly. This is seen as necessary in order to effectively run down fast moving terrorist organizations. For a long time the Special Forces depended on the CIA to do the espionage work in advance of Special Forces A-Teams arriving. In practice, some Special Forces troops were often there, along with CIA personnel, doing the advance work of finding exactly who is who, what is where, and, in particular, who can be depended on to help American efforts.
Since September 11, 2001, the CIA has not made a big stink about greater Department of Defense espionage efforts, if only because the CIA was short of people and still is despite aggressively recruiting for anti-terrorism operations. Besides, a prime source of new CIA agents has long been former, or retired, Special Forces operators. With the new espionage training Special Forces troops are getting, the CIA will be able to hire these guys later and put them to work without having to train them in a lot of espionage techniques. SOCOM is also believed to be hiring retired CIA personnel to help run SOCOM intel operations. But with Iraq and Afghanistan done as major combat zones, the CIA is catching up on its spy shortage situation.
Meanwhile, the CIA has been moving into areas that were previously a monopoly for Special Forces. For example in 1998, the CIA revived an organizational name they originally created in the early 1960s: the Special Operations Group. The original SOG (which eventually had its name changed to "Studies and Observation Group" for security reasons) used CIA personnel, Special Forces troops, and local tribesmen to run intelligence patrols into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam during the early days of the Vietnam war. Actually, the CIA was doing this since the late 1950s. But once SOG was set up the CIA handed it over to the Special Forces but continued to run their own SOG missions in other parts of the world until bad publicity and Congressional hostility pretty much brought the organization to a halt in 1990.
So, as the Cold War ended the CIA was getting out of the daredevil field work business. The 1998 SOG was created to do what the original SOG did, go into hostile territory and get the information any way you can and do something with it. The new SOG has only a few hundred agents. Most of them were former military, with preference given to Special Forces, SEALs, Air Force paracommandos, and marines with interesting service records. Some of the SOGs are retired military, with at least twenty years of experience. The minimum requirement is five years military experience. The starting pay was about $50,000 a year and you have to get through a one year training course first.
But while the CIA was recruiting military people for field operations, the Department of Defense was setting up its own espionage service that duplicated a lot of what the CIA does. Part of this was driven by dissatisfaction with the inability of the CIA to provide the military with timely intelligence. These lapses have frequently come to light after the fact and the generals have not forgotten. When SOCOM was set up in the 1980s, a major capability it acquired was the thousands of Special Forces troops who spent several months to a year overseas working with foreign armies. This was always seen as an excellent way to collect quality intelligence and even the CIA depended on the Special Forces reports to keep current. This was one reason the CIA revived its SOG. While this growing duplication seems inefficient it also provides competition.
If the president doesn't like what he's getting from the CIA he can ask SOCOM to take a look. This keeps everyone on their toes. Competition in the shadows, so to speak. But the CIA and Department of Defense are competitors in the intelligence field and the CIA increasingly sees the military as not assisting or complementing the CIA but trying to replace it, at least when it comes to collecting HUMINT (Human Intelligence, using spies). Congress periodically forces the CIA out of the HUMINT business because it is messy and not always politically correct. While the CIA was glad to let the army help out during the peak years of the war on terror, it now wants the military to do more soldiering and less spying.
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