Defense department officials said these units have been in operation in their current form since October and emphasized the program was developed in cooperation with the CIA.

According to the Washington Post, these battlefield spying units have been operating for two years in Iraq and Afghanistan, as an increasingly essential component of Washington’s “war on terror.” Information about the existence of the secret units was “leaked” by Pentagon officials and first disclosed in the January 23 Post. The Pentagon confirmed much of what the Post and other dailies reported a day later.

At the same time, the New York Times reported that a domestic counterpart of the Strategic Support Branch—code-named “Power Geyser”—took the lead for security during the January 20 inauguration of President George Bush for a second term in office (see article on page 11). These “revelations” point to the increasing role, in the United States and abroad, that the Pentagon is playing in Washington’s spying operations.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military has disclosed it has assigned as many as 10,000 “advisers” to join Iraqi military units as part of a plan to boost morale and accelerate the training of the fledgling Iraqi armed forces, according to the Washington Post and other press accounts. U.S. military officials say the performance of Iraqi troops in securing voting sites in the January 30 elections in Iraq will be an important measure of their progress as a fighting force.

A deadly campaign of suicide bombings and other attacks led by forces loyal to the former Baathist party regime of Saddam Hussein has taken a high toll but has failed to derail the U.S.-orchestrated elections. This campaign has increasingly targeted Shiite civilians. In a statement posted on the Internet, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian who leads a group now named al-Qaeda in Iraq, declared “all-out war” to stop the elections, which he described as a “wicked plot to install Shiites to power.”  
 
‘Intelligence reform’
“It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its longstanding human intelligence capability,” said Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita in a January 23 statement. “A principal conclusion of the 9/11 commission report is that the U.S. human intelligence capability must be improved across the board.”

At the end of last year, the White House beat back an attempt to dilute the Pentagon’s authority over spying operations, forcing last-minute changes in the “intelligence reform bill,” which was approved in December. The legislation was based largely on the recommendations of the 9/11 bipartisan commission. Its initial draft proposed to wrest overall control of intelligence from the Secretary of Defense and give it to the newly created post of Director of National Intelligence.

The Washington Post reported that two senior members of the House Intelligence Committee said they knew no details about the secret Pentagon unit. Sen. John McCain, a Republican and member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was also not aware of the unit, while adding that its existence did not violate the law, according to Reuters.

The chairmen of both the Senate and House Armed Services committees said January 24 that they supported the recently disclosed Pentagon spying programs.

“In my opinion, these intelligence programs are vital to our national security interests, and I am satisfied that they are being coordinated with the appropriate agencies of the federal government,” said John Warner, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a statement he released after meeting with Stephen Cambone, undersecretary of defense for intelligence. His counterpart in the House, Duncan Hunter, who led in making the last-minute changes in the recent intelligence bill, agreed.

Some Democrats, such as Senator Diane Feinstein, a Democrat from California, have proposed hearings be held on the matter. It is clear, however, that this turn of events is another victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Bush administration.  
 
How Strategic Support Branch works
According to Pentagon officials and various press accounts, the Strategic Support Teams are composed of 5 to 10 individual agents—including linguists, interrogators, and officers focused on espionage, infiltration, and recruiting spies abroad. Increasing reliance on information from human spying, rather than electronic eavesdropping, is one of the goals of the transformation of the U.S. military being led by the Department of Defense. These changes include reorganizing the military into smaller and more agile brigades that can move anywhere in the world within days, integrating more the commands of the Army with the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and elevating Special Operations Forces to a primary role in combat missions.

The Pentagon’s spying teams work as an integrated component of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) based in Tampa, Florida, and its various clandestine components, reported the New York Times. Proposals are also circulating at the Pentagon to establish an espionage school of its own, duplicating the CIA’s course at Camp Perry, Virginia, for intelligence operations commands in every overseas region, reported the Post.

In an early planning memo Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the focus of the teams would include “emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines, and Georgia,” according to the Post.

Pentagon officials said at the January 24 briefing that confusion about congressional approval of the Strategic Support Teams arose because funding for their operations was authorized as part of the 2005 budget under a different name—HUMINT Augmentation Teams—which was changed later. The spying units come under the jurisdiction of the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon, which controls about 80 percent of the $40 billion budget for Washington’s spying operations.

According to the January 23 Post, “the Defense Department has decided that it will coordinate its human intelligence missions with the CIA but will not, as in the past, await consent. It also reserves the right to bypass the agency’s Langley headquarters, consulting CIA officers in the field instead. The Pentagon will deem a mission ‘coordinated’ after giving 72 hours’ notice to the CIA.”

The Post also said that Pentagon personnel are undertaking spying missions that blur the line between “clandestine” and “covert” actions. The first refers to operations intended to be undetected. “Covert” refers to missions for which the U.S. government denies responsibility officially—such as assassinations of leaders of opponent groups abroad—but which must be authorized by a special presidential “finding.”

At the January 24 briefing, Pentagon officials denied that the Strategic Support Teams are undertaking “covert” action, insisting the units are functioning strictly undercover.

Asked whether these spying teams might undertake more covert missions, Assistant Secretary of Defense Thomas O’Connell said, “That remains to be determined… depends upon the situation,” according to the Post.

One scenario in which Pentagon agents might play such a role, O’Connell told the Post, is this: “A hostile country close to our borders suddenly changes leadership… We would want to make sure the successor is not hostile.”

Given their geography and current relations with Washington, Cuba and Venezuela are two countries that could fit this scenario.  
 
Power Geyser and the CIA
“Somewhere in the shadows of the White House and the Capitol this week, a small group of super-secret commandos stood ready with state-of-the-art weaponry to swing into action to protect the presidency,” reported the January 23 New York Times. They are the domestic counterpart to the defense department’s Special Support Branch unit. The unit is coordinated through SOCOM and the Northern Command.

The latter was established during the Clinton administration, which for the first time authorized a military command that covers the United States. The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, passed in response to perceived misuse of federal troops who were policing the former Confederate states, restricted military forces from performing domestic policing tasks.

The military’s commandos at the January 20 presidential inauguration were part of 13,000 troops, police officers, and federal agents organized to secure the event.

These commandos operate under a secret counterterrorism program code-named Power Geyser, said the Times. The existence of the unit was first mentioned publicly the third week of January on a website for the book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operation in the 9/11 World. William Arkin, the book’s author, is a former intelligence officer for the Army. Arkin described the operation on his website as “special-mission units in extra-legal missions to combat terrorism in the United States.”

Defense department and White House officials confirmed the operation’s existence and purpose but disputed characterizing it as “extra-legal.” The unit operates under “special authority” from the president or the defense secretary, they said.

Arkin, who says the White House and Pentagon are trying to keep too much information undisclosed, said he wrote the book to counter this secrecy.

Arkin follows in the footsteps of CIA agent Michael Scheuer, who published a book last year called Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terrorism. The book was published under anonymous authorship, while Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran, was still on the job. Imperial Hubris attacked the Bush administration and was used to buttress the Kerry campaign. Scheuer retired in November, after the presidential election.

Since then, under new director Porter Goss, appointed by the Bush administration, the CIA has forced many “analysts” like Scheuer out of the agency and is revising policies to make it harder for employees to publish such books.

The tension between the Pentagon and the CIA is not surprising. It reflects the growing factionalism in the ruling class that has accompanied the debate over the military’s transformation. The CIA was founded in 1946 under the Democratic administration of Harry Truman and has been dominated for decades by liberals. This is now changing, as the Republicans are becoming the majority party in the United States.  
 
U.S. officers ‘embedded’ in Iraqi army
While using the Strategic Support Teams in Iraq with some success, the U.S. occupation forces are also taking steps to speed the shaping of the Iraqi military as a combat force.

U.S. Maj. Frank Shelton is the senior adviser to the 6th Brigade, 23rd Battalion, of the Iraqi Intervention Force. He is one of an estimated 10,000 advisers assigned to fight along with Iraqi troops in a plan to boost morale and accelerate the training of Iraqi soldiers, according to the January 23 Washington Post.

Shelton sleeps five feet from Iraqi Lt. Col. Adell Abbas, commander of the 23rd Battalion. He seldom leaves Abbas’s side, the Post reported. The U.S. officer has reportedly also learned a few words in Arabic and has grown a mustache, common among Iraqi troops.

The battalion operates in Mosul, which has been one of the centers of fierce attacks by Baathist forces and their allies on U.S. and Iraqi troops. Two such U.S. advisers have died fighting with Iraqi troops, according to the New York Times.

The plan is part of a strategic shift by the military to accelerate the training of Iraqi troops and to have them take over the brunt of fighting the Baathist “insurgency.” U.S. commanders have said, for example, that Iraqi troops will take on the most dangerous assignment of securing polling sites for the election. U.S. troops would provide perimeter security so as not to give the appearance of interfering with the vote for an Iraqi national assembly. They would be called in only for emergencies.

Another goal of the plan is to win the confidence of Iraqis. “Sir, Colonel Adell and I are brothers,” Shelton told an Iraqi police chief who was doubtful Iraqi troops could provide protection in Mosul. The Iraqi battalion commander served 19 years under the Hussein regime, the Post said. He is a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war and fought against both U.S.-led invasions. He dispersed his troops on the outskirts of Baghdad as the city fell to U.S. forces on April 4, 2003.

A cousin who had been named a lieutenant general in the battalion helped to get Abbas into the U.S.-trained Iraqi army. According to the Post, Abbas said he was loyal to the old Iraqi army, not the Hussein regime, and was thrilled to return to military service. “I don’t know any other job. If the new Iraqi army does not stand, Iraq will be finished,” Abbas told the Post.

According to press accounts, Washington’s goal is to use the U.S. advisers planted inside the Iraqi military to rapidly transfer most patrols to the Iraqi armed forces after the January 30 elections. At the moment, U.S. and other troops of the “coalition of the willing” carry out about 12,000 patrols a week in Iraq, compared with only about 1,200 joint patrols involving Iraqi forces, according to the Post.

“As Iraqis take on more security responsibilities,” said an article in the January 23 New York Times, U.S. generals say that their troops will be freed “to be quick reaction forces to back up the Iraqis or to help tighten Iraq’s borders, especially with Syria and Saudi Arabia, where foreign fighters and couriers carrying cash for the insurgency often cross with impunity.”  
 
Baathist forces isolated
As it has become clear days before the vote that the January 30 elections will go ahead as planned, Baathist forces have increasingly targeted Shiites, who make up 60 percent of Iraq’s population. Attacks have included the bombing of a mosque January 21 in Baghdad that killed 14 and wounded 40 Shiites, and a similar assault the same day on a Shiite wedding south of the Iraqi capital that left 21 people dead.

The former regime of Saddam Hussein had its main base of support among Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority, and brutally oppressed Shiites and Kurds. Pro-Baathist forces are trying to convince Iraqis that if the leading Shiite electoral coalition wins, it may establish an “Islamic republic” like that of neighboring Iran.

“We have declared an all-out war on this evil principle of democracy and those who seek to follow this evil ideology,” said al-Zarqawi in a recent statement posted on the Internet.

The U.S. military and the Iraqi government say al-Zarqawi is the central leader of Baathist-financed attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops, Iraqi civilians, as well as numerous other bombings, kidnappings, and beheadings of hostages.

On January 25, a spokesman for Iraq’s interior ministry announced the capture of two of al-Zarqawi’s top aides. One of them, Sami Muhammad Ali Said al-Jaaf, who is accused of having organized numerous car bombings, was reportedly captured January 15. Hassam Hamad Abdullah Muhsin al-Dulaimi, allegedly the “propaganda chief” of al-Qaeda in Iraq, was arrested January 14. Al-Dulaimi said that al-Jaaf had been assigned to organize attacks on polling stations during the elections, according to the Iraqi interior ministry.

The January 25 International Herald Tribune quoted al-Zarqawi saying death is the fitting punishment for any Muslim “apostates” who join in the elections. The statement charged that the election is a “wicked plot to install Shiites in power” and “spread their wicked sect among the people.”

To counter such pro-Baathist propaganda, leaders of the United Iraqi Alliance, an electoral coalition comprising the largest Shiite-led parties, have said that the prime minister of the new government after January 30 will not be a cleric. According to the Tribune, there is a less formal agreement that clerics will also be excluded from heading government ministries. “There will be no turbans in the government. Everyone agrees on that,” said Adnan Ali, a leader of the Dawa Party, one of the largest Shiite groups.  
 
 
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