DIA sending
hundreds more spies overseas
File/AFP/Getty Images - Islamist militant groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North
Korea and Iran and military modernization in China are among the Pentagon’s top
intelligence priorities, officials say.
By , E-mail the writer
The
project is aimed at transforming the Defense Intelligence Agency, which has
been dominated for the past decade by the demands of two wars, into a spy
service focused on emerging threats and more closely aligned with the CIA and
elite military commando units.
The total
includes military attachés and others who do not work undercover. But U.S.
officials said the growth will be driven over a five-year period by the
deployment of a new generation of clandestine operatives. They will be trained
by the CIA and often work with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, but
they will get their spying assignments from the Department of Defense.
Among the
Pentagon’s top intelligence priorities, officials said, are Islamist militant
groups in Africa, weapons transfers by North Korea and Iran, and military
modernization underway in China.
“This is
not a marginal adjustment for DIA,” the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Michael T.
Flynn, said at a recent conference, during which he outlined the changes but
did not describe them in detail. “This is a major adjustment for national
security.”
The sharp
increase in DIA undercover operatives is part of a far-reaching trend: a
convergence of the military and intelligence agencies that has blurred their
once-distinct missions, capabilities and even their leadership ranks.
Through
its drone program, the CIA now accounts for a majority of lethal U.S.
operations outside the Afghan war zone. At the same time, the Pentagon’s plan
to create what it calls the Defense Clandestine Service, or DCS, reflects the
military’s latest and largest foray into secret intelligence work.
The DIA
overhaul — combined with the growth of the CIA since the Sept. 11, 2001,
terrorist attacks — will create a spy network of unprecedented size. The plan
reflects the Obama administration’s affinity for espionage and covert action
over conventional force. It also fits in with the administration’s efforts to
codify its counterterrorism policies for a sustained conflict and assemble the
pieces abroad necessary to carry it out.
Unlike
the CIA, the Pentagon’s spy agency is not authorized to conduct covert
operations that go beyond intelligence gathering, such as drone strikes,
political sabotage or arming militants.
But the
DIA has long played a major role in assessing and identifying targets for the
U.S. military, which in recent years has assembled a constellation of drone
bases stretching from Afghanistan to East Africa.
The
expansion of the agency’s clandestine role is likely to heighten concerns that
it will be accompanied by an escalation in lethal strikes and other operations
outside public view. Because of differences in legal authorities, the military
isn’t subject to the same congressional notification requirements as the CIA,
leading to potential oversight gaps.
U.S.
officials said that the DIA’s realignment won’t hamper congressional scrutiny.
“We have to keep congressional staffs and members in the loop,” Flynn said in
October, adding that he believes the changes will help the United States
anticipate threats and avoid being drawn more directly into what he predicted
will be an “era of persistent conflict.”
U.S.
officials said the changes for the DIA were enabled by a rare syncing of
personalities and interests among top officials at the Pentagon and CIA, many
of whom switched from one organization to the other to take their current jobs.
“The stars have been aligning on this for a
while,” said a former senior U.S. military official involved in planning the
DIA transformation. Like most others interviewed for this article, the former
official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature
of the program.
The DIA
project has been spearheaded by Michael G. Vickers, the top intelligence
official at the Pentagon and a veteran of the CIA.
Agreements
on coordination were approved by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, a former
CIA director, and retired Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who resigned abruptly as
CIA chief last month over an extramarital affair.
The
Pentagon announced the DCS plan in April but details have been kept secret.
Former senior Defense Department officials said that the DIA now has about 500
“case officers,” the term for clandestine Pentagon and CIA operatives, and that
the number is expected to reach between 800 and 1,000 by 2018.
Pentagon
and DIA officials declined to discuss specifics. A senior U.S. defense official
said the changes will affect thousands of DIA employees, as analysts, logistics
specialists and others are reassigned to support additional spies.
The plan
still faces some hurdles, including the challenge of creating “cover”
arrangements for hundreds of additional spies. U.S. embassies typically have a
set number of slots for intelligence operatives posing as diplomats, most of
which are taken by the CIA.
The project
has also encountered opposition from policymakers on Capitol Hill, who see the
terms of the new arrangement as overly generous to the CIA.
The DIA
operatives “for the most part are going to be working for CIA station chiefs,”
needing their approval to enter a particular country and clearance on which
informants they intend to recruit, said a senior congressional official briefed
on the plan. “If CIA needs more people working for them, they should be footing
the bill.”
Pentagon
officials said that sending more DIA operatives overseas will shore up
intelligence on subjects that the CIA is not able or willing to pursue. “We are
in a position to contribute to defense priorities that frankly CIA is not,” the
senior Defense Department official said.
The project
was triggered by a classified study by the director of national intelligence
last year that concluded that key Pentagon intelligence priorities were falling
into gaps created by the DIA’s heavy focus on battlefield issues and CIA’s
extensive workload. U.S. officials said the DIA needed to be repositioned as
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan give way to what many expect will be a period
of sporadic conflicts and simmering threats requiring close-in intelligence
work.
“It’s the nature of the world we’re in,” said the senior
defense official, who is involved in overseeing the changes at the DIA. “We
just see a long-term era of change before things settle.”
The CIA is increasingly overstretched. Obama administration officials
have said they expect the agency’s drone campaign against al-Qaeda to continue
for at least a decade more, even as the agency faces pressure to stay abreast
of issues including turmoil across the Middle East. Meanwhile, the CIA hasn’t
met ambitious goals set by former president George W. Bush to expand its own
clandestine service.
CIA officials including John D. Bennett, director of the National
Clandestine Service, have backed the DIA’s plan. It “amplifies the ability of
both CIA and DIA to achieve the best results,” said CIA spokesman Preston
Golson.
Defense officials stressed that the DIA has not been given any new
authorities or permission to expand its total payroll. Instead, the new spy
slots will be created by cutting or converting other positions across the DIA
workforce, which has doubled in the past decade — largely through absorption of
other military intelligence entities — to about 16,500.
Vickers has given the DIA an infusion of about $100 million to
kick-start the program, officials said, but the agency’s total budget is
expected to remain stagnant or decline amid mounting financial pressures across
the government.
The DIA’s overseas presence already includes hundreds of diplomatic
posts — mainly defense attachés, who represent the military at U.S. embassies
and openly gather information from foreign counterparts. Their roles won’t
change, officials said. The attachés are part of the 1,600 target for the DIA,
but such “overt” positions will represent a declining share amid the increase
in undercover slots, officials said.
The senior Defense official said the DIA has begun filling the first of
the new posts.
For decades, the DIA has employed undercover operatives to gather
secrets on foreign militaries and other targets. But the Defense Humint
Service, as it was previously known, was often regarded as an inferior sibling
to its civilian counterpart.
Previous efforts by the Pentagon to expand its intelligence role —
particularly during Donald H. Rumsfeld’s time as defense secretary — led to
intense turf skirmishes with the CIA.
Those frictions have been reduced, officials said, largely because the
CIA sees advantages to the new arrangement, including assurances that its
station chiefs overseas will be kept apprised of DIA missions and have
authority to reject any that might conflict with CIA efforts. The CIA will also
be able to turn over hundreds of Pentagon-driven assignments to newly arrived
DIA operatives.
“The CIA doesn’t want to be looking for surface-to-air missiles in
Libya” when it’s also under pressure to assess the opposition in Syria, said a
former high-ranking U.S. military intelligence officer who worked closely with
both spy services. Even in cases where their assignments overlap, the DIA is
likely to be more focused than the CIA on military aspects — what U.S.
commanders in Africa might ask about al-Qaeda in Mali, for example, rather than
the broader questions raised by the White House.
U.S. officials said DIA operatives, because of their military
backgrounds, are often better equipped to recruit sources who can answer narrow
military questions such as specifications of China’s fifth-generation fighter
aircraft and its work on a nuclear aircraft carrier. “The CIA would like to
give up that kind of work,” the former officer said.
The CIA has agreed to add new slots to its training classes at its
facility in southern Virginia, known as the Farm, to make room for more
military spies. The DIA has accounted for about 20 percent of each class in
recent years, but that figure will grow.
The two agencies have also agreed to share resources overseas, including
technical gear, logistics support, space in facilities and vehicles. The DIA
has even adopted aspects of the CIA’s internal structure, creating a group
called “Persia House,” for example, to pool resources on Iran.
The CIA’s influence extends across the DIA’s ranks. Flynn, who became
director in July, is a three-star Army general who worked closely with the CIA
in Afghanistan and Iraq. His deputy, David R. Shedd, spent the bulk of his
career at the CIA, much of it overseas as a spy.
Several officials said the main DIA challenge will be finding ways to
slip so many spies into position overseas with limited space in embassies.
“There are some definite challenges from a cover perspective,” the senior
defense official said.
Placing operatives in conventional military units means finding an
excuse for them to stay behind when the unit rotates out before the end of the
spy’s job.
Having DIA operatives pose as academics or business executives requires
painstaking work to create those false identities, and it means they won’t be
protected by diplomatic immunity if caught.
Flynn is seeking to reduce turnover in the DIA’s clandestine service by
enabling military members to stay with the agency for multiple overseas tours
rather than return to their units. But the DIA is increasingly hiring civilians
to fill out its spy ranks.
The DIA has also forged a much tighter relationship with JSOC, the
military’s elite and highly lethal commando force, which also carries out drone
strikes in Yemen and other countries.
Key aspects of the DIA’s plan were developed by then-Director Ronald L.
Burgess, a retired three-star general who had served as intelligence chief to
JSOC.
The DIA played an extensive and largely hidden role in JSOC operations
in Iraq and Afghanistan, sending analysts into war zones and turning a large
chunk of its workforce and computer systems in Virginia into an ana-lytic back
office for JSOC.
The head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Adm. William H. McRaven,
who directed the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, has pledged to create
between 100 and 200 slots for undercover DIA operatives to work with Special
Forces teams being deployed across North Africa and other trouble spots,
officials said.
“Bill McRaven is a very strong proponent of this,” the senior Defense
official said.
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