Word: commandant
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...special-operations soldiers, they have a deeper bench than the spooks at Langley. And in Afghanistan, the Pentagon was regularly asked to supply the CIA with people from that bench. The Defense Department already has 44,000 Army, Navy and Air Force commandos in its U.S. Special Operations Command, who are as skilled in covert guerrilla warfare as the CIA's operatives. In the basement vaults of the command's headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla., sit secret contingency plans to send military special-ops teams to any trouble spot in the world, complete with infiltration routes, drop zones...
Like all the SOG's other paramilitary operatives, John had spent years in the U.S. military before joining the CIA; five years is the minimum requirement. CIA recruiters regularly prowl clubs like those at Fort Bragg, N.C., where the Army's Special Operations Command has its headquarters, looking for Green Berets interested in even more unconventional work and higher pay (a starting SOG officer can earn more than $50,000 a year; a sergeant in the Green Berets begins at about $41,000). Special-forces soldiers, Navy seals and Air Force commandos are routinely dispatched to the agency...
...military can't or won't handle. The SOG prides itself on being small and agile, capable of sending teams of 10 operators or fewer anywhere in the world much faster than the Pentagon can. One reason the agency was the first into Afghanistan was that the Special Ops Command dragged its feet getting its soldiers ready for action. Intelligence sources tell TIME that the CIA had requested that commandos from the U.S. Army's elite Delta Force join its first team going into Afghanistan but that the Pentagon refused to send them...
Rumsfeld, nevertheless, is intent on building his own covert force. He recently ordered the Special Operations Command to draw up secret plans to launch attacks against al-Qaeda around the world, and he intends to put an extra $1 billion in its budget next year for the job. Elsewhere in the Defense Department, small, clandestine units, coordinating little with the CIA, are busy organizing their own future battles. Several hundred Army agents, with what was originally known as the intelligence support activity, train to infiltrate foreign countries to scout targets. With headquarters at Fort Belvoir, Va., the unit...
When Donaldson eventually does take command, he could find that most of the commission's important post-Enron decisions have already been made--and by a lame duck. --By Adam Zagorin