Word: covert
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...partnership worked - to a point. Vang Pao's troops gained a reputation for being fierce jungle fighters who rescued downed U.S. aircrews, gathered military intelligence and fought the communists to a stalemate. The effort was for many years the CIA's largest covert operation, until the agency funded the mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In 1969, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, told President Richard Nixon that Vang Pao had 39,000 troops engaged in active fighting. But casualties were so bad, he wrote, that Vang Pao's forces were using teenagers as young as 13 to fill their...
...Suleimani has been active in Afghanistan as well, having visited Kabul several times. Mark Fowler of Persia House says the Quds Force has probably "been putting into place covert infrastructure and developing clandestine relationships aimed both at securing Iranian interests in Afghanistan as well as providing Iran with a capability to strike U.S. forces in the event it is [deemed] necessary...
...Relations between Pakistan and the Obama Administration could be sharply strained if Washington decides to expand its covert air strikes on Pakistani soil. In recent years, Pakistani officials have publicly protested but privately acquiesced when CIA-operated drone strikes have targeted al-Qaeda and Taliban militants in the mountainous tribal areas - a program that has eliminated more than a dozen senior al-Qaeda operatives and even Baitullah Mehsud, the founding leader of the Pakistani Taliban. But the perceived violation of sovereignty has also enraged the Pakistani public. If the U.S. decides to expand the target range of such strikes beyond...
After months of disagreement between Panetta and Blair, Vice President Joe Biden and National Security Adviser James Jones ruled that the CIA would continue to have a direct line to the White House on covert operations and that the long-standing policy of CIA station chiefs being the top intelligence officers in all missions abroad would continue. Blair had sought greater responsibility over the covert ops and the right to anoint a non-CIA staffer as intel boss at certain foreign missions...
...disputes may seem arcane to those outside the intelligence community, but many in the CIA were alarmed by what they saw as Blair's interference in the agency's operations. "For some, this was an existential threat. If Blair was allowed to control covert ops, then how long before the whole of the CIA was absorbed into the DNI?" says a former operations official who retired from the agency last year. "Everyone was looking to Panetta to prevent that from happening." (See who's who on the CIA payroll...