Word: covert
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...President Clinton signed a top-secret order, approved by the congressional intelligence committees, that authorized the CIA to begin covert operations to break up bin Laden's terror network. The agency's counter-terrorism center ... had set up a special bin Laden task force. Analysts were assigned to read every word the Saudi had spoken or written. Computers with sophisticated 'link analysis' programs were busy printing out diagrams of bin Laden's loose-knit network, which included thousands of Muslim fighters ... In early 1996, intelligence sources tell TIME, the CIA also began making plans to 'snatch' Osama from a foreign...
...sure, White House aides and CIA managers understood that a mission to capture bin Laden would probably turn into a mission to kill him, given that the jihadist would almost certainly never go quietly. But according to numerous officials, the CIA officers who would be leading the covert operations wanted ironclad, unrestricted language in presidential memos--which are known, rather redundantly, as Memorandums of Notification (MONs)--that killing bin Laden would be legal. (Ever since Iran-contra and other scandals, covert ops have routinely been lawyered in advance.) As Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll points...
Among the various professional security firms, none is as renowned as Blackwater USA. Based in Moyock, N.C., the firm gets its name from the covert missions undertaken by divers at night and from the peat-colored water common to the area. It was founded in 1996 by former Navy SEAL Erik Prince, who saw a growing need for private security work by governments overseas and private firms. Since then, the company has trained more than 50,000 military and law-enforcement personnel just south of the Virginia border, near Norfolk, at its 6,000-acre facility, which it calls...
...recruited from throughout the Muslim world to join the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. The program to recruit, arm, train and deploy these men involved three U.S.-allied intelligence agencies - those of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia - working in conjunction with the CIA, which was coordinating America's own covert assistance to the Afghan jihad. It suited the Egyptians and Saudis to ship off the restive Islamist elements who might pose a domestic challenge to wage war on the Soviets, and it suited the U.S. to help rally anti-Soviet sentiment in the Islamic world, particularly among Sunni elements naturally...
...under President Clinton and is the latest of several former officials to criticize the Bush team's counterterrorism record. The Administration insists that the Iraq war has not diverted it from attacking al-Qaeda. Clinton, says Clarke, was more focused than Bush on the terrorism threat and launched a covert operation against Iranian interests in retaliation for a 1996 attack on U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. Clarke also says that Tom Ridge, the head of the Homeland Security department, opposed its creation. A spokesman for Ridge insists he supported setting up the agency; Clarke admits he was passed over...