Word: covert
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...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, intelligence contacts and assault points...
...officials, leery of being sucked into new scandals, insist that their covert operations are now subject to layers of oversight. Before an agency paramilitary team can be launched, the President must sign an intelligence "finding" that broadly outlines the operation to be performed. That finding, along with a more detailed description of the mission, is sent to the congressional intelligence committees. If they object to an operation, they can cut off its funds the next time the agency's budget comes...
After approving a covert operation, Bush leaves the details of when and how to Tenet and his senior aides. For example, Administration officials say Bush did not specifically order the Predator attack in Yemen. But after Sept. 11 he gave the CIA the green light to use lethal force against al-Qaeda...
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...
...supposed to be this way. The Indiana Jones role for the CIA was not intended when Congress established the agency in 1947 "to correlate and evaluate intelligence." But the law included language allowing the agency to undertake "other functions and duties," a loophole through which thousands of covert operations have been launched around the globe. Some of these have grown into military operations--as in Afghanistan and Nicaragua in the 1980s--that amount to small wars...