Pentagon spy network revealed

1/24/2005 5:00:00 PM GMT

A report released yesterday by the Washington post states that the Pentagon set a secret intelligence programme that has been operating in states deemed to be "emerging target countries" over the past two years.

The Strategic Support Branch was established in April 2002 under the codename Project Icon to provide the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld with "full spectrum of humint [human intelligence] operations," tasks that have largely been the province of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Washington post said, citing Pentagon documents.

It is a branch of the Pentagon's Defence Human Intelligence Service aimed at complementing the Special Operations Command in Tampa.

The revelations came after last week’s report prepared by Seymour Hersh, who exposed the flagrant abuses carried out by American soldiers on Iraqi detainees in Abu Ghraib prison.

The report stated that the U.S. special forces have been conducting secret operations inside Iran, part of preparations for a possible U.S. strike targeting the country's nuclear facilities.

"It is accurate and should not be surprising that the Department of Defense is attempting to improve its longstanding human intelligence capability," the Pentagon spokesman, Lawrence Di Rita, said in a statement Sunday.

The paper added that the programme was running in both friendly and unfriendly countries; where conventional war might not even be a distant prospect.

The espionage teams include intelligence officers, linguists, technical specialists and interrogators, as well as secret special forces deployed in Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, the Philippines and Georgia, the paper added.

According to recent administration guidelines, the Pentagon need not report all "deployment orders" to Congress, as it previously did.

But Pentagon lawyers argue that, stating that President Bush’s claimed "war on terror" is indefinite, global and ongoing, and that the defence secretary's war powers are extended beyond times of imminent combat.

"Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," a Republican member of Congress with a role in the oversight of national security told The Post.

"It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"

There has been a lot of tension between the CIA and the Pentagon to define responsibilities and determine control over intelligence operations.

The Defense Secretary and the Pentagon accuse the CIA of having a slow-moving and timid culture. Sharing the same concerns, the White decided to launch far-reaching reforms to the agency.

According to analysts, the revelation of the Pentagon spy network is merely the latest incarnation of espionage units that the U.S. military operated throughout the cold war to recruit spies and gather intelligence about the country’s weapons systems.

"DOD is not looking to go develop strategic intelligence," said one senior adviser to Rumsfeld who has an intelligence background. "They're looking for information like, where's a good landing strip? Who's going to get our guys in and out of the country? Who will rat out the activities of home country's military and intelligence services?"

But those front-line teams differ in their scope and frequency of deployments from existing Defense Information Agency units called national intelligence support teams that deploy to commanders' wartime headquarters to provide analytical advice.

"Prior to the 9/11 commission issuing their conclusion that the nation's human intelligence capability must be improved, the Defense Human Intelligence Service has been taking steps to be more focused and task-oriented for the global war on terror," Di Rita said in his statement. "One of the objectives of this effort is to make better human intelligence capability available to assist combatant commanders for specific missions involving regular or Special Operations forces."