Militarisation of the CIA by Dr Farrukh Saleem

[niazikhan2]

On December 30, a suicide attack on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Chapman killed at least seven CIA operatives. Of the seven, Harold Brown was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US army and continued as a major in the Army Reserves. Of the seven, Scott Roberson was a former US Navy SEAL (Navy Sea, air and Land Forces), a Maritime Special Operations Force of the United States navy. Of the seven, Jeremy Wise, also an ex-SEAL, left the US navy in 2009. Of the seven, Master Sergeant (r) Dane Paresi had served the US army for 27 years. Of the seven, at least two were affiliated with Blackwater.

Two conclusions: first, the CIA is being or has already been militarised. Second, contrary to the perception being created in the public that the CIA has distanced itself from Blackwater the two in reality continue to have a close working relationship.

Officially, "CIA’s primary mission is to collect, analyse, evaluate, and disseminate foreign intelligence to assist the president and senior US government policymakers in making decisions relating to national security". But, according to Tom Engelhardt, the editor of America in the New Age of Empire, "After the 9/11 attacks, however, George W Bush empowered the agency to hunt down, kidnap and assassinate suspected Al Qaeda operatives, and the CIA’s traditional specialties of spycraft and intelligence analysis took a distinct backseat to Special Activities Division operations, as its agents set up a global gulag of ghost prisons, conducted interrogations by torture, and then added those missile-armed drone and assassination programmes".

The Special Activities Division (SAD) of the CIA has two sub-divisions: the Political Action Group (PAG) and the paramilitary Special Operations Group (SOG). The PAG is all about undercover activities relating to political influence in foreign lands including economic warfare, psychological warfare and cyber warfare.

The PAG finances news media, instigates coups, undertakes 'spoiling operations’, provides fuel for insurgencies and financial support to political parties. The PAG, for example, funded Solidarity in Poland, kept the Italian Communist Party from winning and brought down Mosaddeq’s democratically elected government in Iran.

The SOG, on the other hand, is all about paramilitary operations and recruits Paramilitary Operations Officers from Delta Force, SEALs, MARSOC Marines and Army Special Forces. The SOG undertakes unconventional warfare including training of guerrillas, reconnaissance, assassinations, ambushes, raids and drone attacks. The SOG, for example, equipped and trained the mujahideen against the Red Army in the 80s, organised the Northern Alliance to overthrow the Taliban government in 2001 and killed Baitullah in 2009.

The CIA’s role is changing -- changing fast. Historically, the SOG only had a few hundred personnel (all of the CIA is estimated to have around 20,000). More recently, the CIA’s primary mission of "collecting, analysing, evaluating and disseminating foreign intelligence" has taken a backseat (Afghanistan alone is now estimated to have several hundred SOG personnel).

What happens when the CIA’s primary mission takes the backseat? Answer: Abdulmutallab manages to board Northwest Airlines Flight 253 and al-Balawi manages his way into FOB Chapman. To be certain, the CIA is getting militarised at the cost of all its other disciplines including geospatial, signature, communications, electronics, telemetry, technical and financial intelligence.

The CIA is militarised and the CIA bandwagon is now being driven by the SAD. America now has two armies -- one that wears uniforms and the other that doesn’t. One that is commanded by Admiral Mullen, the 17th chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the other by Professor Leon Panetta, the 21st director of the Central Intelligence Agency. In all probability, the militarised CIA model is being replicated in other countries -- Pakistan and Yemen for instance -- as America expands its war on terror.



The writer is a columnist based in Islamabad. Email: farrukh15@hotmail.com