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Pentagon refutes report on new espionage unit |
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The US Defence Department has refuted a media report that the Pentagon had created a new espionage arm and was interpreting American law to give Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad.
“There is no unit that is directly reportable to the Secretary of Defence for clandestine operations” and the department “is not attempting to ‘bend’ statutes to fit desired activities”, said Pentagon spokesperson Lawrence DiRita.
The Washington Post, quoting interviews with participants and documents it obtained, had earlier reported that the Pentagon had created a previously undisclosed organisation called the Strategic Support Branch.
It said this organisation arose from Rumsfeld’s written order to end his “near-total dependence on the Central Intelligence Agency” (CIA) for what is known as human intelligence.
The report said the unit, designed to operate without detection and under the Defence Secretary’s direct control, deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces.
It said the unit had been operating in secret for two years in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places.
The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the “full spectrum of human operations”, the report said, quoting an internal account of its origin and mission.
In a statement, DiRita admitted that the Pentagon was attempting to improve its human intelligence capability in the Defence Human Intelligence Service, a component of the Defence Intelligence Agency.
He said before the 9/11 Commission issued its final report concluding that the country’s human intelligence capability must be improved, the Defence Human Intelligence Service had taken steps “to make better human intelligence capability available to assist combatant commanders for specific missions involving regular or special operations forces”.
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