Reprinted from http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15905
Call it the Jason Bourne strategy.
Think of it as the U.S.
Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) plunge into Hollywood -- or into the
absurd. As recent revelations have made clear, that Agency's moves
couldn't be have been more far-fetched or more real. In its post-9/11
global shadow war, it has employed both private contractors and some of
the world's most notorious prisoners in ways that leave the latest
episode of the Bourne films in the dust: hired gunmen trained to kill as
well as former inmates who cashed in on the notoriety of having worn an
orange jumpsuit in the world's most infamous jail.
The first
group of undercover agents were recruited by private companies from the
Army Special Forces and the Navy SEALs and then repurposed to the CIA at
handsome salaries averaging around $140,000 a year; the second crew was
recruited from the prison cells at Guantanamo Bay and paid out of a
secret multimillion dollar slush fund called "the Pledge."
Last
month, the Associated Press revealed that the CIA had selected a few
dozen men from among the hundreds of terror suspects being held at
Guantanamo and trained them to be double agents
at a cluster of eight cottages in a program dubbed "Penny Lane." (Yes,
indeed, the name was taken from the Beatles song, as was "Strawberry Fields," a Guantanamo program that involved torturing "high-value" detainees.)
These men were then returned to what the Bush administration liked to
call the "global battlefield," where their mission was to befriend
members of al-Qaeda and supply targeting information for the Agency's
drone assassination program.
Such a secret double-agent program,
while colorful and remarkably unsuccessful, should have surprised no
one. After all, plea bargaining or persuading criminals to snitch on
their associates -- a tactic frowned upon by international legal experts
-- is widely used in the U.S. police and legal system. Over the last
year or so, however, a trickle of information about the other secret
program has come to light and it opens an astonishing new window into
the privatization of U.S. intelligence.
Hollywood in Langley
In July 2010, at his confirmation hearings for the post of the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper explained the use of private contractors in the intelligence community:
"In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War... we were under a
congressional mandate to reduce the community by on the order of 20%...
Then 9/11 occurred... With the gusher... of funding that has accrued
particularly from supplemental or overseas contingency operations
funding, which, of course, is one year at a time, it is very difficult
to hire government employees one year at a time. So the obvious outlet
for that has been the growth of contractors."
Thousands of "Green Badges" were hired via companies like Booz Allen Hamilton and Qinetiq
to work at CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) offices around the
world, among the regular staff who wore blue badges. Many of them --
like Edward Snowden -- performed specialist tasks in information
technology meant to augment the effectiveness of government employees.
Then
the CIA decided that there was no aspect of secret war which couldn't
be corporatized. So they set up a unit of private contractors as covert
agents, green-lighting them to carry guns and be sent into U.S. war
zones at a moment's notice. This elite James Bond-like unit of armed
bodyguards and super-fixers was given the anodyne name Global Response
Staff (GRS).
Among the 125 employees of this unit, from the Army
Special Forces via private contractors came Raymond Davis and Dane
Paresi; from the Navy SEALs Glen Doherty, Jeremy Wise, and Tyrone Woods.
All five would soon be in the anything-but-covert headlines of
newspapers across the world. These men -- no women have yet been named
-- were deployed on three- to four-month missions accompanying CIA
analysts into the field.
Davis was assigned to Lahore, Pakistan;
Doherty and Woods to Benghazi, Libya; Paresi and Wise to Khost,
Afghanistan. As GRS expanded, other contractors went to Djibouti,
Lebanon, and Yemen, among other countries, according to a Washington Post profile of the unit.
From
early on, its work wasn't exactly a paragon of secrecy. By 2005, for
instance, former Special Forces personnel had already begun openly discussing jobs in the unit at online forums.
Their descriptions sounded like something directly out of a Hollywood
thriller. The Post portrayed the focus of GRS personnel more mundanely
as "designed to stay in the shadows, training teams to work undercover
and provide an unobtrusive layer of security for CIA officers in
high-risk outposts."
"They don't learn languages, they're not
meeting foreign nationals, and they're not writing up intelligence
reports," a former U.S. intelligence official told that paper. "Their
main tasks are to map escape routes from meeting places, pat down
informants, and provide an "envelope' of security... if push comes to
shove, you're going to have to shoot."
In the ensuing years, GRS
embedded itself in the Agency, becoming essential to its work. Today,
new CIA agents and analysts going into danger zones are trained to work
with such bodyguards. In addition, GRS teams are now loaned out to other
outfits like the NSA for tasks like installing spy equipment in war
zones.
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