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.
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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