Bush Wants Plan for Covert Pentagon Role
By DOUGLAS JEHL
Published: November 23, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/23/politics/23covert.html  (must register to view original article)

WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 - President Bush has ordered an interagency group to devise a plan that could expand the Defense Department role in covert operations that have traditionally been the specialty of the Central Intelligence Agency, administration officials said Monday.

A presidential directive signed by Mr. Bush last week sets a 90-day deadline for the review, whose main focus will be whether the military's Special Operations forces should have a role in paramilitary operations that a special C.I.A. unit carries out, the officials said.

With two other directives issued Nov. 18, Mr. Bush also ordered the C.I.A. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to report to him by February on how they intended to improve their performance in the war on terrorism, the officials said.

One directive calls on the intelligence agency to "fix ambitious targets for recruiting, training and deploying operations officers and analysts," as well as "rebuilding agency's core capabilities to collect intelligence from human agents," a senior official said.

The moves, which the White House has not announced, reflect an aggressive postelection effort by Mr. Bush and his senior national security advisers to improve the performance of the military and intelligence and law enforcement agencies in combating terrorism.

In part, the directives respond to recommendations by the independent commission that investigated the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. With bills to turn those proposals into laws in doubt, Mr. Bush's steps to push them may become more significant.

In a telephone interview, Thomas W. O'Connell, the assistant defense secretary for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said he had assured his counterparts who oversee paramilitary operations at the intelligence agency that "there is no preordained outcome" to the review.

"I have heard it said that there is a conspiracy within the Department of Defense to go and rip off the agency's capabilities, and I can assure you that nothing could be further from the truth," Mr. O'Connell said.

The idea of transferring paramilitary authority from the intelligence agency to the Pentagon was among several fundamental changes that the Sept. 11 panel proposed in the summer. In public testimony in August, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and John E. McLaughlin, who was the acting intelligence chief, expressed reservations about the idea, and the recommendation was not included in the measures that Congress set aside over the weekend.

Senior administration officials who spoke about the review came from several agencies, each consulted while the directives were prepared. They would not agree to speak publicly because of the secrecy that cloaks most information about clandestine paramilitary and counterterrorism operations.

Some officials said they believed that civilians in the Pentagon, including the under secretary of defense for intelligence, Stephen A. Cambone, had pressed for the interagency review as part of a quest for a wider role for the Pentagon and the military services in intelligence and counterterrorism.

Special Operations forces and paramilitary units of the intelligence agency already work together in some groups around the world, including those dedicated to the search for Osama bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaeda. But only the intelligence agency paramilitary units, and not Special Operations forces, are authorized to conduct the most sensitive covert operations, under presidential directives known as findings. The examples have included the operations in Afghanistan after the Sept. 11 attacks, when paramilitary units were the first American forces sent there.

The panel is to include representatives of the State and Justice Departments, as well as of the Pentagon and the C.I.A., the officials said. A senior administration official said the task of the group would be "to see whether or not transferring paramilitary authorities in their entirety from the C.I.A. to the Department of Defense would best serve the nation or whether there are other ways to have paramilitary forces work in better cooperation."

The separate directives on the intelligence agency and the F.B.I. laid out an accelerated schedule for the leaders of those agencies to report to the White House on their operations, including areas the Sept. 11 panel and Senate Intelligence Committee have sharply criticized in recent reports.

For the bureau, the directive acknowledges that it has made significant changes but orders it to produce in 90 days "a comprehensive plan with performance measures including timelines for achievement of specific measurable progress in analysis, products, sources, field intelligence operations" and other activities that produce information for the president.

The new director of central intelligence, Porter J. Goss, has promised to focus attention on improving his agency's core mission of intelligence gathering. But early personnel moves by Mr. Goss and his management team have stirred sharp dissent in the directorate of operations, which includes paramilitary operations.

The recommendation by the Sept. 11 panel on paramilitary forces was one of its farthest reaching. Its report called on the Defense Department to take charge of "directing and executing paramilitary operations, whether clandestine or covert," tasks that have routinely fallen within the intelligence agency's domain.

In the years before Sept. 11, the intelligence agency "did not invest in developing a robust capability" in this area but relied on proxy forces organized by agency officers, the report said, with unsatisfactory results. Rather than invest money and personnel in the intelligence agency and the military for paramilitary counterterrorist operations, the report said, "the United States should concentrate responsibility and necessary legal authorities in one entity."

Under current directives, the military's Special Operations Command already has the authority to organize, train and equip the elite commando force and to plan and execute its missions against terrorists.

The Special Operations sector has many times more personnel and more rigorous year-round training than the direct-action units at the C.I.A. The military already routinely lends its Green Berets, Seals and Delta Force members to the intelligence agency on request.

Some veteran members of Special Operations branches have responded negatively to the Sept. 11 recommendation, saying that intelligence agency officers operate under a different set of findings and carry different legal protections than the military, in particular for cases in which they are ordered to conduct the most extreme clandestine operations.

Asked about the idea in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in August, Mr. Rumsfeld said that the idea was worth reviewing, but that "at the moment I certainly wouldn't recommend it." But he recently drafted a directive that instructed regional commanders to create a plan for an expanded Pentagon role in intelligence gathering. The directive, first reported last month in The Wall Street Journal, suggested that the Pentagon should be more active in tracking down terrorist and insurgent leaders.


David Johnston, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker contributed reporting from Washington for this article.