US spies to target Iranians, Chinese
The Australian, 25 April 2012
THE Pentagon is creating a new intelligence agency that will focus on Iran and China as it begins to pivot away from war zones in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The new Defence Clandestine Service will use existing agents, authorities and assets and work closely with the CIA to track emerging threats.
“It will thicken our coverage across the board,” The New York Times quoted a senior defence department official as saying.
Case officers from the Defence Intelligence Agency already secretly gathered information outside of conventional battle zones, the newspaper said, and the latest move further cemented co-operation between the military and the CIA.
The fledgling service was supposed to work closely with CIA officers based at US embassies to collect and distribute intelligence on foreign terrorist networks, nuclear proliferation and other difficult targets, a senior defence official said.
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The initiative, which Defence Secretary Leon Panetta approved last week, aims to boost the Pentagon’s role in recruiting and running spies, a mission the CIA has dominated for decades, as well as putting more case officers and analysts in hot-spots.
The defence official said the new spy service was expected to grow “from several hundred to several more hundred” officers in coming years.
Some of the new spies are likely to be assigned to targets that are intelligence priorities, including parts of Africa and the Middle East where al-Qa’ida and its affiliates are active, the nuclear and missile programs in North Korea and Iran, and China’s expanding military.
The CIA, a civilian agency, and the DIA, a combat support and intelligence agency, long have clashed over their roles.
But increasingly since 2001 US military and intelligence missions have merged in counter-terrorism operations, such as the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and drone strikes in Yemen.
The latest change has been in the works since a classified study last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 16 US intelligence agencies, concluded the military needed better human intelligence-gathering.
The Pentagon is not seeking extra money or manpower. At least for now, DIA personnel would focus on new priorities “as we look to come out of war zones and anticipate the requirements over the next several years,” the defence official said.
The announcement of the new agency comes a week after the Pentagon nominated Lieutenant General Michael Flynn – who served with the Joint Special Operations Command – to head military intelligence.
The selection of General Flynn – who was a critic of military intelligence when he served as the top intelligence officer in Afghanistan in 2010 – reflects the ascendancy of special forces in recent years.
Agencies