Washington Post Article

Today the buzz on the Sunday Morning talk shows was an article in this morning's Washington Post entitled "Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain: New Espionage Branch Delves into CIA Territory". (Warning: Obnoxious Registration Pestering involved. Use http://www.bugmenot.com)

From an uninformed perspective, this whole story stinks to high heaven.

It looks to me like a classical premeditated bureaucratic hatchet job directed against Don Rumsfeld. It has a lot of "fingerprints" of a CIA effort.

These kinds of deliberate bureaucratic attacks are always sprung on the weekend, when the enemy bureaucrat isn't at work and his guard is lowered. They also are timed to take advantage of the Sunday morning news shows, to get maximum "legs" on the story.

They are always vectored through "friendly" Washington Post reporters. Barton Gellman, the author of this report, has been a popular vector for anti-DOD and pro-CIA "leakers" in the past - the opposite of Dana Priest, the author of the recent expose on CIA air operations, who is used by anti-CIA factions.

While there is apparently a thread of truth in the article - the group described in the story apparently does exist, the key strategic points in the article - that Rumsfeld set up the group to circumvent intelligence oversight and report directly to him - are apparently sensationalized and are almost certainly not true. The group described is probably very small, very marginalized, and nothing like it is described in the story.

Except for some damning detail, which does ring true. Key quote (from a sidebar article):

"Internal Pentagon briefings describe Strategic Support Branch members as experienced intelligence professionals with specialized skills, "military operations backgrounds," and the training to "function in all environments under adverse conditions." But four special operations soldiers who provided information for this article, directly or through intermediaries, said those assigned to work with them included out-of-shape men in their fifties and recent college graduates on their first assignments.

"They arrived with shiny black kneepads and elbow pads, shiny black helmets," said one special forces officer who served with Waldroup's men in Iraq. "They brought M-4 rifles with all the accoutrements, scopes and high-end [satellite equipment] they didn't know how to use." An older member of Waldroup's staff "became an anchor because of his physical conditioning and his lack of knowledge of our tactics, techniques and procedures. The guy actually put us in danger."

Another special forces officer, who served with the augmentation team members in Afghanistan, said some of the intelligence officers deployed with his unit were reluctant to leave their base and spoke only to local residents who ventured inside. "These guys can't set up networks and run agents and recruit tribal elders," he said."

This part sounds like the government I know.

But the theme is a familiar one, in the bureaucratic turf wars in Washington, which has become particularly strident in the recent intelligence battles spawned by the 9/11 Commission Report: "We in the CIA are concerned that those DOD spies are amateurish, and are going to get us all in trouble".

Perhaps a more salient point, which all the Washington bureaucrats will miss, can be discerned by reading between the lines.

The sidebar said the operatives deployed by the new unit were all either recent college graduates with no experience, or out-of-shape old men who didn't know what they were doing.

So where are the qualified people in between? Could it be, because the government didn't hire anyone for many years after the end of the cold war, that the intelligence services are now fighting the secret war on terrorism with the third and fourth string?