Excerpts from book, “The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army”, as reported by The Atlantic, claim that using special tracking technology and CIA oversight, US teams have quietly crossed the border to challenge al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their alleged supporters in the Pakistani spy service.
“With Osama bin Laden dead, al Qaeda’s capabilities severely diminished, and the United States scaling back operations in Afghanistan, what will President Barack Obama and his successors do with the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)? A look at what they’ve already been doing outside of war zones gives us some hints.” “In 2005, for example, a 7.6-magnitude earthquake killed 75,000 people in Pakistan-administered Kashmir. After four solid years of war in the region, the United States poured relief services into Pakistan as a show of solidarity with the nominal ally in the war on terror. The US intelligence community took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own into the country. Using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. Al Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country’s tribal areas, largely because of the ISI’s benign neglect,” the report claimed.
In Afghanistan, the ISI was actively undermining the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai, the report said.
It said a JSOC intelligence team also slipped in alongside the CIA.
“The team had several goals. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about al Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and wanted to penetrate the ISI. Under a secret program code-named SCREEN HUNTER, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare. (The program, by then known under a different name, was curtailed by the Obama administration when Pakistan’s anxiety about a covert US presence inside the country was most intense.)” The paper added that rotating teams of SEALs from Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU) Black squadron, aided by US Army Rangers and other special operations forces, meanwhile established a parallel terrorist-hunting capability called VIGILANT HARVEST.
“They operated in the border areas of Pakistan deemed off limits to Americans, and they targeted courier networks, trainers, and facilitators. Legally, these units would operate under the authority of the CIA any time they crossed the border. Some of their missions were coordinated with Pakistan; others were not.” “As of 2006, teams of Green Berets were regularly crossing the border,” the report claimed.
Missions involved as few as three or four operators quietly trekking across the line, their movements monitored by US satellites and drones locked onto the cell phones of these soldiers, it said.
A senior Obama administration official told the paper that by the middle of 2011, after tensions between the US and the Pakistani government became particularly and perhaps dangerously high, “all JSOC personnel except for its declared military trainers were ferreted out of the country”. “Those who remained were called Omegas, a term denoting their temporary designation as members of the reserve force. They then joined any one of a dozen small contracting companies set up by the CIA, which turned these JSOC soldiers into civilians for the purposes of deniability,” the report added.
“By the end of 2011, SEALs and the CIA Special Activities Division ground branch were crossing the border to target militants whom Pakistan would not,” it said.
