“It sounds great in the movies …”
There’s a certain it’s-the-day-after-Sputnik-and-some-crackpot-wants-to-put-a-man-on-the-moon quality to the stories published about a covert scheme that former VP Dick Cheney allegedly told the C.I.A. to keep secret from Congress.
Greg Miller’s story in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times opens this way:
The secret CIA program halted last month by Director Leon E. Panetta involved establishing elite paramilitary teams that could be inserted into Pakistan or other locations to capture or kill top leaders of the Al Qaeda terrorist network, according to former U.S. intelligence officials.
The program — launched in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks — was never operational. But officials said that as recently as a year ago CIA executives discussed plans to deploy teams to test basic capabilities, including whether they could enter hostile territory and maneuver undetected, as well as gather intelligence and track high-value targets.
The initiative evolved through multiple iterations, and was close to being scrapped several times as CIA officials struggled to find solutions to daunting logistical challenges.
In their New York Times story, Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane affirm that “in practice, creating and training the teams proved difficult.” Mazzetti and Shane include this quote about the hypothetical kill-or-capture teams:
“It sounds great in the movies, but when you try to do it, it’s not that easy,” a former intelligence official said. “Where do you base them? What do they look like? Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters on 24-hour alert waiting to be called?”
I’m struggling to reconcile these accounts of impossible logistics with Pulitzer winner Seymour Hersh’s reporting for The New Yorker. Here’s a paragraph from Hersh’s July 7, 2008 piece “Preparing the Battlefield”:
Clandestine operations against Iran are not new. United States Special Operations Forces have been conducting cross-border operations from southern Iraq, with Presidential authorization, since last year. These have included seizing members of Al Quds, the commando arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and taking them to Iraq for interrogation, and the pursuit of “high-value targets” in the President’s war on terror, who may be captured or killed. But the scale and the scope of the operations in Iran, which involve the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), have now been significantly expanded, according to the current and former officials.
Yes, Iran is not Pakistan, so there’s a certain amount of comparing apples to oranges here. But it seems unfathomable that the current reports and Hersh’s year-old reports could both be correct. It makes no sense that an American government capable of covertly snatching Iranian commandos would be thwarted in its hunt for bin Laden by questions such as the aforementioned “Are they going to be sitting around at headquarters …?” puzzler offered up by the unnamed New York Times source.
I don’t have any expertise or credentials to referee this sort of discrepancy. So it’s just confusing at this stage. I hope for more clarity as more stories emerge in this process that Thomas Ricks has called “Cheney being waterboarded by history.”
