Free registration needed
The CIA has rushed to Iraq four times as many clandestine officers as it had planned on, but it has had little success penetrating the resistance and identifying foreign terrorists involved in the insurgency, according to senior intelligence officials and intelligence experts recently briefed on Iraq. The CIA mission in Iraq, originally slated to have 85 officers, has grown to more than 300 full-time case officers and close to 500 personnel in total, including contractors and people on temporary assignment. It is widely known among agency officials to be the largest station in the world, and the biggest since Saigon during the Vietnam War 30 years ago.
| I'm surprised they didn't plan on that... |
Despite the size of the contingent, the agency’s efforts to penetrate Iraq’s ethnic factions and gain intelligence about the insurgency have been hampered by continued violence, the use of temporary and short-term personnel, and the pressing demands of military commanders for tactical intelligence they can use in daily confrontations with armed insurgents. In December, the CIA station chief was replaced with a more experienced officer to handle the unexpected challenges. The violence is making it far more difficult for the CIA to operate. A CIA directive requires case officers to travel only with armed bodyguards, making it nearly impossible to conduct discreet meetings with Iraqis on their own turf, according to intelligence experts briefed on the Iraq mission. The agency operates from more than half a dozen bases around the country. "How do you do your job that way? You can’t," said one former CIA official who recently returned from Iraq. "They don’t know what’s going on out there."
The agency is training a private security firm that employs former Special Forces troops to teach them to be less conspicuous when they accompany CIA officers. As an additional safeguard, and because of a shortage of CIA paramilitary personnel, the agency has also hired private security firms to protect bases and personnel. To meet the demand for additional personnel, the CIA has turned to its reserves -- retirees who are willing to come back full time on short notice -- to fill many positions. To coax more people into the dangerous assignment, many officers and support staff are being rotated out of Iraq after 90-day stints. The temporary assignments have made the core task of developing Iraqi sources more difficult, several intelligence experts said. The CIA’s tasks in Iraq are unusually numerous. In addition to its traditional role in recruiting Iraqis for information that cannot be gleaned elsewhere, the agency is responsible for interrogating Hussein and other Iraqi captives. The CIA remains a key component in the continuing hunt for weapons of mass destruction, and is helping to train a new Iraqi intelligence service that will be responsible for internal intelligence collection and analysis. "They just have so much to do," a senior CIA official said. |