According to an article in the February 1 New York Times, the authorization was outlined in one paragraph of an 800-page Pentagon appropriation bill that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President George Bush in August. Pentagon officials, however, had not spoken publicly about this measure, the Times said, including during recent briefings when they revealed the existence of secret “strategic support teams” created to conduct battlefield spying around the world.

The Pentagon and the commander of Special Operations forces—Gen. Bryan Brown of the Army—had reportedly requested permission to do this as part of a broader effort to make the military less reliant on the CIA.

Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, told the Times the new authority was necessary to avoid repetition of problems the U.S. military encountered during the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. During that assault, Special Operations troops reportedly had to wait for CIA agents to pay informants and could not always count on the CIA to act in a timely manner.

“This is an important authority that we’ve been seeking for some time,” Whitman told the Times.

The relevant provision of the appropriations bill authorizes the secretary of defense to spend as much as $25 million a year through 2007 “to provide support to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups or individuals” who collaborate with U.S. Special Operations units.

This is a tiny sum compared to the huge amounts the U.S. military spends on spying operations worldwide, but the precedent it sets is more important than the figure, the Times said. The Pentagon uses 80 percent of the $40 billion Washington spends annually on “intelligence gathering.”

The funds under the new authorization could be spent for diverse purposes. They include, according to the Times, buying equipment, such as trucks; paying cash to irregular forces allied with Washington for a certain battle, such as the Northern Alliance troops fighting the Taliban in the Afghanistan war; or bribing individuals and groups to get a mission accomplished.

The measure is in step with the deployment by the U.S. military of the strategic support teams, which have been used for battlefield spying around the world for some time. They were revealed by the Pentagon in a January 24 press briefing. It is also in line with the successful effort by the White House and Pentagon at the end of last year to rewrite the “intelligence reform” bill before it was approved. The bill Bush finally signed into law ensured that the military’s vast intelligence operations do not come under the scrutiny of the Director of National Intelligence—a cabinet-level post created by the legislation to centralize the rest of Washington’s spying activities.

According to an article in the February 4 New York Times, the House and Senate Intelligence committees have begun a review of whether the Pentagon has met legal requirements to keep Congress informed of its expanding “intelligence gathering” activities.

Defense department officials who have reportedly testified in the hearings include Stephen Cambone, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence, and Lt. Gen. William Boykin, his deputy.

Spying and other clandestine operations “are difficult to separate,” Boykin reportedly said at the hearings. The general said combat patrols send information into the national intelligence system, and these patrols need national level spying data to identify and kill “terrorists” or “insurgent leaders” in countries such as Iraq. “Our main challenge is finding the enemy,” Boykin said.

“We are running intelligence operations every day on the streets of Baghdad and Afghanistan,” he added. “Action creates intelligence.”

Boykin was reportedly asked whether the government would re-establish a program to pinpoint and murder adversaries, as under Operation Phoenix, which the CIA carried out during Washington’s war against Vietnam.

Boykin replied that the U.S. military and its Special Operations forces were “doing a pretty good job of that right now” in Iraq and Afghanistan. “We’re going after these people,” he said.

“Killing or capturing these people is a legitimate mission for the department,” Boykin added. “I think we’re doing what the Phoenix program was designed to do, without all of the secrecy.”  
 
 
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