As former Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair put it in December 2011, "Covert action that goes on for years doesn't generally stay covert.... [I]f something has been going for a long period of time, somebody else ought to do it, not intelligence agencies."
But even as covert CIA lethal activities appear to have become more and more overt, more and more military activities appear to be moving into the covert realm. In particular, the role of special operations forces -- Navy SEALs, Army "Green Berets," Air Force Special Tactics, and the like -- has dramatically expanded in recent years, and special operations forces are increasingly engaging in activities designed to remain unattributable and unacknowledged.
The overt goes (semi)-covert
After 9/11, the expansion of special operations forces (SOF) activities was virtually inevitable. America's conventional general-purpose forces are fantastically good with tanks and artillery and moving large numbers of people and machines from one place to another, and as the 1991 Gulf War demonstrated, they can roll over enemy armies with ease. But as we know, terrorist organizations don't fight like conventional armies. They eschew uniforms and traditional military command structures and rely instead on stealth, subterfuge, and asymmetrical attack. They blend easily into local civilian populations. As a result, they often confound U.S. conventional forces.
Special operations forces, in contrast, were designed to handle unconventional threats. Various organizations within the SOF community emphasize different skills. SEALs take pride in their ability to conduct lightning raids on high-value targets. (The raid on Osama bin Laden's compound is a classic example.) Army Special Forces, meanwhile, emphasize their ability to keep a low profile and work closely with foreign armed forces, something that takes sophisticated linguistic and cultural skills as well as all-around military expertise. (Full disclosure: My husband is one of these guys, and he's awesome.) Other organizations within the SOF community bring their own unique skills to the table -- including, not coincidentally, skills related to the operation of armed drones.
Put all these skills together, and you have a group of military personnel with precisely the skills needed for the long war. No surprise, then, that both the Bush and Obama administrations have come to rely heavily on special operations forces. Army Special Forces helped Afghanistan's Northern Alliance defeat the Taliban in the fall of 2001, and SEALs played a crucial role during Operation Anaconda.
Since those early post-9/11 days, special operations forces have played an ever-larger role in an expanding number of countries. SOF personnel embedded in over a dozen U.S. embassies conduct counterterrorism-related information operations, and SOF personnel embedded with foreign militaries continue to serve as trainers and advisers. SOF personnel can offer quiet assistance to foreign governments interested in capturing or killing terrorists in their territory, and, if necessary, they can take direct action themselves. They have increasingly been relied upon to capture or kill suspected terrorists outside of "hot battlefields," sometimes through quick cross-border raids, and increasingly through the use of armed, unmanned aerial vehicles.
Much of the time, their precise role is -- of necessity -- kept secret. Foreign governments may want U.S. military help, but only if they can deny any American role. And when military operations raise difficult questions about sovereignty, keeping them secret is often less diplomatically embarrassing for all concerned. Still other military activities rely on secrecy even more directly: For instance, some foreign information operations may be ineffective if everyone knows that a particular radio show or television program is U.S.-funded.
Of course, engaging in covert activities has traditionally been an intelligence community job, not a military job. The CIA and other intelligence agencies must report to the House and Senate select committees on intelligence, but the military reports to the armed services committees, and both the Pentagon and the armed services committees have a strong aversion to letting the intelligence committees horn in on their territory. Regardless of who's doing what, though, all covert activity requires a presidential finding and subsequent notification of the intelligence committee (even if just the Gang of Eight) -- a fact that gives the Pentagon a strong incentive to insist that whatever it is that special operations forces are doing, it's not covert activities.
Conveniently, the Intelligence Authorization Act, which lays out most of the rules for covert activities, exempts "traditional military activities" from its definition of covert action. The definition and scope of "traditional military activities," however, remains hotly contested.
The increasing fuzziness of the line between the intelligence community and the military creates confusion and uncertainty: Who decides which agency should take the lead, and on what basis? How are activities coordinated and de-conflicted? What's the chain of command? What law governs each entity's activities? Must the CIA comply with the laws of war? Does covert military activity risk depriving the military personnel involved of protection under the Geneva Conventions? No one seems to know -- or at least, no one's saying.
All this creates a strange irony. As the administration continues to expand its use of lethal force overseas, the CIA is fighting to insist that its alleged drone strikes are and must remain covert. At the same time, the Pentagon is fighting to insist that its secret special operations missions should not be categorized as covert action. In both cases, the intent -- or at least the result -- is to shield the activities at issue from scrutiny. The CIA wants to keep journalists and the ACLU off its back; the military mostly just wants the intelligence committees to leave it alone.
Regardless, the end result is the same: When the covert goes semi-overt, and the overt goes semi-covert, the public is left in the dark.
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