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Pentagon scales back plans for overseas spying service

 
Published Nov. 2, 2014

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has scaled back its plan to assemble an overseas spy service that could have rivaled the CIA in size, backing away from a project that faced opposition from lawmakers who questioned its purpose and cost, the Washington Post reported Saturday, citing unnamed current and former U.S. officials.

Under the revised blueprint, the Defense Intelligence Agency will train and deploy up to 500 undercover officers, about half the size of the espionage network envisioned two years ago when the formation of the Defense Clandestine Service was announced.

The previous plan called for moving as many as 1,000 undercover case officers overseas to work alongside the CIA and the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command on counterterrorism missions and other targets of national security concern.

Instead, the training schedule has been cut back and most of those involved will be given assignments that are more narrowly focused on the Defense Intelligence Agency's traditional mission of gathering intelligence for the Defense Department.

The revised aim is to stay small but be highly effective, a former senior U.S. intelligence official said, who spoke to the Washington Post on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military planning.

The Pentagon will still be placing dozens of undercover officers in difficult places around the world, including parts of Africa and the Middle East where al-Qaida and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria have significant footholds, the former official said.

The shift is a retreat by Pentagon officials who had sought to transform a spy service long seen as second string to the CIA, repositioning it for an era of more dispersed threats after a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The overhaul was spearheaded by Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and a former CIA operative who has pushed to model the Pentagon's spy service more closely on his former agency.

Aspects of that approach remain intact, including having members of the Defense Clandestine Service take part in the same instruction as their CIA counterparts at the agency's training compound in Virginia.

But the initial scale of the plan has been drawn down substantially, officials said, after it became clear that it could not secure enough support and funding from Congress.