Red Flag Raised Over CIA, Special Forces

The increasing collaboration between U.S. special forces units and CIA paramilitary teams is “fraught with danger” because of fundamental differences in the two groups’ missions and legal authorities, according to a report published by the U.S. Army War College.

The study points to potential problems with America’s growing reliance on CIA and military teams operating together in covert settings. Among them are concerns that members of the armed forces involved in such missions could find themselves considered “unlawful combatants” and deprived of Geneva Convention protections if caught in foreign lands.

The report also raises questions about whether Congress is adequately set up to conduct oversight.

And it suggested that the super-secret nature of the missions, coupled with murky chains of command, could lead to breakdowns in communication with main force units and raise the risk of friendly-fire incidents.

“Close cooperation and intermingling between the CIA and [special operations forces] is fraught with danger given their respective cultures, operational modes, sources of information, and oversight structures,” said the study, which was written last year but surfaced publicly Friday when it was discovered on a Defense Department website.

Although the CIA’s paramilitary operators are almost all former members of the armed forces, they often work under significantly different ground rules. The CIA operatives, who do not wear uniforms or insignia, normally are used in situations in which the government wants to be able to deny any connection to them. The Pentagon’s special forces units, by contrast, normally go into action in uniform, and function -- and expect to be treated -- as regular military personnel.

Those distinctions could lead to legal as well as operational complications, the study said.

It was written by Army Col. Kathryn Stone, a senior attorney in the military who studied at the War College last year. Stone serves as the staff judge advocate -- the top military legal counsel -- at U.S. Southern Command in Miami. Southern Command is responsible for military operations in Latin America, including the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Reached at her home in Miami on Friday, Stone said she favored increased collaboration between the CIA and the military but wrote the report to call attention to some of the potential pitfalls of that relationship.

“I think with this threat we’re facing, we ought to use every element of national power and combine the groups as best we can to win the war on terrorism,” she said. “Let’s just make sure we think it through and understand the risks.”

A spokeswoman for the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., stressed that the report did not necessarily represent the opinion of the faculty at the college or Army leadership. The existence of the report was first noted by Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit group in Washington.

Aftergood said that it was extremely unusual to see a senior military officer weigh in on the Army’s relationship with the CIA. “This is something you don’t normally see,” he said. “There is very little official discussion of the rules governing CIA paramilitary operations.”

The issue is increasingly significant because the United States is in the midst of a major buildup of the CIA’s clandestine service as part of the war on terrorism. At the same time, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has dramatically expanded the Special Operations Command’s budget and responsibilities in the war on terrorism.

Much of the 25-page report is devoted to examining the implications of special operations troops’ increasing involvement in clandestine overseas missions traditionally carried out by the CIA. “The world will rightly ask: Where does it stop?” Stone wrote. “If the U.S. employs [special operations forces] to conduct deniable covert action, then is the next step a clandestine tomahawk missile strike, or maybe even a missile strike whose origin is manipulated to conceal U.S. fingerprints?”

Stone also expressed concern that pairing special forces with CIA operators blurs distinctions between the two that could affect how they were treated if they were caught by a foreign government. Soldiers in uniform and wearing unit insignia are afforded protections under the Geneva Convention that do not apply to covert CIA operatives.

“Will the enemy treat soldiers as soldiers if they are apprehended alongside CIA personnel?” Stone said in an interview.

She also questioned whether special forces troops were adequately advised of the risks. CIA officers know from the moment they start their careers that the government might deny any connection to them or their missions to preserve “deniability.”

“You can brief soldiers on that,” she said, “but when they’re sitting in a camp, detained and labeled spies and unlawful combatants, did they understand the ramifications of that decision?”

That issue is of particular concern, experts said, at a time when the United States is being criticized for classifying prisoners from the war in Afghanistan as unlawful combatants and denying them access to lawyers or mechanisms to appeal those decisions.