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NEW YORK: The Pentagon used the devastating Kashmir earthquake of 2005 as a pretext and cover to send in operatives from their Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) into Pakistan, reveals a new book.
D.B Grady and Marc Ambinder, in their newly-published e-Book 'The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army', write that the JSOC have proven to be the most lethal weapon in the US president's arsenal
In fighting the War in Afghanistan and launching covert raids in Pakistani tribal areas, President Obama and the Pentagon leadership have increasingly made Navy SEALs from the JSOC their military tool of choice. The JSOC's counter-terrorism units are credited with capturing or killing many of the world's most wanted terrorists and insurgent leaders, including Saddam Hussein and most recently Osama bin Laden.
The book credits the secretive JSOC, which functions in an administrative 'grey-area', as having done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack the United States than any other single entity. Counter-terrorism is only one of its many missions.
It is only because of high-profile missions such as Operation Neptune Spear, which resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, that the JSOC, otherwise shrouded in secrecy, has attracted much media hype and public attention.
The authors of 'The Command' say that the US intelligence community "took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own" into Pakistan. Using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.
"Al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country's tribal areas, largely because of the ISI's benign neglect. In Afghanistan, the ISI was actively undermining the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai, training and recruiting for the Taliban, which it viewed as the more reliable partner. The political system was in chaos. The Pakistani Army was focused on the threat from India and had redeployed away from the Afghanistan border region, the Durand line, making it porous once again. [Thus] a JSOC intelligence team slipped in alongside the CIA," says the book.
The authors have detailed the JSOC team's goals in Pakistan. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about al-Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: the JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and it badly desired to penetrate the ISI and target Pakistani officers who were hand-in-glove with terrorist outfits.
"Under a secret program code-named Screen Hunter, the JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorised to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to Al-Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the programme was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare," reveals the book.
The Obama administration finally curtailed the controversial Screen Hunter programme after Pakistan slammed covert US presence inside the country. Still, Pakistani outrage did not deter the JSOC from rotating teams of Navy Seals from DEVGRU Black squadron, aided by Rangers and other special operations forces, and establishing a parallel terrorist-hunting capability called 'Vigilant Harvest'.
"They operated in the border areas of Pakistan deemed off limits to Americans, and they targeted courier networks, trainers, and facilitators," the authors write.
A senior Obama administration official said that by the middle of 2011, after tensions between the United States and the Pakistani government had reached an unhealthy degree of danger, all JSOC personnel except for its declared military trainers were ferreted out of the country. (They were easy to find using that same secret cell phone pinging technology.) Those who remained were called Omegas, a term denoting their temporary designation as members of the reserve force. "They then joined any one of a dozen small contracting companies set up by the CIA, which turned these JSOC soldiers into civilians, for the purposes of deniability," added the book.
Pentagon used 2005 quake to send spies to Pakistan
D.B Grady and Marc Ambinder, in their newly-published e-Book 'The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army', write that the JSOC have proven to be the most lethal weapon in the US president's arsenal
In fighting the War in Afghanistan and launching covert raids in Pakistani tribal areas, President Obama and the Pentagon leadership have increasingly made Navy SEALs from the JSOC their military tool of choice. The JSOC's counter-terrorism units are credited with capturing or killing many of the world's most wanted terrorists and insurgent leaders, including Saddam Hussein and most recently Osama bin Laden.
The book credits the secretive JSOC, which functions in an administrative 'grey-area', as having done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack the United States than any other single entity. Counter-terrorism is only one of its many missions.
It is only because of high-profile missions such as Operation Neptune Spear, which resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011, that the JSOC, otherwise shrouded in secrecy, has attracted much media hype and public attention.
The authors of 'The Command' say that the US intelligence community "took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own" into Pakistan. Using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency.
"Al-Qaeda had reconstituted itself in the country's tribal areas, largely because of the ISI's benign neglect. In Afghanistan, the ISI was actively undermining the US-backed government of Hamid Karzai, training and recruiting for the Taliban, which it viewed as the more reliable partner. The political system was in chaos. The Pakistani Army was focused on the threat from India and had redeployed away from the Afghanistan border region, the Durand line, making it porous once again. [Thus] a JSOC intelligence team slipped in alongside the CIA," says the book.
The authors have detailed the JSOC team's goals in Pakistan. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about al-Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: the JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and it badly desired to penetrate the ISI and target Pakistani officers who were hand-in-glove with terrorist outfits.
"Under a secret program code-named Screen Hunter, the JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorised to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to Al-Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the programme was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare," reveals the book.
The Obama administration finally curtailed the controversial Screen Hunter programme after Pakistan slammed covert US presence inside the country. Still, Pakistani outrage did not deter the JSOC from rotating teams of Navy Seals from DEVGRU Black squadron, aided by Rangers and other special operations forces, and establishing a parallel terrorist-hunting capability called 'Vigilant Harvest'.
"They operated in the border areas of Pakistan deemed off limits to Americans, and they targeted courier networks, trainers, and facilitators," the authors write.
A senior Obama administration official said that by the middle of 2011, after tensions between the United States and the Pakistani government had reached an unhealthy degree of danger, all JSOC personnel except for its declared military trainers were ferreted out of the country. (They were easy to find using that same secret cell phone pinging technology.) Those who remained were called Omegas, a term denoting their temporary designation as members of the reserve force. "They then joined any one of a dozen small contracting companies set up by the CIA, which turned these JSOC soldiers into civilians, for the purposes of deniability," added the book.
Pentagon used 2005 quake to send spies to Pakistan
