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Official: CIA hit squads’ goal was to put ‘bullets in heads’

By Ron Brynaert

Published: July 14, 2009
Updated 4 months ago




Update: Officials tell Newsweek model was Israeli hit squads, Cheney’s involvement may be most ‘politically explosive aspect’; GOP senator wants program resurrected

The goal of the CIA hit squads created by a now canceled secret program was to put ‘bullets in heads,’ an unnamed former intel official tells the Wall Street Journal.

“A secret Central Intelligence Agency initiative axed by Director Leon Panetta examined how to assassinate members of al Qaeda with hit teams on the ground, according to current and former national-security officials familiar with the matter,” Siobhan Gordon reports. “The goal was to assemble teams of CIA and special-operations forces ‘and put bullets in [the al Qaeda leaders'] heads,’ one former intelligence official said.”

Gordon adds, “The plan was never carried out, and Mr. Panetta canceled the effort on the day he learned of it, June 23. The next day, he alerted Congress, which didn’t know about the plan.”

The New York Times reports that the “plans remained vague and were never carried out.”

More from the Times:

Officials at the spy agency over the years ran into myriad logistical, legal and diplomatic obstacles. How could the role of the United States be masked? Should allies be informed and might they block the access of the C.I.A. teams to their targets? What if American officers or their foreign surrogates were caught in the midst of an operation? Would such activities violate international law or American restrictions on assassinations overseas?

Yet year after year, according to officials briefed on the program, the plans were never completely shelved because the Bush administration sought an alternative to killing terror suspects with missiles fired from drone aircraft or seizing them overseas and imprisoning them in secret C.I.A. jails.

“Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more ’surgical’ solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties,” the Times report adds.

Senator Christopher S. Bond (MO-REP) defended the program to the paper, “The Predator strikes have been successful, and I was pleased to see the Obama administration continue them. This was another effort that was trying to accomplish the same objective.”

The Wall Street Journal also quotes Bond.

“Democrats in Congress are calling for an investigation into whether or not it was properly briefed on the matter,” Siobhan Gorman reports for WSJ. “Meanwhile, Sen. Kit Bond, the top Republican on the Senate intelligence panel, said the thrust of the plan should be resurrected. ‘The general concept in the plan is one that should be explored somewhere. Whether it’s a modification of this plan or some related plan,’ he said in an interview.”

In the Washington Post, Bond is quoted as saying, “Why would you cancel it? If the CIA weren’t trying to do something like this, we’d be asking ‘Why not?’”

Gorman notes, “Had it become fully developed, the CIA’s aborted plan would have been a covert-action program. At the outset, the potential operation wouldn’t have been limited to particular countries. The use of hit teams was in accordance with the authority granted by the 2001 order, said a former national-security official familiar with it.”

The Post adds, “One current intelligence official said the program was always small, but over time the agency considered different approaches that took advantage of evolving technical capabilities. Options were being actively weighed as recently as this spring, said the official, who added that Panetta learned of the program during a briefing that described new CIA proposals for going after bin Laden.”

Newsweek reports that the program was modeled on hit squads “deployed by Israel after the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, according to a former senior U.S. official.”

Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff report:

According to two former officials—who, like others quoted in this story, asked for anonymity to speak about sensitive matters—shortly after 9/11, the Bush White House consulted with the Directorate of Operations about expanding the agency’s powers to track or lure terrorists. Top CIA officials ultimately concluded the program posed an unacceptable risk of failure or exposure, according to another former official. As a result, the initial plans proposed by officers of the Directorate of Operations—now known as the National Clandestine Service—were put on hold by CIA Director George Tenet before he left office in 2004, former officials said. Tenet’s two successors, Porter Goss and Gen. Michael Hayden, kept the plans in the deep freeze. But a former official said that until Panetta killed the program outright last month, the CIA never totally abandoned the plans for kill teams; agency personnel believed it was important to have them ready as an option for the president to use, and they continued to try to refine the idea.

….

Two officials familiar with details noted that none of the Democrats on Capitol Hill who have stoked the uproar over the program have alleged it was illegal. But even if it was legal under post-9/11 authorities, it is not hard to understand why a “kill” squad comparable to the Mossad’s “Wrath Of God” teams, which were dispatched to kill terrorists throughout Europe after the Munich Olympics, were a touchy subject within the agency. Aside from the risk of exposure, there was also the risk of mistakes or collateral damage. As part of the Israeli operation, for example, one Mossad team mistakenly assassinated an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway whom they mistook for a top Palestinian terrorist. The hit resulted in the capture and imprisonment of some of the Mossad agents.

Newsweek also reports that “some former officials and agency supporters on Capitol Hill are accusing Panetta of maladroitly handling the controversy by exaggerating Cheney’s role, thereby feeding red meat to the agency’s enemies and dealing a self-inflicted wound to an agency already besieged over allegations of other Bush-era lapses, including the use of harsh interrogation techniques on captured terror suspects.”

The Post on Tuesday morning reported, “Intelligence officials also offered conflicting views of Cheney’s alleged role.”

Likewise, Newsweek reports that different officials are offering different accounts related to the former vice president’s involvement in the program, but that some say it could be the most “politically explosive aspect.”

Cheney has not commented. Two former officials familiar with Cheney’s role in the scheme maintained that the program was not the former vice president’s idea; one of the officials said that when discussion about the program surfaced at the CIA during the final years of the Bush administration, Cheney was not involved in any way and that Cheney was not, at least late in the administration, responsible for ordering the agency to continue to withhold information about the program from Congress. Instead, the agency itself decided to withhold congressional briefings because it did not believe that the program had become operationally advanced enough to warrant them. But other officials confirmed to NEWSWEEK that Cheney was involved in discussions about the program and had pressed the CIA not to inform Congress about it. Some of the officials said that Cheney’s involvement may turn out be the most politically explosive aspect of the controversy.





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