Special Ops, CIA fighting hidden war away from cameras

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Not like we didn't know this was happening but interesting none the less. Thought it kept with the theme of Dtd's much anticipated mod (sort of)

Special Ops, CIA fighting hidden war away from cameras
 


Jack Kelley
USA Today
Apr. 7, 2003 12:00 AM


KUWAIT CITY - As U.S. air and ground forces blast into Baghdad, dozens of CIA paramilitaries and thousands of U.S. Special Operations forces are waging a hidden war in Iraq's shadows.

Under the cover of darkness, they're hunting and assassinating Baath Party members and Republican Guard leaders, rigging selected bridges with explosives and detonating them when suspected Iraqi leaders drive by, and using viruses to disable computers at military command centers, power plants and telephone networks.

Their efforts, largely off-camera, burst into public view with the dramatic rescue of Pfc. Jessica Lynch from a hospital in Nasiriyah, where she was being held as a POW. Lynch, 19, had been captured March 23 when Iraqi forces ambushed an Army supply convoy.

Days later, U.S. Special Operations forces held a rare news conference with Kurdish fighters in Biyara, in northern Iraq, to announce they had crushed Ansar al-Islam, a militant group with ties to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network.

But most of what the Special Operations forces do has been conducted under cover. Their chief goal: finding and killing Saddam Hussein and other top Iraqi officials.

The commandos' efforts, seen and unseen, began in October. They have paved the way for the U.S. advance on Baghdad, U.S. military and intelligence officials say. "Special Ops and the agency's paramilitaries are the secret weapons of this war," a U.S. military official said. "Our conventional forces would never have gone this far so quickly without them."

Special Operation forces - the Army's secretive Delta Force, Green Berets and Rangers; the Navy's SEALS; and select Air Force and Marines units - have played a bigger role in Iraq than in any other war in recent history, military officials say. Nearly 10,000 of the estimated 100,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are Special Ops. That's the largest number in any war since the Vietnam conflict in the 1960s and 1970s.

"As a percentage of (overall war) effort, they are unprecedented for a war that also has a conventional part to it," Army Maj. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, vice director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said last week in Doha, Qatar. "It's probably the most effective and the widest use of Special Operations forces in recent history."

Military officials say Gen. Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. forces in the region, decided to deploy thousands of Special Operation forces in Iraq after the units proved successful in paving the way for the removal of the ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001.

U.S. intelligence officials, who refuse to comment publicly about their operatives, say there are about two dozen CIA paramilitaries inside Iraq.



CIA paramilitaries and Special Operations forces, joined by their British, Australian and Polish counterparts, have one mission in Iraq: to hasten the collapse of Saddam's government, U.S. military officials say. Bush administration officials believe that if they can remove Saddam from power, support for his regime among Iraq's people and military will collapse. They hope that would force the Republican Guard to negotiate a surrender rather than fight U.S. forces that have encircled Baghdad.

"We're determined to crumble this regime from the inside out," a senior U.S. intelligence official in the region said. "We're counting on Special Ops and agency paramilitaries to do whatever it takes." He and others refer to Iraq as a "CIA and special ops playground."

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Second Half of above article

So far, U.S. military and intelligence officials say the paramilitaries and commandos have:


? Destroyed Scud missile launchers in western Iraq, secured oil fields in northern and southern Iraq and seized the Haditha Dam northwest of Baghdad, which the Pentagon thought Iraq might destroy to flood the battlefield.


? Called in airstrikes on countless targets, including Saddam's palaces and military compounds and on Ansar al-Islam, a militant Islamic group in northern Iraq that the Bush administration says is linked to al-Qaida.


? Searched and secured nearly a dozen of nearly 1,000 suspected biological and chemical weapons sites and broken into homes of Iraqi scientists to remove documents about Iraq's military. So far, they have not found evidence of the illicit weapons.


? Tapped into Iraq's Chinese-built fiber optics communications, allowing U.S. forces to intercept the conversations of Iraq's military and political leadership. They've also recruited Iraqis for information on Saddam's whereabouts.

Most of the work done by the CIA paramilitaries and Special Operations forces is conducted at night to take advantage of U.S. night-vision equipment.

On Thursday, hundreds of Special Operations forces were flown by helicopters into the Iraqi capital after Baghdad lost power, U.S. military officials said. The Pentagon has denied reports U.S. forces cut off power there. The commandos are helping other Special Operations forces set up ambushes, search underground tunnel complexes and raid homes in hopes of killing members of Saddam's regime. They've also set up checkpoints to isolate Baghdad from the rest of the country.

The commandos remain in hiding in Baghdad, where they communicate with officials at Central Command in Qatar, and at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The commandos and CIA operatives appear to be working together with few, if any, of the territorial disputes that have plagued the Pentagon and CIA in the past, military and intelligence officials said.

[{E}LuSiVe]

woah.......

i love being an american........