Have We Recreated the OSS?

Osama Bin Laden is dead and that is a very important development that came upon us suddenly but which will reverberate for a long time to come.  There was an aspect to the story, however, that came upon us much more gradually but that will also have important long-term implications.
I refer to the changes in CIA’s role in fighting the nation’s wars.  The simple fact is that the US military has ceased to be THE agency that fights wars, now it is simply ONE of the agencies that does that.  Sometimes the CIA—and more broadly the Intelligence Community—is in the lead; more often it is in support, but either way, it is an indispensible component of our nation’s wars.
CIA Director Leon Panetta has told Jim Lehrer and Brian Williams that the assassination of Osama Bin Laden was conducted under the authority of Title 50, the part of the US Code that governs intelligence operations.  (Title 10 covers military operations.)  In short, the assassination of Bin Laden was, technically speaking, a covert operation, though it must have been about the least secret thing that the Agency has done recently.  Because this was a Title 50 operation, Panetta himself was “in command” of the Navy SEALs who actually double-tapped Bin Laden.
Meanwhile, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which falls under the Director of National Intelligence, has been responsible since its establishment in 2004 for “strategic operational planning” for all US Government counterterrorism activities or, as we used to say, for the “War on Terrorism.”  This means “integrating all instruments of national power, including diplomatic, financial, military, intelligence, homeland security, and law enforcement to ensure unity of effort through a single and truly joint planning process” in Washington.  Among other things, the NCTC prepares “granular, targeted action plans to ensure integration, coordination, and synchronization on key issues, such as countering violent extremism, terrorist use of the internet, terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction, and counter-options (after an attack).  NCTC also leads Interagency Task Forces designed to analyze, monitor, and disrupt potential terrorist attacks.”

This trend goes back even farther than 2004, however.  It’s worth remembering that right after September 11, it was the CIA’s basic concept for taking down the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that prevailed, not that of the US military, and that CIA officers were the first to arrive in country.  Bob Woodward’s book Bush at War  recounted a version of a story that circulated at the CIA that the first Army special operators into Afghanistan that were greeted by a civilian saying some along the lines of “Hi, I’m Gary from the CIA.  Welcome to Afghanistan.” 
The “Gary” in question was Gary Berntsen.  He describes in his own book  his role as the CIA’s on-the-ground commander.  (For a shorter version, see the Washington Post.  For a complementary account from a CIA officer on the ground, see Gary Schroen’s First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan.)   Berntsen’s job didn’t just involve making common cause with anti-Taliban factions and recruiting clandestine sources but helping to marshal portions of the military effort and calling in air strikes on Al Qaeda positions, including bombing Bin Laden himself at Tora Bora.
In addition, of course, there is the CIA’s famous armed drone program.  The CIA worked with the military even before September 11 to create such a capability; in the fall of 2002, the CIA famously exercised it in Yemen. 
There’s a case to be made that the trend goes back even farther than 2001.  Jeffrey Michaels of the War Studies Department at King’s College in London has recently published a fascinating article in which he argues that we have written the military history of the last 60 years in a way that submerges the importance of the CIA in counterinsurgency warfare.  Michaels notes that the most prominent counterinsurgencies in which the United States has been involved since World War II are Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan and that in each of these cases the CIA’s role has been subordinate—providing intelligence support to a large US military force which had the overall lead.  However, he reminds us that there have been a number of “small-scale cases” such as the Philippines in the 1950s and El Salvador in the 1980s in which the United States fought counterinsurgency campaigns with a small military footprint.  In these cases, the CIA has played a much more prominent role than the US military.  He even suggests that we should understand the present-day conflicts in Yemen and Pakistan as additional examples of this phenomenon.  Perhaps, Michaels maintains, we would understand counterinsurgency better if we were willing to admit that the CIA can, in some cases, play a leading role in prosecuting a war and if we were to write these “small-scale cases” back into our military history instead of consigning them to an obscure corner of intelligence history.
From time to time we see calls to recreate the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II intelligence agency that was the forerunner to the CIA.  The claim is that the global struggle against Al Qaeda and its affiliates requires new flexibility, new capabilities, and a scrappy fighting ethos, precisely the sorts of characteristics that the OSS had.  I think it’s possible that we have actually recreated the OSS without even noticing.