Monday, October 22, 2001
CIA Told to Do 'Whatever Necessary' to Kill Bin Laden
Agency and Military Collaborating at 'Unprecedented' Level; Cheney Says War Against Terror 'May Never End'
by Bob Woodward for the Washington Post
President Bush last month signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the agency in 1947, explicitly calling for the destruction of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al Qaeda network, according to senior government officials.
...
Though the new intelligence war presents the CIA with an opportunity to excel, several officials noted that the campaign is also fraught with risk.
Agency and Military Collaborating at 'Unprecedented' Level; Cheney Says War Against Terror 'May Never End'
by Bob Woodward for the Washington Post
President Bush last month signed an intelligence order directing the CIA to undertake its most sweeping and lethal covert action since the founding of the agency in 1947, explicitly calling for the destruction of Osama bin Laden and his worldwide al Qaeda network, according to senior government officials.
...
Though the new intelligence war presents the CIA with an opportunity to excel, several officials noted that the campaign is also fraught with risk.
The agency is being assigned a monumental task for which it is not fully equipped or trained, said one CIA veteran who knows the agency from many perspectives. Human, on-the-ground sources are scarce in the region and in the Muslim world in general. Since the end of the Cold War more than a decade ago, the Directorate of Operations (DO), which runs covert activity, has been out of the business of funding and managing major lethal covert action.
The CIA has a history of bungling such operations going back to the 1950s and 1960s, most notably when the agency unsuccessfully plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro.
[More in link.]
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