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The Origins of the CIA’s Assassination Program: Who Proposed It, What Its
Code Name Was
911Blogger, By Kevin Fenton - Wed, 07/15/2009 - 1:19am
The CIA assassination program that was recently in the media
was actually first partially revealed by the Washington Post in 2005, when
details enabling his originator to be identified were published. The program
made news in the last few days as CIA Director Leon Panetta admitted that
the agency withheld information about it from Congress, although the CIA
never actually used it to assassinate anybody. Nevertheless, the program’s
“duties” seem to have been taken over by something journalist Seymour Hersh
called an “executive assassination wing” that was run out of the Office of
Vice President Dick Cheney, and this grouping did go on missions and kill
people.
The program was first mentioned in Dana
Priest’s groundbreaking article that highlighted the existence
of the CIA’s network of black sites, CIA Holds Terror Subjects
in Secret Prisons, which was published in November 2005. Priest
wrote of the program:
"The CTC's chief of operations argued for
creating hit teams of case officers and CIA paramilitaries that
would covertly infiltrate countries in the Middle East, Africa
and even Europe to assassinate people on the list, one by one.
"But many CIA officers believed that the
al-Qaeda leaders would be worth keeping alive to interrogate
about their network and other plots. Some officers worried that
the CIA would not be very adept at assassination.
"'We'd probably shoot ourselves,' another
former senior CIA official said."
This section of the article was ignored at the
time in the storm that grew over the CIA’s rendition program and
complicity in it by US allies.
The team was also mentioned by the New York
Times’ James Risen in his 2006 book State of War:
"In the intense atmosphere after the September
11 attacks, even more radical and questionable operations were
considered and planned. One such secret activity was code-named
Box Top. In 2002, according to CIA sources, the agency created a
covert paramilitary unit whose mission was to go around the
world to target terrorists. Whether the Box Top unit would have
had the mandate to kill terrorists anywhere in the world or
simply to capture them and bring them back through the rendition
process is unclear. But after the unit was set up and began
training, it was disbanded, and Box Top never went into effect.
CIA sources suggested that the agency’s top management got cold
feet over the prospect of turning the paramilitary unit loose."
That’s on page 35 of my copy (emphasis added).
Interestingly, Risen also mentioned the OVP/Pentagon
teams that supplanted Box Top:
"... Unlike the clandestine service of the
CIA, Rumsfeld’s new covert units—given the benign-sounding name
“operational support elements”—didn’t fall under the
government’s existing rules governing covert action, rules that
required explicit presidential authorization and congressional
notification. In fact, the Defense Department didn’t seem to
believe its special teams needed to tell anyone else in the
government what they were doing, let alone coordinate their
activities with the American ambassadors and CIA station chiefs
in the countries in which they were planning to operate.
Rumsfeld was creating his own private spy service, buried deep
within the Pentagon’s vast black budget, with little or no
accountability.
"Before long, the State Department and CIA
began to hear reports from ambassadors and station chiefs that
special covert military teams were operating in Africa and
elsewhere in the third world. In some cases, the embassies
discovered their activities only by accident or at second hand.
Whenever CIA officials complained to the Pentagon, they were
told that the failure to notify them of the operations was an
oversight and that the teams were simply conducting
reconnaissance.
"The new cowboys at the Pentagon were clearly
asking for trouble. In early 2005, trouble came: members of an
operational support element team working in Latin America killed
a man outside a bar. The American personnel then failed to
report the incident to the US embassy for several days. The
incident has never been made public, but several officials
familiar with the matter say it raises serious questions about
the degree to which the Pentagon’s new secret teams are being
properly managed."
I found that on pages 70-71. Risen therefore
described both the programs back in 2006, although he did not
make the link between the non-implementation of the CIA program
and the implementation of the OVP/Pentagon version.
Although the CIA certainly does not have lists
of its office holders, certainly not Counterterrorist Center (CTC)
chiefs of operations, we have a pretty good idea who the chief
of operations at the time was and what else he is responsible
for (9/11, Osama bin Laden’s escape from Tora Bora, rendition to
torture--see the timeline link below).
In January 2007, Harper’s journalist Ken
Silverstein wrote an article about a CIA officer he called
“James,” giving a resume that indicated he was the CTC’s chief
of operations on and shortly after 9/11. Given marked
similarities in the biography of James and a CIA officer who
goes by a variety of aliases (Rich/Rich B/Richard)—they both
served in Algeria, were close to CIA manager Cofer Black, headed
the CIA’s bin Laden unit, then had another managerial position
at the CTC, became station chief in Kabul after 9/11 and got
involved in the rendition of Ibn Sheikh al-Libi to Egypt—it
appears that they are one and the same person. Therefore, it
seems that Rich B was the officer who championed Box Top.
See
here for a timeline of Rich B’s activities. Don’t miss his
involvement in hiding information about the 9/11
hijackers—apparently including from his own boss—what he knew
before 9/11, his part in rendition to torture before and after
9/11 and his responsibility for bin Laden’s escape from
Afghanistan.
This is highly intriguing as it gives us an
(as-yet indirect) connection between Rich B and Cheney, a
connection I’ve been trying to make for some time: when the CIA
sat on the program Rich B proposed, it was taken up by Cheney,
who also prevented Box Top from being briefed to Congress. Do I
think this is a coincidence? No, I don’t. We know that both Rich
B and Cheney were involved in the post-9/11 rendition and
torture programs - was there any link between them on that issue
as well?
Originally posted
here with additional links.
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