(Part one of three)

The news angle the BBC took in its story Sunday night about Seymour Hersh's latest New Yorker article was how the U.S. military has special forces operating in Iran looking for possible targets to attack.

Other stuff in Seymour Hersh's article is actually far more worrisome.

For one thing, the War on Terror will increasingly be handled by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, while the role of the CIA will be downgraded (never thought I'd see that as a potentially bad thing).

Covert operations against suspected terrorist groups have been authorized in as many as 10 Middle Eastern and South Asian countries, the article claims.

And unlike the CIA's covert ops, no covert military commando mission needs to be reported to Congress. Actually, regional military commanders might not even be told.

The CIA's current paramilitary unit may yet be shifted to the Pentagon's control.

 “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” former CIA clandestine officer Philip Giraldi told Hersh. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.”

It isn't clear whether this new order is even legal. Hersh quotes some experts as Congress thinking it voted to have oversight over covert ops, while the administration argues these are not intelligence-gathering operations but military ones.

One of Rumsfeld's new approaches would be to have covert military personnel on the lookout for items that could be used to build nuclear weapons system, perhaps by posing as corrup businessmen (doesn't sound military to me, but I'm not an expert).

They may recruit local teams. This sent a chill down my spine (the "me" references below refer to Hersh):

“Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”

One official described the new approach to Hersh this way: “It’s a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld—giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally. It’s a global free-fire zone.”

Pentagon forays into covert work in the late 1970s and early 1980s were "disastrous," the article said.

It appears that part of the problem is that in the world of Washington power politics, the CIA lost the battle over who's to blame for humint failures in Iraq.

A former senior C.I.A. officer depicted the agency’s eclipse as predictable. “For years, the agency bent over backward to integrate and coördinate with the Pentagon,” the former officer said. “We just caved and caved and got what we deserved. It is a fact of life today that the Pentagon is a five-hundred-pound gorilla and the C.I.A. director is a chimpanzee.”

In addition ... A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.”

You don't want people who aren't team players analyzing your intelligence data. They might go off-message. :(

And in the new intelligence reform bill, the White House lobbied furiously for certain changes.

The bill that Congress approved sharply reduced the new director’s power, in the name of permitting the Secretary of Defense to maintain his “statutory responsibilities.” Fred Kaplan, in the online magazine Slate, described the real issues behind Hastert’s action, quoting a congressional aide who expressed amazement as White House lobbyists bashed the Senate bill and came up “with all sorts of ludicrous reasons why it was unacceptable.”

“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.

“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it.”

The United States' founding fathers envisioned a system of checks and balances to keep the system from getting out of whack. But if Hersh's article is true (the White House says it isn't, but it isn't specific about the errors and never gave an interview to Hersh), there will be precious little second thought before the U.S. sets off on potentially destabilizing covert missions in the Middle East and Central and South Asia.

The coming wars could indeed be a prescient title.

NEXT: The inauguration