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The CIA Close Protection Unit

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Post by Ted-Pencry 6/1/2013, 19:05

The popular view of Central Intelligence Agency operations officers as gun-brandishing martial arts experts who can kill an adversary using their bare hands could not be further from the truth.

Typically, CIA operatives are trained to avoid attracting attention while establishing useful, long-lasting relationships with foreign assets.

Broadly speaking, guns are rarely used in day-to-day intelligence work. Increasingly, however, CIA case officers operating on counterterrorism assignments in the post-9/11 environment find themselves in warzones with a level of physical risk rarely encountered during the Cold War.

CIA operations planners believe that case officers cannot properly run foreign assets while constantly having to worry about their personal safety, as well as the safety of their recruits.

To address this problem, the CIA put together a new unit shortly after 9/11, which goes by the name Global Response Staff (GRS).

An article published yesterday in The Washington Post provides the most detailed public examination of this new unit to date.

The Post’s Greg Miller and Julie Tate, who authored the article, suggest that the GRS currently has around 250 members, about half of whom are detailed to CIA stations around the world at any given time.

Most are contracted by the Agency as retired Special Forces officers, and only work three to four months a year for around $140,000.

Recruitment is done largely by word of mouth. The Post quotes an unidentified former US intelligence official, who says that GRS recruits are not required to operate within the typical CIA operational framework: unlike their CIA colleagues, “they don’t learn languages, they’re not meeting foreign nationals and they’re not writing up intelligence reports”.

Instead, they are expected to conduct “area familiarization” work, that is, mapping escape routes from places where CIA case officers meet their assets.

They then escort the officers to the selected meeting locations, make first-contact with assets, patting them down to check for weapons or explosives, and providing “an envelope of security” so that case officers can operate in relative safety.

Miller and Tate claim that GRS duty is considered one of the CIA’s “most dangerous assignments”, having cost the lives of at least five out of 14 CIA employees killed in the line of duty since 2009 alone.

Two GRS members were killed last September in Benghazi, Libya, when the United States consulate there came under attack by al-Qaeda-linked militants. Three more lost their lives almost exactly three years ago in Khost, Afghanistan, when a double agent killed eight CIA officers in a suicide attack.

The article suggests that Raymond Allen Davis, a CIA officer who was captured by Pakistani officials in 2011, after shooting two men who allegedly tried to rob him in Lahore, was also a GRS member.

According to The Post, the new bodyguard unit is considered such a critical component of the CIA’s post-9/11 operations that fresh CIA recruits are now trained on how to interact with their GRS teams when operating abroad. The authors’ conclusion is that the new bodyguard unit is indicative of a “broader expansion” of the CIA’s paramilitary activities in the past decade.

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Raymond Allen Davis

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Post by Ted-Pencry 6/1/2013, 19:09

In the years since the Afghanistan invasion, the CIA, long a covert intelligence gathering body, entered a phase of growing militancy that has rendered headline after headline in U.S. mainstream media — and that's due in no small part to its relationship with military operators.

The increasingly conspicuous role of the GRS is part of a broader expansion of the CIA’s paramilitary capabilities over the past 10 years.

Beyond hiring former U.S. military commandos, the agency has collaborated with U.S. Special Operations teams on missions including the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and has killed thousands of Islamist militants and civilians with its fleet of armed drones.

This paramilitary unit, comprised of "scorpions" — the most lethal of American military special operators — is responsible for protecting covert agents and classified drone sites in countries like Yemen, Lebanon, Pakistan and Libya (surely among other unnamed places).

GRS members, untrained in local languages and not expected to be writing up intelligence reports, often come with SWAT team or U.S. Special Forces backgrounds. In sensitive situations their actions have brought attention to covert CIA operations.

Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods, the two agents who died in the Benghazi incident earlier this year, were both a part of the GRS, which the Post reports has at least 125 overseas employees.

Raymond Davis, the "diplomat" captured in Pakistan in early 2011, was also a member of the group.

Their big exposure began in 2011 when Davis opened fired on a couple Pakistani thugs who confronted him in the busy streets of Lahore.

From the Guardian:
Davis, a former special forces soldier, whipped out his 9mm semi-automatic Glock pistol and, still behind the wheel, opened fire. Five shots sliced through the windscreen. Muhammad Faheem, a 19-year-old street criminal, fell dead.

Then a rescue detachment speeding the wrong way down the street in a Toyota Land Cruiser ran down a "cosmetics trader" and just kept going.

Kind of the opposite of covert.

A year and a half later, Fox reported that Woods was in a truck "revving the engine" while the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was under attack. Revving because they were supposedly ordered to "stand down" by CIA Agents, a claim the Agency not only denies, but follows up by saying that there was "no delay" in their response time.

Regardless, their response took about a half hour to reach the mission, which was about a mile away, a distance most Navy SEALs can make on foot, in full gear, in about six or seven minutes.

The actions of Woods and other GRS employees to rescue diplomats at the mission appear to have brought the fight, and thus exposure, to the previously classified CIA Annex.

These missteps by GRS members have given rising comprehension of and recognition to the CIA's most secretive unit: the Special Activities Division, or SAD.

The Agency's SAD is itself comprised of case officers and former special operators, and goes hand-in-hand with the growing use of drone warfare since the beginning of the Global War on Terror.

The combination of the high-visibility drone program and partnerships with special operators, for security or daring raids, has brought unprecedented exposure to military-style operations the CIA has carefully expanded over the past 10 or so years.


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Post by Sabre 6/1/2013, 22:29

Interesting info Ted , Thanks!
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