Pentagon shakes up spy service to focus on global trouble spots

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon will reorganize its spy service to target national security threats around the globe after a decade of focusing chiefly on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a senior defense official said Monday.

The official said several hundred case officers and analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency will be shifted to the new Defense Clandestine Service.

Theservice is supposed to work closely with CIA officers overseas to collect intelligence on foreign terrorist networks, nuclear proliferation and other difficult targets, the official said.

The initiative, which Defense Secretary Leon Panetta approved last week, aims to boost the Pentagon’s role in recruiting and running spies, a mission the CIA has dominated for decades, as well as put more military case officers and analysts in trouble spots around the world.

The defense official, who described the plan on condition of anonymity, said the new spy service is expected to grow “from several hundred to several more hundred” officers in coming years.

Some of the new spies are likely to be assigned to targets that now are intelligence priorities, including parts of Africa and the Middle East where al-qaida and its affiliates are active, the nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran, and China’s expanding military.

The CIA, a civilian agency, and Defense Intelligence Agency, a combat support and intelligence agency, long have clashed over their respective roles and responsibilities. But U.S. military and intelligence missions increasingly have merged in counterterrorism operations since 2001, from the raid on Osama bin Laden’s com- pound in Pakistan to drone strikes in Yemen.

It’s not clear if the Pentagon’s new spy service will overlap with the CIA’S National Clandestine Service or serve as an adjunct.

“I’m not sure what they are supposed to achieve that the CIA doesn’t,” said Joshua Foust, a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst. “This seems like a territorial thing. ‘Hey, the CIA has this, why don’t we have it too?’ … I’m pretty skeptical that it’s necessary or good.”

The change has been in the works since a classified study last year by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, concluded that the military needed better human intelligence-gathering.

The Pentagon is not seeking extra money or manpower. Defense Intelligence Agency personnel will be shifted to focus on new priorities “as we look to come out of war zones and anticipate the requirements over the next several years,” the official said.