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LOS ANGELES - United States special forces operating overseas on secret missions have clashed with the CIA and carried out operations in countries that are staunch US allies, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The clashes had prompted a push for tighter rules for military units engaged in espionage.
In 2004, members of a special forces team operating in Paraguay shot and killed an armed assailant who tried to rob them outside a bar. US officials removed the members of the team from the country.
In another incident, members of a team in East Africa were arrested by the local government after their spy mission was discovered.
"It was a compromised surveillance activity," the paper quotes a former senior CIA official as saying. Members of the unit "got rolled up by locals, and we got them out."
The paper said that some CIA officials complained that special forces sometimes had launched missions without informing the CIA, duplicating or even jeopardising existing operations.
And they questioned deploying military teams in friendly nations - including in Europe - at a time when combat units are in short supply in war zones.
Special forces troops typically work in civilian clothes and function much like CIA case officers, cultivating sources in other governments or terrorist organisations, the LA Times said.
One objective is to generate information that could be used to plan clandestine operations such as capturing or killing terrorism suspects. But it is not uncommon, said a former CIA official, for agency station chiefs to learn of military intelligence operations only after they were under way.
- AFP
