Pentagon's intelligence authority widens: report

The US Defense Department's newest counterterrorism agency, the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), is carrying out intelligence collection, analysis and operations within the United States and abroad, The Washington Post reported Monday.

The CIFA, a three-year-old agency charged with protecting military facilities and personnel, has grown from an agency that coordinated policy and oversaw the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies to an analytic and operation organization with nine directorates and even widening authority, the report said.

The Directorate of Field Activities of the CIFA, whose size and budget remains secret, "assists in preserving the most critical defense assets, disrupting adversaries and helping control the intelligence domain," a fact sheet on the CIFA was quoted as saying.

Another directorate, the Counterintelligence and Law Enforcement Center, "identifies and assesses threats" to Defense personnel, operations and infrastructure form "insider threats, foreign intelligence services, terrorists, and other clandestine or covert entities," the report said.

A third directorate, the Behavioral Sciences, "has 20 psychologists and a multimillion-dollar budget," and supports both "offensive and defensive counterintelligence efforts," according to the report.

In a new move to centralize all counterterrorism intelligence collection inside the United States, the Defense Department this month gave the CIFA authority to task domestic investigations and operations by the counterintelligence units of the military services.

The tasking authority allow the CIFA to assign Defense counterintelligence operations "to execute a specific mission or conduct a function falling within that organization's charter," the report said.

The CIFA's new authority will give the agency the ability to propose missions to Army, Navy and Air Force units, which combined have about 4,000 trained active, reserve and civilian investigators in the United States and abroad, according to the report.

Source: Xinhua