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Today it does, and the SOG's capacities are growing. Its maritime branch has speedboats to carry commandos to shore, and the agency can rent cargo ships through its front companies to transport larger equipment. The air arm, which Pentagon officials have nicknamed the Waffen CIA, has small passenger jets on alert to fly paramilitary operatives anywhere in the world on two hours' notice. Other cargo planes, reminiscent of the Air America fleet that the agency had in Vietnam, can drop supplies to replenish teams in remote locations. For areas like Afghanistan and Central Asia, where a Russian-made helicopter stands out less, the agency uses the large inventory of Soviet-era aircraft that the Pentagon captured in previous conflicts or bought on the black market.
The part of the air arm that has received the most publicity lately is the fleet of remote-controlled Predator drones, armed with 5-ft.-long Hellfire missiles, that the agency bought from the Air Force. In November 2001 the CIA deployed the drone to eliminate bin Laden's lieutenant, Mohammed Atef. Last November's Predator hit in Yemen killed an al-Qaeda commander and his entourage of five, though the strike was controversial: one of the dead men turned out to be a U.S. citizen.
There have possibly been other missteps as well. In February 2002 a CIA Predator fired at a group of Afghan men gathered around a truck, killing at least three of them. U.S. intelligence insists the men were an al-Qaeda band, but locals say they were nothing more than scrap dealers or smugglers. And as the agency tries to pull together rival Iraqi Kurdish forces into a viable guerrilla force that could take on Saddam, it must confront its sorry history in that territory. In 1995 it attempted to organize a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam, but in the end CIA officers fled their base in northern Iraq, abandoning their Kurdish agents to Iraqi police, who rounded up and executed hundreds. The Clinton Administration, fearing the operation would end in disaster, had pulled the plug.
But perhaps the SOG's most notable lapse in the field has been its failure to locate bin Laden. "They're still developing their capability," says a Bush Administration official who has worked with the unit. "It doesn't mean that they won't be a force to be reckoned with. But they're not there yet."
OPPOSITION AND RIVALS
The Pentagon is not happy about the SOG's moving aggressively onto its turf. When aides told Rumsfeld in late September 2001 that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn't go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent there had laid the groundwork with the local warlords, he erupted, "I have all these guys under arms, and we've got to wait like a little bird in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?" What's more, Rumsfeld, according to a Pentagon source, does not like the idea that the CIA's paramilitary operatives could start fights his forces might have to finish.