Foreign Network at Front of CIA's Terror Fight

The CTICs are entirely separate from the covert prisons, known in classified documents as "black sites," that the CIA has run at various times in eight countries. Legal experts and intelligence officials have said that the prisons -- whose existence was disclosed in a Washington Post report earlier this month -- would be considered illegal under the laws of several host countries. The CTICs, by contrast, are an expansion of the hidden intelligence cooperation that has been a staple of foreign policy for decades.

Deepening Ties

The intelligence centers were modeled on the CIA's counternarcotics centers in Latin America and Asia. Faced with corrupt local police and intelligence services, in the 1980s the CIA persuaded the leaders of these countries to let it select individuals for the assignment, pay them and keep them physically separate from their own institutions.

Officers from the host nations serving in the newer CTICs are vetted through background checks and polygraphs. They are usually supervised by the CIA's chief of station and augmented by officers sent from the Counterterrorist Center at Langley. Such daily interaction with U.S. personnel, say intelligence officials, helps keep the foreign service focused.

The first two CTICs were established in the late 1990s to watch and capture Islamic militants traveling from Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt and Chechnya to join the fighting in Bosnia and other parts of the former Yugoslavia, two former intelligence officers said.

Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Tenet outlined a global campaign against terrorism to President Bush. It included invading Afghanistan to wipe out al Qaeda's main base of operations as well as a "Worldwide Attack Matrix" detailing operations against terrorists in 80 countries. The matrix also listed priority countries where al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan were likely to flee during a U.S. invasion.

"If you brought a big hammer down on Afghanistan," as a former CIA official described it, "there weren't too many areas where people could squirt out" and hide. The most likely were Yemen, Saudi Arabia, urban areas of Pakistan, and Indonesia.

On Sept. 17, 2001, Bush signed a classified Presidential Finding that authorized an unprecedented range of covert operations. The overall counterterrorism program included authorization of lethal measures against terrorists and the expenditure of vast funds to coax foreign intelligence services into a new era of cooperation with the CIA, current and former intelligence officials said.

To beef up operations in the priority countries and elsewhere, the agency dispatched officers from its proliferation, counternarcotics, Europe, Africa, Asia and Middle East divisions, said several current and former intelligence officials. It sent paramilitary teams from its tiny Special Activities Division and enlisted the military's Special Operations Forces to augment the teams.

But agency officials knew that a surge of hundreds of CIA officers would not be adequate to solidify the new worldwide infrastructure that Tenet and his top aides envisioned. The agency quickly turned to dozens of sometimes reluctant foreign intelligence services, which had much more intimate knowledge of local terrorist groups and their supporters.

The agency had extensive inducements to offer foreign services once Congress opened the spigot, which it quickly did. "The money was just flowing," said one CIA case officer. In fact, the budget for the CIA's operations increased in the first two years by 2 1/2 times what it had been before Sept. 11, according to two government experts.

The Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters, which manages the CTICs and all other counterterrorism efforts, bought its friends SUVs, night-vision equipment, automatic weapons and push-to-talk radios for countries where intelligence services were starved for even basic material. It sent instructors in surveillance, data analysis and military Special Forces tactics to teach hostage rescue, VIP protection and counterterrorist assault. Foreign countries sent officers to the CIA's training school for weeks-long courses in counterterrorism operations and analysis.

The new cooperative ventures depended as well on loosening U.S. rules for sharing electronic eavesdropping and other precious "signals intelligence," which experts estimate provides 80 to 90 percent of the information the United States gathers about terrorist networks. Tenet ordered streamlined regulations.