The Paramilitary Case Officer

I had a private email from a reader asking about the CIA's paramilitary officer program, so I am covering it here a bit earlier than I had planned. There are basically three types of Case Officers. The CIA Case Officer we call the inside officer who works officially as a US government employee under cover of another governmental agency, the NOC Case Officer who works under deep cover as an employee of a corporation or NGO and the paramilitary Case Officer who works in a hostile military or quasi-military environment.

The CIA maintains a cadre of very specialized personnel called Special Operations and Programs Officers (SOPO) or Paramilitary Case Officers as we were called during the Vietnam War era. Fondly called “knuckle draggers” by insiders, the SOPO are largely recruited among the ranks of present and former US military personnel, mainly personnel with prior combat experience and military intelligence experience such as the Army Special Forces or Navy Seals.

The SOPO receive the same Basic Operations training at the Farm as other Official Cover Case Officers. In addition, they receive six to eight months of specialized paramilitary operations training such as small unit tactics and ambush operations, weapons training, parachute training, explosives training, desert, arctic and tropical jungle escape, evasion and survival training. While most SOPO have previously received such training as part of their military training, the CIA introduces its particular twist to this training based on the peculiar needs of the CIA.

The history of paramilitary operations in the CIA goes back to its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), during World War II. With the creation and growth of the CIA in the 1950’s, little emphasis was given to such operations and the cadre of paramilitary personnel from the OSS days were integrated into other CIA operations or released from service. It was not until the early 1960’s and the infamous Bay of Pigs invasion that the CIA again placed an emphasis on paramilitary operations.

Then along came the Vietnam War. Its counterpart, known as the CIA’s private little war in Laos, resulted in CIA recruiting paramilitary personnel in large numbers. The special operations group within the CIA that was responsible was made a full-fledged Special Ops Division and given major funding to recruit, train and deploy Paramilitary Case Officers abroad to confront communist inspired insurgencies worldwide.

It is the SOPO who are intimately involved in the worldwide war on terror. SOPO are mainly deployed in hostile military theaters such as Iraq and Afghanistan. While they are not supposed to be directly involved in hostile military operations, they often find themselves drawn into such hostile zones by virtue of their work to collect intelligence. Often SOPO are involved in liaison operations with host country intelligence, security and paramilitary forces. They may be “advisors” to local level host country security offices responsible for penetrating local terrorist cells. They may work with local paramilitary forces to fund, plan and deploy teams to pursue terrorists. They also serve as liaison with US military forces in their theater of operations to collect and disseminate intelligence on the local terrorist target.

While the SOPO are an action arm of the CIA at the grass roots level, they also attempt to collect and report to CIA headquarters intelligence information to help CIA analysts understand what is going on at the local level. Thus, they must write operational cables and FIR’s (Field Information Reports) just like any other CIA Case Officer. SOPO also run agent operations just as their Official Cover counterparts. Some operations may be in conjunction with local liaison services and some may be “unilateral” operations.

Paramilitary operations run by the CIA have a mixed history. On the high side was the successful operation to hunt down Cuban communist revolutionary Che Guevara in Bolivia in the 1960’s before he could develop a successful communist insurgency. On the low side was the Phoenix Program in Vietnam – the so-called assassination program to neutralize the Viet Cong Infrastructure. While the Phoenix Program was, indeed, a success in many provinces in Vietnam, it was tainted by the CIA’s intimate involvement with the program’s action element, the Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PUR) that conducted the ambush operations killed many Viet Cong agents. Whatever the track record, however, the CIA is involved in paramilitary operations for the long haul. The SOPO is here to stay if you are interested in this program.