The usual unsourced reporting from The Strategy Page web site. I think the headline is incorrect because the article reads differently. I think they left out the "non" as in non-SOCOM spies told to stand down. But this is an interesting mix of speculation with loose interpretation of history which leads me to think the author (whomever he or she is) does not really know what he/she is talking about.
V/R
Dave
SOCOM Spies Told To Stand Down
December 17, 2012: The CIA has persuaded Congress to rein in Department of Defense plans to increase the number of its intelligence operatives. With Iraq no longer a major area of intel operations, and Afghanistan headed in the same direction, the CIA fears competition from the growing number of Department of Defense spies. The CIA doesn’t want the military to get out of the spy business entirely, they just don’t want more competition in the coming era of less work. In particular, the CIA wants fewer non-SOCOM (Special Operations Command) spies from the Department of Defense. SOCOM, however, is a different matter.
All this is, for the Department of Defense, a sudden switch. Over the last three years SOCOM and the CIA have convinced Congress to allow the two organizations to merge some of their operations and share personnel and other resources. This is a process that started during World War II and, despite some political ups and downs, never completely stopped. By the time September 11, 2001 rolled around the CIA was routinely requesting Special Forces operators to work directly for them, a custom that goes back to the early days (1950s) of the U.S. Army Special Forces.
In the last decade SOCOM (which controls the Special Forces as well as U.S. Navy SEALs and U.S. Air Force special operations aircraft) increasingly found that they could compete with the CIA in producing quality intelligence. The Department of Defense now allows Special Forces troops to be trained for plain clothes, and uniformed, espionage work in foreign countries. The Special Forces have unofficially been doing this sort of thing for decades, sometimes at the request of the CIA. In 1986, the Special Forces even established an "intelligence operations" school to train a small number of Special Forces troops in the tradecraft of running espionage operations in a foreign country. In practical terms, this means recruiting locals to provide information and supervising these spies, agents, and informants.
(Continued at the link below)
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