CIA was a long way from Jason Bourne: LAT

"Keeping activities like this secret is the biggest challenge," said the second former U.S. intelligence official.

The vulnerability of being far removed from U.S. protection was seen as another major barrier to the success of the program.

Even if an assassination team were deployed and succeeded in killing a senior Al Qaeda figure, "what happens to the shooter?" said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official. "We don't send people on suicide missions. I'm sure they were troubled by how to get the guy out of there."

In its initial conception, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA program was seen mainly as an effort to assemble teams capable of carrying out targeted killings. But officials have said that it went through multiple "iterations."

Most recently, the program's focus had shifted toward intelligence collection, officials said, the latest in a series of efforts toward the end of the George W. Bush administration to find Bin Laden.

In that respect, some officials thought the program could replicate on a small scale the successful formula that the U.S. military had employed as part of the "surge" in Iraq, carrying out raids, exploiting the information gathered, and launching follow-up operations in swift succession.

However, different objectives brought different challenges, officials said, including how to get the right mix of personnel that could operate in the badlands of Pakistan without being captured or exposed.

Former officials declined to say whether the CIA had ever held discussions with Pakistan about setting up hybrid teams with members of the Pakistani military or its main spy service, Inter-Services Intelligence. But one former official said that few officials thought the initiative could succeed solely with U.S. personnel.

"If you're born in Kansas, you're always from Kansas," the former official said. "I don't care you long you grow your beard, you're still from Kansas."

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The CIA's assassination team: Dallas Morning News

Jim Mitchell

The Washington Post has a fascinating story on the CIA program that has caused such an inside the Beltway flap.
Put aside, the ridiculous Democrat attempt to help Nancy Pelosi save face by tyring to show that the CIA cheats and misrepresents (like this is news?). And while we're at it let's put aside the equally ridiculous Republican talking point that the Democrats are compromising national security and the ability to take out terrorist leaders.

Now consider the practical elements of any plan to kill anyone on foreign soil.

1) It is one thing to kill a terrorist on the battlefield, covertly or otherwise. It's quite another to kill anyone -- a head of state, a terrorist, a high-level planner in another country. And according to the order President Bush apparently signed after 9/11, the authority of hit squads to operate was not limited at all.

Let's suppose a terrorist flees to Pakistan. Right now, we're likely to use drones and maybe even uniformed special forces to track them into the border regions.

We certainly wouldn't use either to track and kill the terrorist in a major city. Why? The international political fallout would be devastating, just as it would be if an assassination team killed a Taliban leader in a major Pakistan city without informing the Pakistan government. Reverse the situation. What if someone else's civil war, political dispute or 'law enforcement" efforts resulted in a political murder on the streets in the United States. The United States quite properly would be outraged by the violence and the fact that legal means weren't used.

Now suppose a U.S. assassination team were caught or killed innocents in the effort to take out their target, the Pakistan government would have an internal crisis on their hands -- having to denounce the United States or even end cooperation with U.S. intelligence agencies to prevent an internal uprising. I think Panetta and Tenet realized this wasn't worth the risk, that the short-term upside didn't outweigh the long-term downside.

2) The CIA isn't the United States' only intelligence agency. Are their similar programs underway or in the planning stages in other agencies

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