Secret Armies: An Exclusive Look At 10 Secret U.S. Forces
Marc Ambinder, the author of the new eBook the President's Secret Army — the elite units of the Joint Special Operations Command — assembled for BuzzFeed this look at the military units whose mere existence the government goes to great lengths to hide.
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1.
F6 (The Special Collection Service)— In embassies across the globe, National Security Agency analysts work together with CIA teams to intercept signals intelligence (SIGINT) from denied areas — countries the US has to spy on. The folks who work on these teams are part of SCS, a joint CIA-NSA organization. It is not acknowledged by the NSA, although its internal division code, F6, can be found in material released through FOIA requests. If the CIA needs to break into a foreign embassy and bug a room, or set up fancy SIGINT collection equipment in a hotel across from it, its officers will work with SCS members based in the U.S. Embassy.
2.
Ground Applications Program Office — The more anodyne the name is, the more interesting the activities tend to be. GAPO, based at Ft. Belvoir, runs secret technology and procurement programs for Delta Force and for the most highly classified Army intelligence projects. Try to Google it, and you'll come up with next to nothing. But a LinkedIn resume of a former GAPO director says the job is “Responsible for the development, fielding, and sustainment of 190 programs, projects, and equipment evaluations with an annual budget in excess of $500 million, each with its own cost, schedule, and performance standards. Its commander is “[s]elected by senior executives to manage the two top classified programs within the United States Special Operations Command.”
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5.
Unnamed Naval Annex, Potomac River, Washington, D.C. -Its construction in 2003 caused a hubbub in DC: the Navy was building a mysterious and highly classified building smack in the middle of the capital's mall-scape. In order to give their blessing to the the required environmental reviews, members of DC Fine Arts Commission had to be sworn to secrecy about its purpose. A senior U.S official insists that providing the name of the Navy unit that operates the building and linking it to its purpose would constitute a breach of classified information. So all we can say is: it has something to do with highly-secret continuity of government plans in the national capital region.
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8.
Army Compartmented Element, Ft. Bragg — Very little is known about ACE, other than its role in providing real-time intelligence to Army special forces. A detachment of ACE, known by the initials BI, is comprised entirely of highly trained female interrogators and intelligence collectors.
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http://www.buzzfeed.com/marcambinder/secret-armies-an-exclusive-look-at-10-secret-us
We have spent enough money on spying, fighting, security, and other Secret Squirrel operations to solve our economic problems ten times over.
Soon every fact about every person will be stored somewhere in a US facility. The ability to find anything useful is questionable. Their parameters and programs set up to search such massive amounts of info aren't guaranteed to return anything that is close to the truth.
We are slowly beginning to resemble North Korea as more and more money and resources are spent on DoD, DHS, FBI, CIA, and "_______" while everything else is subsumed by some irrational need to control the entire world.
We are dismantling many of the conventional DoD units such as the forces left all over the globe since the beginning of time. Don't count on any of the money saved being put back in the general budget. Most of it will probably be rolled over into black budgets and projects.
Anything not remotely connected to this overarching need for info and the actions to be taken is being starved to death. Needed programs and departments that are vital to the good of the general public are being reduced to a level of ineffectiveness that is both startling and immoral IMHO.
There seems to be nobody who can or will try to slow the changes that are rapidly accelerating. We are caught in a black hole of greed, fearmongering, and irrationality.
I feel less and less safe from all forces, both inside and outside this country.
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