I'm guessing it's just the CIA's in-house special forces unit; with personnel drawn from the DoD's various special forces branches.

The CIA's deniable operators are persons not officially connected to the CIA in any fashion, but on the CIA payroll nevertheless.

For example, the SIS employs the SAS to carry out certain operations home and abroad, whilst the SIS also has it's own deniable operators.

Rebanonjin,

 

It's difficult to guage the left and right boundaries of what's out there when the truth is sometimes stranger than fiction, granted. Whether Matt Damon's characters, played well in the Bourne trilogy and even more so in Team America, or Robert Ludlum's original Bourne is what you're referring to, I have a simpler explanation for a one-man entry into the Iraqi occupied U.S. Embassy in the fall of 1990: the environment in which he was operating. The Iraqis, with notable individual exceptions, are not unassociated with profound buffoonery. Such a task simply becomes less amazing against the background of the Middle East. There are so many dimensions to this region's shared culture that make its security efforts laughable to to folks that apply our force there (and so many hidden dimensions that make our force's grand effects dissipate into nothing to the laughter of its residents), that it reduces the immediate task to doable by a third-world-street-savvy, confident, very skilled, and very gutsy operator. We as a nation, fortunately, have a lot of guys and a fair number of gals that meet that description. Returning to drama, Blackhawk Down portrayed an OD-D operator riding into Bakara Market in downtown Mogadishu (or is Bakara considered uptown?) on a mountain bike, wearing scruffy civilian clothes to accomplish his part in a VIP-snatch. The truth of the region makes remarkable exploits more akin to this portrayal than to, say, Tom Cruise dangling from the HVAC system by a piano wire, in black leotards no less. So not by any means to discount the tip-of-the-spear folks' abilities, whether SAD, Delta, or any of the other go-to guys, the left and right boundaries of their nature collectively fall less in the range of Jedi Knights and more in the range of just damned impressive fighting men. I hope that analogy is at least some of what you were looking for. (Sean Naylor's Not A Good Day To Die might further nail down the range of what's reasonable and what's not in the current milieu for you.) Beyond that, SAD is a matter of idle fascination for me too, or I wouldn't have reached your entry.

I apologise, my last entry should have been addressed to GOP's bullet.

Direct action and hearts-and-minds are all very well, so are CT, CSAR/PJ, FID.  But who does the stuff when you're never supposed to know they were there?  The black bag jobs?  Silent entry and exit with no traces?  Ultraclean assasinations, come to that?  Who taps the phones and cracks the safes and gets the telephotos of X in bed with Y's goat?

Would that be CIA SAD missions?  Police work?  Straight spy stuff?  I know NYPD had considerable expertise in some of these areas (the wiretapping more than the goat stuff or wet work).  Who does that for the nation?

"Black bag jobs" - typically intel agents working for the CIA.

 

"Ultra-clean Assasinations" - If the US is involved, then whatever JSOC/SOCOM unit who calls in the JDAM. However, CIA SAD could be used if we need absolute deniability (ie: they set up a car bomb). Most likely scenario: CIA pays enemy group or supplies them with the resources to pull of the mission.

 

"Phone taps, etc" - FBI, CIA, Police. Usually counter-intel/countersuervaillance agents depending on whether its inside or outside the country, if outside then intel agents.

SAD does alot of different tasks. There is very, very little on them, and I don't think anyone in the know should be discussing what they do in detail on an open public forum. Ever seen the movie "Munich"? Now, I'm not insinuating that SAD does that, as I do not know. However, that is the nature of the intel business. That kind of ultra-secrecy and deniability is accurate. I don't think we should discuss this anymore for OPSEC reasons, because if some loose cannon comes in here with some inside info and starts posting then it could put lives in danger and put our nation and it's goals at risk.

 

 

 Agents meaning foreigners, recruited by CIA officers?

 

   

   

But who does the stuff when you're never supposed to know they were there?  The black bag jobs?  Silent entry and exit with no traces?

There's a lot of redundancy in US capabilities.  A perusal of open source literature out there would suggest various agencies, uniformed and not, can do these sorts of jobs as needed.

 

Ultraclean assasinations, come to that?