Turf wars over who controls “black ops” are as old as the Cold War, but six years after the 9/11 attacks, they are still infecting counterterror operations, intelligence sources say.

The current impasse stems from continued bureaucratic infighting between the Defense and State departments over who controls highly classified U.S. intelligence operations in foreign countries — the American ambassador or the Pentagon. Right now it’s infecting a proposal by the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command to expand its hunt for al Qaeda in Africa, intelligence sources say.

A high-ranking Pentagon official, speaking on condition of anonymity, denied red tape was fouling any special operations, but offered no details.

State Department officials, as well as CIA station chiefs in U.S. embassies abroad, have long complained that Defense Department intelligence operatives frequently try to go around them.

The ambassadors’ annoyance boiled over in March, when veteran U.S. diplomat Edward W. Gnehm told the New York Times that a Military Liaison Element (MLE) dispatched by the Pentagon to Jordan when he was ambassador during 2001-04, tried to launch secret operations without telling him. Two other U.S. ambassadors had similar problems with the Pentagon, Gnehm said.

When the existence of the MLEs surfaced last year, a Pentagon spokesman said they were “there to immerse themselves in the culture, to immerse themselves in the society and be able to take snapshots in time perhaps of what’s going on, to be able to see whether or not there’s any potential for terrorism to take hold, take root.”

But things don’t always go smoothly. In one embarrassing incident in 2004, MLE team members in Paraguay were confronted by a stick-up man and beat him “to a pulp,” according to a knowledgeable source, then left him in the street.

More recently, Ethiopian officials became concerned about MLE activity along its borders with Eritrea and Somalia.

In an interview, Gnehm said he was astonished at the thought that the MLE team would try to escape an ambassador’s notice.

“It’s a complete lack of understanding on how an embassy works,” he said. “They’re going to need passes, and the security officer is going to give them a briefing and ask who they are. And somebody eventually is going to tell the ambassador or his DCM (deputy chief of mission) that they’re all those new military people in the embassy.”

Embassy relations have improved under Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in the past six months, according to news accounts, but they have not improved enough, in the view of some intelligence experts and officials.

Part of Gates’ solution has been to make State and Defense reach agreement on every clandestine operation proposed by the military. But that has only created more red tape in the approval process, a special operations veteran grumbled privately to me last week.

He and other well-informed intelligence sources said the issue now is a Pentagon plan to pursue suspected al Qaeda-affiliated operatives in West Africa, from the oil-rich Islamic regions of Nigeria to the vast desert swaths of Niger, Mauritania, Mali and Chad.

The plan has disappeared into a bureaucratic black hole and might have cost the Pentagon’s hunter-killer teams a chance to roll up al Qaeda operatives there, said the special operations veteran, who would be fired if he spoke publicly about the issue.

“I could overstate — but won’t — and say that we let some people and operations slip through our fingers,” he said. “That would be an overstatement. The sorry part is that we’ll never know — we’ll never know!”

But other veterans of U.S. counterterror campaigns were suspicious of the Pentagon’s plans.

In separate interviews, three of them said it has been their experience that Defense Department intelligence elements have traditionally tried to invent new ways to expand their operations abroad, warranted or not.

Former CIA and State Department counterterrorism official Larry Johnson scoffed at virtually every facet of the Pentagon’s alleged effort to dispatch more hunter-killer teams to West Africa. (By some accounts, Special Forces teams have already been spotted in Niger, Chad and Mali.)

“It’s not like the military is being held back by DoD or State to go kill terrorists,” he told me. “There are no viable targets in Africa that lend themselves to action by U.S. military forces. The threats that do exist-and there are real terrorist threats in Africa-will be most effectively handled by intelligence and law enforcement assets.”

In the case of West Africa, he said, regional rebels are focused on local or tribal issues, not global jihad. As one example, Johnson dismissed Mokhtar Belmokhtar, leader of an Islamicist cell based in southern Algeria, as a “cigarette and car smuggler who talks a tremendous amount of trash” about his supposed connections to al Qaeda.

Belmokhtar is just trying to bolster his street cred in the region, Johnson said. Pentagon efforts to get involved in snatch-and-dash operations against such local personalities “is a hammer looking for a nail,” he said.

A recently retired, longtime CIA operations official agreed — and called it “nothing new.”

“It never stops,” he said in a wide-ranging talk that was conducted on the basis of anonymity because he still consults to U.S. intelligence.

“You guys want to pin this stuff on this administration, but I’ve seen this all throughout my career. It never changes. It never changes from administration to administration. And no matter what laws you pass, the DoD always feels it is not getting what it should be getting from intelligence and it needs to go and do it itself.”

In one case, he said, an operative from the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which was discovered collecting information on antiwar groups in 2004, tried to foster a secret relationship with a French intelligence official in Washington.

It turned out the CIFA man’s recruitment target was the French embassy’s police liaison to the CIA and FBI. The policeman immediately alerted his government’s counterintelligence service to report the American overture. They in turn called the CIA station chief in Paris to ask what was going on.

“The worst aspect of this [expletive] is that it gives a foreign government an opportunity to play with the U.S. government. The guy who is actually charged by law with the maintenance of the intelligence relationship with them is the CIA chief of station,” said the retired official, who headed U.S. spying operations in several countries during a long career.

“But rather than helping him do that job, and then bitching about it if he doesn’t do it right, or putting pressure on his headquarters if he doesn’t do it right, what they do is they bypass it,” he said. “And they do it all the time. It never stops.”

In June 2006, the State Department’s then-counterterrorism chief, Henry Crumpton, assured the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “there are no military personnel assigned to any country anywhere in the world where our ambassador is not fully and completely informed. This is very clear in the letter of instruction the president has given to all of our ambassadors.”

Crumpton added that, “last year, Secretary [Condoleezza] Rice, in a letter to Sen. [Joseph R.] Biden, underscored the importance and the value of the ambassadors overseas and their central role in counterterrorism.”

Foreign Relations Committee investigators in December 2006 issued a report that strongly recommended the State and Defense Departments iron out a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to define who is responsible for special operations forces in countries where the United States has an embassy — the ambassador or the Pentagon.

According to the Special Operations Command consultant, it has not been done. The State Department could not answer a query about the situation on Sept. 28.

“We’ve tried to establish an MOU with the State Department,” said the source, who added that Eric Adelman, assistant secretary of Defense for policy, “doesn’t want to get involved.”

A formal agreement could theoretically put a stop to any Defense Department freelancing abroad.

In the meantime, requests to launch clandestine operations are drowning in red tape.

“An MOU,” the sourced added, “would make it much easier to do business.  . . .  As it is now, it requires a lot of people to get involved for an MLE to go into a country. It can take months.”

WHERE’S THE MONEY? Congressional investigators have spent months digging into the contractor corruption in Iraq that has allegedly cost taxpayers billions of dollars. In the October issue of Vanity Fair, the much-heralded investigative reporters Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele have come up with a particularly interesting facet in the mystery of how $9 billion in reconstruction aid has gone missing. They report that company called NorthStar, operating as a home-remodeling outfit from a house in San Diego but with a Bahamas mailbox address, scored a $1.4 million contract in 2003 from the now-defunct U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority to audit the reconstruction funds. Surprise: NorthStar has no record of ever doing any accounting work, the reporters found. Confronted at the house, NorthStar official Thomas Howell clammed up and referred Steele to the Pentagon, where, despite repeated attempts, he got no answers.

DHS COUNTERINTELLIGENCE CONFUSION: The ability of DHS hackers to manipulate an energy company’s computers, revealed in near simultaneous news accounts by CNN and the Associated Press last week, came as no surprise to experts familiar with the department’s counterintelligence woes. Efforts to establish uniform security procedures at the hydra-headed conglomeration of 18 agencies, from security clearances to computer security, have run up against turf wars and bureaucratic inertia, inside sources say. Charlie Allen, the legendary CIA official who rode to the rescue of DHS’ beleaguered Office of Intelligence and Analysis in 2005, has been saddled with military intelligence enlisted men brought in by a predecessor that one source said “are great guys and all that and may be very talented in their own way” but are “fighting over their weight.” Previous calls to get official comment from Allen’s spokesman on this and other issues have been fruitless.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

First posted Sept. 28, 2007 10:58 p.m.