![]() But as the technologies of close-in collection became more widely available, JSOC developed its own capabilities supporting their own operations, and the Army and NSA jointly developed their own clandestine SIGINT organization, too other parts of the military created their own “technical support” units, leaving the 1st CIG as the experienced but separate entity it is today. In 2002, the Pentagon placed the unit under the tactical control of JSOC. “Close-in” collection is linked to exploitation teams able to collect and exploit signals, media, documents, cell phones, weapons and bomb making materials. These operators are the vanguard to spy on hostage-takers and terrorists, drug runners and revolutionaries, transnational criminal organizations and political insurgents, war criminals and heads of state. It’s best thought of as an army of spies, of covert operators who can penetrate war zones and countries using cover identities separate from the special operators and the Army and not even the United States, spying, targeting, cajoling, bribing, breaking and entering, emplacing sensors and wiretaps and then silently tracking. While it is proper to call the 1st CIG an intelligence organization, it does more than traditional reconnaissance, SIGINT and HUMINT collection, and cyber operations. Sometimes the 1st CIG works with the CIA or intelligence agencies, some of them still secret, and sometimes it conducts what can only be called “national” missions, at the direction of the Secretary of Defense or the President. What is true, is that 1st CIG spends a lot of time working for SOCOM proper, gathering intelligence for SOCOM’s core mission sets, and the funds to improve its facilities often come from SOCOM’s budget, rather than the Army’s. ![]() ![]() It’s become settled lore that the 1st CIG is a wholly owned part of, or subordinate to the not-quite-so-secret Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), the collection of special mission units and classified standing joint task forces. (Special note: pay attention to this bureaucratic trilogy: the Administrative control (ADCON), Operational control (OPCON) and Tactical control (TACON) distinctions will be important for understanding future secrets!) With over 2,000 personnel assigned to a variety of cover units that make up the 1st CIG, it falls under the administrative control of Army headquarters and its Intelligence Security Command (INSCOM) and under the operational control of the U.S. The 1st CIG is a brigade-sized Army intelligence-gathering unit, an army within an army (within the Army). foreign policy, threaten stability (even strategic (nuclear weapons) stability), hide questionable or even illegal practices, or just bureaucratically protect those who manage to achieve secret status from scrutiny and oversight. In fact, as we’ll demonstrate over and over, so many of these secret organizations and programs distort and undermine U.S. Those secrets are cool to know, but they tend to interest adversaries, and they aren’t what we’re curious about.īut secrets like the mere existence of the 1st CIG ? It's an absurd tradition and a function of self-selection to be this tippy-top secret the protection of national defense is incidental. ![]() Yes, of course, there exists in the world outside of Plato’s cave properly classified national security information about technical capabilities, “troop movements,” and about intelligence sources and methods the revelation of those could cause harm to the United States. It’s designed so that no one can ever finish!) (This is just the start of our efforts to get through this maze. The 1st CIG is at the top of a list of more than 600 secret governmental organizations, ones you literally can’t search for online because no one has published anything about them (yet), and it’s part of an empire of more than 100 current special access program we’re tracking. It’s the Army’s covert army: the 1st Capabilities Integration Group (Airborne), or the 1st CIG. We start our journey with the most secret government organization there is, more opaque than the CIA, protected by a special access program (SAP) not acknowledged by the government, cloaked with a variety of codenames and cover names that change regularly.
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