Ground Branch is the land-operating component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division. Together with Marine Branch and Air Branch it constitutes the Agency’s permanent paramilitary capability.[1][2][3]
Who staffs it
Almost none of its people are career CIA officers. In John Kiriakou’s account they arrive having already had long, successful careers in special forces of some kind — the Navy SEALs, the Army Rangers, Delta Force — and were initially seconded to the CIA after September 11 for quick-strike operations.[4][5]
As the years passed the Agency made many of them official, placing them under global services, the Special Activities Division or the Counterterrorism Center as actual CIA employees; others retired from the military and came back as contractors. Kiriakou calls the arrangement a much more efficient way of bringing them on board.[5]
Two components
Kiriakou distinguishes two special-activities organisations rather than one. The first is the Special Activities Division proper, its own division inside the Directorate of Operations, which before 9/11 was the only one — the people who “would go do things in the cover of darkness that nobody talked about.”[6]
The second came after 9/11, when the Counterterrorism Center created its own special activities group: personnel on loan to CTC whose remit was specifically to target terrorists planning operations against the United States. Kiriakou is careful to say he left before the long-term division of labour between the two was settled, and does not claim to know how it is arranged now.[7]
The mission
Asked to state plainly what these people do, Kiriakou does not soften it: “The job is to kill or kidnap and render anybody who might be a threat to the United States, to an American citizen or to an American installation.”[8] Functionally it is the same work they did in uniform — “a special operations mission set, like put a charge on a door, blow it open, shoot people in the face, and leave.”[9][10]
His assessment of it runs both ways at once. At the top of the food chain, he says, the country does want those people out there killing the Osama bin Ladens and the Soleimanis of the world. Against that he sets what the same capability produces when it goes wrong: people snatched off the street and rendered to third countries, tortured there, and only then does that country’s intelligence service come back to the CIA to say this is the wrong man — after nine months of torture, “which has happened repeatedly.”[8][11]
He frames the disagreement through Jose Rodriguez’s argument that you need somebody willing to take those tough decisions, and answers it with the counterweight: as American government officials “we live by the rule of law and by the constitution.”[12]
Culture and secrecy
Within the Counterterrorism Center after 9/11, Ground Branch personnel were a visible but socially sealed presence: “Those guys on loan from SEAL Team 6 came to the office, they never interacted with any of us. I mean, not even so much as a good morning. … They just appeared one day and then they would vanish for a week at a time or two weeks at a time and then come back whispering to each other and not interacting with you.”[13][14] Kiriakou’s own summary of his experience of them is a single greeting: seeing them in the office and saying “hope you had a good weekend.”[4]
The silence was mutual and understood. The nuts and bolts of the work were so secret that nobody discussed it — “You know what they’re doing. I know what they’re doing. Everybody in the office knows what they’re doing. Nobody mentions it.”[15]
The legal question, and the ruling nobody noticed
Kiriakou grounds the Agency’s authority in Executive Order 12333 as amended, which he says permits the CIA to kill anyone in the world who poses a clear and present danger to the United States — with the CIA deciding who qualifies and declining to say, because the public is not cleared: “We’re just going to have to take their word for it.”[16][17]
The unsettled part was the contractors. Bodies such as the global response staff and the ground, marine and air branches are “out there killing, kidnapping, blowing up, you know, whatever” while not being Agency personnel — they work for private companies like Blackwater.[1] Kiriakou reports that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on precisely this and found it legal, so long as the contractors hold a written contract, are acting on the CIA’s behalf, and the CIA has presidential authority for the operation.[18]
What drew his attention was the plaintiff: Abu Zubaydah, who sued the men who tortured him. Kiriakou’s summary of the outcome is blunt — the court’s answer was that he had been tortured but they were acting on the CIA’s behalf, and the CIA was legally permitted to torture people.[19] He adds that one of the attorneys in the case called him to ask why nobody in the media cared about the decision; Kiriakou said he would write something, and observed that otherwise “there’s nothing out there. Nobody paid any attention to this decision.”[18]