The Special Activities Division (SAD) is the Central Intelligence Agency’s paramilitary arm. Per John Kiriakou, the organization has two distinct organizational components: a pre-September 11, 2001 SAD that sat within the agency’s Director of Operations, and a post-9/11 special activities group within the Counterterrorism Center. The expansion was a direct response to the staffing demands of the post-9/11 campaign.[1][2]
Personnel
Almost no SAD personnel are career CIA officers. The majority are former U.S. special-operations forces — Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, Army Rangers, Army Special Forces. “At first, post-9/11, they were seconded to the CIA for quick-strike operations. And then as the years went by, the agency decided to make many of them official.” Many were then formally rolled into Global Services, the Special Activities Division proper, or the Counterterrorism Center. Others retired from the military and returned to the CIA as contractors.[3][4]
Branches
The paramilitary structure is organized into multiple branches by operating medium: Ground Branch, Marine Branch, and Air Branch.[5]
Mission
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.[6]
Kiriakou distinguishes SAD’s dedicated paramilitary teams from ordinary case officers, who instead cultivate relationships; he notes, for instance, that the team that got bin Laden was made up of active-duty Special Forces personnel on loan to the CIA specifically for that operation.[7] Officers who take a “heavy hand” approach, he says, belong to SAD and receive their targets from White House kill-list meetings held on Tuesday mornings — unlike case officers, who are “not going to diplomatic cocktail parties to find their targets” the way he did in his own career.[8]
A substantial fraction of CTC special-activities work, per Kiriakou, is kidnapping rather than killing — “parachuting in somewhere, stealing a van, and snatching somebody off the street” before linking up with a waiting helicopter for extraction. The category of operating environment is itself an indicator: “You’re not snatching people off the street in Dubai or Abu Dhabi … You’re snatching them off the street in Benghazi or Khartoum or Karachi.”[9][10]
Misidentification
Kiriakou identifies misidentification as the principal moral and operational hazard of the work: “You’ve got people being snatched off the street and rendered to third countries and then tortured in those third countries — only then to have that country’s intelligence service come back to the CIA and say, ‘Look, this is the wrong guy.’ And here you’ve been torturing him mercilessly for the last nine months, which has happened repeatedly.”[11]
Anonymity in death
CIA personnel killed in special-activities work are commemorated by anonymous stars on the agency’s wall of honor at headquarters — “there’s no name attached to the star.” As a consequence, casualties among these units are not publicly known.[10]
‘Rick’ and the Cali Cartel
John Kiriakou recounts a colleague, “Rick,” the friendliest man in the office, whose job he only later learned was head of the Special Activities Division: every Tuesday Rick collected the White House kill list, sent his people out, and returned for the next list.[12][13] A 2007 Vanity Fair exposé, Kiriakou says, revealed that Rick had been a hitman for the Cali Cartel before a future Deputy Director for Operations — the two allied against communist insurgents in Colombia — invited him to “do hits for me” instead.[14][15][16]
From Cali cartel to ‘global services’ (HOPE 2025)
John Kiriakou says the affable colleague “Rick” who headed the Special Activities Division had been a Cali cartel hitman, recruited around 9/11 “because we needed somebody who knew how to kill people and not get caught,” and that Rick trained the cadre now called “global services” — the teams that execute the Tuesday morning kill list.[17][18][19]
See also
- Ground Branch
- Counterterrorism Center
- Blackwater
- Executive Order 12333
- Mike Spann
- Billy Wall