The CIA has set up secret joint counterterrorism centers in Europe, Middle East and Asia to track and capture suspected terrorists and penetrate their networks, The Washington Post said Friday.
The centers, known as Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers, or CTICs, act on initial tips that may come from the CIA, but the operations to pick up suspects are usually organised by one of the joint centers, current and former US and foreign intelligence officials told the daily.
"The vast majority of successes involved our CTICs," an ex-counterterrorism official said. "The boot that went through the door was foreign."
The CTICs, the daily said, are entirely separate from the covert prisons known as "black sites" the CIA has run at various times in eight countries that The Washington Post reported on recently unleashing a barrage of criticism.
The CTICs are in countries such as Uzbekistan and Indonesia that have been criticised by the US government for its authoritarian rule or human rights violations, the sources told the daily. The CIA has operated joint counterterrorism centers in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the daily said.
In Paris, despite US-French tension over the Iraq war, CIA and French intelligence services have created the agency's only multinational operations center, which executes world-wide sting operations.
Codenamed Alliance Base, the center in France includes representatives from Britain, France, Germany, Canada and Australia, the sources told the newspapers in interviews. Practically every capture or killing of a suspected terrorist outside Iraq since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States - more than 3,000 in all - was a result of foreign intelligence services working alongside the CIA, the agency's deputy director of operations told a closed-door session of Congress earlier this year, said the daily.
Former Central Intelligence Agency director George Tenet organised the joint operation centers, shifting the agency from its more traditional intelligence gathering activities to the co-operative efforts, known as liaison relationships, which are recasting US dealings abroad , the daily said.
The CTICs are modelled on the CIA's counternarcotics centers set up in the 1980s in Latin America and Asia, which side-stepped corrupt local police and intelligence services by convincing heads of state to assign individuals to the anti-drug effort.