Defense Secretary Robert Gates

Barbara Starr
CNN Pentagon Correspondent

1. The question of whether Defense Secretary Robert Gates would stay on the job, if asked by President–elect Barack Obama is a matter of “minute by minute” speculation around the Pentagon according to a senior defense official who said only Gates knows what is really going on at this point. The official said many senior department officials continue to internally discuss the possibility, but he noted Gates staying on “would be difficult in a practical sense,” because so many of the existing senior staff members are political appointees from the Bush Administration.

For example, two of the most influential senior staff members: Robert Rangel, chief of staff and Jim O’Bierne, chief of White House liaison are deep Bush political loyalists—who would have to be replaced—even though Gates has relied on them since the day he got here. Also all the undersecretaries and assistant secretaries would have to leave as a practical political matter, this official said. The bottom line is…do you really ask Bush loyalists to stay?

Nobody knows the answer. This person who is close to Gates but pretty even handed…says his read is Gates hasn’t been formally asked yet. He believes Gates is playing it very close to the vest, to see what the offer looks like, and what those critical staff arrangements would be. He acknowledges the current rumour of the morning is Gates staying, and Richard Danzig as deputy—and moving up. but who knows? Anything still possible…but if Gates stays the details will be awfully interesting.

Some Obama transition people were in the Pentagon on Friday. Top transition official Michelle Flournoy comes to the building today for courtesy calls.

2. Re Obama saying on 60 Minutes last nite he will close Gitmo. This same senior defense official who is a position to know says the Pentagon has long looked at two options. The brig at Charleston , and fed prisons. In addition to legal questions he says members of congress in those areas have been adamantly opposed. He says the estimate is there are currently about 80 detainees considered still to be such a threat they could not likely be released.

Barbara Starr | BIO
CNN Pentagon Correspondent

The Pakistan-Afghanistan border has been a real problem for the U.S. military. With insurgents hiding out in Pakistan, the U.S. has been frustrated trying to stop them. Today we learned from a senior U.S. official that a number of U.S. military forces did something very rare, they landed at a compound in Pakistan to take out targets linked to recent attacks against U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

The official declined to be identified citing the extreme sensitivity of the matter. The Pentagon has refused to comment officially on the attack, but several defense officials acknowledged that U.S. military activity had taken place inside Pakistan.

Why is all this so sensitive? Under former President Pervez Musharraf there was the well understood public fiction that the U.S. would never enter Pakistan. Any publicly acknowledged U.S. military operations inside Pakistan would have put more pressure on Musharraf from fundamentalists. But there were indeed secret agreements with Musharraf to do just that, especially if the U.S. had intelligence about the location of Osama Bin Laden. A recently retired senior U.S. military official confirmed those arrangements to CNN.

But now, with Musharraf gone, the Pakistani government in utter disarray and the US military furious that Pakistan isn’t stopping attacks against American troops and everyone is on even more fragile eggshells. The only way the US military can get any cooperation out of Pakistan is to promise not to talk about these operations publicly.

Top U.S. military officials met with Pakistani counterparts on board the USS Abraham Lincoln in the North Arabian Sea several days ago to talk about the problem of insurgents on the border, but it’s not clear to what extent they discussed operations like the one we learned about today.

The tactic was an uncommon one for the U.S. military. Generally, NATO forces do not enter Pakistan except when pursuing insurgents in Afghanistan who slipped over the border or, in an extreme case, to pursue a high value target. They have fired from the Afghan side or send in a drone to fire missiles along the border, though.

As we understand it, here is what happened in the border area. A small number of U.S. helicopters landed troops in the village near Angoor Adda in South Waziristan, where Taliban and al Qaeda fighters have hunkered down over the years. Local media reports said the attack used both helicopters and ground troops who came out of a chopper and fired on civilians.

The U.S. official said there may have been a small number of women and children in the immediate vicinity, but that when the mission began “everybody came out firing” from the compound. He said that the U.S. troops specifically attacked three buildings in the compound believed to contain high value individuals responsible for training and equipping insurgents who have been crossing the border in increased numbers in recent months and staging large scale high profile attacks against U.S. and coalition forces.

The official could not say if the troops were going after a specific individual. But he acknowledged the U.S. operation, although complex, was actually launched fairly quickly when it became clear there was sufficient intelligence to take the risk of putting U.S. troops on the ground in a potentially hostile area of Pakistan without formal permission from the government. This official and other sources told CNN there was no indication the target was Osama Bin Laden or his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri.

Barbara Starr
Pentagon Correspondent

Americans have heard the name General David Petraeus and the word Iraq many times together. But with today’s announcement that Petraeus is moving up to head the US Central Command….the name you will start hearing will be General Raymond Odierno. And, you might be wondering…who is “Ray” Odierno?

Odierno commanded the 4th Infantry Division in 2003 when it pulled Saddam Hussein out of the spider hole. Odierno was on his way home in 2004 when his then 26-year-old son Tony was headed into Iraq—the two met for a 90-minute dinner in a mess tent in Kuwait. General Odierno at that point was sometimes referred to as “Tony Soprano” for his very tough line with Iraqis suspected of being involved in insurgent activity.

But for the entire Odierno family, the war was about to change.

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Check out Randi Kaye’s article on CNN.com:

NEW YORK (CNN) – The U.S. government paid more than $1.7 million in defense contracts over the last decade to companies owned by leaders of Warren Jeffs’ polygamous sect, with tens of thousands allegedly winding its way back to Jeffs and his church.

In fact, some of the deals were made after Jeffs was named to the FBI’s “Most-Wanted List” and remained in place while he was on the run.

CNN has learned that between 1998 and 2007, the United States Air Force and Defense Logistics Agency purchased more than $1.7 million worth of airplane parts from three companies owned by members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which practices polygamy.

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When you are a Pentagon correspondent, as I have been since….oh…I don’t want to say how long….you learn that news comes from the strangest places in the 17.5 miles of Pentagon hallways. 

In fact just the other day one of the CIA liaison officers who works here and I were chatting, in the hallway, and he pointed his ‘best intel’ came from hanging out at the Pentagon’s Dunkin Donuts counter in the morning where he could “run into everybody” he needed to talk to without wasting time in endless meetings.

Sometimes you get news by just being in the hallways. You can really get a feel for when things seem to be other than normal, when people are in a crisis mode.

But sometimes you get the most important news by just keeping track of the tidbits and waiting a few weeks for a story to move off the front page. Once it’s out of the headlines, then it’s time to get down to business and talk to my various deep throats around here.

So here’s a tidbit, but it’s darn interesting. 

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