What "black ops" means

[Zane_Marlowe]

Hi friends. Lately I've been seeing people use "covert action" or "black ops" or all their possible variations and seeing people both in ISS and Wraith talking about this as being the focus of their fleet. I wanted to perhaps attempt to distinguish between the respective roles of CIOPS within ISS, and the special forces elements within Wraith Fleet.

An intelligence agency's role is to gather, analyze, and disseminate information to political leadership. This is what CIOPS does. That they are responsible for analysis is obvious. Sources and methods for intelligence gathering consist of (basically) human intelligence (agents) and signals intelligence (electronic surveillance). While the second of those two sources is also clearly CIOPS, I'm going to try to carefully distinguish the latter from the kind of work Wraith does because I think that's where some of the confusion between the roles of these two units.

What CIOPS does operationally with its agents consists of covert activity to gather information. When CIOPS recommends to GALCOM leadership that covert actions be sanctioned against an enemy government, then GALCOM would most likely use Wraith fleet for missions where they would insert commandos who can 1) train the local civilian population to overthrow their government, 2) disrupt enemy supply and communication lines, or 3) perform sneak attacks against high value military targets, or other paramilitary actions as deemed appropriate.

If, on the other hand, GALCOM uses CIOPS to act against an enemy government, then the mission would be one where CIOPS agents would be operating in full view of that enemy government, disguised as a foreign citizen or a harmless resident alien (a diplomat or trader perhaps). The distinction between the two is that CIOPS requires cover identities for its operatives. CIOPS would specialize in missions such as 1) VIP extraction, 2) cultivating foreign nationals as agents to spy on their own government, or perhaps 3) gathering intelligence from from within the enemy government's society.

CIOPS is of course also responsible for counter-espionage, and would task its field operatives appropriately to deal with that. (For counter-Insurgent activities, CIOPS would of course be acting in conjunction with SCID at EarthCOM's request.)

Does that distinction seem helpful and clarifying? I hope so.

ZM out.