WASHINGTON (POLITICO) - An agency tasked with technological sabotage in foreign countries has been created within the U.S. Department of War.
“The Pentagon has spent months quietly building an elite new tech agency to help covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority”.
The agency was created in April, but neither U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth nor any of the department’s key officials have made a public announcement.
It was named Technology Support Office (TSO) and is mentioned in some of the Pentagon’s internal documents, but any information about its activities is classified.
Sources told POLITICO that the agency was established on Deputy War Secretary Steve Feinberg’s initiative, with active participation of his senior adviser Tom Rakusan, who is a longtime veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service.
Hegseth and Feinberg shaped the new agency “by reorganizing two classified Pentagon intelligence programs that have conducted similar clandestine tech-sabotage efforts at a smaller scale since 2023”.
By creating the agency, the Pentagon “is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad - potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations”.
Sources said that one of its objectives was to obstruct research in AI technologies and unmanned systems. A Pentagon spokesperson, however, denied the information outlined in the article.
The Washington Post newspaper wrote earlier, citing sources, that the Pentagon was looking to build a more robust deep-cover spying program to conduct economic warfare against China and other US competitors. This new spy program is also being overseen by Tom Rakusan.