WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – The largest undercover force the world has ever known is the one created by the Pentagon over the past decade, Newsweek has revealed.
Some 60,000 people now belong to this secret army, many working under masked identities and in low profile, all part of a broad program called “signature reduction”, the magazine said.
The force, more than ten times the size of the clandestine elements of the CIA, carries out domestic and foreign assignments, both in military uniforms and under civilian cover, in real life and online, sometimes hiding in private businesses and consultancies, some of them household name companies.
The unprecedented shift has placed an ever greater number of soldiers, civilians, and contractors working under false identities, partly as a natural result in the growth of secret special forces but also as an intentional response to the challenges of traveling and operating in an increasingly transparent world. The explosion of Pentagon cyber warfare, moreover, has led to thousands of spies who carry out their day-to-day work in various made-up personas, the very type of nefarious operations the United States decries when Russian and Chinese spies do the same.
Newsweek said its exclusive report on this secret world is the result of a two-year investigation involving the examination of over 600 resumes and 1,000 job postings, dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests, and scores of interviews with participants and defense decision-makers.
“What emerges is a window into not just a little-known sector of the American military, but also a completely unregulated practice,” the publication said.
“No one knows the program’s total size, and the explosion of signature reduction has never been examined for its impact on military policies and culture. Congress has never held a hearing on the subject. And yet the military developing this gigantic clandestine force challenges U.S. laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct and basic accountability,” it added.
Dozens of little known and secret government organizations support the program, doling out classified contracts and overseeing publicly unacknowledged operations, the paper said.
Altogether the companies pull in over $900 million annually to service the clandestine force—doing everything from creating false documentation and paying the bills (and taxes) of individuals operating under assumed names, to manufacturing disguises and other devices

to thwart detection and identification, to building invisible devices to photograph and listen in on activity in the most remote corners of the Middle East and Africa, it added.
However, the fastest-growing group within the Pentagon’s clandestine force operates exclusively online. These “cyber fighters” assume fake identities to gather intelligence and search for “publicly accessible information” on the internet. They even reportedly take part in “campaigns to influence and manipulate social media”. Hundreds of these shadowy keyboard warriors are employees of the National Security Agency, Newsweek reported.