"No doubt there is still some command-and-control," said one senior Pentagon official with access to the daily bomb damage reports.
"We don't know if it's enough to orchestrate a really effective defense of Baghdad," the official said.
Now that the war has begun, the role played by the CIA in Iraq is much different than the role it played in Afghanistan.
In Afghanistan, the CIA played a crucial role in linking up small groups of American special forces with local tribal warlords with whom the CIA already had developed relationships.
By contrast, the US military has had extensive experience with Iraq and the Persian Gulf, and doesn't need to rely on the CIA to go in first and develop relationships on the ground, officials said.
As a result, the CIA's role in Iraq is a hybrid, a combination of the small-unit, paramilitary campaign that agency officers were involved in Afghanistan, and the more traditional intelligence military support.
The CIA has already sent in small numbers of officers into Iraq to work with Special Operations units.
In addition to its paramilitary activities, the CIA is helping support the conventional forces in the land and air battles in southern and central Iraq, including providing intelligence for targeting for bombing raids and information about the whereabouts of the Iraqi leadership.
But at least in the opening phases of the war, the CIA is not directly involved with special forces in the hunt for chemical or biological weapons inside Iraq. That task has been taken up by the military as well as other organizations, officials said.
The targeting of the Iraqi leadership is a major focus of the CIA. Before the war began, the CIA generated lists of Iraqi leaders close to Saddam who should be detained by American forces. Officials said that a "couple hundred" Iraqi leaders were included on the list.
Meanwhile, the agency had developed at least one human source close to Saddam who was able to disclose the Iraqi leader's location for US bombing a week ago.
RSS