Pete Hegseth’s secret ‘movie-level spy craft’ agency sparks oversight alarm: report

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's Pentagon has spent months quietly standing up a new covert agency that has insiders worried about who's watching it.The Technology Support Office, or TSO, was set up in April to secretly undermine rival nations' defense technology, Politico reported Thursday, citing a dozen current and former national security officials. No senior Pentagon official has mentioned it publicly.Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, a billionaire who made his fortune in private equity, spearheaded the effort and signed the April 14 memo creating the office. He and Hegseth avoided scrutiny by merging two classified programs that had run smaller sabotage operations since 2023.TSO's engineers, special operators and intelligence officers work on projects ranging from custom hacking tools to elaborate deceptions meant to get adversaries to install defective components in their weapons. A former intelligence official who worked with the office said its mission is to "buy time or stop adversaries...