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 from developing technologies" that would most endanger U.S. forces in a major war.
A former senior Pentagon official said success would require officials to "pull off movie-level spy craft." But the official also questioned what approval and oversight structures are in place, warning against "creating something that five years from now will be seen as incredibly problematic."
Only a small group of congressional staffers have been read in, according to a current national security official.
"Because it's a classified space, there's even more opportunities to hide or misdirect," the official said.
The agency has also stirred friction inside the Pentagon. Special Operations Command and U.S. Cyber Command both opposed its creation over fears it would eat into their budgets, according to the report. One former senior Pentagon intelligence official estimated TSO's classified contracting budget alone likely tops $1.5 billion.
Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Jacob Bliss rejected the reporting, saying the inquiry appeared "built on information that is simply not true."
"Whoever is feeding you these claims are either badly misinformed or deliberately leading you astray to peddle their fantasies," Bliss said.