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.
Neither Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth nor any other senior Pentagon official has publicly mentioned the agency since it was established this April — a conspicuous omission for a department that has reveled in announcing other major changes aimed at modernizing the military or adopting hard-nosed new policies against foreign adversaries.
Information on the Technology Support Office, or TSO as it is called internally, is nearly impossible to find on Pentagon websites, and the agency is mentioned by name only in several previously unreported Defense Department historical records and memoranda.
While the specifics of its work are highly classified, POLITICO spoke with 12 current and former U.S. national security officials with varying degrees of knowledge about TSO to understand how the agency came to be, the broad contours of its mission and why its operations are shrouded in secrecy.
Some of these people helped establish TSO or worked closely with it; others attended briefings or spoke with current Pentagon officials about it; and some were familiar with Defense Department intelligence programs now merged into TSO. All were granted anonymity to share sensitive details about the agency that have not been previously reported.
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg, a private equity billionaire and former head of the White House’s Intelligence Advisory Board during President Donald Trump’s first term, led the push inside the Pentagon to create the new agency.
Tom Rakusan, a senior adviser to Feinberg at the Pentagon, has also been closely involved in setting up TSO. Rakusan is a longtime veteran of the CIA’s clandestine service, and most recently worked at Feinberg’s private equity firm, where he focused on emerging technology.
Hegseth and Feinberg established TSO quickly and without attracting outside scrutiny because they largely built the agency by reorganizing two classified Pentagon intelligence programs that have conducted similar clandestine tech-sabotage efforts at a smaller scale since 2023.
But by creating an agency dedicated to expanding that work, the Defense Department is signaling its intent to ramp up a range of aggressive covert activities abroad — potentially including cyberattacks, supply chain disruptions and disinformation operations.
