This sounds like it could be referring to one or more real programs in the CIA/DoD which maintains contacts and infiltration/exfiltration plans with countries around the world so that we can quickly send in some kind of special force team to do a raid or recovery of some material / equipment when we want to. Like if we discover that some uranium or a nuclear device was stolen or being left unattended in Kazakhstan, or for whatever reason was up for grabs, we would obviously like to be able to acquire that very quickly if possible and it is helpful to have contacts in Kazakhstan so that we can send in planes and troops and scientists to very quickly do so.
For example.
This retrieval program would have good reason to advise AARO because AARO is getting reports of people who heard stories about devices obtained from foreign countries and this program might legitimately have relevant knowledge about some of those cases because the witness making the report might be referring to real things but just getting the details wrong, and the CIA can shed light on this to AARO in order to resolve the case. Like oh that top secret rocket we transported from Belarus? That wasn't an alien spaceship, it was a Soviet ballistic missile. Which of course would have reason to be classified. And the DoD might also like to know who has been originating the leaks of real top secret information mixed with misinformation like this.
So a lot of this misinformation and rumors being spread by folks like Matt Ford might be grounded in some bit of truth. There are teams in the military whose job it is to secretly recover technology and material from around the world. They just aren't recovering NHI/ET spacecraft, it's normal human technology and the reason it is classified is understandable. It also raises the concern that some of these pushes for a broad "disclosure of everything mentioned in stories I heard about", if carried out, could be a serious national security threat to the US and our allies, because some of the false rumors are built on top of real classified information that some countries like Russia and China would very much like to get declassified. I'm sure Russia would like to know all the details about the US's efforts to recover nuclear materials globally.
They're toying around with things that people don't know.
The CIA has a group that is, most literally, dedicated to covert acquisition of materials and etc. It is based out of SAC not DS&T.
The OGA deals with R&D related to enabling technical collection operations and some protective functions. I'll give a random theoretical example. Let's say you want to breach into China's missile defense networks, not to disrupt them, but to collect intelligence on their processes. Instead of manually having technical officers collect this data and pass it to analysts, it's 2024, you have the bright idea of using an AI driven scraping system to exist passively on the system siphoning targeted data from specific taskings as they come in. The people making the tools for this would be OGA, and they'd likely be handling parts of the data stream also (they would not do the "hacking"/CNO part).
I'm 99% confident I know where this draw is even coming from, and it's the root sources misunderstanding (or intentionally misrepresenting, but I doubt they followed this in depth anyways) reorganized organizational structures. What the current OGA is came out of the Office of Advanced Technologies and Projects (leaving out a longer wall explaining other lineage) that handled, very broadly, all "advanced" technologies and R&D projects as it was termed at the time. This was later reorganized and multiple new offices within DS&T spawned out of the specific teams within it. OGA came from the team there dealing with, at the time, "advanced" projects that were pretty much what they do now, just in the 90s instead and the er, devolved state of technology from now. There is
one source that references this connection online, but does not elaborate at all what so ever on it.
The "Counterproliferation Center" no longer exists, it was reorganized in 2004 after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence was created. What CPC was linearly shifted into is what the ODNI now calls the National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC). Instead, how it works now, is ODNI "leads" the NCBC and they are primarily responsible for policy, oversight, and coordination of IC components participating in counterproliferation (and biosecurity now) functions. The CIA is a member agency of NCBC.
There's a second point to this also to cover. There is a component of the prior (CIA) CPC and now the (ODNI) NCBC responsible for yes, "recovering" materials if that is people want to term it. This group is an interagency group, led by the ODNI through the NCBC (not the CIA) called the Strategic Interdiction Group.
This group is responsible not for recovering, but interdicting weapons of mass destruction and other materials of importance (eg terror or transnational criminal groups with dangerous CBRN materials but as-of-yet not weaponized). Much like with how ODNI and NCBC function, the SIG staff itself deal a lot more with coordinating and planning between the different participating bodies in the SIG. This is not just the CIA, but also includes a host of other entities with relevant capabilities like from the Dept of Energy and Dept of Defense & certain CBRN environment-capable SOF groups can be attached to it but are not "members". This group does
not just handle the literal interdictions in the sense of obtaining the object, but also includes relevant targeted intelligence processes and etc.
