WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency secret new authority to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists, U.S. officials said, changing the Obama administration’s policy of limiting the spy agency’s paramilitary role and reopening a turf war between the agency and the Pentagon.

The new authority, which hadn’t been previously disclosed, represents a significant departure from a cooperative approach that had become standard practice by the end of former President Barack Obama’s tenure: The CIA used drones and other intelligence resources to locate suspected terrorists and then the military conducted the actual strike. The U.S. drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour in May 2016 in Pakistan was the best example of that hybrid approach, U.S. officials said.

The Obama administration put the military in charge of pulling the trigger to promote transparency and accountability. The CIA, which operates under covert authorities, wasn’t required to disclose the number of suspected terrorists or civilian bystanders it killed in drone strikes. The Pentagon, however, must publicly report most airstrikes.

Mr. Trump has indicated he wants to accelerate the fight against Islamic State and other militant groups. The CIA first used its new authority in late February in a strike on a senior al Qaeda leader in Syria, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, U.S. officials said. The strike in northern Syria on Mr. Masri, a son-in-law of the late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, had been reported, but it wasn’t previously known that the CIA had carried it out under the new authority. U.S. officials are still assessing results of the strike.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the CIA declined to comment.


While U.S. officials said Mr. Trump’s action specifically applied to the CIA’s ability to operate in Syria, it means the agency eventually could become empowered under Mr. Trump to once again conduct covert strikes in other places where the U.S. is targeting militants in Yemen, Libya, Somalia and elsewhere.

Syria may not be the only place where the CIA is now authorized to conduct drone strikes. Earlier this month, a U.S. drone reportedly targeted two men in a village in Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan. The Defense Department didn’t acknowledge conducting the operation, as it typically would.

Workers loaded a Hellfire missile onto a U.S. Air Force MQ-1B Predator in the Persian Gulf region last year. Photo: John Moore/Getty Images

Whether the CIA’s new authority might expand remains unclear. The CIA, the Pentagon and the White House are negotiating a longer-term approach to conducting counterterrorism operations and determining who has the authority to do what, U.S. officials said.

Mr. Trump provided the authority to the CIA not long after meeting with intelligence officials at the agency headquarters on Jan. 21, the day after he was inaugurated, the U.S. officials said. Mr. Trump’s nominee for director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, had yet to be confirmed.


A White House spokesman declined to comment.

The Trump administration is also giving the military more authority to conduct operations on its own without first getting a signoff from the Pentagon or the White House.

The new president’s unexpected decision to give the CIA the strike authority created ferment inside the U.S. government within days of his visit, as U.S. military officials scrambled to respond to the new directive, according to the U.S. officials.

Mr. Trump’s new policy is sure to reignite the debate over targeted killing. Human rights groups believe the Defense Department, with its culture and legal requirement to be more publicly transparent and accountable, is where drone operations should be rooted.


“There are a lot of problems with the drone program and the targeted killing program, but the CIA should be out of the business of ordering lethal strikes,” said Christopher Anders, deputy director of the Washington office of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mr. Anders said the Pentagon should be used for such strikes because it is more publicly accountable to policy makers, members of Congress and the American public.

“It does not mean the CIA cannot have a role in assisting in the use of force in locating targets, but that decision on whether to strike or not to strike and that order should be coming from through the military chain of command,” he said. “The CIA should be a foreign intelligence gathering and analysis organization—not a paramilitary one.”

Under pressure by the ACLU, other human rights groups and others, Mr. Obama in 2013 began to push for more drone operations to be conducted by the Defense Department.


But the efforts to move those operations to the Defense Department ran into problems—a combination of interagency squabbling, budgetary competition and bureaucratic inertia.

Some members of Congress also resisted the effort to move drone operations into the sunlight. Members of the intelligence and armed services committees in the House and Senate traditionally have been eager to maintain their separate oversight of drone operations.

Members of the intelligence committees, for example, generally favor a paramilitary CIA role, and believe they are best positioned to conduct oversight of secret operations, while members of the armed services committees argue the military should control the mission.

In the meantime, Mr. Trump’s move has fueled the competition that exists between the CIA and Pentagon over conducting lethal counterterrorism operations, according to the U.S. officials.

Both agencies take steps to determine the validity of targets before striking. When it comes to vetting targets, the CIA uses a higher, or “near certainty,” standard, while the Defense Department relies on “reasonable certainty” in war zones, though it adheres to the higher standard when operating elsewhere.

As a result, providing more authority to the CIA to conduct strikes could undermine Mr. Trump’s directive to accelerate the fight against Islamic State, al Qaeda and other militant groups because the CIA is thought to be more deliberative in its process, according to current and former U.S. officials.

It is also possible, however, that the pace of strikes could increase as the CIA is given a freer hand to operate on its own and not rely on the military to conduct a strike.

—Carol E. Lee

contributed to this article.

Write to Gordon Lubold at Gordon.Lubold@wsj.com and Shane Harris at shane.harris@wsj.com