They were the highly trained members of the most powerful military in the world. They arrived in helicopters, and Muse thought he could hear their heavy footfalls on the ceilings above him.

And although the armed men who imprisoned Muse had expected them, and fought doggedly, the invaders quickly overwhelmed them.

Soon, Muse found himself face-to-face with a heavily armed man, clad from head to toe in black protective assault gear. It was finally Muse's time to go.

In this case, Muse was going free. An American citizen, he was a hostage of the Panamanian government shortly before the U.S. government's 1989 invasion.

But inspired by exploits such as the one to rescue Muse, policy-makers are envisioning how special operations troops might be used similarly, to help others "go" -- to jail, to trial, or to their deaths.

"The mechanics [for rescuing a hostage] are not any different than capturing a wanted person," said Dave Davis, a former Marine counterintelligence officer who now teaches at the Virginia Military Institute.

Last month, a highly-classified memo leaked from the Pentagon reportedly indicated that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was considering ordering Special Operations Command to engage in covert missions to capture or kill top members of al Qaeda, the terrorist organization headed by Osama bin Laden.

That means special operations teams may soon operate in countries where the local government may not be informed of their presence. And if they are caught, they might not be recognized as Americans.

The considered change has not come without some controversy.

A Long History

ABCNEWS consultant, former CIA counterterrorism chief, Vince Cannistraro said what Rumsfeld had proposed was "unusual," because while SpecOps members had engaged in missions as demanding and secretive as what would be required to kill top al Qaeda members, they had engaged in very few such missions.

"In the large scheme of things, it's not remarkable, but specifically, it is," said Timothy Lomperis, professor at St. Louis University who served as an intelligence officer in the Vietnam War.

The missions proposed by Rumsfeld are covert, which means the sponsoring role of the United States is hidden. A clandestine operation hides the activity itself.

Covert actions require a finding, or authorization from the president, Cannistraro said -- and the CIA has typically been the recipient of such findings. And while the CIA has employed special ops members in its covert missions, special operations personnel seldom figure directly in abduction or assassination missions.

Assassination missions are rare to begin with. According to the 1975 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA had targeted five foreign leaders for CIA assassination. But while three of them eventually died, none was killed directly by U.S. personnel. Instead, they died in coups, some of which allegedly were backed by the CIA.

The situation changed significantly in 1981, when President Reagan signed Executive Order 12333, explicitly prohibiting the agency from taking part, directly or indirectly, in assassinations.

This order did not, however, remove covert operations from the arsenal available to intelligence agencies and the special operations teams.

One of the most daring known exploits took place in June 1988, when special operations teams were ordered to recover a Russian attack helicopter from a remote location in Africa. Labelled "Operation Mount Hope III", special ops members flew two transport planes 500 miles at night without outside navigational aids, extracted the helicopter, and returned despite a blinding sandstorm.

In "Operation Ivy Bells", which started in the early 1970s, Navy SEALs tapped Russian communications lines in the Sea of Okhotsk with a recording device, and returned to check the recordings regularly over the course of a decade, dodging the Russian navy and sound detection devices along the way.

But the special operations experience that is perhaps most well-known was in Somalia.

The proposed hunt for al Qaeda using the U.S. military brings on memories of the failed October 1993 attempt to capture Somali warlord Mohammad Farah Aidid -- during the peacekeeping mission, Operation Restore Hope.

Two decades earlier, there was the MACV-SOG, or Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group, which, alongside the CIA and local mercenaries, conducted cross-border missions throughout Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, to capture enemy leaders or disrupt supply lines.

"This is exactly what happened in Afghanistan," said Lomperis.

In fact, the first American to die in combat in Afghanistan was a CIA agent, Johnny Michael Spann, who was questioning Taliban prisoners captured by special operations teams and the proxy armies of the Northern Alliance when they rose up against him.

When Spann was killed, only one other CIA agent was known to be with him. Local Afghan forces and special operations teams eventually managed to put down the uprising.

Dangers of Covert Action

Alan Farrell, a former MACV-SOG operative who now teaches at the Virginia Military Institute, recalled how risky such missions were.

If you were discovered during one of his cross-border missions, he said, "you were invited to claim you were searching for downed aircraft, or you were disoriented," he said. "You were on your own."

But most of the time, those who had such misfortune were killed, Farrell said.

And using specialist forces instead of independent contractors can pose other issues.

"You risk your own assets. You spend a lot of money, you don't want to send these guys into a buzzsaw," Davis said.

Farrell has similar concerns, saying there are only a limited number of special operations troops available. Their deployment has to be carefully managed "given the length of time it makes to make a special forces soldier," he said.

Farrell said covert missions were also dangerous in a different way, because America's enemies "would like nothing more than to capture a gringo and parade him [in front of TV cameras]."

Since Sept. 11 though, these concerns could be considered negligible, said Cannistraro, the former counter-terrorism chief. "They would be subsumed under the war on terror," he said.

A Political Issue

More significant implications are to be found in the political sphere, experts said. "There's all kinds of little subtexts," Cannistraro said.

Cannistraro saw the move towards a military role in operations outside Afghanistan as a rebuke to the CIA, which has aligned itself with the State Department and expressed doubts about the viability of a war on Iraq. "Rumsfeld is feeling that he doesn't like [CIA chief] George Tenet," he said. Rumsfeld is considered a hawk on Iraq.

Davis considered Rumsfeld's memo more of a "slap in the face" to Tommy Franks, the commander of Central Command -- the man who oversees military operations in Afghanistan and the search for al Qaeda fugitives. "To go to a separate unified command [Special Operations Command] -- if nothing else that was a move to put more pressure on Central Command," he said.

When news of the memo first emerged, reports alleged Rumsfeld was disappointed with the pace of the war on terror. He has since denied the allegations of impatience and unhappiness with Franks. The defense department has also been nebulous about the nature of the leaked memo.

At a Pentagon press conference last week, Rumsfeld confirmed he had met with Special Operations Command, and that war commanders are clear "about my sense of urgency ... about thinking fresh about what might be done." But he also warned that the reports of the meeting were "to some extent flights of fancy."

There has been virtually no public comment about a possible change in direction. Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Armed Forces Committee contacted by ABCNEWS refused to comment, saying through their representatives they had not yet been briefed on the issue.

Nevertheless, most experts welcomed it. They recognized that an increased role by special operations troops might create some coordination problems between the military and the CIA, but they expected it to go smoothly, especially after Sept. 11 exposed the a lack of inter-agency cooperation on intelligence matters.

"What happened is the special forces proved their usefulness in the kind of conflict seen in Afghanistan," Cannistraro said. "It's a natural extension."