Top Secret America: Security bureaucracy too big, hidden to know effectiveness Pt 1 of 2

[Turner]

Top Secret America: Security bureaucracy too big, hidden to know
effectiveness

The top-secret world the government created in response to the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks has become so large, so unwieldy and so
secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people
it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many
agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The
Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative
geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from
public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of
unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put
in place to keep the U.S. safe is so massive that its effectiveness is
impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work
on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and
intelligence in about 10,000 locations throughout the U.S.
Related

An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 11/2 times as many people as live
in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-
secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built
since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost
three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings — about 17 million square
feet.

Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating
redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and
military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of
money to and from terrorist networks.

Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by
foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000
intelligence reports each year — a volume so large that many are
routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources,
was at the heart of the Fort Hood, Texas, shooting that left 13 dead,
as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the
thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert
airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.


They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge
of the nation's security.

“There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms
around that — not just for the DNI (Director of National
Intelligence), but for any individual, for the director of the CIA,
for the secretary of defense — is a challenge,” Defense Secretary
Robert Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the
intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials —
called Super Users — have the ability to even know about all of the
department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in
interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's
most sensitive work.

“I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything” was
how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial
briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small
table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began
flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled “Stop!” in frustration.
Related

“I wasn't remembering any of it,” he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of
retired Army Lt. Gen. John Vines, who was asked last year to review
the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive
programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is
familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he found.

“I'm not aware of any agency with the authority, responsibility or a
process in place to coordinate all these interagency and commercial
activities,” he said in an interview. “The complexity of this system
defies description.”

The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the
country is safer because of all this spending and all these
activities.

“Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in
message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste,” Vines said. “We
consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more
safe.”
Behind the curtain

The Post's investigation is based on government documents and
contracts; job descriptions; property records; corporate and social
networking websites; additional records; and hundreds of interviews
with intelligence, military and corporate officials and former
officials. Most requested anonymity either because they are prohibited
from speaking publicly or because, they said, they feared retaliation
at work for describing their concerns.

The Post's online database of government organizations and private
companies was built entirely on public records. The investigation
focused on top-secret work because the amount classified at the secret
level is too large to accurately track.

This article describes the government's role in this expanding
enterprise. Others describe the government's dependence on private
contractors and one Top Secret America community. On the Web, an
extensive, searchable database built by The Post about Top Secret
America is available at topsecretamerica.com.

Gates, in his interview with The Post, said that he doesn't believe
that the system has become too big to manage but that getting precise
data is sometimes difficult. Singling out the growth of intelligence
units in the Defense Department, he said he intends to review those
programs for waste. “Nine years after 9/11, it makes a lot of sense to
sort of take a look at this and say, ‘OK, we've built tremendous
capability, but do we have more than we need?'” he said.
Related

CIA Director Leon Panetta, who was also interviewed by The Post last
week, said he has begun mapping out a five-year plan for his agency
because the levels of spending since 9/11 are not sustainable.
“Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want
to be prepared for that,” he said. “Frankly, I think everyone in
intelligence ought to be doing that.”

In an interview before he resigned as the director of national
intelligence in May, retired Adm. Dennis Blair said he doesn't believe
there's an overlap and redundancy in the intelligence world. “Much of
what appears to be redundancy is, in fact, providing tailored
intelligence for many different customers,” he said.

Blair also expressed confidence that subordinates told him what he
needed to know. “I have visibility on all the important intelligence
programs across the community, and there are processes in place to
ensure the different intelligence capabilities are working together
where they need to,” he said.

Weeks later, as he sat in the corner of a ballroom at the Willard
Hotel in Washington waiting to give a speech, he mused about The
Post's findings. “After 9/11, when we decided to attack violent
extremism, we did as we so often do in this country,” he said. “The
attitude was, if it's worth doing, it's probably worth overdoing.”

Outside a gated subdivision of mansions in suburban McLean, Va., a
line of cars idles every weekday morning as a new day in Top Secret
America gets under way. The drivers wait patiently to turn left, then
crawl up a hill and around a bend to a destination that is not on any
public map and not announced by any street sign.

Liberty Crossing tries hard to hide from view. But in the winter,
leafless trees can't conceal a mountain of cement and windows the size
of five Wal-Mart stores stacked on top of one another rising behind a
grassy berm. One step too close without the right badge, and men in
black jump out of nowhere, guns at the ready.

Past the armed guards and the hydraulic steel barriers, at least 1,700
federal employees and 1,200 private contractors work at Liberty
Crossing, the nickname for the two headquarters of the Office of the
Director of National Intelligence and its National Counterterrorism
Center. The two share a police force, a canine unit and thousands of
parking spaces.

Liberty Crossing is at the center of the collection of U.S. government
agencies and corporate contractors that mushroomed after the 2001
attacks. But it is not nearly the biggest, the most costly or even the
most secretive part of the 9/11 enterprise.

In an Arlington, Va., office building, the lobby directory doesn't
include the Air Force's mysteriously named XOIWS unit, but there's a
big “Welcome!” sign in the hallway greeting visitors who know to step
off the elevator on the third floor. In Elkridge, Md., a clandestine
program hides in a tall concrete structure fitted with false windows
to look like a normal office building. In Arnold, Mo., the location is
across the street from a Target and a Home Depot. In St. Petersburg,
Fla., it's in a modest brick bungalow in a run-down business park.

Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military
personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances
are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal
cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot
penetrate.

This is not exactly President Dwight Eisenhower's “military-industrial
complex,” which emerged with the Cold War and centered on building
nuclear weapons to deter the Soviet Union. This is a national security
enterprise with a more amorphous mission: defeating transnational
violent extremists.

Much of the information about this mission is classified. And that
lack of specifics is one reason it is so difficult to gauge the
success and identify the problems of Top Secret America, including
whether money is being spent wisely. The U.S. intelligence budget is
vast, publicly announced last year as $75billion, which is 21/2 times
the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many
military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs.

At least 20 percent of the government organizations that exist to fend
off terrorist threats were established or refashioned in the wake of
9/11. Many that existed before the attacks grew to historic
proportions as the Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more
money than they were capable of responsibly spending.

The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, for example, has gone from
7,500 employees in 2002 to 16,500 today. The budget of the National
Security Agency, which conducts electronic eavesdropping, doubled.
Thirty-five FBI Joint Terrorism Task Forces became 106. It was
phenomenal growth that began almost as soon as the Sept. 11 attacks
ended.

Nine days after the attacks, Congress committed $40billion beyond what
was in the federal budget to fortify domestic defenses and to launch a
global offensive against al-Qaida. It followed that up with an
additional $36.5billion in 2002 and $44billion in 2003. That was only
a beginning.

With the quick infusion of money, military and intelligence agencies
multiplied. Twenty-four organizations were created by the end of 2001,
including the Office of Homeland Security and the Foreign Terrorist
Asset Tracking Task Force. In 2002, 37 more were created to track
weapons of mass destruction, collect threat tips and coordinate the
new focus on counterterrorism. That was followed the next year by 36
new organizations; and 26 after that; and 31 more; and 32 more; and 20
or more each in 2007,


Exponential growth

In all, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as
a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people
have required more administrative and logistic support: phone
operators, secretaries, librarians, architects, carpenters,
construction workers, air-conditioning mechanics and, because of where
they work, even janitors with top-secret clearances.

With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of
responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of
the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and
Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching
responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence to bring the colossal effort under control.

While that was the idea, Washington has its own ways.

The first problem was that the law passed by Congress did not give the
director clear legal or budgetary authority over intelligence matters,
which meant he wouldn't have power over the individual agencies he was
supposed to control.

The second problem: Even before the first director, Ambassador John
Negroponte, was on the job, the turf battles began. The Defense
Department shifted billions of dollars out of one budget and into
another so that the ODNI could not touch it, according to two senior
officials who watched the process. The CIA reclassified some of its
most sensitive information at a higher level so the National
Counterterrorism Center staff, part of the ODNI, would not be allowed
to see it, said former intelligence officers involved.

And then came a problem that continues to this day, which has to do
with the ODNI's rapid expansion.

When it opened in the spring of 2005, Negroponte's office was all of
11 people stuffed into a secure vault with closet-size rooms a block
from the White House. A year later, the budding agency moved to two
floors of another building. In April 2008, it moved into its huge
permanent home, Liberty Crossing.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they
remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the
ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing,
information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers
hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last
director, Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as
procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards
and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the
increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to
analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National
Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls
and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those
1.7 billion intercepts into 70 separate databases. The same problem
bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough
analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much
smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the
National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day
flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard
drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of
databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with
one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not
connected, and it amounts to this: It's too hard, and some agency
heads don't really want to give up the systems they have. But there's
some progress: “All my e-mail on one computer now,” Leiter said.
“That's a big deal.”

To get another view of how sprawling Top Secret America has become,
just head west on the toll road toward Dulles International Airport in
Virginia.

As a Michaels craft store and a Books-A-Million give way to the
military intelligence giants Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin,
find the off-ramp and turn left. Those two shimmering-blue five-story
ice cubes belong to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which
analyzes images and mapping data of the Earth's geography. A small
sign obscured by a boxwood hedge says so.

Across the street, in the chocolate-brown blocks, is Carahsoft, an
intelligence agency contractor specializing in mapping, speech
analysis and data harvesting. Nearby is the government's Underground
Facility Analysis Center. It identifies overseas underground command
centers associated with weapons of mass destruction and terrorist
groups and advises the military on how to destroy them.

Clusters of top-secret work exist throughout the country, but the
Washington region is the capital of Top Secret America.

About half of the post-9/11 enterprise is anchored in an arc
stretching from Leesburg south to Quantico in Virginia, back north
through Washington and curving northeast to Linthicum, Md., just north
of the Baltimore-Washington International Marshall Airport. Many
buildings sit within off-limits government compounds or military
bases. Others occupy business parks or are intermingled with
neighborhoods, schools and shopping centers and go unnoticed by most
people who live or play nearby.

Many of the newest buildings are not just utilitarian offices but also
edifices “on the order of the pyramids,” in the words of one senior
military intelligence officer.

Not far from the Dulles Toll Road, the CIA has expanded into two
buildings that will increase the agency's office space by one-third.
To the south, Springfield, Va., is becoming home to the new
$1.8billion National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency headquarters,
which will be the fourth-largest federal building in the area and home
to 8,500 employees. Economic stimulus money is paying hundreds of
millions of dollars for this kind of federal construction across the
region.

It's not only the number of buildings that suggests the size and cost
of this expansion, it's also what is inside: banks of television
monitors. “Escort-required” badges. X-ray machines and lockers to
store cell phones and pagers. Keypad door locks that open special
rooms encased in metal or permanent dry wall, impenetrable to
eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force
capable of responding within 15 minutes. Every one of these buildings
has at least one of these rooms, known as a SCIF, for sensitive
compartmented information facility. Some are as small as a closet;
others are four times the size of a football field.