VANCOUVER - When Barack Obama visits the Virginia headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the not-too-distant future, he might want to scan the room to see how many of them sport green badges, the telltale sign that they are contractors and not federal employees.
At the dozen or so other intelligence agencies scattered around the Washington area, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation on Pennsylvania Avenue or the Maryland-based National Security Agency, he is likely to find quite a number are from the private sector.
A recent federal survey identified some 37,000 private employees in the intelligence sector who work side-by-side with civil servants as analysts, technology specialists and mission managers. About a quarter of this number are involved in the cloak-and-dagger activities of intelligence collection and operations. Indeed, well over half of the 66 billion dollars spent on intelligence in the United States is believed to go to private military contractors that range from the very well known Boeing and Lockheed to much more obscure companies like Anteon, LPA and Verint Systems.
To learn about the 16 agencies that run the nation's spy operations, Obama might pick up a copy of Jeffrey T. Richelson's authoritative handbook on the intelligence agencies ('The U.S. Intelligence Community'), but if he wants to know what the green badgers do inside the agencies, he'll need a copy of Tim Shorrock's 'Spies for Hire,' released earlier this year by Simon and Schuster in hardback.
A new updated paperback version will be available right after the new administration takes office this spring.
'We Can't Spy...If We Can't Buy,' was the catch-phrase on a PowerPoint slide presented by the Terri Everett, the senior procurement executive of the Director of National Intelligence that Shorrock uncovered last year that sums up the attitude of federal intelligence managers, beginning with the Bill Clinton administration.
Shorrock, an investigative journalist who writes for magazines like The Nation, Mother Jones and websites like Salon, is a former business reporter who worked at the Journal of Commerce. He has dug through hundreds of websites and press releases to compile a guide of precisely what the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations have bought for the spy community in the last two decades.
'Spies for Hire' is rather like the best-selling book 'Code Names' by William M. Arkin, a veritable encyclopedia of intelligence and military secrets, stuffed with details that make one's eyes glaze over. Yet it is the only guide that exists to the new alphabet soup of companies that work primarily out of places like Tyson's Corner in northern Virginia.
Shorrock notes that private contractors have always been part and parcel of the U.S. intelligence community, notably in the field of reconnaissance, starting with the U-2 spy plane in the 1950s that Lockhheed built. Even today the bulk of the money spent on contractors is for delivering hardware like satellites.
What is new is companies like Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) of San Diego that have multi-million dollar contracts with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency to create software that analyses the email and phone conversations of ordinary U.S. citizens. While these projects have alarmed civil rights groups, Shorrock notes also that if there's one generalisation to be made about them, it's that 'they haven't worked very well, and some have been spectacular failures.'
Another new trend that Shorrock touches on, although not in detail, is the use of private contractors like CACI and L-3 to provide private interrogators and linguists to the U.S. Army in Afghanistan and Iraq, some of whom have been accused of supervising torture, including participation in the torture at Abu Ghraib.
'It's not just the secrecy, or the corruption, or the cronyism, or the lack of oversight that's wrong with intelligence contracting: it's also the extent of outsourcing itself and the way it's carried out,' says Shorrock in his book. 'The government has yet to spell out what intelligence functions are safe to outsource and which are not.'
What jobs are 'inherently governmental'? Companies like Halliburton already do the bulk of the cooking and cleaning for the military at home and abroad, but is interrogation going too far?
Interrogators that this reporter knows who have worked at Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Camp Cropper and Guantanamo Bay say that they are often more qualified than the soldiers that they work with, and this is mostly true.
Despite several well-publicised cases of alleged contractor abuse during interrogation, the vast majority of the cases of abuse documented by groups like Human Rights Watch in its 'By the Numbers' report, the most detailed study to date, have mostly been conducted by military personnel and not contractors.
Some private contractors have actually challenged government propaganda, like David Kay of SAIC who went into Iraq in 2003 to search for the weapons of mass destruction that Pres. Bush claimed Saddam Hussein had hidden. Kay returned in January 2004 to say Iraq did not have any such weapons.
Yet the contract interrogators I have spoken to themselves point out the lack of supervision that they are given and the fact that the worst punishment that they are ever threatened with is being fired.
The question then is who will do this oversight and decide what can be outsourced and what should not?
Obama has already said that he will be extremely vigilant. 'Under my plan, if contractors break the law, they will be prosecuted,' he told students at the University of Iowa last year.
'I've proposed tougher government reforms than any other candidate in this race -- reforms that would eliminate the kind of no-bid contracts that this administration has given to Blackwater,' he said.
But Shorrock's book demonstrates that the Obama administration is facing the very same conflicts of interest that the Bush administration did because most of the top-ranking officials in the intelligence industry today are already compromised by having crossed back and forth from public to private employment (at twice their government pay or more) and then back again.
Take the case of Michael McConnell, the current director of national intelligence, who ran the National Security Agency before quitting to work for Booz Allen Hamilton for 10 years, and then returned to work for the Bush administration as the nation's spy chief, where he effectively oversees the agencies that provided most of the revenues of his former employer. McConnell also used to head the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, or INSA, a chamber of commerce for the intelligence contractors.
Obama's first pick for the head of the CIA was John Brennan, a former CEO of The Analysis Corporation, a major intelligence contractor, who actually has the same job at INSA that Mike McConnell once held.
Brennan has since dropped out of the running, but Obama observers would do well to refer to 'Spies for Hire' to see what conflicts of interest his future intelligence choices might bring to the table.
Pratap Chatterjee is managing editor of CorpWatch. His new book 'Halliburton's Army' from Nation Books will be in stores in February 2009.
12 Comments so far
Show AllPlease play 007 with someone eles's planet! Strap yourselves to a nose cone and fire yourselves to some black hole in outer space, another galaxy, another universe! No elliptical orbiting with a future return to Earth. Just get out of our lives!
Who needs these guys? The whole military industrial complex and associated nutsacks can get galactically lost! dell
WHat scares me about this is that these private armies are not even a whole step away from being called upon for a gov't coup by some selfish bahstud, someone who just can't do without the power and control at his fingertips if he has the army on the ground to keep the people hostage.
Think people.
If it can be imagined, it can happen. If I can see it, its happened.
Look.
Just look.
Sight will arrive.
"When Barack Obama visits the Virginia headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency in the not-too-distant future, he might want to scan the room to see how many of them sport green badges, the telltale sign that they are contractors and not federal employees."
When Barack Obama visits the Virginia headquaters, he's going to find out that the President of the United States doesn't have the "intelligence clearance" that he though he might have.
After this realization, he might want to read Rep. Louis McFadden's statement about the "Fed" in the Congressional Record of June 10, 1932.
Back-door bailouts for even more shaky corporations which vend dubious products that nobody wants to buy except the government.
Welcome to my World . Surveillance torture Victim Bradenton Florida 24 months and running.
Email and phone tapping is just the tip of the Ice burg my friends.
Try 24/7 surviellance ground crews. Though in Florida , its not covert surviellance to catch really bad terrorists, its gang stalking torture to get create suspects, build their spy network and get rid of political enemies or undesirable community members.
Talk about a grab for job security , power and money.
They are private contractors , no suspects , no money.
No oversight, or checks and balances, if you get on a surviellance list, your life is over, no justice.You will never be allowed to come forward and testify about what has happened to you.
Why. Patriot ACT , they use NSL letters with gag orders to control everyone in your life and all your contacts,slander and character assassinate the victim.
They will come into your home,when you are not their, and if you own porn or sex toys you are a sexual deviant. They will spike your food with drugs to disorient you, confuse you, then when you leave your house you will be mob stalked and tail gated with dark tinted glass trucks.When you are home they will use noise campaigns and D.E.W's ( Directed Energy Weapons) to hurt you .
You wont know whats happening to you, it will scare you into a complete delusional state in a short time. And no one will believe you because they have told everyone you know you are a heavy drug user about to snap.
Thats your private contractors of the DHS spending your money.Your Fire Fighters and EMS workers, and local law enforcement and community watch groups.
THIS IS NATION WIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A lot of things started to make sense to me after I read Spys For Hire.
Within a fifty mile Radius of where I live there are, 2 L3 Facilities, Lockheed Martin , Booz Allen Hamilton, and Central Command for the Iraq war. Tampa Florida.
This is Spy Capital USA.
Trust me , the torture stories are all true, these people are experts at creating job security.
If you torture someone to say they are building nuclear bombs , you may have just added 5 more years to your contracts.
Get my point. Torture and Gang Stalking for surviellance creates what hey need to survive.
Most of the grunts think they serving their country.
The leaders of these organizations are pure evil, because they know exactly what they are doing.
Do you for 1 second believe that this country has so many Terrorists or Home Grown Terrorists that we need to have 1 in every 15 people become a government informant deciding by a quota systems what is suspicious activity.
BornFreeMen
Restore Checks and Balances ,dismantle the private spy machine, Repeal the Patriot Act, and Save the Constitution.
Fascism - Privatized profits and socialized losses.
Great news commentary!
So there are tens of thousands of spies, "beginning with the Bill Clinton administration," and no one suspected that 9/11 was brewing. It was such a big surprise.
Does anyone else question whether this is money well spent?
GoldenMean is correct that this is a means of reducing the (nominal) legal culpability of the US government in war crimes.
NateW is insufficiently cynical of the US military. To paraphrase Smedley Butler ("War is a Racket"), the US military is primarily muscle for organized (crime/)corporations, and as such not really different from mercenaries. Except, mercenaries may be more professional.
Read "The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace," and you will find that little has changed.
Private contractors and mercenaries are how the corporate criminals are able to use the governmental and military aparatus of the US of A to carry out theatres of war in Colombia and elsewhere, without having to declare war to send in our own troops, alert congress to where the money is spent, or report any casualties... Often recruiters for these MC's hire US & foreign military personnel who have already been trained by the taxpayer, then go to work doing the same job for Halliburton, CACI, Dyncorp, etc for twice the pay, again paid with taxdollars...
There is more secrecy and plausable deniability for the civilian spooks running the pentagon if they outsource to corporations and contractors to carryout their dirty work... if they get caught running heroin & cocaine & guns & sex slaves & rackets (like CACI in Bosnia)... they will say it was just a few bad apples...
They may take Uncle Sam's money but who are moles of fortune really spying on and for?
Private spies should be viewed in the same light as mercenaries; Sun-Tzu and Machiavelli were derisive of both. The reason as to why applies, their loyalty is not to the state, but to their pocketbook. The USA already had a private intelligence company before, the Pinkerton's, and anyone slightly familiar with American history shudder at that sordid history. It would appear as if history has not been learned from.
www.wunderman-comics.com