[Infowarrior] - The Business of Intelligence Gathering

[Richard Forno]

June 15, 2008
Off the Shelf
The Business of Intelligence Gathering
By HARRY HURT III
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/business/15shelf.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

AMERICA is ruled by an “intelligence-industrial complex” whose  
allegiance is not to the taxpaying public but to a cabal of private- 
sector contractors that have disgraced our national image and  
potentially compromised our national security for the sake of making  
profits.

That is the central thesis of “Spies for Hire: The Secret World of  
Intelligence Outsourcing” by Tim Shorrock (Simon & Schuster, $27). Mr.  
Shorrock is an investigative journalist who has contributed to The  
Nation, Harper’s Magazine, Mother Jones, Salon and various newspapers.  
His writing here is closer in style to a corporate annual report than  
to a magazine feature, and he makes extensive use of secondary sources  
like other books. But his book is worth plowing through because of its  
disturbing overview of the intelligence community, also known as “the  
I.C.”

Mr. Shorrock says our government is outsourcing 70 percent of its  
intelligence budget, or more than $42 billion a year, to a “secret  
army” of corporate vendors. Because of accelerated privatization  
efforts after 9/11, these companies are participating in covert  
operations and intelligence-gathering activities that were considered  
“inherently governmental” functions reserved for agencies like the  
Central Intelligence Agency, he says.

The roster of outside intelligence contractors includes behemoths like  
AT&T and Verizon Communications and lesser-known companies like the  
military contractor CACI International. Remember, the  
telecommunications companies are said to have willingly aided the  
National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program and a  
program capable of monitoring the Internet communications of virtually  
every American, Mr. Shorrock tells us.

CACI’s contract interrogators have been accused of introducing some of  
the most brutal practices at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, including  
the use of attack dogs. (The company has denied the accusations.) But  
the Pentagon has given CACI a three-year, $156 million contract to  
provide information technology support and training to instructors at  
the Army’s intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

Mr. Shorrock cites instances of spy industry corruption, like the case  
of Randy Cunningham, the former Republican congressman convicted of  
taking $2.4 million in bribes for steering government business to two  
military contractors.

But some of the book’s most intriguing assertions concern the  
permeating influence of the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. In  
2006, Mr. Shorrock reports, Booz Allen amassed $3.7 billion in  
revenue, much of which came from classified government contracts  
exempt from public oversight. Among its more than 18,000 employees are  
R. James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, and Joan Dempsey, a  
former longtime United States intelligence official who declared in a  
2004 speech, “I like to refer to Booz Allen as the shadow I.C.”

The “revolving door” between Booz Allen and the I.C. is personified by  
Mike McConnell, who joined the firm after serving as head of the  
National Security Agency under President Bill Clinton, only to return  
as director of national intelligence under President Bush. Mr.  
Shorrock says Mr. McConnell is the only person who has “gone from a  
top position with industry into the most senior leadership position in  
the nation’s spy system.”

Another company, the Science Applications International Corporation of  
San Diego, is one of the top five C.I.A. contractors and a  
particularly favored vendor of the National Security Agency, the book  
says. Mr. Shorrock says that “so many N.S.A. officials have gone to  
work for S.A.I.C. that intelligence insiders call it ‘N.S.A. West.’ ”

Mr. Shorrock has a major concern with the sheer extent of intelligence  
outsourcing and whether it increases the potential for sensitive  
information to fall into the wrong hands. Even the task of  
administering the government’s database for tracking outside  
contracts, he says, has been outsourced to a private-sector  
contractor. But the government has yet to identify which intelligence  
functions are safe to outsource and which aren’t, he says. “As a  
result,” he writes, “ decisions about contracting are still being made  
on the fly with little regard to their short- and long-term  
consequences.”

MUCH of Mr. Shorrock’s terminology may seem to have a left-wing taste  
to it, but plenty of it comes directly from conservatives. In fact, he  
says the term “intelligence-industrial Complex” was coined (with a nod  
to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 reference to the nation’s “military- 
industrial complex”) by Herbert A. Browne. Mr. Browne is a retired  
vice admiral turned AT&T executive and a former executive director of  
the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, an  
industry trade group.

“The fact that we can have a professional intelligence organization  
outside of the government to support the government is no more  
offensive to me than the fact that we have 80 percent of our military  
communications traveling on commercial satellites or commercial fiber  
optics,” Mr. Browne tells the author. “In fact, I find it very healthy  
for the nation.”

Mr. Shorrock unequivocally believes otherwise. “In the end, if America  
is to reform its intelligence apparatus, decisions about resources and  
structure must be made by its citizens through the government they  
elected — not by outside contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and  
S.A.I.C.,” he writes. “The spies for hire may not like the idea of  
subjecting the intelligence process to more oversight, but they’re not  
the ones paying the bill. It’s high time that we returned intelligence  
to its rightful owners, the American public and its representatives in  
Congress.”

Meanwhile, it appears that there’s no business like the spy business,  
and the spy business is nobody’s business but its own.