[R-G] BOOKS-US: Cloak-and-Dagger, Inc.

[Anthony Fenton]

BOOKS-US:  Cloak-and-Dagger, Inc.
By Pratap Chatterjee*
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=44990

VANCOUVER, Canada, Dec 4 (IPS) - 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.

(END/2008)