Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing

by Tim Shorrock Narrated by Dick Hill

Overview

Running spy networks overseas. Tracking down terrorists in the Middle East. Interrogating enemy prisoners. Analyzing data from spy satellites and intercepted phone calls. All of these are vital intelligence tasks that have traditionally been performed by government officials accountable to Congress and the American people. But that is no longer the case.



Starting during the Clinton administration, when intelligence budgets were cut drastically and privatization of government services became national policy, and expanding dramatically in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA and other agencies were frantically looking to hire analysts and linguists, the intelligence community has been relying more and more on corporations to perform sensitive tasks heretofore considered to be exclusively the work of federal employees. This outsourcing of intelligence activities is now a $50 billion-a-year business that consumes up to 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget. And it's a business that the government has tried hard to keep under wraps.



Drawing on interviews with key players in the intelligence-industrial complex, contractors' annual reports and public filings with the government, and on-the-spot reporting from intelligence industry conferences and investor briefings, Spies for Hire provides the first behind-the-scenes look at this new way of spying. Shorrock shows how corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, CACI International, and IBM have become full partners with the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Pentagon in their most sensitive foreign and domestic operations. He explores how this partnership has led to wasteful spending and how it threatens to erode the privacy protections and congressional oversight that is so important to American democracy.



Shorrock exposes the kinds of spy work the private sector is doing, such as interrogating prisoners in Iraq, managing covert operations, and collaborating with the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans' overseas phone calls and e-mails. And he casts light on a "shadow intelligence community" made up of former top intelligence officials who are now employed by companies that do this spy work, such as former CIA directors George Tenet and James Woolsey. Shorrock also traces the rise of Michael McConnell from his days as head of the NSA, to being a top executive at Booz Allen Hamilton, to returning to government as the nation's chief spymaster.



From CIA covert actions to NSA eavesdropping, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, from the Pentagon's techno-driven war in Iraq to the coming global battles over information dominance and control of cyberspace, contractors are doing it all. Spies for Hire goes behind today's headlines to highlight how private corporations are aiding the growth of a new and frightening national surveillance state.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

Even James Bond is temping these days. According to investigative journalist Shorrock, the CIA and other intelligence agencies now have more contractors working for them than they do spies of their own. Often former staff hired back at double or triple their former government salaries, these private contractors do everything from fighting in Afghanistan to interrogating prisoners, aiming spy satellites and supervising secret agents. Shorrock gives a comprehensive-at times eye-glazing-rundown of the players in the industry, and his book is valuable for its detailed panorama of 21st-century intelligence work. He uncovers serious abuses-contractor CACI International figured prominently in the Abu Ghraib outrages-and nagging concerns about corrupt ties between intelligence officials and private corporations, industry lobbying for a national surveillance state, the withering of the intelligence agencies' in-house capacities and the displacement of an ethos of public service by a profit motive. However, the bulk of the outsourcing Shorrock unearths is rather pedestrian, involving the management of mundane IT systems and various administrative services, and this exposé insinuates more skullduggery than it demonstrates. (May)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Reviews

Private corporations employing former high-ranking federal government and military officials are making huge profits from secret contracts with the CIA, NSA and various baronies in the Defense Department, avers freelance journalist Shorrock. In his first book, the author penetrates the covert worlds of corporations with names like CACI International Inc., Mantech International and Booz Allen Hamilton, as well as government agencies spending tens of billions of taxpayer dollars with no accountability. Dozens of previous titles have examined U.S. failures of information collection and analysis, especially leading up to and after 9/11. Shorrock excavates new dirt by focusing on the business of intelligence: the bottom line in dollars at the private corporations that win government contracts, often without competitive bidding or even public disclosure. The author does a remarkable job of learning as much as he can: gaining entry into conventions of defense contractors usually closed to journalists; sitting through the hearings of congressional committees whose members are regularly stonewalled by the government agencies they are supposed to oversee; reading through partially declassified documents. Peppered with acronyms, descriptions of highly technical hardware and hundreds of unfamiliar names both corporate and human, the book can be difficult to read, but Shorrock's prose is lucid, his passionate brief for open government inspiring. Occasionally, he describes fiascoes already known to the public, such as the nasty interrogation techniques at Abu Ghraib, that illuminate the shadowy role of private corporations performing highly profitable contracted duties once handled by governmentemployees. Shorrock forcefully makes the case that only members of Congress, ostensibly accountable to the citizens who elected them, can halt the inefficiencies and occasional outright financial corruption emanating from the private contractor/intelligence agency nexus. A sterling example of why investigative journalists are valuable during an era of deep, broad and unconscionable government secrecy. Agent: John Ware/John Ware Literary Agency

From the Publisher

"Tim Shorrock is walking, and mapping, a startling fault line of these crazy days: the way government is outsourcing its most basic functions at a time of peril. Replacing public service with private transactions — often shadowy and unaccountable — is what helped bring down Rome. Without fierce scrutiny, and the kind of sharp-eyed disclosures this book provides, it can bring down America. A must read." — Ron Suskind, author of The One Percent Doctrine

"Spies for Hire is an excellent roadmap to the daunting new terrain of U.S. intelligence, in which the explosive growth of intelligence contracting threatens to overwhelm any possibility of independent oversight. In this groundbreaking work, Tim Shorrock explores who has benefitted, who has paid, and why it matters to us all." — Steven Aftergood, Project on Government Secrecy, Federation of American Scientists

"Tim Shorrock is a digger, and he has penetrated a secret and fascinating world to write a telling and readable book." — Evan Thomas, editor at large of Newsweek, author of Sea of Thunder

"Tim Shorrock's well-researched and convincing book reveals how the intelligence community now subcontracts out most of its work — 70 percent — to private-sector companies that inevitably have their own agendas, which may or may not accord with the national interest. By laying out very specifically how all this works, Shorrock has provided a very important service to the country." — Burton Hersh, author of The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA

" A sterling example of why investigative journalists are valuable....A remarkable job." — USA Today

"A disturbing overview of the intelligence community." — The New York Times

"Valuable.... Contains some important, timely truths about the influx of private entrepreneurs into America's spy agencies." — The Washington Post Book World

"A definitive book." — The Nation

"Path-breaking.... Destined to be the gold standard on intelligence contracting." — Asia Times

DECEMBER 2008 - AudioFile

Outsourcing is everywhere—including the cloak-and-dagger business. Much of the government's intelligence gathering is now done by private companies—and very profitably. Dick Hill takes us through a tangle of acronyms and who's-doing-what-for-whom with his usual professional clarity. He picks up on the author's skepticism and sets off quotes, and there are many, with pauses, adding interest and some variety to a long cautionary tale of monitoring communication and satellite spying. Concentration is required to remember which company does what and with whom, usually ex-CIA employees. Not all books translate well to audio; this may be one that, no matter how well read, does not. J.B.G. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171269944
Publisher:	Tantor Audio
Publication date:	07/28/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Spies for Hire The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
By Tim Shorrock
Simon & Schuster Copyright © 2008 Tim Shorrock
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743282246


Prologue

ON MAY 9, 2006, John Humphrey, a former CIA officer making his way up the management ladder of one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, made a stunning disclosure to Intelcon, a national intelligence conference and exhibition at a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. Outsourcing, Humphrey declared, was out of control. Contractors deployed in Iraq and other hotspots overseas were making decisions and handling documents that, in earlier times, had been the sole responsibility of U.S. military and intelligence officers. This had caused a "paradigm shift" in the relationship between government and the private sector, and left companies like his in an untenable position.

Five years ago, "you'd never have a contractor supporting an operation on the field where they're making a recommendation to an officer," said Humphrey. Nor would you find a contractor "making little contributions here and there" in the reports intelligence officers sent back to Washington. "This concerns me a lot, the way these lines are blurring," he went on. "We shouldn't be involved in some of these intelligence operations, or the planning, or the interrogations and what have you." Unless government started taking more responsibility in the field, he warned, the "blowback" for the contracting industry could be profound.

The intelligence professionals in the room looked stunned. They had just sat through two daysof upbeat discussions about the annual $10-billion expansion of U.S. intelligence budgets and the opportunities that money presented for defense contractors, information technology vendors, and former national security officials who still held their top secret security clearances. Upstairs in the exhibition hall, thirty-five companies were displaying the latest high-tech spying equipment and competing to recruit new employees, who could earn up to three times government pay by migrating to the private sector. Words like "blowback" did not come easily at such gatherings.

But this speaker, and the corporation he represented, had an exceptional story to tell. Humphrey was employed by CACI International Inc., a $1.8-billion information technology (IT) company that does more than 70 percent of its business with the Department of Defense. For many years, CACI had been one of the Pentagon's favorite contractors. It was particularly respected for its professional evaluations of software and IT products supplied to the military by outside vendors. During the late 1990s, CACI moved heavily into military intelligence when the Pentagon, its budget reduced by nearly 30 percent from the days of the Cold War and unhappy with the quality of intelligence it was getting from the CIA, began bringing in private sector analysts for the first time.

This proved to be a prescient move for CACI when nineteen Muslim fanatics linked to Al Qaeda, the global terrorist organization then based in Afghanistan, steered three hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the Intelligence Community began scouring Washington for analysts, covert operatives, translators, and interrogators it could deploy in the hunt for the perpetrators, and to fill the ranks of hastily organized counterintelligence centers at the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies. CACI, which already had a small army of trained and cleared intelligence specialists holding security clearances, was perfectly positioned to pick up the slack.

Between 2002 and 2006, CACI signed dozens of new contracts, acquired twelve companies, and more than tripled its revenue, from $564 million a year to nearly $2 billion. Its astonishing growth catapulted the company from a bit role in IT to one of the key players in what has become a $50-billion-a-year Intelligence-Industrial Complex. "CACI is a cash-flow story," Dave Dragics, CACI's chief operating officer, boasted to investors in 2006. "Whenever you hear bad news, it's usually good news for us."

But along the road to this gravy train, CACI stumbled. The trouble began in the summer of 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, shocked by the resistance to its occupation of Iraq, began filling Iraqi prisons with thousands of people suspected of participating in the insurgency The U.S. Army, however, was desperately short of interrogators, particularly anyone with military experience. Through the Department of the Interior, which had subcontracted management of the Pentagon's IT contracts in 2001, the Army renewed several contracts it had signed during the Bosnian war with Premier TechnologyGroup, a small intelligence shop that CACI acquired in 2003. Within weeks of CACI's acquisition, its PTG unit dispatched two dozen former military interrogators and prison guards to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. Many of them were unaware of the nature of the work they would face.

Tasked with the job of rooting out the leaders of the insurgency, some CACI employees directed military interrogators to use techniques on Iraqi prisoners that were, to put it mildly, far outside the norm of civilized conduct. Reports of the mistreatment soon made their way to U.S. commanders in Iraq, who appointed an Army general to investigate conditions at the prison. In the spring of 2004, CACI was thrust into the public limelight when the Army's report, along with hundreds of graphic photographs of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated, were leaked to the press. The Bush administration was thrust into one of its most serious foreign policy crises. After leaving the Pentagon in 2006, Rumsfeld would call Abu Ghraib the worst thing that happened during his five and a half years as secretary of defense (despite being the architect of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, however, he never took responsibility for the actions of his soldiers and contractors).

The details of what CACI's people did at Abu Ghraib were the subject of an insightful book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Abu Ghraib story, and the events recalled in excruciating detail by former Iraqi prisoners in a 2007 film made by Hollywood producer Robert Greenwald called Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. Two internal Army reports concluded that CACI's contract interrogators introduced some of the most brutal practices employed at the prison, including the use of attack dogs. The images of one naked prisoner, cringing in terror as a German shepherd snapped his teeth just inches from the man's genitals, horrified the world. Combined with the testimony of several guards who followed the orders of the CACI and Army interrogators, the pictures convinced U.S. military tribunals to convict two of the dog handlers for assault. But no case was ever made against CACI's men: even though one of CACI's employees, a former prison guard named Steven Stefanowicz, was identified at trial as suggesting the use of the dogs, he has never been charged with a crime. Nor has CACI itself.

Instead, J. P. "Jack" London, CACI's chairman and CEO, made it his life's mission to exonerate his company from any wrongdoing. From the moment the Abu Ghraib story broke in 2004, London fought back with a vengeance, attacking journalists who printed stories about the scandal, and generally castigating anyone who dared to suggest that CACI bore any responsibility for the abuse. At the other extreme, London called Steven Stefanowicz, the man who helped introduce the use of attack dogs at Abu Ghraib, a model employee and praised him for doing "a damned fine job" in Iraq.

The Pentagon, far from chastising its wayward client, continues to reward CACI: despite the unresolved issues involving CACI's role at Abu Ghraib, the Department of Defense has awarded CACI millions of dollars in new contracts, including a three-year, $156 million contract signed in 2006 to provide IT support and training to instructors at the Army's Intelligence School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The Office of the Secretary of Defense has hired CACI for two contracts, worth more than $20 million in total, to support the Pentagon's transformation initiatives and manage its classified and unclassified computer networks supporting homeland security and the global "war on terror." 3 In a lucrative arrangement announced in December 2006, the Army placed CACI in an elite group of companies allowed to bid on $35 billion worth of IT and logistics contracts over the next twenty years.

In his remarks to the intelligence conference,* Humphrey, who had worked as a CIA agent in Europe for more than ten years before joining CACI, was careful not to accept, or even apportion, any blame for what happened at the prison. The individuals involved in the "Abu Ghraib incidents," as he called them, "had the best intentions." A contractor at an internment camp is in "a very stressful situation. You're being told you have to do this, that you're the only one who can do this." Contractors, he concluded, "need to settle back down to being in a supportive role." Inside the government, "there's a little too much right now of 'let's get a contractor and life is good.' There needs to be more of a setting of a line." To date, his speech is the most detailed and honest analysis of Abu Ghraib to come from CACI.

I asked CACI if I could interview London or another executive about Humphrey's allegations and the company's work in Iraq. Jody Brown, CACI's vice president for corporate communications, replied by e-mail. CACI, she said, could not confirm information regarding "employees, vendors, or anyone associated with the company," and has posted a "comprehensive" report on its Web site called Facts About CACI in Iraq. "The subject you have selected for your book is interesting and quite timely," Brown added. "As you seem to be aware, considering your interest and coverage of the company over the past two years, we provide high-value critical information technology services to the U.S. government. Our services are aligned with the nation's highest priorities to prevail in the war on terrorism, secure our homeland and improve government services to our citizens. Most of the services we provide in this area are classified and therefore by contract we cannot discuss them."

What happened at Abu Ghraib, and CACI's refusal to discuss it, stands as a kind of high-water mark for intelligence contracting. In 2006, the year Humphrey delivered his comments, the cost of America's spying and surveillance activities outsourced to contractors reached $42 billion, or about 70 percent of the estimated $60 billion the government spends every year on foreign and domestic intelligence. Unfortunately, we cannot know the true extent of outsourcing, for two reasons. First, in 2007, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) refused to release an internal report on contracting out of fear that its disclosure would harm U.S. national security interests. Second, most intelligence contracts are classified, allowing companies like CACI to hide their activities behind a veil of secrecy.

This book is an attempt to pierce that veil.

Our story will begin with a broad overview of America's new Intelligence-Industrial Complex, the agencies it serves, its key industrial players, and the former high-ranking national security officials who run its largest companies. After that, we'll take a close look at Booz Allen Hamilton, one of the government's most important contractors, and learn how retired Navy Admiral J. Michael McConnell, the former director of Booz Allen's intelligence business, is remaking the nation's intelligence agenda as director of national intelligence. Next, we'll turn to the history of outsourcing in intelligence, focusing primarily on how contracting advanced during the administration of Bill Clinton and the reign of former CIA director George J. Tenet over national intelligence.

After that, we'll bore in on the key intelligence agencies -- the CIA, the many agencies under the command and control system of the Pentagon, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). We'll then take a closer look at the companies, such as CACI and ManTech International, that depend almost entirely on intelligence contracts for their revenues. That will bring us to domestic intelligence and the role of the private sector in the NSA's warrantless surveillance program. In the final chapter, we'll also look at the process of oversight in Congress, particularly as the new Democratic majorities in the House and Senate have tried to shed light on the Bush administration's actions and the role contractors have played in them.

Before embarking on the narrative, allow me to state a major caveat. This is a book about the business of intelligence. It doesn't claim to be an authoritative study of intelligence under the Bush administration. Nor do I claim any special expertise in the inner working of the Intelligence Community. I leave that job to the many excellent reporters out there covering intelligence as a daily beat. But that aside, contracting provides a unique window into intelligence. By ferreting out companies and what they do, we will learn much about how U.S. intelligence operates and what the CIA, the NSA, and other agencies have been up to over the past ten years, both at home and abroad.

Copyright © 2008 by Tim Shorrock

Continues...

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