by Tim Shorrock
Given McConnell’s expansive role in domestic intelligence after taking over as DNI, the most significant part of his confirmation hearing concerned homeland security. “We know that terrorist organizations today are making plans for attacks on our citizens inside our borders,” McConnell told the committee, and later referred to “the current planning by Al Qaeda to attack inside” U.S. borders. In recent years, he said, the Intelligence Community “focused almost exclusively on foreign threats outside our borders. What is new is the need to focus on these threats inside our borders…. This ability to think domestically is, I believe, one of the biggest challenges for the DNI and for the community.” That statement was welcomed by the committee chairman, Senator John D. “Jay” Rockefeller, D–West Virginia, who ended the hearing with a plea for the future DNI to make frequent visits to his state to meet local law enforcement officials.
McConnell’s role as a contractor did come up at least once during the hearing, when Wyden asked about it. But contrary to his pre-hearing pledge, the Oregon lawmaker didn’t attempt to flesh out Booz Allen’s role in intelligence gathering and analysis. Instead, he pleaded ignorance, observing that the Senate committee “doesn’t even know how many contractors are employed by the intelligence community” because, so far, the DNI hadn’t come up with any numbers. McConnell didn’t have the figures, either, but described contracting as a sign of “the goodness of the American system.” “The private sector maintains a significant capability,” he said. “Post-9/11, the government found itself in need of special skills and special talent, and they were not available inside the government. So the government turned to the private sector.” Wyden didn’t ask any obvious follow-ups: If this capability is so badly missing in government, why do companies like yours spend hundreds of millions of dollars to lobby the government to expand contracted jobs? And if it’s so great for the country, why can’t you or the government tell us how much contracting is really going on? The senators’ abdication of their oversight role over the Intelligence Community that McConnell was about to head would have serious consequences.
After leaving Booz Allen and taking over as DNI in the spring of 2007, McConnell moved quickly to shore up his ties with the private sector and express his fealty to the industry from which he’d come. One of his early decisions was to keep secret the long-awaited report on intelligence outsourcing, described in Chapter 1, that had been commissioned in 2006 by his predecessor, John Negroponte. By preventing disclosure of the report’s findings, McConnell saved the Intelligence Community and its largest contractors, including his old company, from the scrutiny that would have inevitably followed in Congress and the press if the true magnitude and scope of outsourcing had been revealed.
In April 2007, only a few weeks after he’d moved into DNI headquarters, McConnell declared a hundred-day plan to improve collaboration between agencies throughout the Intelligence Community. One of the top items on the plan’s to-do list was to streamline the DNI’s acquisition process by reducing the amount of time it takes to bring “complex intelligence platforms” online; this program, promised McConnell, would “dramatically change how the IC does business.” McConnell also pledged to create an Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency, modeled after the Pentagon’s DARPA, to fund technical innovations, particularly “blue sky,” futuristic concepts that individual agencies might not budget for. Significantly, the plan’s focus on acquisitions was listed ahead of several other goals—including integrating foreign and domestic intelligence, accelerating information sharing across agency lines, and clarifying the authority of the DNI—that had been the hallmarks of intelligence reform since the 9/11 attacks. The DNI, McConnell was saying, was now wide open for business.
To make sure that contractors got the message, McConnell created a new DNI position, deputy director for acquisition, and appointed Alden V. Munson, an industry veteran, to fill it. Munson, like McConnell himself, was no ordinary executive. As the former vice president of TRW, he had been involved with highly classified black operations for decades, and, in 2000, had been honored by the National Reconnaissance Office for developing what the NRO described as a “fully automatic electronic intelligence system” to support U.S. military forces in the field. As a partner with the Windsor Group, a defense-oriented investment bank with a large clientele in the intelligence industry, Munson had played an important advisory role in scores of mergers and acquisitions over the past decade.* He was also on the board of directors of bd Systems, Inc., an intelligence contractor specializing in data mining that was acquired in 2006 by Science Applications International Corporation. Munson’s selection signaled the DNI’s determination to leverage the corporate side of intelligence, and its constant litany of buyouts and mergers, to the IC’s advantage. Munson’s “business experience with large acquisitions,” McConnell announced, “will be invaluable as we work to increase our technological agility.”38
McConnell’s most important gesture to the contracting industry involved a little known business association known as the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. Originally founded in 1979 as a forum for informal discussions between the NSA and its contractors, INSA was reorganized in 2005 by a group of prominent contracting executives to serve as a bridge between the industry and the leaders of national intelligence. Those executives, representing Booz Allen, SAIC, Computer Sciences Corporation, and ManTech International, among others, elected McConnell the chairman of INSA in 2005—a relationship that was completely overlooked by the media in its coverage of McConnell’s accession to the DNI.
That was a significant oversight, because shortly after taking over as intelligence chief, McConnell elevated INSA into a virtual partnership with the Office of the DNI, and used its nonprofit status to promote a dialogue within the broader IC on domestic intelligence. When it first began, that dialogue seemed innocent enough; who could argue with developing an industry consensus on this volatile issue? But as we will see later in the book, as McConnell’s term at DNI progressed, he became the leader within the Bush administration of a drive to greatly expand the domestic reach of the NSA and convince Congress to grant immunity to companies that collaborated with the NSA in its surveillance program from its inception in the months after 9/11 to the present day. Seen in this light, McConnell’s experience with INSA, and the role of his company in the Bush-Cheney intelligence regime, take on greater significance.
For years, the most important contractor organization in the Intelligence Community was the Security Affairs Support Association (SASA). Founded in 1979, SASA was the premier industry group for companies doing classified work in what IC insiders call “the intelligence space”—the CIA, the NSA, and the NRO. One of its founders was Leonard Moodispaw, the CEO of Essex Corporation and one of the best-known contractors in the intelligence business. While working at the NSA in the late 1970s, Moodispaw told me, he became frustrated with his inability to speak openly with contractors “in a generic sense.” Strict agency acquisition rules required companies working at the NSA to communicate only with NSA contracting officers. The contractors “could talk to me privately, but didn’t want to talk to the contracting officer because it would become adversarial,” Moodispaw explained. “That’s how SASA was born. I said, ‘there has to be a way to get everybody together without it being us pissing on each other.’”39 He took the idea to Navy Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, the NSA director at the time, and won approval to start an organization to discuss broad issues of concern to both the agency and its contractors. SASA’s first project was to conduct an internal study of the NSA’s acquisitions methods. A new public-private partnership was launched; but, as usual, the actual public was nowhere to be seen.
SASA’s primary function was to create a way for contractors and their government employers to schmooze in peace. Over the years, according to SASA newsletters, many of its events were held at highly secure intelligence facilities normally reserved for meetings of high-level national security officials. In 1988, for
example, the CIA allowed the association to hold a seminar, “Technical Shortfalls in Intelligence Architecture,” in its top secret war room at Langley. “The bubble was packed” for the event, Colloquy, SASA’s in-house publication, reported. “It is fair to observe that it was one of the most stimulating programs in which SASA has ever been involved.” Later that year, the DIA made its Defense Intelligence Analysis Center at Bolling Air Force Base in Virginia available to SASA for an award ceremony for Dr. Edwin Land, who had developed the Polaroid camera for the Intelligence Community. “Many of his countless achievements remain beyond the public domain,” CIA director William Webster said in presenting the award, underscoring the still secretive nature of the industry.
Reading through the lists of speakers at past SASA events is a voyage through the revolving door. In 1991, Duane P. Andrews, then the assistant secretary of defense under Dick Cheney, delivered a keynote speech at a SASA conference; after leaving the Pentagon, he was hired by SAIC and, later, QinetiQ North America, a British-owned defense and intelligence contractor, where he is now the chairman and CEO. Lieutenant General Patrick M. Hughes, the former director of the DIA, once addressed a SASA symposium on “the role of modeling and simulation in the 21st century.” Ten years later, he was a key executive with L-3 Communications and an outspoken advocate for the contracting business. Most of the organization’s past presidents have become major players in the industry as well. Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge, SASA’s president from 1989 to 1992, served in the George H. W. Bush administration as undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, and is now on the board of directors of Lockheed Martin. SASA’s president in 1999 was retired Air Force Lieutenant General James R. Clapper, who went on to head the NGA and later joined the board of GeoEye, a major NGA contractor; now he is back at the Pentagon as the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
The organization’s biggest event was its annual presentation of the Baker Award for contributions to the Intelligence Community. The award was named after William O. Baker, the legendary former director of Bell Labs. It was once the Intelligence Community’s primary R&D center, and was responsible over the years for many key technologies, including sonar tracking systems used by Navy submarines, listening devices for the NSA, and encrypted telephones used by the president and other high-ranking national security officials. The Baker Award typically represents the consensus in government and business of the most influential figure in the IC, and the award dinner was the social event of the year for agencies and contractors alike.
The way SASA chose the recipients was instructive. Every year, the organization invited the departments and agencies of the Intelligence Community, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, and the IC’s scientific, industrial, and academic communities to submit names for nomination. These were reviewed by an awards panel selected by SASA as well as representatives of the secretaries of state and defense and officials with the President’s advisory board and the CIA. The award was traditionally handed out by the director of the CIA. In 2005, it went to retired Air Force Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, who ran the intelligence board for President George H. W. Bush until he was pushed aside in a dispute with Dick Cheney over the Pentagon’s role in intelligence. Other recipients include former CIA director George Tenet; former NGA director Clapper; Charles Allen, a former top CIA officer who is now the intelligence director for the Department of Homeland Security; and, as we saw earlier, Booz Allen’s Joan Dempsey. The awards are now being handed out by INSA, SASA’s successor organization.
In 2005, SASA went through a major shake-up. Its members were trying to figure out the organization’s identity. Was it a networking organization? Or was it a trade association, like the airline groups, all about industry? The collective answer, Tim Sample, INSA’s executive director, told me, was to make SASA a “more professional association” that promoted “collaboration, that partnership between industry, the private sector, academia, and government, for the betterment of what you were trying to do for national security.” In November 2005, SASA was renamed the Intelligence and National Security Alliance, and McConnell, then the executive vice president of Booz Allen, was chosen to spearhead the new organization as chairman of its board of directors.
INSA’s founding corporations included many of the major brand names in intelligence, as well as a few new entries to the industry. Each one, according to the INSA in-house newsletter, made initial investments of between $50, 000 and $150, 000, and pledged at least $25, 000 in membership contributions every year. They are listed on INSA’s Web site: BAE Systems, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), General Dynamics Advanced Information Systems, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, ManTech International, SAIC, and the Potomac Institute, a Washington think tank with close links to the Intelligence Community.
The other two founding companies, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, never belonged to SASA, as the others did. Their presence in the new organization underscores the central role that information technology now plays in the broader national security industry. “[Information technology] is now a huge part of intelligence,” says INSA spokesperson Jason Kello. Asked why the two IT giants joined an organization dedicated to intelligence, he cited INSA’s shift in 2005 from a networking association to a public policy forum. “That’s when Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard stepped forward and helped provide the founding efforts for INSA, monetarily as well as with expertise,” he said.40 HP, which earned $181 million from defense contracts in 2006, is represented on INSA’s board by Tom Hempfield, its vice president for federal sales. Microsoft, which doesn’t break out its federal government earnings, is represented by Linda K. Zecher, vice president for the U.S. public sector. Both executives declined to comment on their companies’ ties with INSA.
Given INSA’s deep roots in the national collection agencies, McConnell was a logical choice for INSA’s first chairman. When he left the organization to take the reins of the Office of the DNI in February 2007, INSA spent several months searching for a successor, and in April chose John Brennan, the president and CEO of The Analysis Corporation. Brennan, whose activities as a contractor are described in more detail later, had extensive experience in the Intelligence Community; he served for more than thirty years at the CIA, and was the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center when it opened in 2004. His breadth of contacts outside of the intelligence mainstream was apparently the key to his selection. “INSA’s board believes that John’s experience in reaching out to departments and agencies in the days immediately after 9/11, including at the state and local levels, best fit INSA’s role of supporting the United States intelligence and national security communities,” INSA stated in a press release. “If anything,” Kello added in an interview, Brennan “understands that intelligence means more than just the federal area. We want to start reaching out to chiefs of police. He comes from a background with the NCTC, understanding intelligence as not just being a Washington-centric policy discussion, like how does this affect people in Kansas City and Miami, that kind of thing.” Brennan is pushing within INSA to expand the reach of U.S. intelligence to the domestic sphere, just as McConnell is doing at the DNI.
The man who manages INSA’s day-to-day activities is Tim Sample, who is himself a second-generation spook. Sample’s father was one of the original members of Army counterintelligence, and spent the years immediately after World War II debriefing Russians at a U.S. Army base in Otsu, Japan. Sample’s career personifies the cozy relationship between the IC and its contractors. After service with intelligence units within the Air Force, he joined the CIA, where he eventually became director of the CIA’s Nonproliferation Center. He went on to become staff director for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, where he worked closely for five years with Porter Goss, R-Florida, the former chairman of the committee who briefly served as CIA director in 2005. Sample left Congress to take a job as vice president for strategic intelligence at Veridian,
a major intelligence contractor that was acquired by General Dynamics in 2005.
Under the leadership of Sample and Brennan, INSA now holds regular discussions with the DNI as well as the leadership of the NSA and the CIA about industry and national security issues. In June 2006, while McConnell was still INSA’s chairman, the Office of the DNI met with INSA to explore “long-term challenges and priorities” facing the Intelligence Community as spelled out in the DNI’s Quadrennial Intelligence Community Review (that review, INSA noted in its newsletter, “previously had not been briefed to the private sector”). The meeting, held at the Northrop Grumman Heritage Conference Center in Chantilly, Virginia, provided a “unique opportunity” for INSA members to “contribute directly to those who are doing the strategic planning and outlining the priorities for the DNI for the next five-to-ten years, a critical time for the Intelligence Community,” according to a press release posted on INSA’s Web site. The event was open only to those holding secret security clearances.
These discussions, Sample assured me in an interview, build “trust” between contractors and the agencies they serve. Private industry and the government “come at things differently, especially in today’s world,” he said. “So it’s an issue of creating that trusted environment, where there can be collaboration and conversation, and where there’s benefits to both sides without a lot of concern about tainting, if you will, industry or government along the way.” He didn’t say much about what these “collaborations and conversations” are about. But he explained, when I asked, that there are things “we want to make sure happen the right way,” because in today’s world “there tends to be a lot of knee-jerk reactions until people understand what the issues are and the goals are. So what we do is try to provide an environment where some of these discussions can be had and people feel fairly comfortable and protected.” But protected from what? Congress? An inquisitive public, concerned about the lack of oversight in defense and intelligence? That isn’t clear.
