by Tim Shorrock
In 2004, Cisco and twenty-seven other contractors involved in computerized warfare formed a business association called the Network Centric Operations Industry Consortium (NCOIC). Its purpose, according to the NCOIC Web site, is to “recommend a unified approach that would enable sensors, communications and information systems to interact within a global network centric environment” and enable “continuously increasing levels of interoperability” across government, corporate, and national lines. Corporate members include BAE Systems, Boeing, General Dynamics, IBM, ITT Industries, L-3 Communications, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Argon ST, CACI International, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems, as well as a handful of companies from the U.K., Sweden, Germany, and Israel.
In 2007, the consortium’s day-to-day activities were run by the chairman of its executive council, Harry D. Raduege, a retired Air Force lieutenant general. He came to the NCOIC after serving for five years as the director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, which manages the Pentagon’s netcentric operations and oversees the acquisition of all communications networks within the Department of Defense, from the White House to the lowest tactical levels of the military. DISA also oversees the construction of the Global Information Grid.*
As a retired Air Force general and the former director of command and control systems for the North American Aerospace Defense Command, Raduege has had extensive experience in netcentric operations. By using advanced technology and the power of the Internet to increase the accuracy and speed of air strikes, Raduege explains, U.S. forces can gain an edge over an adversary that, he says, doesn’t respect international borders and “makes his stand” in the cities and neighborhoods where his own people live. “These hoodlums, these terrorists, hide in the mosques, they hide in the hospitals, they hide in the schools,” he said. “So when they move away from the noncombatants—because that’s the way we function as a society here—we try to get them when they are by themselves, away from the noncombatants.”13
Here’s where technology—a field that Raduege knows well—comes into play. “We have someone on the ground with night goggles,” he continued. “Think of that. See, these guys think under darkness, they can move. So they start moving under darkness, but the guy with the goggles sees them, identifies them, they call this in, or type this in, over a data stream to a command center. And the command center gets an aircraft, they go airborne quickly, they fly over, they look down, they use a GPS, making sure they are actually on the right target, another person on the ground puts a laser on it to make the weapon follow the laser to the guy’s front-shirt pocket. That’s network centric warfare right there.”*
Among the key institutions created to expand the reach of intelligence into military operations are the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers, which link the Pentagon’s nine Unified Combatant Commands and U.S. Forces in Korea with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Known by the acronym JIOCs, these centers were formally established in April 2006 by Stephen Cambone after his office completed a yearlong study of the defense intelligence system. They have become the domain—and a major profit center—for SAIC, one of the largest contractors in the Intelligence-Industrial Complex.
The JIOCs are jointly controlled by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Office of the DNI. They are designed to integrate DoD intelligence with traditional military operations and functions, with the ultimate aim of increasing the speed, power, and combat effectiveness of U.S. military forces. The Department of Defense describes them as the “fulcrum” of a worldwide group of joint intelligence organizations that gather, interpret, and act on information collected by the DIA and its sister agencies, the NSA, the NGA, and the NRO.
During their first eighteen months in operation, the JIOCs were commanded by Lieutenant General William G. Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin is an evangelical Christian who stirred controversy in 2003 for making outlandish, anti-Muslim remarks; he was mildly reprimanded by the White House for referring to the U.S. battles in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a broader war against “a guy named Satan.” Despite his extremist views, he is highly respected within the Intelligence Community for his long military experience, which has included service in Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia, and Iraq. “What we’re trying to do is move towards operationalizing intelligence,” he said in a Pentagon press briefing on the JIOCs in April 2006. In a speech later that year to a conference on geospatial intelligence, Boykin described the JIOCs as “coordinated, synergistic efforts” that are “running intelligence as an operation.”14
Many details of the JIOC system are classified. But the first operational tests of the JIOC concept may have taken place in January 2007, when commandos from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command launched air strikes against Al Qaeda bases and personnel in Somalia, where the U.S.-supported Ethiopian army had routed an Islamist government that had sheltered the terrorist Al Qaeda army. The attacks, carried out by Air Force C-130 gunships, were guided in part with intelligence supplied by the CIA and the NSA, which, if the public descriptions of the joint intelligence system are to be believed, would have flowed out of the JIOCs, the highest level command for sharing military intelligence.15 The JIOC in Iraq, meanwhile, is serving as a “template” for other new centers around the world and, according to the DNI, is “beginning to benefit operations down to the battalion level.”16
As the JIOCs become institutionalized within the military, Pentagon documents claim, they will slowly morph into the larger Global Information Grid, which will eventually include the Distributed Common Ground Systems being built for the armed services by Raytheon and other companies, using standards set by both the Department of Defense and the director of national intelligence.17 Surprisingly, from the beginning, Pentagon officials stressed that the JIOCs would take their orders from the DNI. In his April 2006 briefing, for example, General Boykin explained that the DIA director, Michael Maples, will “take requirements” for the JIOCs directly from Mary Margaret Graham, the deputy director of intelligence for collection, and pass them down to the Combatant Commands, thus creating “an unprecedented level of access to these commands” for the civilian directors of national intelligence.18 As a result of this direct interface, Boykin explained, analysts working out of the JIOCs will draw from the dozens of databases maintained by the NSA and the NGA without having to go through their respective chains of command. “What we’re trying to do is create a situation where the analyst is talking to the collector and there’s no filter in the middle,” he said at the briefing. That’s a perfect job for a contractor, particularly one that is as closely integrated with defense intelligence as SAIC.
In 2005, a few months after the JIOCs were launched by Cambone’s office at the Pentagon, SAIC was hired by the U.S. Army to be the operations manager of the JIOC-Iraq under a two-year, $110 million contract.19 Since then, according to an SAIC briefing for investors in May 2007, the company has signed similar contracts for the JIOCs established at the other major commands (SAIC is also involved as a contractor in the construction of the Global Information Grid, and is “helping achieve the netcentric warfare mission” at the Defense Information Systems Agency, company officials said at the briefing).
An in-house SAIC publication describes the JIOC in Iraq as a “large interactive data repository that allows analysts to pull in information from a wide range of sources,” including imagery and visualization tools. SAIC’s Intelligence and Security Group, which manages the JIOCs, had roughly three hundred to five hundred people overseas working at the centers in 2007. More details were provided by SAIC in its 2007 annual report to shareholders. The JIOC-Iraq, it says, draws on SAIC’s Biometric Automated Toolset, a portable system that records an individual’s unique characteristics for iris, fingerprint, and facial recognition; JIOC analysts use the toolset to “break up terrorist cells and track and capture the enemy.” SAIC has also worked with the Army to “transition” the JIOC-Iraq capabilities into th
e Distributed Common Ground System. It’s all in a day’s work for SAIC, which is one of the most ubiquitous companies in the Intelligence-Industrial Complex.
SAIC was founded by J. Robert “Bob” Brewster, a nuclear physicist who had worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s. In 1957, Brewster went to work for General Atomics, a nuclear research company that was later sold to Gulf Oil. In 1969, dissatisfied with the oil business and Gulf’s plans for its subsidiary, Brewster founded SAIC as a consultant to Los Alamos and other federal labs. From the start, the company’s stock was owned and sold by its own employees—a practice that helped motivate workers to increase revenues and profits, but also allowed the company to avoid filing public reports with the SEC (it went public in September 2006). In 1970, SAIC set up a branch office in Washington to solicit work from the government. Twenty years later, on the strength of Pentagon contracts involving submarine warfare and missile defense and work for the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies, SAIC revenues surpassed the $1 billion mark.
SAIC is deeply entrenched in the intelligence business. Over five thousand of its employees, or about one in every seven, hold security clearances. They offer “domain expertise” across a wide range of intelligence, including counterterrorism, counterproliferation, remote sensing and imaging, intelligence analysis support, signals analysis and processing, signals intelligence systems, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles. “We develop solutions to help the US defense, intelligence and homeland security communities build an integrated intelligence picture, allowing them to be more agile and dynamic in challenging environments and produce actionable intelligence,” SAIC says on its Web site, which defines its role as providing “mission-critical intelligence support in the war on terror.” Interviewed in an SAIC internal newsletter, Larry Prior, a thirty-year veteran of U.S. intelligence who runs the company’s Intelligence and Security Group, explained: “That’s where you have anywhere from 10 to 100 employees and, oh, by the way, the future of the nation rests on their backs.”20
According to a remarkable article by journalist Paul Kaihla in Business 2.0, a monthly magazine that covers cutting-edge, high-tech industries, SAIC’s data mining and sensor systems provided critical clues to the U.S. intelligence team in Pakistan that captured the alleged mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “We are a stealth company,” a company official told the magazine. “We’re everywhere, but almost never seen.”21 SAIC, normally reticent about press coverage, proudly displayed the article on its Web site. (The company declined to comment for this book.)
SAIC, as we’ll see in the next two chapters, is an important contractor at the NSA and the NGA. Its extensive work for intelligence agencies requires the company to be constantly searching for new employees with security clearances. “We really are a hiring machine,” CEO Ken Dahlberg told analysts during the earnings conference call quoted earlier. “If you are a cleared polygraph Intel specialist, you command a lot of activity. So we are doing our best to find ways to keep as well as hire these kind of folks.”
One of SAIC’s largest contracts is with the DIA, which hired the company to manage 2, 900 secure rooms known as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs, where DoD employees and contractors handle classified information. SAIC is responsible for designing, constructing, and maintaining security at these facilities, which are located at defense offices around the country. SAIC also provides the DIA with “highly trained and experienced professional security personnel” cleared at the SCI level—the highest possible in the Intelligence Community—to manage the SCIFs.* But that work is merely the tip of the outsourcing iceberg for the DIA, where contractors make up a substantial part of the workforce.
The Defense Intelligence Agency may be the least known of the nation’s top spy agencies. It was organized in 1961 to create a unified voice for the intelligence branches within the armed forces, and is the nation’s primary producer of foreign military intelligence. The DIA has a budget of about $1 billion and employs more than 11, 000 military and civilian personnel, many of whom work overseas as defense attachés at U.S. embassies. Its current director, Army Lieutenant General Michael Maples, previously served as director of management of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Historically, the DIA director has answered directly to the military brass and then to the secretary of defense.
The DIA describes its primary mission as being to provide “timely, objective, all-source military intelligence to policy makers, war fighters, and force planners to meet a variety of challenges across the spectrum of conflict.”22 One of its most significant assignments is providing centralized management for all national and defense activities related to MASINT, or measurement and signatures intelligence—the sniffing by sensors described earlier that measures, detects, identifies, and tracks what the DIA calls “unique characteristics of fixed and dynamic targets.” MASINT is “particularly important for detecting ballistic missiles, directed energy weapons, and weapons of mass destruction,” Maples told a defense publication in 2006. “We’ve got to have the right kinds of signature databases that we can compare against and the right kinds of collection capabilities to look into those three areas.”23
The DIA was given major new responsibilities under Rumsfeld’s reorganization of the Pentagon. The Strategic Support Branch was an arm of the DIA’s Defense Human Intelligence Service, and DIA personnel were part of the special operations teams dispatched by Cambone and his deputy, Army General William Boykin, to Somalia, Iran, and other countries to conduct counterterrorism activities. The agency is also responsible for management of the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers.
In Iraq, the DIA led the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction, both before and after the invasion, and placed Ahmad Chalabi, the crafty and controversial leader of the Iraqi National Congress, on contract to find evidence of WMD (the DIA paid the INC $340, 000 a month between October 2002 and May 2004, when the DIA cut Chalabi off).24 Nearly all of Chalabi’s sources turned out to be unreliable, including the infamous “Curveball,” the defector who concocted a fantastic story about mobile biological labs that appeared in the National Intelligence Estimate that laid the groundwork for the invasion of Iraq.*
The DIA’s requirements for information technology and skilled analysts have made the agency a major employer of contractors, who represent at least 35 percent of the DIA workforce.† According to DIA officials who spoke to a May 2007 Defense Intelligence Acquisition Conference in Colorado, DIA contractors are filling a “workforce gap” that exists at DIA and most of the other agencies. During the 1990s, as intelligence budgets contracted, hundreds of career DIA officers retired and left the Intelligence Community. When the DIA began hiring new people after 9/11, the veteran officers who should have been around to train and mentor them were gone. But because it takes five to seven years to train a new officer, there was a “generational hole” that could only be filled by former intelligence officers with security clearances; and most of them were now working in the private sector. To carry the agency through, officials said, contractors were the only solution.25 “Although we continuously review our mix of government and contractor personnel to ensure we have the right resources to accomplish our missions, contractors are an integral part of our DIA team,” Maples, the DIA director, told the Washington Post in a letter to the editor in August 2007.26
In the spring of 2008, the agency will award the first contracts under a new $1-billion umbrella contract called Solutions for Intelligence Analysis (SIA). According to Donald L. Black, the DIA’s Chief of Public Affairs, the SIA contracts will have a maximum value of $1 billion over the next five years and will combine “multiple functions under a single contract vehicle.” The purpose of the SIA, he added, “is to provide the defense intelligence community with a responsive, efficient, and reliable means to satisfy requirements for intelligence analysis support and related services. We believe that it encourages competition and teaming.”27 DIA offic
ials also told the Washington Post that the SIA contract was the first of its type “specifically intended for the procurement of intelligence analysis and related services,” and would ensure adequate outside support for the DIA as well as Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force intelligence centers and the military’s overseas command centers.”28 In his letter to the Post, Maples clarified that the DIA “does not outsource analysis…Government managers are fully in charge of this process.”
The DIA’s new contract vehicle is similar to a more secretive series of blanket purchase agreements (BPA) through which the DIA does much of its contracting. A blanket purchase agreement is a simplified acquisition method that allows government agencies to fill anticipated repetitive needs for analytical services and other supplies. According to FedMarket.com, an Internet site for government contractors, “BPAs are like ‘charge accounts’ set up with trusted suppliers. Both agencies and vendors like BPAs because they help trim the red tape associated with repetitive purchasing. Once set up, repeat purchases are easy for both sides.”29 Under the BPA system established by the DIA in 2003, seven teams of vendors were selected to compete against each other for outsourced work with the agency. Each agreement was worth about $300 million to the individual vendor teams, which were led by BAE Systems; Booz Allen Hamilton; Computer Sciences Corporation; Lockheed Martin; Northrop Grumman; SRA International; and Titan Corporation, now a subsidiary of L-3 Communications. Contrary to Maples’s assertion to the Post, the agreements do incorporate analysis: a 2005 DIA report says the BPAs “provide the full spectrum of Information Technology (IT) planning, design, implementation, Intelligence Analysis support services.”30 A similar system of BPAs was established by the ODNI after Michael McConnell was sworn in as DNI in February 2007.
The DIA’s blanket purchase agreements are known collectively as DIESCON 3,* and are also open for bidding to other agencies in the Intelligence Community (if the NSA is looking for IT expertise in a certain area, for example, it can ask for bids from the DIA’s bidding consortiums). The DIA would not place a value on them: Terry Sutherland, a DIA press officer, told me that “because of classification, we’re not going to be able to get into specific numbers.” Instead, he referred me to the DIA contracting Web site, which states that the purpose of the DIESCON 3 contracts is to meet “IT-related program requirements in support of counter-terrorism, homeland defense and intelligence collection, production and dissemination.”31 DIA contractors are required to provide IT support within twenty-four hours of a request from the DIA or any other intelligence agency.
