by Tim Shorrock
Other key industry players in geospatial intelligence were identified in an interoperability demonstration that took place during the GEOINT 2007 symposium in San Antonio sponsored by the U.S. Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. The demonstration was similar in scope to the one that took place in 2006 and described in chapter 7. But the latest scenario was domestic in nature and involved the tracking by U.S. intelligence of a Cuban ship carrying spent nuclear fuel heading for the U.S. Gulf Coast. Among the many corporations offering analytical, imagery, and signals intelligence tools for the demonstration were both the giants and the lesser-knowns of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex.
They included ESRI, whose popular mapping software is used extensively by the NGA to collect, analyze, distribute, and search its extensive imagery collection. SRA International is an important supplier of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance programs to the National Security Agency and defense intelligence agencies. PCI Geomatics is a Canadian company that sells software to the NGA and other defense and intelligence agencies that allows them to quickly process and interpret geospatial imagery. MetaCarta of Cambridge, Massachusetts, makes software for counterterrorism and homeland security use that allows analysts to search lines of unstructured text for geographic references, which are then viewed as icons on a map; one use, according to the company, is to search news accounts of, say, a shipment of nuclear fuel, and “pinpoint the concentration and visualize patterns” of the incident “within seconds versus minutes or hours.”87
Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, produces the GeoScout software that allows the NGA to blend its classified data from spy satellites with systems operated by the NSA and other intelligence agencies. ITT Industries makes ISR and “persistent surveillance” software used in unmanned aerial vehicles to collect and transmit imagery, and developed and built the sensor system for WorldView-1, the commercial satellite launched in 2007 by DigitalGlobe (with the financial support of the NGA) that can collect up to 290, 000 square miles of images every day. AGI, of Exton, Pennsylvania, produces much of the mapping and imagery software used on the Global Hawk and Predator UAVs, and creates three-dimensional mapping files from Google Earth imagery that allow intelligence analysts to visualize terrain and combine SIGINT, MASINT, and imagery intelligence into a single platform. BAE Systems, an important contractor for the NGA and the CIA, has developed a new electronic system called Geospatial Operation for a Secure Homeland that helps intelligence and domestic security agencies acquire and combine geospatial data from satellites, sensors, and terrestrial sensors to create “situational awareness” and speed recovery from natural disasters and “terrorist or criminal incidents.” Intergraph Corporation, of Huntsville, Alabama, produces geospatial information software used by the NGA and other intelligence agencies to share and combine classified data from different sources and to mix data from sensors and video so “complex security problems can be visualized and managed swiftly,” according to its Web site. LPA Systems of Fairport, New York, formed a Geospatial Intelligence Group in 2006 following years of research for the Air Force, and now offers a suite of software tools to the Intelligence Community that can, among other things, combine imagery from infrared sensors with high-resolution satellite photographs to monitor conditions on the ground for both homeland security and military situations.
In the demonstration at the GEOINT symposium, all of these companies displayed their software products and explained how they and agencies such as the NGA, NSA, the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the Marine Corps would use them to monitor the Cuban terrorists responsible for diverting the radioactive fuel from a nuclear facility in northern Cuba and then—with the help of a Predator launched from MacDill Air Force Base in Florida—track and intercept the cargo as it departed from Cuba on a ship and moved across the Caribbean to Corpus Christi, Texas, a major port on the Gulf Coast. The exercise illustrated how sophisticated the U.S. domestic surveillance system has become in the six years since the 9/11 attacks, and how it can be used to find and track almost anybody considered suspicious by national security authorities. In the right hands, those tools can do enormous good; but in the wrong ones, America could take on the trappings of a police state. In the end, these companies, and dozens of other firms that work for the CIA, the NSA, and the rest of the Intelligence Community, may be the only winners in America’s national surveillance state.
10
Conclusion: Ideology, Oversight, and the Costs of Secrecy
“There are two ways to look at this activity: as a grim attempt to turn public anxiety into a business opportunity or—the viewpoint naturally favored by those in the industry—as a chance to fight the good fight while upholding sound capitalist principles.”
—LOS ANGELES TIMES COLUMNIST MICHAEL HILTZIK, WRITING ABOUT THE PALADIN CAPITAL GROUP, A PRIVATE EQUITY FUND CREATED AFTER 9/11 TO FOCUS EXCLUSIVELY ON THE HOMELAND SECURITY AND INTELLIGENCE MARKETS
INTELLIGENCE CONTRACTING is a lucrative business: it’s hard to argue with revenue growth of 15 to 20 percent year after year—or, in the case of Essex Corporation, 156 percent for five years straight. But as we’ve seen, money and profits are not the sole motivators for the corporations and executives who populate the Intelligence-Industrial Complex. Because so many top executives are former intelligence officers themselves, many of their companies are motivated by politics as well. For CACI’s CEO, Jack London, that translates into a desire to “disseminate vital intelligence” for the fight against “the Islamofascists.” For ManTech CEO George Pedersen, it’s a yearning for his company to be “on the battlefield,” whether in Iraq, South Korea, or the Philippines. For the senior vice presidents of the big prime contractors, Booz Allen Hamilton and Science Applications International Corporation, it involves power, either as a way to influence future policy or make changes in the way the Intelligence Community is organized. And for many contractors at the Pentagon and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, it’s helping rank-and-file war-fighters in Iraq and Afghanistan get access to the same intelligence being analyzed by men in suits and uniforms in Washington.
These motivations point to something we have yet to broach in our analysis of intelligence contracting: the role of ideology in the business. To get there, we must return to the months after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, and to how the interpretation of those attacks and the U.S. response that followed created a new ideology that transformed relations between state and capital in the national security arena. Out of those events came an ideological stew that blended patriotism, national chauvinism, fear of the unknown, and old-fashioned war profiteering, all of which have played into the corporate demand for new markets and fresh sources of capital and profits. Thus was born the ideology of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex.
In 2002, as the nation braced for the next move in what President George W. Bush had dubbed the “global war on terror,” the Bush administration and its corporate allies began talking of a common ideological framework for the long struggle ahead. America, they said, needed a new form of governance to respond to terrorism—a “partnership” between the private and public sectors that would come together to pursue and defeat the common enemy. That alliance was based on a simple proposition: that the private sector, as the owner of 90 percent of the nation’s communications, energy, and transportation networks, must play a central role in the fight against terrorism and for the “homeland.” Government, it was said repeatedly, couldn’t protect the American people without industry; homeland security, we were told again and again, “was too important to be left to the government alone.” Mike McConnell, then the senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, summed up the corporate thinking in a 2002 speech to a group of financial executives. Because “all of the critical infrastructure we’re dependent on” is privately owned, he said, “our moral responsibility is to understand the change and have firms engaged in a public-private partnership to protect their businesses and the citizens of this co
untry.”1
The implications of the new ideology for the private sector were captured in 2003 by the nation’s most powerful corporate lobby, the Business Roundtable, which represents the CEOs of America’s 150 largest corporations. “Many old paradigms that dominated the American psyche before 9/11 have been set aside since the events of the tragic day,” the Roundtable boldly proclaimed in a special report that called for an “anti-terror joint venture” between business and the Bush administration. “So also must the historic government-business relationships of the past be redefined in a new era of cooperation and collaboration.” Specifically, the CEOs said, that meant setting aside old conflicts that, in the era before 9/11, had disrupted the ability of corporations to support the government. “Historical suspicions and adversarial relationships between government-as-regulator and business-as-regulated have traditionally made cooperation difficult,” the Roundtable argued. “In the current security climate, this could prove disastrous to the common objective of enhancing homeland security.”2
When that report was released, American corporate executives were still reeling from the stunning collapse of Enron, the Houston energy giant whose meteoric rise in the 1990s was accomplished largely by systematic accounting fraud, and a dozen other scandals that shook Wall Street between 2001 and 2003. The Business Roundtable’s new rhetoric blew in like a refreshing breeze: “Nine-eleven changed everything,” we were told again and again; conflict between government and business simply would not do in an age when national unity was a matter of survival. From now on, the business of Booz Allen Hamilton, or Halliburton, or ManTech, or CACI, or Blackwater, was the business of America. Companies benefiting from the enormous expansion of contracting for domestic security, military operations overseas, and intelligence projects began to justify their profits as an incidental benefit for their dedication to the nation’s security interests, and executives began to portray themselves as not merely businessmen but as patriots. In the heated atmosphere in Washington after 9/11 and in the months preceding the invasion of Iraq, conferences on defense and homeland security began taking on the trappings of nationalistic pep rallies.
One of the earliest displays of the businessman-as-patriot phenomenon came during a 2003 conference on homeland security financing at the National Press Club. It was organized by Equity International, a public relations company that would go on to sponsor several major conferences on doing business in Iraq, and was attended by a wide range of companies involved in the intelligence contracting industry, including Booz Allen Hamilton, BearingPoint, QinetiQ, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Harris Corporation. Throughout the two-day symposium, corporations were told repeatedly that their business plans were akin to military operations. “Clearly this war can only be won if the public and private sectors join together hand in hand,” declared John Elstner, the CEO of the Chesapeake Innovation Center, a business incubator funded by the National Security Agency, in his opening speech. During the plenary session, Darryl B. Moody, the vice president of the homeland security and intelligence sector of BearingPoint and one of the first private sector individuals assigned to a Transportation Security Administration task force on terrorism, was introduced as “a soldier in the homeland security war.” Moody, whose company also helped plan the U.S. occupation of Iraq and is a prime contractor for the NSA, thanked the organizers for “bringing together industry and government to exchange information and collaborate on what I believe is one of the most noble causes of our time, that is, defending our homeland.” William S. Loiry, Equity’s president, urged the corporations in the room to prepare for a protracted battle: “The constant dark clouds of further terrorism suggest that we are in for a long, expensive and complicated fight.”3
That rhetoric smothered the fact that the “noble cause” of homeland security would, over time, yield enormous profits for a host of government contractors. Within three years, the Department of Homeland Security would be spending nearly $16 billion a year on goods and services from the private sector, making it the third-largest employer of contractors in the federal government. Among the beneficiaries of DHS’s spending in 2006 were Booz Allen Hamilton, which was awarded $43 million to provide services to the DHS intelligence unit, and BearingPoint, which was paid $8 million to provide strategic planning and legislative support to the Transportation Security Administration (which Moody, BearingPoint’s vice president, was advising). Upon reading the $16 billion DHS figures in a government report in the fall of 2007, Senator Joseph Lieberman, I-Connecticut, angrily commented: “Plainly put, we need to know who is in charge at DHS—its managers and workers, or the contractors.”4 To the companies involved, however, the confusion was a small price to pay for their new “partnership” with the federal government.
The new ideology of partnership is evoked just as fervently in the intelligence contracting industry, which is still riding high on a surge of Intelligence Community contracts with the private sector that topped $42 billion in 2006. Its most forceful and eloquent champion is retired Air Force General Kenneth Minihan, who preceded McConnell as NSA director and served before that as commander of the Air Intelligence Agency, and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Throughout his career, Minihan has been a strong proponent of using information technology as a weapon of war. “Information dominance is a mind-set,” he said in 1994. “It is the attitude needed to make ourselves a powerful weapon on the battlefields of the 21st century.”5
After retiring from active duty in 1999, Minihan became a director of several companies trying to exploit the burgeoning intelligence market of the late 1990s. In 1999, in recognition of his emerging role as a private sector intelligence operative, Minihan was elected president of the Security Affairs Support Association, the predecessor to the Intelligence and National Security Alliance and the primary association for CIA and NSA contractors. But it was the events of 9/11 that really jump-started Minihan’s business career and transformed the retired Air Force general into a strong advocate for public-private cooperation in the arena of intelligence.
In 2002, Minihan joined forces with two former intelligence colleagues—Jim Woolsey, the former director of the CIA, and Alf Andreassen, a former naval intelligence officer who had worked at senior levels for the intelligence research firms Bell Labs and AT&T Government Solutions—to form the Paladin Capital Group. It was the nation’s first private equity fund to invest exclusively in companies making products for the homeland security and intelligence markets. (Paladin’s goal, Minihan once said, “is to toughen our critical infrastructure so that we can compete in the 21st century with the same success that we had in the 20th century. We also want to make a profit.”)6* By 2006, Minihan had been elected to the board of directors of four Paladin companies and no fewer than six intelligence contractors, including ManTech International, BAE Systems, MTC Technologies Inc., and Verint Systems Inc., an Israeli-owned company that makes a key wiretapping software used by the FBI and the Intelligence Community.
Those companies hired Minihan for his uncanny ability to understand what technologies are best deployed by an intelligence agency. “During his long and distinguished career of supporting national defense and military information services, Lt. Gen. Minihan focused on defining and selecting technology solutions to solve the most difficult challenges in the Intelligence Community,” Robert A. Coleman, ManTech’s president and chief operating officer, explained when his company elected Minihan to its board in 2006.7 A high-ranking executive at one company told me that he once brought Minihan with him to a meeting with Jim Clapper when the latter was director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. “Ken was able to describe, general to general, what we had to offer, and it was much better than I could have done,” the executive said. “I get him down here when we have a particular problem, and he looks at it from his perspective, based on his service. He’s a very visionary kind of guy.” George Tenet shares in that admiration. In his Acknowledgments in At the Center of the Storm, the for
mer CIA director placed Minihan at the top of a list of twelve intelligence officers and contractors who “understand the strength” of the broader intelligence community and “its unity of purpose.”8
Minihan’s intense interactions with intelligence officials and contractors have made him the de facto ideologist for the Intelligence-Industrial Complex. His basic argument, repeated frequently at intelligence industry meetings, is that economic globalization and the diffusion of computer and communications technologies have shattered the barriers that once allowed agencies like the NSA or the CIA to operate in a vacuum. The Intelligence Community, he argues, cannot ignore the technical innovations taking place in the commercial world. And with America’s economic and military superiority under constant attack, his thinking goes, government and business must join together as a matter of survival to confront the common evil. That means erasing the lines that once separated industry and government and joining forces, as the Business Roundtable suggested, to defeat America’s adversaries.
During the Cold War, Minihan told a 2005 conference of intelligence professionals, the leading edge of American technology was in government agencies such as the NSA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. But now, due to the global dissemination of information and communication technologies, “we’re all enmeshed together” in a global infrastructure that has become critical to the U.S. “intelligence apparatus.” In the past, Minihan said, contractors “used to support military operations; now we participate [in them]. We’re inextricably tied to the success of their operations.” This new situation, he argued, presents corporations with “interesting opportunities” to create technologies that governments can take advantage of, “with all the complexities that exist in merging the interests of the private and public sector in the intelligence apparatus.”9
