Spies for Hire

by Tim Shorrock

  42. Glenn Greenwald, “Jay Rockefeller’s unintentionally revealing comments,” Salon, January 24, 2008.

  43. Quoted in the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s lawsuit against AT&T, www.eff.org/cases/att/attachments/eff/complaint. See also Tim Shorrock, “Watching What You Say,” The Nation, March 20, 2006; and AT&T’s statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, March 15, 2005.

  44. “Strategic Plan 2007–2012: Leading the Defense Intelligence Enterprise,” Defense Intelligence Agency, www.dia.mil.

  45. “AT&T Government Solutions Wins $14 Million Contract,” AT&T press release, June 13, 2005.

  46. Shorrock, “Watching What You Say.”

  47. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “Case Dismissed? The Secret Lobbying Campaign Your Phone Company Doesn’t Want You to Know About,” Newsweek, September 20, 2007, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20884696/site/newsweek/page/0/.

  48. The correspondence between the telecom companies and the House committee can be found at “The Public Record” section of the committee Web site, http://energycommerce.house.gov.

  49. Ellen Nakashima, “Verizon Says It Turned Over Data Without Court Orders,” Washington Post, October 16, 2007.

  50. Eric Lichtblau, “FBI Data-Mining Went Beyond Initial Suspects,” New York Times, September 10, 2007.

  51. October 12, 2002, letter from Randal S. Milch, Verizon’s senior vice president for legal and external affairs and general counsel, to leading Democrats on the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, available on the committee Web site, http://energy commerce.house.gov/Press_110/110-ltr.101207.Verizonrspto100207.pdf.

  52. “Full Statement from Attorney of Former Qwest CEO Nacchio,” Wall Street Journal, May 12, 2006.

  53. Nacchio’s court filings about Qwest’s relationship with the NSA and other government agencies were with a U.S. district court in Colorado in 2006 and released by the court in October 2007. Copies of the documents are available on the Web site of the Rocky Mountain News, which first reported Nacchio’s contention that he lost contracts due to his refusal to cooperate with the NSA, at http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/tech/article/0,2777,DRMN_23910_5720619,00.html.

  54. Shane Harris, “NSA Sought Data Before 9/11,” National Journal, November 2, 2007.

  55. Ellen Nakashima and Dan Eggen, “Former CEO Says US Punished Phone Firm,” Washington Post, October 13, 2007.

  56. Kelly Yamanouchi, “Feds: No Act Existed Against Qwest,” Denver Post, October 23, 2007.

  57. David Milstead, “Assertion Shoots Hole in Nacchio’s Secret Info Stance,” Rocky Mountain News, October 23, 2007.

  58. W. David Gardner, “Prosecutors Poke Holes in Nacchio’s Last-Ditch Appeal,” Information Week, October 23, 2007.

  59. David Milstead, “Prosecution: No Retaliation Against Nacchio,” Rocky Mountain News, October 22, 2007.

  60. Greg Miller, “Court puts limits on surveillance abroad,” Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2007.

  61. James Risen, “Bush signs law to widen reach for wiretapping,” New York Times, August 6, 2007.

  62. Marty Lederman, “Senate Passes Administration Bill [UPDATED with Link to and Analysis of S.1927],” Balkinization, August 4, 2007, http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/08/senate-passes-administration-bill.html.

  63. Lawrence Wright, “The Spymaster, The New Yorker, January 21, 2008.

  64. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, “Terror Watch: A Secret Lobbying Campaign,” Newsweek, September 20, 2007.

  65. Quoted in Lawrence Wright, “The Spy Master,” The New Yorker, January 28, 2008.

  66. Hearing on FISA, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, May 1, 2007.

  67. DNI Michael McConnell, letter to Senator Christopher Bond, January 25, 2008, made public by the Senate Intelligence Committee.

  68. Julian E. Barnes, “Air Force Spy Plane to Fly Over Fire Zone,” Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2007.

  69. “NGA Supports Federal Response to California Wildfires,” NGA news release number 07–12, October 26, 2007.

  70. “Civil Applications Committee (CAC) Blue Ribbon Study,” Independent Study Group final report, September 2005, www.fas.usg/irp/eprint/cac=report.pdf.

  71. “Fact Sheet: National Applications Office,” Department of Homeland Security, August 15, 2007, http://www.dhs.gov/xnews/releases/pr_1187188414685.shtm.

  72. Eric Schmitt, “Liberties Advocates Fear Abuse of Satellite Images,” New York Times, August 16, 2007; and Joby Warrick, “Domestic Use of Spy Satellites to Widen,” Washington Post, August 16, 2007.

  73. Scott Shane, “Shift in Spying Money to Agents from Satellites Is Sought,” New York Times, June 15, 2005.

  74. “‘Satellites Won’t Penetrate Homes,’” Satellite Week, September 10, 2007.

  75. Warrick, “Domestic Use of Spy Satellites to Widen.”

  76. Jack M. Balkin and Sanford V. Levinson, “The Processes of Constitutional Change: From Partisan Entrenchment to the National Surveillance State,” Yale Law School, Public Law Working Paper No. 120; and Fordham Law Review, Vol. 75, No. 2, 2006, available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=930514.

  77. John Ashcroft, Network Centric Warfare Conference, Washington, D.C., January 18, 2006.

  78. One of i2’s products, a software program called Analyst’s Notebook, is one of the most widely used tools in intelligence analysis, and has been praised by U.S. military intelligence officers in Iraq for helping them “visualize relationships and detect patterns.” The company is very open about its aims. “To win the war on terrorism,” i2 declared on its Web site in 2006, “it is critical to provide analysts with tools that can quickly discern patterns and meaning from large data sets and enable them to effectively share intelligence with a variety of agencies charged with countering terrorist activities and their many related crimes.” The article was accompanied by a photograph of President Bush looking over a chart, created with i2 software, depicting Osama bin Laden’s financial network; the picture was taken during Bush’s 2001 tour of the Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network in Vienna, Virginia.

  79. John Pike, interview with author, April 2007.

  80. Robert Block, “US to Expand Domestic Use of Spy Satellites,” Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2007.

  81. Eric Schmitt, “Liberties Advocates Fear Abuse of Satellite Images,” New York Times, August 16, 2007.

  82. Ibid.

  83. “Civil Applications Committee (CAC) Blue Ribbon Study/Independent Study Group Final Report,” unclassified report released September 2005, http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/cac-report.pdf.

  84. Charles Allen and Robert Murrett, GEOINT 2007, San Antonio.

  85. “Domestic spying program detailed soon,” United Press International, December 20, 2007.

  86. I was present for this speech. A transcript of Kerr’s remarks can be found at “Remarks and Q&A by the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence Dr. Donald Kerr,” 2007 GEOINT symposium sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation, San Antonio, Texas, October 23, 2007, http://www.dni.gov/speeches/20071023_speech.pdf.

  87. “MetaCarta and Mosaic, Inc. Join Forces on the Fight Against Terror,” MetaCarta press release, July 16, 2007, http://www.metacarta.com/news-room/press-releases.html?display=detail&id=66.

  10. CONCLUSION: IDEOLOGY, OVERSIGHT, AND THE COSTS OF SECRECY

  1. Eric Chabrow, “Security Contractors Have Military and Intelligence Roots,” Information Week, February 25, 2002.

  2. “Terrorism: Real Costs, Real Threats, Joint Solutions,” Business Roundtable, July 23, 2003, www.businessroundtable.org.

  3. At this conference, even the most mundane of tasks took on the colors of the new crusade. In one session, Andrew Maner, an official with the Bureau of Customs and Border Protection of the Department of Homeland Security, argued that a new Customs program to download freight information from large corporate importers would be good for business and discourage terrorists as well. “Trade is an ally in the war on
terrorism,” he declared, adding: “There’s a lot of great patriots in this industry.” The next day, Michael Meldon, a retired executive from Science Applications International Corporation, the San Diego intelligence contractor, explained his motivations in accepting his new post as CEO of the newly formed Homeland Security Business Council. “I’m not simply responding to the security threat,” he said. “I’m really doing something that’s going to benefit my business and my bottom line as well as help the security of the United States of America.” Introducing the council’s vice president, a business lobbyist named Kim Dougherty, he exclaimed: “She’s not interested in making money; she’s a patriot.” There again was that merging of interests. It was as if 9/11 had erased the need for regulation or oversight, or even common sense.

  4. Spencer S. Hsu, “Homeland Security’s Use of Contractors Is Questioned,” Washington Post, October 17, 2007.

  5. “Information Warfare—Not a Paper War,” Journal of Electronic Defense, August 1994.

  6. “Paladin Secures $150M for Homeland Security,” BuyOuts, November 15, 2004.

  7. “ManTech Names Lt. Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, Former Director of NSA and DIA, to Its Board of Directors,” ManTech press release, June 12, 2006, http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=130660&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=871475&highlight=.

  8. George J. Tenet, At the Center of the Storm (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 516. Others on Tenet’s list of “great leaders and friends” included (with their corporate and agency identifications), Jim Clapper (GeoEye/undersecretary of defense), Pat Hughes (L-3 Communications/DIA), Jake Jacoby (CACI/DIA), and Keith Hall (Booz Allen Hamilton/CIA).

  9. Minihan delivered this speech at the 2005 Intelcon intelligence symposium in Washington, D.C., on February 8, 2005.

  10. These quotes are from earlier chapters, and are sourced there.

  11. “R. James Woolsey Joins Booz Allen as Vice President,” Booz Allen press release, July 15, 2002.

  12. Woolsey made these remarks at a speech I attended on March 19, 2004, in Tysons Corner, Virginia.

  13. In a typical public-private partnership scheme, a private company might invest in a hospital or a highway, and then lease the completed projects back to a local government (the London Underground is a public-private partnership, for example). Unions hate them; to save money and maximize their profits, the companies supplying the public services usually pay lower wages and provide fewer benefits to their workers, and often reduce the kinds of services provided to the public. Governments often opt for them as a way to provide services without raising taxes, and companies love them because they offer a guaranteed stream of earnings and profits.

  14. Interview with Gilman Louie, Journal of Homeland Security, August 2002, http://www.homelandsecurity.org/newjournal/Interviews/displayInterview2.asp?interview=14.

  15. J. Michael Hickey, “Improving Emergency Preparedness and Response Capabilities,” testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emergency Communications, Preparedness, and Response, July 19, 2007.

  16. “Brief of Amicus Curiae Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America in Support of Appellants and Urging Reversal,” filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. This and other legal documents in the lawsuits against the NSA, AT&T, and Verizon can be read at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Web site, www.eff.org.

  17. Walter Pincus, “House Panel Approves a Record $48 Billion for Spy Agencies,” Washington Post, May 4, 2007.

  18. Rep. David Price, D–North Carolina, telephone interview, May 2006.

  19. P. W. Singer, interview with author, Washington, D.C., May 2006.

  20. Tim Sample, interview with author, August 2006.

  21. Steven Jacques, now a consultant to the USGIF, telephone interview with author, July 2006.

  22. My account of Price’s bill and the Bush administration’s response is based in part on an article in Secrecy News by Steven Aftergood, “Bill on Contractor Liability Raises Intel Agency Concerns,” October 8, 2007. For the entire debate, see the Congressional Record, October 4, 2007, page H11261-H11267, at http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2007_cr/h-meja.html.

  23. Aftergood, “Bill on Contractor Liability Raises Intel Agency Concerns.”

  24. Ken Silverstein, “Six Questions for Marcus Stern on Duke Cunningham,” Harper’s Online, May 22, 2007, http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/05/hbc-90000141.

  25. Greg Miller, “‘Duke’ Inquiry Cites Breakdowns,” Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2006.

  26. “Harman Releases Statement and Text of Unclassified Cunningham Report,” Rep. Jane Harman press release, October 17, 2006, http://www.house.gov/list/press/ca36_harman/October_17_06.shtml. The actual study, “Report of the Special Council for the Cunningham Inquiry,” can be found at http://www.house.gov/list/press/ca36_harman/report.pdf.

  27. Marilyn W. Thompson and Ron Nixon, “Even Cut 50 Percent, Earmarks Clog Military Bill,” New York Times, November 4, 2007.

  About the Author

  Tim Shorrock is an investigative journalist who has been writing about U.S. foreign policy, national security and business for more than twenty-five years. His articles have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, Mother Jones, Salon, and The Progressive. For most of the 1990s, Shorrock was a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Journal of Commerce. He lives in Tahoma, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, and can be reached through his blog and Web site, www.timshorrock.com.

  * Among those on the receiving end of London’s wrath were Peter Singer, a prominent expert on private military companies who had penned a mild critique of CACI in the Washington Post; former California state treasurer and gubernatorial candidate Phil Angilides, who dared to question CACI’s tactics at Abu Ghraib during a public hearing of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System’s investment committee (CalPERS, as an investor in CACI, had a legal right and a fiduciary duty to study the issue); and Randi Rhodes, a talk show host on Air America Radio, who was sued by CACI for comments she made about the company on the air.

  * There was a touch of irony in this. During Armitage’s time at the State Department, his open battles with the neoconservative hawks around President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney became legendary inside Washington. According to the Washington Post ’s Bob Woodward, Armitage advised Powell on more than one occasion to tell the neocons to “go fuck themselves,” and, at one point, even refused to deliver a speech about Iraq drafted for him by Cheney’s office. “Armitage exceeds even his own former boss and current best friend Colin Powell in visceral hatred of the neoconservatives,” Christopher Hitchens, the cranky British columnist for Vanity Fair, once wrote (“The End of the Affair,” Slate, July 17, 2006). Yet here he was, two years after those battles, working for companies making money directly from the war his former nemeses had started. Whichever side Armitage was on, he’d clearly learned an important lesson: you don’t need a neocon to know which way the wind blows.

  * Booz Allen is involved as a consultant in more than twenty industries, from energy to chemicals to consumer goods. But it seems most at home advising governments on how to outsource public agencies. The company contracts with governments all over the world, with the bulk of its clients in Europe and Asia. Its services, it says on its Web site, are “increasingly valuable” outside the United States “as government-led monopoly operations privatize and begin to compete in both their local markets and the global market.” Privatization is Booz Allen’s watchword at home as well, particularly in its dealings with the Department of Defense.

  * Roy Prosterman, a controversial U.S. academic who managed that program and later introduced U.S.-style land reform to South Vietnam and El Salvador, was hired by Booz Allen in the 1990s to conduct an AID study of land rights in post-communist Moldova.

  * After his retirement, Copeland published several best-selling books, and in 1988 wrote an article (“Spooks for Bush”) endorsing George H. W. Bush for president. A
lthough he criticized CIA paramilitary operations like the Bay of Pigs, he ended his life as an unapologetic supporter of the agency and U.S. foreign policy in general. “I am 100 percent capitalist and imperialist, a believer in Mom, apple pie, baseball, the corner drugstore, and even American-style democracy for us, even if I doubt its relevance in many of the alien cultures in which I’ve worked,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Game Player.

  * Woolsey is also the chairman and chief spokesman for the reborn Committee on the Present Danger, a right-wing policy group that advocates “total victory” in the war against terrorism, and was a founding member and senior adviser to the Libby Legal Defense Trust, a group of conservatives who raised money to help former Cheney adviser I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby defend himself against charges that he lied to a grand jury investigating the outing of former CIA operative Valerie Plame. (Woolsey definitely puts his money where his mouth is: in addition to his job at Booz Allen, he sits on the boards of several prominent defense-oriented information technology firms, and is a principal with the Paladin Capital Group, the first private equity fund to focus exclusively on the homeland security marketplace.) Other former intelligence officials at Booz Allen include Dale Watson, the former counterterrorism director at the FBI, and Richard Wilhelm, the first director of the NSA’s Information Warfare office. Booz Allen’s work for the Pentagon and other global defense clients is managed by Dov Zakheim, who served in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon as comptroller and chief financial officer from 2001 to 2004.