Spies for Hire

by Tim Shorrock

  * The future imagery project was killed in 2005 after a loss of more than $4 billion. See Philip Taubman, “In Death of Spy Satellite Program, Lofty Plans and Unrealistic Bids,” New York Times, November 11, 2007.

  * Among the companies Windsor advised were CACI International, MTC Technologies, ManTech International, Analex, Anteon, BAE Systems, Dynamic Research Corporation, and L-3 Communications. All of them are major intelligence contractors and do extensive business with the DNI.

  * These were the government agency representatives on INSA’s board in September 2007. From the CIA, Carmen Medina, associate deputy director for intelligence, and Caryn Wagner, executive director of intelligence community affairs. From the DIA, Barbara A. Duckworth, chief of staff. From the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Terrance M. Ford, assistant deputy chief of staff, G-2 (Intelligence). From Army Counterintelligence, Thomas Gandy, director for human intelligence, foreign disclosure, and security in the Office of the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. From the NSA, Richard C. Schaeffer, information assurance director. From DHS, James F. Sloan, assistant commandant for intelligence and criminal investigations, U.S. Coast Guard. And from the FBI, Donna Bucella, director, Terrorist Screening Center.

  * John McMahon, one of the CIA officials who supervised CORONA, is now a registered lobbyist for Lockheed Martin. In 2005, he filed a lobbying disclosure report with Congress saying that he had represented Lockheed in obtaining “funding for classified programs.”

  * A document released by the CIA in 2007 as part of its collection of past misdeeds called the “family jewels” describes an incident in 1972 when the CIA asked an official of AT&T for copies of telephone call slips relating to U.S.-China calls. According to the note, the operation “lasted for three or four months and then dried up.” Agency officials concluded that “the collection of these slips did not violate the Communications Act”—which prohibits companies from giving the government customer records without a warrant—“since eavesdropping was not involved.”

  * Intelcon was supposed to be an annual event, but was held only twice, in 2005 and 2006. The sessions attracted hundreds of contractors, national security officials, think tank analysts, and journalists. In 2007, however, the conference was suspended without explanation by its organizers.

  * Bob Woodward, writing in the Washington Post, called IBEX “a project of truly Buck Rogers proportions.” According to his report, former CIA director Richard M. Helms, then the American ambassador to Iran, initially described the Raytheon killings as a “professional” job carried out with Polish machine guns and a pistol stolen from the U.S. military mission to Iran. Iranian newspapers initially claimed the hit was the work of Islamic terrorists, but the Shah told “an American” that “the Russians” were behind it. “Two hours later,” wrote Woodward, “Helms told the same American he agreed with the Shah.” See “IBEX: Deadly Symbol of U.S. Arms Sales Problems,” Washington Post, January 2, 1977.

  * The other twenty-nine firms were swallowed up in the wave of mergers that swept through the defense industry in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of SASA’s earliest benefactors, a company called California Microwave Systems, operated satellite earth stations, microwave radio networks, and surveillance aircraft for U.S. intelligence agencies. It was later sold to Northrop Grumman, and in 2003, three of its pilots working in Colombia were captured by Marxist guerrillas after their plane was shot down (they are still being held more than four years later). Northrop Grumman acquired three other SASA founders: Essex, BDM, and TRW. Loral Electronic Systems and McDonnell Douglas were later acquired by Lockheed Martin. Intercon USA, a consulting firm, made a splash in 1997 when it hired Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB general, for its staff, but never made it into the news again. Quarry Hill, another consulting firm, went out of business after its president died in 1978. The other companies simply went belly-up or disappeared as corporate entities. I obtained this information from back issues of SASA’s in-house magazine, Colloquy.

  * Grace also had a special relationship with organized labor, which had a huge political and economic stake in the heavily unionized federal government and opposed many of the changes he tried to implement. For many years, Grace was the chairman of the Agency for International Free Labor Development (AIFLD), which was founded in 1962 by the U.S. government and the AFL-CIO to finance and train pro-American “free trade unions” in Latin America. Under the cover of anti-communism, AIFLD’s real purpose was to undercut leftist labor unions more attuned to the state-led economic development so popular in the Third World at the time; it also played a role in U.S.-supported coups in Guyana, Brazil, and Chile. Throughout its sordid history, AIFLD maintained close ties with the CIA, which covertly funded some of its activities in Latin America. With the AFL-CIO, through AIFLD, on his side, Grace was in a position to ease labor’s opposition to the privatization drive he was about to launch with Reagan, who greatly weakened the power of organized labor by firing nine thousand air traffic controllers who went on strike in 1981. For more on AIFLD and its relationship with the CIA, see my article “Labor’s Cold War,” in The Nation, May 1, 2003.

  * After leaving the CIA, Woolsey returned to his old Washington law firm of Shea & Gardner. There, he became actively involved in supporting Iraqi opposition figures, including Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who had gathered in Washington to press for U.S. help in overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein. In 1998, he joined the Project for the New American Century, an advocacy group founded by prominent neoconservatives, and was one of eighteen people to sign the organization’s open letter to President Clinton urging him to use military action to topple the Saddam Hussein regime (other signers who figure in this book include Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and Richard Armitage). He lobbied for passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which endorsed the concept of regime change and allocated $100 million to Iraqi opposition parties, including Chalabi’s INC. Woolsey was moving right, and fast. But he also maintained his interest in the intelligence business. During the 1990s, Woolsey joined the board of, and was given a substantial share of stock in, Yurie Systems Inc., a data networking company founded by Jeong H. Kim, a former naval officer who had worked in the black world of fast-attack nuclear submarines. Woolsey’s involvement in Yurie turned out to be fortuitous in 1998, when the company was acquired by defense and intelligence contractor Lucent Technologies for nearly $1 billion. In 2006, Kim, by then the CEO of Lucent, appointed Woolsey to the board of a separate U.S. subsidiary for Lucent’s classified work with intelligence agencies after its acquisition by France’s Alcatal.

  * “Needless to say, [the task force members] offered inadequate evidence to support [their] multibillion-dollar savings estimates,” Ann Markusen, an economist at the University of Minnesota and an expert on defense acquisition, wrote about the study. Nevertheless, it served as a blueprint for the outsourcing boom that followed. See Ann Markusen, “The Case Against Privatizing National Security,” Dollars & Sense, May/June 2004.

  * Based in Washington with offices in major metropolitan centers, such as Atlanta and St. Louis, BENS describes itself as a “non-partisan group of business leaders.” It started out, according to Ken Beeks, its current vice president for policy, with a “left-leaning, anti-nuke tilt,” and did some of its earliest lobbying on arms control, such as the chemical weapons treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate in April 1997. But over time, it evolved into a conservative advocacy group that monitors government spending on weapons and intelligence systems and works with the Pentagon and the Intelligence Community to improve their business practices in procurement and acquisition. Charles G. Boyd, BENS’s president and CEO, is a retired Air Force general who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and, during the 1990s, served as a defense consultant to Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Its board of directors has historically included chief executives from the nation’s best-known and largest corporations, including major government contractors such as Lockheed Martin and DynCorp. Its curren
t chairman, Steven Cheney, was a close aide (but no relation) to Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense in the George H. W. Bush administration.

  * The Clinton administration denied charges, voiced primarily in Europe, that MPRI’s project was an attempt to circumvent the international arms embargo imposed on the former Yugoslav states. “Nonetheless,” concluded the Washington Post, “MPRI’s involvement appears in keeping with US interests in creating a Croatian military counterweight to Serbian domination in the Balkans and promoting democratic practices in former communist states.” See Bradley Graham, “US Firm Exports Military Expertise,” Washington Post, August 11, 1995.

  * Haver, the former vice president and director of intelligence for TRW’s Information Technology Group, remains extremely bitter about the outcome. Speaking to an intelligence conference in 2006, he said: “If you want to know the origins of our community’s problems, if you want to know why there’s a 9/11 Commission and a WMD Commission, and all the rest of this, don’t look in 2001, or 2002, or even the 2000s—look at 1995, 1996, and 1997. If you are going to be a major player in the intelligence community five or ten years from now, you’ll still be paying for some of those decisions.”

  * The three key figures in Tenet’s reforms ended up in the private sector. Jeremiah, as we’ll see further on, emerged during the Bush administration as a key adviser to the intelligence contracting industry. Both Gannon and Dempsey now work for major CIA contractors—the former at BAE Systems, the latter, as we’ve seen, at Booz Allen Hamilton.

  * Even though this money was raised to counter the terrorist threat, much of it was diverted to other projects that had nothing to do with counterterrorism. According to the CIA’s Office of Inspector General, which conducted an internal study of the CIA’s accountability for 9/11 in 2005, CIA managers “moved funds from the base budgets of the Counterterrorist Center and other counterterrorism programs to meet other corporate and Director of Operations (DO) needs.” Some of these funds went to “strengthen the infrastructure” of the DO and other money went to programs “unrelated to terrorism.” No explanation was given of what these “corporate” funds were. The top secret IG report was declassified in August 2007. See “OIG Report on CIA Accountability with Respect to the 9/11 Attacks,” CIA, June 2005.

  * Despite the government’s attempt to keep its location a secret, the NCTC would not be hard to find. According to the Washington Times, it is located in Tysons Corner, Virginia, in the same complex that houses the CIA Counterterrorism Center and the Pentagon’s Joint Intelligence Task Force–Combating Terrorism center. See Cryptome, http://eyeball-series.org/nctc/nctc-birdseye.htm. And Mike McConnell, the DNI, scoffs at the comparison between NCTC and the Bourne movies. “We can’t do that,” he told The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright in January 2008. “That’s all horse pucky.”

  * Jeppesen is also involved as a contractor in geospatial intelligence. A Boeing handout at a 2007 intelligence symposium in San Antonio lists “Jeppesen Government and Military Services” as one of four subsidiaries of Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which provides “prime contractor support to government customers that require diverse geospatial intelligence services”—a designation that could include the CIA as well as the NGA and other Pentagon agencies. Jeppesen and the other subsidiaries, Boeing says, work “in specialized organizations with broad resources to meet the time-critical requirements of today’s warfighter.”

  * The Post also reported that TIDE has created significant concerns about secrecy and privacy, with innocent civilians frequently mistaken for terrorist sympathizers and some individuals remaining on the list long after they’ve been cleared by their own governments.

  * See chapter 3, page 105.

  * A CACI job opening in Sarajevo in 2004 provided a hint, however; it advertised for a chief of human intelligence with eight years experience in all-source intelligence analytical work, with knowledge of counterintelligence, collections, and information management and dissemination.

  * Perhaps the Bush administration should have used Sentia’s prediction software. In 2004, based on a simulation model of Iraqi political factions drawn up between October 2002 and April 2004, the Sentia program tested by the CIA predicted, “Things are ugly in Iraq. And the current simulations suggest that the situation will get even worse, from the perspective of the U.S. Without a change in the approach toward different constituencies in Iraq, it will become increasingly difficult for the U.S.-led ‘coalition’ to consolidate support for a new regime. Terrorist-like activities are likely to continue and escalate.” The Sentia report on Iraq was posted on a blog called Enough, I’ve Had It, and can be found at http://blogs.salon.com/0003752/2004/04/14.html. The report was still posted in February 2008.

  * In January 2008, the MASINT Association changed its name to the Advanced Technical Intelligence Association (ATIA) to reflect the expanded use of measures and signatures intelligence by homeland security, defense, and other intelligence agencies. See Wilson P. Dizard, “Intell Group renamed to reflect mission changes,” Government Computer News, January 16, 2008.

  * O’Sullivan spoke at a panel on intelligence R&D at the GEOINT 2006 conference in Orlando, sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation. “I’ve spent my career in the clandestine and the black world, and I don’t often step out of those shadows to speak at events like this except when it’s a topic I feel deeply about,” she began. “Our reliance and need for research and innovation in order to push intelligence to where it needs to be to serve our policy-makers is one area I care greatly about.”

  * The 9/11 Commission’s findings in this area are as relevant now as they were then. Since the end of the Cold War, the commission argued, the CIA had gradually lost its influence over imagery and signals intelligence, which were now concentrated in the hands of the NGA, the NSA, and the NRO. Meanwhile, following the first Gulf War, the Pentagon had grasped “the value of national intelligence systems (satellites in particular) in precision warfare” and “appropriately drawn these agencies into its transformation of the military.” The commission also drew attention to Cambone’s new job, saying that an “unintended consequence” of the creation of this position was “far greater demand made by Defense on technical systems, leaving the DCI less able to influence how these technical resources are allocated and used.” In short, the commission was saying that the Pentagon had far too much power over intelligence. See Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, page 409.

  * Industry, perhaps reflecting differences within the Intelligence Community itself, never took a formal stand on Hunter’s bill. Nevertheless, defense and intelligence contractors have been extremely supportive of Hunter at election time. Between 1989 and 2004, defense contractors donated $1.3 million to the San Diego congressman, three times more than any other industry group. Hunter’s top defense contributors over his career, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, are Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, General Atomics, the Carlyle Group, SAIC, Titan Corp., Raytheon, and BAE Systems. All of them have extensive portfolios in intelligence. The $246, 410 Hunter received from the industry in 2006 made him the third largest recipient of defense money in the House behind Jack Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, and Curt Weldon, R-Pennsylvania.

  * The Global Information Grid, according to the Frost & Sullivan report, is “a Department of Defense communications infrastructure that supports intelligence missions, and enhances information sharing across the DoD from military bases in the United States to tactical mobile platforms.” If readers have difficulty understanding what the grid is and how it works, they are not alone. As I was reporting on this chapter, I asked the intelligence expert John Pike what he knew about it. “I’m having a little difficulty figuring out whether the GIG is a piece of hardware, a program or a slogan,” he said. “I keep having to come back on the [GlobalSecurity.org] Web site to rework these C3I programs, because it is often hard to figure out i
f we’re talking about an actual piece of hardware, or whether it is a programmatic collection of only tangentially related pieces of hardware—or whether it’s just a slogan or simply an intelligence construct. And there have been times when I was trying to figure out a piece of hardware, and it was not [a piece of hardware], it was just a slogan. This C3I stuff is sometimes difficult to understand.” (C3I refers to command, control, communications, and intelligence.)