Spies for Hire

by Tim Shorrock

  * The NCTC control room itself was designed by engineers from Walt Disney Imagineering, which is normally in the business of developing theme parks. See Lawrence Wright, “The Spymaster,” The New Yorker, January 21, 2008.

  * While at DISA, his official bio states, Raduege led the efforts to restore communications to the Pentagon after the 9/11 attacks and managed the agency’s expansion of the Global Information Grid into a “$1 billion transformational communications program.” In addition to his job at the NCOIC, Raduege works in the private sector as a consultant on defense and intelligence matters. At present, he is chairman of the Deloitte Center for Network Innovation, a division of the consulting firm Deloitte & Touche that helps corporations and government agencies develop “netcentric solutions” (other Deloitte consultants include Tom Ridge, the former secretary of homeland security, and Mary Corrado, the former financial director of the CIA and the NRO). Before that, Raduege was a member of the Strategic Business Relationships team at IBM, where he focused on “net-centric operations across war-fighting, intelligence and business applications,” according to the NCOIC.

  * This is not the place for a full-blown analysis of the pros and cons of netcentric warfare. For an excellent overview, I direct readers to the work of the military journalist Noah Sachtman. See, for example, his excellent article, “How Technology Almost Lost the War,” in Wired, Issue 15–12, November 27, 2007.

  * There is an intriguing detail about SAIC and its SCIFs buried in George Tenet’s Acknowledgments in At the Center of the Storm, his book about his experiences with the Bush administration: “Arnold Punaro of SAIC,” he wrote, “graciously provided me with a secure workspace to review and work with classified material.” Punaro is identified on the SAIC Web site as the company’s executive vice president for government affairs, communications, and support operations, as well as general manager of its Washington operations. Getting use of such a secure room is no small feat. To prevent eavesdroppers from picking up top secret conversations, a typical SCIF has film on the windows, walls fitted with soundproof steel plates, and white-noise makers embedded in the ceiling. Punaro must have had approval from SAIC and the CIA to allow Tenet such access. Bill Harlow, Tenet’s co-author, told me that Tenet could have used office space at the CIA to work on the book, but that he “believed it would be better not to be producing his memoirs at a government facility.” It was “a matter of convenience” to use the room at SAIC, Harlow said.

  * George Tenet was quite critical of the DIA in his memoirs. In one section, he chided agency officials for sitting through a review of the NIE “without ever mentioning that possibly bogus information was being cited…. Perhaps they didn’t recognize their own information when they saw it, but that strains credulity.”

  † The 35 percent is the official figure, provided to me by Donald L. Black, the DIA’s Chief of Public Affairs in January 2008. I have heard reliable estimates that the DIA’s contracting level may be as high as 51 percent.

  * DIESCON 3 stands for “Defense Intelligence Information Systems Integration and Engineering Support Services Contract 3.”

  * Air Force General Michael Hayden, then the director of the NSA, made a similar statement to the Senate and was also reprimanded by Rumsfeld. He was later appointed second in command to the DNI and is now director of the CIA.

  * For a detailed account of Cambone’s new role at QinetiQ, see my article, “QinetiQ Goes Kinetic: Top Rumsfeld Aide Wins Contract from Office He Set Up,” CorpWatch, January 15, 2008, available on the web at http://corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14898.

  * One of them is the RU-8D, a small prop plane used by the Army Airborne Signal Intelligence Corps to fly over battlefields in Vietnam. The other is a much larger C-130 that commemorates an Air Force spy plane shot down over Armenia by a Soviet MiG-17 in 1958, killing all seventeen crewmembers. Altogether, more than forty U.S. spy planes were shot down between 1945 and 1977, according to the NSA, and 156 cryptologists died in action. According to NSA literature, a Cryptologic Memorial Wall inside the walls of the NSA lists the names of these NSA heroes and heroines, ending with the latest victim—a U.S. Navy cryptologist, Petty Officer Steven P. Daugherty, who was killed by an IED while returning from a mission in Iraq on July 6, 2007.

  * The story of Echelon and the broader intelligence relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom was told by the journalist Patrick Redden Keefe in his 2005 book, Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping (New York: Random House, 2005).

  * I discovered the underlying figures quite by accident. As I was studying the DNI slides, I used my mouse to right-click on the slide showing the 70 percent figure. At that, a series of bar graphs popped up showing the aggregate spending on contracts over the past decade. When my story about the contracting figures appeared in Salon, we posted a link to Everett’s presentation, which was still posted on the DIA’s Web site. Later that week, R. J. Hillhouse, the intelligence blogger, used the $42 billion contracting figure to extrapolate on the broader intelligence budget. By reverse engineering the numbers in data imbedded in the PowerPoint slides, she found that the budget of the sixteen U.S. intelligence agencies in 2006 was $60 billion, almost 25 percent higher than most analysts believed. By inadvertently releasing the keys to that number in the PowerPoint presentation, she said, the ODNI had revealed “one of the government’s most guarded secrets.” (“Exclusive: Office of Nation’s Top Spy Inadvertently Reveals Key to Classified Intel Budget,” The Spy Who Billed Me [blog], June 4, 2007.) In response, the ODNI issued a highly unusual statement. “In recent reports, information contained in an unclassified [ODNI] presentation at a government acquisitions conference has been mistakenly assumed to be representative of the overall budget of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” said Ellen Cioccio, the ODNI’s acting director of public affairs, in a statement issued on June 19, 2007. “The slides and accompanying presentation were designed to illustrate general trends in Intelligence Community contracting for conference participants. They concerned overall procurement award trends; they did not address the issue of Intelligence Community contractors (personnel under contract) or the size of the Intelligence Budget, in relative or actual terms.” Cioccio added that the bar graphs and their underlying data were based on a “small, anecdotal sample” of a portion of the IC’s contracting activities and therefore could not “be used to derive either the overall [IC] budget or a breakdown of any portion of the budget.”

  * Jim Woolsey, who had left the CIA in 1995, contradicted Tenet’s claim of innocence. In an article for the Wall Street Journal on March 17, 2000, he exhibited the righteous and indignant anger toward Europe that would so endear him to neoconservatives after 9/11. “Yes, my continental friends, we have spied on you,” he wrote derisively of Echelon. “We have spied on you because you bribe. Your companies’ products are often more costly, less technically advanced or both, than your American competitors’. As a result, you bribe a lot.” The core of Europe’s problem, he argued, was the role of the state. “In spite of a few recent reforms, your governments largely still dominate your economies, so you have much greater difficulty than we in innovating, encouraging labor mobility, reducing costs, attracting capital to fast-moving young businesses and adapting quickly to changing economic circumstances.” In the end, he added: “Get serious, Europeans. Stop blaming us and reform your own statist economic policies…. Then we won’t need to spy on you.”

  * NSA surveillance isn’t only directed at hostile governments or organizations; the agency eavesdrops on friend and foe alike. In fact, U.S. surveillance of trade negotiations is so routine that security authorities in South Korea held a special briefing in 2006 for trade negotiators preparing for talks on a proposed free trade agreement between Washington and Seoul. At a two-day workshop in Seoul, according to the conservative daily Chosun Ilbo, Korean intelligence officials “revealed the extraordinary inventiveness of the US’s intelligence surveillance power” and warned negotiators to be
on the watch for a “dragonfly robot that records conversation with microphones concealed in its trunk as it sluggishly drones about the room.” One official drew special attention to Echelon, the U.S.-U.K. surveillance net. “There is no telling what lengths the US with its technological might will go if it decides to eavesdrop,” the Koreans warned. See “Korean FTA Negotiators Primed on US Bugging Tricks,” Chosun Ilbo, April 20, 2006, www.chosun.com.

  * Powell’s presentation provided a satisfying lift to the NSA workforce. At Fort Meade, thousands of NSA employees and contractors “watched from a packed cafeteria and auditoriums that thundered with applause when Powell played the three intercepts, a rare display of their Top Secret work,” Bob Woodward wrote in Plan of Attack, his second book on the Bush administration’s war policies. See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 309.

  * Haseltine is now associate director for science and technology with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

  * The White House produced some documents on the IT and Internet companies, and Senator Leahy made them available to other lawmakers in a classified briefing.

  * Hamre was a fortuitous pick for SAIC. In October 2007, he was selected by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to chair the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. His term as an SAIC director expires in 2008.

  * It paid for the privilege. At the GEOINT conference, major contractors were offered exclusive rights to sponsorship of key events. For $50, 000, General Dynamics won the right for exclusive sponsorship of the exhibit hall itself (“Dominate the landscape! Get attendees to start thinking about your company before they enter”). The welcome reception, including cups and napkins complete with company logos, was snatched up for $40, 000 by BAE Systems. For the same price, Boeing and SAIC won the sponsorship rights for the Hall of Fame Dinner on closing night, where Joe Scarborough, an MSNBC talk show host, delivered the keynote address. Other deals included $30, 000 for sponsorship rights to the golf tournament (won by SAIC); $20, 000 for the Internet Café (Harris Corp.); $30, 000 for the conference tote bag (ManTech International); and $10, 000 for the shoeshine stand (Lockheed Martin). Everything was for sale, even the hotel door hangers ($5, 000)—but these, alas, went unclaimed, along with the $5, 000 hotel turn-down service (“Make one last impression before the GEOINT 2006 attendees turn in for the night”).

  * Due to those complaints, Google has hired former Secretary of State Colin Powell as an adviser.

  * That doesn’t mean it can’t be used for intelligence. In July 2007, for example, a DigitalGlobe satellite took detailed photos of two roads leading to a construction area near Iran’s nuclear sites. The photos were clear enough to show rocks and debris in large piles, leading U.S. analysts to conclude that a major tunnel complex was being built. See Joby Warrick, “Tunneling near Iranian Nuclear Site Stirs Worry,” Washington Post, July 9, 2007.

  * The satellites with the highest possible resolution are no longer flying, according to Pike. Current satellites have a resolution of about six inches or so. The KH-8, which flew during the Cold War and was used to photograph Soviet military installations, had a resolution of three inches. The NRO stopped flying KH-8s in the 1980s.

  * McConnell himself made the comparison between himself and SAIC’s Thomas. In August 2007, during a public speech at an intelligence conference in El Paso, Texas, McConnell recalled to an audience of intelligence professionals his circumstances when he was asked by the Bush administration to consider taking over as DNI. “Quite frankly, I was enjoying supporting this community from, shall we say, an executive position in industry,” he said. Without identifying any companies, he added: “General Thomas and I had similar positions, he in one company and me in another.” See “Remarks by DNI Michael McConnell at the 2007 Border Security Conference, as released by the DNI,” Federal News Service, August 14, 2007.

  * Three other companies qualify for the list because they are focused almost entirely on providing intelligence for one or more of the armed services. But they will receive only a mention because they are more narrowly focused on defense. They are NCI Information Systems Inc., a major Army contractor that provides information assurance services for the NSA and the NRO; DRS Technologies Inc., which supplies signals intelligence equipment and defense electronics to the NSA and the Department of Defense; and Dynamic Research Corp., a major supplier of information technology to the U.S. Air Force and Army, with a sizable presence in the NSA. In addition, two important intelligence contractors, SAIC and SRA International Inc., have diversified clients within the federal government, and (as mentioned above) are more rightly known as federal government pure plays. SAIC earns 90 percent of its revenue, and SRA 99 percent of its revenue, from federal contracts.

  * Through Sytex, Lockheed Martin has become a major force in military interrogations. Throughout 2006 and 2007, Lockheed Martin was recruiting counterterrorism analysts and linguists for Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The positions require top security clearances. One such job listed on www.intelligencecareers.com in April 2007 stated that “regional and cultural knowledge of various entities associated with known terrorist groups being targeted in the Global War on Terrorism are a plus.”

  * CACI posted a lengthy rebuttal to the film on its Web site, with a ponderous title that sounded like something out of Borat’s Kazakhstan: “CACI Corrects False Information About Its Former Business in Iraq 2003–2004.” That posting is no longer on its Web site, but has been substituted with a section listing questions and answers about CACI’s role in Iraq. See: http://www.caci.com/iraq_faqs.shtml.

  * Given London’s own extremist views, Mofaz was an interesting choice. For the last two years, Mofaz had been in charge of fighting the Palestinian intifada, and under his command the Israel Defense Forces had stepped up the demolitions of the homes of suicide bombers, blockaded Palestinian towns, and carried out the assassination of key Palestinian militants. Mofaz had even compared the uprising to the 9/11 attacks on the United States and branded the Palestinian Authority as a “terrorist entity.”

  * The technology was employed by the Department of Justice during the discovery part of the trial of two Libyan intelligence agents charged with masterminding the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988. Before the trial began, CACI built a special facility in New Jersey to scan and search the thousands of documents collected by the Justice Department, which helped draw up the Lockerbie indictments. The eighty-four-day trial in the Netherlands ended on January 31, 2001, with the conviction of one of the agents, Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, who was sentenced to life in prison; the second defendant was acquitted. Two hundred seventy people died in the incident.

  * The task force provides daily assessments of potential terrorist threats to U.S. military personnel and facilities around the world, and played a significant role in the tracking and eventual arrest of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held for a time as an enemy combatant who was accused by U.S. authorities of conspiring with two Muslim men to create a North American terror cell that allegedly provided money, recruits, and other support for anti–United States terrorist activities.32 Padilla was convicted on these charges in 2007.

  * In February 2006, Samuel Provance, an Army soldier who had been penalized by the military for blowing the whistle on detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib, testified before the House Government Reform Committee. Provance, who was stationed with the Army’s V Corps, was in charge of information systems at the prison. He arrived at Abu Ghraib in September 2003. At first, he told Congress, “there were only a couple companies of military intelligence soldiers and a handful of computers, but then a group came from Guantánamo Bay (GTMO), Cuba, to ‘make the place better run’ (as we were told). There was a conflict between the GTMO soldiers and those who were already at Abu Ghraib, having to do with the way interrogations were being conducted and reported.” In general, he said, “our people wanted to use the techniques we were trained to use at Ft. Huachuca, and the GTMO people
had very different ideas. After this period, the number of civilian contractors who reported increased significantly. Those contractors were principally from CACI and Titan Corporations…. Soldiers from other MI units then came, as well as even more civilians.” See Samuel J. Provance, prepared statement for the House Government Reform Committee, February 15, 2006, made available by the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition and the Project on Government Oversight. Provance added more detail in an hour-long interview with radio journalist Amy Goodman on January 25, 2008. See www.democracynow.org, January 25, 2008.

  * In 2006, Salon reporters Mark Benjamin and Michael Scherer made several important disclosures about CACI’s interrogators. In one story, they reported that Charles Graner, one of the prison guards convicted for his role in the abuse, told Army investigators that “Big Steve” Stefanowicz had given orders to him and other guards to strip prisoners naked, deprive them of sleep, put them in stress positions, and humiliate them sexually. According to a copy of Graner’s testimony obtained by Salon, “Graner told Army investigators that he followed Stefanowicz’s orders because Stefanowicz worked with military intelligence, which was in charge of prisoners.” Later, Benjamin obtained a previously unpublished photograph showing a CACI contractor, Daniel Johnson, interrogating an Iraqi prisoner using what General Fay, in his report, had called “an unauthorized stress position.” He also reported that Private Ivan Frederick, another low-level soldier convicted of abuse at the prison, had told Army investigators that Johnson directed him to abuse the Iraqi policeman described in the Fay report, including putting “his hand over his mouth” to stop his breathing. See “The Abu Ghraib Files,” Salon, March 14, 2006; and “‘Big Steve’ and Abu Ghraib,” Salon, March 31, 2006.