Spies for Hire
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* In April 2007, Clapper said that he had assessed the results of CIFA’s data gathering program called Talon and “does not believe they merit continuing the program as currently constituted, particularly in light of its image in Congress and the media.” See Walter Pincus, “Pentagon to End Talon Data-Gathering Program,” Washington Post, April 25, 2007.
* Scientists, too, are concerned about the NAO. It will replace the Civil Applications Committee, which has reviewed civilian requests for classified reconnaissance information for the past thirty years. By placing that authority in the Department of Homeland Security, scientists, including those working for such government agencies as the U.S. Forest Service, worry that their requests for such data could be vetoed or delayed for security reasons. “The scientists say this information is very valuable to them, and they are concerned that this new office will be looking more at homeland security and law enforcement,” Representative Norm Dicks, a Democratic member of the House Homeland Security Committee, told a reporter from McClatchy News Service. In a letter to the Bush administration, Dicks said the NAO “represents a potentially serious harm over the longer term to the constitutional protections U.S. citizens expect and deserve.” See Les Blumenthal, “Scientists oppose move to restrict satellite data,” McClatchy News Service, Tacoma News Tribune, January 13, 2008.
* When Paladin’s homeland security fund was announced in 2003, the press immediately seized on the connection with 9/11. “Fight Terror, Make a Buck,” was the headline of a BusinessWeek story that began by asking: “Does the war on terror have a silver—or even a golden—lining? A couple of onetime intelligence chiefs think so.” Buyside, a newsletter for mergers and acquisitions specialists, dubbed its Paladin story “Patriotic Profits.” Between 2002 and 2006, Paladin raised over $500 million, primarily from the pension funds of large labor unions and industrial corporations, and invested the money in twenty-five companies. The four Paladin companies where Minihan is a director include Nexidia Inc., which develops software sold to intelligence agencies that can phonetically search texts and audiotapes in dozens of languages at speeds 100, 000 times faster than traditional techniques, and Arxan Technologies Inc., which develops anti-tampering software used by the U.S. military and defense contractors to protect critical technologies on weapons they sell overseas. See “Fight Terror, Make a Buck,” BusinessWeek, January 27, 2003; and “Patriotic Profits,” Buyside, May 1, 2003.
* In October 2001, for example, Donald Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board dispatched Woolsey to Europe to try to confirm reports that Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers, had met in Prague with Iraqi intelligence; later, Woolsey was responsible for bringing several Iraqi dissidents, along with their concocted stories about weapons of mass destruction, to the attention of the Pentagon and the Defense Intelligence Agency. As we know now, none of this information was true; but it helped lay the groundwork for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which Woolsey, as a longtime member of the Project for the New American Century, had been advocating for nearly ten years.
* The actual term was “not a partisan gunslinger.” That’s how columnist Robert Novak described Armitage, then an anonymous source, in the story that exposed Valerie Plame as a CIA officer working under nonofficial cover as a financial consultant.
* For example, “public-private partnerships” could be used as a cover for undermining environmental regulations. In 2004, Booz Allen Hamilton’s Jim Woolsey argued that attempts by public interest groups to obtain environmental data about corporations through the Freedom of Information Act were “not a sensible way to behave with respect to vulnerabilities.” What the country needed, he explained, “are public-private partnerships that work together so that industry can feel confident that when it discloses something it’s not disclosing something in such a way it can be used in litigation against it or more disasters that terrorists could find out about.” Following this logic, the American Chemistry Council opposed a Senate bill that would have given the Environmental Protection Agency the power to assess the vulnerability of chemical plants and oil refineries to terrorist attack. A better idea, the council suggested, was to consolidate those responsibilities under the Department of Homeland Security and “continue the public-private partnerships that have advanced our critical infrastructure security since 11 September.” Woolsey made his remarks at a speech I attended on March 19, 2004, in Tysons Corner, Virginia. See also “Industry Boosts Attack on Corzine’s US Chem Security Bill,” Chemical News & Intelligence, September 4, 2002.
* As of March 1, 2008, President Bush had not signed the bill. In December 2007, the White House informed Congress that if the conference bill was presented to the president as passed by the House and Senate, “the president’s senior advisers would recommend that he veto the bill.” The administration opposed several provisions, including a requirement limiting interrogation techniques and the requirement for a cost-benefit analysis on contractors. With or without the bill, however, Congress had established new policies on outsourcing. See “Statement of Administration Policy, H.R. 2082—Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008,” Executive Office of the President, December 11, 2007.
* Even in those limited venues in Congress where contracting has been openly discussed, it was clear that Admiral McConnell and the other people running the Intelligence Community couldn’t even decide among themselves what was proper, and what was improper, to outsource. The state of confusion was underscored during two Senate confirmation hearings in 2007. In the first one, which took place in January 2007, McConnell appeared and was politely questioned by Ron Wyden about where he would draw the line on outsourcing. “You wouldn’t be likely to want contractors to be interrogators, for example?” Wyden asked. Without hesitation, McConnell answered: “I can’t imagine using contractors for anything like that.” Given what happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where contract interrogators from CACI International were implicated in some of the worst abuses identified by Army investigators, that was a remarkable response. A decision to classify interrogation as inherently governmental would have indicated a major change in administration and military thinking, and a new direction for the Intelligence Community and its partners in the contract interrogation business. Yet less than two months later retired Air Force General James Clapper gave a very different answer when he was asked by another Senate committee to submit written answers to questions about his pending nomination as undersecretary of defense for intelligence. One question asked him to explain the “proper role” of contractors in intelligence interrogation operations. “I believe it is permissible for contractors to participate in detainee interrogation, as long as they comply with the policies and guidance which govern DOD military and civilian interrogators,” Clapper replied. “As I understand it, DOD contractors who conduct government-approved interrogations must be properly supervised and closely monitored throughout the interrogation process, and may not themselves, approve, supervise, or monitor interrogations.” That was certainly an improvement over what had occurred under Donald Rumsfeld and Stephen Cambone. But it was exactly the opposite of what McConnell, Clapper’s boss at the DNI, had said in his confirmation hearing. When the nation’s two most senior intelligence officials aren’t on the same page on a subject as sensitive as the outsourcing of interrogations, it’s hard to believe they could be in sync on anything else.
* In a major development in the Abu Ghraib scandal in November 2007, a federal judge in Washington ruled that a civil lawsuit alleging abuse and torture by CACI interrogators at Abu Ghraib can go forward. The ruling means that CACI will face a civil trial where the allegations against the company can finally be placed before a jury. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than two hundred former Iraqi prisoners by the Center for Constitutional Rights. CACI officials once again denied any wrongdoing and predicted they would be vindicated at trial. In the same ruling, the judge ended a similar lawsuit filed against Titan Corp., a unit of L-3 Communications that supplied contract translato
rs to military interrogators at Abu Ghraib. See Josh White, “Judge Allows Abu Ghraib Lawsuit Against Contractor,” Washington Post, November 7, 2007.
* In a statement on the House floor on May 10, 2007, Price explained the intent of his bill. Intelligence officials, he said, must start asking basic questions: “Should [contractors] be involved in intelligence collection? Should they be involved in analysis? What about interrogations or covert operations? Are there some activities that are so sensitive they should only be performed by highly trained Intelligence Community professionals?” Such transparency is absolutely critical as contracting continues to expand, Paul Cox, Price’s press secretary, told me. “As a nation, we really need to take a look and decide what’s appropriate to contract and what’s inherently governmental,” he said.
* As of March 2008, Price’s bill had yet to be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Senate version of the bill does not exclude intelligence contractors.
* “Under the earmark process, basically, you hire a lobbyist to get you a pot of money from Congress,” says Peter Swire, a professor of communications law at Ohio State University I quoted earlier who directed a Clinton-era White House task force that examined how U.S. surveillance laws should apply to the Internet. “And if you’re doing earmarks in order to protect America, that’s patriotic, you know everyone can be proud to do that; and if you’re doing earmarks to protect America with top secret systems, then everybody understands why it stays in the shadows. But that raises the risk of corruption. Earmarks have low transparency. Top secret projects have even lower transparency. So it becomes almost impossible from the outside to judge between two choices. Choice One is, it’s a valuable project that’s protecting America. Choice Two is, that powerful figures are lining their pockets. And when you go outside the normal procurement process and you go straight to Congress, the risk of corruption increases.”
* Mitchell Wade, MZM’s CEO, pled guilty in 2006 to giving Cunningham more than $1 million in bribes, including a payment of $700, 000 over market value for one of Cunningham’s homes. Thomas Kontogiannis, another MZM executive, pled guilty in February 2007 to illegally financing Cunningham’s purchase of a $2.5 million mansion. In November 2007, former MZM executive Brent Wilkes was convicted of giving Cunningham more than $700, 000 in bribes (pleading not guilty, he testified in court that “he felt that giving gifts to powerful members of Congress was an accepted practice among firms trying to get military contracts”). Wilkes faces separate charges of bribing Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, once the CIA’s third in command and a childhood friend of Mitchell Wade. Foggo faces charges of bribery in connection with the case, and has pled not guilty. See Tony Perry, “Ex-Contractor Convicted of Bribing Cunningham,” Los Angeles Times, November 5, 2007.
* Although the committee didn’t name any of the contractors involved, some companies could be identified by the project. Representative Ralph Hall, R-Texas, for example, inserted a $6.2-million earmark to upgrade the RC-135 surveillance aircraft known as the Rivet Joint, which collects signals and communications intelligence for military and other collection agencies; that work is being done by L-3 Communications, an important NSA contractor. Five separate earmarks worth a total of $15 million were inserted by Representative Bud Cramer, D-Alabama, who represents the area around Huntsville, which is home to the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Missile and Space Intelligence Center. The earmarks will benefit four contractors at the center: Sparta Inc. and Intergraph Corporation, which are both based in Huntsville, and Lockheed Martin and Boeing, two of the missile center’s prime contractors (those four companies are also among Cramer’s top corporate contributors, and together have contributed $268 million to Cramer since 1989, according to the Center for Responsive Politics). The largest single earmark on the House list, for $23 million, was inserted by Representative Jack Murtha, D-Pennsylvania, who is well-known as a master at providing money to companies in his district in Johnstown. It will fund the National Drug Intelligence Center in Johnstown, an arm of the Justice Department providing intelligence and analysis to counter drug traffickers. Since it opened in 1993, Murtha has siphoned more than $500 million to the center, which has remained open despite several attempts by the Bush administration and the Pentagon, which consider the center wasteful and duplicative, to shut it down.
* See the footnote on page 369.