Outsourcing

An old friend once told me that when ‘public spectacles’ happen, like the non-existent ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ or the Edward Snowden Saga,  the plan behind them always has more than one goal. That’s not to say that every newsworthy event is planned, but there will always be a plan to spin the public’s interpretation of that event– to do otherwise would be a wasted opportunity.

My old friend would probably have said, “a.nolen, you thought too much about what the Snowden revelations mean to people like you, and not enough about what the revelations mean to the people who use these abusive programs every day.”

I do not know every purpose behind what Snowden did, but I feel strongly that one such purpose was to reign in intelligence outsourcing. Intelligence outsourcing is a threat to full-time, ‘lifer’ spooks because it takes away their power base. Intel outsourcing has existed for a long time, but it started to get scary for intel ‘lifers’  in the 1990s and turned into a feeding frenzy after 9/11.

As much as I wanted Snowden to be a hero, he ain’t. Now that I’ve dropped those blinders, what should have been clear all along has slowly come into focus: immediately after Snowden’s revelations, establishment pundits began to call for an end to intelligence outsourcing. “Put the Spies Back Under One Roof!” shouted Tim Shorrock of the NYT on June 13th. The Washington Post was there one week earlier: “The outsourcing of U.S. intelligence raises risks among the benefits” said Robert O’Harrow Jr.

Neither the NYT or WaPo had to work hard to come to these conclusions, because dear old Dianne Feinstein spelled it out for everybody:

“I’m very concerned that we have government contractors doing what are essentially governmental jobs and, I think, particularly with highly classified information,” Feinstein said. “Government people, who take an oath to keep that information secure, should be the ones” handling sensitive intelligence.

In fact, if you Google ‘intelligence outsourcing’, you’ll get a ton of links to mid-2013 news stories about Snowden’s leaks, followed by a rash of ‘outsourcing analysis’ from 2007, when outside contracting last drew fire  and prompted the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to request a study on the phenomenon.

Back in 2007, this is what the AFCEA, a US military think-tank/lobby,  had to say about outsourcing:

Since the mid-1990s, intelligence outsourcing has increased 38 percent to reach $42 billion in 2005, with an estimate of 60,000 to 70,000 contracting personnel. According to multiple press accounts, more than $34 billion, or 70 percent of the intelligence community’s budget for fiscal year 2007, was spent on private contractors for tasks ranging from intelligence collection to dissemination. Media reports suggest that 60 percent of the Central Intelligence Agency is supported by contractors, and 70 percent of its counterintelligence field activities are as well.

Congress estimated that the government spent on average $126,500 annually to support a full-time intelligence civilian. At least $250,000 is necessary to support a core contractor with overhead fees. Many supporters of outsourcing argued that even though a core contractor costs substantially more than a full-time civilian, the total expenditure to pay for the civilian benefits and retirements far exceeds the short-term cost.

I doubt things have got any better under Obama. So you see, if your power-base really is the CIA (for example) and you’re not just at the Agency to further business interests somewhere else, then outsourcing is a big problem for you: you’re loosing control of the information flow and being bled dry in the process. The US intelligence community isn’t used to being on the receiving end of that type of deal!

How did the Intelligence Community find themselves in this position? The fall of the USSR didn’t help, but more than that, they fell victim to their own predation. It’s in their culture to exploit. If you hire people whose big talent is to manipulate events towards their own ends, guess what type of management you’ll end up with…

James the Gnome

Four months after James R. Clapper left his federal job as head of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in June 2006, he joined the boards of three government contractors, two of which had been doing business with his agency while he was there.

It was not the only revolving door entered by Clapper, who is now President Obama’s nominee to be director of national intelligence.

In October 2006 he was hired full-time by DFI International, which was trying to boost its consulting with intelligence agencies. In April 2007, when he returned to public service as the chief of the Pentagon’s intelligence programs, DFI paid him a $50,000 bonus on his way out the door, according to his financial disclosure statement. Five months later, DFI landed a contract to advise Clapper’s Pentagon office, though company officials do not recall collecting any revenue from the deal.

And…

Clapper’s first private-sector stint came after he retired from the Air Force in 1995 as a lieutenant general. He worked for Booz Allen and SRA International, both major intelligence contractors. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was tapped to lead the geospatial agency, which purchases satellite imagery from private firms and analyzes it for military and intelligence agencies.

Clapper left in June 2006 and joined two corporate boards — 3001, a mapping and surveying company whose main clients included the geospatial agency; and GeoEye, whose predecessor firm in 2004 had won a $500-million contract from the agency while Clapper was chief. Clapper also joined the advisory board of Sierra Nevada, an Air Force contractor.

Booz Allen Hamilton– ya’know like Snowden–  is part of the Carlyle Group, George Bush Senior’s old haunt and current employer of one of Bill Colby’s boys, Johnathan E. Colby. Check out Jonny’s corporate bio. Ken Delanian goes on:

Now, however, Clapper is poised to become intelligence chief at a time when Congress is asking questions about the explosive growth of private contracting in the $75-billion U.S. intelligence operation. With lawmakers calling on the Obama administration to reduce the outsourcing, a logical question is whether a veteran of the close alliance between government and contractors — Clapper strongly defended the practice in response to a lawmaker’s question about a Washington Post series last week — is best suited to bring that system to heel.

Was Clapper’s head in the game?

“I worked as a contractor for six years myself, so I think I have a good understanding of the contribution that they have made and will continue to make,” he said. “I think the issue is, what’s the magnitude? And most importantly … how do we ensure that we’re getting our money’s worth?”

While that attitude must have made his patrons happy, I guess it’s not what his new team wanted to hear, ’cause now Clapper’s got to deal with the Snowden mess…

But Clapper is more than just a ‘squirrel trying to get a nut’  in the outsourcing phenomenon; he helped lay the foundation.  Way back in the 1990s,  in what appears to be the Autumn/Winter 1993/94 American Intelligence Journal, Clapper showed himself to be an advocate of ‘rationalization’, which is the first step to outsourcing*. His article, titled Reorganization of DIA and Defense Intelligence Activities by Lieutenant General James R. Clapper, USAF, Director Defense Intelligence Agency, starts this way:

“Gentleman, we have no more money. Now we must think.”– Ernest Rutherford, British Physicist and Noble Prize Winner, 1871-1937

Rutherford used those words in the early 1890s while addressing a poorly-funded British Government committee assigned the task of determining the feasibility of splitting the atom. Little did Baron Rutherford of Nelson know at the time, but his insightful declaration would, in many ways, define the principal challenge the US defense intelligence community faces today, almost a century later.

Clapper, I’m sure it would warm the cockles of Lord Rutherford’s heart to know he gave voice to your concerns!

Clapper goes on to describe how he (and his staff) trimmed the fat in various intelligence activities:

As part of the DIA reorganization we sought to drive authority down the management chain to the lowest level, and shifted the agency’s previous analytic orientation from a regional to a functional basis.

The restructuring also cut supervisors by 169, or by approximately 30%, and reduced burdensome layering across the agency…

The article details more layoffs, restructurings, stream-linings, etc. which freed up military talent so that men like Clapper could rent it back to the government at twice the price later… a practice which Lord Rutherford’s generation first instituted back in Britannia. (Clapper does not draw out his historical reference to make that connection! A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, James.)

So you see, from an intelligence-lifer’s point of view, making Clapper DNI was putting a fox in charge of the hen-house. DNI is an Obama-appointed position, which tells us that the power behind the president has more to do with ‘Money That Likes the Use Intelligence’, rather than grisly ‘intelligence-lifers’, who are powerful only as information gatekeepers. This is the lifers’ ‘meme’, courtesy of Jonah Gale’s 2011 ‘Masters in Security‘ thesis at Georgetown Uni:

This thesis finds that intelligence outsourcing—while a useful tool—may be financially and structurally deleterious and undermines American constitutional governance when contractors are allowed to perform inherently governmental activities.

Mr. Gale has a bright career ahead of him. What that means to you and me is that the right people were being conditioned with this message as far back as 2011, while the actual ‘take down’ operation came two years later. Make sure everybody knows what to do when ‘it’ happens!

What does surprise me about the Snowden operation is that it appears intelligence gate-keepers’ interests are going to trump the money interests. Michael Woods, VP of Verizon Communications, made a statement on June 5th this year addressing the “inappropriateness” of outsourcing intelligence. Whatever Verizon’s real reasons for this request for distance, the message is clear: time to take eavesdropping in-house. Woods’ statement is one that the Senate Intelligence Committee decided to make prominent on their website.

However, intelligence-lifers’ victory isn’t complete: note that the Intelligence Authorization Act for FY 2014 pretty much puts a band-aid on the outsourcing problem. After all, Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein’s own millions come from military contracts– she’s gonna put numero uno first, even if she has to give lip-service to the other team. (Feinstein’s vice-chair, Saxby Chambliss, was part of the post 9/11 intelligence inquiry which was supposed to pinpoint where spooks failed. Whatever Chambliss actually found, we ended up with an outsourcing bonanza. So guess which team he’s on.)

My guess is that Snowden himself knows what he’s doing, because in his NBC interview he made hints about ‘more regulation’ making PRISM-like programs safer; a view which is very naive.  Snowden’s not naive.

The ugly truth here is that the ‘lifer’ intelligence community’s answer to their outsourcing problem was to disgorge state secrets. I’m happy that these secrets came out; in an attempt to save their own butts these spooks actually did something good for the country. However, their intentions do matter: the lifers did a noble thing for small-minded, selfish reasons. They betrayed what they say is in the US’s best interests to protect their own power-base. That’s a Bill Colby-worthy move; somebody’s been taking notes these past 40 years.

If you needed more proof that these folks can’t be trusted with mass surveillance tools, you’ve got it right here. The intelligence community exists to further the interests of the intelligence community. We can do better.

—* Clapper championed two ‘pinch points’ in the flow of intelligence also, 1) the National Military Joint Intelligence Center (NMJIC) which controls what ‘Combat Command’ hears from eight other intel gathering outfits, including the NSA and CIA and 2) the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System (JWICS) which tells every different military operation what they need to know when they need to know it… what Clapper ominously calls a “classified CNN”. Is that what you really wanted to say James?

Clapper’s Intel Pinch Points, courtesy of this 1993 paper.

Yikes. Tell me those two creations aren’t ripe for exploitation.

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