[Dialogue] Outsourcing Intelligence: How Bush Gets His National Intelligence from Private Companies

Fri Aug 3 13:27:41 EDT 2007

AlterNet

Outsourcing Intelligence: How Bush Gets His National Intelligence from
Private Companies

By R.J. Hillhouse, The Nation
Posted on July 31, 2007, Printed on August 3, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/57979/

The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq War has
been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater USA, Triple
Canopy and others provide security services against military-level threats,
and they regularly engage in combat.

But what is not generally known is that the secret side of the Iraq War and
the larger "war on terror" is also conducted by private corporations,
fielding private spies. The reach of these corporations has extended into
the Oval Office. Corporations are heavily involved in creating the
analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most
sensitive national security document, the President's Daily Brief (PDB).

Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence
community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the
long-established practice of keeping operations in US government hands, with
only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts.
Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations.
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May
that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.

For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private
corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the
Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of
the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit, CIFA
(Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors.

Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May
that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA,
the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the
CIA's most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS),
responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of
employees of for-profit corporations.

Employees of private corporations -- "green badgers," in CIA parlance --
provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA operations in Iraq to
recruiting and running spies. They also gather human intelligence on behalf
of the CIA and analyze it, creating intelligence products used by the
intelligence community and also shared with other branches of government.

Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed Martin,
Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated
into analytical divisions throughout the intelligence community, including
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that
produces the final document of the President's Daily Brief.

The President's Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses
from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at
the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the
President every day as the US government's most accurate and most current
assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned
on August 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US."

It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but
much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering
is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me
that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it's
impossible to distinguish their work from the government's.

Although the President's Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is
misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with
corporate logos plastered all over it.

Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a
corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into
the PDB to influence the US national security agenda, at this time it would
be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often
intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to
introduce intelligence into the system.

To take an extreme example, a company frustrated with a government that's
hampering its business or the business of one of its clients could introduce
or spin intelligence on that government's suspected collaboration with
terrorists in order to get the White House's attention and potentially shape
national policy.

Or, more subtly, a private firm could introduce concerns about a particular
government to put heat on that government to shape its energy policy in a
favorable direction.

To get us into the Iraq War, intelligence regarding alleged weapons of mass
destruction had to be very artfully manipulated to short-circuit a
formidable bureaucracy designed to prevent just such warping of
intelligence. Due to the shift toward wide-scale industrial outsourcing in
the intelligence community, even that fallible safeguard has been eroded.

Sources like "Curveball," the Iraqi informant who wrongly asserted the
existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and upon whom the CIA
relied, are no longer needed. This is particularly frightening when one
considers that the "war on terror" is fought by a $100 billion-plus industry
that has a vested interest in its continuation.

The tools needed to close this vulnerability are available, and they can be
found in the private sector. Existing techniques could be applied to monitor
the intelligence community for any suspicious activity to insure that no
corporation could manipulate US government policy in this way.

Closing the gaps is simply a matter of the Director of National Intelligence
acknowledging the problem, then finding the political will and leadership to
implement a solution. Unfortunately, it will probably take a public outcry
to make this happen. 

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