UPDATED US "National Security": Revealing the Sprawl of "Top-Secret America"...in 2007 (Shorrock)

UPDATED 1030 GMT: The Washington Post has now published the third and final part of its series, a look at the "intelligence complex" in Fort Meade, Maryland.



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On Monday, as The Washington Post launched its high-profile three-part series, "Top Secret America", on the vase intelligence network not only within the Government but amongst private contractors, we noted: "Much of this was known by close observers of US politics and foreign policy years before that, soon after — and indeed before — a US invasion of Iraq which was marked by faulty intelligence, wayward covert action, and a distortion of effective (and legal) policy at home and abroad."

For all the information put forth by Dana Priest and William Arkin, it is worth noting --- since the series does not do so --- those who had already documented the expanding sprawl of "intelligence" in and beyond the National Insecurity State. One of those reporters is Tim Shorrock, who published articles in Salon, Mother Jones, and The Nation between 2003 and 2007 and then the book Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing.

Shorrock's view of the Post series?

[They] their best to obfuscate what contractors really do for US intelligence. They're eight years behind and still haven't caught up. Basically their stories are throwing big numbers at readers—such as the fact that of 854,000 people with top security clearances, 265,000 are contractors. But that's work that can be done by interns; there's virtually nothing in their series about the broader picture—like what it means to have private for-profit companies operating at the highest levels of our national security."

UPDATED The Perils of US Intelligence: A “Top-Secret World” Beyond Control (Priest/Arkin)
US “National Security”: More on the Sprawling “Top Secret America” (Priest/Arkin)

This is Shorrock's article, "The Corporate Takeover of US Intelligence",  from Salon in June 2007:

More than five years into the global "war on terror," spying has become one of the fastest-growing private industries in the United States. The federal government relies more than ever on outsourcing for some of its most sensitive work, though it has kept details about its use of private contractors a closely guarded secret. Intelligence experts, and even the government itself, have warned of a critical lack of oversight for the booming intelligence business.

On May 14, at an industry conference in Colorado sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, the U.S. government revealed for the first time how much of its classified intelligence budget is spent on private contracts: a whopping 70 percent.

The DNI figures show that the aggregate number of private contracts awarded by intelligence agencies rose by about 38 percent from the mid-1990s to 2005. But the surge in outsourcing has been far more dramatic measured in dollars: Over the same period of time, the total value of intelligence contracts more than doubled, from about $18 billion in 1995 to about $42 billion in 2005.

"Those numbers are startling," said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists and an expert on the U.S. intelligence budget. "They represent a transformation of the Cold War intelligence bureaucracy into something new and different that is literally dominated by contractor interests."

Because of the cloak of secrecy thrown over the intelligence budgets, there is no way for the American public, or even much of Congress, to know how those contractors are getting the money, what they are doing with it, or how effectively they are using it. The explosion in outsourcing has taken place against a backdrop of intelligence failures for which the Bush administration has been hammered by critics, from Saddam Hussein's fictional weapons of mass destruction to abusive interrogations that have involved employees of private contractors operating in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Aftergood and other experts also warn that the lack of transparency creates conditions ripe for corruption.

Trey Brown, a DNI press officer, told Salon that the 70 percent figure disclosed by Everett refers to everything that U.S. intelligence agencies buy, from pencils to buildings to "whatever devices we use to collect intelligence." Asked how much of the money doled out goes toward big-ticket items like military spy satellites, he replied, "We can't really talk about those kinds of things."

The media has reported on some contracting figures for individual agencies, but never before for the entire U.S. intelligence enterprise. In 2006, the Washington Post reported that a "significant majority" of the employees at two key agencies, the National Counterterrrorism Center and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, were contractors (at CIFA, the number was more than 70 percent). More recently, former officers with the Central Intelligence Agency have said the CIA's workforce is about 60 percent contractors.

But the statistics alone don't even show the degree to which outsourcing has penetrated U.S. intelligence --- many tasks and services once reserved exclusively for government employees are being handled by civilians. For example, private contractors analyze much of the intelligence collected by satellites and low-flying unmanned aerial vehicles, and they write reports that are passed up to the line to high-ranking government officials. They supply and maintain software programs that can manipulate and depict data used to track terrorist suspects, both at home and abroad, and determine what targets to hit in hot spots in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such data is also at the heart of the National Security Agency's massive eavesdropping programs and may be one reason the DNI is pushing Congress to grant immunity tocorporations that may have cooperated with the NSA over the past five years. Contractors also provide collaboration tools to help individual agencies communicate with each other, and they supply security tools to protect intelligence networks from outside tampering.

Outsourcing has also spread into the realm of human intelligence. At the CIA, contractors help staff overseas stations and provide disguises used by agents working under cover. According to Robert Baer, the former CIA officer who was the inspiration for the character played by George Clooney in the film "Syriana," a contractor stationed in Iraq even supervises where CIA agents go in Baghdad and whom they meet. "It's a completely different culture from the way the CIA used to be run, when a case officer determined where and when agents would go," he told me in a recent interview. "Everyone I know in the CIA is leaving and going into contracting whether they're retired or not."

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US "National Security": More on the Sprawling "Top Secret America" (Priest/Arkin)

The Washington Post has published the second part of the high-profile series by Dana Priest and William Arkin, based on two years of investigation, of the sprawling US "national security state", which now takes in hundreds of thousands of private personnel as well as Government employees:

In June, a stone carver from Manassas chiseled another perfect star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers at all. They were private contractors.

US “National Security”: Revealing the Sprawl of “Top-Secret America”…in 2007 (Shorrock)
UPDATED The Perils of US Intelligence: A “Top-Secret World” Beyond Control (Priest/Arkin)

To ensure that the country's most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation's interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called "inherently government functions." But they do, all the time and in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation by The Washington Post.

What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal workforce includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest -- and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. In interviews last week, both Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta said they agreed with such concerns.

The Post investigation uncovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America created since 9/11 that is hidden from public view, lacking in thorough oversight and so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

It is also a system in which contractors are playing an ever more important role. The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government's dependency on them than at the CIA, the one place in government that exists to do things overseas that no other U.S. agency is allowed to do.

Private contractors working for the CIA have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in the Washington suburbs. At Langley headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency's training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of American spies.

Through the federal budget process, the George W. Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other agencies involved in counterterrorism to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the size of the permanent workforce, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought - wrongly, it turned out - that contractors would be less expensive.

Nine years later, well into the Obama administration, the idea that contractors cost less has been repudiated, and the administration has made some progress toward its goal of reducing the number of hired hands by 7 percent over two years. Still, close to 30 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies is contractors.

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UPDATED The Perils of US Intelligence: A "Top-Secret World" Beyond Control (Priest/Arkin)

UPDATED 1500 GMT: Acting Director of National Intelligence David Gompert has put out an innocuous statement (at least it's not "anonymous", like the one fed to ABC's George Stephanopoulos --- see 1430 GMT) on the Washington Post story: "The reporting does not reflect the Intelligence Community we know....The fact is, the men and women of the Intelligence Community have improved our operations, thwarted attacks, and are achieving untold successes every day."

With respect, Mr Gompert, perhaps the point of the story is the community "you know" but the one that you should know about, given its size and apparent consequences?

UPDATED 1430 GMT: Spencer Ackerman has a sharp take on the Washington Post "package", including not only the Priest/Arkin article but the linked source material:

US “National Security”: Revealing the Sprawl of “Top-Secret America”…in 2007 (Shorrock)
US “National Security”: More on the Sprawling “Top Secret America” (Priest/Arkin)

Dana Priest and William Arkin of The Washington Post have now published their much-anticipated exposéof the "top-secret world" of US intelligence services, which extends far beyond official bodies such as the Central Intelligence Agency.

It includes a searchable database cataloging what an estimated 854,000 employees and legions of contractors are apparently up to. Users can now to see just how much money these government agencies are spending and where those top secret contractors are located. Check out this nine-page list of agencies and contractors involved in air and satellite observations, for instance. No wonder it scares the crap out of Official Washington: it’s bound to provoke all sorts of questions — both from taxpayers wondering where their money goes, and from U.S. adversaries looking to penetrate America’s spy complex.

But this piece is about much more than dollars. It’s about what used to be called the Garrison State — the impact on society of a Praetorian class of war-focused elites. Priest and Arkin call it "Top Secret America" and it’s so big, and grown so fast, that it’s replicated the problem of disconnection within the intelligence agencies that facilitated America’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack. With too many analysts and too many capabilities documenting too much, with too few filters in place to sort out the useful stuff or discover hidden connections, the information overload is its own information blackout. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe,” a retired Army three-star general who recently assessed the system tells the reporters."

Glenn Greenwald has also posted a lengthy consideration of the implications of the "unchecked Surveillance State":  "The Real U.S. Government -- the network of secret public and private organizations which comprise the National Security and Surveillance State -- expands and surveills and pilfers and destroys without much attention and with virtually no real oversight or accountability."

On the insipid side of the ledger, ABC News celebrity anchorman George Stephanopoulos channels the inevitable anonymous "Administration source" trying to trash the story: "The database...is 'troubling'...[because] it could become a road map for adversaries."

Beyond the relative merits of these responses, notice the twist here in the 21st-century media world. The chatter is not about the newspaper article, as it would have been in olden days, but about an on-line database. That in itself is testament not only to the changed dynamics brought by the Internet but by the "traditional" media's hope for survival and relevance: the Post has put in extensive effort to frame this story as an ongoing resource for scrutiny of the US Government.

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POSTED 0730 GMT: Credit to Priest and Arkin for important journalism, based on research since 2008. However, much of this was known by close observers of US politics and foreign policy years before that, soon after --- and indeed before --- a US invasion of Iraq which was marked by faulty intelligence, wayward covert action, and a distortion of effective (and legal) policy at home and abroad. (Indeed, Arkin brought some of this to light, albeit in a blog tucked away on The Post's website.) Why did we not see such vital investigations on front pages then?

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the DNI [Director of National Intelligence], but for any individual, for the director of the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Underscoring the seriousness of these issues are the conclusions of retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs. Vines, who once commanded 145,000 troops in Iraq and is familiar with complex problems, was stunned by what he discovered.

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