The Washington Post's R.J. Hillhouse reports that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell recently classified a long-awaited report resulting from a year-long examination of outsourcing by U.S. intelligence agencies.
The move is an attempt to bury an issue that has become a growing concern among national security experts: the outsourcing of intelligence to private industry.
According to Hillhouse, over 50 percent of the National Clandestine Service -- "the heart, brains and soul of the CIA" -- has been outsourced to private firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
Although the use of private contractors is not new, and for some functions (like the provision of cutting-edge technologies) even makes sense, the scale of this activity has become unprecedented in recent years, and is another new ripple in the annals of war profiteering under Bush and co.
It is part of a broader pattern: the wholesale corporatization of the executive branch during Bush's two terms. According to a recent report by Rep. Henry Waxman, procurement spending rose from $203.1 billion in 2000 to $412.1 billion in 2006, a new record.
As is common knowledge, the privatization game comes with many subplots involving cronyism, waste, fraud and other abuses. But in the world of espionage, those subplots are likely to be so byzantine that they will be fodder for dozens of Bourne sequels.
Sometimes the story appears to be pure political expediency. That could be the case with the CIA -- where privatization was Bush's answer to internal critics of the war in Iraq.
A couple of years ago, Bush sent Porter Goss over to purge the CIA of dissidents, especially those in places like the Near East Division, where few top career officials supported the idea of war with Iraq.
So it's no surprise that more than half of the workforce in Baghdad and Islamabad, Pakistan are now industrial contractors -- "green badgers" in CIA parlance. What shade of green would that be? Maybe they should be called "greed badgers."
These companies are loaded with neocons and close cronies who have passed through the revolving door. At Booz Allen, for example, you've got James Woolsey, who pushed the Saddam-al Qaeda link story before the war.
Lockheed, the nation's biggest Defense contractor, is a way station for dozens of administration cronies, including Bruce Jackson, the Lockheed VP who formed the "Committee for the Liberation of Iraq" before the war, after Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser at the time, called him into meeting at the White House and told him that the US was definitely going to war in Iraq and needed help in bolstering the reasons to do so.
As Hillhouse wrote, "the director of national intelligence has put our security at risk by classifying the study on outsourcing and keeping the truth about this inadequately planned and managed system out of the light."
Will Congress get tough and push for release of the report, or conduct hearings and its own review?
As currently drafted, the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 (H.R. 2082) requires the CIA to report all contracts to the congressional intelligence committees, including the impact on the intelligence community workforce, the contractors' performance and instances of waste, fraud and other abuses (see section 411, which you can find on Thomas).
In the Senate, Senator Obama introduced the Transparency and Accountability in Military and Security Contracting Act of 2007, which would require reports to Congress by specified federal officials on information with respect to federal military and security contracts being performed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
More transparency is definitely needed. As investigative reporter Tim Shorrock recently noted, "because nearly 90 percent of intelligence contracts are classified and the budgets kept secret, it's difficult to draw up a list of top contractors and their revenues derived from intelligence work."
But transparency is not enough. It doesn't deal with certain other issues, including conflicts of interest (what contractor would, for example, protest against a policy that violated the civil rights of Americans, knowing it would probably hurt their chances for future contracts?), the revolving door/brain drain (since individuals can carry their security clearance with them, the intelligence community increasingly "finds itself in competition with its contractors for our own employees," an annex to the national intelligence strategy reported in October).
Moreover, as Shorrock reports, there is no cost savings. The average annual cost for a government intelligence officer is $126,500, compared to the average $250,000 (including overhead) paid by the government for an intelligence contractor. The Senate Intelligence Committee concludes : "Given this cost disparity, the Committee believes that the Intelligence Community should strive in the long-term to reduce its dependence upon contractors."
Easier said than done. Once certain work is outsourced, the private companies become entrenched at a deep level.