by Tim Shorrock
But even longtime critics of Pentagon outsourcing were taken aback in January 2008, when the Counter-Intelligence Field Agency awarded a five-year, $30-million contract to the Missions Solutions Group of QinetiQ North America (QNA), the U.S. subsidiary of the British intelligence contractor QinetiQ Group PLC. Under the contract, the QNA unit, which was formerly known as Analex Corporation and had been working for CIFA since 2003, will provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the controversial agency. The contract was noteworthy because it was awarded just two months after QinetiQ North America hired Stephen Cambone, the former undersecretary of defense for intelligence, as its vice president for strategy. And it came on the heels of a series of QinetiQ deals inked with the Pentagon in the booming business of network centric warfare. That’s an area that the British firm specializes in with a line of products that includes military drones and robots, low-flying satellites and sophisticated jamming technologies.*
Cambone is the most senior of a savvy group of former high-ranking Pentagon and intelligence officials hired by QinetiQ to manage its expansion in the U.S. market—a list that includes, as we saw earlier, Duane Andrews, a former top aide to Dick Cheney when he was secretary of defense, and former CIA Director George Tenet. While he was at the Pentagon, Cambone oversaw CIFA and was deeply involved in the promotion of network centric warfare. His appointment, observes intelligence expert Steven Aftergood, reflects the “incestuous” relationships that exist between former officials and private intelligence contractors. “It’s unseemly, and what’s worse is that it has become normal,” he told me. “The problem is not so much a conflict of interest as it is a coincidence of interests—the IC and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical.”62
For Gates and Clapper, however, managing a privatized enterprise like today’s Pentagon was second nature: after all, both men had spent a considerable amount of time working in the defense and intelligence industries. After Gates left the CIA in the early 1990s, he had served as a director for SAIC as well as the intelligence contractor TRW.63 Clapper, too, was well connected: in between his defense jobs, he was a director of satellite vendor GeoEye, which is largely funded by NGA contracts, and worked as an executive for several other NGA companies.64 Previously, as NGA director, Clapper had presided over an agency where half the employees were full-time contractors. And just before taking the position of undersecretary of defense, Clapper had served as the chief operating officer of DFI Government Services, which holds IT and consulting contracts with the National Intelligence Council, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and other military and intelligence agencies.65 As if to underscore Aftergood’s point, nine months after Clapper assumed his duties at the Pentagon, DFI—newly merged with the British defense contractor Detica Group PLC and renamed DeticaDFI—signed a contract with Clapper’s office to provide analytical services to the Pentagon in collaboration with the CIA contractor Scitor. Under the contract, Detica announced, the DeticaDFI/Scitor team will “improve the client’s ability to provide more rapid and effective intelligence aimed at curbing terrorist threats.”66
Clapper and Gates were thus more than comfortable with the extent of outsourcing in the intelligence business. In that sense, nothing had changed. And if that was true at the Pentagon, it was equally true at the NSA and the NGA, where we now turn our attention.
6
The NSA, 9/11, and the Business of Data Mining
OVER THE PAST THREE YEARS, the American public has learned more about the National Security Agency and its formidable abilities in signals intelligence than it did over the agency’s previous sixty-year history. As recently as 1995 it was highly unusual for an NSA director to give a public speech or testify before Congress, and rarer still for a national leader to visit NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. Even the vaguest references to the NSA were routinely excised from White House memoirs and congressional reports.1 But the revelations in December 2005 of the existence of the NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program, and the subsequent debates in Congress about the President’s wiretapping powers, completely altered the political landscape for the once-secret agency.
By 2008, the director of the NSA was as ubiquitous in the media and Congress as the secretary of state or the chairman of the Federal Reserve. President George W. Bush had paid three public visits to Fort Meade, more than any president in history. As the debate over the NSA’s powers and its ties to the private sector spilled into the federal courts and the media, terms like “intercept,” “SIGINT,” and “data mining,” rarely uttered outside the closed doors of the Intelligence Community before the turn of the century, had become part of the popular vernacular. For people accustomed to keeping every detail about the NSA’s technical prowess under wraps, the changes were astonishing.
“NSA used to stand for ‘No Such Agency,’ and now you have books on it,” marveled Peter Swire, an expert on surveillance law at Ohio State University who was the chief counselor for privacy in the Clinton administration. “We’ve had a national education on this.” To industry professionals used to operating under a thick cloak of secrecy, however, the new transparency was alarming, even dangerous. The intelligence business “is conducted in secret for a reason—you compromise sources and methods,” Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell sternly instructed the House Intelligence Committee in September 2007 as it opened yet another hearing on the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set the rules for domestic wiretapping. The congressional debate about the NSA and FISA has “allowed those who wish us harm”—Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies—to “understand significantly more about how we were targeting their communications,” warned McConnell. By merely talking about this subject, he added, Congress could cause Americans to die.2
It was a revealing moment for McConnell, the former contractor who had spent the better part of the last ten years working to improve the government’s eavesdropping powers, first as NSA director, then as the senior executive for intelligence at Booz Allen Hamilton, and finally at the Office of the DNI. More than anyone else in government, he understood that public deliberations about the NSA’s targeting abilities were exposing the Intelligence Community’s worst-kept secret: that the NSA, once the nation’s leading technology incubator, has developed an overwhelming dependence on the private sector for the very “sources and methods” that make electronic surveillance possible.
Over the last decade, as the NSA’s budget doubled from $4 billion a year to over $8 billion, the agency has become the outsourcing vanguard of national intelligence. In 2007, well over half of its budget was spent on contracts, according to industry officials and former intelligence officers who work with the agency. Every time the NSA detects unusual activity at a missile base in North Korea, tracks down a terrorist suspect in Pakistan, or analyzes the content of domestic and international phone calls, you can be certain that a contractor wearing a green badge is involved at every level.
The NSA’s classified budget—which probably exceeded $10 billion in 2007—is the largest single appropriation in the Intelligence Community, and has been augmented over the last few years by $2 billion or $3 billion more in funds from the supplemental bills passed by Congress for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Much of that money goes toward information technology projects—data mining, signals analysis, making and breaking codes—that have helped make the NSA the technical leader of the Intelligence Community. At the same time, the NSA is at the forefront of the IC’s top priority of integrating information across agencies and getting intelligence directly to the war-fighter involved in combat.
The companies doing this work range in size from huge defense contractors to small, focused companies that provide specialized technology for mining and analyzing data. Science Applications International Corporation, the secretive San Diego company that expects to earn $9 billion in 2008, may b
e the NSA’s largest contractor: more than 75 percent of its revenue flows from national security contracts. Computer Sciences Corporation, a $15 billion IT services company based in El Segundo, California, and the defense giant Northrop Grumman are the prime contractors on Project Groundbreaker, the $5 billion project started in 2001 that outsourced the management and operations of NSA’s internal computer and communications networks to private companies. The day Project Groundbreaker began, more than one thousand NSA employees were transferred from the government to the private sector. “They walked out on Friday as NSA employees, and came back Monday as employees of CSC,” recalls Frank Blanco, who was the NSA’s director of personnel when the transition occurred in December 2001.3
Booz Allen Hamilton, McConnell’s old company, is a key adviser to the NSA on outsourcing and a prime contractor for some of the agency’s most sensitive projects. “While outsourcing information technology has long been common at corporations, it was not typical in the government until Booz Allen helped [the NSA] find advantages in private-sector practices,” the company boasted in its 2001 Annual Report about the consulting services it provided on Project Groundbreaker.4 Among other tasks, Booz Allen helped the NSA select software programs and evaluated vendor proposals. As a result, Booz Allen remains “a key member of the team managing the entire NSA infrastructure,” the company says.5 In 2002, IBM won a major contract to jointly develop a system to mine data and help the NSA “learn about our targets,” according to congressional testimony by former NSA director Michael Hayden. Other big contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and L-3, as well as smaller, more focused firms such as CACI and ManTech, provide extensive IT and technical support to the NSA. Below them are literally dozens of start-ups developing specialized technology for the agency.
Outsourcing extends to every division of the NSA. Inside the agency’s Signals Intelligence Directorate, which provides U.S. military leaders and policy-makers with intelligence derived from monitoring global communications, contractors analyze data, write reports, and produce finished intelligence that is passed up the line to high-ranking officials in government. They supply and maintain software programs that manipulate data as well as remote sensing technology, data mining programs, and software that can translate data into visual graphics.
At the NSA’s information assurance directorate, which is charged with securing the communications of high-ranking American officials in the national security infrastructure, contractors provide collaboration tools to help the NSA communicate with other intelligence and defense agencies, and supply information security tools to protect the integrity of NSA and other intelligence data. At the management level, the NSA has contracted out background investigations and performance reviews on individuals working for the agency, including both government employees and the contractors themselves.6 And, as with Booz Allen, many of the agency’s contracts are monitored by private sector companies.
According to my best estimates, at least 50 percent and as much as 75 percent of the people at NSA headquarters and its ground stations around the world are contractors working for the private sector. Unfortunately, my figures could not be matched against official numbers because the NSA would not comment on its outsourcing policies or make anyone available for an interview. “After thoughtful review, the NSA respectfully declines the invitation to participate in your book project,” Ken White of the NSA’s corporate communications and strategy group informed me in an e-mail in the spring of 2007.
The NSA’s headquarters is a gleaming black edifice that towers over the landscape of Fort Meade, a sixty-acre military base about fifteen miles due north of Washington, D.C. The monstrous building, designed with specially darkened glass that keeps outsiders from snooping in, dominates a complex of more than sixty office buildings, warehouses, semiconductor chip factories, and laboratories. More than 65, 000 people work there as engineers, physicists, mathematicians, linguists, and computer scientists. The machines and computers they use eat up more electric power than the nearby city of Annapolis, and make the NSA the largest customer of Baltimore Gas & Electric, the state’s largest utility. Since 2005, the NSA has been headed by Army Lieutenant General Keith Alexander, the former deputy chief of staff of the Army and a onetime director of intelligence for the United States Central Command. His campus is the nucleus of a global network of radar domes, satellites, aircraft, ships, and ground interception stations that provide the most sensitive intelligence available to the U.S. government.
More than 70 percent of the President’s Daily Brief, a summary of the key events of the day presented to the White House every morning by the DNI, is said to come from the NSA. The agency, under the direction of the White House and the DNI, collects, decodes, translates, and analyzes all signals intelligence relevant to U.S. foreign policy, including phone calls placed by Al Qaeda, foreign political and military leaders, insurgent groups considered dangerous to America, drug dealers, and trade and arms control negotiators. And as a combat support agency of the Department of Defense, the NSA is charged with transmitting actionable intelligence to military units and war-fighters in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, and using its surveillance and encryption units to detect the make and type of weapons systems the enemy is using. “There is not a single event that the US worries about in a foreign policy or foreign military context that NSA does not make a very direct contribution to,” McConnell remarked when he was running the NSA in 1995—a statement as true then as it is now.7
Much of the global chatter analyzed by the NSA is captured by its Central Security Service. The CSS is the parent organization for signals and cryptology units of the Army, Navy, and Air Force, and includes the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), the Naval Security Group, and the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, formerly known as the Air Intelligence Agency (AIA). These units listen in on global communications from NSA posts at home as well as overseas, including from such places as Misawa Air Base in Japan and Menwith Hill in the United Kingdom. CSS units operate the NSA’s huge fleet of spy planes and drones that fly along the borders of China, Colombia, and other countries to monitor military and commercial communications traffic and track emissions from radar and missile guidance systems operated by foreign armies.
The NSA’s most important partner in the Intelligence Community is the National Reconnaissance Office, which builds and manages the nation’s fleet of spy satellites and operates ground stations where signals and imagery from those satellites are downloaded and analyzed. When the NSA needs coverage of a certain area, say the western third of Iraq or a mountain chain in North Korea, it sends a request up to the NRO, which can tip the satellites just a degree or two to sweep a new area (that can still take days and even weeks, I’m told). The same satellites are used by the NGA for its imagery and mapping programs, thus creating a strong, symbiotic relationship between the NSA and its sister national agencies that answer to the Pentagon’s chain of command.
The NSA also maintains a close and frequently tense relationship with the CIA. Analysts at Langley use information from the NSA’s intercepts of phone calls and e-mails in their intelligence estimates for the White House and Congress, and work closely with the NSA in their collection efforts against Al Qaeda and governments considered hostile to the United States. The cooperation isn’t always smooth, however. During the first six months of 2002, according to the 9/11 Commission, which studied the events that led to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the White House issued “no less than seven executive-level memoranda” to delineate the agencies’ separate responsibilities in collection and stop their perennial squabbling.8 The CIA’s Office of Inspector General elaborated on the “persistent strain” in relations between NSA and the CIA in a top secret report that was declassified in 2007. It found that, throughout the 1990s and right up to 9/11, the NSA monitored cell phone conversations between top Al Qaeda operatives but refused to share the raw transcripts with the CIA.9 Indeed, the NSA re
mains one of the most security-obsessed agencies in the Intelligence Community.
As you approach Fort Meade by car, you’re surrounded by electric fences topped with barbed wire, armed security guards in black Humvees, and signs reading “Danger: National Security Zone.” Around a curve is National Vigilance Park, where the NSA has on display two reconnaissance aircraft used for its secret missions during the Cold War.* The only building on the campus where the public is allowed is the National Cryptological Museum, which opened in 1993. It is housed in a former motel that the NSA acquired to keep the building out of public hands. The museum holds thousands of artifacts marking the history of electronic surveillance, from its origins during World War II through its many triumphs and tragedies during the Cold War. “It’s kind of like the baseball Hall of Fame,” a museum staffer told me as I walked through during a recent visit.