by Tim Shorrock
This classified zone is where the major intelligence contractors, specifically the systems integrators, come into play. To transmit classified NGA imagery and data to other agencies as well as military consumers, the NGA relies on IT contractors with large numbers of employees with security clearances. In 2001, the NGA awarded a $17 million contract to Booz Allen Hamilton to build one of the Intelligence Community’s first multiagency databases for the imagery agency. The first stage of the Future Intelligence Requirements Environment, known by the acronym FIRE, was completed in 2006, and has been demonstrated to other potential customers in the military and the IC over the last eighteen months. The system is designed to help intelligence agencies cut across their own stovepiped systems and share information widely across the IC.32
According to Defense News, the database collects information from multiple agencies and provides a “suite” of analysis and simulation tools that allows analysts to decide how to use imagery. “FIRE can play out all the possibilities and options based on stacks of accumulated data being collected from sensors, and from known data about friends and enemy platforms and systems,” the newspaper said. “Armed with that vast amount of multi-intelligence information, its modeling and simulation tools can play out the ‘what-ifs.’”33 Booz Allen wouldn’t comment on any aspect of its work for the Intelligence Community. But its Web site provides some details of its offerings to the NGA, including expertise in a “wide range of imagery formats, commercial remote sensing systems and information systems.” Judging by the prominent role played at GEOINT by Booz Allen executives such as Keith Hall and Joan Dempsey, the NGA is one of the company’s most important customers.34
SAIC has a major contract with the NGA (the agency won’t put a value on it) to produce geospatial information transmitted to U.S. troops and intelligence staff around the world. In 2004, as mentioned earlier, the company received a Meritorious Unit Citation from CIA director George Tenet for developing the imagery systems used by the Predators, U-2s, and Global Hawk surveillance aircraft deployed by the CIA and the NGA over Iraq.35 SAIC also plays a key role in NGA activities as a result of its work as the principal contractor for the Joint Intelligence Operations Capability-Iraq, the Pentagon unit that transmits classified intelligence to U.S. military forces engaged in battle. Managing SAIC’s work for the NGA is Leo Hazlewood, a twenty-three-year veteran of the CIA who served as the NGA’s first deputy director.
Lockheed Martin is responsible for what may be the NGA’s most sweeping project. It is developing for the NGA a “ground-based infrastructure” designed to help users of the NGA’s satellite and imagery data to improve their ability to distribute, share, and exploit the information. The contract, called GeoScout, was awarded in 2003 for an unspecified amount, and is proceeding in four “blocks” that could take up to ten years to complete. The ultimate goal, Lockheed Martin executives say, is to create a system that seamlessly blends data from unclassified commercial and classified military satellites. “GEOSCOUT allows the foundation for connectivity,” says Jeffrey Harris of Lockheed Martin. The project, now in Block Two, is managed by Michael Thomas, a Lockheed Martin vice president in its Integrated Systems & Solutions unit and a member of the USGIF board of directors. Its future, however, is uncertain: GeoScout is frequently cited by intelligence analysts, along with the NSA’s Trailblazer, as an expensive project in which too much power was ceded by government managers to the contractor.36
Some of the NGA’s smaller software vendors operate on a classified level as well. AGI, the company that produced the imagery for Mission: Impossible III, operates as a subcontractor to SAIC and Booz Allen’s classified integration programs, and offers workshops (called “agi-classified”) to intelligence agencies. A brochure distributed at the GEOINT conference advertised a series of workshops in 2007 in El Segundo, California; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Chantilly, Virginia; where AGI said experts from key U.S. defense and intelligence organizations and AGI engineers would explain how AGI technology could be used for intelligence applications. Similarly, the USGIF and the NGA co-sponsored a series of technology workshops in May 2007 for private companies and government agencies to learn about the latest offerings in geospatial technology. The first day’s session was a classified event, open only to officials and contractors holding SI/TK clearances. Those designations are part of a broader clearance called SCI, or “sensitive compartmented information,” which must be obtained before working on intelligence collection systems. SI refers to special intelligence, and TK to talent keyhole; both are common security clearances for professionals working with signals and geospatial intelligence. (The second day of the conference was unclassified and open to everyone.)
In addition to being classified, the integration and analytical services provided by SAIC, Booz Allen, and other companies are proprietary. That is, they are produced by those companies with the understanding that the key technology won’t be disclosed to their competitors. It’s kind of a private form of classification—a fact that General Clapper, when he was still director of the NGA, alluded to in a 2004 interview with Directions, the NGA’s in-house magazine. Asked if the NGA is working to declassify and commercialize its leading technologies, he replied that “the reverse of what you describe is the norm.” The NGA, he said, “works closely with industry to take its unclassified technology and use it as a platform upon which we add classified data.” But there is a “crucial difference” between the industry’s technology and the NGA’s classified data, he explained: the former is “protected because it is proprietary in nature,” while the NGA data is protected “because it is classified.”37 In both cases, however, the information is kept secret from the general public. At the same time, the issue of proprietary systems and their inability to communicate with each other has become one of the biggest weaknesses in the Intelligence Community.
It was no accident, therefore, that the theme of the GEOINT 2006 conference was “interoperability.” Every speech seemed calibrated to emphasize the need to fuse intelligence across agencies, the military, and domestic law enforcement. John Negroponte laid out the broad strokes of the policy in his closing speech. But he left the details up to his aides, who were in Orlando to lay down the law on intelligence sharing. Mary Margaret Graham, the same DNI official who had spilled the beans on the intelligence budget two years before, issued a not-so-veiled warning to intelligence agencies and their contractors that the days of proprietary systems and endless budgets for satellites were over. From here on out, she said, the DNI was going to stress interoperability. “The shining spacecraft, crucial though it may be, is not the whole story,” she said. “Today we must ensure that the ground architecture—the magic on the ground—receives as much if not more attention to ensure we take full advantage of the finely tuned and highly capable sensors that we operate.” That is beginning to happen with the “public-private partnership between NGA and the commercial imagery industry,” she concluded.
Graham and other officials were careful to define information sharing as a government mandate. But they knew, as did every attendee at the GEOINT conference, that the actual work of integrating intelligence is being done by the private sector information technology companies that now dominate the intelligence contracting industry. “There is a real need inside the IC to share information and domains,” John F. Olesak, the vice president of Northrop Grumman’s Intelligence Group, explained to me during a break in the proceedings. “The idea is to move away from stovepipes, whether derived from imagery, signals intelligence, or human intelligence, to be shared across multi-disciplines and multi-organizations to get more synergy and make it more available to people who might not have it.” Northrop Grumman’s “response as a corporation,” he said, “is to look to develop tools, techniques, and technologies to help get us to the point where customers share information. Information sharing is a very important part of our entire portfolio.”
To drive this point home, Northrop Grumman and about a dozen other compan
ies at the conference joined forces to produce an “interoperability technology event” that would show agency officials in the audience that many companies already have the capabilities demanded by the nation’s intelligence leaders. The demonstration, the highlight of the symposium’s second day, was narrated on the GEOINT 2006 stage by Chris Tucker, the president and CEO of IONIC Enterprise Inc., a supplier of communications software used by the NGA and its contractors. He described a complex scenario involving a high-level mission to Greece and Turkey by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, complicated by political turmoil and a disastrous earthquake. The scenes played out against a percussion-laden soundtrack that sounded suspiciously like the theme to The Exorcist, and a raft of high-tech graphics reminiscent of 24, the popular Fox counterterrorism show.
Under the scenario, Rice’s first stop was Athens for a meeting of the G8. From there, she was to fly to a gathering of NATO ministers in Istanbul, where Eric S. Edelman, the undersecretary of defense for policy (and the former U.S. ambassador to Turkey) was to join her. The big headache in Greece was a series of protests by “potentially conflicting groups” determined to “air their grievances.” Among them were Muslim groups “protesting the latest Middle East conflicts.” But of greatest concern—and here the drumbeat intensified—was the Greek nationalist group November 17th, which, according to the narrator, had a long “record of international terrorism.”
The interoperability phase of the scenario began with the Greek police transmitting, via e-mail, topographical maps of Athens, along with Rice’s planned route to the airport, to a multinational operations center where U.S. intelligence officers were monitoring the protests. One officer checked open source reporting from the news media to get a handle on emerging threats, and then ran the names of some of the groups identified in news reports through a Web-based data mining service he had handily loaded onto a laptop. Instantly, the screen showed several “Salafist detainees,” presumably Sunni extremists imprisoned by the Greek government. The agent put these names through a link analysis program that searched for hidden relationships, and came up with a “host of specific individuals known to be in Athens.” More information was added to the link analysis results, including NSA intercepts of the Salafist cell phone calls overlaid with NGA imagery of the area. Seeing this, the U.S. intelligence agents on the scene reported that the detainees had gathered “at construction sites in and around Athens.” At that point someone on Rice’s security detail piped up: “This is a bad scene. How did we miss this on the security prep?”
The next sounds were a British reporter describing mayhem at the construction sites, including percussion grenades exploding among the crowds. U.S. officials asked for the latest from the Greek police: they reported major fires and explosions, and urged a rerouting of Rice’s motorcade to the airport. The new map was then “pushed out” to the Secret Service and the Greeks, and Rice arrived safely at the airport to catch her flight. As her plane lifted off, she issued a press statement decrying the “loss of civility in this seat of civilization.” (Take that, you Greek militants.)
In-flight to Turkey, things took a turn for the worse. The pilots on Rice’s plane, dubbed Air Force Two, radioed ahead to Turkish Air Traffic Control, which suddenly went silent. So they checked in with their counterparts at CENTCOM headquarters in Doha, Qatar, and were told that a big earthquake had just rocked Turkey. Rice decided to land at a U.S. airbase in Turkey where she could “personally assist in the relief.” Then she heard that her colleague Edelman couldn’t be located; he’d been speaking about U.S. foreign policy at the country’s largest university, the epicenter of the quake. He was now somewhere in the rubble. U.S. intelligence analysts started looking for imagery that might help in Edelman’s rescue, and transmitted it directly to the computers used by their colleagues in the U.S. and Turkish militaries.
But the destruction at the university, as bad as it was, was suddenly overshadowed by a shadowy organization called Black Friday, which warned the Turkish government not to use “infidels” to look for Muslims in the rubble. To counter this threat, U.S. intelligence brought in two UAVs to fly over the area—one to establish a wireless communications network, and the other to monitor the security situation at the university “as the crowd grows larger and expresses its discontent.” By now there were fifty thousand dead, and gunfire could be heard in the streets: the “unintended result” of the U.S. rescue mission had been “heightened unrest amongst Turkish workers who now think the U.S. forces are taking over Istanbul.” After another sweep by one of the UAVs, the security team was given new rules of engagement in case they came under attack. Hours later, the U.S. official was found alive in the rubble and flown to Germany. The crisis was over, and “the good guys made it out alive.”
“What we have just witnessed,” Tucker said as the lights went back on, was twenty applications from sixteen different vendors, “all working seamlessly together with each application knowing nothing about the other vendor’s platforms, their operating systems, or the code base on the other side of that request.” Michele Weslender, one of Negroponte’s top deputies at the DNI, took the stage next. The demonstration, she said, was an example of what American companies and U.S. intelligence were now capable of. “We planned ahead, we adapted open international standards across the board for the government, military, and industry, and we were able to seamlessly on the fly take data from multiple sources and fuse it so we have shared situational awareness.” Later, I was told, representatives from several U.S. agencies asked the foundation to make the same demonstration available to them.
It’s not at all clear how easily the big contractors will be able to make their systems interact with each other. After the GEOINT conference, I spoke to retired Admiral Herbert Browne, who was about to retire after five years as the executive director of the Armed Forces Communications Electronics Association. AFCEA is the largest organization for intelligence contractors, and represents companies involved primarily in military intelligence. The message from the Intelligence Community and the Pentagon about integration, Browne told me, has been heard “loud and clear. They are saying to us, ‘make sure it can interconnect, or we don’t intend to spend any of the taxpayer money on it.’” But the problem for contractors and agencies alike, he said, is that most of the systems “were built in a stovepiped environment, and it’s going to take a while to make the transition.” It’s a lot like cars and houses today, he said—each has its internal computers that control the temperature, but neither system is linked to the other; starting over would mean burning down your house and buying a new car. “Well, we’re just not ready to burn down the intelligence houses and buy brand-new cars,” he said. “We’re ready to do what we can to progressively increase the amount of info exchanged between the intelligence communities, and that’s the direction we’re headed.”38
Some outside critics of the Intelligence Community are wary of such claims. One of the most skeptical is Robert David Steele, a twenty-five-year veteran of national security who served in the CIA, worked on classified programs involving both imagery and signals intelligence, and founded the Marine Corps Intelligence Center. As an advocate of open source intelligence that uses publicly available information, such as foreign language newspapers and journals, to build U.S. knowledge about the world, Steele is particularly scornful of the classified work done for intelligence agencies by contractors, which he sees as wasteful and of little value. When I described the USGIF interoperability event to him, his voice seemed to leap at me out of the telephone.
“One of the huge problems that we have in intelligence is that every agency and every division has a whole range of sweetheart deals with contractors built up over the years to the point where there is never really true and proper competition,” he said. At one point in his career, when he was part of a steering group that studied the use of IT across the Intelligence Community, “we found twenty different contracts across the agencies for advanced analytic workstations, and eve
ry single one of them was with a different contractor.” Steele added that this was true across the board in the IC, and makes the idea of linking disparate systems a pipe dream. “When a contractor talks to you about interoperability, that is code for wrapping a huge blanket around its proprietary system and putting together a very ugly bridge to everything else. It won’t work, it’s not affordable, it’s not scalable, it’s idiocy. It’s a huge waste of money and time.”39
Clearly, the information sharing scenario so dramatically portrayed at the GEOINT conference is a long way off. As a high-level study group convened by the NGA concluded in July 2007, “the DOD continues to be frustrated by the inability to get direct theater downlinks to the regional combatant commanders who view current unclassified imagery information and products as critical to mission execution.”40 But for every skeptic like Steele, there are five companies ready to prove him wrong. The most eager to jump into intelligence projects, no matter which agency funds them, are a group of contractors that depend almost entirely on spying for their revenue and trade their shares on the stock market. This shrinking breed, known as the “pure plays,” is where we turn next.