Rent-A-Spy

The new buzz phrase, according to Shorrock, is "net centric warfare," a contractor-supplied technology that pushes information out "to the soldier at the tip of the spear," allowing him "to download data, imagery, and intelligence from computer bases located in nearby command posts or from spy planes flying overhead." Net centric warfare "is right in the sweet spot we provide for our customers," Shorrock quotes Robert Coleman, president of ManTech International, a top intelligence contractor, telling investors at the Mandarin Oriental. The event's keynote speaker was former CIA Director George Tenet, who within three months of his speech "would join, either as a director or an adviser, four companies that were directly involved with the high-tech military strategies he was endorsing," Shorrock writes.

This is a movie version of Washington, of course, with black-hat war profiteers right out of Catch-22's M & M Enterprises. Beyond the caricatures is a world in which contractors necessarily fill gaps in U.S. intelligence capabilities and provide valuable new technology. Yes, they're turning a profit along the way, but is that inherently evil, as Shorrock suggests? His book would have benefited mightily from interviews with some of the officials he lampoons. But one-sided though it is, it contains some important, timely truths about the influx of private entrepreneurs into America's spy agencies.

Shorrock -- a frequent contributor to such liberal muckraking magazines as Mother Jones, the Nation and the Progressive -- dates the beginning of the intelligence "outsourcing boom" to the Carter and Reagan years, when cutting the federal payroll became a Washington mantra. But it was during the Clinton administration that the privatization of intelligence went on steroids, abetted by industry-dominated study commissions championed by Vice President Al Gore and Defense Secretary William Cohen. Oh, the savings, purred the representatives of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications and other contracting giants on the board of the National Defense Panel, which recommended a vast privatization of national security activities. More than 30,000 government jobs, it estimated, could be cut.

"A revolution in business affairs," Gore and Cohen said in a joint statement.

"A corporate vision for the Defense Department," said Cohen, more precisely.

The revolution was accompanied by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was to provide a "peace dividend" through reductions in national security spending. The soft part of the budget, as always, was personnel. R. James Woolsey, faced with cuts as Bill Clinton's CIA director in 1993, slashed the number of large CIA stations by more than 60 percent and of case officers working overseas by more than 30 percent, Shorrock reports.

The spies were out in the cold. Yet Woolsey was "ferocious" in defending the intelligence community's technical budget, according to Spies for Hire:"He fought vigorously to increase spending on expensive high-technology programs -- precisely the vehicles that were funding the great leaps being made at the time by Titan, Martin Marietta, and other companies he advised before going to the CIA."

That's a nasty swipe. Is Shorrock suggesting that Woolsey fired spies to make a buck for his pals? Alas, Woolsey doesn't get space to defend himself. In any event, as has been fully reported elsewhere, the CIA was sadly lacking HUMINT -- spy handlers collecting human intelligence -- when al-Qaeda's storm hit landfall in New York and Washington.

So the old boys who had been cut from the rolls, or had retired, saw an opportunity. One of them was Richard "Hollis" Helms, a 30-year CIA veteran who retired in 1999. "In the months after the 9/11 attacks, he began taking notice of the many retired intelligence officers who were being hired by defense contractors," Shorrock writes. He "seized the moment" and created Abraxas, which quickly grew into a company with $65 million in revenues and more than 200 former intelligence officers on its payroll, "the largest aggregate of analytical counter-terrorism capabilities outside of the U.S. government."

Would the United States be better off if those operatives were working as CIA employees, reporting directly to agency supervisors rather than to private bosses whose loyalty to the company's bottom line may trump the nation's national security? After reading Shorrock's strenuous indictment, you will wonder. ·

Jeff Stein is the national security editor and SpyTalk columnist for Congressional Quarterly.