Ever since the 1950s, with the rise of America's modern military-industrial complex, high-level U.S. officials and military men have moved between the government and private sectors. But what we have today with the intelligence business is something far more systemic: senior officials leaving their national security and counterterrorism jobs for positions where they are basically doing the same jobs they once held at the CIA, the NSA and other agencies -- but for double or triple the salary, and for profit. It's a privatization of the highest order, in which our collective memory and experience in intelligence -- our crown jewels of spying, so to speak -- are owned by corporate America. Yet, there is essentially no government oversight of this private sector at the heart of our intelligence empire. And the lines between public and private have become so blurred as to be nonexistent.
Shortly after leaving government in 2005, Armitage was recruited to the board of directors of ManTech International, a $1.7 billion corporation that does extensive work for the National Security Agency and other intelligence collection agencies. He's also since advised two private equity funds with significant holdings in intelligence enterprises. Veritas Capital, where Armitage served as a senior adviser from 2005 to 2007, owns intelligence consultant McNeil Technologies Inc. and DynCorp International, an important security contractor in Iraq. For a time, Veritas also owned MZM, Inc., the CIA and defense intelligence contractor that was caught -- before the Veritas acquisition -- bribing former Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham.
In 2007, Armitage, along with several Veritas executives, moved over to DC Capital Partners, an intelligence-oriented buyout firm with some $200 million in assets. One of its first acquisitions after Armitage came on board was Omen Inc., a Maryland company that provides information technology and consulting services to the NSA. The fund has since combined Omen with two other intelligence contractors to form a new company called National Interests Security Company LLC, which has 850 employees, more than half of them holding top secret or higher security clearances.
Through his own eponymous consulting firm, Armitage has lobbied on behalf of L-3 Communications Inc., one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, to help it sell anti-submarine surveillance systems to Taiwan. L-3, like ManTech, is also heavily involved in Iraq. (Further topping off Armitage's investment interests in the war: He sits on the board of directors of ConocoPhillips, which is aiming to become a major player in Iraq's energy industry through a joint venture with Russia's Lukoil.)
In these jobs, former high-level officials like Armitage continue to fight terrorist threats and protect the "homeland," as they once did while working in government. But by fusing their political careers with business, these former officials have brought money-making into the highest reaches of national security. They have created a new class of capitalist policy-makers that is bridging the gap between public policy and private business in ways that are unprecedented in American history.
Take the case of George Tenet, who retired in 2004 from his service as President Bush's CIA director. As he was writing his memoirs and preparing for a new career as a professor at Georgetown University, Tenet quietly began cutting deals with companies that earn much of their revenues from contracts with the intelligence community. And, as I was the first to report a year ago in Salon, Tenet began to make big money off of the Iraq war. By the end of 2007, he had made nearly $3 million in directors' fees and other compensation from his service as a director and adviser to four companies that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq, as well as in the broader war on terror.
Those companies include L-1 Identity Solutions Inc., an intelligence and biometric conglomerate that holds a near-monopoly on software that identifies people by their fingerprints and facial characteristics; Guidance Software, a Pasadena, Calif., supplier of investigation and forensic software to the FBI and the Intelligence Community; and the Analysis Corp., a Fairfax, Va., intelligence contractor founded by Tenet's former chief of staff, John Brennan. Brennan himself went into the spy business after serving as chairman of the National Counterterrorism Center -- which is one of the Analysis Corp.'s biggest clients.
In Tenet's most prestigious position, he was the only American director of QinetiQ, the British defense research company that was privatized in 2003 and acquired by the well-connected Carlyle Group. Earlier this year, Tenet left QinetiQ's UK parent to join the board of QinetiQ North America, the company's U.S. subsidiary and one of the fastest-growing contractors in the U.S. intelligence market. There, Tenet is working with CEO Duane P. Andrews, a former assistant secretary of defense who was the chief intelligence adviser to Dick Cheney when he was Secretary of Defense in the early 1990s. (Prior to joining QinetiQ, Andrews would have had plenty of contact with Tenet, as Andrews was a senior executive with Science Applications International Corp., a major CIA and NSA contractor.)
In January, QinetiQ North America expanded its intelligence network by hiring Stephen Cambone, who was the assistant secretary of defense for intelligence under Donald Rumsfeld, as its vice president for strategy. That appointment came just days after the company won a $30 million, five-year contract to provide unspecified "security services" to the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, a controversial domestic security agency that was created by Rumsfeld and Cambone in 2002 and later took heat from Congress for illegally spying on antiwar and religious activists.
One of the most spectacular transitions from intelligence to business took place at Blackwater USA, the security contractor infamous for its trigger-happy soldiers in Iraq. One of Blackwater's first major contracts, negotiated by founder Erik Prince, was a secret no-bid $5.4 million deal with the CIA signed shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Shortly thereafter, Blackwater hired as its vice chairman Cofer Black, the CIA's former top counterterrorism official who was dispatched by Tenet in the days after 9/11 to brief President Bush and his advisers on the CIA's plans for overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Rob Richer, the CIA's former Associate Deputy Director of Operations and, before that, head of its Near East division, became Blackwater's Vice President of Intelligence, and later went to work for a private intelligence company.
Appointments like this, observes intelligence expert Steven Aftergood, reflect 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 after the news broke about Stephen Cambone's move to QinetiQ. "The problem is not so much a conflict of interest as it is a coincidence of interests -- the Intelligence Community and the contractors are so tightly intertwined at the leadership level that their interests, practically speaking, are identical."
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