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http://www.salon.com/news/excerpt/2008/05/29/spies_for_hire/print.html
Former high-ranking Bush officials enjoy war profits
Now working inside America's "shadow" spy industry, George Tenet,
Richard Armitage, Cofer Black and others are ca****ng in big on Iraq and
the war on terror.
By Tim Shorrock
May. 29, 2008
Richard L. Armitage, who served from 2001 to 2005 as Deputy Secretary of
State, was a rarity in the Bush administration: an official who
delighted in talking to the press. Re****ters loved him for his withering
criticism of the neoconservative zealots around President George W. Bush
and in part because he fed them tidbits about the White House they could
obtain nowhere else. His accidental disclosure to conservative columnist
Robert Novak that Valerie Plame, the wife of Iraq war critic Joseph
Wilson, was working undercover for the Central Intelligence Agency
remains one of the most notorious leaks of the Bush era.
But perhaps because of his cozy ties to the Wa****ngton press corps and
the media's obsession with Plamegate, very little has been written about
Armitage's extensive business dealings. In fact, Armitage is one of the
most successful capitalists in Wa****ngton. He has successfully parlayed
his experience in covert operations and secret diplomacy into a thriving
career as a consultant and adviser to some of the biggest players in
America's Intelligence Industrial Complex -- cor****ations that are
working at the heart of U.S. national security and profiting handsomely
from it.
Armitage, currently an adviser to presidential candidate John McCain,
had once been Colin Powell's closest ally during the bitter disputes
inside the Bush administration over the invasion and occupation of Iraq.
According to the Wa****ngton Post's Bob Woodward, Armitage advised Powell
on more than one occasion to tell the neocons to "go **** themselves,"
and, at one point, even refused to deliver a speech about Iraq drafted
for him by Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Yet, three years after those epic battles, Armitage is enjoying life as
a stakeholder in a dozen private companies that are making money
directly from the war started by his former nemeses.
Over the past decade, contracting for America's spy agencies has grown
into a $50 billion industry that eats up seven of every 10 dollars spent
by the U.S. government on its intelligence services. Today, unbeknownst
to most Americans, agencies once renowned for their prowess in analysis,
covert operations, electronic surveillance and overhead reconnaissance
outsource many of their core tasks to the private sector. The bulk of
this market is serviced by about 100 companies, ranging in size from
multibillion dollar defense behemoths to small technology shops funded
by venture capitalists.
Nearly every one of them has sought out former high-ranking intelligence
and national security officials as both managers and directors. Like
Armitage, these are people who have served for decades in the upper
echelons of national power. Their lives have been defined by secret
briefings, classified do***ents, covert wars and sensitive intelligence
missions. Many of them have kept their security clearances and maintain
a hand in government by serving as advisers to high-level advisory
bodies at the Pentagon, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National
Security Agency and the White House. Now, with their government careers
behind them, they make their living by rendering strategic advice to the
dozens of information technology vendors and intelligence contractors
headquartered along the banks of the Potomac River and the byways of
Wa****ngton's Beltway.
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 cor****ate
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 cor****ation
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 im****tant 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 re****t 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 "*****uous" relation****ps 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 leader****p level that their interests, practically speaking, are
identical."
Former high-ranking officials bring tremendous value to a government
contractor seeking new work or a private equity fund looking for
companies to buy. "You understand the decision-making process inside the
Beltway, and that is liquid gold," says Roger Cressey, who worked in
President Clinton's National Security Council as deputy director of
counterterrorism and is now a partner in Good Harbor Consulting, a
company he founded with his former boss at the NSC, Richard Clarke.
Cressey, who is a terrorism consultant for NBC News, adds that the
influence of a retired official lasts only a limited period of time
after he or she leaves office. "You have 18 to 24 months to translate
your rolodex into real services," he says.
But the value of a CIA director or national security official goes much
further than a rolodex. Because high-ranking officials have been privy
to classified and top-secret information for years -- and sometimes, in
the cases of people like Armitage and Tenet, decades -- they have
details about intelligence programs, classified operations and the
internal affairs of other countries that few others can claim.
Armitage, who was a senior Pentagon official during the Reagan
administration, was deeply involved in covert operations in Vietnam as a
Navy officer and, shortly after September 11, flew to Pakistan on behalf
of the Bush administration to deliver a stark message to its military
president, Pervez Musharraf, that drastic measures would follow if
Musharraf did not sup****t the war on terror. He also led an influential
group of U.S. officials who quietly pushed the Japanese government to
adopt a more militaristic role in global affairs over the last seven
years.
In all of these tasks, Armitage would have had access to the most
classified intelligence available to U.S. officials, including telephone
intercepts provided by the NSA. That kind of experience is extremely
valuable to a company like ManTech, which sells and operates signals
intelligence systems to the NSA and provides "cyber and physical
security" for U.S. embassies and consulates around the world. According
to ManTech CEO George J. Pedersen, who also employed Armitage as an
adviser during the 1990s, Armitage was brought on as a director for his
"enormous insight into our cor****ation's capabilities and operations."
(Armitage did not respond to a written request for an interview.)
Tenet is even more connected: With the former CIA director on board,
L-1's CEO Robert LaPenta told analysts last year, "a phone call gets us
in to see whoever we want." Tenet, of course, has extensive knowledge
about intelligence services in Saudi Arabia, the UK and Pakistan as well
as secret operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia. His insights have
already helped L-1 in its acquisition strategies. Shortly after Tenet
joined L-1's board, the company acquired one of the CIA's hottest
contractors, SpecTal, which has 300 employees with top-secret security
clearances who work extensively in Afghanistan. Months before, during a
2006 meeting with L-1 executives about SpecTal's potential business in
that country, Tenet urged company executives to "call the SpecTal guys"
because "they know everybody in every one of these ministries that you
need to go talk to," according to LaPenta. L-1 not only called them; it
bought them out, and has since combined SpecTal with its latest
acquisition, Advanced Concepts Inc., a systems engineering firm holding
contracts at the NSA. Tenet, through a spokesman, declined to comment.
Power also flows out of a former high-ranking official's presence as a
policy-maker. During the 1990s, when Armitage was building his
reputation as a private consultant and defense industry adviser, he was
a member of President Clinton's Defense Policy Board. Although Armitage,
like any board member, was prohibited from divulging contents of
meetings with his clients, the internal discussions and access to
classified do***ents helped shape the advice he gave his clients. That's
certainly the impression one gets from officials at CACI International,
a key intelligence contractor where Armitage served on the board of
directors during that time. During his tenure as a director in the
1990s, CACI officials wrote in 2001, Armitage provided "valuable
guidance on CACI's strategic growth plans and the federal government and
Defense Department markets."
The same can be said of many of Armitage's contem****aries in the defense
and intelligence industries who advise their clients while holding
positions in government advisory boards at the Pentagon, the CIA and the
NSA. One of Armitage's fellow directors at ManTech, for example, is
Retired Admiral David E. Jeremiah. He is a member of President Bush's
Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and a paid adviser to the National
Reconnaissance Office, the super-secret agency that manages the nation's
spy satellites. A third ManTech director, Richard J. Kerr, a 32-year
veteran of the CIA, led a 2005 study for the CIA into the agency's
prewar *****sments of Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction.
One of the most representative figures in America's new private
intelligence elite is Joan A. Dempsey. She is currently a vice president
of Booz Allen Hamilton, where for the last three years she has worked
alongside former CIA director Jim Woolsey and more than 1,000 other
former intelligence officers. Dempsey, a steely-looking blonde, began
her career as a naval technician listening to Soviet bomber and
submarine traffic at Misawa Air Base in Japan, a key NSA listening post.
Over the years, she slowly worked her way up the intelligence chain of
command at the Pentagon, from Naval Intelligence to the Defense
Intelligence Agency. In 1997, she was appointed deputy assistant
secretary of defense for intelligence and security in the Clinton
administration, the highest civilian intelligence position in the
Department of Defense at the time. There, she had responsibility over
the NSA, the NGA and the NRO, the three national collection agencies
controlled by the Pentagon, as well as the DoD's tactical command,
control, communications and intelligence (C3I) efforts.
By 1999, Dempsey had become George Tenet's representative to the rest of
the Intelligence Community as the CIA's director of community
management. In that position in 1999 she won the everlasting sup****t of
the Intelligence Community -- and its growing army of contractors --
when she led negotiations with the Republican-led Congress that added
$1.2 billion to the intelligence budget. That figure still remains one
of the largest single-year increases in the history of the National
Foreign Intelligence Program. Five years later, partly in recognition of
this feat, Dempsey was given the William O. Baker award for meritorious
intelligence service by the Security Affairs Sup****t Association (SASA),
which from 1979 to 2005 represented the largest prime contractors at the
NSA and the CIA. Her remarks at that ceremony serve as a kind of
leitmotif for the outsourcing phenomenon in intelligence.
In her acceptance speech, Dempsey paid effusive praise to the
cor****ations she had known over the years, many of whom had purchased
tables for the event: General Dynamics, Es*** Cor****ation, Oracle
Cor****ation, Computer Sciences Cor****ation, AT&T Government Solutions,
ManTech and Lockheed Martin. She thanked her "Pentagon friends" from L-3
Communications, with whom she had worked "on my favorite program of all
time, the U-2" spy plane. She spoke of her pride in working with the
Boeing Company on the Future Imagery Architecture, a $4 billion project
by the NRO and the NGA to build and operate the next generation of
imagery satellites (the project was cancelled in 2005). At the CIA,
Dempsey said, she had "benefited enormously" from her work with Booz
Allen Hamilton and SAIC.
Then she went slightly off-script: "I like to call Booz Allen the shadow
IC," she said, using the common acronym for the intelligence community,
because it has "more former secretaries of this and directors of that"
than the entire government. That must have caused some chuckles at the
lead table, where Woolsey was sitting. But Dempsey, of course, got the
last laugh. Fifteen months later, she joined the "shadow IC" herself as
a vice president. In her job at Booz Allen, she "provides strategy
consulting services to the US government, including the national
security and civil sectors, as well as commercial industry," according
to company spokesperson George Farrar. Then, in January 2007, Dempsey's
joke came full circle when Mike McConnell, her boss at Booz Allen, was
appointed Director of National Intelligence. In the space of a few
years, Booz Allen had been transformed from a "shadow" intelligence
community player into the real thing.
It was most intriguing, then, to hear what Dempsey is actually doing in
her new job at Booz Allen. In the spring of 2006, Dempsey was invited to
speak to a seminar on intelligence reform at Harvard University. In a
remarkably candid speech, Dempsey disclosed that her office at Booz
Allen was evaluating the entire decision-making process within the
intelligence community. Under her supervision, she said, Booz Allen was
"studying the implications of the many decisions that are being made on
a daily basis right now all over the intelligence community," including
by the staff of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. "No
one has thought through the implications of those decisions in a
strategic or aggregate sense for the future," she added. So Booz Allen
is helping out by "trying to forecast" what these decisions "mean for
the intelligence community of the future -- what it's going to look
like, how it's going to operate -- along a trend line."
It was a remarkable cir***stance: Booz Allen was conducting a study for
the DNI, a position that was about to be filled by one of the company's
own -- Mike McConnell. The shadow IC was now helping the real IC prepare
for an immediate future when the real IC would be led by the shadow IC.
This was more than a revolving door: The private and the public sides of
intelligence were now sharing the same room.
--
Dan Clore
My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
http://tinyurl.com/2gcoqt
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://tinyurl.com/292yz9
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
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Skipper: Professor, will you tell these people who is
in charge on this island?
Professor: Why, no one.
Skipper: No one?
Thurston Howell III: No one? Good heavens, this is anarchy!
-- _Gilligan's Island_, episode #6, "President Gilligan"
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