Bloated US intelligence needs an urgent diet

• Source: Global Times
• [08:09 September 03 2010]
• Comments

Editor's Note:

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, a huge portion of US intelligence has been contracted to private firms and organizations. Nine years later, even Secretary of Defense Robert Gates doubts whether the US government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. Was such privatization an inevitable choice, or was 9/11 taken advantaged by a group of ill-intentioned, corrupt officials? Can US intelligence be restored to a manageable size? Global Times (GT) reporter Chen Chenchen interviewed Tim Shorrock (Shorrock), a commentator on US national security and East Asian politics, and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (2008), on these issues.

Tim Shorrock

GT: Do you think the privatization of intelligence is understandable, due to the colossal tension in the wake of the 9/11 attacks? Is anti-terrorism a justified excuse?

Shorrock: Yes, it's understandable, but not a full explanation. The US experienced a horrific attack on 9/11 from a virtually unknown enemy, and it needed to protect itself immediately and find out who had planned and carried out the attack so it wouldn't happen again.

It turned to contractors for much of its immediate needs. Because by 2001, much of the institutional memory and the collective knowledge of intelligence was in the private sector, for the reasons that there had been huge cuts in intel-ligence budgets and staffs following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the formal end of the Cold War, and many former intelligence operatives had gone to work for private companies.

So the country faced an emergency situation, and suddenly had to bring in thousands of analysts, operatives and translators. As I detail in Spies for Hire, many of the contractors after 9/11 had experience providing intelligence services to the Clinton administration in the late 1990s, particularly in the US/ NATO war in Bosnia.

Unfortunately, however, the post- 9/11 "emergency" is still in place. At some point after the attacks, the US government should have stood back and asked: Where do we need to hire government intelligence officials? Where are the gaps we need to fill? Instead, the Bush administration, the CIA and the intelligence agencies kept on hiring contractors.

No questions were asked about the wisdom of this policy until 2006 or 2007, when Congress began inquiring about the size and scope of the privatized intelligence force.

Worse, instead of tracking down Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda forces and beefing up the intelligence agencies with trained government personnel to carry out that task, former President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney decided to invade Iraq.

And they began to systematically politicize the collection of intelligence, demanding from the CIA proof that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Contractors, who always want the next contract, made that politicization even easier.

So I would conclude that the massive privatization that we see today was in no way inevitable. It was managed by shortsighted officials, some with close ties to contractors, who saw no problem in shoveling 70 percent of our intelligence budget to the private sector and dozens of very profitable firms.

Contracting and outsourcing is a for-profit operation. Profit-making and protecting the country are two separate things and should never be linked.

GT: Since contractors wanted to get contracts renewed, they probably exaggerated threats against national security. To what extent were contractors' intelligence reports trusted by government agencies? Are there specific examples of exaggerated reports by private companies resulting in bad government decisions?

Shorrock: There are about 200 firms that really control most of the business with the intelligence community, as well as the national security community. Their reports are trusted very highly by the government. Bush's Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell, came to his job directly from a contractor, Booz Allen Hamilton. President Obama's chief counter-terrorism advisor, John Brennan, was also a contractor before coming to the White House.

As for examples of tainting intelligence, that's very difficult to show because these operations are classified and secret. We don't know what's in reports passed up the chain to senior government officials, nor do we know what portion of intelligence reports are written by contractors.

But I do know that some contractors have provided strategic advice to the US government about future intelligence programs in which they had a direct financial stake. I'm glad to see that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently ordered an end to contractors writing such reports for Pentagon intelligence agencies.

Only government officials working for an administration elected by the people should be able to direct future spending and decide on future projects.