Outsourcing Intelligence: Author
R.J. Hillhouse on How Key National Security Projects Are Contracted
to Private Firms
Amy Goodman interview
Democracy Now, July 26th, 2007
Author R.J. Hillhouse caused a stir in
Washington last month when she revealed more than 50 percent of
the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private
firms. Now Hillhouse has exposed private companies are heavily
involved in the nation's most important and most sensitive national
security document - the President's Daily Brief. And there appears
to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from inserting
items favorable to itself or its clients into the President's
Daily Brief in order to influence the country's national security
agenda. [includes rush transcript]
"Red alert: Our national security
is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the 'war on
terror' have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers.
They're about the mammoth private spying industry that all but
runs U.S. intelligence operations today... the private spy industry
has succeeded where no foreign government has: It has penetrated
the CIA and is running the show." Those are the opening lines
to a recent article in the Washington Post by R.J Hillhouse, a
blogger and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the
nation's intelligence agencies.
According to Hillhouse more than 50 percent
of the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private
firms such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and
Raytheon. Hillhouse's article in the Washington Post created a
firestorm of controversy within the intelligence community. A
week later the Office of the Director of National Intelligence
responded defending the use of private contractors.
Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach
of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private
companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical
products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive
national security document - the President's Daily Brief. And
there appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations
from inserting items favorable to itself or its clients into the
President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country's national
security agenda.
R.J. Hillhouse joins us now in Tulsa,
Oklahoma.
0. R.J. Hillhouse. Writes the national
security blog The Spy Who Billed Me. Her latest article "Outsourcing
Intelligence" was posted on the Nation Magazine website this
week. She is also the author of a new spy novel, "Outsourced."
0.
JUAN GONZALEZ: "Red alert: Our national
security is being outsourced. The most intriguing secrets of the
'war on terror' have nothing to do with al-Qaeda and its fellow
travelers. They're about the mammoth private spying industry that
all but runs U.S. intelligence operations today. [] The private
spy industry has succeeded where no foreign government has: It
has penetrated the CIA and is running the show."
Those are the opening lines to a recent
article in the Washington Post by R.J. Hillhouse, a blogger
and novelist who closely tracks the privatization of the nation's
intelligence agencies. According to Hillhouse, more than 50% of
the National Clandestine Service has been outsourced to private
firms, such as Abraxas, Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin and
Raytheon.
AMY GOODMAN: Hillhouse's article in the
Washington Post created a firestorm of controversy within
the intelligence community. A week later, the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence responded, defending the use of private
contractors.
Now Hillhouse has exposed that the reach
of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Private
companies are now heavily involved in creating the analytical
products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive
national security document: the President's Daily Brief. And there
appears to be few safeguards from preventing corporations from
inserting items favorable to themselves or to their clients into
the President's Daily Brief in order to influence the country's
national security agenda.
R.J. Hillhouse joins us now from Tulsa,
Oklahoma. She has written extensively about outsourcing of the
war on terror in her blog, thespywhobilledme.com. She has also
just published a novel called Outsourced. We welcome you
to Democracy Now!, R.J. Hillhouse. First, talk about this
expose, what you found.
R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, what I found is,
as you said, private corporations have completely penetrated the
intelligence apparatus of the United States. It's impossible --
even in the response to me by the Director of National Intelligence
that was published in the Washington Post, they admitted
that without private corporations they would be unable to function.
So what we're seeing is basic responsibilities of government have
been handed over to the private sector, which I really don't have
a problem with, but how it has occurred is very problematic. There
are layers of responsibility that have been handed to private
sector, so the government has actually very little control in
some of what's going on in terms of espionage. There's management
layers, and private corporations actually run other corporations
that are doing espionage work, the entire gamut of everything
from the NSA, what is being done in pattern analysis with phone
calls. Internet traffic is handled by some private corporations.
Actual gathering of intelligence on the ground, running of covert
operations on behalf of the CIA, it's all in private hands. It
seems that James Bond bills by the hour.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you talk even about
the presidential daily briefing. Could you explain how that has
become privatized, as well?
R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, it's not clear if
the very final document is done by private corporations. It's
clear at every stage of the way, what's called a government employee
or blue badger will sign off on it. But all of the information
that goes into it, the analytical products that become part of
the President's Daily Brief, are produced by private corporations,
because they're -- the work of analysts who receive their paychecks
from corporations such as Booz Allen, Raytheon and others, is
not distinguished from that of government employees. So that brings
up a huge national security vulnerability, that one could very
easily shape or nudge along US national security policy, because
this is the most important national security document that we
have in this country.
AMY GOODMAN: Explain how the President's
Daily Brief works -- first how that intelligence is gathered and
then how it's presented to him.
R.J. HILLHOUSE: The intelligence is gathered
by the sixteen different intelligence agencies by statute that
make up the intelligence community. That would include the more
familiar, CIA, the NSA, Defense Intelligence, some [inaudible]
various intelligence agencies, the National Counterterrorism Center.
And each of those, the analysts first are gather -- people gather
the product or the intelligence. In some cases, things have been
outsourced, like in the CIA the actual case officers are outsourced.
They gather that intelligence. It goes to analysts.
In the case of the CIA, the Directorate
of Intelligence, my acquaintances tell me that over half is run
by private corporations or staffed -- the work force is staffed
by private corporations with really analytical supervisors signing
off on it. So they all gather the intelligence in the field, which
much of that is gathered by private corporations in these sixteen
different intelligence agencies, is put into analytical products
that talk about what the major topics or issues are in the different
regions. It's funneled up to the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence, which sifts through this and determines which are
the most important pressing issues, and those are taken and put
into the President's Daily Brief, which the Director of National
Intelligence briefs the President on each day.
I mean, we're all, I think, familiar with
the President's Daily Brief, if nothing else, from that famous,
I believe it was August 6th Daily Brief from 2001: Bin Laden determined
to strike in the US. It's meant to be able to give a heads-up
to the President, to the very top of government officials, as
to what the potential national security problems are that have
to pay attention to that very day. And it's quite chilling when
one realizes that because there is no distinction between the
work of private corporations, or the work of corporations -- some
of these are publicly traded, but I say "private" to
differentiate from the public sector -- the work of corporations
and the work of government employees. And so, there is great potential
to introduce things into the intelligence stream or simply to
nudge things in a certain direction. I mean, there also would
be the possibility of political manipulation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, given the possibility,
obviously, that there are accountability issues and ethics issues
involved by so much privatization of intelligence work, there
would also seem to me to be intelligence issues, questions involved,
security issues, in terms of how are these people vetted and also,
at least within the agencies, like Central Intelligence, they
have career employees who they can follow throughout decades sometimes
in terms of their reliability. But how are these private contractors
vetted?
R.J. HILLHOUSE: That's an excellent point.
At this stage of the game it's not as frightening as what will
happen over the next five and ten years. The people are vetted
in the same way through the security backgrounds, on polygraphs,
etc., as a government employee is. At this case most of them are
former government employees that have gone over to the private
sector. But the real danger occurs when -- and those people have
been socialized and trained and been held in government yoke for
twenty, thirty years, so it's very unlikely that they would behave
against the interest of the US government.
But then, of course, there's this next
generation of spies. What's going to happen as corporations begin
to raise their own case officers, train them in corporate values,
rather than the values of public service? And at the same time,
we've got hemorrhaging going on at the CIA, where over half of
the employees of the CIA have been there for five years or less.
So we have a situation where it's really kids running the CIA.
So we have a great deal of instability in the system. And as turnover
occurs, as companies lose contracts, of course, people become
unemployed, and that also is a great counterintelligence danger
with what happens to down-on-their-luck spies.
AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, Ronald Sanders,
Associate Director of National Intelligence, Office of the Director
of National Intelligence, wrote a letter of objection to the Washington
Post about your July 8th Outlook article, "Private Spies:
Who Runs the CIA? Outsiders for Hire." He says it was "way
off base. It suggested [that] the use of contract personnel by
intelligence agencies [such as] the CIA is somehow damaging to
national security." He writes, "Quite the contrary --
we could not accomplish our intelligence missions without them.
U.S. intelligence agencies were dramatically downsized in the
1990s, in some cases by as much as 40 percent. Whatever else their
pre-Sept. 11 failings, our agencies simply [did not] have enough
people to do the job." Your response, R.J.?
R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, first, I would agree
with him on most of that, because those were not -- that was not
the point that I made, that the use of private contractors isn't
the problem. The problem is how it's been structured. It's comes
about very quickly and in a wartime situation, so it's been cobbled
together, and it's a very fragile system, and that's what I point
to. I think many of these private companies are actually doing
very good work, but what we need to see is that it's done in a
smarter way, where it's a more accountable way.
And we need to look at everything that
these corporations are doing and see, should that be a government
employee or this should be a corporation, because what we're looking
at is entire branches of the CIA are farmed out to private corporations.
So you'll see twenty, what they're called, "green badgers,"
or workers for a private corporation, reporting to a single blue
badger, or government employee. And within the layers of green,
there could be other companies that are reporting -- are part
of that branch. So it's multiple, multiple corporations reporting
back to a single government employee, who most likely is a very
junior person, because of the high level of turnover at the CIA.
So, clearly, that one blue badger or employee is not going to
know everything that's going on. So there's some real accountability
issues and questions about the -- not just the scope, but the
use of contractors. I mean, I completely agree that they couldn't
do it without the contractors.
AMY GOODMAN: And how does weapons of mass
destruction fit into this, the lie that was spread? Do you see
that as part of this picture or the result of this outsourcing?
R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, I wouldn't say it's
a result of the outsourcing. Where I would fit WMDs in is simply
a great example of the manipulation of intelligence that can occur
when there is a political will to do so. And in this case, there
was a formidable bureaucracy to prevent the manipulation of intelligence.
I mean, much had to be put in place in order to use the bad intelligence
from curveball to stovepipe everything up to the Office of the
Vice President and to really do a workaround from the bureaucracy
of the CIA that was trying, in many parts of it, to prevent manipulation
of the intelligence.
But now what we see is, theoretically,
it would be a lot easier to do something like the specter of weapons
of mass destruction in another country, because corporations control
the intelligence. They control the gathering of it. They control
the intelligence in multiple different agencies, so suddenly you
could have something being reported in the CIA the same time the
NSA is picking up on it and perhaps the Military Intelligence
Agency could be picking up. But with their current system, there
would be no way to detect that it could actually be the same company
that's behind it, that's feeding things into the intelligence
stream. So that's how I would tie weapons of mass destruction
into it.
AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, we're going
to come back to you, but we're going to break first. R.J. Hillhouse
writes a national security blog, thespywhobilledme.com. I want
to ask about that PowerPoint presentation you got a hold of from
the Office of National Intelligence and also ask about your book
Outsourced, a novel. Stay with us.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We are talking to R.J. Hillhouse,
runs the blog, thespywhobilledme.com. Latest article, "Outsourcing
Intelligence," is posted on The Nation magazine website.
Juan?
JUAN GONZALEZ: Yes. I'd like to ask you
about your novel. In addition to all of the research that you
do on intelligence, you have now produced this fictional account,
Outsourced. Why fiction?
R.J. HILLHOUSE: Because I found that there
were things that could only be written about in fiction. It's
amazing for someone who has lived in the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe to find that in this country we're in a similar
place. In the repressive regimes, literature has often played
the role of bringing things to light that could not otherwise
be discussed. And I found that there are some things that are
going on in the intelligence community or things that are going
on with our government with relationships between corporate and
government that it was only safe to discuss under the guise of
fiction. So it's an unusual transformation that a novelist would
actually be ahead of media in this. I mean, it is the norm for
me to be contacted each week by people from New York Times,
Washington Post and others to try to learn about what's
going on in outsourcing. So it's very strange as a novelist that
I actually have moved ahead of that.
And I've not only been at the center of
controversy in the intelligence community, I've also been in the
center of controversy in the literary world, because I believe
that and I've been very public about it, that thriller writers,
that novelists, have failed us today. They haven't helped us understand
the darker truths of what's going on in the war on terror, the
ambiguities, the changes that have occurred in how we're fighting
the war on terror and what that shows us about ourselves. Unfortunately,
thriller writers have failed us. As you know, it's mainly -- and
I'll call it for what it is -- beach reach that we see, that we
don't see literature playing this larger role in society, but
rather, the novels become a race of, we have to stop the terrorists
from, what would be in a jargon, a, b, or c weapons -- atomic,
biological or [chemical] weapons -- and it just -- it underscores
the narrative of our time, which is, be afraid, be very afraid,
and only a hero who will violate the Geneva Conventions, only
a hero who will violate the Constitution will save us. So I tried
to do something very different with Outsourced.
AMY GOODMAN: R.J. Hillhouse, you focus
on Iraq -- you focus on Iraq and Uzbekistan in this novel, and
also in this novel you say Osama bin Laden has been captured,
but they're just afraid to announce it for fear of terror attacks.
Talk more about the core of this story, this fictional account.
R.J. HILLHOUSE: I believe that core of
the story is left best left in Outsourced and in discussing
it in the fictional account. I mean, I also deal with some other
very hot issues that are best discussed only in fiction, such
as black sites run by the CIA, the secret prisons. In Outsourced,
those black sites have been privatized to private corporations.
Private corporations are running the facilities' management contracts.
Private corporations are running the facilities' security contract.
So various things like that can only be discussed in fiction until
the mainstream media gets its act together.
AMY GOODMAN: Back on the story that you
have been breaking news with in the Washington Post and
at The Nation, you recently obtained an Office of the Director
of National Intelligence PowerPoint presentation that reveals
that 70% of the US Intelligence budget is allocated to private
contractors. 70%.
R.J. HILLHOUSE: It's an absolutely stunning
figure. It was actually the journalist Tim Shorrock that first
found that PowerPoint presentation and the slide that showed the
70%. My contribution to it was recognizing that because, based
of the information in it and in a hidden table in the presentation,
it was possible to reverse-engineer the national intelligence
budget, which appears that we're really spending about $60 billion
on intelligence each year, and out of that, $42 billion is going
to private corporations. So what we see happening is the mainstream
media has not been writing about this, has not been exploring
it, but we've had a $42 billion industry come take over major
responsibilities of government, when no one was noticing except
a novelist. As I said, it's quite a turn of events.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And from what you have
been able to tell, the impact of all of the intelligence failures
around 9/11 and weapons of mass destruction and the reorganization
of the nation's intelligence agencies, what's been the result
of that?
R.J. HILLHOUSE: Well, many of the changes
have occurred in the intelligence agency. I'm not sure that they
-- we could relate those directly to what's occurred with outsourcing.
And, of course, the manipulation of intelligence, that had nothing
to do with private corporations, although, as I've pointed out,
it would be possible to do that quite easily or much more easily
now than before.
But what we've seen is the CIA and other
parts of the national intelligence community failed us when it
came to 9/11, and unfortunately, because of changes that have
gone on in the last five years, those agencies are much, much
weaker than they've ever been before. I mean, I would even question
whether the CIA will survive another year, and if it does survive
on the current trajectory, is it a CIA that we want to have, with,
I mean, currently very high turnover rate? They're in great denial
with what's going on. There have been some measures to try to
stop it, but they're half-measures at best. Over 50% of the people
working there with less than five years experience, and this is
a profession that it takes a -- there is a great long learning
curve. And within the people that are 50%-or-less five-years experience,
there's high turnover among those, as well. And at the same time,
you've got another half of the agency is outsourced to private
corporations. So there's some real questions of health of our
intelligence apparatus, and it has definitely declined since 9/11.
And those are some of the things that I look at fictionally in
Outsourced.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you
very much for joining us. I want to thank Nesreen for being with
us, coming up, the teacher who will be joining us, but I want
to thank R.J. Hillhouse, who has written the new book called Outsourced,
a novel, and has breaking stories on that issue, among them, "Outsourcing
Intelligence," posted on The Nation magazine website.
Amy
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