The Spy Who Billed Me: Director of National Intelligence Report on Outsourcing of Intelligence

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About R J Hillhouse

Dr. Hillhouse has run Cuban rum between East and West Berlin, smuggled jewels from the Soviet Union and slipped through some of the world’s tightest borders. From Uzbekistan to Romania, she's been followed, held at gunpoint and interrogated. Foreign governments and others have pitched her for recruitment as a spy. (They failed.)

A former professor and Fulbright fellow, Dr. Hillhouse earned her Ph.D. in political science at the University of Michigan. Her latest novel, OUTSOURCED (Forge Books) is about the turf wars between the Pentagon and the CIA and the privatization of national security.

Dr. Hillhouse is an expert on national security outsourcing. Her controversial work has twice elicited a formal response by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence--the only times that office has ever publicly responded to the writings of a private citizen.

She is a regular media guest and available for interviews.

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Dr. Hillhouse is quoted in Reuters UK story about Blackwater USA.

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Article by Dr. Hillhouse "Outsourcing National Intelligence The Nation: Private Corporations Are Now Able To Insert Their Agendas Into President's Briefings"

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Link to transcript of nationally syndicated TV interview wtih Dr. Hillhouse and streaming video

Article by Dr. Hillhouse breaking the story on contractor involvement in the President's Daily Brief
"Outsourcing Intelligence"

Dr. Hillhouse's controversial opinion piece that was one of the most emailed and blogged about on the Washington Post website: "Who Runs the CIA?"

The Associate Director of National Intelligence responds to Dr. Hillhouse's WaPo piece and Dr. Hillhouse responds by pointing out how we've been hearing these same tired excuses for Intelligence Community failings for years.

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UPI analysis piece on Dr. Hillhouse's reverse-engineering of the national intelligence budget

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« Attention Bloggers & Journalists: Advance Complimentary Copies of OUTSOURCED Available | Main | Update: DNI Study on Outsourcing Scrubbed »

April 25, 2007

Director of National Intelligence Report on Outsourcing of Intelligence

I keep hearing that the release of the report that Negroponte commissioned over a year ago on the use of contractors at the CIA and throughout the intelligence apparatus is imminent. Seems something just keeps holding it up...can't imagine what's going on.

Posted by R J Hillhouse on April 25, 2007 in CIA, Private intel corporations | Permalink

Technorati Tags: Director National Intelligence, outsourcing, private intelligence corporations

Comments

I wonder if the forthcoming outsourcing report isn't jiving with the human capital report that was issued last October.

Posted by: Retired | April 25, 2007 at 19:53

Retired, but couldn't it also be that the problem is it jives too well with certain parts of the Human Capital Plan???:

Competition with Contractors. Increasingly, the IC finds itself in competition with its contractors for our own employees. Confronted by arbitrary staffing ceilings and uncertain funding, components are left with no choice but to use contractors for work that may be borderline “inherently governmental” – only to find that to do that work, those same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then “lease” them back to us at considerably greater expense

Posted by: R J Hillhouse | April 25, 2007 at 21:33

Interesting point, although I think that "leasing" individual former employees back, which is what the human capital report implied, is considerably different than contracting out the work of an entire branch to a contractor, with the only employee in said branch being the branch manager who has an entire industrial contractor chain of command structure under him. In reality, is he still a "branch manager", or just a contracting officer's technical representative (COTR)?

Posted by: Retired | April 26, 2007 at 13:55

I think in any case, when you start relying on people who are only interested in cash, things go bad quick! I know that recruiters from certain Industrial Contractors have tried, and in many cases, succeeded in hiring whole SOF teams with visions of grandeur! I have been on one of those teams and have also worked with former employees who are now making the "big bucks". It starts out with the interest in adrenaline pumping action and love of your country. Then someone comes along and tries to make you forget about sacrifice and the "good of the country"! They make you selfish. I'm actually thinking of going industrial, but have many concerns, because I feel my loyalty and willingness of sacrifice for the "bigger picture" will only get me burned in the private sector. What have we become?!?

Posted by: jhill | May 25, 2007 at 11:52

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OUTSOURCED

Acknowledgements

A tip of the hat to investigative journalist Tim Shorrock who inspired the name of this blog with his path-breaking 2005 article, "The Spy Who Billed Me."

Shorrock has a dedicated web page on outsourcing in intel. It links to many of his articles which are must-reads for anyone interested in the privatization of intelligence.

The Spy Who Billed Me