The Spy Who Billed Me

DIA General Counsel: Green Badgers as Unreliable Employees

In a letter to the editor of the Washington Post last Friday, the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Lt. Gen. Michael Maples responded to the WaPo story that the DIA was outsourcing a record $1 billion.

Gen. Maples writes:

The proposal is a consolidation of more than 30 existing contracts into a single contract vehicle that can be more effectively managed. Hence, this posting is not a "record" in outsourcing intelligence activities; rather, it is a better way of aggregating existing requirements.

Now it's a clever defense that the contract is not record-setting since these services are already outsourced--we're not doing anything eye-popping--we did that a long time ago; it's just that no one was looking.  Given the Beltway love of word parsing, it is also worth noting that no where does the general claim that that $ 1 billion of current contracts are being canceled or replaced.  We have no idea as to the size of the 30 existing contracts that will be folded into the new contract vehicle.

One real question it raised for me was in the statement, "DIA contractors currently represent about 35 percent of our workforce."  It's a tough one to reconcile with an unclassified presentation at a conference in May by the Office of the General Counsel of the DIA included this enlightening slide:

 

Now can anyone help me understand this?  If it's true that contractors make up only 35% of the workforce of the DIA, why are they 51% of the personnel in DIA office space?  Is the DIA that generous with its office space?  Or are we perhaps looking at yet another case of numbers parsing to minimize the real issue?

Call me naive, but I'm guessing the DIA *loves* to share its office space with green badgers, wanting them to feel comfortable in big, roomy offices where they can exercise their "fiduciary duty to their employer only," while applying their "profit motive" to do the DIA's work to "diverse and different standards".... 

Now I'm guessing the same thing is going on at Headquarters where those blue badger government employees with their "taxpayer funded salaries" are probably doing everything they can to provide comfortable, generous office space to their green badger workforce.  Perhaps yet another way for the blue badgers to fulfil their "fiduciary obligation to serve the public good" through their "universal and strict conduct standards" might be requiring all blue badgers to use public transportation so that the green badgers don't have to deal with the hassle of the current parking crunch at Langley.  We can't forget, green badgers are part of the public those blue badgers serve.  At the very least, the blue badgers could move to the back of the parking shuttle and let the green badgers sit in the front.  After all, as the General Counsel of the DIA points out, "contractor can reassign employees from one contract to another at whim," so it makes sense to give green badgers unobstructed access to the nearest exists...

Perhaps DIA leadership should have consulted its own General Counsel before contracting out $1 billion of intel services with the goals of adding "greater flexibility to realign government resources, improve oversight and be more responsive, with potential savings in cost and manpower."  This slide suggests that the Office of the General Counsel might not be in agreement.

It could very well be that outsourcing some DIA intel services could be a good thing, but before doing so, many issues need to be resolved.  Given the difference between government employees and contract employees as viewed by the Office of the General Counsel of the DIA itself, the real question the press, Congress and the public should  be posing to Generals Maples and Clapper and others at the Pentagon is: 

• Why do they intend to increase their number of contract employees when they recognize such inherent problems with the employment model? 
• Can the DIA afford $1 billion of staff who are paid a "private business salary" when it's own government staff receive "taxpayer funded salaries"? 
• Can the DIA really afford $1 billion of staff who do not have a fiduciary duty to the DIA, but to another entity? 
• Can the DIA afford $1 billion of staff who have "diverse and different standards?"  Can the DIA afford $1 billion of staff who contractors can "reassign from one contract to another at a whim"? 
• And can the DIA afford the coming green badger morale crisis when those current contract employees who occupy 51% of DIA office space get squeezed to wedge in the new $1 billion of green badger staff?  Could it be they're counting on their blue badgers to feel the squeeze, do their "fiduciary obligation to serve the public good" and suck it in even more.

Happy Labor Day.

Finally, the DIA Gets Some Respect

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) falls into the Rodney Dangerfield don't-get-no-respect category of the Intelligence Community.  That changed today in an op-ed in the Boston Globe.  The Globe published an ill-informed piece about intel outsourcing in which a regular Globe columnist James Caroll wrote:

...President Bush is similarly destroying something essential to our own democracy. A signal of that was sounded last week when The Washington Post reported that the Defense Intelligence Agency is transferring "core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection" to private contractors -- up to a billion dollars worth.

The DIA as something essential to our own democracy? 

Wow.  Who would've thunk it?  (Including those inside the Pentagon....)  Just a few months on the job and the self-proclaimed "Godfather of HUMINT" General Clapper has turned everything around.   

If he can be lured away from the Pentagon, I'm thinking out loud here:  the man for Jose's job...

Back to the Globe piece--Caroll warned:

This raises the prospect that hired guns, instead of sworn officials, will be conducting covert operations, spying missions, interrogations, "renditions," surveillance -- the whole dangerous complex of shadow activity that began as the government's most sensitive responsibility.

Had the author done his homework, he would have learned that his list of activities he fears will now be outsourced by the DIA have long been outsourced by the CIA--and democracy has yet to collapse.  However, without intel contractors, our Intelligence Community would cease to function.  It is how the outsourcing is structured that raises serious national security issues that must be addressed and in sensible, practical ways, taking into account that we're at war on several fronts intel agencies are stretched to the limit and a little beyond at the moment. 

There are significant problems with the proposed Pentagon intel outsourcing, but not that services are going to be outsourced or the amount of outsourcing.  The problems are how the contracts will be structured and how conflicts of interest will not be addressed.  And, of course, the fact that the Pentagon decided to spend a $1 billion before figuring out what it needs and really wants to buy.

Ironically, farming out DIA intel services (which are already highly outsourced) will probably only improve service quality as individuals and firms that have long experience with the CIA began to perform intel activities for the DIA--an outsourcing twist on the new purple badge. 

So perhaps by outsourcing its brains, the DIA may very well start to earn some respect within the IC. 

DIA Outsources a Record $1 billion+ of Intel Services

I'm on vacation, but a report today in the Washington Post was enough to lure me away from my kneeboard and back to the keyboard:

The Defense Intelligence Agency is preparing to pay private contractors up to $1 billion to conduct core intelligence tasks of analysis and collection over the next five years, an amount that would set a record in the outsourcing of such functions by the Pentagon's top spying agency.

While it's a jaw-dropping figure, it's not surprising given the Director of National Intelligence's emphasis upon acquisitions.  (See "The ODNI's Wal-Mart Approach to Intel.")  But it does fly in the face of the DNI's public statements.  For example, Ronald P. Sanders, Associate Director of National Intelligence wrote in response to my July Washington Post article:

Our workforce has recovered to the point that we can begin to shed some contract personnel or shift them away from core mission areas...

One billion plus dollars of intel contracting seems less like shedding and more like a Sumo wrestler gorging himself before a match. 

I was unable to quickly find the DIA announcement of the contract (and would appreciate the link from readers who find it), however, the WaPo article gives a few clues about the contract:

The DIA did not specify exactly what it wants the contractors to do but said it is seeking teams to fulfill "operational and mission requirements" that include intelligence "Gathering and Collection, Analysis, Utilization, and Strategy and Support."  It holds out the possibility that five or more contractors may be hired ...

Translated, this means broad, soup to nuts intel work, from running agents to creating those analytical products that get funneled into the President's Daily Brief--anything the DIA can conceive of. 

On the upside, if they are able to pull in some of the contractors who are currently doing work for the CIA, the overall quality of Defense Intel could be improved.

Holding out the possibility that five or more contractors could be hired for such indefinite tasks strongly suggests this is some form of an IDIQ contact vehicle--Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity  In all likelihood, it means the $1 billion plus of contracts is already targeted for the primes such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, SAIC and probably Scitor, maybe also Raytheon.  (Sorry Abraxas--just be grateful you can still hold your own at the NCS...)

The smaller firms will be forced to line up with one of the primes who will largely control their fate for the life of the contract.  It also suggests there will be layered management structures, with contractors overseeing contractors from other firms with limited government oversight.  But hey, it works for satellites and human intel gathering and analysis really aren't that different--just ask the DNI and D/CIA...

And at this point the DIA isn't sure what it wants to contract for, only that it intends to outsource a billion dollars of services and it has to go through the motions of an RFP to meet Federal Acquisition Rules (FAR) requirements to give the appearance of an open competition that is, in reality, anything but. 

Even though it seems at this point the DIA doesn't entirely understand its needs, rest assured that soon after the award, the primes and subs will rush to their DIA contracts and show them exactly what it is that they have been looking for all along, how their firms can provide that precise service and just how easily it can be procured now that the "competitive" bidding is out of the way. This happens in part because the expertise to understand the intel services and even the intelligence needs has been lost to government as expertise has migrated to the private sector.  And this loss is guaranteed to accelerate since so many green dollars are being thrown into the DIA which is already heavily outsourced.

So will the DIA get what it really needs through such a procurement system that gives contractors the power to define the Pentagon's intelligence needs?  Unfortunately, the 800-pound gorilla of the Intel Community will never know because it's outsourced its brains. 

Pass the bananas--or rather issue a task order to Halliburton for a bunch.

Jim Bohannon: Take 2. Live this Thursday

I'll be live on the Jim Bohannon Show this Thursday night, 10:00 p.m. to 11:00 p.m. EDT.  It's a national broadcast and you can find out how to locate a local station in this post.

In the DC area, it's on Washington Post radio at 107.7 FM and 1500 AM.

The Agency Defends Its Legacy

The CIA has repeatedly taken bullets it to protect both those it serves, ongoing operations and its own code of silence.  It's taken blame for 9/11 despite the CIA Counterterrorist Center's Chief Cofer Black's urgent and repeated warnings that bin Laden was poised to strike in the US.  It's been criticized for prewar intelligence failures in Iraq, even though the intelligence coming up through the Agency was accurate and its predictions about the postwar challenges were chillingly accurate. The Agency rarely sets the record straight and that's part of what makes it such an easy target for public criticism.  On Monday, it broke the silence and issued a statement about the inaccuracies of a recent book, Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes, that claims to be "the definitive history of the CIA."

I have only read the last few pages of Legacy of Ashes which are about the current situation facing the CIA and outsourcing.  If the rest of the book is like those pages, there is good reason that the CIA needed to speak up and that everyone should listen.

I had a couple of discussions with Mr. Weiner about the topic of those pages.  I hesitate before making any portion of a private conversation public, but in this case Mr. Weiner's thoughts from that conversation are already public in his book.

One of the conversations with Mr. Weiner was in April of this year before he was in the final pass of the galleys when changes could still be made on his manuscript.  In that phone call, Mr. Weiner expressed to me his disgust of how people who had served the public interest for so long would leave the CIA so that he could get rich as an intel contractor during a time the Agency needed him the most to help track down al Qaeda.  He singled out Cofer Black as an example of this.  I stopped him, backed up the conversation and corrected him--Cofer Black didn't leave the Agency for personal reasons--most definitely not because of a lack of dedication to public service--but rather he was forced out by Rumsfeld because of his criticism of the Pentagon.  I urged Mr. Weiner to look into it more closely. 

I heard the same accusations about Mr. Black repeated again by Mr. Weiner in a later conversation in June.  He clearly hadn't done the background fact-checking that I would expect from a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist.  I was even more shocked to see a version of these unfounded claims in print in the pages of Legacy of Ashes.  In this case, Mr. Weiner's accusations about Cofer Black do not match known facts that I had personally made Mr. Weiner aware of this at a time when he could have corrected the book--had he been interested in creating an unbiased history of the CIA.  Clearly, that was not his objective.

 

Ironically, I usually find myself a critic of the Agency, but I am deeply committed to truth in whatever  dark corners where it may be found, even the CIA's Public Affairs Office:

 

CIA Statement on “Legacy of Ashes”

August 6, 2007 

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The CIA is no stranger to criticism. Intelligence work, focused as it is on the uncertain, the unknown, and the deliberately hidden, comes with great difficulty and risk. There will be shortcomings and unpleasant surprises. That said, Tim Weiner’s recently published book, Legacy of Ashes, paints far too dark a picture of the agency’s past. Backed by selective citations, sweeping assertions, and a fascination with the negative, Weiner overlooks, minimizes, or distorts agency achievements. 

In 1948, the CIA accurately assessed the chances of war with the Soviets as nil. According to Weiner, that was a failure “because no one listened.” The development of the U-2 spyplane was a stunning technological achievement that offered a unique look behind the Iron Curtain. To Weiner, it is tied to failure, because the CIA should have had better human sources inside the Soviet Union. Through analytic rigor, the agency made a near-perfect forecast of the 1967 Mideast War. Weiner attributes it wholly to information from a foreign intelligence service. The CIA offered accurate and timely warning of Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, a fact Weiner obscures in his narrative. 

Those are but a few examples. The story of Pyotr Popov, the CIA’s first major Soviet spy, gets very short shrift. Weiner rightly speaks of the Soviet sources killed by the treachery of Aldrich Ames, yet never mentions the skill it took to recruit those sources or the intelligence they provided the United States. Time and again, Weiner takes things to the darkest corner of the room. He knows better. In promoting his book, he says the design and deployment of intelligence satellites and the study of imagery from them “helped keep the Cold War cold.” That in itself was no minor achievement. 

Despite its claims to be “the” history of the CIA, the book is marked by errors great and small. Here is a relatively brief, and admittedly incomplete, catalogue: 

• The book’s first few paragraphs mistakenly assert that President Harry Truman never wanted the CIA to engage in covert action. But he signed National Security Council (NSC) directives assigning responsibility for covert action to the CIA—at a time when CIA officials were skeptical about taking on this mission. Weiner himself notes in the book that Truman’s NSC approved 81 covert CIA actions.

• The book points out that covert actions are undertaken at the behest of the President to achieve specific ends at specific times. To Weiner, those objectives are illegitimate, to be viewed solely through the prism of events decades later, as though you can draw a simple, straight, decisive line of causation through years of complicated history.

• The book states that a 1952 operation in Manchuria undertaken by two CIA officers, Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey, was a personnel rescue mission. In fact, the purpose of the operation was to recover documents.

• The book charges that Frank Wisner, a pioneer of the agency’s covert operations, successfully resisted Director of Central Intelligence Walter Bedell Smith’s order to cancel ineffective ones. But a major Asian program was shut down in 1953—on Wisner’s watch as the head of CIA’s covert operations.

• The book states that the National Security Agency (NSA) was created in response to an interception and decryption program that was compromised in 1949. In fact, the NSA was established in 1952 to correct serious problems with military signals intelligence during the Korean War.

• The book alleges that the CIA used Radio Free Europe to spark the 1956 Hungarian uprising. But Weiner’s main source for this idea is a Radio Free Europe memo that was written after the uprising.

• The book suggests that the CIA didn’t predict the collapse of the Soviet Union. As a number of prominent outside observers have noted, the agency had warned of trouble signs in the Soviet Union on regular occasions since the 1970s.

• The book states that current CIA Director Michael Hayden is the first active duty military officer to lead the agency since Walter Bedell Smith in the 1950s. But Stansfield Turner was an active duty admiral in the U.S. Navy during the first two years of his tenure as Director of Central Intelligence.

Even Weiner’s telling of his juiciest tale, involving the American ambassador to Guatemala, is gravely flawed. There is much less to this than Weiner suggests—for starters, the supposed intelligence on which it is based did not even come from the CIA or a CIA source. As is so often the case, there is more than one side to the story. But you would not know that from Weiner’s book. 

What of the CIA today? This is the agency that did much to oust the Taliban from Afghanistan after 9/11 and collapse the Al-Qa’ida safe haven there. This is the agency that unraveled the A.Q. Khan proliferation network and learned enough about Libya’s nuclear program to persuade Tripoli to step back from it. And the agency that has helped foil terrorist plots and erode the structure and leadership of a terrorist movement that is extremely dangerous and highly adaptable. Weiner’s verdict: These skilled and dedicated officers are “the weakest cadre of spies and analysts in the history of the CIA.” 

The agency makes no claims to perfection—far from it. We strive each day to learn from our successes and failures. Not even Weiner can claim that the CIA shrinks from its past. The huge volume of material we have declassified, rare for an intelligence service, underscores the point. With a strong range of sources, Tim Weiner had an opportunity to write a balanced history of a complex, important subject. But he did not. His bias overwhelms his scholarship. One cannot learn the true story of the CIA from Legacy of Ashes.

Mini-KGB for Rent

In one of the more fun articles I've read in ages, BusinessWeek's Eamon Javers explores the world of ex-KGB and ex-GRU spies for rent at a Virginia company called Trident Group (not to be confused with my literary agency, Trident Media Group, although publishing insiders will know there are some obvious similarities between the two beyond the company name...)   Trident, which is staffed mainly by former GRU officers and some former KGB, assists Western firms navigate the treacherous free-for-all of Born Again capitalism in Russia and the other former Soviet states where business "ethics" are usually spoken of in finger quotes.  Special activities that have to happen for a company to succeed there are best left to silent professionals who are hired by companies that don't like to ask a lot of questions.

Now this brings up the interesting issue of when a Fortune 500 company would be better advised to use the services (though a cutout, of course) of Cofer Black's Total Intelligence or Yuri Koshkin's Trident, a mini-CIA vs. mini-KGB.  In the end the choice probably comes down to style preferences, how big your Russian troubles are and whether you like your ethics in finger quotes. 

BusinessWeek's Javers is quickly distinguishing himself for shedding light upon some of the more interesting and unique corners of the private intelligence industry.

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Addendum:  Companies seeking assistance with business dealings in Russia/CIS might also want to consider the services of iJet.  And remind Alex to send my customary referral fee...

Last Minute Schedule Change: Jim Bohannon Appearance Postponed

It will be rescheduled sometime for the next week or two due to the breaking news of the tragic bridge collapse.  I'll update whenever we have a new date confirmed.

Sorry if this inconvenienced anyone.

Today Live (Again) in DC on Federal News Radio

While you're stuck in Beltway traffic, you can hear me discussing the outsourcing of intel on the Federal News Network at 1050 a.m. at 4:25 p.m. today. 

For those outside of the DC area, it can be heard over the internet here. 

Also please note that tonight's national radio interview with Jim Bohannon has been moved to 11 p.m. EDT due to breaking news.

Time Change: Live Nationwide Radio, Thursday, Aug. 2 on the Jim Bohannon Show

Due to breaking news with the tragic bridge collapse, I will be on starting an hour later, from 11:00 p.m. EDT tonight until midnight.  rescheduled sometime in the next few weeks and will advise.

I'll be live for one, possibly two hours Thursday night, 10:00 p.m. to 12:00 p.m. on national radio on the Jim Bohannon Show.  The Jim Bohannon Show has been listed as one of the 100 most influential shows in radio and Jim was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 2003.  I've appeared on his show before and he's a wonderful interviewer, one of the best.  He was a frequent sub for Larry King, then later took over his late night slot.

Jim' also a fellow Ozarker, further evidence of how we hillbillies are taking over the world with such other famous and (and perhaps infamous) notables from the hills of the Ozarks as Wal-Mart, John Ashcroft and my cousin Brad Pitt.

The live program can be heard on the Westwood radio network (which includes former CBS radio network affiliates.)  You can find a local station here.  Streaming audio is available from several local stations that carry the program.

Live on Washington Post radio in DC Thursday, Aug. 2

I will be giving a short live interview tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, August 2nd at 1:10 p.m.on the Washington Post radio about the outsourcing of key aspects of the President's Daily Brief.  This which can be heard in the DC area at 1500 AM and 107.7 FM.  It will also be live via streaming audio on the internet.