James Clapper Hedges on Providing Ongoing Updates on Special Ops Activities (and Other Disconcerting Answers)

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As Josh Rogin and Marc Ambinder note, James Clapper is scheduled to get a vote tomorrow in the Senate Intelligence Committee on his nomination to be Director of National Intelligence. Ambinder reports that Kit Bond is most dissatisfied with Clapper at this point, the rest of the committee really ought to join in Bond’s dissatisfaction given his answers to their post-hearing questions. Take this response to Russ Feingold:

Success in the area of counterterrorism requires that the Intelligence Community and the Department of Defense coordinate their activities, and that congressional oversight not be fragmented. One example is Section 1208 of U.S.c. Title 10, which authorizes assistance to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups, or individuals supporting U.S. counterterrorism military operations. The Senate Armed Services Committee has expressed concern that U.S. Special Operations Command may be leveraging this authority for long-term engagement with partner nations, rather than exclusively to support operations, particularly in countries other than Iraq and Afghanistan. Information about the use of Section 1208 is therefore critical if the Intelligence Committee is to conduct oversight of how the U.S. government as a whole is fighting terrorism around the world.

• Will you ensure that this information is provided to the Committee?

Section 1208 of the FY 2005 National Defense Authorization Act, PL 108-375, requires the Secretary of Defense to submit an annual report “to the congressional defense committees on support provided to foreign forces, irregular forces, groups, or individuals engaged in supporting or facilitating ongoing military operations by United States special operations forces to combat terrorism.”

If confirmed as the DNI I would not view the provision of DoD clandestine military operational information to the SSCI as being within my authority or responsibility; however, I would fully support an arrangement agreed to by the affected oversight committees for the submission of information to Congress concerning this matter. [my emphasis]

Feingold’s question pertains to this issue.

• Section 1208 (Support to Foreign Forces)

Section 1208 of the FY 2005 NDAA authorized DOD to reimburse foreign forces, groups, or individuals supporting or facilitating ongoing counter-terrorism military operations by U.S. special operations forces (SOF). The FY 2009 NDAA authorized $35 million a year for this authority through FY 2013. The Obama Administration did not request a change to Section 1208.

The HASC bill increases the annual budgetary authority to $50 million in order to limit funding restraints during the planning of Section 1208-funded operations. The HASC was generally supportive of Section 1208 programs and was pleased with more effective reporting of Section 1208-related activities. The HASC voiced concern, however, that Section 1208 should not to become a “train and equip” program managed by Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The HASC also expressed uneasiness over the use of private contractors to carry out Section 1208 activities and thus required additional reporting requirements to track such contracting.

The SASC bill does not raise the Section 1208 funding level, and the committee expressed dissatisfaction with current reporting. SASC voiced concern that SOCOM may be using 1208 funds to leverage long-term engagement with partner nations rather than exclusively for supporting military operations by U.S. special operations forces to combat terrorism. The SASC asked SOCOM to review their Section 1208 execution to eliminate such leveraging. [my emphasis]

In other words, the House Armed Services Committee has expressed concern that DOD is using this Special Ops provision to train allies in military operations, and using contractors to do so. As Feingold notes, the Senate Armed Services Committee is concerned that in the guise of supporting distinct operations, DOD is engaging in long-term operations.

To me, this reads like DOD is using this provision to engage in war in countries against which we’re not at war: like Somalia and Yemen. This sounds like the authority DOD is using to engage in operations–including drug related ones–in 75 countries, as Jeremy Scahill has reported.

So Russ Feingold, presumably thinking of the way in which the Bush Administration started using Special Ops for covert actions partly to hide them from the intelligence committees, asks the retired general nominated to head the Intelligence Community whether he would share information with the intelligence committees about the activities. And Clapper responds, I’m not legally obligated to. But, if the Armed Services Committees agree, we can do some info sharing. Nothing, incidentally, about sharing the information in as timely fashion as the CIA would have to share information on less risky covert ops. Just a yearly report, I guess.

Now perhaps Clapper’s willingness to share information is all well and good and I shouldn’t worry.

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So Why Can’t Democrats Rein in the Intelligence Industrial Complex?

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Jeff Stein had a piece on the response to the WaPo article on intelligence contracting the other day that started with this question:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has long wanted more members of Congress to know what’s going on at the CIA, but why doesn’t she announce a full-fledged investigation into the intelligence contractor mess, complete with televised hearings?

In it, he quotes from someone he describes as a Pelosi aide saying there’s little will to get this done.

Back to Pelosi: An aide, who like all the others speaks only on condition of anonymity, said she “certainly sees a need to step up oversight.” But after taking an informal sounding, he added, Pelosi found “there wasn’t any momentum for it.”

I asked her about that quote when we talked on Saturday. Her first response was to deny that such a quote could have come from one of her staffers, and to suggest it had come from the intelligence committee (which is what her office said in a follow-up to me as well).

Pelosi: You mean someone from the intelligence committee? Not my staff or my office.

When I asked whether there was any support for doing something about contracting, Pelosi said the WaPo article had raised awareness of the problem.

Wheeler: Is there the support in the House and the Senate to do something about all this contracting?

Pelosi: This has been very well read by members.

Wheeler: The Washington Post piece?

Pelosi: Yes. And it isn’t, it doesn’t come as a surprise to people. But it comes as almost a relief that finally some of this is out in the open.

Pelosi went on to describe all the problems with contracting: the cost, the lack of a single chain of accountability, the lack of information-sharing, and the turf battles. Then she basically said the Intelligence Committee would have to take a look–or, maybe, the Administration might assess whether it was making us safer.

Pelosi: I think there, my view is, I think the intelligence committees would have to take a really harsh look, and I would hope the Administration has to say, are the American people safer because of what’s happening in the intelligence community and I think it’s all about their security.

In response to her hope the Administration would do something about contracting, I noted that James Clapper–on his way to being confirmed as DNI–has been a big fan of contracting. Pelosi’s response was to direct responsibility back to the Intelligence Committee.

Wheeler: Although, again, Clapper has been involved in the contracting side and seems to be a pretty big fan of using contractors, I mean he kind of poo-pooed the whole article, so do you think Clapper, again, assuming he’s approved…

Pelosi: I don’t have to vote on him so I’m sort of, I’m always saying to the White House, why him? No, I just don’t know. I don’t want to go there. I don’t know enough to give you a precise view on that. But I do know that this really needs some careful consideration and some review and the intelligence committee is the appropriate place to do it.

Of course, the folks at the Intelligence Committee–at least according to Pelosi though not according to the attribution in his article–are the ones giving Jeff Stein anonymous quotes saying any real investigation of the contracting won’t happen.

For her part, Jan Schakowsky (remember, she was in the room for the interview) doubted the commitment (implicitly, I assume she means the Executive Branch, since they’re the ones still awarding Blackwater contracts) to reducing intelligence contracting. But she also doubts whether the committees (remember, she’s a member of HPSCI) know what these contractors are doing, and ultimately comes back to the question of whether they make us safer.

Schakowsky:While there has occasionally been lip service that we need to reduce the number of contractors, it’s been disappointing to me that in the last few months we’ve seen Blackwater get another big contract with the CIA and with the State Department. I would really question the commitment–any commitment–to reducing the number of contractors. Just even in the most sensitive missions.

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Nancy Pelosi: How Dare the Administration Say they Would Veto Intelligence Reform?

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In a an interview with me on intelligence reform on Saturday, Speaker Pelosi suggested that the White House should either accept real reform of the oversight function–including some version of House amendments on GAO review of intelligence programs and expanded intelligence briefing beyond the Gang of Four–or accept full responsibility if anything goes wrong with its intelligence programs, because the intelligence committee (or at least the House intelligence committee) cannot exercise effective oversight under the current rules.

Recent coverage on the intelligence reform routinely points out that Speaker Pelosi refuses to budge on these two issues. But it rarely explains why Pelosi is so adamant about these reforms. In our interview, Pelosi (and Jan Schakowsky, who was in the room) laid out some of the reasons: Pelosi discussed the times when Gang of Four members were briefed but could not tell others (including an oblique discussion of the games CIA played with their briefings of her on torture). Schakowsky reminded Pelosi that Congress did not know the intelligence “justifying” the Iraq War. The Speaker also described a time when expanding numbers of House staffers were read into a topic only briefed to the Gang of Four, even while the members of the committee were not briefed. Pelosi mentioned the investigation Schakowsky’s subcommittee did, which concluded that CIA had failed to inform the Intelligence Committee of five major incidents. Schakowsky described the resource and expertise limitations on the committee and explained how GAO could alleviate that. Pelosi described an unevenness between the way the White House treats non-compartmented intelligence requests from the Senate and the House–including deciding to prevent specific members from seeing particular intelligence.

And both women described the absurdity by which a quarter-million contractors can get Top Secret clearance but the members of Congress selected to conduct oversight over Executive Branch intelligence activities (including, in an ideal world, over those very same contractors) couldn’t get access to the same information the contractors got.

Pelosi and Schakowsky seemed thoroughly frustrated with the joke that has become of intelligence oversight, particularly since the Bush Administration found a bunch of new ways to game the system and now the Obama Administration has threatened to veto House efforts to eliminate the ways Bush succeeded in gaming the system.

And of course, we discussed all these complaints in the context of last week’s WaPo series and what Pelosi calls the “Leviathan” of the intelligence contracting world, in which, right now, Congress can’t conduct cost analysis of contractors or measure the efficacy of the outsourced programs.

Now, I’m pretty sympathetic with the frustration with the arrogance of Administrations that refuse to share information.

Nancy Pelosi: Now, not having to do with the difference between ranking and regular members, when I became Ranking Member, I was in the room all the time and this and that oh my god and then you can’t and members are taking votes and you’re thinking, ‘You don’t even know what you’re voting on.’

[snip]

So but if you’re a Senator–and this is why the Senate doesn’t mind that much–if you’re a Senator and you want to go and get any information on intelligence–I’m not talking about highly compartmented–

Marcy Wheeler: Wiretapping and interrogation…

Pelosi: Well, it just depends on what they might be at any given time. I’m just talking about intelligence information. Intelligence. You’re a Senator [knocks on table] Here it is. You’re a House member, you have to have a vote of the Committee.

Schakowsky: Yes you do.

Pelosi: … to get it. Which you may or may not get. And which the Administration may or may not approve, depending on who it is and the rest of that. Read more →

Pelosi: Members Are Taking Votes … You Don’t Know What You’re Voting On

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In his review of the Wikileaks material on Afghanistan, Marc Ambinder notes that John Kerry referred to “serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan.”

Will it raise skepticism in Congress? Absolutely. The chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, said in a statement that “[h]owever illegally these documents came to light, they raise serious questions about the reality of America’s policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those policies are at a critical stage and these documents may very well underscore the stakes and make the calibrations needed to get the policy right more urgent.”

As Siun notes, the leak comes just before the House votes on an Afghan supplemental.

But what about the Senate, which voted on Thursday to pass the supplemental? If John Kerry, the Chairman of the SFRC and no slouch on Afghanistan policy, suggests these leaks shed new light on our Afghan policy, does that mean he and the rest of the Senate had enough information to vote to escalate the war in Afghanistan in the first place?

The degree to which Administrations–Republican and Democratic–withhold information and then ask Congress to endorse actions inflected by that information was a central theme of my discussion with Nancy Pelosi (and Jan Schakowsky) on Saturday. In a discussion of the way Administrations limit briefings on important issues to the Gang of Four or Eight, she describes  realizing–after she became Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee–the degree to which other members of Congress were voting on policies they knew nothing about. “When I became Ranking Member I was in a room all the time on this and that … and then members are taking votes and you’re thinking ‘you don’t even know what you’re voting on.'” Schakowsky followed up on Pelosi’s point to note how central that ignorance was when Congress authorized the Iraq War.

Now, Pelosi and other members of the Gang of Four bear some responsibility for perpetuating this system that asks Congress to authorize Executive Branch actions in ignorance.

But as I’ll show in my longer post on Pelosi’s comments, that’s precisely why she’s holding out for GAO oversight of the intelligence community and–more directly on point–expanded briefing beyond the Gang of Four.

I’m not sure there is anything in the new WikiLeaks bunch that would have convinced Congress that we can’t continue to dump money into Afghanistan (I’ll take a look at the WikiLeaks documents once I’m done transcribing this interview). But the lessons of the last week–notably, a reconsideration of the degree to which much of the intelligence community has been privatized and hidden in opaque contracts, as well as the WikiLeaks demonstration that the White House isn’t completely forthcoming about the problems in its war in Afghanistan–all demonstrate the need to give Congress the real oversight ability they lack now.

Leaving Las Vegas

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I’m at the airport well in advance of my flight to leave Netroots Nation, and thought it overdue to check in, since I’ve been so quiet all week.

This year’s Netroots Nation–the fifth (I’ve attended all of them)–felt utterly familiar, like a family reunion only without any of the fights about politics. FDL had a good contingent (as has probably been obvious): given that we do so much work together remotely, it was great to spend time with Rayne, Gregg, Michael Whitney, David Dayen, Lisa Derrick, and Jon Walker. And I enjoyed spending good time with Rosalind, Bob Schacht, and Garrett.

Just as important seeing the increasingly few people trying to return our country to the rule of law. In addition to the great people on my panel: Jerry Nadler, Vince Warren, Matthew Alexander, and Adam Serwer, people like Daphne Eviatar and Jason Leopold were there (and I’ve not spent much time with either before), as well as more folks from ACLU and CCR. Jeremy Scahill would have been at my panel–except that his conflicted with mine (though we did get to spend some time together).

And then there were all the discussions about where we go from here. There was a bunch of discussion about several things: how we put the teacher funding back into the war supplemental–we have no business firing teachers to pay for war (yeah, then there’s the big question of whether we have any business at war in Afghanistan). There were lots of discussions about the economy generally. And there was near unanimity (well, maybe downright unanimity) that we need to make sure that Elizabeth Warren gets the Consumer Financial Protection Agency position.

In fact, one of the highlights of the trip this year was meeting some of the best women in politics. I got to meet Warren, who is every bit as much a rock star in person as she is on teevee. I spent some time with Linda Chavez-Thompson, talking about what she will do when she wins her election to be Lieutenant Governor of Texas. And, as you’ll see on Monday once I’ve transcribed everything and written it up, I had the opportunity to talk to Nancy Pelosi (and Jan Schakowsky) about intelligence reform. It’s pretty damned humbling–and inspiring–to get to spend time with such a collection of women heroes.

There’s a lot more I’ll hopefully write up over the next few days. But for the moment, I head back home once again remembering that this bloggy politics thing is all about community.

FDL Talks Intelligence Contracting with Tim Shorrock

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The Washington Post has been turning lots of heads this week with a big series on intelligence contracting. But we here at FDL have been talking about it for years, not least when we hosted Tim Shorrock–who wrote the book on intelligence contracting, Spies for Hire–for a book salon two years ago.In light of all the attention focused on the issue this, week, I asked Shorrock to come back to talk to use about the series, the problems with contracting, and some other issues the WaPo didn’t hit.

As I pointed out on Monday, one thing Shorrock emphasized was the degree to which the contractors are partnering with the government to develop longterm strategy.

Shorrock describes, for example, [Mike] McConnell’s key role in the formation of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade organization that serves as a bridge between large intelligence contractors (like Booz Allen, SAIC, Computer Sciences Corporation, and ManTech) and the officers from CIA, NSA, and DHS who join them on the board of the organization. “INSA,” Shorrock explains, “is one of the only business associations in Washington that include current government officials on their board of directors.” Shorrock describes how INSA worked with the DNI (back when John Negroponte was DNI and McConnell was head of INSA and a VP at Booz Allen) to foster information sharing in the intelligence community–including with contractors. He reports that, for the first time in 2006, INSA’s contractors were consulted on the DNI’s strategic plans for the next decade. And Shorrock describes one intelligence veteran wondering “if INSA has become a way for contractors and intelligence officials to create policy in secret, without oversight from Congress.”

McConnell, after nurturing this enhanced relationship between contractors and government intelligence services, ascended to serve as DNI. He was, Shorrock points out, “the first contractor ever to be named to lead the Intelligence Community.” Once confirmed, McConnell immediately buried a report assessing the practice of outsourcing intelligence. And he worked to further expand the ties between government spying and its contractors.

[snip]

[The warrantless wiretap program] not just about Bush and Cheney ignoring laws and spying on citizens (though it is that). It’s that, in the name of fighting terrorism, the Bush Administration is creating a monstrous new Intelligence-Industrial Complex in which intelligence contractors and the government collaborate–with little oversight–to snoop at home and abroad.

If you’re interested in the WaPo piece, I recommend you pick up Shorrock’s book for a really exhaustive picture of the problem.

Meanwhile, I’ll start off this chat with some questions for Shorrock:

1) I complained the other day that the WaPo had not used the confirmation hearings for James Clapper–which happened yesterday–to contextualize the issues and possible solutions for the problems identified in their story. You’ve written about Clapper’s role in the privatization of intelligence. Assuming he is confirmed, what are the ramifications for our security and our budget?

2) On Monday’s installment, the WaPo used the example of Nidal Hasan to explain the risk of the redundancy and sheer volume of information:

In the days after the shootings, information emerged about Hasan’s increasingly strange behavior at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had trained as a psychiatrist and warned commanders that they should allow Muslims to leave the Army or risk “adverse events.” He had also exchanged e-mails with a well-known radical cleric in Yemen being monitored by U.S. intelligence.But none of this reached the one organization charged with handling counterintelligence investigations within the Army. Just 25 miles up the road from Walter Reed, the Army’s 902nd Military Intelligence Group had been doing little to search the ranks for potential threats. Instead, the 902’s commander had decided to turn the unit’s attention to assessing general terrorist affiliations in the United States, even though the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI’s 106 Joint Terrorism Task Forces were already doing this work in great depth.

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The Contractors Causing Chaos but Not Out and Out Corruption

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I’m beginning to agree with Rayne’s comment of the other day that the only explanation for the length of the WaPo series on contractors is to please the Pulitzer committee. The other most (perhaps more) likely explanation for the style of the piece is that editors have tried so hard not to piss off the security establishment–and to stop short of voicing the conclusions that Dana Priest and William Arkin’s work support–that they’ve turned Priest and Arkin’s work into a bunch of disembodied fluff.

Take a look at the logic of this passage–which points out the drawbacks of using contractors–to see what I mean:

Since 9/11, contractors have made extraordinary contributions – and extraordinary blunders – that have changed history and clouded the public’s view of the distinction between the actions of officers sworn on behalf of the United States and corporate employees with little more than a security badge and a gun.

Contractor misdeeds in Iraq and Afghanistan have hurt U.S. credibility in those countries as well as in the Middle East. Abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, some of it done by contractors, helped ignite a call for vengeance against the United States that continues today. Security guards working for Blackwater added fuel to the five-year violent chaos in Iraq and became the symbol of an America run amok.

Contractors in war zones, especially those who can fire weapons, blur “the line between the legitimate and illegitimate use of force, which is just what our enemies want,” Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middlebury College and the author of “One Nation Under Contract,” told the independent Commission on Wartime Contracting at a hearing in June.

Misconduct happens, too. A defense contractor formerly called MZM paid bribes for CIA contracts, sending Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who was a California congressman on the intelligence committee, to prison. Guards employed in Afghanistan by ArmorGroup North America, a private security company, were caught on camera in a lewd-partying scandal.

It starts with a classic “on the one side, on the other” piece of cowpie: a sentence that even linguistically refuses to take sides. Contractors, you see, are extraordinary in all ways!!!

Then watch the shift into an almost agent-less soft-pedaling of the problems contractors have caused. Abuse of prisoners happened. But apparently, only at Abu Ghraib, not at Bagram, not at Gitmo, not at firebases where detainees died. And the names of those contractors? Their role in the abuse? The WaPo stops short of telling you, for example, that a CACI interrogator was the one instructing the grunts at Abu Ghraib to abuse detainees. The WaPo also doesn’t tell you the CACI contractors never paid any price for doing so. The WaPo doesn’t mention that DOD believed they had no way of holding  contractors accountable for such things (though the case of David Passaro, in which a detainee died, of course proved that contractors could be prosecuted).

Then there’s Blackwater. What’d they do? Why they, “added fuel to the five-year violent chaos in Iraq and became the symbol of an America run amok.” No mention of Nisour Square. No mention of the Iraqi Vice President’s murdered security guard.  No mention of the contractors killed in Fallujah–who were left exposed by Blackwater. No mention of the illegal gun smuggling. And definitely no mention of the most recent allegations that Blackwater has been involved with assassination squads. Instead, we get Allison Stanger’s quote–alluding to contractors doing the actual killing, but never actually spelling that out for those who don’t read Jeremy Scahill (or, frankly, Erik Prince).

And then, after alluding to the CACI interrogators who avoided the legal consequences the Abu Ghraib guards paid, after alluding to Blackwater’s fueling of chaos but not mentioning its many legal problems, only then does this story say,

Misconduct happens, too.

Which, grammatically and logically, suggests the CACI and Blackwater crimes were not actually misconduct.

And even here there’s some real fudging. According to the WaPo, there was only one contractor involved in the Duke Cunningham story: MZM. (And even there, WaPo makes no mention of MZM’s involvement in CIFA’s spying on American citizens.) No mention of the other contracting scandal exposed in the Duke Cunningham case, wherein the third most senior guy at CIA, Dusty Foggo, went to jail for sending contracts to his childhood buddy Brent Wilkes in exchange for prostitutes and–possibly–a plush job after he left the CIA. That kind of revolving door corruption is one of the real and repeated problems with reliance on contractors. The such a senior person at CIA sold out security for an expensive whore ought to serve as a cornerstone for this morality tale. But according to the WaPo, it didn’t happen.

And that’s how the miracle of modern MSM editing presents the downsides of contractors as largely disembodied chaos rather than security contracts getting doled out for reasons that have nothing to do with security, rather than contractors abusing their quasi-immune status to engage in really counterproductive crimes.

WaPo Top Secret Story: Why Not Nominate God to Be Director of National Intelligence?

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I trust you will all read Dana Priest and William Arkin’s story on the unwieldiness of our Intelligence Industrial Complex. It is good, insofar as it focuses needed attention on a huge problem.

But boy is it itself unwieldy. Today’s overview appears to want to be two stories: one on the problem with out-of-control contracting, and one on how that led to the failure to identify the Nidal Hasan and UndieBomber threats.

Moreover, what I find utterly shocking is that today’s 5315-word installment includes only this reference to the simmering battle over intelligence reform and the Director of National Intelligence position and tomorrow’s confirmation hearing for James Clapper!

“There’s only one entity in the entire universe that has visibility on all SAPs – that’s God,” said James R. Clapper, undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the Obama administration’s nominee to be the next director of national intelligence. [my emphasis]

Remember, this hearing is tomorrow. The debate that has led up to it has covered whether or not we need a stronger DNI, whether or not GAO can audit intelligence programs, and whether more than 4 people should be briefed on major new intelligence programs.

Every single one of the issues that has led to tomorrow’s confirmation hearing is an issue that goes to the heart of the problems identified in the WaPo piece: the ongoing lack of real value-added analysis to make sense of all the intelligence collected, the opacity and potential waste and fraud of the entire IIC, and the turf battles that contribute to that waste.

So while I’m grateful that this story (and more importantly, the issues behind the story, since the content of today’s installment has largely already been reported by Tim Shorrock) is getting as much attention as it is, I’m aghast that the WaPo didn’t try to contextualize it by framing the issues in it in terms of Clapper’s nomination to be DNI.

The guy the Obama Administration nominated to be Director of National Intelligence seems glib about the utter lack of transparency and oversight in our intelligence world (his predecessor, Dennis Blair, claims in the story he was able to see it all). One after another high level security official are quoted in the story complaining about the lack of central focus on intelligence–precisely the issue that Clapper’s nomination won’t solve.

If Clapper’s nomination is approved tomorrow–and it sounds like DiFi has resigned herself to approving Clapper not because she thinks he’s adequate to the job but because the interim DNI is retiring shortly–it will represent success on Obama’s part at forestalling efforts to deal in substantive way with the problems identified in the story.

That’s the news in this WaPo story.

The Intelligence Industrial Complex Prepares for War

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In my review of Tim Shorrock’s important Spies for Hire, I summarized one of the most important parts of the narrative he tells in the book.

Shorrock describes, for example, [Mike] McConnell’s key role in the formation of the Intelligence and National Security Alliance (INSA), a trade organization that serves as a bridge between large intelligence contractors (like Booz Allen, SAIC, Computer Sciences Corporation, and ManTech) and the officers from CIA, NSA, and DHS who join them on the board of the organization. “INSA,” Shorrock explains, “is one of the only business associations in Washington that include current government officials on their board of directors.” Shorrock describes how INSA worked with the DNI (back when John Negroponte was DNI and McConnell was head of INSA and a VP at Booz Allen) to foster information sharing in the intelligence community–including with contractors. He reports that, for the first time in 2006, INSA’s contractors were consulted on the DNI’s strategic plans for the next decade. And Shorrock describes one intelligence veteran wondering “if INSA has become a way for contractors and intelligence officials to create policy in secret, without oversight from Congress.”

McConnell, after nurturing this enhanced relationship between contractors and government intelligence services, ascended to serve as DNI. He was, Shorrock points out, “the first contractor ever to be named to lead the Intelligence Community.” Once confirmed, McConnell immediately buried a report assessing the practice of outsourcing intelligence. And he worked to further expand the ties between government spying and its contractors.

[snip]

[The warrantless wiretap program] not just about Bush and Cheney ignoring laws and spying on citizens (though it is that). It’s that, in the name of fighting terrorism, the Bush Administration is creating a monstrous new Intelligence-Industrial Complex in which intelligence contractors and the government collaborate–with little oversight–to snoop at home and abroad.

Now, Shorrock’s book got far too little attention, IMO. But he did lay out in great detail the many problems with the degree to which we have outsourced our national security infrastructure to contractors (and Jeremy Scahill has, of course, tirelessly chronicled that as well).

Which is why I’m amused by the panic revealed in a memo the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a few weeks ago preparing all members of the intelligence community for an upcoming Dana Priest series covering the same terrain. The memo reveals:

  • The Director of Communications for ODNI, Art House, briefed Intelligence Community public affairs officers on the article back in January
  • House briefed the Deputies Committee for the intelligence community on the Priest series the week the memo was released
  • House has laid out a response plan to Priest’s article including his agency and the NSC, to be coordinated with all the IC agencies
  • House is already planning “a meeting or conference call to review procedural action before, during and after publication, and to compare substantive points that might be offered in rebuttal to the article”

Perhaps that’s just good messaging strategy–the kind that (as it happens) becomes a lot less effective when it is laid out ahead of time.

But what I’m perhaps most amused by is this paragraph:

This series has been a long time in preparation and looks designed to cast the IC and the DoD in an unfavorable light.  We need to anticipate and prepare so that the good work of our respective organizations is effectively reflected in communications with employees, secondary coverage in the media and in response to questions. [my emphasis]

Nowhere in this memo–at least as republished by Marc Ambinder–does House even hint that Priest has her details wrong (and given that she’s been working on it for two years, I’d be surprised if she did). The only real risk that House raises is the “unauthorized disclosure of sensitive and classified information.”

Yet the conclusion he draws from months of preparation for an article by Priest that is presumably factually correct is that it is “designed to cast the IC and the DoD in an unfavorable light.”

I’ve got a ton of respect for Priest’s reporting and therefore would guess that the article is designed to reveal the truth about the IC and DoD. And yet the intelligence community, inside its bunker, perceives a search for the truth as a design to portray it unfavorably.

What an apt explanation, then, for the problem with excessive contracting: when a reporter avails herself of Constitutionally protected rights to act as a watchdog on our government and its contractors, the government itself assumes that must be an attack. Hell, the IC has had time to preemptively respond to some of the problems Priest is about to reveal (and, as I said, Shorrock gave them a head start two years ago).

But instead, it has decided to go to war.

Spooky Timing

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I assume this is a coinkydink. But oh what a coinkydink it is.

Sergei Tretyakov, a high-ranking Russian spy whose defection to the United States in 2000 was regarded as one of the most significant coups against the Russian government since the collapse of the Soviet Union, died June 13 at his home in Osprey, Fla.

Mr. Tretyakov’s wife said he died after suffering a heart attack, according to Pete Earley, the author of a book about Mr. Tretyakov. The former Russian spy was 53 and news of his death was withheld at the request of his family pending an investigation into the cause, Earley said.

[snip]

At the time of his defection on Oct. 11, 2000, Mr. Tretyakov allegedly had been working as a double agent for the United States for three years while he was the SVR’s second-in-command in New York. From 1995 to 2000, he oversaw all Russian covert operations in the city and had more than 60 intelligence officers under his command, according to [a book by Pete Earley on Tretyakov].

The intelligence Mr. Tretyakov handed over during his time as a double agent amounted to more than 5,000 top-secret SVR cables and scores of classified Russian intelligence reports. He wrote an estimated 400 papers for the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the White House.

The WaPo doesn’t say it explicitly, but Tretyakov was, at the time of his defection, the First Secretary at the Russian Mission to the UN in NYC. The Russian handlers of the illegal spy ring just swapped back to Russia served in the same kind of role (Russian Official #2, who is described in most detail in the complaints on the spies, is or was the Second Secretary to the Russian Mission). And the FBI has had the network of illegals under surveillance since at least 2000, suggesting that Tretyakov likely alerted the US of the extent of the ring when he defected (the FBI started surveillance before he defected, but if he was a double agent as has been reported, he may have tipped the US off to the ring).

And look at how it lines up with the discussions of and timing of the bust:

June 5: Mikhail Semenko’s laptop chats with Russian Official #2 surveilled

June 9: Chapman’s laptop chats with Russian Official #1 surveilled

June 11: Obama briefed about Russian spy swap

June 13: Tretyakov dies

June 16: Chapman’s laptop chats with Russian Official #1 surveilled

June 18: Obama chairs NSC meeting on Russian spy swap

June 24: Obama and Dmitri Medvedev go to Ray’s Hell Burger

June 25: Complaint against 9 spies dated

June 26: FBI collects evidence against last two remaining spies; FBI agent says to Chapman, “I know you are going back to Moscow in two weeks.”

June 27: Spies arrested

June 29: Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov complains about timing of arrest; Obama reported to be miffed about timing of arrest; DOJ attributes timing to pending travel–presumably Chapman’s

Week of July 5: White House almost cancels spy swap because names of proposed spies in Russia leaked

July 8: Spy swap completed

July 10: Two weeks after FBI Agent said Chapman would be traveling to Russian in two weeks; Tretyakov’s death reported

The family may have withheld news of Tretyakov’s death by the heart problem he had had his entire life, but the delay also happened to have delayed news of his death until the spying activity he was originally part of was–at a minimum–exposed as part of this spy sting. And note the meetings involving President Obama on arresting the illegals and conducting the spy swap happened within a week before and after his Tretyakov’s death.

So maybe it’s not such a coinkydink after all…