by Tim Shorrock
November 16, 2009
from Crocodyl Website
Contents
- SI International/Serco
- Boeing Integrated Defense Systems
- BAE Systems/Global Analysis Unit
- Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and its Primary Contractors
- The Analysis Corporation (TAC)
- Spectal LLC (L-1 Identity Solutions)
- Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems
- Booz Allen Hamilton/Carlyle Group
- CACI International Inc.
- SAIC – Science Applications International Corporation
- Project Groundbreaker (NSA Contract)
- Lockheed Martin – Information Systems And Global Services
Author/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
1818 Library Street, Suite 1000 Reston, VA 20190
Principal Agencies
National Security Agency (NSA), National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), Office of Naval Intelligence
Air Force Information Warfare Center, Department of Defense
Top Executives
Edward J. Casey, Jr., Chairman and CEO
Harry Gatanas – Senior VP, Defense and Intelligence Group (former NSA director of Acquisitions)
Annual Revenue
$510 million (2006)
Intelligence Percent of Revenue
48 percent
Summary
Ratings
- Washington Technology Top 100: #44 (Note: last listing before Serco acquisition)
SI International, Inc. of McLean, Va., is a key NSA contractor now owned by Serco Inc. of the UK, the world’s largest outsourcing company. SI runs some of the NSA’s support and management functions. Its niche is advising intelligence and defense agencies on their acquisition and outsourcing strategies.
It also helps intelligence agencies as they shift from proprietary “stove-pipes” to integrating their IT systems with sister agencies and the Pentagon’s evolving Global Information Grid. GIG is the Internet-like system that will theoretically link military commanders, warfighters, and national collection agencies into a single classified network.
In August 2008, SI was acquired by Serco Inc., which describes itself as a “a leading provider of professional, technology, and management services focused on the federal government.” SI International is now part of Serco’s North American division. See Serco’s press release.
SI bought into many of its contracts by acquiring smaller companies holding specialized NSA contracts. Of particular importance was SI’s $30 million acquisition in 2004 of Bridge Technology Corporation, which had extensive contracts with defense intelligence agencies.
Bridge “really gave us name-brand recognition within the intelligence community,” S. Bradford “Bud” Antle, SI’s former president and CEO, told investors during a 2006 Washington conference on defense investing sponsored by the Friedman Billings Ramsey investment firm.
“The IC wants other players. They get a bit in-bred because they have a set of contractors that are clean with capabilities they’ve known forever.”
For that reason, agencies are pleased when they “see an acquisition like us buying Bridge.”
Corporate Information
According to SI’s old website, the company specializes in “mission critical outsourcing.”
That means SI International,
“is an expert in putting together mission-critical business process outsourcing (BPO) solutions for record management and processing, case management, workflow management, human resource services, and logistics operations.
These outsourcing arrangements increase efficiency, productivity and quality of service, lower administrative costs, reduce office supply costs, enhance supervisory oversight over personnel, minimize time spent on unnecessary research and statistical analysis, and enable civilian agency and Department of Defense personnel to take on higher priority assignments.
Given today’s global environment, government employees are routinely asked to take on more and more tasks with increasingly finite resources, which makes the need for these BPO arrangements even more acute.”
CorpWatch Analysis
Because of its high-visibility role as an adviser for the NSA, SI has filled its management team and board of directors with former high-ranking intelligence officials.
Harry Gatanas, SI’s executive vice president for strategic programs, oversees the company’s business with the Pentagon and its intelligence agencies and remains with the company as Serco’s Senior Vice President, Defense & Intelligence Group. Gatanas came to SI directly from the NSA, where he was the agency’s senior acquisition executive and the contracting manager for Project Groundbreaker, one of the largest outsourcing projects ever undertaken by a federal government agency.
Prior to coming to the NSA, Gatanas spent 30 years in military intelligence, where his duties included managing contracts for the Army.
Recent Contracts/Events
In April 2008, SI announced that it was a member of an SAIC team that won a multi-award, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity contract supporting the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
Under the contract, SAIC wrote in a press release,
“SAIC will support the DIA mission with services in areas including foreign cultures, regional dynamics, illicit drugs, infectious disease and health, and emerging and disruptive technologies to provide effective analysis for the Defense Intelligence Enterprise.”
SI’s latest contract with the NSA was signed in April 2008, when it won three “Enterprise Program Management” contracts with a potential value of more than $300 million. Under the contracts, SI will help NSA “upgrade its acquisition management services” and “modernize its information technology, systems and programs” (major subcontractors on the project include Booz Allen Hamilton and Lockheed Martin).
In 2005, SI signed a three-year contract with the NSA to provide training in financial management, and in 2006 added a five-year $6.9 million “task order” to run the NSA’s human resources “welcome center” in Fort Meade.
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from DIA and company press releases.
Email – Info@si-intl.com
Phone – +1-703.939-6000
Website – http://www.serco-na.com/
Boeing Integrated Defense Systems
Author/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
100 North Riverside, Chicago, Illinois 60606 (Boeing HQ), P. O. Box 516, St. Louis, Missouri 63166 (Integrated Defense Systems)
Principal Agencies
National Security Agency (NSA)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA)
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
Top Executives
W. James McNerney, Jr., chairman of the board, president and CEO of The Boeing Company
Jim Albaugh, executive vice president, Boeing; president and CEO, Boeing Integrated Defense Systems (member, National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee)
Annual Revenue
$66.4 billion (Boeing corporate)
Intelligence Percent of Revenue
Not Disclosed
Summary
BOEING’S NICHE
Boeing Integrated Defense Services (IDS) is the intelligence unit of the Boeing Company. Based in Chicago, Boeing is a $61.5 billion aerospace company with more than 161,000 employees, and makes commercial jetliners and military aircraft, satellites, and advanced information and communications systems.
IDS has close ties with the NSA and the intelligence community’s signals intelligence units. It has an important office about a mile from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, in an industrial park filled with NSA contractors. Boeing was involved in some of the Bush administration’s most secretive programs: Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a Boeing subsidiary, handled computerized flights plans for the CIA when it kidnapped (rendered) suspected terrorists and flew them to secret prisons around the world.
Boeing also has a major stake in domestic intelligence as the prime contractor for the DHS surveillance system, SBInet, which is designed to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border with a “virtual fence” network of surveillance systems and communications towers.
FINANCES
Boeing IDS, with $32.1 billion in revenues, earns slightly more than half of Boeing’s total annual revenues. Its 71,000-person business unit provides solutions “to meet the enduring needs of defense, space, and intelligence customers in the United States and around the world,” according to the company’s website.
The division is headquartered in St. Louis, and has “concentrated operations” in Southern California; Seattle; Houston; Philadelphia; Mesa, Arizona; Huntsville, Alabama; the Space Coast of Florida; San Antonio; and Washington, D.C.
Corporate Information
INTELLIGENCE MISSION
According to Boeing’s website, its most important intelligence unit is its Mission System Group.
This organization,
“provides the subject matter expertise, technical excellence, and operational experience required to lead Boeing’s effort to support the horizontal integration of the Intelligence Community (IC).
We are organized, not by customer, but by capability to provide the NGA, CIA, DIA and NSA an enterprise level approach to global situational awareness, content management and knowledge capture. Our architectural solutions facilitate the seamless integration of military and intelligence missions by leveraging open standards and commercial technology.”
Capabilities include:
- Mission Infrastructure (“providing secure, integrated network solutions that support intelligence and command systems”)
- Intelligence Analysis & Services (“integrated, analytical intelligence support to the warfighter”)
- commercial imagery solutions to “produce, manage and visualize geospatial information.”
Key customers of the unit, the company says, include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
Boeing’s geospatial intelligence offerings are provided through Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which also holds contracts with the NSA. It allows agencies and military units to map global shorelines and create detailed maps of cities and battlefields, complete with digital elevation data that allow users to construct three-dimensional maps.
Other agencies are served through Boeing’s Advanced Information Systems (AIS) unit headquartered in Anaheim, California.
AIS is part of the company’s Intelligence and Security Systems, the Boeing division,
“that is dedicated to providing ground-based and other integrated intelligence and security solutions for a variety of U.S. government customers. More than half of the work performed by AIS supports classified government programs.”
In December 2007, Boeing formed a new Intelligence and Security Systems (I&SS) division that appears to combine many of the company’s services for foreign and domestic intelligence.
Based in Washington, D.C., I&SS has a workforce of about 2,000 people at nine locations nationwide, and includes four program areas:
- Advanced Information Systems
- Mission Systems
- Security Solutions, which includes SBInet (the electronic wall being built on the US-Mexico border)
- Advanced I&SS
According to a company press release, the new division,
“enables increased focus on the complex challenges faced by our homeland security and intelligence community customers… I&SS will improve our ability to bring comprehensive, net-enabled capabilities to meet our customers’ dynamic requirements.”
DOMESTIC SECURITY
AIS is also home to Boeing’s SBINet contract for the US government’s Secure Border Initiative.
As described by the company, SBI is,
“a comprehensive plan by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to gain operational control of the US borders through the integration of increased staffing; interior enforcement; detection technology and infrastructure; and coordination on federal, state, local, and international levels.”
Boeing’s contribution, through a contract worth at least $2.5 billion, is SBINet,
“a program focused on transforming border control through technology and infrastructure. SBINet will provide frontline personnel advantages in securing the nation’s land borders through the most effective integration of current and next generation technology, infrastructure, staffing, and response platforms.”
SBINet is managed and executed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency and contracted out to the Boeing team, which includes key intelligence contractors DRS Technologies, L-3 Communications, Unisys Global Public Sector, and USIS (formerly a
Carlyle Groupcompany).
The Boeing consortium, the company says,
“will detect, monitor, and classify potential and actual crossers [of the border]. At that point, the system will enable sector command centers to dispatch the right agents and resources to respond to the scene.”
The equipment will include ground-based and tower-mounted sensors, cameras and radars; fixed and mobile telecommunications systems; ground-penetrating detecting systems; command and control center equipment; and information database and intelligence analysis systems.
CorpWatch Analysis
SUMMARY
Boeing’s intelligence division, while little known outside of the military establishment, plays a critical role in the so-called war on terror.
In 2006, IDS began testing for its defense and intelligence clients a new product that downloads signals and imagery from military satellites and sends the data instantly to analysts in ground stations.
“For the first time,” said Boeing, “signal intelligence receivers proved that they could automatically identify the target — a mock terrorist — and trigger airborne surveillance assets to track the target on the ground, while capturing full-motion imagery and broadcasting it instantly to analysts several hundred miles away.”
[1]
The system will eventually become part of the US Army’s array of high-tech weaponry.
One of IDS’s most important units is its Mission Systems group, which supports the national collection agencies “with solutions that allow them to acquire, manage, visualize and communicate intelligence from multiple sources.”
CIA OPERATIONS
A Boeing subsidiary played a key role in the secret “extraordinary rendition” program that sent many terrorist suspects to CIA-operated interrogation cells outside the United States.
According to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boeing, handled,
“many of the logistical and navigational details for these trips, including flight plans, clearance to fly over other countries, hotel reservations, and ground-crew arrangements.”
[2]
In her 2008 book The Dark Side (Doubleday/2008), Mayer added details.
Quoting Sean Belcher, a former Jeppesen employee, she reported that,
“while the Bush administration was insisting that it did not render suspects to be tortured, executives at Jeppesen had no such illusions. [Belcher] described a meeting in which one of his bosses, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said, ‘We do all of the extraordinary-rendition flights – you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.’” (Mayer, page 129).
Jeppesen is also involved as a contractor in geospatial intelligence.
A Boeing handout at a 2007 intelligence symposium in San Antonio lists “Jeppesen Government and Military Services” as one of four subsidiaries of Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which provides “prime contractor support to government customers that require diverse geospatial intelligence services.”
That designation could include the CIA as well as the NGA and other Pentagon agencies. Jeppesen and the other subsidiaries, Boeing says, work “in specialized organizations with broad resources to meet the time-critical requirements of today’s warfighter.”
At GEOINT 2007, Boeing, one of the intelligence community’s biggest suppliers of satellites, displayed its “information sharing environment” software.
It is designed to meet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s new requirements that agencies stop buying “stovepiped” systems that cannot talk to each other and start focusing on products that allow the NGA and other agencies to easily share their classified imagery with the CIA and other sectors of the community.
“To ensure freedom in the world, the United States continues to address the challenges introduced by terrorism,” a Boeing handout said. Its new software, the company said, will allow information to be “shared efficiently and uninterrupted across intelligence agencies, first responders, military and world allies.”
Recent Contracts/EventsIn April 2008, Boeing and CSC, another major intelligence contractor, joined forced to pursue a multi-billion dollar contract with the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) “to execute the Special Operations Forces’ global mission.”
“The combined technical, integration, and sustainment strengths of Boeing and CSC offer the best possible team to support USSOCOM worldwide, and to bring SOFSA new capabilities that offer enhanced performance while establishing cost-saving efficiencies for operations,” Jim Sheaffer, president of CSC’s North American Public Sector, wrote in a press release.
SOURCES
[1] “Boeing Demonstrates Anti-Terrorism Integrated Tactical Solutions,” Boeing company press release, June 22 2006.
[2] Jane Mayer, “The CIA’s Travel Agent,” The New Yorker, October 30, 2006.
Email – forrest.s.gossett@boeing.com (Boeing media relations)
Phone – +1-314-363-0650
Website – Boeing Integrated Defense Systems
Back to Contents
BAE Systems/Global Analysis Unit
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters1601 Research Blvd., Rockville MD 20850
Principal AgenciesCentral Intelligence Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National Counter-Terrorism Center
Department of Defense
Top ExecutivesWalter P. Havenstein, president and CEO
John Gannon, vice president of Global Analysis (former deputy director for Intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency)
Annual Revenue$28.2 billion (BAE U.S. parent)
Intelligence Percent of RevenueNot disclosed
SummaryRankings(BAE Systems Inc.)
- Washington Technology Top 100: #12
- Defense News Top 100: #3
BAE Systems Inc., is the U.S. subsidiary of the British defense giant BAE. It is the sixth-largest U.S. defense contractor and a major player in the U.S. intelligence market.
Its rise was fueled by a string of strategic acquisitions of American companies, the largest of which was United Defense Industries (UDI).
BAE bought UDI in 2005 for $4.2 billion from the Carlyle Group, the well-connected Washington-based private equity fund. UDI, which makes the Bradley Fighting Vehicle and other weapons systems used by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, was a huge money-maker for
Carlyle, and its acquisition helped catapult BAE into third place in the global defense market, just behind Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
Corporate InformationBAE Systems’ website explains how its Global Analysis intelligence unit operates:
“[It] is a leading provider of skilled, fully cleared, and experienced intelligence and geospatial analysts working directly with Government agencies and U.S. military commands to satisfy regular and surge requirements. Policymakers, intelligence officers, war fighters, and law enforcement officers have come increasingly to rely on the sophisticated intelligence analysis provided by Global Analysis to help them understand the threats, risks, and opportunities generated by today’s rapidly evolving international environment.
“Along with this on-site support, Global Analysis offers outsourced studies and assessments. Through its own group of ‘in-house’ senior analysts, Global Analysis is prepared to provide the intelligence community, the wider U.S. Government, U.S. military commands, and the U.S. private sector with customized strategic assessments and analysis on political, economic, and security issues.
“Our sophisticated, all-source analysis program is led by Dr.John Gannon, vice president of Global Analysis and former deputy director for intelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency. Dr. Gannon is ably supported by a range of seasoned senior analysts and managers from the intelligence community as well as by analytic support specialists. …”
The unit provides professional and analytic staffing; workforce development; technical and tradecraft training; advanced analytic tools; strategic studies and assessments; design, construction, and management of analytic facilities.
BAE Systems has extensive operations throughout the Washington, D.C. area and operates numerous Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities (SCIF) for intelligence agencies.
These facilities have special windows that prevent outside infiltration of electronic spying devices.
According to BAE,
“Our newest facility in Herndon, Virginia, known as the Information Analysis Center (IAC) is a state-of-the-art workspace, built to stringent…customer security, communications, and analytic requirements. This facility, which was opened in July, 2005, provides over 150,000 square feet of accredited SCIF space accommodating over 700 personnel.
In addition to workspace, BAE Systems provides the IAC with a 24 x 7 cleared armed guard force, and an array of security services, including badging, holding and passing clearances, and escorting.”
BAE’s contractor staff at the IAC specialize in counter-terrorism, counter-insurgency, counter-proliferation, leadership analysis, electronic warfare, infrastructure vulnerabilities analysis, medical intelligence, underground facilities assessments and open-source intelligence analysis training for the private sector.
CorpWatch AnalysisBAE Systems is one of the prime beneficiaries of an outsourcing agenda under which the U.S. Intelligence Community spent 70 percent of its estimated $60 billion annual budget on contracts with private companies.
BAE’s services to U.S. intelligence – including the CIA and the National Counter-Terrorism Center – are provided through its Global Analysis Business Unit, located in McLean, Va., a stone’s throw from the CIA. The unit is headed by Dr. John Gannon, a 25-year veteran of the CIA who reached the agency’s highest analytical ranks as deputy director of intelligence and chairman of the National Intelligence Council.
Today, as a private sector contractor for the Intelligence Community, Gannon manages a staff of more than 800 analysts with security clearances.
In 2008 BAE added considerable depth to its intelligence offerings by acquiring MTC Technologies, a Dayton-based supplier of intelligence and technology systems to the NSA and other agencies.
It also acquired Detica Group, another British intelligence consulting company that has been making deep inroads into the U.S. defense intelligence market and the CIA.
FOREIGN REQUIREMENTS
As a subsidiary of a foreign corporation, BAE Systems Inc. operates under a Special Security Agreement with the US government that requires the company to appoint outside directors who are American citizens to a Government Security Committee.
These board members are responsible for overseeing BAE’s compliance with US national security and export regulations and vouch for the company before US officials.
According to BAE,
“Our long history of successful compliance with the SSA allows BAE Systems to supply products and services to the Department of Defense, Intelligence Community and Homeland Security on some of the Nation’s most sensitive programs.”
BAE Systems’ outside directors all have extensive experience inside the American intelligence and national security communities.
They include:
- Lee H. Hamilton, former Speaker of the House and co-chair of the 9/11 Commission
- Richard J. Kerr, former deputy director of Central Intelligence
- Gen. Kenneth A. Minihan, former director of the NSA
- Gen. Anthony C. Zinni (USMC, retired), former commander-in-chief U.S. Central Command
BAE SYSTEMS AND THE CIA
BAE’s role in U.S. national security and, in the process, underscores the degree of outsourcing in U.S. intelligence.
“The demand for experienced, skilled, and cleared analysts – and for the best systems to manage them – has never been greater across the Intelligence and Defense Communities, in the field and among federal, state and local agencies responsible for national and homeland security,” according to a Global Analysis unit brochure distributed in October at GEOINT 2007, an annual symposium sponsored by the prime contractors for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The mission of the Global Analysis unit,
“is to provide policymakers, warfighters, and law enforcement officials with analysts to help them understand the complex intelligence threats they face, and work force management programs to improve the skills and expertise of analysts,” the brochure states.
At the bottom of the brochure is a series of photographs illustrating BAE’s broad reach:
- a group of analysts monitoring a bank of computers
- three employees studying a map of Europe, the Middle East and the Horn of Africa
- the outlines of two related social networks that have been mapped out to show how their members are linked
- a bearded man, apparently from the Middle East and, presumably, a terrorist
- the fiery image of a the aftereffects of a car bomb explosion in Iraq
- four white radar domes (known as radomes) of the type used by the National Security Agency to monitor global communications from dozens of bases and facilities around the world
BAE AND HOMELAND SECURITY
The brochure may look and sound like typical corporate PR.
But amidst BAE’s spy talk, strategically placed phrases alert intelligence officials to BAE’s active presence inside the United States.
The tip-off language was,
- “federal, state and local agencies”
- “law enforcement officials”
- “homeland security”
By including them, BAE was broadcasting that it is not only a contractor for agencies involved in foreign intelligence, but also for domestic security agencies – a category that includes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the FBI, as well as local and state police forces stretching from Maine to Hawaii.
One of BAE’s newest products is specifically tailored for the homeland security market. “Geospatial Operations for a Secure Homeland – Awareness, Workflow, Knowledge” (GOSHAWK) is designed to provide geospatial intelligence – the computerized mapping and imagery tools managed by the NGA – to help law enforcement and state and local emergency agencies prepare for, and respond to, “natural disasters and terrorist and criminal incidents.”
Under the GOSHAWK program, BAE supplies “agencies and corporations” with data providers and information technology specialists “capable of turning geospatial information into the knowledge needed for quick decisions.”
A typical operation might involve acquiring data from satellites, aircraft, and sensors in ground vehicles, and integrating those data to support an emergency or security operations center.
One of the program’s special attributes, the company says, is its ability to “differentiate levels of classification,” meaning that it can deduce when data are classified and meant only for use by analysts with security clearances.
BAE IN IRAQ
During GEOINT 2007, three BAE Systems employees, newly returned from a three-week tour of Iraq and Afghanistan with the NGA, demonstrated a new software package.
SOCET GXP uses Google Earth software as a basis for creating three-dimensional maps that U.S. commanders and soldiers use to conduct intelligence and reconnaissance missions.
Eric Bruce, one of the BAE employees back from the Middle East, said in the fall of 2007 that his team trained U.S. forces to use the GXP software “to study routes for known terrorist sites” as well as to locate opium fields.
“Terrorists use opium to fund their war,” he said. Bruce also said Iraqi citizens helped his team locating targets. “Many of the locals can’t read maps, so they tell the analysts, ‘There is a mosque next to a hill,’” he explained.
The U.S. Army’s Topographic Engineering Center bought earlier versions of the software and used them to collect data on more than 12,000 square kilometers of Iraq, primarily in urban centers and over supply routes.
Bruce said BAE’s new package is designed for defense forces and intelligence agencies, but can also be used for homeland security and by highway departments and airports.
Recent Contracts/EventsIn July 2008,Nicole Suveges, a BAE Systems political scientist working in Iraq as an intelligence contractor for the US 4th Infantry Division, was killed in a bombing in Sadr City, Baghdad.
Suveges had a masters degree in political science from George Washington University, where she had written a dissertation on “Markets and Mullahs: Global Networks, Transnational Ideas and the Deep Play of Political Culture.”
She was working under a BAE contract to the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command to provide “training, programmatic, and staffing support” to the Army’s Human Terrain System program. (“BAE Systems statement regarding the loss of employee in Iraq,” BAE Systems News Release, June 25, 2008).
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from company press releases.
Email – greg.caires@baesystems.com (Greg Caires, director of Media Relations, BAE Systems Inc.)
Phone – +1 (703) 907-8261, +1 (301) 738-4000
Website – http://www.baesystems.com/ProductsServices/bae_prod_eis_global_analysis.html
Back to Contents
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and its Primary Contractors
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
HeadquartersThe Pentagon/Department of Defense, Virginia; Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.
Principal AgenciesPentagon
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Top ExecutivesLieutenant General Ronald L. Burgess, Jr, Director
Annual Revenue$1 billion (estimated 2009)
Intelligence Percent of Revenue(N/A – DIA is a contracting agency)
Summary
The Defense Intelligence Agency has an estimated budget of $1 billion and employs more than 11,000 military and civilian personnel, 35 percent of whom are contractors.
It is the primary intelligence agency for the Pentagon and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, integrates all information available from intelligence units of the unified combatant commands, and ensures delivery of intelligence from spy satellites and surveillance planes to war-fighters on the ground in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other battlegrounds.
Despite DIA’s recent award to a private consortium of a contract worth more than $1 billion, the agency’s officials insist:
“We are not outsourcing intelligence analysis,” says Donald Black, DIA chief of public affairs. “A full-time government employee maintains authority, direction, and control over the process and a senior analyst/leader reviews all analytical products.”
[1]
Several former high-ranking DIA officials have left government to work for contractors (for examples, see the CACI profile).
Corporate Information
- Principal contractors: BAE Systems; Booz Allen Hamilton; SAIC, Inc.; CACI International, Inc.; and L-3 Communications Inc.
- Percent of workforce employed by contractors: 35
CorpWatch AnalysisThe Defense Intelligence Agency was organized in 1961 to create a unified voice for the intelligence branches within the armed forces, and is the nation’s primary producer of foreign military intelligence.
The DIA has a budget of about $1 billion and employs more than 11,000 military and civilian personnel, many of whom work overseas as defense attachés at US embassies. Its current director, Army Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, previously served as director of management of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Historically, the DIA director has answered directly to the military brass and then to the secretary of defense.
The DIA describes its primary mission as providing,
“timely, objective, all-source military intelligence to policy makers, war fighters, and force planners to meet a variety of challenges across the spectrum of conflict.”
One of its most significant assignments is to provide centralized management for all national and defense activities related to MASINT, or measures and signatures intelligence – the “sniffing” by sensors that measures, detects, identifies, and tracks what the DIA calls “unique characteristics of fixed and dynamic targets.”
MASINT and its related disciplines is one of the most highly classified projects within the intelligence community.
It is,
“particularly important for detecting ballistic missiles, directed energy weapons, and weapons of mass destruction,” Maples told a defense publication in 2006.
“We’ve got to have the right kinds of signature databases that we can compare against, and the right kinds of collection capabilities to look into those three areas.”
The DIA’s requirements for information technology and skilled analysts have made the agency a major employer of contractors.
According to DIA officials who spoke to a May 2007 Defense Intelligence Acquisition Conference in Colorado, DIA contractors are filling a “workforce gap” that exists at DIA and most of the other agencies. During the 1990s, as intelligence budgets contracted, hundreds of career DIA officers retired and left the intelligence community.
When the DIA began hiring new people after 9/11, the veteran officers who should have been around to train and mentor them were gone. But because it takes five to seven years to train a new officer, there was a “generational hole” that could only be filled by former intelligence officers with security clearances; and most of them were working in the private sector.
Contractors were the only solution, officials said, to carry the agency through.
“Although we continuously review our mix of government and contractor personnel to ensure we have the right resources to accomplish our missions, contractors are an integral part of our DIA team,” DIA Director Maples, told the Washington Post in an August 2007 letter to the editor.
Previous DIA contracting: BPAsThe DIA’s latest “Solutions for Intelligence Analysis” (SIA) contract is the successor to a series of Blanket Purchase Agreements (BPAs) through which the DIA has historically done most of its contracting.
A blanket purchase agreement is a simplified acquisition method that allows government agencies to fill anticipated repetitive needs for analytical services and other supplies.
According to FedMarket.com, an Internet site for government contractors,
“BPAs are like ‘charge accounts’ set up with trusted suppliers. Both agencies and vendors like BPAs because they help trim the red tape associated with repetitive purchasing. Once set up, repeat purchases are easy for both sides.”
Under the BPA system that it established in 2003, DIA selected seven teams of vendors to compete against each other for outsourced work with the agency.
Each agreement was worth about $300 million to the individual vendor teams, which were led by,
- BAE Systems North America
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- Computer Sciences Corporation
- Lockheed Martin
- Northrop Grumman
- SRA International
- Titan Corporation, now a subsidiary of L-3 Communications Inc.
Contrary to Maples’ assertion to the Post, the agreements do incorporate analysis: A 2005 DIA report says the BPAs,
“provide the full spectrum of Information Technology (IT) planning, design, implementation, Intelligence Analysis support services.”
A similar system of BPAs was established by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) after Michael McConnell was sworn in as DNI in February 2007.
The DIA’s blanket purchase agreements are known collectively as DIESCON 3, and are also open for bidding to other agencies in the intelligence community. (If the NSA is looking for IT expertise in a certain area, for example, it can ask for bids from the DIA’s bidding consortiums.) Each team in the DIESCON 3 system has a specific focus.
The Booz Allen team, for example, includes 10,000 analysts with top secret, sensitive, compartmentalized information (TS/SCI) security clearances, and its consortium includes Accenture, a major outsourcing consultant to government agencies and private corporations, as well as Attensity Inc., a data analysis company initially funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm.
The Booz Allen team works closely on issues related to MASINT for the DIA; another important line of work, according to the Booz Allen BPA website, is data mining and link analysis for the CIA, the NSA, and the FBI.
BAE Systems, which captured 41 orders worth $105 million during the first year of its agreement with the DIA, leads an industry team that specializes in analyzing enemy military forces, providing mapping and 3-D imagery to Pentagon intelligence teams, and preparing finished intelligence on paramilitary forces and insurgent and terrorist organizations operating in Iraq and other countries of interest.
BAE’s BPA team includes SAIC, Booz Allen, Intellibridge Corporation, General Dynamics, Advanced Concepts Inc., SpecTal, and 41 other companies (the last two were acquired in 2007 by L-1 Identity solutions, the intelligence conglomerate where George Tenet is a director).
The Lockheed Martin BPA team claims to have the largest cleared workforce in the nation and, according to its DIESCON 3 website, provides,
“exceptional depth to respond to both surge requirements and planned customers tasks.”
Its forte seems to be providing large, agency-wide IT systems for the DIA and other agencies.
The team includes three of the top U.S. IT firms, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, as well as the consulting firm BearingPoint, which helped plan the U.S. occupation of Iraq for the Department of Defense.
Another member of the team is The Analysis Corporation, the intelligence contractor run by CIA veteran John Brennan.
Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, has put together a powerful combination of companies that have made their way up the federal contracting chain by managing the oversight of other contractors. They manage the DIA’s system for processing bids and awarding contracts. It includes CACI International, AT&T, Mantech International, and four small, high-tech companies that provide contract analysts to the CIA.
A fifth consortium is managed by Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), one of the NSA’s most important contractors. It manages global information networks, and produces and disseminates intelligence products, including specialized expertise in the area of imagery processing and archiving.
The CSC team includes CACI International and L-3 MPRI.
This last company is one of the largest private armies in the world, and would have at its disposal hundreds of paramilitary officers who would fit in exceedingly well with the DIA’s secret intelligence teams in the Middle East and North Africa.
Recent Contracts/EventsIn April 2008, the DIA awarded prime contracts to eight companies, giving them the right to bid on $1 billion worth of work over a five-year period.
Companies hired under the “Solutions for Intelligence Analysis” (SIA) contract will provide intelligence analysis support to the DIA as well as to the Armed Forces and the intelligence units of the military’s combatant commands, such as the U.S. Central Command.
According to SAIC, the intent of the SIA contract is “to streamline the process of acquiring new contractors for the Defense Intelligence Enterprise.” That “enterprise,” it said, consists of the DIA, the intelligence units of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines, as well as the Combatant Commands. [2]
These companies will perform the work:
- BAE Systems (the U.S. subsidiary of the British defense giant BAE)
- Booz Allen Hamilton
- CACI International
- Concurrent Technologies Corp. – http://www.ctc.com
- L-3 Communications Inc.
- Northrop Grumman Corp.
- Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC)
- SRA International Inc. [3]
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from DIA and company press releases.
[1] Email interview with Tim Shorrock, December 2007.
[2] SAIC, “Solutions for Intelligence Analysis,” http://www.saic.com/contractcenter/sia.
[3] SRA International specializes in providing engineering and IT services to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies. Through its Orion Center for Homeland Security, it provides counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and analytical services to the Department of Homeland Security and various military intelligence units.
Email – DIA-PAO@dia.mil (Public affairs)
Phone – +1-703-695-0071 (Public affairs)
Website – http://www.dia.mil
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The Analysis Corporation (TAC)
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters1501 Farm Credit Drive, Suite 2300, McLean, VA 22102-5000
Principal AgenciesCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Department of State
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
Top ExecutivesAlexander Drew, President
Annual RevenueNot disclosed (privately owned)
Intelligence Percent of RevenueNot disclosed
Summary
The Analysis Corporation (TAC) specializes in providing counterterrorism analysis and watchlists to U.S. government agencies.
It is best known for its connection to John O. Brennan, its former CEO, a 35-year veteran of the CIA and currently President Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser. Brennan, the first director of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), retired from government in November 2005 and immediately joined TAC.
TAC is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the defense and intelligence contractor, Global Strategies Group/North America. As of 2008, it employed more than 140 people who, according to company literature, support the work of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security agencies “with heavy emphasis on counterterrorism.”
Much of TAC’s business is with the NCTC itself. In fact, the NCTC is one of the company’s largest customers, and TAC provides counterterrorism (CT) support to “most of the agencies within the intelligence community,” according to a company press release.
One of its biggest customers is the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which manages the NCTC.
Corporate InformationOn its website, TAC states:
“TAC is at the forefront of the effort to safeguard U.S. national security interests. Since its start in 1990, TAC has provided mission critical intelligence support and technical solutions to the U.S. Government and non-governmental clients.
Each and every day, TAC makes important contributions in the counterterrorism (CT) and national security realm by supporting national watch-listing activities as well as other CT requirements.”
An earlier posting said that TAC,
“has a strong cadre of cleared intelligence analysts and specialists who have extensive experience in CT and related fields.
With a demonstrated record of retaining quality CT analysts in a dynamic market, TAC consistently provides skilled analysts intimately familiar with the missions, roles, and responsibilities of the Government’s multifaceted CT Community.
TAC employees are integrated into intelligence, law enforcement, defense, and homeland security work units, serve in Government operations centers, and play a critical role in watch-listing efforts… TAC staff consists of subject matter experts with extensive expertise in a wide range of disciplines.
This expertise is available to assist clients in business process re-engineering, program management, strategic planning, applied technology, facilitation, and governance challenges.”
CorpWatch AnalysisDuring the 1990s, TAC developed the U.S. government’s first terrorist database, “Tipoff,” on behalf of the State Department.
The database was initially conceived as a tool to help U.S. consular officials and customs inspectors determine if foreigners trying to enter the United States were known or suspected terrorists. In 2003, management of the database – which received information collected by a large number of agencies including the CIA, NSA, and FBI – was transferred to the CIA’s Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) and, later, to the National Counterterrorism Center.
In 2005, Tipoff was expanded and renamed the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, or TIDES, and fingerprint and facial recognition software was added to help identify suspects as they crossed U.S. borders.
TAC remains an important NCTC contractor: In 2005, it won a $2.3 million contract in a partnership with CACI International to integrate information from the Defense Intelligence Agency into the TIDES database.
TIDES is now “the wellspring for watch lists distributed to airlines, law enforcement, border posts, and U.S. consulates.”
With nearly half a million names in its database, TIDES is also the first intelligence database to include both foreigners and U.S. citizens, according to the Washington Post. The Post also reported that TIDES has created significant concerns about secrecy and privacy, with innocent civilians frequently mistaken for terrorist sympathizers, and some individuals remaining on the list long after their own governments have cleared them.
TAC has become a critical private sector player in the nation’s counterterrorism efforts. In the five years after 9/11, its income quintupled, from less than $5 million in 2001 to $24 million in 2006.
In 2006, TAC increased its visibility in the intelligence community by creating a “senior advisory board” that included three heavy hitters from the CIA: former Director George J. Tenet, former Chief Information Officer Alan Wade, and former senior analyst John P. Young.
“We will want to tap into their expertise, they are part of the brain trust here,” Brennan told the Washington Post (Tenet, in a statement released by TAC, said he would help the company “address critical needs as government and industry work together to fight terrorism.”)
According to a former contractor familiar with TAC, Brennan is one of Tenet’s closest friends and confidantes, and hired Tenet primarily as a “rainmaker” – someone who brings new business and contracts to a firm.
A former CIA officer who served in the Middle East said Brennan’s close ties with Tenet go back to the early 1990s, when Brennan was the chief of station in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a country that Tenet visited frequently as director of Central Intelligence (DCI).
Recent Contracts/EventsIn March 2008, TAC was one of two State Department contractors charged with illegally accessing passport records of presidential contenders Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain.
In response, TAC issued a statement on March 21:
“Late this morning, representatives of the Department of State informed The Analysis Corporation (TAC) for the first time that one of the individuals who had been detected inappropriately accessing passport files of prominent political figures was a TAC employee.
The individual was working on contract at the Department of State. This individual’s actions were taken without the knowledge or direction of anyone at TAC and are wholly inconsistent with our professional and ethical standards. TAC has an exemplary record of supporting the Department of State and other elements of the U.S. Government for close to two decades. We are fully cooperating with the Department of State in its investigation.
Specifically, we have honored the Department’s request to delay taking any administrative action related to the employment of the individual in order to give the Department’s Office of the Inspector General the opportunity to conduct its investigation. We deeply regret that the incident occurred and believe it is an isolated incident.”
Ironically, TAC’s CEO at the time, John Brennan, was an adviser to the Obama campaign (see CNN).
In November 2007, TAC CEO John Brennan resigned from the company and from his position as chairman of the Intelligence National Security Alliance to take a position in the Obama transition team (see the company’s announcement).
Brennan, who served during the presidential campaign as Obama’s chief intelligence adviser, was a top candidate for the job of CIA director, but was passed over after several national security bloggers reported that he was a key part of the CIA team that reportedly engaged in torture and enhanced interrogations of Guantanamo detainees.
He remains Obama’s primary adviser on intelligence issues. For more, see Washington Post, “Obama’s Battle Against Terrorism To Go Beyond Bombs and Bullets”.
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from DIA and company press releases.
Email – info@theanalysiscorp.com
Phone – +1.703.738.2840
Website – http://www.theanalysiscorp.com/
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Spectal LLC (L-1 Identity Solutions)
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters1875 Campus Commons Drive, Suite 100, Reston, Virginia 20191
Principal AgenciesCentral Intelligence Agency (CIA)
Unidentified government agencies
Top ExecutivesAnn Holcomb – president (former SpecTal vice president)
Ron Hammond – executive vice president
Ed Balint – executive vice president
Annual RevenueLatest annual revenue: $47 million (2005), $60 million (2006). Note: Revenue not disclosed for later years, following SpecTal’s acquisition by L-1 Identity Solutions.
Intelligence Percent of Revenue100% (estimate)
Summary
SpecTal was founded by a group of former CIA officers in the late 1990s to take advantage of a sudden spike in intelligence contracting during the last years of the Clinton administration.
After 9/11, it found itself in high demand. SpecTal employs more than 325 people, most of whom are former CIA and defense intelligence officials (the company says its employees are veterans of the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, the FBI, the Department of State, and other federal agencies).
Ninety-five percent of them have top-secret security clearances or higher. According to the company’s website, its staff includes the former chief of intelligence for the CIA Directorate of Operations and the former CIA deputy director for development of policies for collection, dissemination, and sharing of intelligence.
“After 9/11, SpecTal was there with the right experts at the right time and the right place,” VirginiaBusiness.com reported in 2006.
[1]
“Intelligence and federal law enforcement agencies needed to rapidly gear up to fight a global war on terrorism. Officials filled their gaps in expertise by turning to companies with the right blend of skills and resources. SpecTal fit the bill perfectly and quickly became a preferred vendor.”
In 2006, SpecTal shot to #1 in VirginiaBusiness.com’s “Fantastic 50” annual list of the state’s fastest growing companies, with a 4002 percent increase in revenue between 2001 and 2006 (that’s four thousand percent, not four hundred!).
It is now owned by L-1 Identity Solutions Inc., the biometric specialist and intelligence contractor run by defense investor Robert V. LaPenta.
Corporate Information
HISTORY
SpecTal was founded in 1999 by a husband and wife team, John and Louise Cross. It functioned “as a very small business providing consulting services to the intelligence community” until the couple decided to slow down in 2002. [2]
They hired three executives from Electronic Data Systems (EDS – the data processing firm once owned by Texas investor Ross Perot). The new execs took the company into new areas, including participating as contractors in covert operations in Afghanistan. As part of the larger company L-1 Identity Solutions, executives say, SpecTal will “enhance” L-1’s “product line” for counter-terrorism [3], for example, “assist[ing] with future development of the HIDE device.
Produced by L1’s subsidiary, Securimetrics, HIDE is used in Iraq by the U.S. government. The mobile device captures biometric information and transmits it back to a database to verify a person’s identity. (Securimetrics on Aug. 10 [2006] received a $10 million DoD contract for the devices.).”
SpecTal’s website reads like something out of a spy novel:
“From the situation rooms of Washington, D.C., to the back alleys of the Third World, SpecTal employees have devoted their lives to handling America’s most daunting security and intelligence challenges,” it states. SpecTal explains that it provides “a wide range of analytical, linguistic, technical, and other support to intelligence, defense, and law enforcement agencies. We can augment your team with proven and cleared personnel and/or provide specialized training to your current staff. In many cases, we are veterans of your organization and understand your needs and organizational culture.”
In other words, many of its employees are former intelligence officers who go back as contractors to the same agencies they used to work.
SpecTal emphasizes that it provides key expertise in the business and management of intelligence.
It recently established a “SpecTal Center for Excellence in Intelligence Management (CEIM)” to focus on training intelligence agents in disseminating information.
“Our expert team has experience in multiple IC agencies crafting new intelligence dissemination procedures, training reports and requirements personnel, validating and vetting information and its sources, and ensuring the protection of sources and methods.
The CEIM is a company-wide resource that can be called upon to provide ad hoc consulting services or permanent staffing for any of our customers at any time.”
CorpWatch AnalysisSpecTal was an interesting choice for L-1. Prior to its acquisition, SpecTal was working closely with the CIA in Afghanistan on a number of classified missions that George Tenet, as CIA director, was apparently quite familiar with.
In November, 2006, several L-1 executives met with Tenet to discuss potential business in Afghanistan.
During the course of that conversation, LaPenta told investors, Tenet urged L-1 to,
“call the SpecTal guys” because “they know everybody in every one of these ministries that you need to go talk to.”
[4]
Tenet is now an L-1 director.
In May, 2007, L-1 picked up another intelligence contractor, Advanced Concepts Inc. (ACI), where 80 percent of the 300 employees have top-secret clearances.
ACI, according to LaPenta, is a systems engineering firm that, among other things, protects computer systems for the National Security Agency, making it “a great compliment for SpecTal.” [5]
By combining the two companies, LaPenta told analysts, he hoped that SpecTal might get some of its “training and analysis and ops people” hired at the NSA, and get work for ACI’s IT and systems people at the CIA.
Recent Contracts/EventsIn October 2006, SpecTal was acquired by L-1 for $100 million. SpecTal is now operating as an L-1 unit out of a 15,700 square foot office building it leased in Reston, Virginia, in a deal that expires in March 2012.
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from DIA and company press releases.
[1] “Government intelligence needs spur SpecTal to the head of the list,” VirginiaBusiness.com, May 2006.
[2] “Government intelligence needs spur SpecTal to the head of the list,” VirginiaBusiness.com, May 2006.
[3] “L1 to acquire SpecTal for $100m,” Security Systems News, Sept. 14, 2006.
[4] L-1 Identity Solutions, Inc., Analyst Meeting transcript, November 2, 2006.
[5] L-1 Identity Solutions, Inc., Earnings Conference Call, May 9, 2007 (available on the SEC website).
Email – info@spectal.com
Phone – +1-866-SPECTAL (773-2825), +1-703-860-6186
Website – http://www.spectal.com/index.htm
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Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters7700 Arlington Blvd M104, Falls Church, VA 22042-2900; 1200 South Jupiter Road, Garland, Texas, 75042
Principal AgenciesDefense Intelligence Agency
National Security Agency
National Reconnaissance Office
Central Intelligence Agency
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Other “proprietary customers”
Top ExecutivesWilliam H. Swanson, chairman and CEO, Raytheon
Michael D. Keebaugh, vice president (Raytheon) and president, Raytheon IIS
Lynn A. Dugleis, vice president (Raytheon) and deputy general manager, Raytheon IIS
Annual Revenue$23.2.3 billion (Raytheon, 2008)
Intelligence Percent of Revenue20% of Raytheon total (estimate)
Summary
Rankings(Raytheon parent)
- ”Washington Technology” Top 100: #5
- ”Defense News” Top 100: #6
Raytheon Intelligence and Information Services (Raytheon IIS) is the primary spying unit of defense industry giant Raytheon. In 2007, it earned revenues of $2.7 billion and employed more than 9,000 workers, 80 percent of whom held security clearances of top secret or higher. That made Raytheon IIS one of the nation’s largest intelligence contractors.
According to the Raytheon [www.raytheon.com/businesses/riis/ website],
“IIS is a leading provider of intelligence and information solutions that provide the right knowledge at the right time, enabling our customers to make timely and accurate decisions to achieve mission goals of national significance. When you need trusted intelligence solutions, the clear choice is Raytheon.”
On its intelligence unit, Raytheon states:
“IIS has established itself as the premier provider of command and control systems capable of transforming data into actionable intelligence. Through its ground integration initiative, IIS is helping to create a more integrated and collaborative intelligence community.
Using advanced software technologies, IIS is integrating separate systems into a highly effective enterprise solution – allowing customers to rapidly adapt to their changing needs. IIS is also helping the U.S. Air Force to develop the system design for the next-generation Global Positioning System (GPS) Control Segment for satellite communications.
Through this effort, IIS is providing command, control and mission support for current GPS Block II and all future satellites as well as supporting existing and new interfaces.”
Corporate Information
RAYTHEON’S NICHE
The unit provides many of the tools used by the U.S. military and defense intelligence agencies for their global intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations. Its most important clients in the Intelligence Community are the NSA, NGA, and NRO, for which it provides signals and imaging processing, as well as information security software and tools.
Raytheon’s IIS operations are closely linked to the company’s Network Centric Systems unit, which designs and operates many of the Pentagon’s high-tech weapons and targeting systems. Raytheon IIS has almost a monopoly hold on the market for command-and-control of U-2 spy planes and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) such as the Predator, which has seen extensive action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These systems were most recently displayed at the “Empire Challenge ‘09” intelligence exercise held annually with the UK.
FINANCES
In the fourth quarter of 2007, with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in full swing, Raytheon’s intelligence unit had net sales of $808 million, a 17 percent increase from the same period in 2006, when sales were $690 million.
In 2007, Raytheon IIS was the company’s fastest growing unit (by comparison, sales for its Network Centric Warfare unit rose 13 percent, and missile systems rose by 8 percent).
The intelligence unit’s increase, the company said was “primarily due to new programs,” including $538 million worth of new classified contracts – and one “major classified contract” worth a whopping $246 million.
In 2007, intelligence systems were responsible for about 15 percent of Raytheon’s total revenue.
HUBRIS
Raytheon loves to tout its work. In July 2008, it re-posted a laudatory Slate.com story on its website about its Universal Control System, which directs military drones for the U.S. and British militaries.
The article’s title: “
HISTORY
Raytheon’s record in the area of intelligence and reconnaissance goes back decades, and includes many international projects.
During the 1990s, the company (with the assistance of the Clinton administration) won the prime contract to provide the Brazilian government with a $1.4 billionSystem for the Vigilance of the Amazon(
SIVAM).
Press reports described it as a “sophisticated web of sensory and communication devices” including satellites, surveillance aircraft and dozens of radar systems, that monitor the 3.1 million square miles of the Amazon.
At the time of the contract, it was the largest radar system ever built.
CorpWatch Analysis
NETWORK CENTRIC WARFARE
Raytheon IIS is one of the most important contractors in the Intelligence Industrial Complex. Its role in U.S. intelligence and war-fighting is best symbolized by a massive project the U.S. Air Force launched in 2007: the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS).
Designed and built by Raytheon, DCGS is the Pentagon’s first Internet-based portal to combine tactical intelligence from military units with signals intelligence and imagery from the national collection agencies, the NSA, and NGA.
When completed, it will link fighter pilots with intelligence analysts and commanders on the ground, giving them a common platform from which to read, interpret, and act on intelligence data.
Similar systems are being developed for the Army and Navy by Raytheon and several of its competitors in the defense industry, including Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and SAIC.
The idea behind the DCGS-like systems is to give members of the armed forces and their commanders the ability to import raw sensor feeds from military satellites, U-2 spy planes, and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and thus see and hear from a single screen the entire panoply of intelligence, including imagery, signals, streaming video, and radio communications.
Eventually, the networks will be linked together by a “Global Information Grid,” which will offer U.S. forces a,
“seamless, secure, and interconnected information environment, meeting real-time and near real-time needs of both the warfighter and the business user,” according to the NSA, which is charged with protecting the grid from outside tampering.
Air Force officers involved in DCGS planning describe their prototype as the military’s equivalent to Travelocity, the Internet site used by consumers to make airline and hotel reservations.
“For the first time, on a simple workstation, we’ll be able to guide all our ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) products,” says Air Force Lieut. Col.Steven G. Zenishek, who is managing DCGS development for the Air Force.
By using DCGS to create a common,
“battlespace awareness,” he says, warfighters will be able to find and track enemy soldiers and insurgents, “making sure we target the bad guys and not the good guys.”
The ultimate object is to “compress the kill chain” – the time it takes from identifying a target to launching a strike – from hours into minutes.
GEOINT
Raytheon is one of the founders of the United States Geospatial Foundation, an organization of contractors that work for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
At GEOINT 2006 in Orlando, most of the exhibitors were displaying technologies designed to combat the Iraqi counterinsurgency. Raytheon’s Intelligence and Information Systems was one of them: It was offering a visualization software, Enterprise Modeling and Simulation, that is loaded with data from airborne sensors that provide three-dimensional views of urban centers.
The program, said Raytheon, will,
“open up substantial new possibilities for mission planning, rehearsal of upcoming battles, and even tactical re-planning during actual combat.”
A U.S. commander will use the simulation software,
“to roam about and see the precise relationships among the various structures, enemy forces, and his own force distribution,” allowing him to search for signs of “incipient terrorist activity” and even “look at the world from the perspective of their enemy.”
The Enterprise software is part of the larger Distributed Common Ground System (described in Spies for Hire, Chapter Five), which Raytheon has designed to give Air Force commanders and fighter pilots instant access to imagery, signals intelligence, and measures and signature intelligence.
DCGS
TheDistributed Common Ground Systemis a striking example of how national intelligence collection agencies were incorporated into military operations during the
George W. Bushadministration and the reign of his Secretary of Defense,Donald Rumsfeld.
DCGS was developed under the direct supervision of Stephen Cambone, who served from 2002 to 2007 as the nation’s first undersecretary of defense for intelligence and was the top intelligence advisor to Rumsfeld.
During the first few years of the Bush administration, the Pentagon became the dominant force in U.S. intelligence, with vast new powers in human intelligence and domestic counterterrorism. Its new powers were partly a reflection of the fact that 85 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget is allocated to Pentagon agencies.
But they also flowed from a strong desire by Rumsfeld, Cambone, and their allies in the Bush administration – most notably Vice President Dick Cheney – to place intelligence collection under the Pentagon’s command and control system, and to create within the Department of Defense a separate spy network that would provide an alternative source of intelligence to the Central Intelligence Agency, which had been the nation’s primary source of human intelligence since its founding in 1947.
Raytheon is therefore a key player in the militarization of U.S. intelligence (for more on DCGS, see Raytheon’s web page on the system).
Recent Contracts/Events
In April 2008, Raytheon added an “information security practice” to its IIS business.
According to Washington Technology (5/12/08), the move will,
“allow the company to focus more intently and bring more resources to bear on a long-standing but still-emerging challenge for its federal customers.
The decision was made partly because Raytheon’s defense and intelligence customers, particularly military installations, had an unprecedented number of ever-changing cyber-attacks that are increasingly sophisticated and complex.”
In September 2009, Raytheon acquired BBN Technologies, which it says,
“has a long history of innovative products and solutions including the ARPANET (forerunner of the Internet).”
BBN’s current offerings, the company said,
“include the Boomerang acoustic-based shooter detection system currently deployed with U.S. forces, and a broad range of technology development programs, many considered mission-critical by defense and intelligence customers.”
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from DIA and company press releases.
Email – kdlittle@raytheon.com (IIS media)
Phone – +1-(703) 849-1675 (IIS media)
Website – http://www.raytheon.com/businesses/riis/
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Booz Allen Hamilton/Carlyle Group
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters8283 Greensboro Drive, McLean, VA 22102
Principal AgenciesNational Security Agency (NSA), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Top ExecutivesKeith Shrader, chairman and CEO (formerly with Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning, and RCA, where he was the top executive in the government communications system division)
J.M. “Mike” McConnell, Executive Vice President and leader of Booz Allen Hamilton’s National Security (former director of the National Security Agency and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence)
Annual Revenue$4 billion (2006)
Intelligence Percent of Revenue25 percent (estimate/not disclosed)
Summary
Rankings
- Washington Technology Top 100: #11
- Defense News Top 100: #23
Booz Allen Hamilton was founded in 1914 in Chicago by three businessmen who gave the firm its name.
In 1940, after more than three decades as a consultant to the top-ranking companies in America’s manufacturing and service economy, including Montgomery Ward, Goodyear Tire, and the Illinois State Railroad, it started working for the U.S. military, where its clients included the Navy, Army, and, after the war, the Air Force and Department of Defense.
Its initial contracts with the Navy set the pace for its defense work: As a management consultant, Booz Allen helped the Navy restructure for World War II, and permeated its ranks with contractors (“Each Navy bureau had a Booz rep,” Investors Daily reported in a 2005 profile of the firm).
That relationship served as a template for Booz Allen’s later work in intelligence and national security.
Corporate InformationBooz Allen Hamilton, like its rival SAIC, is involved in virtually every aspect of the modern intelligence enterprise, from advising top officials on how to integrate the 16 agencies within the Intelligence Community (IC), to detailed analysis of signals intelligence, imagery and other critical collections technologies.
The company’s strategic role in the IC was best described in 2003 by Joan Dempsey, then the top assistant to CIA Director George Tenet for community management.
“I like to call Booz Allen the Shadow IC,” she said when receiving a lifetime achievement award from a contractor group, because it has “more former secretaries of this and directors of that” than the entire government.
Dempsey is now a senior vice president at Booz Allen, responsible for many of the programs she managed while at the CIA. Booz itself it now owned by
the Carlyle Group, one of the nation’s most politically-connected private equity funds.
THE CARLYLE GROUP
In July 2008 Booz Allen completed a previously announced separation of its U.S. government and global commercial businesses, and announced the $2.54 sale of a majority stake in its government unit to the Carlyle Group.
The Carlyle unit retained the name Booz Allen Hamilton, while the firm’s commercial and international unit, still owned by Booz Allen executives, now operates as Booz & Company. Booz Allen Hamilton earns about $4 billion a year from its government contracts, the firm claims.
But company insiders say the actual figure is closer to $5 billion, and that BAH earns at least $1 billion a year from classified contracts.
BAH is one of the NSA’s most important contractors, and owes its strategic role there in part to Mike McConnell, who was Bush’s director of national intelligence. McConnell was the director of the NSA from 1992 to 1995, and on leaving government, was hired by Booz Allen to run its military intelligence programs.
In that capacity, McConnell and Booz Allen were involved in some of the Bush administration’s most sensitive intelligence operations, including the infamous Total Information Awareness (TIA) program run by former Navy Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame. Now, after leaving the Bush administration, McConnell is back at his old company running its entire national security unit.
Booz Allen is a key adviser and prime contractor to all of the major US collection agencies – the CIA, NSA, NGA, NRO, and Defense Intelligence Agency – as well as the Department of Homeland Security, National Counterterrorism Center, Department of Defense, and most of the Pentagon’s combatant commands.
Since the late-1990s, Booz Allen has forged a particularly close relationship with the NSA, which hired Booz Allen as its chief outside consultant on Project Groundbreaker, a $4 billion project in which the NSA outsourced its “non-mission critical” internal communications systems to a private sector consortium led by Computer Sciences Corporation and the IT unit of Northrop Grumman.
On its website, Booz Allen describes its intelligence work as part of its broader expertise in information technology.
“Whether dealing with homeland security, peacekeeping operations, or the battlefield, success depends on the ability to collect, safeguard, store, distribute, fuse, and share information – on getting the right information to the right place at the right time,” it says.
“Our security professionals work in partnership with clients to develop capabilities, share best practices, and leverage the best thinking and most effective integrated solutions for protecting information and networks against cyber and physical threats.”
Among the many services Booz Allen provides to intelligence agencies, according to the website, are wargaming (simulated drills in which military and intelligence officials test their response to potential threats like terrorist attacks), as well as data-mining and data analysis, signals intelligence systems engineering (an NSA specialty), intelligence analysis and operations support, the design and analysis of cryptographic or code-breaking systems (another NSA specialty), and “outsourcing/privatization strategy and planning.”
The company’s 2007 annual report spells out several other areas of expertise, including “all source analysis,” an intelligence specialty managed by the CIA and the Office of the DNI that draws on public sources of information, such as foreign newspapers and textbooks, to add texture to data gathered by spies and electronic surveillance.
Booz Allen is also working on one of the most important initiatives the intelligence community has launched in recent years: the Cryptographic Modernization Program.
It is a multiyear effort being managed by the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Agency, an affiliate of the NSA once known as the Air Intelligency Agency.
Last fall, during a presentation to an intelligence conference in San Antonio, Air Force Gen. John C. Koziol, the commander of the agency, described the project as an attempt to combine signals intelligence, imagery, and measures and signatures intelligence – a discipline known as MASINT that uses sensors to pick up tell-tale signs of chemicals and other substances – into a single electronic package that can be used by combat and special operations commanders to track the enemy.
When completed, Koziol said, the modernization program will improve intelligence gathered by unmanned aerial vehicles and satellites and transmit it to “cryptographic centers” that his agency manages around the world.
Booz Allen, according to its website, is contributing to the project by,
“analyzing design trade-offs; planning acquisition programs; and supporting the fielding of hundreds of thousands of modernized air, space, and ground cryptographic devices.”
That makes Booz Allen a full partner in the project, which, according to Koziol, has been “fully endorsed” by Adm. McConnell at the Office of the DNI.
CorpWatch AnalysisTo carry out its tasks at the intelligence agencies, Booz Allen has hired a dazzling array of former national security officials and foot soldiers.
In 2002, Information Week reported that Booz Allen had more than 1,000 former intelligence officers on its payroll. In 2007, as I was writing a chapter about Booz Allen for Spies for Hire, my 2008 book on outsourced intelligence, I asked the company if it could confirm that number or provide a more accurate one.
Spokesman George Farrar e-mailed:
“It is certainly possible, but as a privately held corporation we consider that information to be proprietary and do not disclose.”
Unlike many of its competitors in the intelligence industry, Booz Allen is a privately held company whose shares are owned by its 300 vice presidents. The vast majority of them work for the commercial division, about 80 are in “government support,” with the rest focused on Booz Allen’s corporate and international work, Booz Allen’s Farrar told CorpWatch.
Most of these vice presidents have long and deep experience in the intelligence community, and are beginning to act as a training cadre for senior jobs back in government.
Booz Allen’s most illustrious alumnus, for example, is Michael McConnell, current director of National Intelligence.
Before President George W. Bush appointed him to run the intelligence community in January 2007, McConnell, the former director of the NSA during the Clinton administration, spent more than 10 years as a Booz Allen senior vice president in charge of the company’s extensive contracts in military intelligence and information operations for the Department of Defense.
In that work, his official biography states, McConnell provided intelligence support to,
“the U.S. Unified Combatant Commanders, the director of National Intelligence Agencies, and the Military Service Intelligence directors.”
That made him a close colleague of not only Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon chief from 2001 to 2007, but of Vice President Dick Cheney, who served Bush as a kind of intelligence godfather from the earliest days of the administration.
During the first Bush administration and the first Gulf War, McConnell had worked for Cheney, then the secretary of defense, as the chief intelligence adviser to Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Cheney was so impressed with McConnell’s work during the war that he appointed him to head the NSA in 1993. (He later intervened personally to convince McConnell to take the DNI job.)
As Booz Allen’s chief intelligence liaison to the Pentagon, McConnell was at the center of action, both before and after 9/11.
During the first six years of the Bush administration, Booz Allen’s contracts with the US government rose dramatically, from $626,000 in 2000 to $1.6 billion in 2006. And as I reported last year in Salon, McConnell and his staff at Booz Allen were deeply involved in some of the Bush administration’s most controversial counterterrorism programs.
They included the Pentagon’s infamousTotal Information Awareness(
TIA) data-mining scheme run, by former Navy Adm.John Poindexter. TIA was an attempt to collect information on potential terrorists in America from phone records, credit card receipts, and other databases.
Congress cancelled TIA over civil liberties concerns, but much of the work was transferred to the NSA, where Booz Allen continued to receive the contracts.
In 2002, when the CIA launched a financial intelligence project to track terrorist financing with the secret cooperation of SWIFT, the Brussels-based international banking consortium, Booz Allen won a contract to serve as an “outside” auditor of the project.
SHRADER/CEO
The man most responsible for Booz Allen’s growth as an intelligence contractor is Keith Shrader, who has been running the company as chairman and CEO since 1998.
Shrader, an electrical engineer by training, came to Booz Allen in 1974 after serving at the senior management level at two prominent telecommunications firms: Western Union, where he was national director of advanced systems planning; and RCA, where he served in the company’s government communications system division.
These positions prepared him well for his later work at Booz Allen as a consultant to the telecom industry. According to his official biography, he “led major assignments” for the industry as a Booz Allen consultant, and was deeply involved in the company’s “landmark work for AT&T” when the government broke up that firm.
In those assignments, Shrader may have been exposed to the telecom industry’s close ties to U.S. intelligence. During the years he worked for Western Union and RCA, those firms, along with ITT World Communications, were part of a secret surveillance program known as Minaret. Under that scheme, telecom companies, with the concurrence of a handful of high-ranking executives, handed over to the NSA information on all incoming and outgoing U.S. telephone calls and telegrams.
Minaret was an early version of the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program launched by the Bush administration after 9/11.
Minaret, and the involvement of the private companies in NSA spying, was exposed by the congressional committees investigating intelligence abuse in the mid-1970s, and was the inspiration behind the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which set the rules – including the important requirement for warrants – for the domestic surveillance of telephone traffic.
None of this history is alluded to in Booz Allen’s official propaganda, but Shrader, on his appointment as CEO in 1998, mentioned in a rare press interview with the Financial Times that the most relevant background for his new position of chief executive was his experience working for telecommunications clients and doing classified defense work for the U.S. government – “something of a Booz specialty,” the FT pointed out.
Booz Allen adds on its website that Shrader, as CEO, has also,
“led important programs for the U.S. National Communications System and the Defense Information Systems Agency,” two of the most important classified intelligence networks in use by the federal government.
Under Shrader, Booz Allen also became the NSA’s most important outside consultant, culminating in its advisory role in Project Groundbreaker.
That project, which awarded its first contracts in the summer of 2001, put Booz Allen in a prime position to capture NSA and other intelligence work in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when intelligence budgets, and NSA spying, increased substantially.
After 9/11, by Booz Allen’s account, the firm helped the Bush administration and the Intelligence Community reshape their spying capabilities to match the new era of counterinsurgencies and terrorist threats.
“The nature of intelligence changed dramatically in the wake of 9/11,” Christopher Ling, a Booz Allen vice president, explained in the company’s most recent annual report. “An entire analytic production system geared to detect large-scale cold war adversarial capabilities was suddenly required to transform.”
At Booz Allen, he added,
“We are finding innovative ways to integrate intelligence and operations, enabled by advanced visualization and data management capabilities, which has allowed us to pioneer tactics, techniques, and procedures.”
In addition to serving as a prime contractor on Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness project, Booz Allen was active on both the military and economic fronts on the “war on terror.”
For the Pentagon, it helped develop the “blue force” tracking system that allows soldiers and commanders in Iraq and other battlegrounds the ability to electronically identify friendly troops. And in the weeks leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Booz Allen sponsored and organized several conferences aimed at helping US corporations secure contracts in occupied Baghdad.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, one of the most ardent backers of the war, was a keynote speaker at one of these conferences.
KING OF THE REVOLVING DOOR
Booz Allen prides itself on its dedication to the agencies it works for and on the personal relationships it has forged between its personnel and their defense and intelligence clients.
“We stay for a lifetime,”Mark J. Gerencser, senior vice president in charge of Booz Allen’s government contracting division, remarked in 2006.
The best guide to its intelligence work, therefore, is its executive leadership – the vice presidents who are each poised to profit personally from a corporate takeover by the Carlyle Group. A quick study of their biographies posted on Booz Allen’s website provides an excellent guide to the company’s extensive relationships with the intelligence community.
As the director of Booz Allen’s U.S. government business, for example, Gerencser serves in “several broad-based roles,” including “representing industry” to the Office of the secretary of defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which manage the Pentagon’s vast intelligence operations.
He is also a member of Booz Allen’s leadership team that sets the strategic direction of the company, and has run many of the war games Booz Allen staged for its government clients.
Just below Gerenscser in the company’s intelligence hierarchy is Ken Wiegand, another senior vice president.
Weigand came to Booz Allen in 1983 after working for a decade in Air Force intelligence, and he now leads the firm’s work for national intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the Department of Homeland Security.
His specialty, the website says, includes imagery intelligence operations, which are managed by the NGA, one of Booz Allen’s most important clients.
Senior Vice President Joseph W. Mahaffee, a veteran of naval intelligence, is the leader of Booz Allen’s Maryland procurement office business, which puts him in charge of the company’s contracts with the National Security Agency in Fort Meade.
He focuses on “meeting the SIGINT and Information Assurance mission objectives” of the NSA with various technology services, including systems engineering, software development, and “advanced telecommunications analysis.”
Another key Booz Allen figure at the NSA is Marty Hill, who came to the company after a 35-year career in signals intelligence and electronic warfare, and previously served as an expert on “information operations capabilities and policy” for Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.
He leads of team of 1,200 professionals engaged in all aspects of SIGINT, including technical analysis, systems development and operations.
Vice President Pamela Lentz is a former cryptology officer with the Navy and once worked as a program manager for TRW, one of the nation’s oldest intelligence contractors. (It is now owned by Northrop Grumman)
She is Booz Allen’s “client service officer” for the firm’s Defense Intelligence Agency and military intelligence markets, which includes intelligence units within the Navy, Air Force, Army, the unified combatant commands and the undersecretary of defense for intelligence.
Among other tasks, Lentz manages a 120-person Booz Allen team that supports the National Reconnaissance Office, the Pentagon agency that manages the nation’s military spy satellites. She also runs a task force that supports human intelligence collection efforts at the DIA.
Vice President Laurene Gallo, a former intelligence analyst at the NSA, leads a Booz Allen “intelligence research and analysis” team that support several agencies, including the CIA, the Office of the DNI and the National Counterterrrorism Center.
Vice President Richard Wilhelm, whose job at Booz Allen is to work with the CIA and the ODNI, came to the company after a long career in US intelligence that included stints directing the Joint Intelligence Center for Iraq during Operation Desert Storm and as the NSA’s first director of information warfare.
Vice President William Wansley, a former Army intelligence officer, leads a team of experts in “strategic and business planning” that supports the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, the part of the CIA that conducts covert operations and recruits foreign spies, as well as the Office of the DNI.
Another vice president, Robert W. Noonan, a retired Army lieutenant general who once served as the Army’s deputy chief of staff for intelligence and the commanding general of the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, is in charge of expanding Booz Allen’s military intelligence business within all the armed services, the combatant commands, the DIA, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
Recent Contracts/EventsIn spite of its tremendous power as a contractor, Booz Allen has received very little criticism or even scrutiny from Congress.
In January 2007, the Senate, when it held hearings on Admiral McConnell’s nomination as director of National Intelligence, had a rare opportunity to inquire about the company. Prior to the hearing, several senators said they would question McConnell about Booz Allen’s role as a contractor; but the hearing was a desultory affair, and senators posed few questions to the new DNI about the high level of contracting in the intelligence community or the specific role of Booz Allen.
In February 2007, a Booz Allen contract with the Department of Homeland Security came under close scrutiny in the House.
In February 2007, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA., the chairman of the House Committee on Government Oversight and Reform, charged that Booz Allen had a significant conflict of interest over its contract to oversee an $8 billion contract with the DHS Secure Border Initiative known as SBI-Net.
Under the contract, Boeing and other companies will build a “virtual fence” of cameras, radar, and sensors that will transmit imagery and data to border patrol agents working along the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico.
The conflict arose, said Waxman, because Booz Allen had a long-standing relationship with Boeing, the prime contractor for SBI-Net, and could therefore not provide objective oversight of the program.
At the hearing, Waxman pointed out to DHS officials that they had hired 98 people to oversee the SBI-Net contract.
“But the problem is that 65 of these people don’t work for the government. They work for the contractor,” he said. “You’re relying on them to do the function that a government ordinarily would do.”
DHS officials responded that Booz Allen had been hired for advice, not for oversight.
Waxman’s criticism could be made of a myriad of contracts Booz Allen holds with intelligence agencies. At the NSA, for example, it has advised the agency about several contracts that involve companies with which Booz Allen has close business ties. That is also true at the NRO, NGA and CIA. So far, however, no reports of conflicts of interest have emerged from Congress, which in any case exercises little oversight over intelligence contracts.
In another damaging report issued in 2007, Congress’ General Accounting Office found that the Department of Homeland Security was spending nearly $16 billion a year on goods and services from the private sector, making DHS the third-largest employer of contractors in the federal government.
Among the beneficiaries of DHS’s spending mentioned in the report was Booz Allen Hamilton, which in 2006 was awarded a $43 million no-bid contract to provide services to the DHS intelligence unit.
On reading the $16 billion DHS figures in the GAO report in fall 2007, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., angrily commented:
“plainly put, we need to know who is in charge at DHS – its managers and workers, or the contractors.”
The Washington Post later found that Booz Allen’s no-bid intelligence contract with DHS had ballooned from $2 million in 2003 to more than $30 million in 2006 – 15 times its original value. When DHS lawyers first examined the Booz Allen deal, the Post said, they found it was “grossly beyond the scope” of the original contract, and had violated government procurement rules.
DHS lawyers ordered an open competition, but it was delayed for a year.
During that time, the Post said,
“the payments to Booz Allen more than doubled again under a second no-bid arrangement, to $73 million.”
Here is a short list of recent Booz Allen unclassified contracts (2008):
- A $6.3 million contract to provide research on 3-D facial recognition biometric software for the Information Assurance Technical Analysis Center at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska, awarded in 2008.
- A $48 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to conduct research on “survivability and lethality implications” of an Air Force vehicle program, awarded in 2008.
- In a partnership with CACI International, EDS, Lockheed Martin, SAIC and SRA, the right to bid on $12.2 billion worth of contracts for telecom and IT services for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), awarded in 2007.
- Participation in a consortium of seven companies that will bid on up to $20 billion worth of work in Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance – a mouthful of a term usually referred to as C4ISR – for the Army’s Communications Electronics Command, which is based in Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, awarded in 2006.
- A five-year, $250 million contract to provide “systems engineering technical assistance” to the Science and Technology Directorate of the Department of Homeland Security, signed in 2005.
SOURCES
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008) and from company press releases.
Email – Farrar_George@bah.com (Media relations)
Phone – +1-(703) 902-4588
Website – http://www.boozallen.com/home
Back to Contents
CACI International Inc.
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters1100 North Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22201
Principal AgenciesNational Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Department of Defense (DOD), Office of the Secretary of Defense (SecDef)
Top ExecutivesJ.P “Jack” London, chairman of the board
Paul M. Cofoni, president and CEO
Annual Revenue$2.4 billion
Intelligence Percent of RevenueNot disclosed
Summary
CACI International Inc. is one of the world’s largest private intelligence services providers and is deeply involved in classified “black” operations everywhere on the globe where U.S. military forces are active.
It is best known to the American public as one of two contractors involved in the U.S. government’s abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
The best way to describe CACI is as a private supplier of signals intelligence, human intelligence, imagery, and black ops, all rolled into one enterprise.
“We support all four of the intelligence community’s priority focus areas: analysis, collection, user outcomes, and management,” CACI stated in its 2006 annual report.
CACI’s intelligence contracts now make up 35 percent of the company’s revenues, 95 percent of which is earned from the federal government.
Corporate InformationLongtime CEO Jack London rattled off the company’s clients in a conference call with analysts in the spring of 2007:
“the Department of Defense, all the military services, the intelligence community at the strategic level. That’d be your CIA, your NRO, your NSA, DIA, and NGA.”
CACI’s primary intelligence customer, he said, is the Army.
“We know what’s happening out there in terms of the global war on terrorism threat,” he said. “And that is primarily being supported in the military from the United States Army’s perspective as well as the United States Marine Corps.”
CACI’s largest single contract, worth $450 million, is with the U.S. Army’s electronics communication command, which is responsible for electronic warfare – command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, also known as C4ISR. [1]
Other customers include the U.S. Navy’s littoral and mine warfare program, the Air Force’s Pacific Command and Control unit, and the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the Pentagon unit responsible for network centric warfare. Elsewhere in the Intelligence Community (IC), CACI holds major contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the DHS’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency.
But the contract that CACI will always be known for is the one to provide interrogators at Abu Ghraib (see CorpWatch analysis, below).
RUMSFELD ALLY
CACI’s services, London constantly reminded investors during the Bush era, were perfectly aligned with the Pentagon’s.
“As the fight against terrorism and the Islamofascists continues, technologies will keep evolving to collect, analyze and disseminate vital intelligence to support the war fighter and the national security authorities,” he said in CACI’s fourth quarter financial report in 2006.
“Information and intelligence is where the growth is likely to be for the simple reason that, in the final analysis, accurate information from quality sources, communicated through secure channels to the right people, will trump all other weapons of war. In this environment, CACI is at the forefront.”
[2]
CACI’S NICHE
CACI’s most important asset is its 10,000-person workforce, two-thirds of whom hold security clearances.
Of those 10,000, CACI’s website says, “about 2,000 have top-secret sensitive compartmentalized information clearances,” the highest possible clearance attainable in the Intelligence Community.
CACI’s employees are stationed throughout the world, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bahrain, Kuwait, Belgium, Bosnia, Hungary, Germany, Italy, the UK and Japan. [3] Recent job postings also show that CACI performs classified work in South Korea and Colombia, where U.S. intelligence agencies have extensive electronic warfare and eavesdropping operations.
NSA/SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE
CACI has very close ties with the NSA. During an interview in July 2006 with WMAL radio in Washington, CEO Jack London elaborated. CACI, he said, helps intelligence agencies monitor Internet traffic and terrorist communications. He also described data-mining – an important task for an agency that must sift through millions of bits of date every day – as “one of our specialties.”
CACI, he said, does “forensic-type work” using information from,
“overhead imagery, communications satellites and intercepts, pulling all these things together in a forensic way, playing the detective, if you will, and connecting the dots and being able to determine connections among organizations and among cells of people.”
[4]
Gail Phipps, a former NSA official who was the executive vice president of CACI International from 1999 until November 2008, refers to the new science of espionage as “exquisite intelligence.”
“We need to be able to pinpoint a person or a cell and be 99 percent confident that we know where they are, and in exact time,” she says.
“That’s very different from the type of analysis systems we put together in the past.”
[5]
CACI International has designed an elaborate website to explain the services in provides in the area of signals intelligence.
On one page, CACI boasts that it is a “dynamic provider of the nation’s SIGINT needs,” providing SIGINT services “ranging from concept development to system integration.”
Most of its NSA work, I was told by industry executives familiar with CACI, is done through a subsidiary called CACI Technologies. In Iraq, units from this division have provided mobile, high-performance computers to support the NSA’s interception of signals emanating from enemy weapons systems, CACI officials told a Washington-area military forum in 2004.
They also help the NSA download data about insurgent movements picked up by UAVs flying overhead. That program is “effective, affordable and deployable” and provides “an incredible amount of power down to the lowest echelon” of the Army, Jeffrey Posdamer, a senior manager at CACI Technologies told the forum. The system can be used practically anywhere, and apparently has been deployed in Iraq.
According to CACI’s chairman, J. P. “Jack” London, his company was instrumental in the joint tracking by the NSA and the NGA that resulted in the 2006 capture and execution of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the former commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq.
CACI on its intelligence offerings, from its website:
“CACI has rapidly grown into a world leader in providing timely solutions to the intelligence community.
Engaged across a wide range of national intelligence disciplines from the most complex space-based operations to human source intelligence, we help America’s Intelligence Community collect, analyze and share global information in the war on terrorism; focus on two distinct customer categories, national strategic and law enforcement and tactical and military service; support multiple disciplines; and uncover terrorist activity by providing capabilities ranging from complex space-based operations to human source intelligence.”
CACI on signals intelligence (SIGINT), from its website:
“The war on terrorism and the rapidly evolving and expanding challenges of new technologies have placed extraordinary demands on the signals intelligence community. Surging to the new threat while defeating the technology-based challenges mitigating conventional signals intelligence methods requires a company with a nuanced understanding of SIGINT methods and procedures.
CACI’s more than 30 years of experience with our world’s best technical expertise and commitment to the SIGINT mission ensure CACI will be a dynamic provider of the nation’s SIGINT needs for many years to come.”
CorpWatch Analysis
IDEOLOGY
Since 9/11, CACI defined itself as a virtual extension of the Bush administration’s foreign policy and the global war on terror.
“CACI supplies one of the most vital weapons in the war on terrorism: cleared, qualified experts in intelligence gathering, analysis, operations and support,” the company declared in its [2004 annual report.]
“Working with the intelligence community in its mission to preempt, disrupt, and defeat terrorism worldwide” – notice the careful placement of that word preempt, lifted directly from the Bush lexicon – “our people provide counter-terrorism intelligence analysis and terrorist targeting support. They assist with intelligence collection. And their unique skills help thwart terrorist attacks against the United States.”
From the first days of the invasion of Iraq, CACI positioned itself as utility player for the Department of Defense, which provides the company with more than 70 percent of its revenue.
Days before U.S. troops rolled into Iraq in 2003, London boasted to the Washington Post that CACI is,
“playing a role in a large choreography to make sure the president and Rumsfeld have the right information at the right time and can disseminate their decisions back to the battlefield. We’ll be ahead of the enemy’s ability to outmaneuver us.”
[6]
This included “enemies” at home as well.
CIFA
Until recently, one of CACI’s key Pentagon clients was theCounterintelligence Field Activity office(
CIFA), which uses CACI’s “Highview” document and records management software to “help combat the growing foreign adversary intelligence collection threat.”
In 2005, Rumsfeld’s office rewarded CACI for its contribution to the war effort with two contracts worth nearly $20 million to streamline its IT operations.
The two one-year projects supported the Pentagon’s transformation initiatives and allowed Rumsfeld’s staff to manage its classified and unclassified computer networks supporting homeland security and the war on terror. [7]
MANICHEAN VIEW OF THE WORLD
London’s political philosophy closely matched the imperial visions of Rumsfeld and the neocons he brought into the Pentagon.
His world is a Manichean one, divided between the United States and the forces of evil. He stands out among his peers in the business of intelligence for his fanatical views on terrorism and his almost religious allegiance to the Bush-Cheney agenda of pre-emptive war and global military dominance.
Like
George Bush, he sees evil lurking throughout the developing world, where he points to a “rising environment” of extremist individuals and organizations.
“It seems that nobody (in the Middle East) has organizational self-control; everything flips into an aggressive violent reaction,” he told Washington’s WMAL radio in 2006.
[8]
In 2002, London came up with a “simpler way” to define the “asymmetric warfare” practiced by the Palestinians and other Arab groups in their resistance to the United States and Israel:
“Not fighting fair.”
He added:
“Precisely, asymmetric warfare means facing a cunning and conniving adversary of inferior strength, who finds ways to exploit vulnerabilities to radical extreme, and frequently with frightening psychological effect.”
In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, which has honored him twice for his contributions to IT, London laid out his analysis of the “
Today, he said,
“instead of warring against a single empire, we’re facing” not only Al Qaeda but “groups like the Islamic Resistance Group, or Hamas; the Islamic Jihad; Hizbullah; the Liberation Tigers of Sri Lanka” – as if they were all connected.
He informed his audience that,
“some of the Al Qaeda leadership is now believed to be in Lebanon with the Hizbullah.”
If so, that would be news to U.S. intelligence, which has never mentioned any such connection.
London locates the origins of today’s troubles to the Iranian revolution of 1979, and argues that the current confrontation between the United States and Islamic groups in the Middle is,
“not only a global war but a culture clashing kind of situation.”
He seems easily frightened by the prospect of even peaceable protest.
In 2006, alerted by a friend, he watched a website broadcast from London of a demonstration by Moslems carrying,
“incredible placards and posters” about “what Islam meant and how it was going to resist Western culture, and ‘don’t pick on us.’ It was a very scary kind of thing. That’s a small group of people, but it’s an idea that is taking hold and getting some traction and is a serious concern for us going forward.”
CACI’s position as a contractor in the Intelligence Community, he went on, is to,
“provide solutions that the politicians and military organizations can use to either suppress or redirect some of those aggressive energies.”
[9]
HISTORY
CACI didn’t start out as an intelligence company.
From the time of its founding in 1962 until the late 1990s, CACI grew primarily by selling proprietary software, including an optical scanning technology it developed for the Navy, to various agencies of the federal government, including the Departments of Justice, Commerce and Transportation.
In 1972, the company moved its headquarters from California to Washington, D.C., and hired London, a former Navy pilot, as a program manager. A year later, it shortened its name from California Analysis Center Inc. to CACI International. London moved steadily up the company’s ranks and was named president and CEO in 1984.
He moved methodically to capture software markets in the areas of law enforcement and the military. He also gave the company its motto: “Ever Vigilant.”
CACI’s optical scanning technology has been a particularly profitable niche.
Used extensively by the Justice Department and the FBI, it can scan up to 26 million documents a month, transform the data into digitized information, translate foreign text into English, and then search for concepts and ideas within the data.
“What it does is eliminate the need for a person to actually look at the stuff and try to interpret it,” says Dave Dragics, CACI’s vice president for investor relations.
“So they can do analysis a lot quicker than they did before.”
[10]
After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, CACI’s technology was used to read and analyze the thousands of Al Qaeda documents found in caves and other hiding places, CACI has said. [11]
London first began eyeing the intelligence market in the late 1990s, when his company identified defense outsourcing as a “business opportunity trend line” and made a specific decision to move into the area of classified intelligence contracts. [12]
As he bought into the intelligence market, London began hiring as advisers people with extensive experience in defense and covert operations.
His first big catch was Richard Armitage, who served on CACI’s board of directors from 1999 to 2001. At the time, Armitage was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and had recently joined the private sector after a long career in defense, intelligence and covert operations.
Once CACI was committed to defense, it changed the makeup of its board of directors.
London’s board recruits included
- retired Navy Admiral Gregory G. Johnson, the former commander in Chief of NATO forces in Southern Europe
- Arthur Money, a former assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence
- Larry Welch, the former chief of staff of the Air Force and former Commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command
- former NSA deputy director Barbara McNamara
- retired Army General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
(Shelton’s “unsurpassed knowledge of our military markets and clients will be extremely valuable as an asset to CACI,” London told investors after his appointment in 2007. Shelton was also a director of Anteon before it was sold to General Dynamics.)
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY & THE REVOLVING DOOR
Meanwhile, as the Defense Intelligence Agency expanded its outsourced activities during the Rumsfeld years, CACI concentrated heavily on building relationships with that agency.
In January 2006, CACI appointed Lowell Jacoby, a former Navy admiral and former DIA director, to be executive vice president for strategic intelligence opportunities.
A year later, CACI hired Louis Andre, Jacoby’s chief of staff at the DIA, to be Jacoby’s deputy – in effect, transferring the former top two officials at the DIA to CACI. (Andre’s official title is senior vice president of intelligence business strategy.)
ABU GHRAIB
CACI got involved in Abu Ghraib through an IT contract it obtained when it acquired a company called Premier Technology Group in 2003. PTG was formed in the late 1990s by a group of former Army intelligence officers who had worked in Bosnia.
By acquiring PTG, Defense News reported, CACI expanded its activities,
“to a whole host of tactical units in country and in other theaters of operations” around the world.
[13]
Best of all for CACI, PTG had existing contracts with the Pentagon for intelligence analysis and security services, IT, training, program management and logistics, and 360 employees with high-level security clearances.
At the time of CACI’s acquisition, all of PTG’s contracts were being administered by the Department of Interior. Two of the contracts, one worth $19.9 million, the other $21.8 million, required CACI to supply “screening, interrogation and support functions” and “human intelligence” at an unspecified site in Iraq.
Because CACI was also being asked to screen Iraqis captured by U.S. forces, the contracts also called for biometric software that could identify suspects through facial characteristics and fingerprints.
According to Frank Quimby, a Department of Interior press officer, the Army justified these IT requests because,
“enormous amounts of information had to be integrated in order to prepare for interrogations and make maximum use of the information gathered.”
[14]
It was through this convoluted – and virtually untraceable – route that CACI ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. Altogether, CACI hired 31 interrogators under its two IT contracts.
The interrogators arrived at the prison at a critical time. For the first few months after U.S. forces took control of the prison, U.S. military intelligence officers conducted interrogations. But their efforts didn’t yield the kind of information on the insurgency sought by Rumsfeld and Cambone.
Their solution, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker,
“was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.”
Cambone ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention center at Guantanamo, to visit Baghdad to review interrogation procedures.
His solution “was to ‘Gitmoize’ the prison system in Iraq – to make it more focused on interrogation” by using techniques of sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and placing prisoners in stress positions for lengthy periods of time. Miller and his new recruits, Hersh wrote, brought “unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib.” [15]
CACI was brought in precisely at the time that Miller’s “unconventional methods” were being introduced. (NOTE: for the full story of CACI and Abu Ghraib, consult Chapter Eight (“The Pure Plays”) of Tim Shorrock,
SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence.
Recent Contracts/EventsIn August 2008, CACI made a strategic appointment to its board of directors by addingJames L. Pavitt, the former Deputy Director of Operations for the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to CACI,
“Mr. Pavitt brings more than 30 years of experience in the Intelligence Community, with proven expertise in homeland security and counterterrorism, as well as financial risk assessment, defense, and information technology. As the CIA’s Deputy Director for Operations, Mr. Pavitt managed the agency’s globally deployed personnel and nearly half of its multibillion-dollar budget.
He also served as the head of America’s Clandestine Service, leading the CIA’s operational response to the attacks of September 11, 2001. As Chief of the CIA’s Counter-proliferation Division, he managed and directed intelligence operations against global proliferation networks. From 1990-1993, Mr. Pavitt served as Senior Intelligence Advisor on the National Security Council team for President George H.W. Bush…
Since 2004, Mr. Pavitt has served as a Principal of the Scowcroft Group in Washington, D.C., which provides clients with assistance and advice for dealing in the international arena. In this role, he provides strategic advice and risk assessments to clients in the fields of homeland security, counterterrorism, financial services, defense, and information technology.
Mr. Pavitt also serves on the board of directors of the Patriot Defense Group, LLC and Advanced Blast Protection, Inc. as well as the advisory board of Olton Solutions, Ltd, a company based in the United Kingdom.”
Said CEO Jack London: Pavitt’s,
“30 years of intelligence experience will be critical to our Board as we guide CACI’s ongoing growth as a premier provider of distinctive intelligence offerings and innovative professional services and information technology solutions. We will especially rely on his expertise as we continue to evolve the unique CACI tools and resources we provide to help the government analyze data and ascertain and counter terrorist threats.”
Said CEO Jack London: Pavitt’s,
“30 years of intelligence experience will be critical to our Board as we guide CACI’s ongoing growth as a premier provider of distinctive intelligence offerings and innovative professional services and information technology solutions. We will especially rely on his expertise as we continue to evolve the unique CACI tools and resources we provide to help the government analyze data and ascertain and counter terrorist threats.”
SOURCES
Most of the sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008). Other sources are as follows:
[1] Ellen McCarthy, “Intelligence Work Comes to CACI Via Acquisitions,” Washington Post, July 8, 2004.
[2] 2006 CACI International Earnings Conference Call, August 17, 2006.
[3] These figures, and the statistics on clearances, were provided by CACI officials during a conference call with analysts on March 8, 2007.
[4] A sound clip of this interview was posted for a time on CACI’s website, www.caci.com.
[5] CACI presentation to Friedman Billings Ramsey conference on defense investing, March 8, 2007.
[6] “Thousands of private contractors support US forces in Persian Gulf,” Washington Post, March 3, 2003.
[7] “Rumsfeld’s office streamlines its IT,” UPI, November 10, 2005.
[8] “Dr. London’s radio interview with Brian Roberts,” on CACI’s website at http://www.caci.com/announcement/radio_interview_7-06.shtml
[9] “Dr. London’s radio interview with Brian Roberts,” on CACI’s website at http://www.caci.com/announcement/radio_interview_7-06.shtml.
[10] Company presentation, Friedman Billings Ramsey investor conference, Washington, D.C., March 1, 2006.
[11] See the transcript of CACI’s analyst conference call of February 28, 2007.
[12] Conference call with investors, May 5, 200X.
[13] CACI International Earnings conference call, April 22, 2004.
[14] Telephone interview with Dept of Interior, 2004.
[15] Seymour Hersh, “The Gray Zone: How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib,” The New Yorker, May 15, 2004.
Email – jbrown@caci.com (Jodi Brown, Executive VP – PR)
Phone – +1-(703) 841-7800
Website – http://www.caci.com/index.shtml
Back to Contents
SAIC – Science Applications International Corporation
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters1100 North Glebe Road, Arlington, VA 22201
Principal AgenciesNational Security Agency (NSA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), Department of Defense (DoD)
Top ExecutivesKen Dahlberg, chairman of the board and CEO
K. Stuart Shea, president, Intelligence, Security and Technology Group
Annual Revenue$8.1 billion (2007)
Intelligence Percent of RevenueSubstantial (not disclosed)
Summary
Together with Booz Allen Hamilton, San Diego-based SAIC stands like a private colossus across the whole intelligence industry. Of SAIC’s 42,000 employees, more than 20,000 hold U.S. government security clearances, making it, with Lockheed Martin, one of the largest private intelligence services in the world.
SAIC’s largest and most well-known customer in the intelligence community is the National Security Agency. Indeed, so many NSA officials have gone to work at SAIC that intelligence insiders call the company “NSA West.”
SAIC also does a significant amount of work for the Central Intelligence Agency, where it is among the top five contractors.
Corporate Information
SAIC’S INTELLIGENCE NICHE
SAIC is deeply involved in the operations of all the major collection agencies, particularly the NSA, NGA and CIA. SAIC, for example, managed one of the NSA’s largest efforts in recent years, the $3 billion Project Trailblazer, which attempted (and failed) to create actionable intelligence from the cacophony of telephone calls, fax messages, and emails that the NSA picks up every day.
Launched in 2001, Trailblazer experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in cost overruns and NSA cancelled it in 2005. (See special section below). SAIC’s Homeland Intelligence Solutions Operation unit holds contracts with the controversial Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, now part of the DIA.
More than 5,000 SAIC employees, or about one in every seven, hold security clearances. They offer “domain expertise” across a wide range of intelligence, including counterterrorism, counter-proliferation, remote sensing and imaging, intelligence analysis support, signal analysis and processing, signal intelligence systems, surveillance and reconnaissance systems, and unmanned aerial vehicles.
SAIC’s extensive work for intelligence agencies requires it to be constantly searching for new employees with security clearances.
“We really are a hiring machine,” CEO Ken Dahlberg told analysts during a recent earnings conference call. “If you are a cleared polygraph intel specialist, you command a lot of activity. So we are doing our best to find ways to keep, as well as hire, these kind of folks.”
According to the SAIC website, the company develops,
“solutions to help the US defense, intelligence, and homeland security communities build an integrated intelligence picture, allowing them to be more agile and dynamic in challenging environments and produce actionable intelligence.”
Its website defines its role as providing “mission-critical intelligence support in the war on terror.”
Interviewed in a SAIC internal newsletter, Larry Prior, a 30-year veteran of U.S. intelligence who runs the company’s Intelligence and Security Group, explained:
“That’s where you have anywhere from 10 to 100 employees and, oh, by the way, the future of the nation rests on their backs.”
NSA
SAIC has a somewhat symbiotic relationship with the NSA: The agency is the company’s largest single customer, and SAIC is the NSA’s largest contractor.
The company’s penchant for hiring former intelligence officials played an important role in its advancement. The story of
Black William Black, Jr. is another case in point.
In 1997, the 40-year NSA veteran was hired as an SAIC vice president “for the sole purpose of soliciting NSA business,” according to a published account. [1] Three years later, after NSA initially funded Trailblazer, Black went back to the agency to manage the program; within a year, SAIC won the master contract for the program.
Other key SAIC hires for its intelligence division include:
- John Thomas, a retired army major general and commander of the US Army Intelligence Center
- Larry Cox, an 11-year NSA veteran and former director of Lockheed Martin’s SIGINT division
- John J. Hamre, the former deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration *
* Hamre was a fortuitous pick for SAIC. In October 2007, he was selected by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates to chair the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee. His term as an SAIC director expired in 2008.
Two former secretaries of defense, William J. Perry and Melvin Laird, as well as the current secretary, Bob Gates, have served on its board of directors. For most of the Bush administration, SAIC’s top intelligence man was Duane Andrews, SAIC’s corporate executive vice president.
For years, he ran SAIC’s NSA programs, including its contract for Trailblazer (under that project, he once declared that SAIC “will continue to provide NSA with all the technology and systems support needed to help them achieve their goals.” ). Before coming to SAIC, Andrews had been a close aide to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Their ties dated back to the first Gulf War, when he was an assistant secretary of defense in Cheney’s Pentagon (Andrews is now the CEO of QinetiQ’s North American operations).
IMAGERY
SAIC has a major contract with NGA (the agency won’t put a dollar value on it) to produce geospatial information transmitted to U.S. troops and intelligence staff around the world.
In 2004, the company received a Meritorious Unit Citation from CIA Director George Tenet for developing the imagery systems used by the Predators, U-2s, and Global Hawk surveillance aircraft the CIA and NGA deployed over Iraq.
Tenet praised SAIC for,
“developing and deploying a capability making theater airborne imagery available to a wide range of defense and intelligence users.”
This may have been Tenet’s way of recognizing SAIC’s role in a famous incident during the early stages of the war against Al Qaeda, when CIA officers, with Tenet in the room, fired a missile from a CIA Predator flying above Yemen, killing a key member of Al Qaeda and one of his American accomplices.
According to a 2007 profile of SAIC in Vanity Fair, the CIA relies on SAIC to spy on its own workforce.
“If the C.I.A. needs an outside expert to quietly check whether its employees are using their computers for personal business, it calls on SAIC.”
SAIC also plays a key role in NGA activities as a result of its work as the principal contractor for the Joint Intelligence Operations Capability-Iraq, the Pentagon unit that transmits classified intelligence to U.S. military forces engaged in battle.
Managing SAIC’s work for the NGA is Leo A. Hazlewood, a 23-year CIA veteran who served as the NGA’s first deputy director.
DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE
One of SAIC’s largest contracts is with the DIA, which hired the company to manage 2,900 secure rooms known as Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs, where DoD employees and contractors handle classified information.
SAIC is responsible for designing, constructing, and maintaining security at these facilities, which are located at defense offices around the country. It also provides the DIA with “highly trained and experienced professional security personnel” cleared at the SCI leve – the highest possible in the intelligence community – to manage the SCIFs.
There is an intriguing detail about SAIC and its SCIFs buried in Tenet’s acknowledgements in At the Center of the Storm, his book about his experiences with the Bush administration:
“Arnold Punaro of SAIC graciously provided me with a secure workspace to review and work with classified material,” Tenet wrote.
Punaro is identified on the SAIC Web site as the company’s executive vice president for government affairs, communications, and support operations, as well as general manager of its Washington operations.
Getting use of such a secure room is no small feat.
To prevent eavesdroppers from picking up top-secret conversations, a typical SCIF has film on the windows, walls fitted with soundproof steel plates, and white-noise makers embedded in the ceiling. Punaro must have had approval from SAIC and the CIA to allow Tenet such access.
SAIC describes itself, in the opening lines of its 2008 annual report, as,
“a provider of scientific, engineering, systems integration and technical services, and solutions to all branches of the US military, agencies of the US Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other US Government civil agencies, state and local government agencies, foreign governments and customers in selected commercial markets.”
SAIC’s private operatives, the company says, work with U.S. defense and intelligence agencies to,
“build an integrated intelligence picture, allowing them to be more agile and dynamic in chaotic environments and produce actionable intelligence.”
SAIC ACTION REPORT
SAIC operates many of the Predators flown by the U.S. military over the skies of Iraq and Afghanistan. These unmanned drones have become the most lethal weapons in the U.S. arsenal.
Here, from SAIC’s Fall/Winter 2006 in-house magazine is the company’s report:
SAIC’s Predator Operations Support:
On July 27, 2006, Taliban extremists gathered inside a building in Kandahar, Afghanistan, possibly to plot a terror strategy against US forces. In Iraq, enemy forces traveled in a vehicle near Ramadi, the southwest tip of the Sunni Triangle.
Both targets were spotted by Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying above. More than 7,000 miles away at the Predator Operations Center in Nevada, Air Force pilots launched the Predators’ Hellfire missiles – destroying the building in Kandahar and the vehicle near Ramadi, according to a US Central Command Air Forces airpower summary.
Both the pilots flying the Predators and the military analysts who identify threats rely on SAIC for 24-hour/7-day-a-week technical support at the Nellis Air Force Base Predator Operations Center. SAIC helps ensure that analysts have current intelligence to identify, select, track and evaluate enemy targets.
In fact, Predator has been credited with dramatically shortening the sensor-to-shooter cycle – the time between target identification and attack – from hours to minutes.
SAIC also helps ensure that analysts have current threat tracks to protect the Predator from possible enemy retaliation…
SAIC works to help ensure that the network circuits delivering all of these operate with little interference. Predator is also known for its highly accurate targeting.
SAIC experts helped by writing software that extracts the Predator’s telemetry data and places it on maps for the air defense and route planning functions. In addition, SAIC created chat-room robots to monitor mission-relevant conversations and record them in time-stamped sequence to establish the decision timeline for post-mission analysis.
According to an SAIC white paper, U.S. senior decision makers have used these logs to ascertain “ground truth” for vital missions.
WEBSITE
Go to SAIC’s website and you’ll hit one of four possible opening screens:
- SAIC’s involvement in “health solutions” (definitely not national health care)
- protecting “critical infrastucture” (with a photograph of a key facility, maybe a nuclear power plant, behind)
- “integrating sustainable environmental solutions” (an iceberg)
- “Supporting National Security Efforts: SAIC provides scientific, engineering, technical services and products to the Warfighter”
The accompanying photo is of a humvee in a cargo container – a symbol of the protracted ground war that has marked the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
But Iraq is hardly the only source of SAIC’s profits from national security.
According to its website:
“We are a leading provider of scientific, engineering, systems integration and technical services and products to all branches of the US military, agencies of the US Department of Defense (DoD), the intelligence community, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other US Government civil agencies…
SAIC’s national security efforts reach across all branches of the military and support the full spectrum of military operations – from peace keeping and humanitarian missions to major conflicts. SAIC also helps the Department of Defense, the FBI, and other agencies combat terrorism, cybercrime, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.”
SAIC describes its key contributions to national intelligence as follows:
“New Directions in Information Sharing. In response to an Executive Order from the president, our systems integration experts helped prepare a plan for an information-sharing environment to strengthen the intelligence community’s ability to find, track and stop terrorists. The efforts of our employees garnered letters of appreciation from President Bush.
“Information Processing and Analysis. We also strengthened our own capabilities in this critical area with the acquisition of Object Sciences Corporation.
OSC provides key technical support to the Information Dominance Center, the premier intelligence test bed for new technologies and concepts developed for the US Army’s Intelligence and Security Command (the NSA’s Army unit).
The Information Dominance Center has helped reshape how intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) information is processed and analyzed, and has provided critical assistance to the warfighter in the overall global war on terrorism. …
“Central Management, Regional Delivery: To improve information sharing and IT support to regional combatant commands, services and agencies, SAIC is playing a key role in transforming the intelligence IT infrastructure. We are helping transform the DoD Intelligence Information System architecture to a centrally managed and regionally delivered IT infrastructure.
Regional service centers will provide common mission support capabilities to intelligence users at all levels of command. The benefits of this approach include better access to emerging technologies and tested business practices, and better use of limited resources. Better Access to Geospatial Intelligence…
“A new tool on the front line in Iraq – biometrics – has helped military personnel identify builders of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), potentially saving the lives of civilians and soldiers alike.
SAIC played a key role in developing the portable Biometric Automated Toolset (BAT), used by soldiers on patrol and base security personnel to access fingerprint, iris and facial scans. SAIC provided operational support for the system, which is now deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Our efforts also helped the US Coast Guard target and track multiple networks of suspected terrorists and smugglers. For the Coast Guard Intelligence Coordination Center, an SAIC team developed a new ‘holistic’ approach to analyzing disparate intelligence information.
Those efforts provided actionable intelligence that led to a number of arrests and deportations.”
CorpWatch Analysis
COUNTING ON CONTRACTING
SAIC calls itself a government “pure-play” – a Wall Street term that refers to a company that focuses on a single market. In SAIC’s case, that market is the U.S. government, which is responsible for 93 percent of the company’s sales.
Most of its revenue, 75 percent, comes specifically from national security contracts, and intelligence is a key part of this business.
In 2007, SAIC won 17 major government contracts, each worth at least $100 million.
“Our internal revenue growth for fiscal 2008 was favorably impacted by increased activity on a number of new and continuing programs in our intelligence, defense, and homeland security business areas,” retired Army Gen. John D. Thomas, SAIC’s senior vice president and general manager of Operations, Intelligence and Security, said in a prepared statement.
SAIC sees a bright future for itself: 40 percent of the federal work force is expected to retire between 2007 and 2012.
The government “must outsource as a means of survival,” Kenneth C. Dahlberg, SAIC’s chairman and chief executive, assured investors in a 2007 conference call.
Because the federal government “must deliver safety to the people,” Dahlberg added, the market for government outsourcing is likely to increase three to five percent a year well into the decade.
Much of this growth is expected in intelligence. As SAIC notes in its 2008 annual report,
“Our reputation and relationship with the US Government, and in particular with the agencies of the Department of Defense (DoD) and the US intelligence community, are key factors in maintaining and growing revenues under contracts with the US Government…
The US Government’s increased spending in recent years on homeland security, intelligence, and defense-related programs has had a favorable impact on our business in fiscal 2008, 2007, and 2006. Our results have also been favorably impacted by the US Government’s increased spending on information technology (IT) outsourcing and other technical services.”
FINANCES
SAIC’S government segment revenues increased $881 million, or 12 percent, in fiscal 2008 to $8.3 billion, including internal revenue growth of 8 percent.
The increase in the intelligence business area was due to new program wins and higher levels of activity on existing programs, including certain classified and operational intelligence programs in fiscal 2008.
HISTORY
SAIC was founded by J. Robert “Bob” Brewster, a nuclear physicist who had worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1950s.
In 1957, Brewster went to work for General Atomics, a nuclear research company that was later sold to Gulf Oil. In 1969, dissatisfied with the oil business and Gulf’s plans for its subsidiary, Brewster founded SAIC as a consultant to Los Alamos and other federal labs.
From the start, the company’s stock was owned and sold by its own employees – a practice that helped motivate workers to increase revenues and profits, but also allowed the company to avoid filing public reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission (it went public in September, 2006). In 1970, SAIC set up a branch office in Washington, D.C. to solicit work from the government.
Twenty years later, on the strength of Pentagon contracts involving submarine warfare and missile defense and work for the Federal Aviation Administration and other agencies, SAIC revenues surpassed the $1 billion mark.
FORMER HIGH-RANKING OFFICIALS
SAIC employs large numbers of former CIA officials. Leo Hazlewood, the senior vice president for SAIC’s Mission Integration Business Unit, which works with the NGA, joined the company in 2000 after a 23-year career with the CIA.
His positions there included comptroller, director of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (later merged into the NGA) and deputy director for Operations.
Other former high-level CIA officials working for SAIC include Chief Technology Officer Andy Palowitch, who previously served as director of the CIA’s Central Intelligence Systems Engineering Center, and Vice President for Corporate Development Gordon Oehler, who retired from the CIA in 1997 after 25 years, including a stint as director of the CIA’s Non-Proliferation Center.
That center was also an area where SAIC held contracts. Peter Brookes, a senior fellow for national security affairs at the conservative Heritage Foundation, was detailed to the CIA’s NPC to work on issues related to arms control, treaties, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction while working for SAIC.
Other former CIA officials who have worked for SAIC in the past include John M. Deutch, President Clinton’s second CIA director, and Rear Adm. Bobby Ray Inman, the CIA’s former deputy director. Both men served for a time on SAIC’s board of directors.
KEY ROLE IN THE US “WAR ON TERROR”
SAIC plays a critical role in U.S. military operations in Iraq through a key institution created to expand the reach of intelligence into military operations: the Joint Intelligence Operations Centers (JIOC).
The JIOC link the Pentagon’s nine Unified Combatant Commands and U.S. Forces in Korea with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. These centers were formally established in April 2006 by Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone, after his office completed a year-long study of the defense intelligence system. These linked organizations have become the domain – and a major profit center – for SAIC.
The JIOC is jointly controlled by the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Office of the DNI. They are designed to integrate DoD intelligence with traditional military operations and functions, with the ultimate aim of increasing the speed, power, and combat effectiveness of U.S. military forces.
The Department of Defense describes them as the “fulcrum” of a worldwide group of joint intelligence organizations that gather, interpret, and act on information collected by the DIA and its sister agencies, the NSA, NGA, and NRO.
During their first 18 months in operation, the JIOC was commanded by Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, the deputy under secretary of defense for intelligence. Boykin is an evangelical Christian who stirred controversy in 2003 by making outlandish, anti-Muslim remarks.
The White House mildly reprimanded him for referring to the U.S. battles in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of a broader war against “a guy named Satan.”
(Despite his views, Boykin is highly respected within the intelligence community for his long military experience, which has included service in Vietnam, Grenada, Somalia, and Iraq.
“What we’re trying to do is move toward operationalizing intelligence,” he said in a Pentagon press briefing on the JIOC in April 2006.
In a speech later that year to a conference on geospatial intelligence, Boykin described the JIOC as “coordinated, synergistic efforts” that are “running intelligence as an operation.”)
Many details of the JIOC system are classified. But the first operational tests of the concept may have taken place in January, 2007, when commandos from the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command launched air strikes against Al Qaeda bases and personnel in Somalia, where the U.S.-supported Ethiopian army had routed an Islamist government that had sheltered the terrorist Al Qaeda army.
The attacks, carried out by Air Force C-130 gunships, were guided in part with intelligence supplied by the CIA and the NSA. If public descriptions of the joint intelligence system are to believed, the intelligence would have flowed out of the JIOC, the highest level command for sharing military intelligence.
The JIOC in Iraq, meanwhile, is serving as a “template” for other new centers around the world and, according to the DNI, is “beginning to benefit operations down to the battalion level.”
As the JIOC becomes institutionalized within the military, Pentagon documents show, they will slowly morph into the larger Global Information Grid, which will eventually include the Distributed Common Ground Systems being built for the armed services by Raytheon and other companies, using standards set by both the Department of Defense and the Director of National Intelligence.
And from the beginning, Pentagon officials have stressed that the JIOC take its orders from the DNI.
In his April 2006 briefing, for example, Gen. Boykin explained that DIA Director Michael Maples, will “take requirements” for the JIOC directly from Deputy Director of Intelligence for Collection Mary Margaret Graham, and pass them down to the Combatant Commands, thus creating “an unprecedented level of access to these commands” for the civilian directors of national intelligence.
As a result of this direct interface, Boykin explained, analysts working out of the JIOC will draw from the dozens of databases maintained by the NSA and NGA without having to go through their respective chains of command.
“What we’re trying to do is create a situation where the analyst is talking to the collector and there’s no filter in the middle,” he said.
That’s a perfect job for a contractor, particularly one that is as closely integrated with defense intelligence as SAIC.
In 2005, a few months after the JIOC was launched by Cambone’s office at the Pentagon, SAIC was hired by the U.S. Army as operations manager of the JIOC-Iraq under a two-year, $110 million contract. Since then, according to an SAIC briefing for investors in May 2007, the company has signed similar contracts for the JIOC established at the other major commands.
(SAIC is also involved as a contractor in the construction of the Global Information Grid, and is “helping achieve the netcentric warfare mission” at the Defense Information Systems Agency, according to the briefing).
An in-house SAIC publication describes the JIOC in Iraq as a,
“large interactive data repository that allows analysts to pull in information from a wide range of sources,” including imagery and visualization tools.
SAIC’s Intelligence and Security Group, which manages the JIOC, had roughly 300 to 500 people overseas working at the centers.
SAIC provides more details in its 2007 annual report to shareholders. The JIOC-Iraq, it says, draws on SAIC’s “Biometric Automated Toolset,” a portable system that records an individual’s unique characteristics for iris, fingerprint, and facial recognition; JIOC analysts use the toolset to “break up terrorist cells and track and capture the enemy.”
SAIC has also worked with the Army to “transition” the JIOC-Iraq capabilities into the Distributed Common Ground System. It’s all in a day’s work for SAIC, which is one of the most ubiquitous companies in the intelligence industrial complex.
Recent Contracts/EventsIn June 2008, SAIC was awarded a prime contract by theDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency(DARPA) to develop a,
“synergistic human/machine system to help military officers and their staffs quickly make command decisions and generate multiple options on the battlefield.”
The two-year contract is worth $42 million.
Sources
Primary sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008), company information, and other sources as follows:
[1] “SAIC team wins National Security Agency Trailblazer contract,” SAIC press release, October 21, 2002.
Email – laura.luke@saic.com (Laura Luke/media contact)
Phone – +1-(703) 676-4300 (Washington operations)
Website – http://www.saic.com/natsec/intelligence.html
Back to Contents
Project Groundbreaker (NSA Contract)
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
HeadquartersN/A
Principal AgenciesNational Security Agency (NSA)
Top ExecutivesN/A
Annual RevenueN/A
Intelligence Percent of RevenueN/A
Summary
- Agency: National Security Agency (NSA)
- Value: $5 billion (classified)
- Prime contractors: Computer Sciences Corporation, Logicon/Northrop Grumman
- Implementation Date: November 2001
- Contract extended: June 2007
Project Groundbreaker is a $5 billion project to rebuild and operate the NSA’s “nonmission-critical” internal telephone and computer networking systems.
The project is managed by a vendor team led by Computer Sciences Corporation and Logicon, the IT subsidiary of Northrop Grumman. It is one of the largest outsourcing projects the federal government has ever attempted.
In managing the project for the NSA, CSC and Logicon created the “Eagle Alliance” consortium that drew in practically every major company involved in defense and intelligence outsourcing.
Subcontractors included:
- General Dynamics
- BAE Systems
- Titan Corp. (now L-3 Communications Inc.)
- CACI International
- TRW (now part of Northrop Grumman)
- Mantech
- Lockheed Martin
- Verizon (one of the companies that allegedly granted the NSA access to its consumer database under the Terrorist Surveillance Program)
- as well as Dell Computers, Hewlett-Packard, and Nortel Networks
Under the NSA’s “employee-friendly approach,” contractors received monetary incentives to hire NSA employees.
“This type of outsourcing program hits our sweet spot,” said Frank Derwin, Logicon’s vice president at the time of the contract award.
Corporate InformationThe NSA announced the project in a July 31, 2001 press release.
According to Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then NSA director, the “outsourcing partnership” with CSC and Northrop Grumman will allow the NSA to “refocus assets” on its “core missions of providing foreign signals intelligence and protecting U.S. national security-related information systems” by turning over key IT services “for industry’s purview.” [ ]
Hayden added:
“The ability of NSA to perform its mission depends on an efficient and stable Information Technology Infrastructure, one that is secure, agile, and responsive to evolving mission needs in balance with the requirements to recapitalize and refresh technology.”
In describing the project, the NSA said the “government-industry partnership” will,
“result in service quality improvements, continuous modernization of NSA’s Information Technology Infrastructure (ITI), as well as cost avoidance for the agency over the duration of the contract. It is also an employee-friendly approach to redefining NSA’s internal corporate structure in that the contractors will receive monetary incentives to hire a significant number of agency employees, and offer them comparable or better pay, benefits, and opportunities.
Over the contract duration, Eagle Alliance will manage the selective ITI areas while the NSA provides continuous governance and monitoring based on Service Level Agreements that identify the performance levels required. NSA will continue to provide transition services (e.g., career counseling, résumé preparation, and seminars) for employees interested in moving to the private sector under this contract.”
’Revolving door’
In September 2009, General Hayden joined a CSC “Cyber Advisory Committee,” a
“panel of industry experts that will inform the company on its cyber strategy. The committee will provide senior company executives with strategic counsel regarding national security and industry issues related to cyber security, including CSC strategies, offerings and positioning.”
CorpWatch AnalysisCSC had been in the government contracting business for nearly half a century when it was selected to manage the Groundbreaker project. It was founded in 1959 to write software for defense manufacturers, and in 1963 became the first software company to go public.
Over the years, it built a multi-billion dollar business as a systems integrator for companies and government agencies, starting with computer contracts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States, CSC formed a new business unit to go after homeland security and intelligence work.
“One reason we did this was the wealth of discussion about sharing data among the agencies and the first responders, especially when it comes to terrorist threats,” said Pat Ways, CSC’s vice president for federal sector business development.
[ ]
By 2004, largely as a result of Groundbreaker, CSC had become the nation’s third-largest federal contractor, with prime contracts worth more than $4 billion. [ ]
Northrop Grumman, CSC’s partner in the Groundbreaker project, is best known as a designer and manufacturer of military surveillance and combat aircraft, defense electronics and systems, as well as large naval combat ships. It first became an important intelligence contractor in 1999 when it acquired DPC Technologies, a Maryland IT company with close contractual ties to the NSA.
It moved deeper into intelligence in 2002 when it acquired TRW, a long-time CIA and NSA contractor. Those acquisitions, plus its 2007 takeover of Essex Corporation, greatly expanded Northrop Grumman’s presence at NSA headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
Project Groundbreaker was marred from the start by technical and managerial problems. In 2006, Siobhan Gorman, the Baltimore Sun’s intelligence reporter, interviewed dozens of NSA officials and contractors involved in the project.
She found that Groundbreaker’s $2 billion price tag had doubled, and that technical problems with the system were legion.
“Computers are integral to everything NSA does, yet it is not uncommon for the agency’s unstable computer system to freeze for hours, unlike the previous system, which had a backup mechanism that enabled analysts to continue their work,” she wrote.
“When the agency’s communications lines become overloaded, theGroundbreaker systemhas been known to deliver garbled intelligence reports.”
Worse, agency linguists told Gorman that the number of conversation segments they could translate in a day had dropped significantly under Groundbreaker.
The NSA, she concluded,
“has no mechanism to systematically assess whether it is spending its money effectively and getting what it has paid for.”
[4]
In June 2007, the NSA exercised its options in the original contract and extended Project Groundbreaker for another three years. The new contract is worth $528 million. [5]
The NSA’s action,
“underscores NSA’s confidence in the Eagle Alliance’s experience and ability to deliver state-of-the-art information technology solutions that result in sound operational performance for the agency,” James W. Sheaffer, president of CSC’s North American Public Sector division, announced in a press release.
Recent Contracts/Events
N/A
SOURCESMost of this information comes from Chapter 6 of Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire (Simon & Schuster/2008). Other sources are as follows:
[1] “National Security Agency Outsources Areas of Non-Mission Information Technology to CSC-Led Alliance Team,” NSA press release, July 31, 2001.
[2] Dennis McCafferty, “CSC has a lock on government business,” VAR Business, September 30, 2002.
[3] Anitha Reddy, “Computer systems spur growth for contractors,” Technews.com, May 10, 2004.
[4] Siobhan Gorman, “Computer ills hinder NSA,” Baltimore Sun, February 26, 2006.
[5] “CSC-led alliance receives three-year option for NSA Groundbreaker contract,” CSC press release, June 6, 2007.
Email – N/A
Phone – N/A
Website – N/A
Back to Contents
Lockheed Martin: Information Systems And Global Services
Author/ResearcherTim Shorrock
Headquarters6801 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda, MD 20817
Principal AgenciesDepartment of Defense (DoD), National Security Agency (NSA)
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
Top ExecutivesRobert J. Stevens, chairman of the board, president and CEO, Lockheed Martin
Linda Gooden, executive vice president, Information Systems & Global Services
Annual Revenue$41.8 billion (Lockheed Martin)
Intelligence Percent of RevenueNot disclosed
Summary
Rankings(Lockheed Martin)
- Washington Technology Top 100: #1/$13.4 billion in contracts
- Defense News Top 100: #1/$41.8 billion annual revenue
“Everyone talks about the intelligence community as ‘those guys in government,’ whether it’s the people in the military or the people in the agencies. Well, guess what? You are all part of the intelligence community. In fact, you probably make up the largest part of it.”
– Ben Romero, the director of Intelligence and Homeland Security Programs for Lockheed Martin, speaking to a roomful of contractors in Washington, D.C., 2005.
Lockheed Martin is the largest of the top six systems integrators that dominate the intelligence contracting industry, and is particularly significant in the areas of surveillance, reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and network-centric warfare.
With $42 billion in revenue and more than 52,000 cleared information technology personnel in its workforce, Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest defense contractor, and employs what may be the largest private intelligence force on the globe.
It is also the single largest contractor and the largest IT provider to the U.S. federal government. Its slogan, repeated frequently in television ads, is “We never forget who we’re working for.”
In intelligence, that would be all the major collection agencies, particularly the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and the National Reconnaissance Office, as well as the Department of Defense and the many military intelligence agencies (see Tim Shorrock, Mother Jones, “Out of Service.”)
Corporate Information
ORGANIZATION
Lockheed Martin employs more than 140,000 people and is divided into three operating units: aeronautics, including tactical aircraft and R&D; space systems, including commercial and military satellites; and systems and IT, which includes C4I – the military acronym for intelligence and reconnaissance, and IT.
Intelligence is a key part of all three divisions, but most of the company’s contracts are held by the IT division, Information Systems & Global Services, or IS&GS.
“Some of our work, you will never hear about,” the company website says.
“Our classified work has supported the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) as they dealt with the most high-visibility situations in recent US history and many others you never saw on the news.”
NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY
Lockheed Martin has extremely close and long-standing ties with the NSA. In the mid-1950s it built the U-2 spy plane that played a key role in the Cold War and conducted some of the NSA’s initial research in signals collection.
“The U-2 has been the backbone of our nation’s airborne intelligence collection operations for several decades and continues to provide unmatched operational capabilities in support of Operation Enduring Freedom,” Lockheed Martin states in its 2008 annual report. The U-2 “is expected to continue to provide leading-edge intelligence collection capabilities for years to come.”
The company’s extensive contracts with the NSA first became public in 1997.
That year, Margaret Newsham, a contract engineer working for Lockheed Space and Missile Corporation at an NSA listening post in the United Kingdom, disclosed to Congress the existence of Echelon. This global surveillance network is run by the NSA and its counterparts in Britain, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.
She made the disclosure after hearing NSA intercepts of international calls placed by Sen. Strom Thurmond, the conservative South Carolina Republican. Her revelations sparked a spate of Congressional inquiries into whether the NSA was illegally listening in on domestic conversations.
The discussions, led by a Republican civil libertarian, Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, presaged the intense debate that would follow the 2005 revelations about President Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program.”
In July 1998 a report commissioned by the European Parliament confirmed that, through Echelon, the United States, and its closest allies had the capability to intercept most European phone calls, emails, and data communications, as well as the technology to decode almost any encrypted communication.
This revelation sparked deep suspicion in European capitals that NSA was using Echelon to capture European business intelligence and trade secrets and pass them to U.S. companies.
Under a contract signed in 2005, Lockheed Martin provides an integrated electronic security system to protect NSA facilities in the Washington area.
A similar system is in place at the Pentagon and dozens of U.S. military facilities abroad.
KEY AGENCIES
Lockheed Martin is an important contractor for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA).
In one major project for the NGA, Lockheed Martin is developing a “ground-based infrastructure” designed to help users of the agency’s satellite and imagery data better distribute, share, and exploit the information.
The contract, “Geo-Scout,” was awarded in 2003 for an unspecified amount, and is proceeding in four “blocks” that could take up to 10 years to complete. The ultimate goal, NGA officials say, is to create a system that seamlessly blends data from unclassified commercial and classified military satellites.
The project, now in Block Two, is managed by Michael Thomas, a Lockheed Martin vice president in its Integrated Systems & Solutions unit. Its future, however, is uncertain: Geo-Scout is frequently cited by intelligence analysts, along with the NSA’s Trailblazer, as an overly expensive project in which government managers ceded too much power to the contractor.
At the Pentagon, Lockheed Martin was one of the contractors that provided counterintelligence analysis for the Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office (CIFA).
Its jobs included tracking “logical combinations of keywords and personalities,” estimating current or future threats, creating and delivering reports, and monitoring current intelligence of specified contracts. In 2006, the company was hiring personnel for a “performance planner” who would “develop and analyze missions, program goals, [and] objectives and systems” for CIFA.
At the Defense Intelligence Agency, which now manages CIFA, Lockheed Martin runs a bidding consortium that claims to have the largest cleared workforce in the nation and, according to the Lockheed Martin website, provides “exceptional depth to respond to both surge requirements and planned customers tasks.”
The consortium’s forte seems to be providing large, agency-wide IT systems for the DIA and other agencies. The team includes three of the top U.S. IT firms, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, and Sun Microsystems, as well as the consulting firm BearingPoint, which helped plan the 2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq for the Department of Defense.
Another member of the team is The Analysis Corporation, the intelligence contractor run by CIA veteran John Brennan.
NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE
As one of the prime suppliers of reconnaissance and surveillance technology, Lockheed Martin is deeply involved in the Pentagon’s Distributed Common Ground System, or DCGS.
On its website, Lockheed Martin describes DCGS as,
“a global, internet-like network where both military and national agencies have access to time-sensitive intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance data.”
CorpWatch AnalysisLockheed Martin was created during the 1990s through a merger of Lockheed’s aircraft division with Martin Marietta, Loral Defense, and the General Dynamics combat aircraft division.
In the end, five huge firms were left standing: Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing and General Dynamics. Lockheed Martin and other large defense contractors have snatched up the rest.
In 2004 and 2005 Lockheed Martin acquired the government IT unit of Affiliated Computer Services Inc., inheriting several contracts with defense intelligence agencies and Sytex, a $425 million Philadelphia-based company that held contracts with the Pentagon’s Northern Command and the NSA/Army Intelligence and Security Command.
By 2007 the company employed 52,000 IT specialists with security clearances, and intelligence made up nearly 40 percent of its annual business, company executives said.
One of Lockheed Martin’s most important intelligence-related acquisitions took place in the 1990s, when the conglomerate bought Betac Corporation. Betac was one of the companies the government hired during the late 1980s to provide communications technology for the secret Continuity of Government program the Reagan administration created to keep the U.S. government functioning in the event of a nuclear attack.
Under a 1982 presidential directive, the outbreak of war could trigger the proclamation of martial law nationwide, giving the military the authority to use its domestic database to round up citizens and residents considered threats to national security. TheFederal Emergency Management Agency(
FEMA) and the Army were to carry out the emergency measures for domestic security.
To build the communications system that would allow this secret government to communicate,
- FEMA hired the Harris Corporation, an important Florida-based intelligence contractor
- the CIA hired McDonnell-Douglas (this was before its merger with Boeing)
- the Pentagon hired TRW, an important intelligence contractor that was acquired in 2002 by Northrop Grumman
The military’s contracting tasks were assigned to the Information Systems Command based at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, where the project was managed by Brig. Gen. Eugene Renzi, the deputy chief for operations at the base and the senior national program officer at the Army systems command.
One of the biggest winners was Betac Corporation, a consulting firm composed of former intelligence and communications specialists from the Pentagon.
Betac was one of the largest government contractors of its day and, with TRW and Lockheed itself, dominated the intelligence contracting industry from the mid-1980s until the late 1990s. Its first project for the Continuity of Government plan was a sole-source contract to devise and maintain security for the system.
Between 1983 and 1985, the contract expanded from $316,000 to nearly $3 million, and by 1988 Betac had multiple COG contracts worth $22 million. Betac was eventually sold to ACS Government Solutions Group and is now a unit of Lockheed Martin.
Here’s how Lockheed Martin describes its “National Intelligence Systems & Services” work on its website:
“Every day, the men and women of the U.S. Intelligence Community stand guard at the gates of our national security, diligently working to stay one step ahead of those who would do us harm.
They are supported by a sophisticated network of systems and sensors that collects, processes and distributes vital intelligence to the analysts, warfighters, and leaders who need it most.
Lockheed Martin is proud to deliver a wide range of systems and services that support the Intelligence Community’s mission of ensuring global security.”
Recent Contracts/EventsIn August 2008, Lockheed Martin won a $32 million contract from the NGA to provide,
“specialized geospatial training to analysts and officials across the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.”
Under the contract, Lockheed Martin provides professional instructors to run classes and develop curricula for courses offered by the NGA College based in Washington, D.C., and St. Louis, Missouri.
In April 2008, Lockheed Martin provided technical support and communications networks for a Cyber Defense Exercise war game conducted by the NSA.
SOURCESMost of the sourcing for this profile came from Tim Shorrock, ”Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing” (Simon & Schuster/2008).
Other information came from the Lockheed Martin website and press releases.
Email – keith.mordoff@lmco.com (IS&GS Media Relations)
Phone – +1-(301) 240-5706
Website – http://www.lockheedmartin.com/isgs/index.html
