by Tim Shorrock
November 16, 2009
from
Crocodyl Website
Contents
SI International/Serco
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
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/
Back to Contents
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 Group company).
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/Events
In 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/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
1601 Research Blvd.,
Rockville MD 20850
Principal Agencies
Central Intelligence
Agency, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, National
Counter-Terrorism Center
Department of Defense
Top Executives
Walter 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 Revenue
Not disclosed
Summary
Rankings (BAE Systems Inc.)
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 Information
BAE 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 Analysis
BAE 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,
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/Events
In 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/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
The Pentagon/Department
of Defense, Virginia; Bolling Air Force Base, Washington, D.C.
Principal Agencies
Pentagon
Joint Chiefs of Staff
Top Executives
Lieutenant 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 Analysis
The 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: BPAs
The 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/Events
In 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
Back to Contents
The Analysis Corporation (TAC)
Author/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
1501 Farm Credit Drive,
Suite 2300, McLean, VA 22102-5000
Principal Agencies
Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Department of
State
National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), Office of the Director
of National Intelligence (ODNI)
Top Executives
Alexander Drew, President
Annual Revenue
Not disclosed (privately
owned)
Intelligence Percent of Revenue
Not 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 Information
On 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 Analysis
During 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/Events
In 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/
Back to Contents
Spectal LLC (L-1 Identity Solutions)
Author/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
1875 Campus Commons
Drive, Suite 100, Reston, Virginia 20191
Principal Agencies
Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA)
Unidentified government agencies
Top Executives
Ann Holcomb – president
(former SpecTal vice president)
Ron Hammond – executive vice president
Ed Balint – executive vice president
Annual Revenue
Latest 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 Revenue
100% (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 Analysis
SpecTal 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/Events
In 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
Back to Contents
Raytheon Intelligence and Information Systems
Author/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
7700 Arlington Blvd M104,
Falls Church, VA 22042-2900; 1200 South Jupiter Road, Garland,
Texas, 75042
Principal Agencies
Defense Intelligence
Agency
National Security Agency
National Reconnaissance Office
Central Intelligence Agency
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Other “proprietary customers”
Top Executives
William 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 Revenue
20% of Raytheon total
(estimate)
Summary
Rankings (Raytheon parent)
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: "Killing
Real People Becomes a Video Game".
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 billion System 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
The Distributed Common Ground
System is a striking example of how national
intelligence collection agencies were incorporated into
military operations during the
George W. Bush
administration 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/
Back to Contents
Booz Allen Hamilton/Carlyle Group
Author/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
8283 Greensboro Drive,
McLean, VA 22102
Principal Agencies
National 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 Executives
Keith 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 Revenue
25 percent (estimate/not
disclosed)
Summary
Rankings
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 Information
Booz 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 Analysis
To 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
infamous Total 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/Events
In 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/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
1100 North Glebe Road,
Arlington, VA 22201
Principal Agencies
National 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 Executives
J.P “Jack” London,
chairman of the board
Paul M. Cofoni, president and CEO
Annual Revenue
$2.4 billion
Intelligence Percent of Revenue
Not 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 Information
Longtime 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 the Counterintelligence 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
“war
on terror.”
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/Events
In August 2008, CACI made
a strategic appointment to its board of directors by adding
James 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/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
1100 North Glebe Road,
Arlington, VA 22201
Principal Agencies
National 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 Executives
Ken 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 Revenue
Substantial (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/Events
In June 2008, SAIC was
awarded a prime contract by the Defense 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/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
N/A
Principal Agencies
National Security Agency
(NSA)
Top Executives
N/A
Annual Revenue
N/A
Intelligence Percent of Revenue
N/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 Information
The 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 Analysis
CSC 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, the Groundbreaker
system has 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
SOURCES
Most 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/Researcher
Tim Shorrock
Headquarters
6801 Rockledge Drive,
Bethesda, MD 20817
Principal Agencies
Department of Defense (DoD),
National Security Agency (NSA)
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), National
Reconnaissance Office (NRO)
Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)
Top Executives
Robert 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 Revenue
Not disclosed
Summary
Rankings (Lockheed Martin)
"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 Analysis
Lockheed 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. The Federal 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/Events
In 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.
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 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
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