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The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
Simon & Schuster
May 2008
On Sale: May 14, 2008
448 pages
ISBN: 0743282248
EAN: 9780743282246
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
In Spies for Hire, investigative reporter Tim Shorrock
lifts the veil off a major story the government doesn't
want us to know about -- the massive outsourcing of top
secret intelligence activities to private-sector
contractors.
Running spy networks overseas. Tracking down terrorists in
the Middle East. Interrogating enemy prisoners. Analyzing
data from spy satellites and intercepted phone calls. All
of these are vital intelligence tasks that traditionally
have been performed by government officials accountable to
Congress and the American people. But that is no longer the
case. Starting during the Clinton administration, when
intelligence budgets were cut drastically and privatization
of government services became national policy, and
expanding dramatically in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA
and other agencies were frantically looking to hire
analysts and linguists, the Intelligence Community has been
relying more and more on corporations to perform sensitive
tasks heretofore considered to be exclusively the work of
federal employees. This outsourcing of intelligence
activities is now a $50 billion-a-year business that
consumes up to 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget.
And it's a business that the government has tried hard to
keep under wraps. Drawing on interviews with key players in the Intelligence-
Industrial Complex, contractors' annual reports and public
filings with the government, and on-the-spot reporting from
intelligence industry conferences and investor briefings,
Spies for Hire provides the first behind-the-scenes look at
this new way of spying. Shorrock shows how corporations
such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, CACI
International, and IBM have become full partners with the
CIA, the National Security Agency, and the Pentagon in
their most sensitive foreign and domestic operations. He
explores how this partnership has led to wasteful spending
and threatens to erode the privacy protections and
congressional oversight so important to American democracy. Shorrock exposes the kinds of spy work the private sector
is doing, such as interrogating prisoners in Iraq, managing
covert operations, and collaborating with the National
Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans' overseas phone
calls and e-mails. And he casts light on a "shadow
Intelligence Community" made up of former top intelligence
officials who are now employed by companies that do this
spy work, such as former CIA directors George Tenet and
James Woolsey. Shorrock also traces the rise of Michael
McConnell from his days as head of the NSA to being a top
executive at Booz Allen Hamilton to returning to government
as the nation's chief spymaster. From CIA covert actions to NSA eavesdropping, from Abu
Ghraib to Guantánamo, from the Pentagon's techno-driven war
in Iraq to the coming global battles over information
dominance and control of cyberspace, contractors are doing
it all. Spies for Hire goes behind today's headlines to
highlight how private corporations are aiding the growth of
a new and frightening national surveillance state.
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