Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing by Tim Shorrock Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
Book Review: Excellent Subject, Many Facts, But Not Impartial
Summary: 4 Stars
Author Shorrock does the nation a great service in providing a basis for discussion of the out-sourcing of intelligence and IT support functions to private industry by federal agencies. For this I would have given him five stars, but it is evident his theme is that such out-sourcing is generally a subversion of the proper function of government and its control by representatives of the people. To this end, he seems to select those incidents that favor his viewpoint, rather than presenting the situation in an impartial manner for the reader to draw his own conclusions. By this I do not mean that the author should not present his own analysis and conclusions -- only that the facts should not be presented with perjorative adjectives and snide comments concerning personal and corporate motives. As an ex-intelligence officer, I certainly would have moved into a private corporation where my skills could have been used to help fulfill the security mission of the Federal Government had personal circumstances not intervened, and I like to think my motives would have been more aligned with satisfaction in accomplishing the mission than for personal profit.
At any rate, this is an important work, and my views of Shorrock's book are almost isomorphic with those contained in the reviews by Steele and "Retired Reader."
With respect to the issue of private corporations being restricted to not breaking the law (either international, US, or any any other country's), one must realise that the gathering of covert HUMINT essentially ALWAYS involves breaking someone's laws. If a contractor is expressly forbidden to do this or is to be held accountable for such trangressions, then contractors cannot perform positive intelligence gathering functions. Unfortunately, at the present time the CIA and all other agencies involved in covert intelligence gathering are clearly incapable of fulfilling their missions in this regard without using private contractors. Regardless of the reasons for this lack of in-agency capability, to eliminate private contractors as the author seems to desire, would be to put America's security at grave risk.
There are solutions to this problem, but the author seems more intent on promoting his leftist agenda than in addressing the issues with the clear goal of improving America's intelligence. Yes, the use of private contractors has gone too far, but what level of private contracting and for what functions would be appropriate? And how do we get to that appropriate level? Alas, these questions were missing in this book, and unfortunately I have not found them yet in any other.
Lastly, allow me to register my disappointment with the reaction to this book. To date, there have been only six reviews and judging from the ratings pro and con on the reviews, I would estimate that the number of readers of the reviews are not more than forty. That's pretty insignificant when one considers the importance of the book's topic, and shows the lack of public interest in this subject. Something is terribly wrong with the US reading public when banal books like those by Friedman and Zakaria promoting the U.S.'s submission to international organizations and globalism receive thousands of reviews and ratings and books on the condition of the CIA and intelligence out-sourcing draw almost no interest.
Book Review: A whole new world
Summary: 5 Stars
Tim Shorrock has dared to go where no journalist has gone before and explores new paradigms and issues that will be here for years to come: the explosive new world of privatized intelligence gathering and analysis. No doubt, this important work will become a landmark reference.Book Review: Good Intentions, Bad Results
Summary: 5 Stars
This book appears to be a compilation of articles that together reveal the excessive use of private contractors by the major agencies of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC). According to its author, the IC public officials in many cases have abdicated their duties to the public in favor of private contractors whose loyalties are divided between the public good and corporate profits. In any type of expose' it has to be asked how accurate are the charges and is the author really providing the whole story? Well the answer in this case is yes and no.
The close relationship between the mega U.S. intelligence agencies (CIA, DIA, NGA, NRO, and NSA) and private contractors is indisputable. What this book tries to do, but fails, is show this relationship is also corrupt and dangerous to national security. He does provide many examples of intelligence agency employees moving to the private sector and lavish use of contractors on key intelligence agency projects. Yet he clearly has not spent much time considering the real problems affecting contractor-intelligence client relations.
First there are really three types of contractors currently serving the IC. The first are that body of contractors who provide consulting, advisory, and training services. The second are those contractors that provide technical support services such as development of information systems, IT infrastructure construction or enhancement, and other services that the clients lack the in-house expertise to perform. Finally there are the contractors who supply staffing for the core functions of collection and analysis, because their clients don't have the in-house personnel to fill all of the billets that they are authorized.
This latter use of contractors for core mission assignments is the most often criticized by folks within and out of the IC. But as with all things there are two views of this. For example, John Brennan President of The Analysis Corporation (former CIA officer, mentioned in this book) is in point of fact an honest and patriotic IC contractor who strongly supports the use of contractors to fill core positions. Of course that is his business, but he appears sincere in this belief. (This reviewer had a polite dust-up with Brennan on this issue and ended up agreeing to disagree).
In the end, the use of any type of contractor by the IC is a neutral phenomenon. Contrary to the contentions in this book, contractors while wishing to make a profit also generally want what is best for their clients. Their clients really want to meet their mission requirements and look to contractors to help them accomplish this. The problem with the concept of out-sourcing lays with the execution not the concept itself. Far too often it turns out that the clients are not competent to draw up the technical requirements or do not understand the goals they are articulating. And too often contractors will take the money without pushing back and telling their requirements are worthless (politely of course) or sit down with the client to clarify goals and purposes.
Book Review: Useful Contribution, Neglects Outputs & Constituencies
Summary: 4 Stars
Edit of 4 Jun 08 to strongly recommend Retired Reader's review as a companion to my own observations.
I sat down with this book today and found it absorbing. It is perhaps the best overview for anyone of names and numbers associated with the $60 billion (or more, perhaps as much as $75 billion) a year we waste on the 4% we can steal, and next to nothing on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). The book loses one star for failing to integrate over 300 relevant books (see the annotated bibliographies to my first two books), and for failing to apply any visualization at all. This book is a mass of facts and figures, names and places. With or without visualization, it is a seminal reference point and recommended for all university and public libraries.
The book focuses mostly on technical waste--the inputs--and does not cover outputs nor constituencies. The reality is as General Zinni has put it so well: the IC produces 4% of what is needed, at a cost so horrendously wasteful as to warrant severe outrage among all taxpayers.
Having read the book, I can state that the author's agenda, if he has one, is to expose the risk to our civil liberties of creating a national surveillance state in which the bulk of the expertise is outside the government and subject to corruption and cronyism as well as lack of oversight.
Here are three tid-bits that strongly support the author's general intent, and some links.
1) Secret intelligence scam #1 is that there is no penalty for failure. Lockheed can build a satellite system that does not work (for NASA as well as the secret world--two different failures--or get the metrics wrong so priceless outer space research does not deploy a parachute--}and get another contract. Similarly SAIC with Trailblazer, CACI in Iraq, Blackwater murdering civilians and ramming old men in old cars out of the way, this is all a total disgrace to America.
2) "Butts in seats" means that most of our money goes to US citizens with clearances who know nothing of the real world, *and* the contractor gets 150% of their salary as "overhead." That is scam #2.
3) Scam #3 is that the so-called policy world, when it exists, does not really care what the secret world has to say, unless it justifies elective wars, secret prisons in the US (Halliburton) and so on. Dick Cheney ended the policy process in this administration. But even without Cheney and his gang of proven liars, the dirty little secret of the secret world is that a) there is no one place where all information comes together to be made sense of; and b) less than 1% of what we collect gets looked at by a human; and c) most of the policy world could care less what Top Secret Codeword information is placed before them--as Colin Powell says so memorably in his autobiography, he preferred the Early Bird compilation of news clippings.
I have been saying since 1988 that the secret emperor is not just naked, but institutionalized lunacy. Books like this are helpful, eventually the public will hear our voice.
Here are specific tid-bits that caught my attention as I went through the book.
+ Two errors in reference to me: I was neither a committee chair nor a program director. The author does quote me accurately.
+ Early on I am impressed to note documented facts:
- 50% of the clandestine case officers at CIA are contractors
- 35% of the Defense Intelligence Agency workforce is contracted
- Virtually 100% of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is contracted
- 70% of all US Intelligence Community funds are spent on external contracts rather than internal capabilities.
- Booz Allen Hamilton has 10,000 employees with Top Secret Codeword clearances
- Revolving door is gutting the agencies (and most retirements will take place between 2007 to 2012--we have no middle management, no bench).
- Total Information Awareness (TIA) program never died, it went underground
- Pentagon under Cheney, then Cheney-Rumsfeld, now Cheney-Gates appears committed to outsourcing everything except the shooting--this is very very bad for all of us
- SIGINT data stream is wagging the dog--three V's of unstructured data are volume, velocity, and variety (183 languages we don't speak) but the author cited General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret) telling a conference that all the high-tech in the world cannot give him plans and intentions on the battlefield.
- History of outsourcing goes back to the Odeen (CEO BDM) report sponsored by the Defense Science Board, this was the beginning of trying to privatize everything possible. Combined with the Pentagon's inherent disrespect for the CIA, it made privatizing intelligence even more attractive.
- McConnell comes out of this book looking respectable, Woolsey and Tenet less so. Dempsey was not a Navy officer by career--they sent her to knife and fork school when she managed the Navy intelligence budget within GDIP, much as the USMC took care of Arnold Punaro who ultimately made one-star while being Staff Director of the SASC. Although the author excels at naming names, and he discusses failures where they are known, there is very little substantive understanding of how the US IC has collapsed on all fronts--personnel, budget, finance, facilities, global presence, global coverage, relevance to the customer, etcetera.
- CACI and SAIC come out of this book looking truly terrible, while ManTech and Booz Allen Hamilton come out as moderately competent. I have to remind myself that contractors are not evil--they do what we incentivize them to do, and right now it is OUT OF CONTROL.
- He names LtGen Ken Minihan, USAF, as the de facto ideologist for the intelligence-industrial complex, and provides a good review of how venture capital funds were created to focus specifically on secret contracts.
- John Brennan emerges from this book as the man behind the curtain, levering the International and National Security Alliance (INSA) to further the complex. I disagree with the author's characterization of the DNI and INSA alliance as unethical. I do however agree that it is unprofessional in that INSA is executing myopic orders and not contributing at all to the needed cross-fertilization and understanding of where the real innovation is happening, in Collective, Peace, and Commercial Intelligence (the latter the complete opposite of Contractor Intelligence, or butts in seats).
See also:
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Blond Ghost
The Very Best Men Four Who Dared:The Early Years of the CIA
Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
There are success stories. Here are two books on one such case, where the White House and the Pentagon chose not to act over four days:
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on bin Laden and al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
Bottom line books:
On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
I put this book down wishing that the field of cognitive science would evolve more quickly. Our profession is in disarray, in confusion, seeking to substitute butts in seats and dollars for cultural, linguistic, historical, and other forms of context. We need several multinational life boats of change catalysts--such as a Multinational Decision Support Center in Tampa, taking over the rapidly vacating Coalition Coordinating Center, in order to create the world's first unclassified intelligence center dedicated to providing open decision support to all parties active in stabilization & reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief (both at home and abroad). The IC is, as I said in Forbes ASAP, Inside Out and Upside Down. This is not the contractor's fault. It is our fault. We are a Dumb Nation instead of a Smart Nation. Bad. Very bad.
Book Review: Great Data - Simplistic Conclusions
Summary: 3 Stars
While I found Mr Shorrock's book quite interesting and well researched I was dissappointed by his conclusions. While it is clearly true that the intelligence industry has benefitted from the surge in counter-terrorism spending, there was a missed opportunity by the author to recognize that any successes the community has had (and of which they will probably not acknowledge)may in fact be due to that surge. Let's face it, ever since the Eisenhower years there has been an industry-government relationship that benefits both, whether the military or the intelligence community. However, to characterize those on the industry side as somehow less patriotic, and only out to make a buck, is insulting to those contractors who devote thier lives to protecting this country with little recognition, and equally to those government officers who choose to outsource some tasks in order to get the job done in the best and most immediate way they can.
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