Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing (Hardcover)

by Tim Shorrock (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Even James Bond is temping these days. According to investigative journalist Shorrock, the CIA and other intelligence agencies now have more contractors working for them than they do spies of their own. Often former staff hired back at double or triple their former government salaries, these private contractors do everything from fighting in Afghanistan to interrogating prisoners, aiming spy satellites and supervising secret agents. Shorrock gives a comprehensive—at times eye-glazing—rundown of the players in the industry, and his book is valuable for its detailed panorama of 21st-century intelligence work. He uncovers serious abuses—contractor CACI International figured prominently in the Abu Ghraib outrages—and nagging concerns about corrupt ties between intelligence officials and private corporations, industry lobbying for a national surveillance state, the withering of the intelligence agencies' in-house capacities and the displacement of an ethos of public service by a profit motive. However, the bulk of the outsourcing Shorrock unearths is rather pedestrian, involving the management of mundane IT systems and various administrative services, and this exposé insinuates more skullduggery than it demonstrates. (May)
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From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com

Reviewed by Jeff Stein

Not long ago I had lunch with a recently retired senior CIA officer who worked himself into an expletive-laced rage over private contractors who had taken up seats in the agency's sanctum sanctorum, the clandestine services where the spies roam.

Many of them, he said, had spent only a few years working for the agency. Then they performed Washington's version of alchemy, turning their top-secret security clearances into gold-plated jobs with the new breed of Beltway bandits, the intelligence contractors, at twice their old pay.

Unlike in decades past, when firms such as Boeing and Lockheed provided spy planes and satellites and other hardware that the CIA could not possibly build itself, the new breed of contractor offers the CIA guys in trench coats and black ops gear, ready to do the work the agency traditionally has done.

My CIA acquaintance, who retired as chief of a large European station, groused that making money had replaced duty, honor, country in the spy ranks -- and along with it, accountability. "If they make a mistake," he asked, "do you think their company is going to admit it, if it threatens their contract?"

Late last year, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden finally jammed a crowbar into the revolving doors, barring ex-employees from returning to work on their old projects for 18 months.

As investigative reporter Tim Shorrock notes in this valuable (and angry) book, contractors have long had the run of the Pentagon and CIA, working hand in hand on projects ranging from reconnaissance satellites to Predator drones. But Shorrock persuasively shows that the business has changed dramatically in recent years, beginning even before the Sept. 11 attacks set off a homeland security gold rush.

Today, intelligence contracting is a $45 billion-a-year industry, he says, chewing up three quarters of the estimated $60 billion intelligence budget. It is no longer limited mainly to providing hardware; its reach now extends from top to bottom, from data-mining contractors who sift the Internet for terrorist activity to spy handlers, regional intelligence analysts and ex-special operations troops who run paramilitary operations.

Cold War-era hardware, such as the U-2 spy plane, unquestionably made us safer. Has outsourcing made us safer in an age of non-state terrorism? Shorrock does not think so. As the U.S. occupation of Iraq was tanking in 2006, he writes, intelligence contractors gathered "over sushi and Chinese hors d'oeuvres . . . sipping cognac" at a conference at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Washington, where they gloated over their business fortunes. "The industry's on a roll," one investment adviser told him, even if the war on terror isn't.

The new buzz phrase, according to Shorrock, is "net centric warfare," a contractor-supplied technology that pushes information out "to the soldier at the tip of the spear," allowing him "to download data, imagery, and intelligence from computer bases located in nearby command posts or from spy planes flying overhead." Net centric warfare "is right in the sweet spot we provide for our customers," Shorrock quotes Robert Coleman, president of ManTech International, a top intelligence contractor, telling investors at the Mandarin Oriental. The event's keynote speaker was former CIA Director George Tenet, who within three months of his speech "would join, either as a director or an adviser, four companies that were directly involved with the high-tech military strategies he was endorsing," Shorrock writes.

This is a movie version of Washington, of course, with black-hat war profiteers right out of Catch-22's M & M Enterprises. Beyond the caricatures is a world in which contractors necessaril