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Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing Kindle Edition
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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMay 6, 2008
- File size788 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
"Spies for Hire is an excellent roadmap to the daunting new terrain of U.S. intelligence, in which the explosive growth of intelligence contracting threatens to overwhelm any possibility of independent oversight. In this groundbreaking work, Tim Shorrock explores who has benefitted, who has paid, and why it matters to us all." -- Steven Aftergood, Project on Government Secrecy, Federation of American Scientists
"Tim Shorrock is a digger, and he has penetrated a secret and fascinating world to write a telling and readable book." -- Evan Thomas, editor at large of Newsweek, author of Sea of Thunder
"Tim Shorrock's well-researched and convincing book reveals how the intelligence community now subcontracts out most of its work -- 70 percent -- to private-sector companies that inevitably have their own agendas, which may or may not accord with the national interest. By laying out very specifically how all this works, Shorrock has provided a very important service to the country." -- Burton Hersh, author of The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA
" A sterling example of why investigative journalists are valuable....A remarkable job." -- USA Today
"A disturbing overview of the intelligence community." -- The New York Times
"Valuable.... Contains some important, timely truths about the influx of private entrepreneurs into America's spy agencies." -- The Washington Post Book World
"A definitive book." -- The Nation
"Path-breaking.... Destined to be the gold standard on intelligence contracting." -- Asia Times
About the Author
Reader of over 400 audiobooks, Dick Hill has won three coveted Audie awards and been nominated numerous times. He is also the recipient of several AudioFile Earphones Awards. AudioFile includes Dick on their prestigious list of "Golden Voices."
From The Washington Post
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 necessarily fill gaps in U.S. intelligence capabilities and provide valuable new technology. Yes, they're turning a profit along the way, but is that inherently evil, as Shorrock suggests? His book would have benefited mightily from interviews with some of the officials he lampoons. But one-sided though it is, it contains some important, timely truths about the influx of private entrepreneurs into America's spy agencies.
Shorrock -- a frequent contributor to such liberal muckraking magazines as Mother Jones, the Nation and the Progressive -- dates the beginning of the intelligence "outsourcing boom" to the Carter and Reagan years, when cutting the federal payroll became a Washington mantra. But it was during the Clinton administration that the privatization of intelligence went on steroids, abetted by industry-dominated study commissions championed by Vice President Al Gore and Defense Secretary William Cohen. Oh, the savings, purred the representatives of Boeing, Lockheed Martin, L-3 Communications and other contracting giants on the board of the National Defense Panel, which recommended a vast privatization of national security activities. More than 30,000 government jobs, it estimated, could be cut.
"A revolution in business affairs," Gore and Cohen said in a joint statement.
"A corporate vision for the Defense Department," said Cohen, more precisely.
The revolution was accompanied by the collapse of the Soviet Union, which was to provide a "peace dividend" through reductions in national security spending. The soft part of the budget, as always, was personnel. R. James Woolsey, faced with cuts as Bill Clinton's CIA director in 1993, slashed the number of large CIA stations by more than 60 percent and of case officers working overseas by more than 30 percent, Shorrock reports.
The spies were out in the cold. Yet Woolsey was "ferocious" in defending the intelligence community's technical budget, according to Spies for Hire: "He fought vigorously to increase spending on expensive high-technology programs -- precisely the vehicles that were funding the great leaps being made at the time by Titan, Martin Marietta, and other companies he advised before going to the CIA."
That's a nasty swipe. Is Shorrock suggesting that Woolsey fired spies to make a buck for his pals? Alas, Woolsey doesn't get space to defend himself. In any event, as has been fully reported elsewhere, the CIA was sadly lacking HUMINT -- spy handlers collecting human intelligence -- when al-Qaeda's storm hit landfall in New York and Washington.
So the old boys who had been cut from the rolls, or had retired, saw an opportunity. One of them was Richard "Hollis" Helms, a 30-year CIA veteran who retired in 1999. "In the months after the 9/11 attacks, he began taking notice of the many retired intelligence officers who were being hired by defense contractors," Shorrock writes. He "seized the moment" and created Abraxas, which quickly grew into a company with $65 million in revenues and more than 200 former intelligence officers on its payroll, "the largest aggregate of analytical counter-terrorism capabilities outside of the U.S. government."
Would the United States be better off if those operatives were working as CIA employees, reporting directly to agency supervisors rather than to private bosses whose loyalty to the company's bottom line may trump the nation's national security? After reading Shorrock's strenuous indictment, you will wonder.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
ON MAY 9, 2006, John Humphrey, a former CIA officer making his way up the management ladder of one of the nation's largest intelligence contractors, made a stunning disclosure to Intelcon, a national intelligence conference and exhibition at a hotel in Bethesda, Maryland. Outsourcing, Humphrey declared, was out of control. Contractors deployed in Iraq and other hotspots overseas were making decisions and handling documents that, in earlier times, had been the sole responsibility of U.S. military and intelligence officers. This had caused a "paradigm shift" in the relationship between government and the private sector, and left companies like his in an untenable position.
Five years ago, "you'd never have a contractor supporting an operation on the field where they're making a recommendation to an officer," said Humphrey. Nor would you find a contractor "making little contributions here and there" in the reports intelligence officers sent back to Washington. "This concerns me a lot, the way these lines are blurring," he went on. "We shouldn't be involved in some of these intelligence operations, or the planning, or the interrogations and what have you." Unless government started taking more responsibility in the field, he warned, the "blowback" for the contracting industry could be profound.
The intelligence professionals in the room looked stunned. They had just sat through two days of upbeat discussions about the annual $10-billion expansion of U.S. intelligence budgets and the opportunities that money presented for defense contractors, information technology vendors, and former national security officials who still held their top secret security clearances. Upstairs in the exhibition hall, thirty-five companies were displaying the latest high-tech spying equipment and competing to recruit new employees, who could earn up to three times government pay by migrating to the private sector. Words like "blowback" did not come easily at such gatherings.
But this speaker, and the corporation he represented, had an exceptional story to tell. Humphrey was employed by CACI International Inc., a $1.8-billion information technology (IT) company that does more than 70 percent of its business with the Department of Defense. For many years, CACI had been one of the Pentagon's favorite contractors. It was particularly respected for its professional evaluations of software and IT products supplied to the military by outside vendors. During the late 1990s, CACI moved heavily into military intelligence when the Pentagon, its budget reduced by nearly 30 percent from the days of the Cold War and unhappy with the quality of intelligence it was getting from the CIA, began bringing in private sector analysts for the first time.
This proved to be a prescient move for CACI when nineteen Muslim fanatics linked to Al Qaeda, the global terrorist organization then based in Afghanistan, steered three hijacked jetliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the worst terrorist attack in American history, the Intelligence Community began scouring Washington for analysts, covert operatives, translators, and interrogators it could deploy in the hunt for the perpetrators, and to fill the ranks of hastily organized counterintelligence centers at the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies. CACI, which already had a small army of trained and cleared intelligence specialists holding security clearances, was perfectly positioned to pick up the slack.
Between 2002 and 2006, CACI signed dozens of new contracts, acquired twelve companies, and more than tripled its revenue, from $564 million a year to nearly $2 billion. Its astonishing growth catapulted the company from a bit role in IT to one of the key players in what has become a $50-billion-a-year Intelligence-Industrial Complex. "CACI is a cash-flow story," Dave Dragics, CACI's chief operating officer, boasted to investors in 2006. "Whenever you hear bad news, it's usually good news for us."
But along the road to this gravy train, CACI stumbled. The trouble began in the summer of 2003, when Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, shocked by the resistance to its occupation of Iraq, began filling Iraqi prisons with thousands of people suspected of participating in the insurgency The U.S. Army, however, was desperately short of interrogators, particularly anyone with military experience. Through the Department of the Interior, which had subcontracted management of the Pentagon's IT contracts in 2001, the Army renewed several contracts it had signed during the Bosnian war with Premier Technology Group, a small intelligence shop that CACI acquired in 2003. Within weeks of CACI's acquisition, its PTG unit dispatched two dozen former military interrogators and prison guards to Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison. Many of them were unaware of the nature of the work they would face.
Tasked with the job of rooting out the leaders of the insurgency, some CACI employees directed military interrogators to use techniques on Iraqi prisoners that were, to put it mildly, far outside the norm of civilized conduct. Reports of the mistreatment soon made their way to U.S. commanders in Iraq, who appointed an Army general to investigate conditions at the prison. In the spring of 2004, CACI was thrust into the public limelight when the Army's report, along with hundreds of graphic photographs of Iraqis being tortured and humiliated, were leaked to the press. The Bush administration was thrust into one of its most serious foreign policy crises. After leaving the Pentagon in 2006, Rumsfeld would call Abu Ghraib the worst thing that happened during his five and a half years as secretary of defense (despite being the architect of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, however, he never took responsibility for the actions of his soldiers and contractors).
The details of what CACI's people did at Abu Ghraib were the subject of an insightful book, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, by Seymour Hersh, the reporter who broke the Abu Ghraib story, and the events recalled in excruciating detail by former Iraqi prisoners in a 2007 film made by Hollywood producer Robert Greenwald called Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers. Two internal Army reports concluded that CACI's contract interrogators introduced some of the most brutal practices employed at the prison, including the use of attack dogs. The images of one naked prisoner, cringing in terror as a German shepherd snapped his teeth just inches from the man's genitals, horrified the world. Combined with the testimony of several guards who followed the orders of the CACI and Army interrogators, the pictures convinced U.S. military tribunals to convict two of the dog handlers for assault. But no case was ever made against CACI's men: even though one of CACI's employees, a former prison guard named Steven Stefanowicz, was identified at trial as suggesting the use of the dogs, he has never been charged with a crime. Nor has CACI itself.
Instead, J. P. "Jack" London, CACI's chairman and CEO, made it his life's mission to exonerate his company from any wrongdoing. From the moment the Abu Ghraib story broke in 2004, London fought back with a vengeance, attacking journalists who printed stories about the scandal, and generally castigating anyone who dared to suggest that CACI bore any responsibility for the abuse. At the other extreme, London called Steven Stefanowicz, the man who helped introduce the use of attack dogs at Abu Ghraib, a model employee and praised him for doing "a damned fine job" in Iraq.
The Pentagon, far from chastising its wayward client, continues to reward CACI: despite the unresolved issues involving CACI's role at Abu Ghraib, the Department of Defense has awarded CACI millions of dollars in new contracts, including a three-year, $156 million contract signed in 2006 to provide IT support and training to instructors at the Army's Intelligence School in Fort Huachuca, Arizona. The Office of the Secretary of Defense has hired CACI for two contracts, worth more than $20 million in total, to support the Pentagon's transformation initiatives and manage its classified and unclassified computer networks supporting homeland security and the global "war on terror." 3 In a lucrative arrangement announced in December 2006, the Army placed CACI in an elite group of companies allowed to bid on $35 billion worth of IT and logistics contracts over the next twenty years.
In his remarks to the intelligence conference,* Humphrey, who had worked as a CIA agent in Europe for more than ten years before joining CACI, was careful not to accept, or even apportion, any blame for what happened at the prison. The individuals involved in the "Abu Ghraib incidents," as he called them, "had the best intentions." A contractor at an internment camp is in "a very stressful situation. You're being told you have to do this, that you're the only one who can do this." Contractors, he concluded, "need to settle back down to being in a supportive role." Inside the government, "there's a little too much right now of 'let's get a contractor and life is good.' There needs to be more of a setting of a line." To date, his speech is the most detailed and honest analysis of Abu Ghraib to come from CACI.
I asked CACI if I could interview London or another executive about Humphrey's allegations and the company's work in Iraq. Jody Brown, CACI's vice president for corporate communications, replied by e-mail. CACI, she said, could not confirm information regarding "employees, vendors, or anyone associated with the company," and has posted a "comprehensive" report on its Web site called Facts About CACI in Iraq. "The subject you have selected for your book is interesting and quite timely," Brown added. "As you seem to be aware, considering your interest and coverage of the company over the past two years, we provide high-value critical information technology services to the U.S. government. Our services are aligned with the nation's highest priorities to prevail in the war on terrorism, secure our ho...
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Product details
- ASIN : B001949VEW
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster (May 6, 2008)
- Publication date : May 6, 2008
- Language : English
- File size : 788 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 650 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #522,563 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #69 in Censorship (Kindle Store)
- #315 in Government Management
- #324 in Intelligence & Espionage (Kindle Store)
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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.
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.
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この手のノンフィクション小説は「作者の意図に沿った事実」だけを紡いでいくパターンが多いのですが、作者は敢えて白黒をつけず、事実だけを淡々と公平にレポートします。小説というより寧ろ論文やクロニクルに近く天晴れとも言えますが、延々と読まされる方はやや疲れます・・・。
CIAがファンド会社(In-Q-Tel社)を立ち上げて、民間ハイテク諜報産業に投資・育成(incubate)した~Google Earthの前身も含む~というのが実にアメリカ的で面白かったです。キャッチーなタイトルに反して、非常に真面目且つストイックな本でした。
I would recommend reading just to provide a backgound to inteligence and those who think about investing in any 'public' security companies.
I enjoyed the update issued at the back that informed the reader of the situation at a later date and how things have changed.
In fairness, the trade has grown of late so maybe he need to write an update.






