Feedback from inquisitive minds is the best validation of this website
I was very pleased this morning to find that four readers using my wordpress platform had delved into the website archive or used Google search to find my 2022 essay about the contents and relevance of a book of essays I published in 2010, Great Post Cold War American Thinkers on International Relations – the book which I mentioned in yesterday’s installment here. It was still more pleasant to find on my daily Amazon account that one reader had just purchased a copy of that book after reading my remarks yesterday.
The link is here for those subscribers who have joined this community recently and would like to catch up: https://gilbertdoctorow.com/20203/28/great-post-cold-war-americanthinkers-on-international-relations/
On my substack platform, one subscriber posted a comment on yesterday’s introduction to my ‘Dialogue Works’ interview suggesting I was possibly being too self-promoting. To this I replied that when you are publishing even a gentle critical comment on Messrs. Jeffrey Sachs and John Mearsheimer directly not to mention a harsher critique of Scott Ritter indirectly, you are by definition no ‘wilting violet.’
Indeed, I am today battle-scarred from the Information Wars. Back in 2010, when I was a Visiting Fellow of the Harriman Institute, Columbia University, I delivered a book presentation of the newly released Great Post Cold War...Thinkers in a room of the Harriman Institute, which was then still a major center of Russian studies in U.S. higher education but is today a center of Ukrainian studies and of the ‘de-colonization’ of Russia. I was met by stony faces, since faculty had no idea that one might say anything other than complimentary if not adulatory when writing about the ‘greats’ of political science, namely Kissinger, Brzezinski, Huntington and Fukuyama, among others.
Then there was another communication yesterday from a reader with a properly inquisitive mind who asked for the link to my article written a decade or more ago which I mentioned in the chat with Nima Alkhorshid, the one dealing with Cheney’s gutting the Deep State, meaning here the State Department and the CIA along with other federal government intelligence groups. In that same article I spoke about why the Sovietologists were chased out and some Middle East and Islamist extremism experts were ushered in, plus the shift of a substantial part of the intelligence budget away from federal employees and towards commercial suppliers on short term contracts. All of this, by the way, is why I believe that sanitizing the intelligence agencies will take a great deal more than replacement of the very top echelons there who may be yes-men to the White House.
Regrettably, in trying to respond to this request, I discovered that I had not included that very important essay in my several published collections of essays, and that I do not have the skills to locate it in the archive of either of my web platforms, though in principle it should be there from when I transferred the entire record of my essays published over the course of five or more years on the guest platform of the French-language Belgian daily Le Soir away from there to my then new wordpress website. Perhaps I will succeed in locating the article in question in one of my memory sticks or on now retired PCs. In that case I will republish it here. But as a token indication of the sources I was using for my article I have cut and paste below the introductory pages of one of those key sources. Note that the information on outsourcing of intelligence work dates from 2006. I have not followed up this question recently and do not know the proportion of intelligence gathering done inside the federal agencies versus by contract to commercial service providers.
I was pleased to get this request, because we disseminators of commentary on current international events should, where possible, explain to readers and listeners what are our sources.
In its own way, this nasty experience trying and failing to locate an important article that I had written a decade or mor ago is the very reason why I periodically publish collections of my essays as e-books or paperbacks. Websites come and go; books do not. However, it is always a challenge to know what to republish in a book and what to leave to the side because it does not appear to be germane to the central idea of the book.
Quote
ANALYSIS 03/12/2007
OUTSOURCING INTELLIGENCE:
THE EXAMPLE OF THE UNITED STATES
by Raphaël RAMOS, Research Associate
This past September, the polemic around Blackwater USA[1] illustrated the growing reliance of the American government on the private sector to carry out security missions that formerly were entrusted to the military. In Iraq, this practice has assumed unprecedented scope. According to the Washington Post, the number of armed persons working in Mesopotamia for companies under contract with the United States government has ranged between 20,000 and 30,000[2]. If we look beyond the area of security, the number of individuals present in Iraq on the basis of contracts signed by companies with the Pentagon or US State Department was estimated in July, 2007 to be more than 180,000[3]. Among these civilians employed by private companies, some work on behalf of intelligence agencies such as the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) or the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency).
Contrary to conventional wisdom, this practice of outsourcing intelligence is nothing new. In fact it goes back to the very beginning of the American nation. Due to a lack of money and of intelligence professionals, certain activities involving collecting and analysing data were entrusted to civilians who were engaged for brief periods of time. Thus, during the War of Independence, General George Washington made use of many networks of civilian spies. In the same way, during the 19th century, the company of the well-known Allan Pinkerton conducted espionage on behalf of the American government. This process slowed down in the 20th century when intelligence became professional and specialised military agencies emerged. It reappeared in the 1990s and continued to develop, reaching a scale never seen before. According to internal sources within the American intelligence community, nearly seventy percent of its budget is spent via contracts with private companies[4].
While the ‘privatisation of security’ has been the subject of many articles and studies, the process of outsourcing party of intelligence activities still remains largely ignored. By taking the example of the United States, the leading country in this domain, it would seem interesting to go into the development of this phenomenon and examine its true extent, the reasons for its happening today and its limits.
Though, as we have seen, the use of private companies in the area of intelligence is nothing new, the extent of the phenomenon today is without precedent. It is still difficult to evaluate precisely, because of the secrecy inherent in the practice of intelligence and the polemics that have rendered this question very sensitive in the United States. Last April, Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence (DNI), was supposed to present a report on the practice of outsourcing within the community he directs. This report was initially delayed and then was classified, thus rendering its publication impossible.[5]
At the same time, the press revealed that according to a presentation made within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the American intelligence community devotes nearly seventy percent of its budget to outsourcing part of its activities. This is difficult to verify and has been challenged by certain officials in Mr. McConnell’s office[6], but the figure nonetheless confirms a tendency towards increased reliance of the federal intelligence agencies on subcontractors. Other sources revealed that for the year 2004, around half of the intelligence budget was used to obtain the services of private companies[7]. The explosion in the number of these specialised enterprises suggests there is a very lucrative market here being fed by the sixteen member bodies of the American intelligence community.[8]
w The agencies and the activities concerned
Outsourcing is greatest among the agencies reporting to the Defense Department. The intelligence activities managed by the NSA (National Security Agency), the NGA (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) and the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) are undeniably the most costly. In addition, their high technology nature makes it inevitable to go to actors in the private sector. Thus, ever since the summer of 2001, the NSA has had a signed contract worth more than two billion dollars subcontracting certain of its activities concerning Information Technologies and communications over a period lasting ten years.[9] Similarly, ever since its creation in 1995, the NGA has relied on the private sector to supply it with software and Information Systems. Today, out of the 14,000 persons working in NGA premises, nearly half are in reality employed by subcontractor companies.[10] All the same, one must note that the most ‘traditional’ activities such as human collecting of intelligence or analysis are also affected by this phenomenon.
[1] On September 16, 2007, some employees of Blackwater USA killed seventeen Iraqi civilians during a shooting under circumstances that remain hazy. Following this event, the Iraqi government asked the security company to leave Iraq.
[2] Steve Fainaru, Saad al-Izzi, ‘U.S. Security Contractors Open Fire in Baghdad,’ The Washington Post, May 27, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/26/AR2007052601394.html
[3] T. Christian Miller, ‘Private Contractors Outnumber US Troops in Iraq,’ The Los Angeles Times, July 4, 2007.
[4] Tim Shorrock, ‘The corporate takeover of U.S. intelligence ,’ Salon.com, June 1, 2007. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/06/01/intel_contractors/
[5] Scott Shane, ‘ Government Keeps a Secret After Studying Spy Agencies ,’ The New York Times, April 26, 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/26/washington/26contracting.html
[6] Shaun Waterman, ‘Analysis: Intel Spending and Contractors,’ UPI, June 27, 2007. http://www.upi.com/Security_Terrorism/Analysis/2007/06/27/analysis_intel_spending_and_contractors/3391/
[7] Major Glenn J. Voelz, USA, Managing the Private Spies: The Use of Commercial Augmentation for Intelligence Operations, Washington D.C., Center for Strategic Intelligence Research, Joint Military Intelligence College, June 2006, p. 12.
[8] Basing ourselves on the official figure of the intelligence budget, 43.5 billion dollars, as published by the American Administration, the intelligence outsourcing market would be more than 30 billion dollars for the year 2007.
[9] National Security Agency Outsources Areas of Non-Mission Information Technology to CSC-Led Alliance Team, NSA Press Release, July 31, 2001. http://www.nsa.gov/releases/relea00034.cfm
[10] Tim Shorrock, 'The corporate takeover of U.S. intelligence,’ op. cit.