Book Review: Tim Shorrock's 'Spies for Hire'

by Meteor Blades [courtesy of Daily Kos]

Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing
By Tim Shorrock
Simon & Shuster, 2008
439 pages
$17.99

If your budget is limited or your spare hours are few, sit down at Barnes & Noble and read the first chapter of Tim Shorrock’s Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting that far who won’t set aside the money and time to take the book home and devour the rest of it. Shorrock gives us as clear a picture of the business ties of the Intelligence-Industrial Complex as can be done by a guy without a TS/SCI, the highest security clearance.

These days, as he tells us, the majority of people who do have TS/SCIs aren’t employed by the government. They’re private contractors. And they didn’t get those clearances by talking about their work to outsiders, unless their specific task is disinformation. Despite zipped lips and unreturned phone calls, Shorrock has pried off lids and written a book as revealing in its own way as the seminal The Puzzle Palace, James Bamford’s great 1982 exposé about the National Security Agency.  

You won’t read the words "ruling class" in Spies for Hire, and I’m sympathetic, because few writers who want to be taken seriously will unhesitatingly employ those words in public discourse these days. Not so much out of fear that Patrick Buchanan will redbait them as that many post-Cold War liberals will do so. But a slice of the ruling class is who Shorrock describes throughout his book.

The most dangerous people on the planet are not the fanatics squatting in hide-outs in the mountains of Pakistan or operating sleeper cells in Amsterdam. They are instead the chieftains and sub-chieftains of an interwoven array of entrepreneurial intelligence mavens engaged in a "public-private partnership" whose power and behavior and reach are limited only by the elected officials charged with their supposed oversight. At the beck and call of this dangerous array are money, information, expertise, the latest technology, lethal force, and the ear of political leaders who actively or passively set the ethical and legal parameters, if any, in which these spies for hire operate on a daily basis. They have in their hands the most sophisticated tools for going after whomever they designate as "the bad guys" – and anybody else they wish – secretly. And much else. Most of this isn’t new. But in the old days, the early ‘90s and before, those engaged in this work were almost always government guys. Now it’s hard to tell.

At the National Security Agency, National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, Defense Intelligence Agency, and Central Intelligence Agency, indeed, the entire alphabet soup of 16 agencies that fall under the purview of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, government analysts often find themselves sitting next to corporate analysts working on the same project, but for two or three times the salary. At the CIA, they call them "green-badgers" to distinguish them from the government employees who wear blue badges, and they are everywhere. It’s not just people with badly needed, ultraspecialized experience that can’t be found in-house. Contractors have filled jobs as high as deputy chief of station for the CIA.

Epitomizing what’s happened is the guy at the top of the whole shebang, Mike McConnell. Appointed as director of national intelligence by President Bush in January 2007, McConnell came out of both the public and private sectors. A vice admiral in the Navy, where he served all but three of his 29 years as an intelligence officer, including a stint as Colin Powell’s chief of intelligence when the general was chairman of  the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War, McConnell departed for Booz Allen Hamilton in 1996. As executive vice president for 10 years there, he managed the company’s extensive contract jobs in military intelligence, which kept him in close contact with the alphabet soup of government intelligence agencies. How much Booz Allen profited from these contracts is classified information, but it was not peanuts. As Shorrock writes, those contracts meant that the company was "directly involved in the most sensitive initiatives taken by U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon during the war on terror."