This Spy for Rent

NYT ^ | 6/13/04 | JAMES BAMFORD

[diotima]

Assessing, cultivating and recruiting spies has long been a key job of Central Intelligence Agency officers. But now it is the C.I.A. officers themselves who are being assessed, cultivated and recruited — sometimes right out of the agency's cafeteria. In what is leading to a critical spy drain, private companies are aggressively seeking highly trained employees of our espionage agencies to fill government contracts.

With the resignation of George Tenet as director of central intelligence and the final hearings of the 9/11 commission this week, the stage is set for the first major restructuring of the intelligence community in decades. While there has been much discussion of moving agencies and creating an "intelligence czar," the privatization of our spies has been largely overlooked.

The C.I.A. is awash in money as a result of post-9/11 budget increases. But because of the general uncertainty over the future, it faces a long delay before it can recruit, train and develop a new generation of spies and analysts. So for now it is building up its staff by turning to the "intelligence-industrial complex."

These corporations range from Fortune 500 giants like Booz Allen Hamilton and Northrop Grumman to small companies made up almost entirely of former senior C.I.A. officers, like the Abraxas Corporation in McLean, Va. For example, one Abraxas expert, Mary Nayak, formerly ran the Directorate of Intelligence's South Asia group; now she's been hired as a consultant to the C.I.A.'s review group on 9/11.

Private contractors are taking over jobs once reserved for highly trained agency employees: regional desk officers who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the 24-hour crisis center; analysts who sift through reams of intelligence data; counterintelligence officers who oversee clandestine meetings between agency officers and their recruited spies; and reports officers who act as liaisons between officers in the field and analysts back at headquarters.

[diotima]

Ping.

[Casloy]

This article leaves a lot out. In the first place, much of the hiring done by these private companies comes from money appropriated by congress directly for Counter Terrorism. The same money can't be used for hiring staff employees. Furthermore, most of the employees being hired are retirees not staffers in the middle of their careers. In many ways this process makes sense. Building up the counter terrorism program with contractors allows you to increase or decrease the staffing quickly. Once you hire a staffer you are stuck with him or her for the long haul, needed or not. Also, contractors can be shifted around within the intelligence community very quickly. You can't do that with staffers.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[Libertina]

Espionage... important job but one I could never envision doing. Interesting choice. But this does say a lot about the agency going through changes.. at the bottom there is only one direction - up.

[Kate of Spice Island]

bump