Intelligence, Inc.

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Thu, 10 Mar 2005 14:32:24 -0800 (PST)

 

 

Intelligence, Inc.

 

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/21422/

 

 

Intelligence, Inc.

By Pratap Chatterjee, AlterNet

Posted on March 7, 2005,

 

 

Just an hour north of the Mexican border, at the base of the

cloud-capped Huachuca Mountains in southern Arizona, lies a military

base with a long history of covert military action. In its early days

as a military fort, it was the location of the capture of Geronimo,

the last Apache warrior to resist the United States. More recently,

Fort Huachuca housed the training of many of the interrogators who

worked in the prisons of Cuba's Guantanamo Bay and Iraq's now infamous

Abu Ghraib prison.

 

In 2003, just 237 interrogators graduated from the United States Army

Intelligence Center, headquartered at the fort. Today, plans call for

quadrupling the number of qualified interrogators to 1,000 a year by

2006 and the number of soldiers trained in basic intelligence skills

to 7,000. This is an astronomical increase, far beyond the current

capabilities of the center.

 

While military contracting for construction or weapons manufacturing

is nothing new, the privatization of intelligence instruction is a new

and rapidly expanding sector that came about less than four years ago.

One estimate in Mother Jones magazine, compiled from interviews with

military experts, suggests that as much 50 percent of the $40 billion

given annually to the 15 intelligence agencies in the United States is

now spent on private contractors.

 

James Bamford, the author of The Puzzle Palace (an expose of the

National Security Agency which is now used as a textbook at the

Defense Intelligence College), is worried about this new trend. " While

there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community

working closely with private industry, " he wrote in The New York

Times, " there is the potential for trouble unless the union is closely

monitored. Because the issue is hidden under heavy layers of secrecy,

it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate figures on just how

much money and how many people are involved. "

 

In an interview, Bamford told us he is concerned about the cost of

privatization. " After spending millions of dollars training people,

taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies. "

 

Among experts, especially those who have worked in the intelligence

business, there is growing concern that privatization also means the

government has less control over its own operations and that the costs

of privatization may outweigh its benefits.

 

A Booming Business

 

Among the private contractors cashing in on the privatization boom is

Virginia-based Anteon International Corp., which has grown tenfold in

the last decade. The company has become one of the nation's primary

contractors for intelligence sharing, intelligence training and video

game warfare simulators. One of Anteon's offices is located on the

Huachuca base itself, while the second sits a mile away on Main

Street, in a bright, freshly-painted pink building, sandwiched between

Enterprise Rent-A-Car, with whom it shares a parking lot, and

Filiberto's Mexican restaurant.

 

Although Anteon first came into existence in 1976, its profits really

began to soar 20 years later, when former investment banker Frederick

Iseman bought the company assets for a mere $48 million. Today,

Anteon's annual revenues exceed a billion dollars and its share price

has jumped from its initial public offering of $18 to $36 in the last

three years.

 

Iseman, who admits he knew nothing about military contracting before

he bought the company (his other investments range from orange juice

to waste management), says he realized he needed connections to expand

on the business. So he recruited a group of highly-placed former

military officials to his board, ranging from William Perry, former

head of the Pentagon, to Hugh Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff under Bill Clinton.

 

The company is shy about revealing the nature of its work for the

military. " We are an information technology systems integrator, " says

Mark Meudt, spokesman for Anteon. " Roughly 90 percent of our work is

for the federal government and the rest is for other governments or

sub-contracts with other companies that have federal contracts. " Meudt

refused to comment on any of the intelligence contracts at Fort

Huachuca, but estimated that a fifth of the company's work is in

simulation training for the military.

 

Today the company holds a master contract to teach a wide variety of

courses for the Initial Entry Training (IET) in the intelligence

school: ranging from the basic course to the more specialized Advanced

Individual Training (AIT) courses such as counter-intelligence

training, interrogation, signals intelligence, electronic intelligence

and signal identification.

 

Traditionally, these IET and AIT jobs were handled by two battalions

of the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade based at Fort Huachuca: the

305th and 309th (a third battalion, the 344th, conducts similar

training in Texas). Today the tasks of teaching — from drawing up the

curriculum to the final exams for the students — still take place on

the military base, but many are conducted by instructors from the

private companies.

 

Classes are held in a big pink H-shaped building in the northwest

quadrant of Fort Huachuca with a red-tiled roof, named Nicholson Hall

after an American intelligence officer who was shot and killed by

Soviet sentries in East Germany in 1985.

 

New students approaching the building must pass under a steel blue

ribbon over the main entrance, emblazoned with the words: " Through

these gates, pass the leaders of Military Intelligence. " Also known as

Building 81505, the windows on the structure are painted a light green

to prevent the casual visitor from seeing in.

 

" Instructors ... portray human intelligence sources in a variety of

role playing scenarios, in diversified settings and environments, such

as practical, situational and field training exercises and tests, "

reads a description of jobs completed on the web site of ISIS, one of

Anteon's sub-contractors.

 

In addition, these instructors " conduct post-role verbal critiques ...

complete written evaluations of student performance ... grade student

reports ... and perform duties as team leaders for 6-12 student

teams. " In short, private companies have taken over the training of

the nation's spies and interrogators.

 

Mysterious Contracts

 

The myriad intelligence contracts are typically vague about exactly

what the contractor's work will involve. In fact, many contracts read

as if they are for entirely unrelated services. A great number of the

contracts signed at Fort Huachuca are officially for " information

technology, " but in reality have been used to fund intelligence work —

more specifically, the hiring of civilian interrogators to work

directly in Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq.

 

At least one was administered by the staff in Building 22208, an

unremarkable old military office on the southeastern edge of the Brown

Parade Field in the heart of the fort, which hosts the Department of

Interior, Directorate of Contracting. This civilian agency holds a

technology contract for a company named Premier Technology.

 

Soon after the contract was issued, however, Premier was bought up by

another Virginia company named CACI International Inc., which used the

original contract to hire private interrogators to work in Abu Ghraib

prison.

 

A similar technology contract deal was pulled by Maryland-based

Lockheed Martin Corporation, which bought up a small company named

Affiliated Computer Services Inc. (ACS) with a Department of Interior

technology contract, and then used the contract to employ private

interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

 

The Titan Corporation, which describes itself as " a leading provider

of comprehensive information and communications products, solutions,

and services for National Security, " was also awarded contracts that

were used to provide services atAbu Ghraib prison. Although not signed

at Fort Huachuca, these contracts supplied the prison with

translators, who have also been implicated in the prison abuse.

 

Most of the translators hired by Titan did not have security

clearances. At least one, Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, had actually failed out

of Fort Huachuca's intelligence school (and later pled guilty to

mishandling classified information and making false statements), while

CACI employees were drafted to do intelligence tasks that they had

never been trained to do. Stephen Stephanowicz is a good example. He

was trained at the base to inspect satellite pictures, but worked as

an interrogator and is now being sued in federal court for allegedly

humiliating, torturing and abusing Iraqi prisoners detained by U.S.

authorities.

 

These are the concerns that weigh heavily on the minds of experts, who

monitor the shadowy world of interrogation and intelligence.

 

" As was made clear by the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, involving private

contractors in sensitive intelligence operations can lead to

disaster, " Bamford wrote in his New York Times op-ed. " And the

potential for disaster only grows when not just the agents on the

ground, but their supervisors and controllers back at headquarters,

are working for some private company. "

 

Bob Baer, the former CIA Middle East specialist and author of the book

See No Evil, says the same phenomenon is happening within his former

agency. " After 1997, practically all training is done by contractors, "

he says. " The CIA is even hiring contractors as station chiefs in

other countries.

 

" I think it was by default — to get around personnel limits and to get

rid of severance problems, " Baer adds. " But these companies don't vet

people, you cannot keep track of who they are working for and of

course they are not efficient. They have lower standards. Their job is

to make money, and so they will tell you whatever you want to hear.

It's called 'customer satisfaction' — you want a convertible, you get

a convertible. "

 

Part of the problem with hiring private contractors, Baer believes, is

the lack of checks and balances. " Now if you ask a private company to

produce a report on Afghan opium production, they will produce the

report, but it might not be the truth. If you ask a CIA nitwit to

write the report, he will care about getting it right, although he

will probably get it wrong. But at least his motivation is correct. "

 

A related article, printed in WorldNetDaily in January 2002, quoted a

source on the base saying that many of the instructors were " a bunch

of soldier's housewives, most who have never been in the Army [and who

do not] even meet the minimum requirements set forth in the hiring

guidelines for the contract. " These instructors, the source said, " are

married to the student [course] graders, who will assure that no

student complains that the teaching is not up to par. "

 

There are also a number of ways for small, start-up contractors to

enter the fray – some by qualifying as disadvantaged minority

enterprises, but most by poaching military personnel straight off the

base and paying them higher salaries or tapping into the market of

retired intelligence officers.

 

Take Castillo Technologies, founded by Alan Castillo, a former Marine.

He registered as a disadvantaged business owner (he is Latino), so

that he could snap up federal contracts to supply intelligence

trainers at Fort Huachuca, after quitting his job at Motorola in 2000.

 

Likewise, ISIS — named after the Egyptian goddess of fertility and

motherhood — was founded by Janice Walker, is headquartered in Sierra

Vista and promotes itself as a woman-owned business. Walker recently

hired Steve Manigault, who worked for the 304th battalion, to go back

and work at the same battalion as a contractor. Walker offers military

battalions a quick and easy way to hire her company to work on the

base for a variety of tasks — from environmental impact assessments to

database management — using what is known as a Blanket Purchase

Agreement (BPA), a government license to get contracts without

competitive bidding.

 

Neil Garra is an example of someone who was hired after retirement.

Garra worked off and on the base for over a decade of his military

career, beginning as a military instructor in 1989, rising to vice

deputy director of the Battle Laboratory on the base in 1999, before

retiring in 2000. Today he has his own small business, named S2

Company, which takes on sub-contracts to design war game simulations.

 

Walker and Garra return neither phone calls nor emails requesting

their comment on the contracts. Castillo spoke briefly with us over

the phone, but hung up when asked about his new intelligence contracts.

 

In Denial

 

Today, Fort Huachuca is still smarting under the attention brought by

the Abu Ghraib scandals. And officials at the fort are reluctant to

talk openly about whether privatization has anything to do with the

problems that have come to light.

 

The United States Training and Doctrine Command, the umbrella

organization for all military training, agreed to answer questions

from us about the Anteon contracts, but has yet to provide any

answers, despite two months of phone calls and email communication.

" We are waiting for the 111th Military Intelligence Brigade to give us

the information, but we cannot provide you with any timeline as to

when that might be, " says Tanja Linton, the spokeswomen for Fort Huachuca.

 

Meanwhile, the revolving door between intelligence training, the

battlegrounds of the Middle East, and private business continues to

spin. Gen. James " Spider " Marks, who was commander of the base when

news of the scandals broke last April, told National Public Radio last

May: " I'm disgusted by (the Abu Ghraib scandal) just like you are, and

those aren't interrogation techniques. That's a bunch of rogue

soldiers conducting evil acts. "

 

But like many of his former interrogators, Marks too quit the military

last fall to take a job in the lucrative private intelligence business

– he become the senior vice president of intelligence and security for

a company named McNeil Technologies Inc..

 

Visitors to the base today will notice that there is a blank spot at

the entrance gates where the picture of Marks used to hang — it has

not been replaced with the picture of his successor, Maj. Gen. Barbara

Fast.

 

That's because Fast is being investigated for her role in Iraq, where

she supervised two Army intelligence officers implicated in the

scandal — Col. Thomas M. Pappas and Lt. Col. Steve Jordan, both with

the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade, which operated the Abu Ghraib

prison. Official investigations allege that Fast was notified of

abuses in the prisons but did nothing about them. Only time will tell

whether there's a job waiting for her in the private sector as well.

 

http://www.alternet.org/story/21422/