R.J. Hillhouse, the author of Outsourced, the latest in espionage fiction, takes an interesting look at real, live outsourcing at the CIA in Sunday’s Washington Post. Here’s an excerpt:
“Although the contracting system is Byzantine, there’s no question that the private sector delivers high-quality professional intelligence services. Outsourcing has provided solutions to personnel-management problems that have always plagued the CIA’s operations side. Rather than tying agents up in the kind of office politics that government employees have to engage in to advance their careers, outsourcing permits them to focus on what they do best, which boosts morale and performance. Privatization also immediately increased the number of trained, experienced agents in the field after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“Even though wide-scale outsourcing may not immediately endanger national security, it’s worrisome. The contractors in charge of espionage are still chiefly CIA alumni who have absorbed its public service values. But as the center of gravity shifts from the public sector to the private, more than one independent intelligence firm has developed plans to “raise” succeeding generations of officers within its own training systems. These corporate-grown agents will be inculcated with corporate values and ethics, not those of public service.”
Comment: Exactly. All the contract agents Booz Allen and other companies send into the intelligence services are also there for business development, trying to drum up the next contract. That skews the whole system towards business and away from what the intelligence agencies should be doing – finding out as much as they can about the rest of the world, tracking real – not phantom – enemies, and finding ways to avoid antagonizing more people in the Middle East and inviting more attacks. But I’m not sure if I buy the part about boosting morale and performance. What I hear is the opposite: contracting has deprived US intelligence of a generation of mentors who can help train the next generation of analysts, thus downgrading the whole enterprise. Still, Hillhouse raises important issues and makes a powerful case for monitoring this relatively trend in national security policy.
