Cybersecurity and the new intelligence ruling class
By Tim Shorrock (first published in The Nation, 2015)
About a year ago, I wrangled a media invitation to a “leadership dinner” in Northern Virginia sponsored by the Intelligence and National Security Alliance. INSA is a powerful but little known coalition of spies and contractors founded by companies working for the National Security Agency. It’s become the premiere organization where intelligence policies are discussed and debated by the men and women who run the massive Cyber-Intelligence industrial complex that encircles Washington.
The keynote speaker was Matthew Olsen, was then the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. He used his talk to bolster the morale of his colleagues stung by the public backlash against NSA’s mass surveillance programs, the extent of which was still coming to light in the steady release of Edward Snowden’s huge trove of documents. “NSA is a national treasure,” Olsen declared. “Our national security depends on NSA’s continued capacity to collect this kind of information.” There was loud, sustained applause.
One of those clapping was a former Navy SEAL named Melchior Baltazar, the founding CEO of an up-and-coming company called SDL Government. Its niche, an eager young flack explained, is providing software that military agencies can use to electronically translate hundreds of thousands of Twitter and Facebook postings in foreign languages into English, and then rapidly search through the postings for potential clues to terrorist plotting or cyber-crime.
It sounded like the perfect tool for the NSA. Just a few months earlier, Snowden had leaked documents revealing a secret program called PRISM that gave NSA direct access to the servers of tech firms including both Facebook and Google. Others showed that NSA and Britain’s GCHQ had special units focused on cracking encryption codes at social media globally.
SDL’s software would be perfectly designed for such a task. It might useful, say, for a team of Navy SEALs on a covert operation trying to make sure their cover wasn’t being blown by somebody on social media – something that almost happened when an alert Twitter user in Pakistan picked up early signs of the secret U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. And of course there’s no limits on how NSA could deploy it.
In any case, the software, SDL boasts, is “securely deployed on-premise, behind the firewall, at over 75 government organizations, including the Department of Defense and the Intelligence Community.” Obviously that could include the NSA. No wonder he was here at INSA, rubbing shoulders with the kings and queens of the intelligence contracting industry.
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This small company, and INSA itself, are vivid examples of the rise of a new class in America: the cyber-intelligence ruling class.
These are the people – often referred to as “intelligence professionals” – who do the actual analytical and targeting work of the NSA and other agencies in America’s secret government. Over the last 15 years, literally thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms and private equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government – often for the same agencies they came from. Except this time, their mission is strictly for profit.
Take Matthew Olsen, who served prior to the NCTC as the general counsel for the NSA and a top lawyer for the Department of Justice. He is now the president for consulting services of IronNet Cybersecurity, the company founded last year by Army General Keith Alexander, the longest serving director in the history of the NSA. It’s being paid upwards of a million dollars a month to consult with major banks and financial institutions in a “cyberwar council” that will work with NSA, the Treasury Department and other agencies to deter cyber-attacks that “could trigger financial panic,” Bloomberg reported last July.
Some members of this unique class are household names. Most cable viewers, for example, are intimately familiar with Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden, two of the top national security officials in the Bush administration. In 2009, they left their positions at Justice and the NSA to create the Chertoff Group, one of Washington’s largest consulting firms, with a major emphasis on security. Others are unknown, except to deep insiders in the surveillance and militarized cyber world.
Sam Visner, who I wrote about in a 2013 Nation article on NSA whistleblowers, is more under the radar. He is a former SAIC executive hired by Hayden as his SIGINT director and then tasked to manage his privatized (and disastrous) Trailblazer program that was outsourced to (who else?) SAIC. In 2003, he returned to the giant contractor for a while, then moved on to CSC, which not only manages but owns the NSA’s internal communications system. For most of the last five years, as the cyber industry grew by leaps and bounds under Obama, Visner was running CSC’s massive cybersecurity program for the government.
Hardly a week goes by in Washington without a similar transition. In March, the Washington Post reported on “the latest hot jobs in Washington’s revolving door” – cyber lawyers. Robert Mueller, the recently retired Director of the FBI, had just joined the national security law practice of Wilmer Hale. There, he will lead “the most sensitive internal investigations” and “counsel in crisis management.” His latest task? Advising Alexander as he tries to tap down the outrage he sparked in Congress by hiring two NSA officials who will work simultaneously for IronNet and the agency.
Well, enough, you might say: isn’t this simply a continuation of Washington’s historic revolving door? The answer is no.
As I see it, the cyber and intelligence ruling class of today is qualitatively different – and more dangerous – than the military intelligence complex identified by President Eisenhower in his famous farewell address. Correspondingly, its implications for democracy, inequality, and secrecy are far more insidious.
To be sure, American policies have always been shaped by and for the one percent. Throughout U.S. history, U.S. diplomatic and national security officials came directly from the ruling elite, and more often that not served those interests while in office (Allen and John Foster Dulles, the brothers and law partners who ran the CIA and the State Department for the Eisenhower administration, were classic examples, running multiple operations to support their own clients).
The 1950s also saw the beginnings of the movement of retired generals into industry.
In 1956, C. Wright Mills, a radical sociologist and a professor at Columbia, published The Power Elite, a groundbreaking study of the institutions through which the corporations of his day wielded political and economic power. Mills was particularly disturbed by the spectacle of multinational companies appointing prominent generals to their boards. Among those who had traded in their uniforms for big business, he found, were some of the great heroes of World War II: General Douglas MacArthur (Remington Rand), Gen. Lucias Clay (Continental Can) and Gen. Jimmy Doolittle (Shell Oil).
This “personnel traffic,” Mills wrote, symbolized “the great structural shift of modern American capitalism toward a permanent war economy.” It was a prescient analysis that would be borne out in time. But Mills was only talking of generals; presidents and secretaries of state going into the military business was simply unthinkable at the time.
Traditionally, people of that caliber left government for higher pursuits – the World Bank, the Ford Foundation – not directly related to their former jobs. The first high-ranking official to break this mold may have been Richard Nixon. For six years before he was elected president in 1968, Nixon toured the world on behalf of Pepsico and Lockheed, the biggest clients of his New York law firm. But after leaving the White House in disgrace, he faded into obscurity, finally emerging as a kind of elderly statesman and the author of weighty historical tomes.
The next two decades saw the rise of private security companies and consultancies run by former CIA and FBI agents. Once, in the early 1980s, I was startled to find myself seated next to William Colby, the notorious former director of the CIA, at a seminar on the Panama Canal; he was there representing a consortium of Japanese construction firms. And of course there was Henry Kissinger, who walked away from his years as national security adviser and Secretary of State to start a corporate consulting firm that remains one of the most powerful in Washington.
But there was one line Cold War officials never crossed: taking positions at defense contractors; until the 1990s, this was considered unseemly. Then came Frank Carlucci, a former Deputy Director of the CIA who served in Ronald Reagan’s second term as national security adviser and Secretary of Defense. Within weeks of retiring, he joined the boards of no less than nine maj0r corporations, including three that were important military contractors.
This was too much for Caspar Weinburger, a former Bechtel executive who was Carlucci’s predecessor at the Pentagon. “Generally, I would not think it appropriate to serve on the board of a company that had extensive contractual relationships with the department, particularly not if they had those relationships while I was in office,” he told a reporter at the time. “Cap is entitled to his own preferences,” Carlucci sniffed. He went on to chair the Carlyle Group, the private equity firm that by 2001 was nation’s ninth largest defense contractor.
With the end of the cold war, Carlucci’s way became the norm. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, intelligence and defense budgets were cut and thousands of CIA and NSA officers left the government for positions with defense contractors. Demand for them grew during the Balkan War, especially when President Clinton deployed U.S. forces to Bosnia. Pressed, the military and its intelligence agencies began hiring private companies to do work historically carried out by the state.
Among them was Halliburton, the Texas oil-services and logistics firm. In 1995, after retiring as Secretary of Defense for President George H.W Bush, Dick Cheney became the CEO of Halliburton; over the next six years, he transformed it into one of the world’s largest military contractors. Around the same time, the elder Bush was hired as a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group. By the time Cheney became vice president for George W. Bush in 2001, outsourcing was official policy, and the migration of senior level government officials into the military and intelligence industry was standard practice. This ushered in the new age.
What we have now is a national security class that simultaneously bridges the gap between private and public, merging their government careers with their jobs as corporate executives and consultants. By keeping their security clearances, they have access to the most highly guarded intelligence, and use it to the benefit of their corporate and government clients. The power they wield is exponentially greater than their Cold War predecessors.
To see the difference, let’s take a dive into the Chertoff Group and its best known executive, former NSA Director Michael Hayden.
Michael Chertoff founded his consultancy in March 2009, barely two months after President Obama was inaugurated. His co-founder was Chad Sweet, who had been his chief of staff at DHS and had earlier worked in the CIA’s National Clandestine Service. In effect, they recreated the national security team that provided much of the intelligence advice to Bush and Cheney, and said so in their literature. Chertoff’ provides “business and government leaders with the same kind of high-level, strategic thinking and diligent execution that have kept the American homeland and its people safe since 9/11,” the firm’s website states.
When Hayden came on board in April 2009, he emphasized that continuity. “After serving for decades at the highest levels of the U.S. military and the U.S. intelligence services, I grew accustomed to working alongside remarkably talented and dedicated professionals,” he wrote. “I wanted an opportunity to recreate the experience in the private sector.” He did just that.
One of his recruits was Charles E. Allen, a legendary figure in intelligence whose last jobs were as Assistant Director of Central Intelligence for Collection to George Tenet and, subsequently, director of intelligence for Chertoff’s DHS. Another principal with extensive NSA experience is Paul Schneider, who was Chertoff’s deputy secretary at DHS; from 2002 to 2003, he was Hayden’s Senior Acquisition Executive at the NSA. That would have put him in charge of all of the NSA’s hugely expensive contracting, which exploded during Hayden’s reign from 1999 to 2006.
With other hires, Hayden created a kind of shadow NSA; the firm’s principles now include the former Deputy Chief of Staff for Cyber and Director of the NSA Threat Operations Center; the head of U.S. Counterintelligence at ODNI; two veterans of the CIA’s National Clandestine Services; and the former deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney.
But Chertoff isn’t Hayden’s only gig. He’s also joined the board of directors of two key NSA contractors, Motorola Solutions and Alion Science and Technology. Strangely, Alion touts Hayden’s role in domestic surveillance. “Under his guidance as the Director of NSA, the domestic telephone call database was created to monitor international communications to assist in locating terrorists,” its bio of Hayden reads.
Chertoff does not disclose its clients. But one of its most important functions for both the state and its contractor allies is as a broker of mergers and acquisitions. Using its team of NSA, CIA and DHS veterans (who of course have deep, classified knowledge of their agencies’ contracting past and its future needs), the Chertoff Group has brokered dozens of contractor deals through its subsidiary, Chertoff Capital. Its focus: Cybersecurity; Intelligence and Data Analytics; Defense Technology; and “Development and Diplomacy (‘Soft Power’)” You get the picture.
In one important deal that neatly links many key players in intelligence, Chertoff brokered the acquisition of Sotera Defense Solutions (whose CEO is Keith Alexander’s business partner in IronNet), by Potomac Fusion (which owns the company that runs the TIDES database and was once headed by CIA Director John Brennan). Both Sotera and Potomac are key NSA contractors, and have managed major surveillance contracts in Afghanistan for the U.S. Central Command. These aren’t just “deals”; they also represent significant reorganizations within the Intelligence Community, which is 70 percent contracted and requires centralization like any other industry.
Another other way the “dual ruling class” exerts undue influence is through the media. Hayden appears on one cable channel or another almost every day, extolling the greatness of the NSA and it vast surveillance capabilities. Is that any wonder, when you consider how much he has invested in it? Look into any “national security analyst” on the networks, and you’ll find a member of this class. Matthew Olsen, the former NCTC director and Ironnet principle, recently joined ABC News as a commentator. There are dozens of other examples. Watch carefully; few of them ever diverge from the company (or NSA, or CIA) line.
Meanwhile, members of this dual class all rub shoulders at such places as INSA, where they often meet behind closed doors to discuss classified programs. Sam Visner, for example (now a top executive with the consultant ICF International) is a member of INSA’s executive committee and its “Cyber Council.” And even while making millions of dollars through their contracting and consulting gigs, these former officials advise the same agencies they profit from: Olsen, was just named to the DHS Homeland Security Advisory Council. It’s a cozy, closed, and very profitable world.
So what does the existence of such a class mean?
First off, it deepens inequality. We all know that private corporations can buy all the access they desire through their hefty political donations. Now they have access of a different kind, through executives like Hayden or Alexander, to knowledge based on the highest held secrets of the state. According to a declassified document obtained in April by the Times, three of the privateers named in this article, Hayden, McConnell and Alexander, were all “read into” Stellarwind, the warrantless surveillance program started after 9/11. They are bound by law not to divulge those secrets; but their knowledge based on those secrets is of unfathomable value to the corporations they advise on cybersecurity and acquisitions strategies. That knowledge isn’t shared with the public; only the companies that can afford it.
Second, it places participatory democracy at risk. The vast majority of Americans are excluded from the discussions and decision-making the “dual class” has at its secret meetings. While hashing over controversial programs such as domestic spying, offensive cyber-operations, or FBI terrorist entrapment programs, the state and corporate elite at INSA operate on a completely different plane than the rest of us. Meanwhile, the black hole of secrecy keeps this new class and its organizations immune from any meaningful oversight from either the executive branch or Congress.
Strangely, however, virtually none of the documents leaked by Edward Snowden so far have focused on the corporate elephant that so clearly dominates the surveillance jungle. As far as I’ve been able to track, there’s only one Snowden document that actually mentions a major contractor. It was released as part of one of Der Spiegel’s 2013 stories on NSA spying on Germany.
The document identifies a code name – FIFTYEXPLAIN – as the “covert term representing NSA’s contract with Computer Services Corporations (CSC) for mission support. All publicly available information regarding work on this contract…will be sanitized so that no association with NSA will be made.” It’s dated 16 February 2005. My guess is, it was written to protect the company from exposure as James Risen and other Times reporters were preparing their first blockbuster story on NSA spying, which came out that December.
As of today, this document has yet to be mentioned by either The Intercept or the Washington Post, the largest recipients of the Snowden trove. The only corporations named in their documents have been companies that were targeted by NSA, not collaborating with it. This may in part be due to Snowden’s apparent reluctance to leak documents directly pertaining to his work with Booz Allen Hamilton and, before that, Dell Computers.
In the film Citizen Four, in fact, Snowden actually downplays his role at Booz Allen, which is one of the NSA’s most important corporate advisers. At one point, he mentions that he was employed by Booz as an “infrastructure analyst” for NSA in Hawaii. But he never elaborates on the company’s extensive relationship with the agency; nor is he asked (on camera at least) about Booz and other contractors by Glenn Greenwald or the filmmaker herself, Laura Poitras. At another point, when he’s told that security officers have arrived at his residence in Hawaii, he points out that they come from NSA, not Booz.
In public comments he’s made since then, Snowden has spoken only very generally about NSA’s contractors. In 2013, I had an opportunity to post a question to him via Twitter during his appearance at SWSX in Austin. He spoke almost generically, providing nothing we didn’t know. “The problem is that when the NSA gets a pot of money, they don’t develop the solution for themselves – they bring in contractors” who “aren’t accountable,” he said. He went on to say that “it was not uncommon for me at the NSA as a private employee to write the same point papers and kind of policy suggestion that I get as an official employee of the government at the CIA.”
Yet not one document has surfaced that would shed any light on how that actually works, or how high up the chain of command a Booz Allen, a CSC or an SAIC has influence. That may be a decision by his publishers, because in the film, Snowden made clear he didn’t “want to be the person making decisions for what should be published and what shouldn’t.” So the ball is in the court of those journalists who have access to his documents. Either that, or Snowden was more loyal to Booz Allen than he was to his own government.
Documents on the contractor role at NSA and other agencies are essential if we are to understand the totality of U.S. spying programs and its “infrastructure,” as The Intercept calls it. To confront the surveillance state, we also have to confront the private-public joint venture that the “state” has become and reveal the new intelligence ruling class for what it really is: a conclave of government and the private sector with zero accountability and massive powers never seen before.