Editor’s note: At the time this article was published, Joshua Foust was employed by Northrop Grumman, a defense contractor.
Here’s a neat exercise: with the obvious exception of some interviews with corporate and agency spokesman, and a bizarre interview with a girlfriend in a bar, try to find something in The Washington Post’s “Top Secret America” that isn’t on Google.
You won’t find much. Some contractors seem to have more money than they know what to do with? Written about in 2005 in Mother Jones.* There’s been a massive build up of secret facilities? The Washington Post itself covered that last year as well, when it noted all the secret buildings and communications infrastructure in the Tysons Corner area of Northern Virginia made it difficult to expand the Metro. Sometimes intelligence analysts can be jerks to their girlfriends? Well…
Indeed, it is truly remarkable how little new information “Top Secret America” presents. The last entry in the three-part series, “The Secrets Next Door,” discusses what the NSA does in its massive sprawl of buildings in Ft. Meade, MD: cryptology, eavesdropping, linguistics, and so on. It sounds scary, but that’s all publicly available on the NSA website. You don’t need special access to see, as the paper points out in “National Security, Inc.,” that the entirety of the Dulles Toll Road is lined with military and intelligence contractors—as journalist Tim Shorrock has noted, you can drive around in your car, unrestricted, and see all of these buildings. Authors Dana Priest and Bill Arkin make a point to remind readers that they aren’t posting addresses or identifying buildings of any agencies… but even the supposedly secret Liberty Crossing, which houses the National Counterterrorism Center and the Director of National Security, is easily found in Google Maps based on their description (you can even see the entrance to the facility in Street View).
The Post has made it very clear that they are performing a public service in providing all of this information, and in one sense they are: their work has made public information about the intelligence community (IC) much more accessible for regular people who wish to understand it. But so what? The series lacks the context, scope, and inquisitive spirit necessary to help people better understand what this information means, and how alarmed they should be by it all.
Priest and Arkin have written in their stories that agencies have grown out of control… and that could easily be true, but where is the line? Is the NSA an acceptably-sized organization with 10,000 employees, but not with 10,001? They state that contracting firms routinely perform jobs that are “inherently governmental functions,” to borrow the legal term. Only Priest and Arkin never define what they think that term means (it’s legally somewhat nebulous), nor do they provide examples of contractors performing said un-contractable work.
Let’s look at the sheer size of the IC. No one could possibly deny it has grown enormously in the last eight years. I noted earlier this week that the IC’s growth didn’t happen in a vacuum: it took place at the behest of Congress and the public, demanding “more” intelligence to counter the global counter-terror threat. The use of contractors has grown because the IC’s mission has expanded tremendously, but the ease of hiring permanent employees has not.
It is healthy to question why these two dynamics are at play. Why do we demand the IC perform more tasks, then restrict its ability to hire employees, then complain when it contracts out work to compensate? Is it even appropriate to give the IC such an expanded mission? If so, how can we modify how the community as a whole functions to reduce waste?
Priest and Arkin ask none of these questions. In fact, it’s not clear what they were asking. In the piece about intelligence contractors, we hear some eye-popping stories: cleared contractors can fetch $50,000 finders’ fees, some companies reward their employees with BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes, and signing bonuses of $15,000, and so on. But there’s no indication such practices are widespread: Priest and Arkin simply say such things are “common,” and cite “industry insiders” as their source.
Let’s unpack that $15,000 signing bonus. Priest and Arkin say it was for a group of software developers hired at Raytheon, a large firm that provides missile technology and computer security systems to the government. According to Glassdoor.com, a software development engineer at Microsoft can expect bonuses of up to $45,000 in a single year, when cash and stock bonuses are accounted for. A one-time $15,000 bonus merely for joining a company is relatively paltry in comparison, however enormous it might seem on its own.
Private companies are not the only members of the intelligence community that offer surprising perks to their employees. The CIA recently emerged from a lawsuit against a onetime recruit who billed the agency for $13,500 in moving expenses but then declined to take the job. A federal judge ruled the CIA’s lawyers committed fraud in the lawsuit, and instructed the CIA’s general counsel to “initiate an investigation into the actions that took place in this matter and whether there exists a pattern and practice of abuse by the CIA with respect to debt collection.” Yet few complain about suspicions that the CIA routinely hassles and defrauds young college graduates.
- 1
- 2
FINALLY! Someone got it right concerning the farce that is "Top Secret America." The Post series was written only to inflame, not to educate. As someone who has worked in the IC for a decade, I can tell you that only ONE defense contractor (Mantech) gave away ONE BMW to ONE employee in a lottery of TS/Poly new employees after a period of employment. And that was in 2005! Does The Post article state this? Of course not. The Post writers completely misinformed the public on that one, and the text only serves to rile the general populace up. "Top Secret America" is a great example of poor journalism.
#1 Posted by Daniel, CJR on Thu 22 Jul 2010 at 10:33 PM
I can't imagine a more parochial outlook than yours. I can't drive up and down the Dulles Toll Road because I'm 2700 miles away, and neither can 99% of other Americans. Nor am I likely to sit around for weeks Googling this stuff on my own out of curiosity, and neither are 99% of other Americans because we have other stuff to do.
What's the circulation of Mother Jones again? I read it from time to time, but I can guarantee that way more than 99% of other Americans don't, and probably most of them never heard of it.
And I can give you a much better example than Mother Jones. Jason Peckenpaugh wrote an extraordinarily prescient story about the nascent Homeland Security department in Government Executive magazine eight years ago. I read it at the time, but I would guess that I might have been among 100 or so people who did so without being a government employee or vendor or journalist. I'd bet your farm that you didn't read it.
All of which is to say that while you may know a great many people who were already familiar with much or all of of what Priest covered, you're in a very, very tiny minority. I'll grant you that it lacks context in places and is perhaps unnecessarily harsh about personnel and practices, although I think not throughout, and I can see why from your perspective the hype is way overblown.
But I'm someone who is probably better informed about this stuff than many, and there's a great deal of information in the series that I would never have gathered on my own. So strip off the insulation and take a look at this from an outsider's frame of view. If you don't mind.
#2 Posted by Weldon Berger, CJR on Fri 23 Jul 2010 at 01:48 AM
I found it ironic that a supposedly major piece of journalism (the Washington Post series) failed to "connect the dots" about the Intelligence Community. One of the missing correlations is that Americans don't want all of their Intelligence functions consolidated in one place. If what the Russia learned that led to the dismantling of the KGB in the 1990's can be viewed as a valuable lesson, there are good reasons not to build a unified Intelligence organization. With that decision, duplication of effort becomes a nearly unavoidable consequence. Perhaps this is the price we pay for liberty in a world that requires eternal vigilance. Beats the secret police alternative.
#3 Posted by Reasmus, CJR on Fri 23 Jul 2010 at 11:34 AM
I think you could make a far stronger argument that what Americans want , at least since the Bay of Pigs, is effective oversight of the intelligence community, something made pretty much impossible by the proliferation of different shops, not to mention the 100 or so Congressional committees and subcommittees with their fingers in the pie.
And I think among the more important points of the Post series is that effective intelligence gathering is made far more difficult by turf battles among, and the astonishing volume of raw material generated by, all those agencies. Not to mention the infrastructure issues such as different IT systems that make communication difficult even when agencies want to cooperate with one another.
#4 Posted by Weldon Berger, CJR on Fri 23 Jul 2010 at 11:47 AM