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.
You wouldn’t learn these things from “Top Secret America.” That’s because much of it is written without context—there is outrage there, but Priest and Arkin never say what we should be outraged about. The growth of the intelligence contracting universe is indeed worrying, but not for the reasons Priest and Arkin state: it’s not the size that matters, but how manageable it is. They say it is unmanageable, but don’t say how or why (there are hints, as when Vice Adm. David Dorsett, the Director of Naval Intelligence, reveals he was able to convert only one single contractor to a government position over the course of an entire year, but Priest and Arkin don’t follow through on what that means).
Priest and Arkin write that, near Ft. Meade, employees and contractors who work for the TSA can’t function in normal life: they walk around hunched over, unable to blend into a Borders book store, advertising their presence with drone-like haircuts and suits. In one particularly bizarre section, we learn that Jeanie Burns, the girlfriend of one long-time NSA employee, says her boyfriend won’t travel with her, doesn’t like to go out, and doesn’t do anything interesting. “I feel cheated,” she says.
Priest and Arkin never say why we should care. They don’t ask if we actually get good analysis from people so incapable of existing in normal social settings (we probably do for some things, like cryptology, but probably don’t for other things, like radicalizing cultural and social movements). Priest and Arkin said that, in bars near Ft. Meade, undercover agents circulate among the unwinding employees to make sure they don’t say anything untoward, but they don’t wonder why the NSA feels it necessary to flood bars with secret agents, or what possible effect it could have either on the analytic community—how could such severe paranoia not severely affect one’s quality of life?—or the broader residential community of Ft. Meade. They just say that it happens, and move on.
There are other worrying aspects to the proliferation of contractors in the IC: often, the contractors don’t play well with the government employees. Secretary of Defense Bob Gates said, “You want somebody who’s really in it for a career because they’re passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money.” As if contractors only care about paychecks and government employees only care about passion and patriotism. The statement could easily be reversed: IC software developers, as one example, work for far less than their peers in Silicon Valley because they are passionate and care about the country, while government employees prefer the job security and greater comp. time. Either statement essentializes and trivializes the real dynamics at play between contractors and “govvies,” as they’re often called.
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