Blank Spots on the Map Read online

  I stopped for a moment, nervous at having stumbled onto one of the intelligence community’s more secure facilities. It was a familiar feeling. Here I was in a place that had no outward signs of being anything other than another run-of-the-mill office park, but it didn’t feel that way to me. It was the same feeling I had outside the AT&T building in San Francisco (which houses the NSA surveillance room) months before: When you know what’s behind the facade of everyday landscapes, the familiar architecture becomes unsettling, even frightening. A sunny corporate park in the suburbs wasn’t the most obvious place to experience what Freud called “the uncanny.”

  The NCTC is designed to blend in with the corporate architecture of the surrounding area, but the relationship goes both ways: The corporate landscape also blends into the NCTC. Inside the complex, it’s not clear where the corporate world ends and the civic world starts.

  If I’d been able to enter the complex that day, more than half the people I’d have met inside would have been private contractors, or “green badgers,” pulling paychecks from corporations like Lockheed Martin or Northrop Grumman and sending the bill (with a nice profit margin) to the taxpayer. Since the 1990s, and especially after 9/11, the spy business has become big business.

  Nowadays, the intelligence community is cheerfully described as a “public-private partnership.” Contractors perform everything from designing and implementing software systems, to analyzing raw intelligence, to producing classified reports for policy makers. Overseas, private contractors have taken over some of the government’s most sensitive jobs. For-profit corporations “run” foreign agents out of American embassies in faraway places, staff secret CIA black sites, and conduct “enhanced” interrogations of terror suspects. At a February 2008 congressional hearing, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) asked CIA director General Michael Hayden about the extent of intelligence outsourcing:

  REP. SCHAKOWSKY: Are contractors involved in CIA detention

  interrogation programs?

  GEN. HAYDEN: Absolutely.

  REP. SCHAKOWSKY: Were contractors involved in the waterboarding

  of al Qaeda detainees?

  GEN. HAYDEN: I’m not sure of the specifics. I’ll give you a tentative

  answer: I believe so.

  Three quarters of the people working at the CIA station in Islamabad, Pakistan, are said to be contractors. At the CIA headquarters in Baghdad, contractors outnumber agency employees. Back at Langley, green-badgers outnumber civil servants. They attend meetings about everything from how many office supplies to buy to managing the most questionable of covert operations. The scale of privatization extends far beyond the halls of the CIA. The National Reconnaissance Office is almost entirely staffed by corporate contractors, and approximately $7 billion of the agency’s estimated $8 billion budget goes to private industry. At the Pentagon, 35 percent of the Defense Intelligence Agency’s staff is contractors. In the contemporary intelligence community, there is no distinction between public and private.

  Except pay. With the sizable disparity in wages between a civil servant and a private specialist, the old “revolving door” between government and business once open to only the highest officials now includes even career civil servants. During the height of the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, recruiters randomly called engineers and other dot-commers’ workstations to offer better jobs at competing companies. That practice has migrated to the halls of Langley. Private intelligence recruiters have become so aggressive that former director of central intelligence Porter Goss issued warnings to several companies to stop making pitches to CIA officers in the agency cafeteria.

  This didn’t start on September 12, 2001. Throughout the 1990s, privatizing government services was one thing that both parties could agree on. Al Gore spearheaded the process of “rein-venting government,” as he called it. The Republican Congress was only too happy to go along with the widespread diversion of public funds into private hands. Gore imagined government working like a corporation when he described what he meant by the privatization boom he helped inaugurate: “We need governments that are as flexible, as dynamic, as focused on serving their customers as the best private companies around the world. We need to adopt the very best management techniques from the private sector to create governments that are fully prepared for the Information Age.” Gore wanted to “do more with less.” So the Clinton administration and the Republican Congress “downsized” and privatized a host of government services, including the intelligence community. Then 9/11 happened.

  Among the mirrored windows and manicured lawns of Northern Virginia, new and old intelligence companies are enjoying boom times. The spy business is big business. Booz Allen (the company behind the “Total Information Awareness” system), for example, boasts of “[employing] more than 10,000 TS/SCI cleared personnel”—people holding those “above top secret/sensitive compartmentalized information” security clearances with bizarre names such as “Gamma,” “VRK,” and “Credible Wolf.” The taxpayers pay to train, vet, and clear these folks, then companies like Booz Allen recruit them and rent them back to their old jobs at much higher rates. It happens at every level: Booz Allen’s executives include former CIA director James Woolsey, George Tenet’s former chief of staff Joan Dempsey, and Keith Hall, a former director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell’s career is typical: After serving as director for the National Security Agency, McConnell became an executive at Booz Allen in charge of military and intelligence projects for the Department of Defense until the Bush administration tapped him to replace John Negroponte as director of national intelligence.

  Booz Allen’s offices on Greensboro Drive in McLean lie next to the Science Applications International Corporation. Sometimes called “the largest government contractor you’ve never heard of ” (with $8 billion in revenue for fiscal year 2008), the majority of the company’s forty thousand employees possess security clearances, and much of the company’s work comes in the form of classified contracts. Former SAIC board members include NSA director and CIA deputy director Bobby Inman, who served on the board for more than twenty years. Other former SAIC board members include CIA directors John M. Deutch and Robert M. Gates.

  If CIA front companies had Web sites promoting their classified work, they might look something like the advertisements for companies like Abraxas, the Baer Group, SpecTal, or Total Intel. The Abraxas Corporation, for example, “gives you the most qualified and respected professionals from every facet of private industry, national and homeland security, law enforcement, and diplomatic service to define and defeat risk.” SpecTal advertises “All-source regional, functional, and technical analysts; field operations officers; trainers; software engineers; program managers; specialized government consultants; and operational support professionals.” Their team of “veterans of the CIA, DIA, NGA (NIMA), NRO, FBI . . .” and other intelligence agencies include “speakers of more than 20 languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Chinese, [and] Korean . . .” The Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis, another private intelligence company, advertises that it “supports a variety of national security operations such as interpersonal deception detection, undercover/clandestine operations, psychological operations and mass persuasion, cross-cultural applications of intelligence tradecraft, understanding and mitigating terrorist recruitment, threat assessment, interview and interrogation techniques, and risk communication, among others.” Its promotional copy explains that the company “[harnesses] a broad range of social sciences, including social, cognitive, forensic and cultural psychology, sociology, social and cultural anthropology, and political science” in its intelligence work.

  The scale of private intelligence contracting is, as you might have guessed, secret. Even unclassified intelligence-related contracts don’t appear in the USAspending.gov database, an application designed to increase government transparency. Perversely, the creation of the database has had the opposite effect with regard to intellige
nce contracts: Previously accessible information has disappeared.

  Trying to track intelligence spending by “following the money,” as the old Watergate cliché goes, leads immediately and unavoidably to blank spots in the federal ledger, the black budget. Most of the intelligence budget is hidden somewhere in the sections dealing with the Department of Defense.

  You can download a copy of the Department of Defense budget (available as an Excel or PDF file) by doing a simple Internet search for the comptroller’s office at the DoD. Print it out and the defense budget is about the size of a phone book, an enormous document composed of thousands of pages detailing the DoD’s projected expenditures for each year. Here are some random line items for fiscal year 2008:• Amount the Army’s Base Operations Support forces intended to pay the U.S. Postal Service: $7.054 million

  • Amount the Air Force receives from leasing a communications site at Vandenberg Air Force Base out to AT&T: $10,500

  • Amount the Air Force’s Air Operations Training program expects to spend on commercial transportation services: $1.965 million

  • Amount the Army wants to “enhance soldier efficiency, effectiveness, and sustainability” by providing “laundries, latrines, and showers which directly affect combat readiness and sustain combat power by promoting wellness and preventing disease” in the global war on terror: $12.3 million

  But there’s much more to the military budget than cell phone towers and toilet seats. Nestled among the budget’s countless line items, the funding for secret parts of the military and intelligence agencies is masked by code names and blank spaces. Much of the black budget resides in the section of the Air Force budget dealing with research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDT&E) programs.

  At first glance, the RDT&E section looks unremarkable. It details how much the Air Force wants to spend flight-testing MQ-9 Reaper drones, researching secure communications for its space operations, and developing safety procedures for armaments through the SEEK EAGLE program office. On closer inspection, however, an entirely different kind of spending appears.

  (Note: each digit represents one thousand dollars, so CHALK EAGLE, for example, is allocated $352.86 million)

  The difference between SEEK EAGLE and CHALK EAGLE (0603576N) is that CHALK EAGLE has no corresponding program description. It is a classified project. Nonetheless, the Air Force does provide a budget number for the classified program ($352.86 million for FY 2009). The same isn’t true for other names and code names of these projects:

  At the most secret end of the budgetary spectrum is a collection of programs that have no associated code names or budget numbers:

  There is, however, a small and telling quirk in all of this. By adding up all of the individual items in the various parts of the defense budget and comparing that number to the published total, one can derive a very basic sketch of the black budget’s scale. For the fiscal year 2009 RDT&E budget, for example, the sum of all the line items is about $64,091,301,000. The published total is $79,615,941,000. The difference between the two numbers is the total cost of unacknowledged programs: about $15,524,640,000. This number is the black budget’s cornerstone, but is only part of the overall black budget.

  By taking the numbers of all three categories—classified programs with code names and budget numbers, programs with code names without budget numbers, and programs with no names and no numbers—one can derive a more accurate “best guess” estimate of the Pentagon’s black budget.

  Steven Kosiak, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C., conducted an analysis of classified defense spending for FY 2009 for both the procurement and research sections of the defense budget. His calculations show a black budget of $34 billion for the year, the highest since the Reagan-era peak in 1987. The Pentagon’s black budget, however, doesn’t represent the entirety of secret spending. Intelligence funding comes from another black budget, although the two can significantly overlap.

  “The black budget is like a Venn diagram between intelligence and military dollars,” Kosiak told me. “There are parts of the intelligence budget that are classified, but other parts are unclassified.” Black military dollars for classified aircraft don’t necessarily come out of the same accounts as the CIA payroll, but they aren’t easy to separate from one another, either.

  Back in the heart of the nation’s capital, amid monuments to Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington, the National Gallery of Art’s sculpture garden sits among the national museums lining the Mall. I have a special fondness for art, so when I had a moment of downtime, I visited the sculpture garden, which houses work by some of the United States’ most celebrated artists. There was Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele II, a large, rounded sheet of inch-thick weathering steel, and conceptual artist Sol Le-Witt’s Four-Sided Pyramid, fashioned from concrete blocks and mortar. One of the garden’s prized possessions is a piece by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, who made their mark by taking everyday objects and turning them into monumental sculptures: clothespins, pickaxes, shuttlecocks, pieces of pie. Their contribution to the national sculpture garden is a large steel and cement sculpture in the shape of an old typewriter eraser.

  Across the street from the sculpture garden is the National Archives, whose Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom houses original copies of the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution. From the Bible, to Shakespeare, to Sun Tzu’s Art of War, historical documents are constantly reworked and re-interpreted in ways that make them relevant to the present. This is also true of the U.S. Constitution in the National Archives. But as the black budget became a permanent feature of the state, something particularly brutal happened. It was as if Claes Oldenburg’s oversized eraser crossed the street and did a job on Section I, Article 9, Clause 7 of the U.S. government’s founding document.

  Section I, Article 9, Clause 7, the Constitution’s “receipts and expenditures” clause, is straightforward:

  No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.

  The language is deliberately unambiguous. Congress has to authorize every dime that the government spends with attendant legislation, and every dime the government spends has to be reported to the public.

  The Founding Fathers understood the golden rule: “He who has the gold makes the rules.” They understood that, in the halls of government as it is in so many other affairs, money is both information and power. As such, Section I, Article 9 is a rebuke to the old monarchism the Founding Fathers wanted to free themselves from. “The people,” argued George Mason, “had a right to know the expenditures of their money.” Open books, argued James Madison, imparted both knowledge and responsibility upon a democratic citizenry: “A popular Government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or perhaps both,” he wrote. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.” Open books were a fundamental check on presidential power and a prerequisite to democracy. Congress’s power of the purse combined with the mandate to publish all government expenditures, the idea went, would help guarantee democracy. Open books would enfranchise the citizenry, prevent corruption, and put significant checks on future presidents’ monarchical whimsies. “The purse and the sword ought never to get into the same hands, whether legislative or executive,” said George Mason at the Constitutional Convention.

  Nonetheless, there are precedents for the contemporary black budget in the earliest days of the Republic. The first Congress, for example, gave George Washington a “contingency fund” of $40,000 that the first president could use for special diplomatic missions and in foreign affairs. But this was a far cry from creating a permanent, statutory, institutionalized basis for classified spending; a
“contingency fund” is not quite the same thing as a permanent multibillion-dollar black budget and a global black world.

  Niels Bohr’s “huge factory” of secrecy and weapons development became permanent in a few short years after the Second World War. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 essentially continued the Manhattan Project in perpetuity and established a norm that information relating to nuclear weapons was “born classified.” Although the Atomic Energy Commission would be a civilian agency, it would be charged with developing a classification system to preserve nuclear secrets and directed that scientific research related to nuclear weapons remain secret. Research data would not appear in scientific journals. Patents related to nuclear weapons would be kept under commission control, outside the normal patent system. The plants at Oak Ridge and Hanford and the secret laboratory at Los Alamos would continue the top-secret work they’d begun during the war.

  The black budget, one of the Manhattan Project’s foundations, was also formalized in the Second World War’s aftermath. Like the top-secret project to build the bomb, it began as a temporary wartime measure and became permanent in the war’s aftermath. Congress wrote the black budget into law when it created the CIA. Apart from a few lonesome protests in Congress, there was little debate. For most of the U.S.’s postwar history, the black budget has gone unnoticed in the halls of the legislature. On the few occasions where the subject has been taken up, most notably during the Nixon meltdown and in the 9/11 Commission, its legitimacy has been called into question.