Security lapse provokes new criticism of huge role played by costly intelligence contractors

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies on Capitol Hill March 12 before the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats.

Πηγή: The Center for Public Intergrity
By Richard H.P. Sia
June 13 2013

The Obama administration promised four years ago that it would significantly shrink the number of private contractors working for U.S. intelligence agencies. But a key member of Congress said this week she remains unconvinced the administration has done enough to shift critical intelligence-related jobs back to government employees.

The most recent public data from the intelligence community depict a one-year decline of 1 percent in the number of contractors holding security clearances, leaving private-sector workers still holding about 22 percent of all those clearances.

In the wake of new controversy about such work, stemming from the recent leak of secrets about U.S. surveillance tactics by a federal contract employee in Hawaii, officials this week cited the decline as a sign of the administration’s commitment to reduce the outsourcing of intelligence work, reversing a hasty expansion of the contractor population after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say that problems with outsourcing intelligence functions to private contractors have not been solved. The panel reported in March that after some early progress, some intelligence agencies have been hiring additional contractors. This has resulted in a contracting workforce that “continues to grow,” the committee said in a March 22 report on its activities.

The battle over the administration’s commitment to thin contractor ranks is expected to intensify because of the unprecedented security breach claimed this month by Edward Snowden, who worked less than three months for national security consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. The company said it fired the 29-year-old Snowden on Monday for violations of its ethics policy.

At the White House this week, spokesman Jay Carney responded to questions about the number of contractors and their access to classified material by saying these topics merit debate. But he did not say if President Obama will reassess the role of contractors. “I think that is an interesting question and perhaps worthy of debate as part of this conversation that we should be having,” Carney said Tuesday.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper’s office, reacting to questions by the Center for Public Integrity, said this week that the number of so-called core contractors, who assist in the collection and analysis of intelligence, has declined by 36 percent since 2007, when the collection of such personnel data began.

But that statistic, which appears in an unreleased report, refers to a subset of the overall number of those contractors holding clearances, and partly to reductions that preceded Clapper’s arrival in August 2010, government sources said. The pace of reductions has since slowed and “in certain cases, the addition of new contractors outweighed those [positions] dropped and converted” to civilian jobs, one congressional source said, speaking on condition he not be named.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who vowed in 2010 to keep pushing “until contractors are not used for any inherently governmental purpose” in the intelligence community, said this week in a statement to the Center for Public Integrity that she plans to step up her efforts now. “I am working on legislation to reduce the numbers of contractors and their access to highly classified information,” she said Tuesday.

Congress passed legislation in 2011 allowing intelligence officials to exceed authorized personnel ceilings if they hire federal employees to replace contract workers on a one-for-one basis. But it has not used legislation to force specific cuts in the contractor workforce.

At a Sept. 13, 2011 joint hearing of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Feinstein disclosed what she described as a 2009 agreement by the Obama administration to shrink contractor numbers by 5 percent a year, largely by transferring to federal employees any "inherently governmental" work being done by contractors.

The impetus for the informal promise, which had not been publicized before then, was public outrage over the involvement of private contractors in some of the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. A congressional aide said this week that the agreement originally involved the Central Intelligence Agency. But the 17 agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence community also agreed to reduce the number of contractors performing a range of critical tasks, the aide said.

That 2009 agreement capped a year when Feinstein’s committee seized on the contracting issue and revealed in a report accompanying the annual intelligence authorization bill that in 2008, contractors comprised 29 percent of all intelligence community personnel but collected a whopping 49 percent of the personnel budget.

The committee acknowledged agencies had made a 3 percent reduction in the total number of intelligence contractors in 2009, but insisted in its report on a 5 percent reduction in 2010.

On July 20, 2010, Feinstein raised the outsourcing issue during Clapper’s confirmation hearing to be director of national intelligence. She and her committee colleagues said they were disturbed by disclosures in the Washington Post that more than 300 firms carried out key functions of the intelligence community.

The number of contractors had been “coming down slightly” during the tenure of his predecessors, she told Clapper.

He agreed with her that time had come “for that pendulum to swing back as it has historically” to reduce the size of the contractor workforce as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ending. Clapper, an Air Force lieutenant general who retired in 1995 and then worked briefly as a Booze Allen Hamilton executive for military intelligence programs, explained past growth by saying that with the “gusher” of funding after 9/11 to support the wars and global counterterrorism operations, “it is very difficult to hire government employees one year at a time.”

“So the obvious outlet for that has been the growth of contractors,” Clapper said. But he added that he needed to see what impact past contractor cuts have had, telling Feinstein: “I’m just reluctant to commit to a fixed percentage" of annual reductions.

By the time Clapper appeared at a joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees on Sept. 13, 2011 – an event intended to assess the intelligence community a decade after 9/11 – Feinstein told him and then-CIA Director David Petraeus they were not doing enough on the contractor front.

Clapper’s office had released figures for fiscal year 2010 showing that the number of so-called core contractors who give direct support to critical intelligence tasks had declined by only 1 percent.

“We had an agreement in 2009 to reduce I.C. contractor numbers by 5 percent a year, but it's clear that progress has not been maintained and sufficient cuts are not being made,” Feinstein said.

When asked this week to comment about the agreement, Michael Birmingham, a spokesman for Clapper, declined to discuss what he referred to as private discussions between the director of national intelligence and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

But Birmingham gave a preview of the case Clapper is likely to make to Congress about the size of the contractor workforce. “Since Director Clapper has been the DNI, the number of core contract personnel has been reduced by 15 percent," he said. Details appear in a classified report given to Congress.

A congressional source said a reduction in the rate of shrinkage “is to be expected, as the cuts get harder the more you make.” But Feinstein still believes that “further cuts are appropriate, that contractors should not be performing inherently governmental functions, and that contractors should not have access to large amounts of highly classified information, as Mr. Snowden appears to have had,” the aide added.

Feinstein’s interest in limiting access to classified material is not surprising. “Clearly there’s going to be intense scrutiny of the security clearance [process] as a result of the Snowden case,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. Among key questions federal investigators and lawmakers will be asking, he said, are: “Was the scope of his access broader than justified? Was he vetted? Or was he fully vetted?”

“People are asking, why does a kid who couldn't make it through a community college can make $200,000 grand a year and be exposed to some of our most significant secrets,” Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said at a hearing Tuesday. “So we'll have a lot of hearings...on this.”

The latest annual report on security clearances showed the annual shifts vary by category. In fiscal year 2012, 15,482 fewer contractors held confidential, secret or top-secret clearances than in fiscal year 2011. But 4,428 more held top-secret clearances to handle the most sensitive information, like that leaked by Snowden.

The total number of people with security clearances rose 1.1 percent in the one-year period, with 4.9 million government employees and contractors having confidential, secret or top-secret clearances as of last Oct. 1, the report said. Of that total, 1.4 million held top-secret clearances, with more than a third of that group comprised of contractors.

The report also listed a significant jump in the number of contractors deemed eligible during the year for a top-secret clearance -- and a nearly corresponding drop in the number of government employees who were given similar status.

The 133,493 contractors newly deemed eligible for access to top-secret information represented a 30.5 percent increase over the number of contractors in the same category the year before. The number of contractors eligible for confidential and secret clearances rose by nearly 12 percent. For government employees, however, the number eligible for top-secret clearance dropped by nearly 22 percent, while those eligible for confidential and secret clearances declined by 9 percent, the report showed.

Birmingham, the spokesman for Clapper, discounted any notion that these trends portend substantial contractor growth in the last year, explaining that the figures only refer to government workers and contractors considered eligible for access to sensitive materials, but not yet awarded their clearances. Some outside experts said this data could reflect the high turnover seen often within the contractor workforce.

Both Clapper’s office and the White House took pains this week to praise the vast majority of intelligence contractors as patriotic Americans who take an oath to protect the nation’s national security secrets.

“Contractors are an integral part of our workforce and are critical to our national security efforts,” Clapper said in a message sent Monday to the Intelligence Community workforce. “No matter what color badge you wear, you prove every day how much you care about our nation.”

In response to questions Tuesday, White House spokesman Carney said, “I would note that contractors have long been involved in both our defense and intelligence efforts, and that when it comes to security clearances, they are subject to the same system of checks and security clearance procedures as government employees.”

CIA agent in police triggers probe

New York Council members Daniel Drumm and Robert Jackson listen as NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly testifies before the public safety committee.

Πηγή: gulfnews
By AP
Oct 19 2011

Washington: Working inside the New York Police Department is one of the CIA's most experienced clandestine operatives. He arrived in July as the special assistant to the deputy commissioner of intelligence. While his title is clear, his job responsibilities are not.

Federal and city officials have offered differing explanations for why this top CIA officer was assigned to a municipal police department since AP revealed the assignment in August.

The CIA is prohibited from spying domestically, and its unusual partnership with the New York Police Department (NYPD) has troubled top lawmakers and prompted an internal investigation.

The last time a CIA officer worked so closely with the NYPD, beginning in the months after the 9/11 attacks, he became the architect of aggressive police programmes that monitored Muslim neighbourhoods.

With that earlier help from this CIA official, the police put entire communities under a microscope based on ethnicity rather than allegations of wrongdoing, according to the AP investigation.

It was an extraordinary collaboration that at times troubled some senior CIA officials and may have stretched the bounds of how the CIA is allowed to operate in the United States.

The arrangement surrounding the newly arrived CIA officer, who was at the centre of one of the worst US intelligence fiascos in recent history, has been portrayed differently from that of his predecessor.

When first asked by the AP, a senior US official described the posting as a sabbatical, a programme aimed at giving the man in New York more management training.

Technical information

Testifying at City Hall recently, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the CIA operative provides his officers "with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas". He said the CIA operative provides "technical information" to the NYPD but "doesn't have access to any of our investigative files".

Citing a presidential order authorising the CIA to assist local law enforcement, Kelly said: "Operating under this legal basis, the CIA has advised the police department on key aspects of intelligence gathering and analysis that have greatly benefitted our counter-terrorism mission and protected lives in New York City."

CIA Director David Petraeus has described him as an adviser, someone who could ensure that information was being shared.

But the CIA already has someone with that job. At its large station in New York, a CIA liaison shares intelligence with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, which has hundreds of NYPD detectives assigned to it. And the CIA did not explain how, if the adviser doesn't have access to NYPD files, he's getting management experience in a division built entirely around collecting domestic intelligence.

James Clapper, the director of National Intelligence, mischaracterised him to Congress as an "embedded analyst" — his office later quietly said that was a mistake — and acknowledged it looked bad to have the CIA working so closely with a police department.

Petraeus tells CIA analysts to heed troops on war

In this Sept. 6, 2011, file photo, new CIA director David Petraeus, right, speaks following his swearing-in ceremony with his wife Holly Knowlton Petraeus, center, and Vice President Joe Biden,

Πηγή: AP
By KIMBERLY DOZIER

Oct 14 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) -- David Petraeus, the former general who led the Afghanistan war and now heads the CIA, has ordered his intelligence analysts to give greater weight to the opinions of troops in the fight, U.S. officials said.

CIA analysts now will consult with battlefield commanders earlier in the process as they help create elements of a National Intelligence Estimate on the course of the war, to more fully include the military's take on the conflict, U.S. officials say.

Their input could improve the upcoming report card for the war.

The most recent U.S. intelligence assessment offered a dim view of progress in Afghanistan despite the counterinsurgency campaign Petraeus oversaw there and painted a stark contrast to the generally upbeat predictions of progress from Petraeus and other military leaders. Petraeus has made no secret of his frustration with recent negative assessments coming primarily from the CIA, and said during his confirmation hearing that he planned to change the way the civilian analysts grade wars.

The CIA's analysis makes up the bulk of national intelligence estimates, which help guide the White House and Congress in drafting future policy.

The CIA says Petraeus' tweaks to the agency's part of the assessment will add to its accuracy, not tilt the results, and that military commanders' views were always part of the equation.

"Analytic debate and discussion haven't been chilled; they've been promoted," CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.

The change has been backed by National Intelligence Director James Clapper, another senior U.S. official said.

The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the intelligence assessment is classified.

Petraeus took over as head of the CIA last month. He was directly in charge of the war in Afghanistan for more than a year - his last job in uniform - and oversaw the war as the head of Central Command before that. Like Iraq, Afghanistan has become a proving ground for the theories of counterinsurgency Petraeus is credited with making central to current U.S. military doctrine.

The previous U.S. intelligence assessment on Afghanistan and Pakistan earlier this year contradicted then-war-commander Petraeus' assessment. Where he saw "fragile but reversible progress," the analysts from across the intelligence community largely reported stalemate in several parts of the country. The disagreements were highlighted in the CIA's district by district assessments in which progress was graded geographically, with intelligence analysts seeing far less progress in key districts than did military commanders on the ground.

They emphasized a spate of assassinations by the Taliban and poor performance by the Afghan government in their report, two U.S. officials say.

Analysts also were negative about the performance of the Afghanistan security forces, whereas military commanders saw some units performing competently.

After taking the top spy job, Petraeus dispatched a top CIA official to the Afghan war zone to interview both sides to try to reconcile their differing opinions. Petraeus together with his staff concluded that those lower-level commanders on the battlefield needed to have input into the CIA process, two U.S. officials said.

In the previous process of assessing Afghan districts - which becomes a key building block of national intelligence estimates - analysts only sent their work to the top military commander, toward the end of the process. Now they'll share their conclusions with lower-level officers earlier to give them the opportunity to assess the intelligence analysts' conclusions and offer dissenting opinions, two officials said.

That process of including the field commanders first was actually started by then-Gen. Petraeus, who asked that his regional commanders review the draft CIA assessments before he did, one senior official said. Marine Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan now, has now made the same request, the official said.

Critics of the change say allowing the military more pushback will have a chilling effect on the analysts' ability to give the war a failing grade, a senior intelligence official said.

One intelligence official expressed concern that this would institutionalize the former general's habit when in Afghanistan of challenging the CIA's unflattering conclusions, the official said.

Senior U.S. officials insist the military will not be able to change the CIA's analysis but only add comments if they dissent from it. How those comments will be reflected has not yet been determined.

Petraeus insisted at his confirmation hearing in June that he could "grade my own work." But he vowed then to change the way the CIA grades wars, saying the analysts relied on battlefield data that was often six weeks to eight weeks old. He called that a snapshot that was outdated by the time it reached decision-makers.

Petraeus earlier told senators he'd disagreed with four such national intelligence estimates on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- two because he thought they were too pessimistic, and two he thought were too optimistic.

Tweaking the way data is collected and analyzed is not new for Petraeus, said one U.S. military official who worked as a troubleshooter for the general in Afghanistan.

Petraeus had been equally demanding of commanders in the field, asking them to constantly grade their district's progress, and had been working to revamp the reporting process there as well, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to describe the military intelligence collection process.

Petraeus would ask field commanders to assess everything from how secure the area was to whether the Afghan government was providing people adequate services, but his troubleshooting team had found there was no uniform scale within the military to compare progress district by district. The troubleshooters concluded that commanders making the calls were often less than well-versed in judging non-military measures of progress such as the integrity of local government, so the assessment was often based on the commander's personal opinions.

That was something Petraeus was working to fix when he left, the official said.

The February Afghan intelligence assessment found that special operations night raids, combined with village-by-village security operations, had shown more lasting progress in undermining the Taliban and their influence than attempts by conventional military forces to drive out militants, according to three U.S. officials who have read the analysis and described it to The Associated Press.

Petraeus oversaw both the conventional and special operations military campaigns, but his ideas about how to outsmart insurgent militias are more closely associated with the conventional military.

The report did not favor one strategy over another. But the information gave ammunition to those who supported Vice President Joe Biden's special operations-centered counterterrorism strategy over Petraeus' backing of traditional counterinsurgency. It was seen as proof for some that the additional conventional forces Petraeus championed made little impact on the overall campaign and a slam against parts of the strategy designed by its architect just as he seeks to lead the intelligence service.

President Barack Obama's announcement of a drawdown of 33,000 troops is being seen as another departure from Petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy.

Petraeus would only say it was a more "aggressive ... timeline" than he'd recommended, which meant greater risk that U.S. forces might not succeed.

In at least one instance, the analysts' conclusions in that last intelligence assessment tracked with Petraeus' recommendation of keeping larger numbers of troops on the ground for a longer time period.

The intelligence analysts pointed to intercepted communications and broadcasts among Taliban commanders who were heartened by Obama's drawdown timetable and were able to reverse their decline of last spring in recruiting new fighters, two U.S. officials said.

Top US intelligence official visits Turkey

US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (Photo: AP)

Πηγή: Todays Zaman
Sep. 19 2011


US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has arrived in Ankara for a surprise visit, a news report said on Monday.

Clapper arrived in Ankara on Sunday evening and began talks with Turkish officials on Monday morning, private NTV television reported. There was no official statement on Clapper's visit from Turkish or US authorities.

Clapper is having talks at the General Staff, the National Intelligence Organization (MİT) and the Foreign Ministry, according to NTV. His talks focus on the planned deployment of a US radar system as part of a NATO-backed missile defense system in the eastern Turkish province of Malatya and the fight against the terrorist Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), as well as the developments in the Middle East.

Turkey announced earlier this month that it had agreed to the deployment of the X-Band radar as part of NATO's missile defense system, designed to protect the European allies of NATO from missile threats that could stem from Russia or Iran. Turkey had insisted during the course of negotiations over hosting the US radar that no country should be mentioned as a source of threat, a demand accepted by the US and other allies.
On Sunday, Turkish officials denied earlier reports that Clapper was to visit Turkey soon.

The US has been sharing intelligence with Turkey about the movements of the PKK in a joint effort to combat the terrorist group. Turkish and American officials have recently discussed the possibility of predator drones being stationed at bases in Turkey.

Given the fact that US withdrawal from Iraq is only weeks away, the American military may soon send its unmanned aerial vehicles home. Turkey, which has found half of its own unmanned aerial vehicles impounded by its formerly close ally Israel, has suggested instead that they be stationed in Turkey for intelligence gathering against the PKK.