SEMPER OCCULTUS
OVER THE TOP SECRETS from SPY-CO-SOMATIX,
SPY 1099: PSYOP Explorations
Red, White & Black Ops Blues
by Iona Miller
"Darker than velvet, brighter than diamonds..."
"I rehabilitate Intelligence Agents and train human beings. I am the Spywhisperer."
"Darker than velvet, brighter than diamonds..."
"I rehabilitate Intelligence Agents and train human beings. I am the Spywhisperer."
DARK MATTERS
Leutrell Osborne, Sr., 26-year CIA Spymaster; Anthony Sylvester
NEGATIVE LIBERTIES - TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE -
SPY 1099: OUTSOURCING INTELLIGENCE
OVER THE TOP SECRET
Top Secret America Video Intro http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
Database of Private Spooks http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/search-through-top-secret-americas-network-of-private-spooks/
Military Intel Contractors http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/60589
CIA vs DoD Turf War http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/43840
FRONTLINE on Top Secret America http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/
SPIES R-US
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. The Washington Post claims there are more than 1,200 government organizations and 1,900 private companies working on intelligence, counterintelligence and homeland security in 10,000 locations. Over 854,000 people, one and a half times the population of Washington DC have top secret clearance. Some say that years after 9/11 the spy community has become outrageously expensive and unwieldy. Fallout includes an overload of applicants and a broken clearance system.
Top Secret America Video Intro http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
Database of Private Spooks http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/07/search-through-top-secret-americas-network-of-private-spooks/
Military Intel Contractors http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/60589
CIA vs DoD Turf War http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/43840
FRONTLINE on Top Secret America http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/topsecretamerica/
SPIES R-US
The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work. The Washington Post claims there are more than 1,200 government organizations and 1,900 private companies working on intelligence, counterintelligence and homeland security in 10,000 locations. Over 854,000 people, one and a half times the population of Washington DC have top secret clearance. Some say that years after 9/11 the spy community has become outrageously expensive and unwieldy. Fallout includes an overload of applicants and a broken clearance system.
Spy In the Box
COUNTER INTELLIGENCE
Efforts to prevent hostile intelligence organizations from gathering and collecting intelligence, whether against the United States, commercial or industrial activities, or information associated with national security. These tasks have been greatly complicated since 9/11 as emphasis has shifted from threats involving nation-states to extremist individuals and organizations.
Spy In the Box
Today's spies for hire can be found online. Independent contractors are the 'fast food' of Intelligence. Clients can order from their service menus. Traditionally, spies have always been outsourced, rather than official employees of intelligence agencies, such as Case Officers or "spy masters."
There are 16 official members of the Intelligence Community, an assemblage of separate agency intelligence organizations which gather, evaluate, and distribute information, most of which is secret. Made up of 16 organizations, its activities are controlled and coordinated by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President.
The DNI is charged primarily with developing the overall intelligence budget, designing procedures to govern large intelligence acquisitions, setting priorities and coordinating policies/activities for the 16 intelligence agencies, monitoring covert operations, setting policy for working with foreign intelligence services. DNI has authority to request information from nonintelligence agencies, and perform joint planning for counterterrorism operations for all 16 intelligence agencies. Also reporting to DNI are the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is staffed by terrorism experts from the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon; the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board; and the National Counter Proliferation Center.
Minimize Risks; Maximize Payoffs
Now current and former Intelligence employees are outsourcing themselves and their private CIA-style security companies. Security is composed of highly trained former military, special operations, intelligence and law enforcement personnel as well as professional private security and investigative personnel.
In terms of "deep politics" war is fraud, a manipulated and lucrative commodity that intentionally perpetuates itself in the Long War. That includes "silent" or asymmetric war, drug war, terror war, oil war, economic war, corporate espionage and the myths of war that our culture lives and dies by. Even the classic Cold War is back, in economics rather than an arms race.
The head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, said the spending growth on intelligence likely is not sustainable and that he's at work on a five-year plan for the agency. "Particularly with these deficits, we're going to hit the wall. I want to be prepared for that," he told the Post. "Frankly, I think everyone in intelligence ought to be doing that."
Strategic Intelligence
Online security businesses deploy both Blue Badge (Govt.) and Green Badge (Civilian) personnel. Most security and intelligence jobs are now subcontracted to private security agencies, giving rise to the phenomenon of "SPY 1099," the Intelligence contractor. They are paid more for private sector work than government work to make the economy scream.
"NOAH" is one such [fictitious] intelligence-gathering and risk management firm providing companies with both information and analysis to enable them to identify, manage and mitigate risks that can arise either from the normal flow of business or from unanticipated contingencies. NOAH responds to threats posed by organized crime, and those directed toward critical infrastructure with emphasis on prevention as well as reaction. NOAH safeguards information security, market entry, critical assets, verifies investment theses, and develops critical acquisition data.
NOAH mitigates risk of reputation threat, ensures brand and intellectual property protection, and eliminates fraud and personnel issues. Other services include strategic crisis consulting, due diligence of complicated transactions, business intelligence, solutions to regulatory challenges, encryption, strategic crisis consulting, security and preparedness, investigations and forensics, as well as open-source and intelligence-based geopolitical risk assessment. Investigative capabilities include asset tracing, forensic auditing, forensic data recovery and analysis, audio forensics, handwriting analysis and psychological profiling.
The firm’s mission exercises the founders’ expertise, experience and network of relationships to provide clients with a higher standard of business intelligence and analysis, risk assessments and due diligence support for transactions, even in the most challenging emerging markets. NOAH consists of professionals drawn not only from the intelligence world, but also from value-added disciplines, such as the legal profession, financial regulation, investment banking, investigative journalism, diplomacy, forensic science and law enforcement. This well-rounded team is based in offices in Washington, DC, and Annapolis, MD. with continued worldwide growth.
OUTSOURCING CITIZENRY
Outsourcing Citizenry
The Citizen Corps Program engages citizens in personal preparedness, exercises, ongoing volunteer programs, and surge capacity response. Citizen Corps is FEMA's grassroots strategy to bring together government and community leaders to involve citizens in all-hazards emergency preparedness and resilience related to Homeland Security.
InfraGard is a private non-profit organization run as a public-private partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests and combining the knowledge base of a wide range of members. At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector.
InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States. All InfraGard members are associated with a local chapter. There is no 'National membership.' Protection of our nation’s infrastructure cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone. It requires coordinated action from numerous stakeholders – including government, the private sector, law enforcement, academia and concerned citizens. A fictionalized version could be called "IntraGuard."
More than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect and provide information on fellow Americans. In return, members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public, and at times before elected officials. “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate Total Information Awareness program (TIPS), turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” according to an ACLU report titled “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.”
InfraGard, with members from 350 companies of the Fortune 500, started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats. “Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years. FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard . . . from our perspective, that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
Intel: Raw & Cooked
The government has outsourced everything from spy satellites to covert operations. They even outsource buildings. Outsourced contractors set up black sites, design programs and create mobile, hand held covert communications devices and the latest must-have spy-tech accessories. They also do data mining and intelligence analysis work.
Today, the ties between intelligence agencies and the private sector -- the "shadow intelligence community" -- are so close, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. After leaving government, these officials keep their high-level security clearances, which makes them extremely valuable to their new employers. “You can’t do any business without having the clearances,” says former Spy Master Jake Stockwell. “How else would you know about the contracts?” The most secretive contractors are the Intelligence Community's A-team. Even the military is gearing up to invade our daily lives through domestic deployment.
Re-Tooling Intelligence
Who are these guys; what are they up to and what do they do? A handful of government agencies require TS/SCI contractor access and really only two major intelligence agencies do so. One of them is located in Langley, Virginia a couple of miles from the eastern entrance to the Dulles Toll Road with satellite offices stretching to the west. The other is located in Ft. Meade, Maryland. So, one serves CIA and another NSA.
They have staff co-located at an Annapolis Junction Maryland facility. To the uninitiated, that means they contract with the CIA, work extensively with Army and Navy tier-one Special Forces Teams as well as Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a little NSA thrown in. Geography tells the tale of who is working for whom.
Employees have experience working in hostile and denied areas and have immediate availability to deploy as part of a team or alone to ply their trade abroad or in the US. (Private domestic spying, anyone?) Go-bags packed, ready to deploy with teams raises the obvious follow up question: which teams?
They tag along along with Special Forces teams to foreign hostile or denied areas with comm equipment that has offensive and defensive capabilities --for ELINT and SIGINT collection. They set up in a house that happens to be in the path of a highly directional signal or on top of just the right cable. The metaphorical houses are probably in such friendly spots as Iran or wherever the yellow brick road of GWOT contracting leads.
They set up covert listening posts and surveillance. Teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems. This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.
Private CIA
CIA officials won't say how much of the agency’s work is done by private companies, but admit that outsourcing has increased substantially since 2001. Of the estimated $40 billion the United States is expected to spend on intelligence this year, experts say at least 50 percent will go to private contractors. An even bigger piece of the pie now goes to domestic security companies serving Fusion Centers.
Intelligence and law enforcement have merged and work together at home and abroad. Police departments across the country have created networks of databases called "fusion centers" in an effort to detect and prevent acts of terrorism. The ultimate objective is to create a nationwide reporting system of suspicious behaviors so that the authorities can "connect the dots" before an attack can occur.
Civil liberties groups claim these fusion centers are beset with legal and practical problems. One legal problem is that the police should not be opening files on people because they exercised their right to free speech, such as demonstrating against the foreign policies of the United States. One practical problem is that the police are gathering so much mundane information that practically anyone could end up on a list of "suspicious" persons because some official arbitrarily decided to fill out a tip sheet. Join us for a discussion of the pros and cons of this newly proposed system of policing.
Teams of military and law enforcement veterans and other motivated, capable Americans protect diplomats, provide training, and offer logistic services. They do those things in support of friendly nation peace operations around the world, including support of some of our Muslim allies.
Underworld to Overworld
These Ops are special and not necessarily accountable to anything but the bottom line. Operations range from the Underworld of black markets, black gold and money laundering to the Overworld of global controllers and Corpoglomerates. They know how things operate and how to get the job done while protecting the clients assets and secrets.
"Intelligence services" represent an unprecedented concentration of military expertise and force in the hands of private corporations. They evaluate clients through research and due diligence, to ensure they are legitimate actors who support freedom and security. They only take on work that is sanctioned by the U.S. government, or so they say.
Halliburton will probably never shake its bad reputation. Blackwater became so infamous, it changed its name to Xe, much like the maligned Whackenhut changed to "The GEO Group, Inc." GEO is now a world leader in the delivery of correctional and detention management, health and mental health, and other diversified services to federal, state and local government agencies around the globe. GEO offers a turnkey approach that includes design, construction, financing and operations. GEO represents government clients in the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada,
Substantive Deliverables
With mixed personnel, they circumvent the turf war between Police, CIA and the Pentagon. Services include Acquisitions, National and International Emergency Response, Think Tanks, Field Security, Action Teams, Fusion Analysis, Cyber Forensics, Network Security, Data Analysis, Transactional Auditing, Tutorial Assisstance and Systems Transformation.
Also, counter measures, anti-terrorism evaluation, technology and development training, theater-wide communications operations, intelligence liason, clandestine procedures and training, incident management and protective operations. Encryption methodologies and the design of secure communications networks within a defense environment. COMSEC, INFOSEC, and SIGSEC. EMF risk assessment and reduction.
* Counter-Intelligence Services
* All-Source Fusion Analysis Services
* Strategic Debriefing
* Translation Services
* Tactical Translation Services
* HUMINT Support
* Imagery Analysis Support
* Topographic Support
Intellipedians
The CIA has grown wise to the power of open-source collaboration, and Intellipedia—a classified version of Wikipedia—is humming with activity 3 years after its debut, Time reports. The site boasts 900,000 pages of content written by 100,000 identified intelligence professionals. Advocates cite the rapid treatment of questions as evidence of Intellipedia’s effectiveness.
For example, an agent posted a page asking how to collect evidence from a chlorine-based IED after coming across one in Iraq. "Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world chimed in on this thing, and we got a perfectly serviceable set of instructions in two days," says one user. Some hardliners have questioned the site’s security, but other say a rapidly evolving database is exactly what the intelligence community needs to combat the ever-changing face of terrorism.
Moonlighting Intel
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side -- a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation's top-level intelligence talent.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in "deception detection," the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.
A government official familiar with the policy insists it doesn’t impede the CIA’s work on critical national security investigations. This official said CIA officers who want to participate in it must first submit a detailed explanation of the type of work involved and get permission from higher-ups within the agency.
If any officer requests permission for outside employment, those requests are reviewed not just for legality, but for propriety. There is much about the policy that is unclear, including how many officers have availed themselves of it, how long it has been in place and what types of outside employment have been allowed. The CIA declined to provide additional details.
Generally, federal employees across the vast government work force are allowed to moonlight in the private sector, but under tight guidelines, that can vary from agency to agency, according to the federal Office of Government Ethics.
“In general, for most nonpolitical employees, they may engage in outside employment, but there are some restrictions,” said Elaine Newton, an attorney at the Office of Government Ethics. She explained that agencies throughout the federal government set their own policies on outside employment, and that they all typically require that the employment not represent a conflict of interest with the employee’s federal job and that the employee have written approval before taking on the work.
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
BIA has employed active-duty CIA officers in the past, although BIA president Cheryl Cook said that has “not been the case with BIA for some time.”
But the ties between BIA and the intelligence world run deep. The name itself was chosen as a play off CIA. And the presence of so many former CIA personnel on the payroll at BIA causes confusion as to whether the intelligence firm is actually an extension of the agency itself. As a result, BIA places a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not, in fact, controlled by Langley.
BIA’s clients can put the company on a retainer for as much as $400,000 to $800,000 a year. And in return, they receive access to a variety of services, from deception detection to other programs that feature the CIA intelligence techniques.
The tactics that BIA officials such as these teach hedge fund clients are based in a program it calls “Tactical Behavior Assessment."Unlike polygraph machines, the TBA technique allows examiners to work without hooking up their subject to a series of wires. The subject never knows he’s being scrutinized.
Polygraph machines work by measuring a person’s physical responses, such as heart rate, that indicate stress. Analysts using the machine need to sit with their subject for a long time. They have to establish a person’s physiological baseline, so they begin with a “control” conversation about neutral topics, before they can begin grilling the subject. Conducting an interview and doing a thorough analysis of polygraph results can take hours.
TBA focuses on the verbal and nonverbal cues that people convey when they aren’t telling the truth. Psychologists familiar with the method say it works because human beings just aren’t hard-wired to lie well. Holding two opposing ideas in your brain at the same time — as you have to do in order to tell a lie — causes a phenomenon they term “cognitive dissonance,” which creates actual physical discomfort. And when people are uncomfortable, they squirm. They fidget ever so slightly, they pick lint off their clothes, they shift their bodily positions.
Agents look for the physical indicators of lying. They watch for a person shifting anchor points. If the person is leaning forward on one elbow, does he switch to the other one? Interrogators watch for grooming gestures such as adjusting clothes, hair or eyeglasses. They look to see if the person picks at his fingernails or scratches himself. They watch for the person to clean his surroundings — does he straighten the paper clips on the table or line up the pens? If he does, he could be lying.
To obtain verbal clues, agents listen for several kinds of statements. They’ll listen for qualifying answers, phrases that begin with words like “honestly,” “frankly” or “basically.” The agents will be listening for detour phrases like “as I said before ...” They’ll want to hear if the person invokes religion — “I swear to God” — or attacks the questioner: “How dare you ask me something like that?”
Other red flags: Complaints —“How long is this going to take?” Selective memory —“To the best of my knowledge.” Overly courteous responses —“Yes, sir.”
BIA doesn’t just offer training, though. For a fee, its officers do the analysis themselves.
Read more: www.politico.com/news/stor...z0fpSZdMbN
The Citizen Corps Program engages citizens in personal preparedness, exercises, ongoing volunteer programs, and surge capacity response. Citizen Corps is FEMA's grassroots strategy to bring together government and community leaders to involve citizens in all-hazards emergency preparedness and resilience related to Homeland Security.
InfraGard is a private non-profit organization run as a public-private partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests and combining the knowledge base of a wide range of members. At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector.
InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States. All InfraGard members are associated with a local chapter. There is no 'National membership.' Protection of our nation’s infrastructure cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone. It requires coordinated action from numerous stakeholders – including government, the private sector, law enforcement, academia and concerned citizens. A fictionalized version could be called "IntraGuard."
More than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect and provide information on fellow Americans. In return, members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public, and at times before elected officials. “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate Total Information Awareness program (TIPS), turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” according to an ACLU report titled “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.”
InfraGard, with members from 350 companies of the Fortune 500, started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats. “Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years. FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard . . . from our perspective, that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
Intel: Raw & Cooked
The government has outsourced everything from spy satellites to covert operations. They even outsource buildings. Outsourced contractors set up black sites, design programs and create mobile, hand held covert communications devices and the latest must-have spy-tech accessories. They also do data mining and intelligence analysis work.
Today, the ties between intelligence agencies and the private sector -- the "shadow intelligence community" -- are so close, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. After leaving government, these officials keep their high-level security clearances, which makes them extremely valuable to their new employers. “You can’t do any business without having the clearances,” says former Spy Master Jake Stockwell. “How else would you know about the contracts?” The most secretive contractors are the Intelligence Community's A-team. Even the military is gearing up to invade our daily lives through domestic deployment.
Re-Tooling Intelligence
Who are these guys; what are they up to and what do they do? A handful of government agencies require TS/SCI contractor access and really only two major intelligence agencies do so. One of them is located in Langley, Virginia a couple of miles from the eastern entrance to the Dulles Toll Road with satellite offices stretching to the west. The other is located in Ft. Meade, Maryland. So, one serves CIA and another NSA.
They have staff co-located at an Annapolis Junction Maryland facility. To the uninitiated, that means they contract with the CIA, work extensively with Army and Navy tier-one Special Forces Teams as well as Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a little NSA thrown in. Geography tells the tale of who is working for whom.
Employees have experience working in hostile and denied areas and have immediate availability to deploy as part of a team or alone to ply their trade abroad or in the US. (Private domestic spying, anyone?) Go-bags packed, ready to deploy with teams raises the obvious follow up question: which teams?
They tag along along with Special Forces teams to foreign hostile or denied areas with comm equipment that has offensive and defensive capabilities --for ELINT and SIGINT collection. They set up in a house that happens to be in the path of a highly directional signal or on top of just the right cable. The metaphorical houses are probably in such friendly spots as Iran or wherever the yellow brick road of GWOT contracting leads.
They set up covert listening posts and surveillance. Teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems. This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.
Private CIA
CIA officials won't say how much of the agency’s work is done by private companies, but admit that outsourcing has increased substantially since 2001. Of the estimated $40 billion the United States is expected to spend on intelligence this year, experts say at least 50 percent will go to private contractors. An even bigger piece of the pie now goes to domestic security companies serving Fusion Centers.
Intelligence and law enforcement have merged and work together at home and abroad. Police departments across the country have created networks of databases called "fusion centers" in an effort to detect and prevent acts of terrorism. The ultimate objective is to create a nationwide reporting system of suspicious behaviors so that the authorities can "connect the dots" before an attack can occur.
Civil liberties groups claim these fusion centers are beset with legal and practical problems. One legal problem is that the police should not be opening files on people because they exercised their right to free speech, such as demonstrating against the foreign policies of the United States. One practical problem is that the police are gathering so much mundane information that practically anyone could end up on a list of "suspicious" persons because some official arbitrarily decided to fill out a tip sheet. Join us for a discussion of the pros and cons of this newly proposed system of policing.
Teams of military and law enforcement veterans and other motivated, capable Americans protect diplomats, provide training, and offer logistic services. They do those things in support of friendly nation peace operations around the world, including support of some of our Muslim allies.
Underworld to Overworld
These Ops are special and not necessarily accountable to anything but the bottom line. Operations range from the Underworld of black markets, black gold and money laundering to the Overworld of global controllers and Corpoglomerates. They know how things operate and how to get the job done while protecting the clients assets and secrets.
"Intelligence services" represent an unprecedented concentration of military expertise and force in the hands of private corporations. They evaluate clients through research and due diligence, to ensure they are legitimate actors who support freedom and security. They only take on work that is sanctioned by the U.S. government, or so they say.
Halliburton will probably never shake its bad reputation. Blackwater became so infamous, it changed its name to Xe, much like the maligned Whackenhut changed to "The GEO Group, Inc." GEO is now a world leader in the delivery of correctional and detention management, health and mental health, and other diversified services to federal, state and local government agencies around the globe. GEO offers a turnkey approach that includes design, construction, financing and operations. GEO represents government clients in the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada,
Substantive Deliverables
With mixed personnel, they circumvent the turf war between Police, CIA and the Pentagon. Services include Acquisitions, National and International Emergency Response, Think Tanks, Field Security, Action Teams, Fusion Analysis, Cyber Forensics, Network Security, Data Analysis, Transactional Auditing, Tutorial Assisstance and Systems Transformation.
Also, counter measures, anti-terrorism evaluation, technology and development training, theater-wide communications operations, intelligence liason, clandestine procedures and training, incident management and protective operations. Encryption methodologies and the design of secure communications networks within a defense environment. COMSEC, INFOSEC, and SIGSEC. EMF risk assessment and reduction.
* Counter-Intelligence Services
* All-Source Fusion Analysis Services
* Strategic Debriefing
* Translation Services
* Tactical Translation Services
* HUMINT Support
* Imagery Analysis Support
* Topographic Support
Intellipedians
The CIA has grown wise to the power of open-source collaboration, and Intellipedia—a classified version of Wikipedia—is humming with activity 3 years after its debut, Time reports. The site boasts 900,000 pages of content written by 100,000 identified intelligence professionals. Advocates cite the rapid treatment of questions as evidence of Intellipedia’s effectiveness.
For example, an agent posted a page asking how to collect evidence from a chlorine-based IED after coming across one in Iraq. "Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world chimed in on this thing, and we got a perfectly serviceable set of instructions in two days," says one user. Some hardliners have questioned the site’s security, but other say a rapidly evolving database is exactly what the intelligence community needs to combat the ever-changing face of terrorism.
Moonlighting Intel
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side -- a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation's top-level intelligence talent.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in "deception detection," the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.
A government official familiar with the policy insists it doesn’t impede the CIA’s work on critical national security investigations. This official said CIA officers who want to participate in it must first submit a detailed explanation of the type of work involved and get permission from higher-ups within the agency.
If any officer requests permission for outside employment, those requests are reviewed not just for legality, but for propriety. There is much about the policy that is unclear, including how many officers have availed themselves of it, how long it has been in place and what types of outside employment have been allowed. The CIA declined to provide additional details.
Generally, federal employees across the vast government work force are allowed to moonlight in the private sector, but under tight guidelines, that can vary from agency to agency, according to the federal Office of Government Ethics.
“In general, for most nonpolitical employees, they may engage in outside employment, but there are some restrictions,” said Elaine Newton, an attorney at the Office of Government Ethics. She explained that agencies throughout the federal government set their own policies on outside employment, and that they all typically require that the employment not represent a conflict of interest with the employee’s federal job and that the employee have written approval before taking on the work.
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
BIA has employed active-duty CIA officers in the past, although BIA president Cheryl Cook said that has “not been the case with BIA for some time.”
But the ties between BIA and the intelligence world run deep. The name itself was chosen as a play off CIA. And the presence of so many former CIA personnel on the payroll at BIA causes confusion as to whether the intelligence firm is actually an extension of the agency itself. As a result, BIA places a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not, in fact, controlled by Langley.
BIA’s clients can put the company on a retainer for as much as $400,000 to $800,000 a year. And in return, they receive access to a variety of services, from deception detection to other programs that feature the CIA intelligence techniques.
The tactics that BIA officials such as these teach hedge fund clients are based in a program it calls “Tactical Behavior Assessment."Unlike polygraph machines, the TBA technique allows examiners to work without hooking up their subject to a series of wires. The subject never knows he’s being scrutinized.
Polygraph machines work by measuring a person’s physical responses, such as heart rate, that indicate stress. Analysts using the machine need to sit with their subject for a long time. They have to establish a person’s physiological baseline, so they begin with a “control” conversation about neutral topics, before they can begin grilling the subject. Conducting an interview and doing a thorough analysis of polygraph results can take hours.
TBA focuses on the verbal and nonverbal cues that people convey when they aren’t telling the truth. Psychologists familiar with the method say it works because human beings just aren’t hard-wired to lie well. Holding two opposing ideas in your brain at the same time — as you have to do in order to tell a lie — causes a phenomenon they term “cognitive dissonance,” which creates actual physical discomfort. And when people are uncomfortable, they squirm. They fidget ever so slightly, they pick lint off their clothes, they shift their bodily positions.
Agents look for the physical indicators of lying. They watch for a person shifting anchor points. If the person is leaning forward on one elbow, does he switch to the other one? Interrogators watch for grooming gestures such as adjusting clothes, hair or eyeglasses. They look to see if the person picks at his fingernails or scratches himself. They watch for the person to clean his surroundings — does he straighten the paper clips on the table or line up the pens? If he does, he could be lying.
To obtain verbal clues, agents listen for several kinds of statements. They’ll listen for qualifying answers, phrases that begin with words like “honestly,” “frankly” or “basically.” The agents will be listening for detour phrases like “as I said before ...” They’ll want to hear if the person invokes religion — “I swear to God” — or attacks the questioner: “How dare you ask me something like that?”
Other red flags: Complaints —“How long is this going to take?” Selective memory —“To the best of my knowledge.” Overly courteous responses —“Yes, sir.”
BIA doesn’t just offer training, though. For a fee, its officers do the analysis themselves.
Read more: www.politico.com/news/stor...z0fpSZdMbN
NOC, NOC
HUMINT
Human intelligence. The collection of intelligence from human sources, including defectors, voluntary sources, spies recruited to betray their country or organization, prisoners, diplomats, information from allied or liaison intelligence services.
Who does HUMINT: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/network/#/overall/types-of-work/human-intelligence/
The US needs to reconfigure how it uses HUMINT tools by examining their effectiveness in the recruitment-centered model. When using this tool, the collecting agency finds a member of an adversarial group with access to important information. He then turn him or her into a spy by building a personal relationship and eventually popping the question, “Will you spy for me?”
Back pocket agents are nefarious agents or assets, loosely associated to the Company. The key is an "agent" has a narrow meaning and in the espionage business one ought not use words and terms that are loosey-goosey. An agent generally is paid and proven. An asset may not be paid nor in agreement with the nation state.
This model dominates since the Cold War, when spying followed fairly predictable guidelines. The organizational solution to the question of penetration was to rely on finding agents ‘in-place’ and to develop an approach in which agent recruitment played the fundamental role in HUMINT operations. However, even using ‘in-place’ sources had its difficulties. The normal process of developing and managing a HUMINT source consists of a cycle of Spotting, Assessing, Recruiting, Handling, and Terminating an asset In the Recruitment Cycle.
Driving this is an organizational culture that elevates recruiting in the hearts and minds of the Clandestine Service cadre. Career paths are driven by asset and agent recruiting, ‘hallway reputation,’ and ‘scalp-hunting,’ which measures performance for promotions. The highest value is given to recruiting and personality traits that facilitate it. In the Cold War that meant infiltrating the diplomatic scene of embassies and consulates under the guise of ‘official cover’ – cover where an officer’s affiliation with the US is not concealed, but his or her status as an intelligence officer is.
Intelligence liason in the War on Terror is necessarily more difficult, due to access to cultural groups, de-centralization of authority, and heavy need for collection on terrorist targets. Liason with foreign security units is crucial, actually better understood as a form of subcontracted intelligence collection based on barter.
Thus, liaison for the purpose of HUMINT collection is essentially “outsourc[ng the task of penetration,” an approach upon which the CIA appears to regularly lean when collecting on terrorists. Herein lies liaison’s greatest weakness - that we cannot control it. In a liaison partnership, HUMINT officers may be afforded access to a captured terrorist, or made aware of or allowed to participate in the partner service’s surveillance.
NOC, NOC, Who's There?
Only a small percentage of the CIA's employees (perhaps less than 10 percent of the agency's estimated 10,000 to 20,000 workers) are clandestine officers involved in operations—the traditional spy stuff that includes recruiting sources, executing covert missions, and gathering intelligence. The remaining 90 percent are analysts, managers, scientists, and support staff. Because of their various roles, CIA employees require different levels of protective cover:
No cover. Upper management, college recruiters, congressional liaisons, Director George Tenet: These men and women are publicly acknowledged CIA employees.
Light cover. Many of the CIA's analysts and scientists fall under this category. Their families and friends might know who they really work for, but publicly, they claim to be employed by some other innocuous government agency or group. One former intelligence officer described this as "the cover you use if your airplane gets hijacked": It's safe enough to use on a quick visit overseas, say to meet with intelligence counterparts in a friendly country, but insufficient cover for spies stationed abroad.
Official cover. Most CIA employees engaged in operations overseas are given official cover: a sham job in the U.S. embassy (or working for another government agency) that affords them diplomatic immunity. These spies work under varying degrees of secrecy—the CIA station chief in a major ally nation may be well-known on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, but his subordinates, who actually recruit new informants, may not be. Such spies probably confide in their immediate families, but otherwise are unlikely to reveal their true occupation. (Although some operatives working in allied nations are "declared" officers, which means the CIA informs the host government that they are spies.) The advantage of official cover is that if officers are caught, they enjoy the benefits of diplomatic protection; at worst, they'd be publicly outed and sent home in disgrace.
Nonofficial cover. NOCs (the word rhymes with "rocks") are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work abroad without diplomatic protection (often they pretend to work for some commercial enterprise). If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the United States would admit their true identities. When using official cover could put a spy's life and work at risk, NOC is the only alternative.
A little-noticed provision in the public section of a mostly-classified Senate intelligence bill signals that the Central Intelligence Agency is more serious than ever about plans to expand its program of setting up cover jobs for CIA officers outside of the usual posts in the State Department and other government agencies. Some believe the CIA's non-official cover, or NOC (pronounced KNOCK), program is the likeliest way for the agency to penetrate terrorist organizations or even, say, the nuclear program of Kim Jong Il's closed regime in North Korea.
"With terrorism, counter-proliferation — the kinds of threats that we face — you have to be more inventive in the way you deploy people overseas," said a knowledgeable U.S. official. "So you are going to have a lot of people who are not under official cover." America's most famous NOC is Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed last summer after a columnist reported that Bush administration officials had said she was behind a 2002 trip by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam had sought to buy uranium from Niger.
NOCs have traditionally been a tough position to fill. Though not a complete solution to the CIA's problem of gathering human intelligence, the NOC program can help. It's extremely expensive and dangerous to build a credible non-official cover by planting someone in, say, a corporate executive post in Islamabad or as a cell phone salesman in Madrid — positions in which a CIA officer would have no diplomatic immunity from arrest by the host government and little protection from deadly retribution by terrorists. Worse, the CIA has faced major bureaucratic hurdles in setting up an infrastructure to ensure that an NOC appears to be paid by a cover employer while actually being paid a government salary but at the same time only liable for taxes on a — often much lower — CIA officer's wage.
The Senate intelligence committee quietly passed a measure early this month that would make it clear that the CIA can "pay salaries, allowances, retirement, insurance, and other benefits to CIA employees under non-official cover in a manner consistent with their cover." This also suggests that a NOC might be allowed to keep at least some of the larger salary that goes with their fake job.
Although some experts believe CIA Director George Tenet already has much if not all of this authority, this legislation would give the CIA additional flexibility. "This is intended to sort of cut through some of the paperwork," the U.S. official said. "There shouldn't be any excuse for not doing these kinds of things." Demonstrating the importance of non-official cover across the entire U.S. intelligence community, the Senate bill also makes permanent the authority for the Pentagon to use front companies in its intelligence gathering, an authority that until now has been subject to renewal.
CIA continues to expand its NOC program. Intelligence officials say several hundred NOCs are now in the field, and the number is growing. Senior officials from the agency's National Collections Branch have been quietly approaching businesses doing overseas work to ask if they will provide covers for CIA case officers. Energy companies, import-export firms, multinational concerns, banks with foreign branches and high-tech corporations are among those being approached. Usually the company president and perhaps another senior officer, such as the general counsel, are the only ones who know of the arrangement. ``The CEOs do it out of a sense of patriotism,'' says former deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman.
In effect, the companies get free executives. For the cover to be plausible, the CIA must recruit business-school graduates who can put in a productive day's work with the firm and then spy during their off-hours. The CIA has even begun experimenting with recruiting mid-level corporate executives who yearn for adventure, then placing them in overseas firms as ``NOCs of convenience'' to penetrate a target for several years.
When the mission is over, the execs return to the business world. But while they are NOC officers, the CIA pays them a government salary. The company pays them a corporate salary-- usually much larger--to keep up the cover, but that money is quietly returned to the company. In fact, the agency's Covert Tax Branch has a secret relationship with the IRS to resolve the two W-2 forms an officer gets each year.
NOCs are out in the cold. But the CIA believes NOCs are the best way to carry out many clandestine operations. A foreign-intelligence service usually has no trouble spotting CIA officers operating under an embassy's cover. Not so for NOCs. ``If you're working drugs, thugs or tech transfers, you're going to be in banks all the time looking at financial transactions''--jobs often better suited for an officer under corporate cover, says a CIA contractor. NOC officers also have had more luck spying on ``hard targets'' such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, where the U.S. has no embassies in which to hide CIA operatives. In some countries, CIA is even experimenting with setting up two stations. One would be under the traditional embassy cover to serve as a decoy, while another much more secretive station would handle the NOCs.
CIA sources report NOCs sponsors overseas include: RJR Nabisco, Prentice-Hall, Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Pan Am, Rockwell International, Campbell Soup, and Sears Roebuck. In some cases, flamboyant conservative businessmen like Ross Perot and the late Malcolm Forbes have actively cooperated with the CIA in stationing officers worldwide. In other cases, obscure U.S. companies doing business abroad--such as a tiny Texas firm that deals in spare tractor parts in Latin America, cited by a former CIA officer--have taken part in the NOC program. Shipping lines, mineral and oil exploration firms, and construction companies with international operations, like the Bechtel Corp., often house NOCs.
By joining the CIA in clandestine activities, a company tacitly accepts that some of its employees could routinely break the law in another country and, if exposed, embarrass the company and endanger its other overseas employees.
Unlike most CIA officers, who are stationed abroad disguised as State Department employees, military officials, or other U.S. government personnel attached to an American embassy, NOCs operate without any apparent links to the U.S. government. They are able to approach people who would not otherwise come into contact with a U.S. embassy official. The CIA's operations within terrorist, drug trafficking, and arms dealer networks often involve NOCs, who can move more easily in such circles without raising suspicion.
In recent years, according to several CIA sources, NOCs have increasingly turned their attention to economics. Using their business covers, they seek to recruit agents in foreign government economic ministries or gain intelligence about high-tech firms in computer, electronics, and aerospace industries. They also help track the development of critical technologies, both military and civilian.
NOCs frequently stay 5, 10, or more years in one place. During that time, the NOC is truly "out in the cold." Their contacts with control officers in the CIA station are strictly limited; they do not have access to embassy files; and they must report through secret communications channels and clandestine meetings.
"As a NOC officer you are truly alone," says John Quinn, who spent much of the 1980s as a NOC in Tokyo. "The sense of isolation and loneliness is difficult to describe to those who have never experienced it." Because NOCs do not have the diplomatic immunity that protects CIA officers operating under embassy cover, if they are exposed they are subject to arrest and imprisonment--and they can be executed as spies.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,638325,00.html#ixzz0gJUIS074
Human intelligence. The collection of intelligence from human sources, including defectors, voluntary sources, spies recruited to betray their country or organization, prisoners, diplomats, information from allied or liaison intelligence services.
Who does HUMINT: http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/network/#/overall/types-of-work/human-intelligence/
The US needs to reconfigure how it uses HUMINT tools by examining their effectiveness in the recruitment-centered model. When using this tool, the collecting agency finds a member of an adversarial group with access to important information. He then turn him or her into a spy by building a personal relationship and eventually popping the question, “Will you spy for me?”
Back pocket agents are nefarious agents or assets, loosely associated to the Company. The key is an "agent" has a narrow meaning and in the espionage business one ought not use words and terms that are loosey-goosey. An agent generally is paid and proven. An asset may not be paid nor in agreement with the nation state.
This model dominates since the Cold War, when spying followed fairly predictable guidelines. The organizational solution to the question of penetration was to rely on finding agents ‘in-place’ and to develop an approach in which agent recruitment played the fundamental role in HUMINT operations. However, even using ‘in-place’ sources had its difficulties. The normal process of developing and managing a HUMINT source consists of a cycle of Spotting, Assessing, Recruiting, Handling, and Terminating an asset In the Recruitment Cycle.
Driving this is an organizational culture that elevates recruiting in the hearts and minds of the Clandestine Service cadre. Career paths are driven by asset and agent recruiting, ‘hallway reputation,’ and ‘scalp-hunting,’ which measures performance for promotions. The highest value is given to recruiting and personality traits that facilitate it. In the Cold War that meant infiltrating the diplomatic scene of embassies and consulates under the guise of ‘official cover’ – cover where an officer’s affiliation with the US is not concealed, but his or her status as an intelligence officer is.
Intelligence liason in the War on Terror is necessarily more difficult, due to access to cultural groups, de-centralization of authority, and heavy need for collection on terrorist targets. Liason with foreign security units is crucial, actually better understood as a form of subcontracted intelligence collection based on barter.
Thus, liaison for the purpose of HUMINT collection is essentially “outsourc[ng the task of penetration,” an approach upon which the CIA appears to regularly lean when collecting on terrorists. Herein lies liaison’s greatest weakness - that we cannot control it. In a liaison partnership, HUMINT officers may be afforded access to a captured terrorist, or made aware of or allowed to participate in the partner service’s surveillance.
NOC, NOC, Who's There?
Only a small percentage of the CIA's employees (perhaps less than 10 percent of the agency's estimated 10,000 to 20,000 workers) are clandestine officers involved in operations—the traditional spy stuff that includes recruiting sources, executing covert missions, and gathering intelligence. The remaining 90 percent are analysts, managers, scientists, and support staff. Because of their various roles, CIA employees require different levels of protective cover:
No cover. Upper management, college recruiters, congressional liaisons, Director George Tenet: These men and women are publicly acknowledged CIA employees.
Light cover. Many of the CIA's analysts and scientists fall under this category. Their families and friends might know who they really work for, but publicly, they claim to be employed by some other innocuous government agency or group. One former intelligence officer described this as "the cover you use if your airplane gets hijacked": It's safe enough to use on a quick visit overseas, say to meet with intelligence counterparts in a friendly country, but insufficient cover for spies stationed abroad.
Official cover. Most CIA employees engaged in operations overseas are given official cover: a sham job in the U.S. embassy (or working for another government agency) that affords them diplomatic immunity. These spies work under varying degrees of secrecy—the CIA station chief in a major ally nation may be well-known on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, but his subordinates, who actually recruit new informants, may not be. Such spies probably confide in their immediate families, but otherwise are unlikely to reveal their true occupation. (Although some operatives working in allied nations are "declared" officers, which means the CIA informs the host government that they are spies.) The advantage of official cover is that if officers are caught, they enjoy the benefits of diplomatic protection; at worst, they'd be publicly outed and sent home in disgrace.
Nonofficial cover. NOCs (the word rhymes with "rocks") are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work abroad without diplomatic protection (often they pretend to work for some commercial enterprise). If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the United States would admit their true identities. When using official cover could put a spy's life and work at risk, NOC is the only alternative.
A little-noticed provision in the public section of a mostly-classified Senate intelligence bill signals that the Central Intelligence Agency is more serious than ever about plans to expand its program of setting up cover jobs for CIA officers outside of the usual posts in the State Department and other government agencies. Some believe the CIA's non-official cover, or NOC (pronounced KNOCK), program is the likeliest way for the agency to penetrate terrorist organizations or even, say, the nuclear program of Kim Jong Il's closed regime in North Korea.
"With terrorism, counter-proliferation — the kinds of threats that we face — you have to be more inventive in the way you deploy people overseas," said a knowledgeable U.S. official. "So you are going to have a lot of people who are not under official cover." America's most famous NOC is Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed last summer after a columnist reported that Bush administration officials had said she was behind a 2002 trip by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam had sought to buy uranium from Niger.
NOCs have traditionally been a tough position to fill. Though not a complete solution to the CIA's problem of gathering human intelligence, the NOC program can help. It's extremely expensive and dangerous to build a credible non-official cover by planting someone in, say, a corporate executive post in Islamabad or as a cell phone salesman in Madrid — positions in which a CIA officer would have no diplomatic immunity from arrest by the host government and little protection from deadly retribution by terrorists. Worse, the CIA has faced major bureaucratic hurdles in setting up an infrastructure to ensure that an NOC appears to be paid by a cover employer while actually being paid a government salary but at the same time only liable for taxes on a — often much lower — CIA officer's wage.
The Senate intelligence committee quietly passed a measure early this month that would make it clear that the CIA can "pay salaries, allowances, retirement, insurance, and other benefits to CIA employees under non-official cover in a manner consistent with their cover." This also suggests that a NOC might be allowed to keep at least some of the larger salary that goes with their fake job.
Although some experts believe CIA Director George Tenet already has much if not all of this authority, this legislation would give the CIA additional flexibility. "This is intended to sort of cut through some of the paperwork," the U.S. official said. "There shouldn't be any excuse for not doing these kinds of things." Demonstrating the importance of non-official cover across the entire U.S. intelligence community, the Senate bill also makes permanent the authority for the Pentagon to use front companies in its intelligence gathering, an authority that until now has been subject to renewal.
CIA continues to expand its NOC program. Intelligence officials say several hundred NOCs are now in the field, and the number is growing. Senior officials from the agency's National Collections Branch have been quietly approaching businesses doing overseas work to ask if they will provide covers for CIA case officers. Energy companies, import-export firms, multinational concerns, banks with foreign branches and high-tech corporations are among those being approached. Usually the company president and perhaps another senior officer, such as the general counsel, are the only ones who know of the arrangement. ``The CEOs do it out of a sense of patriotism,'' says former deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman.
In effect, the companies get free executives. For the cover to be plausible, the CIA must recruit business-school graduates who can put in a productive day's work with the firm and then spy during their off-hours. The CIA has even begun experimenting with recruiting mid-level corporate executives who yearn for adventure, then placing them in overseas firms as ``NOCs of convenience'' to penetrate a target for several years.
When the mission is over, the execs return to the business world. But while they are NOC officers, the CIA pays them a government salary. The company pays them a corporate salary-- usually much larger--to keep up the cover, but that money is quietly returned to the company. In fact, the agency's Covert Tax Branch has a secret relationship with the IRS to resolve the two W-2 forms an officer gets each year.
NOCs are out in the cold. But the CIA believes NOCs are the best way to carry out many clandestine operations. A foreign-intelligence service usually has no trouble spotting CIA officers operating under an embassy's cover. Not so for NOCs. ``If you're working drugs, thugs or tech transfers, you're going to be in banks all the time looking at financial transactions''--jobs often better suited for an officer under corporate cover, says a CIA contractor. NOC officers also have had more luck spying on ``hard targets'' such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, where the U.S. has no embassies in which to hide CIA operatives. In some countries, CIA is even experimenting with setting up two stations. One would be under the traditional embassy cover to serve as a decoy, while another much more secretive station would handle the NOCs.
CIA sources report NOCs sponsors overseas include: RJR Nabisco, Prentice-Hall, Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Pan Am, Rockwell International, Campbell Soup, and Sears Roebuck. In some cases, flamboyant conservative businessmen like Ross Perot and the late Malcolm Forbes have actively cooperated with the CIA in stationing officers worldwide. In other cases, obscure U.S. companies doing business abroad--such as a tiny Texas firm that deals in spare tractor parts in Latin America, cited by a former CIA officer--have taken part in the NOC program. Shipping lines, mineral and oil exploration firms, and construction companies with international operations, like the Bechtel Corp., often house NOCs.
By joining the CIA in clandestine activities, a company tacitly accepts that some of its employees could routinely break the law in another country and, if exposed, embarrass the company and endanger its other overseas employees.
Unlike most CIA officers, who are stationed abroad disguised as State Department employees, military officials, or other U.S. government personnel attached to an American embassy, NOCs operate without any apparent links to the U.S. government. They are able to approach people who would not otherwise come into contact with a U.S. embassy official. The CIA's operations within terrorist, drug trafficking, and arms dealer networks often involve NOCs, who can move more easily in such circles without raising suspicion.
In recent years, according to several CIA sources, NOCs have increasingly turned their attention to economics. Using their business covers, they seek to recruit agents in foreign government economic ministries or gain intelligence about high-tech firms in computer, electronics, and aerospace industries. They also help track the development of critical technologies, both military and civilian.
NOCs frequently stay 5, 10, or more years in one place. During that time, the NOC is truly "out in the cold." Their contacts with control officers in the CIA station are strictly limited; they do not have access to embassy files; and they must report through secret communications channels and clandestine meetings.
"As a NOC officer you are truly alone," says John Quinn, who spent much of the 1980s as a NOC in Tokyo. "The sense of isolation and loneliness is difficult to describe to those who have never experienced it." Because NOCs do not have the diplomatic immunity that protects CIA officers operating under embassy cover, if they are exposed they are subject to arrest and imprisonment--and they can be executed as spies.
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,638325,00.html#ixzz0gJUIS074
The Spy Who Billed Me
2007-(The Nation) This column was written by R.J. Hillhouse.
The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq War has been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy and others provide security services against military-level threats, and they regularly engage in combat. But what is not generally known is that the secret side of the Iraq War and the larger "war on terror" is also conducted by private corporations, fielding private spies. The reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Corporations are heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document, the President's Daily Brief (PDB).
Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in U.S. government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.
For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA's most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.
Employees of private corporations — "green badgers," in CIA parlance — provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies. They also gather human intelligence on behalf of the CIA and analyze it, creating intelligence products used by the intelligence community and also shared with other branches of government.
Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that produces the final document of the President's Daily Brief.
The President's Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the U.S. government's most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it's impossible to distinguish their work from the government's. Although the President's Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.
Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the U.S. national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.
• Nearly 50% of contractors perform management and planning tasks, computer upgrades and maintenance functions or work as personnel or payroll officers.
• About a quarter of private contractors were employed to skirt federal hiring limits.
• Contractors are typically paid more than government employees.
• The discrepancy has caused some "talented individuals" to quit government jobs but has not caused a "mass exodus."
"Contractors allow us to expand quickly and contract quickly," Sanders said. "I don't believe we're overly reliant on contractors."
The survey, the first to attempt to account for intelligence contracting, was begun last year, in part because of concerns by intelligence service leaders that too many government workers were quitting to take private work.Last September, CIA Director Michael Hayden said his agency needed to guard against becoming a "farm system for contractors."A separate study of the impact of contracting at the CIA is continuing, spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
Stephen Marrin, who teaches intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., says hiring higher-paid contractors raises a "fairness issue" and can impact morale. Marrin, who worked as a CIA analyst for 2½ years in the mid-1990s, later returned to the agency as a contract analyst for about a 25% raise. Hiring contractors, he said, can save the federal government money on retirement benefits.
http://www.thespywhobilledme.com/about.html
The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq War has been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy and others provide security services against military-level threats, and they regularly engage in combat. But what is not generally known is that the secret side of the Iraq War and the larger "war on terror" is also conducted by private corporations, fielding private spies. The reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Corporations are heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document, the President's Daily Brief (PDB).
Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in U.S. government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.
For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA's most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.
Employees of private corporations — "green badgers," in CIA parlance — provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies. They also gather human intelligence on behalf of the CIA and analyze it, creating intelligence products used by the intelligence community and also shared with other branches of government.
Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that produces the final document of the President's Daily Brief.
The President's Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the U.S. government's most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it's impossible to distinguish their work from the government's. Although the President's Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it.
Concerned members of the intelligence community have told me that if a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the U.S. national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.
• Nearly 50% of contractors perform management and planning tasks, computer upgrades and maintenance functions or work as personnel or payroll officers.
• About a quarter of private contractors were employed to skirt federal hiring limits.
• Contractors are typically paid more than government employees.
• The discrepancy has caused some "talented individuals" to quit government jobs but has not caused a "mass exodus."
"Contractors allow us to expand quickly and contract quickly," Sanders said. "I don't believe we're overly reliant on contractors."
The survey, the first to attempt to account for intelligence contracting, was begun last year, in part because of concerns by intelligence service leaders that too many government workers were quitting to take private work.Last September, CIA Director Michael Hayden said his agency needed to guard against becoming a "farm system for contractors."A separate study of the impact of contracting at the CIA is continuing, spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.
Stephen Marrin, who teaches intelligence studies at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., says hiring higher-paid contractors raises a "fairness issue" and can impact morale. Marrin, who worked as a CIA analyst for 2½ years in the mid-1990s, later returned to the agency as a contract analyst for about a 25% raise. Hiring contractors, he said, can save the federal government money on retirement benefits.
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Spy in the Box
- There are nearly 1,300 government organizations and 2,000 private companies working in 10,000 locations across the country.
- There are 854,000 people who have top-secret security clearances.
- There are 33 building complexes for top-secret work that are under construction or have been built just in Washington, DC since 9/11... totaling 17 million square feet of space.
- Analysts turn out 50,000 intelligence reports every year... you can bet many of them never get read.
- And, at least 263 organizations have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11... that of course means hiring lots and lots of people. But don't ask where Osama bin Laden is… nobody knows.
