McConnell is certainly right on that point. Many intelligence analysts believe that congressional oversight during the Bush administration has been virtually nonexistent. Despite the administration's flagrant abuse of U.S. laws concerning privacy and NSA wiretaps of U.S. citizens, the Republican majority did very little to investigate its abuses.
Now there is a new Congress that actually believes in oversight. One intelligence program that should merit its attention, and that members might want to ask McConnell about during his confirmation hearings, is Total Information Awareness, a data-mining project run by former National Security Advisor John Poindexter that was outlawed by Congress in 2003. Between 1997 and 2002, according to a recent report by the American Civil Liberties Union, Booz Allen was awarded more than $63 million worth of TIA contracts. Last Friday, Newsweek reported that McConnell was a "key figure" in making Booz Allen, along with SAIC, the prime contractors on the project.
Shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Booz Allen was hired by the CIA to audit the agency's monitoring of trillions of dollars in international financial transactions moving through a European cooperative called SWIFT. The company's impartiality to monitor this program was questioned last year by a European Union panel, which recommended independent supervision and declared that "we don't see such independent supervision under the current situation, and this must be established."
The ACLU and Privacy International, an organization that monitors government intrusion, jointly issued a scathing report on the issue last September. "Though Booz Allen's role is to verify that the access to the SWIFT data is not abused, its relationship with the US government calls its objectivity significantly into question," the two organizations said.
Booz Allen rejected the charge. "What clients are buying from us is independence and objectivity," spokeswoman Marie Lerch told the New York Times. But the company's close ties to the intelligence community through its employment of former high-ranking officials calls that objectivity into question.
Another key area that Congress should examine is Booz Allen's relationship with the NSA. Largely through McConnell, Booz Allen has very close ties to the NSA, once considered so secret its initials were said to stand for "No Such Agency."
Booz Allen served as the NSA's chief advisor on one of its most significant outsourcing projects. Called Groundbreaker, this huge project was launched shortly before the 9/11 attacks to overhaul the NSA's internal I.T. systems. Booz Allen's work on this project was outlined in a Booz Allen magazine piece on "Government Clients." Working with the NSA, the article states, Booz Allen "helped create a new model of managed competition that outsourced key pieces of the agency's IT infrastructure services." Its work on Groundbreaker "included source selection support and evaluating vendor proposals."
Last year, however, the Baltimore Sun investigated the project and concluded it was a failure. Over the course of the project, Groundbreaker's $2 billion price tag had doubled, and the problems with the system, according to insiders who spoke to the Sun, were legion. "Some analysts and managers have said their productivity is half of what it used to be because the new system requires them to perform many more steps to accomplish what a few keystrokes used to," the paper reported. Another NSA program that Booz Allen was involved in, Trailblazer, which was designed to overhaul the NSA's signals intelligence system, is widely considered an even worse failure.
Booz Allen's involvement with both projects would have directly involved the company in the NSA's surveillance of U.S. domestic communications under what President Bush calls the "Terrorist Surveillance Program." Although Bush claims that the NSA program is so narrow that the agency is only listening to calls where an al-Qaida operative is at the other end, longtime analysts of the NSA believe that the program is much bigger than it has been portrayed. "I think they're listening to everybody," says John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a highly respected defense research organization.
When the Groundbreaker and Trailblazer problems came to light, the Senate suspended the NSA's independent acquisition authority. In July 2006, the oversight subcommittee of the House intelligence committee issued a blistering critique of the Pentagon's management of the NSA and other intelligence programs. "Many of the major acquisition programs at the National Reconnaissance Office, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency have cost taxpayers billions of dollars in cost overruns and schedule delays," the bipartisan report concluded. Booz Allen was deeply involved in all three, and as head of the firm's defense intelligence programs, McConnell would have had direct participation.
Contracting has now become so ubiquitous in intelligence that the DNI itself is complaining. "Increasingly, the IC [intelligence community] finds itself in competition with its contractors for our own employees," the DNI wrote in an unclassified report on personnel policies released last June. "[T]hose same contractors recruit our own employees, already cleared and trained at government expense, and then 'lease' them back to us at considerably greater expense."
Concomitant with this report, the DNI launched its first study of intelligence contracting. The results, however, won't be in until the end of this fiscal year. By then, McConnell will probably be firmly ensconced as the director of DNI. Getting a grip on these problems is too much to ask of a contractor who was himself deeply involved in them.
About the writer
Tim Shorrock writes about national security, intelligence and other topics for The Nation, Mother Jones and other publications. He is working on a book about the privatization of intelligence, to be published in 2008.
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