The Spy Who BIlled Me

Not Blackwater, but Xe, as in Xena Warrior Princess

2009-02-13T19:10:12-05:00

Blackwater has gone to ground--sort of. In a move to apparently distance itself from its image as reckless cowboys that was etched into the world's mind from the September 2007 Baghdad Nisoor Square shoots, Blackwater USA is once again rebranding itself. It has changed its name (and presumably legal structure) to Xe. (Pronounced, "Z" as in "Xena, Warrior Princess.")

The world's largest private security company that once boasted on its website, "We are not simply a 'private security company.' We are a turnkey solution provider for 4th generation warfare," has taken yet another step to distance itself from its swashbuckling past. Due to its aggressive, yet effective tactics, it became the world's poster child for irresponsible guns for hire, an ironic reputation since Blackwater was actually one of the most professional of the hundred plus private military organizations.

Given that the Iraqi government recently kicked Blackwater out of the country and BW subsequently lost that portion of a larger State Department security contract, the move is most likely to distance itself from this past so closely associated with the Bush Administration's questionable Iraq policies and to make contracting with it more palatable for government organizations and private entities. In a few years, everyone will still remember Blackwater, but few will recall that Xe (again, pronounced "Z" as in "Xena, Warrior Princess.") is indeed its successor. The cryptic name is unlikely to incite strong public opposition or at the least the fear of it.

It is unclear if the new legal structure will help limit the legal liabilities of Blackwater, containing them within the Blackwater USA, LLC structure and shielding the new entity.

The shift to Xe (as in "Xena, Warrior Princess") appears to be rather hasty. Xe (as in Xena) does not yet have its own website and they have not yet begun redirecting internet traffic away from the old Blackwaterusa.com. Xe has yet to roll out a new logo.

For those who are remain nostalgic for the old Blackwater bravado, the former Blackwater Pro Shop has been rebranded, but it continues to stock a wide variety of Blackwater gifts, including my fave, the Blackwater bear.

Dusty Gets Green Light for Green Badge

2008-10-01T02:15:03-04:00

Former number three at the CIA, Dusty Foggo, cut a sweet deal with federal prosecutors and pleaded guilty to one felony count for abusing his Agency position to funnel lucrative water contracts to Brent Wilkes, former friend and intel contractor. The terms of the plea agreement essentially bar Foggo from holding a government position requiring a security clearance. However, the deal expressly allows Dusty to work for an intel contractor requiring a security clearance. In other words, Dusty has been green lighted to become a green badger and use his government contacts to steer business to intel contractors along the Beltway.

Br'er rabbit just got thrown into the briar patch of the Beltway Bandits, restoring our shaken faith in Dusty's cunning. Apparently federal prosecutors understanding of the world of intel contracting was as good as Br'er Fox's of the briar patch.

And those intel contractors are probably already lining up to add Foggo to their team. It's not that often that someone of Foggo's stature, skill and charm come onto the market. Of course, Dusty will first have to serve a possible prison sentence of up to 37 months, but after that he be free to introduce his unique flair to Beltway business. Beyond wining and dining blue badgers at his favorite Capital Grille in Tyson's Corner, he has most likely picked up a few more elaborate entertainment ideas from his buddy Brent -- Scotland and cigars and Hawaii and hookers.

Okay, so hookers probably weren't Brent's idea...

Memo to Dusty: when flying blue badgers and their families to Scotland for golf and cigars, don't use your own credit card or the company's charter jet, but use a cutout instead. Ditto for Hawaii and hookers. Think tradecraft.

Blackwater Gearing Up for Hurricane Gustav

2008-08-29T18:17:40-04:00

Blackwater Worldwide is currently seeking qualified law enforcement officers and security personnel to potentially deploy to provide security in the possible aftermath of Hurricane Gustav. This is the first time Blackwater has mobilized under its controversial Homeland Security contracts. Blackwater did deploy security personnel to assist New Orleans in wake of Hurricane Katrina and this resulted in great controversy since it was the first time a private military corporation had deployed on US soil.

Blackwater issued the following call for personnel late Friday afternoon:

Blackwater is compiling a list of qualified security personnel for possible deployment into areas affected by Hurricane Gustav.
Applicants must meet all items listed under the respective Officer posting and be US citizens. Contract length is TBD.

Law Enforcement Officers (all criteria must apply)

1. Current sworn [may be full time, part time or reserve]

2. With arrest powers

3. Armed status (must indicate Armed and/or Semi Auto. Revolver only not accepted)
expiration must be greater than 60 days out

4. Departmental credentials (not just a badge)

Armed Security Officers (all criteria must apply)

Only from the following states: OR, WA, CA, NV, NM, AZ, TX, FL, GA, SC, NC, VA, MD, IL, OK

1. Current/active/licensed/registered armed security officer

2. All training verification [unarmed and armed certificates of completion]

3. Current state issued face card indicting armed status [expiration must be greater than 60 days out]

Applicants will be required to provide an electronic copy of the above required credentials/documents, recent photo within
the last six months with response to this AD prior to consideration for deployment.

Personnel who meet the above qualifications and are interested, please send resumes and files to: 25505@blackwaterusa2.hrmdirect.com

Excellence in Intel Contracting

2008-05-23T20:37:00-04:00

I've long been skeptical of the Director of National Intelligence's emphasis upon "Excellence in Acquisition," but the recent contracting experience of a green badger has me convinced it might not be such a bad idea after all. And no, this is not a joke or parody. I'm business as usual in the wacky world of intel contracting.

Recently, an intelligence community (IC) agency awarded a multi-year contract for services to a major government contractor after a lengthy, scrupulously fair competition. It was anticipated that there were going to be two, perhaps even three, initial task orders (TOs) on the contract. No problem. The contracting officer (CO) assigned was young and inexperienced, but the workload on this particular contract was anticipated as being light.

The contractor’s contracts manager (CM) that had been assigned to the contract was an experienced hand who had left the awarding agency after several years for the greener pastures and lighter pressures of the private sector. On the Friday after the contract award, he got a panicky telephone call from the young CO. “There aren’t three initial TOs, there are eleven!” And they’re due out by COB (close of business) Monday. I can’t do it, I don’t know enough about the different specifications for the task orders.”

The green badger felt for the young CO, he knew what it was like to be under a lot of time pressure, which was one of the reasons that he had left government service. “Don’t panic”, he said, “I’ll come in over the weekend and help you out, if you like.” The CO agreed to the help.

Over the course of Saturday and Sunday, the CM essentially wrote the eleven initial task orders from scratch, each one with customized administrative specifications for security, personnel, travel. work locations (i.e., on site or off site), etc. The CM gave the TOs to the CO in “softcopy” (i.e., on a thumbdrive) Sunday evening so complete that the CO could just fill in the contract number, print them, and send them back to the contractor. After he finished, the CM was feeling pretty patriotic, and even treated himself to a stiff drink with dinner on Sunday evening. He may not be a government employee anymore, he thought, but he was still taking care of the mission.

When the hardcopy TOs arrived by courier mid day on Tuesday, the CM was stunned when he started reviewing them. The “blank” contract number had indeed been filled in, and the substantive deliverables were still the same. The customized administrative specifications for all eleven TOs had been changed, however, by someone just copying those that had been written for the first task order into the other ten. For at least four of the eleven TOs, this materially changed what was required to respond to the TOs, and thus increased the cost over the amount that would normally have been proposed. More importantly, however, was the fact that new administrative specifications rendered at least those four task orders nonsensical, and the CM had to go back to the CO and ask him to clarify what he really wanted.

“I can see now why the DNI [Director of National Intelligence]procurement executive thinks that acquisition needs to be a core competency,” the CM commented. “It’s gotten so bad in acquisitions that you can’t even do their job for them without them somehow screwing it up.”

2008-05-23T19:33:39-04:00

The post that was in this place has been deleted. It reported on a rumor regarding the latest Foggo indictment, clearly stating that this was a rumor. If you read it, please ignore its contents.

I have consistently held this blog to a higher standard and with that post I slipped. Rumors deserve no place on this blog. It was a judgment error and I apologize.

Congrats to WaPo's Steve Fainaru

2008-04-08T00:49:45-04:00

Warmest congratulations to the Washington Post's Steve Fainaru for winning the Pulitzer Prize in the international affairs category for his phenomenal reporting on private military corporations in Iraq! Over the past year he as been without peer in the mainstream media for his exceptional work. The following pieces were the basis for the prize:

A Chaotic Day On Baghdad's Airport Road (April 15, 2007)
Iraq Contractors Face Growing Parallel War (June 16, 2007)
Cutting Costs, Bending Rules, And a Trail of Broken Lives (July 29, 2007)
For Abducted Guards, Iraq Wasn't Just About Money (July 30, 2007)
Where Military Rules Don't Apply (Sept. 20, 2007)
Guards in Iraq Cite Frequent Shootings (Oct. 3, 2007)
How Blackwater Sniper Fire Felled 3 Iraqi Guards (Nov. 8, 2007)
Iraqis Detail Shooting by Guard Firm (Nov. 26, 2007)
Warnings Unheeded On Guards In Iraq (Dec. 24, 2007)

Well deserved, Steve! Bravo!

Three Claps for Clapper: CIFA in the Crosshairs

2008-04-02T04:13:58-04:00

Longstanding rumors about the imminent demise of the Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity's (CIFA) seems to be finally proving themselves to be true. The New York Times reports today that the Department of Defense Deputy Director for Intelligence, Gen. James Clapper, has recommended dismantling CIFA. CIFA was involved in controversial domestic spying programs.

CIFA's had a key role in the Duke Cunningham scandal and the prominent role intelligence contractors play at CIFA.

The NYT neglected to mention that CIFA is the government's most heavily outsourced intelligence agency. Over 30 corporations provide 90% of CIFA's staff--that's a blue green ratio of 1:9. CIFA's prime contractors are the usual suspects such as SAIC.

The DoD Inspector General has found inconsistencies between CIFA's procurement practices and procurement regulations that have resulted in overpayment for office space. CIFA was involved in further "inconsistencies" between procurement law and its multimillion dollar contracts with MZM, a benefactor of former Congressman Duke Cunningham.

The center piece of CIFA's domestic intelligence programs was the TALON database which logged unconfirmed reports of "suspicious" incidents within the US. These suspicious incidents have included various protests by peace groups, including Quakers. The Pentagon announced in August 2007 that it was shuttering the TALON program, effective the following month. Without the TALON data to sift through, it's unclear what CIFA contractors have been doing in the interim.

One possibility is noted by the NYT is mentioned in documents obtained by the ACLU:

Newly declassified documents released on Tuesday shed more light on another activity coordinated by the Pentagon’s counterintelligence office, issuing letters to banks and credit agencies to obtain financial records in terrorism and espionage investigations.

Despite its rather verbose mission statement, CIFA's purpose has been nebulous since its creation by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

Many consider CIFA to be the largest boondoggle in the Intelligence Community.

Pentagon Asserts Authority Over Contractors--Finally

2008-03-28T00:28:29-04:00

Five years into the Iraq War, the most heavily outsourced war in history, the Pentagon has issued a memorandum clearly giving authority of military commanders over the civilian contractors in their areas of operation. Until now, lines of authority have been unclear and local commanders often been frustrated with contractors with seemingly no accountability. A year and a half ago the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) was amended to extend jurisdiction to contractors serving alongside DoD personnel in a war or contingency operation, but the DoD did not issue guidelines on the amended code. In fact, no one seemed to notice the changes for several months until after the question was called by a 2006 Christmas shooting by a Blackwater armorer in the Baghdad Green Zone.

The memorandum outlines how commanders should respond to civilian contractors who break federal laws, including granting them court-martial authority, albeit in cases in which the Department of Justice determines that it will not initiate criminal proceedings. This authority is not extended to include Department of State contractors, although the DoS was notified of the changes.

A policy buried in the memo does raise some potentially interesting questions for CIA contractors:

Commanders possess significant authority to act whenever criminal activity may relate to or affect the commander's responsibilities, including situation in which the alleged offenders' precise identity or actual affiliation is to that point undetermined.

The CIA and its contractors do not operate under Department of Defense authority, but rather under the authority of the Chief of Mission (i.e. Ambassador), even though both military and intelligence may be operating parallel in a particular region. Things can get particularly sticky in cases were the CIA uses some time of military cover (i.e. individual, such as guys posing as DoD civilian contractors, or organizational cover in which military cover is used to hide an Agency base, etc.) Now the memo allows commissioned, warrant, petty and noncommissioned officers to detain DoD contractors believed to be committing crimes. It's easy to see how in the flurry of trying to quell a potential problem, local MPs could detain civilians who ostensibly fall under this memo and its references. The real issue would be what to do with them...

If the military lets these guys go because it is discovered that they actually fall under the Chief of Mission and thus are a Department of Justice problem, their cover is blown. However, if the cover façade is maintained, the military might actually end up having to let the accused perps go because they don’t have jurisdiction.

In actual practice, these situations are generally resolved by hustling the alleged perps out of country as quickly as possible back to CONUS, which was the Department of State/Blackwater solution to the 2006 Christmas shooting before anyone had discovered the changes to the UCMJ.

This assumes, however, that the perps are willing to cooperate. What if they are not, a la Frank Terpil? Then we'll find out whether Chavez can really measure up to Fidel's hospitality.

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Note to regular readers. My apologies for the long delay between posts. It's been a slow news period, one that coincided with me being hit by a particularly nasty flu bug. Needless to say, backlogged while I was sick, so it took a little longer to get around to regular posts. I expect to be more active in the next few weeks.

As contractor news has been rather slow, tips are particularly welcome right now and can be emailed to rjh AT thespywhobilledme.com.

Blackwater Enters the Campaign: Hillary calls for a ban

2008-02-29T04:12:59-05:00

Just as Blackwater had finally fallen from the headlines and the boys in Moyock thought their State Department contract would be quietly renewed, their worst nightmare has hit: Blackwater is a campaign issue. In an ironic twist of politics, Erik Prince is now on the same side of the contractor issue as Obama--more or less.

Senator Hillary Clinton broke her longstanding silence on private security contractors in Iraq. Her senate office announced late Thursday that she is co-sponsoring a bill to ban "Blackwater and other private mercenary firms in Iraq."

The timing of the announcement is particularly curious. It comes less than a day after the investigative journalist and Blackwater critic Jeremy Scahill published a piece in the Nation in which the Obama campaign conceded that, "if elected Obama will not 'rule out' using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq." The campaign also informed Scahill that Obama would not be signing on to legislation banning the use of contractors in war zones by 2009 . Ignoring that the issue of funding contractors versus government employee positions is a Congressional one, the campaign also informed Scahill that Obama would increase State Department funding so that State could build their own ranks and eventually replace contractors.

Scahill noted the difficulty of the position:

The senior adviser acknowledged that Obama could find himself in a situation where, as President, he continues using forces he himself has identified as "unaccountable." The Obama campaign, in other words, may have painted itself into a corner.

It appears that Clinton's campaign realized the risk Obama was taking and picked up the issue in an attempt to outflank Obama on the left and pick up the vote of Blackwater opponents.

I spoke with Scahill about the coincidental timing. "For over a week I tried to get Hillary Clinton's campaign and Senate staff to issue a policy statement reflecting her position on her potential future use of PMCs in Iraq if she won the presidency. Silence. Then, the day after my story comes out revealing that Obama will not "rule out" using them, all of a sudden Hillary Clinton becomes the most important political figure in the US to call for a "ban" on Blackwater et al." Scahill said. "Where was her call for a ban after Nisour Square?"

Maybe somewhere underneath the Oval Office drapery measurements?

Senator Clinton targeted what has become America's most hated company with unusually strong rhetoric, clearly intended for emotional appeal, something her campaign has sorely lacked:

"From this war's very beginning, this administration has permitted thousands of heavily-armed military contractors to march through Iraq without any law or court to rein them in or hold them accountable. These private security contractors have been reckless and have compromised our mission in Iraq. The time to show these contractors the door is long past due. We need to stop filling the coffers of contractors in Iraq, and make sure that armed personnel in Iraq are fully accountable to the U.S. government and follow the chain of command," said Senator Clinton.

Thousands of heavily-armed contractors marching through streets? Contractors marching? More like lounging around Liberty pool in Speedos.

Obama seems to be confident enough in his lead that he can risk political fallout of the acknowledgment that whoever becomes the next president will have little choice but to continue reliance upon contracted security. The math is simple. The number of Blackwater, Triple Canopy and DynCorp personnel in Iraq is nearly equal to the number of Diplomatic Security Service officers worldwide (approximately 1395 vs. 1450.) The US government is not in a position to replace them.

Obama's campaign seems to understand something about the contracting issue and now that Senator Clinton has taken a position, it's time for her to do her homework and maybe even bring on a new national security advisor who understands the complexity of the issues.

I hear that Cofer is available...

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Disclaimer: In no way do I endorse either of these candidates, although I do admit that if Cofer signed on as their national security advisor, I would support a Prince/Scahill ticket.

Contractor's Website Reveals Clandestine CIA Programs

2008-02-19T02:57:47-05:00

Is there any way one can figure out some of the CIA's most highly guarded secrets from a corporate website?

Absolutely.

I’ve done it. (And you can count on it that America’s friends and enemies alike have, too.)

Recently while researching a piece for The Spy Who Billed Me, I took a break and reviewed my internet logs to see who was curious about my recent writings on the black sites. Among hundreds of hits on the page (and thousands in the logs), one in particular jumped out. It was a single page view that lasted for some fifty seconds and it came from an unmasked site, a common signature. I backtracked it and was shocked at what I found.

Typically members of the Intelligence Community have their IPs masked when they visit the blog, living no fingerprints, but not this one. The hit was from a company I had never heard of before, but with less than a minute on their site, I knew I had discovered one of the Intelligence Community's most secretive contractors, one of the A teams. The big surprise was that this corporate website leaked secrets like Zubaydah after his first thrifty-five second waterboarding.

I'm sure many are skeptical that a contractor would reveal clandestine ops on their sites, but keep in mind their sites are also marketing themselves to the corporate world and sometimes they say a little too much, believing that they have coded their information enough to protect it.

So let's see what can be deduced from an open source, available to all of America's friends and enemies on the world wide web. We’ll dissect the company's website and see just how well intelligence outsourcing is working from an operational security perspective.

(Note: Not that every intel agency worth it's salt hasn't already scooped up this info, but out of respect for Intelligence Community sensibilities, I'll call the Dulles toll road corridor contractor "Heckle and Jeckle Gizmos" and I won't quote directly from the site.)

Now the first question when reviewing Heckle and Jeckle's site, or any contractor's for that matter, is to ask: who do these guys work for? This can help quickly zero in on what they're up to.

Heckle and Jeckle boast that most of their employees have TS/SCI clearances, many based on a particularly thorough procedure, the highest level of security clearances. There are but a handful of government agencies that require this for contractor access and really only two major intelligence agencies that do so. One of them is located in Langley, Virginia a couple of miles from the eastern entrance to the Dulles Toll Road and it has well-known, overt satellite offices stretching out west thereon at various exits. The other is located in Ft. Meade, Maryland.

For those who live as far out of the Beltway as I do, these clearances suggest that Heckle and Jeckle are doing business with the CIA and NSA.

The specific governmental entities Heckle and Jeckle provide outsourced services for can be quickly narrowed down though the geography of their corporate offices which are located near Dulles airport in northern Virginia; in Cumberland County, North Carolina; Virginia Beach, Virginia and Tampa, Florida and if we dig a little we discover 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.

When it comes to who is working for whom in the Intel Community, geography doesn't lie: Location, location, location.

For purposes of our analysis, the next question then becomes , what is Heckle and Jeckle's specialty? According to their site, it's specialized communications, including nonattributable communication systems and communications devices that function in hostile environments. In fact, their 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?

Anyone know any teams in Virginia Beach or Fayettenam?

And where would they be tagging along with these Special Forces teams? Maybe to the Special Forces Club in London, but Heckle and Jeckle’s employees' background suggests foreign hostile or denied areas.

Now what could they possibly do in hostile, denied or politically sensitive areas?

Again, the contractor’s website gives us the answer: Heckle and Jeckle's comm equipment has offensive and defensive capabilities.

Offensive communications--can you say clandestine ELINT and SIGINT collection?

In laymen's terms, setting up in a house that happens to be in the path of a highly directional signal or on top of just the right cable, but in this case the metaphorical houses are probably in such friendly spots as Iran or wherever the yellow brick road of GWOT contracting leads.

To pull the conclusions of our open-source intelligence (OSINT) together, Heckle and Jeckle 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.

In other words, they set up black sites albeit a different type than has been in the news lately. To put it into context, such black sites such as covert listening posts in hostile territories and even in friendlier ones where discovery could create international tensions count among the Intelligence Community's blackest secrets. And now, thanks to the About page on Heckle and Jeckle's website, we know that the CIA is outsourcing this to Heckle and Jeckle, whose identity would make it somewhat easier to uncover the black collection sites.

Now that's serious OPSEC.

(We can only hope that they outsource the cover aliases they use when establishing and serving these sites.)

Digging inside the website, particularly into its previous versions which can be found in the internet archive, we can create an even more revealing picture of what Heckle and Jeckle are up to.

From job descriptions for various types of engineers they're seeking, we learn that their main facility is near the Dulles Toll Road in northern Virginia. Since contractors tend to locate their main facilities near their contracting agencies, this suggests that the bulk of their work is for the Directorate of Science and Technology (DS&T) at the CIA, the relevant offices of which are conveniently located nearby. No surprise. DS&T provides the equipment that the National Clandestine Services uses to do its job.

In 2005 the firm began posting job openings (although it's questionable how many linguists and engineers know enough about H&J to to go directly to their site looking for a job.) These are rich with details indicating various clandestine programs, OSINT just waiting to be scooped up.

Here we learn that Heckle and Jeckle are seeking subject matter experts (SME) in Arabic to work with its customer's teams in Annapolis Junction, MD. This can only be the National Security Agency. The NSA is primarily made up of contractors and providing them with SMEs is nothing special. Let's move on.

Heckle and Jeckle also brag about a micro-electromechanical facility which becomes particularly interesting in conjunction with their job openings announcements. Reviewing the skill sets they're looking for, it quickly becomes apparent that they design and program their own computer chips, so they're clearly creating proprietary cutting-edge gadgets. It's notable how frequently they're searching for engineers with experience in one of the most miserable operating systems for mobile devices: Windows mobile. They're also regularly seeking programmers versed in another mobile device language: Symbian. Now this information taken in conjunction with their specialty and their prior claims of micro-electromechanical facilities suggests they're designing and creating a lot of mobile, hand held covert communications devices.

And here I'd venture a pure guess that these are probably designed to look like standard run-of-the-mill Treos and other smart phones, blending their “intelligent phones” into the mobile world. The largest consumer of such gizmos is, of course, the CIA's DS&T, adding to suspicions that Heckle and Jeckle is a major DS&T contractor. The primary use of such covert communications gear is for communications with nonofficial cover officers (NOCs) and agents. So the information on Heckle and Jeckle's site suggests that they are likely designing and creating the latest must-have accessories for NOCs and agents, a far cry from the clunky COVCOM gear of yesteryear. (And from the Agency's point of view, knowledge of this would be a serious security breech. Keep in mind the CIA does not even allow contractors to acknowledge their affiliation with the Agency, let alone divulge the programs they are working on, particularly such sensitivities ones.)

Not only have CIA programs been compromised, so have SOCOMs. Judging from the job postings for positions in Florida, Heckle and Jeckle are doing data mining and analytical work for SOCOM. Among other things that can be deduced, they search for relational patterns of terrorist activity and affiliations, looking at a wide array of seemingly innocuous relationships using open source and clandestinely gathered data, particularly focusing upon financial transactional data. I'm betting they have a very sophisticated quantitative model that they're constantly tweaking that underlies this process.

Again, Heckle and Jeckle job postings give us hints to other SOCOM programs. It appears that Heckle and Jeckle are involved in tracking SOCOM assets worldwide. Moving beyond Heckle and Jeckle's own website to other open sources, it's possible to learn some of the specs of related handhelds including whose low-earth orbiting satellites they use. Digging a little deeper, it's also possible to discover the code name of Heckle and Jeckle's RF geolocation program...

US national security is compromised by the Intelligence Community's heavy dependence upon corporations, corporations whose websites sometimes spill out some of the darkest government secrets to those who know how to read them. Last week's revelations by D/CIA Hayden that CIA contractors have been involved in enhanced interrogation techniques at detention facilities (i.e. waterboarding at black sites) should make it clear even to the casual observer that private corporations are integrally involved in the Intelligence Community's most sensitive and secretive clandestine and covert programs. Nothing is off-limits. Corporate involvement in clandestine programs raises operational security concerns that only exist because these companies market their services to the private sector, capitalizing upon their exotic experience with the US government.

In other words, we're taking risks with our national security, risks we don't have to take. Perhaps some of the risk can be mitigated through restrictions upon contractor marketing and better contractor policing. As a big fan of the private sector and of government outsourcing, I don’t like to think that the problem is inherent to outsourcing, but at the moment, it’s hard to imagine it otherwise. A Congressional ban on using government contracting experiences for marketing purposes may be one partial solution.

The Director of National Intelligence McConnell has been a strong proponent of increased use of open-source intelligence, OSINT. It's overdue that the Intelligence Community takes OSINT for seriously counterintelligence (CI) purposes (and it comes as no surprise that CI uses of OSINT was a notable omission in the ODNI's Open Source Conference last summer.) This needs to be immediately addressed--our national security depends upon it. Eliot, are you listening?

I'm sure some in the Intelligence Community will be appalled that I have publicly posted this analysis, particularly since it involves a key clandestine player, but keep in mind, what I’ve done is an exercise in OSINT, an exercise the Intelligence Community should have done long ago. Whereas the contents of this article might come as a surprise to intelligence professionals in Ouagadougou and Ulaanbaatar, they won't be in Moscow, Beijing or even Tehran.

And they shouldn't be in McLean.

"Heckle and Jeckle" are the ones who posted the raw intel on their own website and they're the ones who left their corporate electronic footprints on my blog. It's particularly ironic, since they're specialists in covert communications. It's equally ironic that I've protected their identity when they’ve hardly bothered to hide our national secrets. It is not my intent to hurt the company.

It's my sincere hope that as a result of this post, the Intelligence Community pays a little more attention to the operational security compromises of the divided intelligence contractor mission of serving the public interest while marketing those same services to the corporate world. As I wrote in the Washington Post last summer, corporations have succeeded where few foreign governments have: they've penetrated the CIA. Now it's up to the Agency and the Intelligence Community to ensure that programs are not further compromised as a result of this wide-scale industrial penetration.

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(And if anyone needs assistance closing up the gaps from someone who discerns faint patterns within reams of seemingly unrelated data, I rent out for parties.)