In June, a stone carver chiseled another star into a marble wall at CIA headquarters, one of 22 for agency workers killed in the global war initiated by the Sept. 11 attacks.
The intent of the memorial is to publicly honor the courage of those who died in the line of duty, but it also conceals a deeper story about government in the post-9/11 era: Eight of the 22 were not CIA officers. They were private contractors.
To ensure that the country’s most sensitive duties are carried out only by people loyal above all to the nation’s interest, federal rules say contractors may not perform what are called “inherently government functions.” But they do all the time, in every intelligence and counterterrorism agency, according to a two-year investigation.
What started as a temporary fix in response to the terrorist attacks has turned into a dependency that calls into question whether the federal work force includes too many people obligated to shareholders rather than the public interest and whether the government is still in control of its most sensitive activities. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and CIA Director Leon Panetta last week said they agreed with such concerns.
The investigation shows that the Top Secret America created since 9/11 is hidden from public view, lacks thorough oversight and is so unwieldy that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.
It also is a system in which contractors are playing an ever more important role. Of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, the Post estimates 265,000 are contractors. There is no better example of the government’s dependency on them than at the CIA.
Private contractors working for the agency have recruited spies in Iraq, paid bribes for information in Afghanistan and protected CIA directors visiting world capitals. Contractors have helped snatch a suspected extremist off the streets of Italy, interrogated detainees once held at secret prisons abroad and watched over defectors holed up in Washington’s suburbs. At Langley, Va., headquarters, they analyze terrorist networks. At the agency’s training facility in Virginia, they are helping mold a new generation of spies.
Through the federal budget process, the Bush administration and Congress made it much easier for the CIA and other counterterrorism agencies to hire more contractors than civil servants. They did this to limit the federal work force, to hire employees more quickly than the sluggish federal process allows and because they thought — wrongly, it turned out — that contractors would be less expensive.
Nine years later, the idea that contractors cost less has been repudiated, and the administration has made some progress toward its goal of reducing the number of hired hands by 7 percent over two years. Still, close to 30 percent of the work force in the intelligence agencies is contractors.
“For too long, we’ve depended on contractors to do the operational work that ought to be done” by CIA employees, Panetta said. But replacing them “doesn’t happen overnight.”
A second concern of Panetta’s: contracting with corporations, whose responsibility “is to their shareholders, and that does present an inherent conflict.”
Or as Gates, who has been in and out of government his entire life, puts it: “You want somebody who’s really in it for a career because they’re passionate about it and because they care about the country and not just because of the money.”
Contractors can offer more money — often twice as much — to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.
The idea that the government would save money on a contract work force “is a false economy,” said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA official and now president of an intelligence training academy.
As companies raid federal agencies of talent, the government has been left with the youngest intelligence staffs ever. At the CIA, employees from 114 firms account for roughly one-third of the work force, or about 10,000 positions. Many are temporary hires, often former military or intelligence- agency employees who usually work less, earn more and draw a federal pension.
Such workers are used in every conceivable way.
Contractors kill enemy fighters. They spy on foreign governments and eavesdrop on terrorist networks. They help craft war plans. They gather information on local factions in war zones. They are historians, architects, recruiters in the most secretive agencies. They staff watch centers across the Washington area. They are among the most trusted advisers to generals leading the nation’s wars.
So great is the government’s appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed “body shops,” that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to those in the business.
Making it more difficult to replace contractors with federal employees: The government doesn’t know how many are on the federal payroll. Gates said he wants to reduce the number of defense contractors by about 13 percent, to pre-9/11 levels, but he’s having a hard time even getting a basic head count.
“This is a terrible confession,” he said. “I can’t get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense,” referring to the department’s civilian leadership.
The estimate of 265,000 contractors doing top-secret work was vetted by several high-ranking intelligence officials. The Top Secret America database includes 1,931 companies that perform work at the top-secret level. More than one-quarter — 533 — came into being after 2001; others have expanded greatly. Most are thriving even as the rest of the United States struggles with bankruptcies, unemployment and foreclosures.
The privatization of national-security work has been made possible by a nine-year “gusher” of money, as Gates recently described national-security spending since the 9/11 attacks.
Most contractors do work that is fundamental to an agency’s core mission. As a result, the government has become dependent on them in a way few could have foreseen.
Last week, typing “top secret” into the search engine of a major jobs website showed 19,759 unfilled positions.
Source:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012398987_topsecret20.html
