US outsources spying

Spy Agencies Outsourcing to Fill Key Jobs

Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON — At the National Counterterrorism Center — the agency created two years ago to prevent another attack like Sept. 11 — more than half of the employees are not U.S. government analysts or terrorism experts. Instead, they are outside contractors.

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., senior officials say it is routine for career officers to look around the table during meetings on secret operations and be surrounded by so-called green-badgers — nonagency employees who carry special-colored IDs.

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Senior U.S. intelligence officials said that the reliance on contractors was so deep that agencies couldn't function without them.

"If you took away the contractor support, they'd have to put yellow tape around the building and close it down," said a former senior CIA official who was responsible for overseeing contracts before leaving the agency earlier this year.

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Contractors are subject to the same background checks and security clearance requirements as full-time employees, officials said. But some of that clearance work itself has been outsourced, officials said, and even the screening done by the CIA hasn't been infallible.

In one well-known case, David A. Passaro was hired as a contractor with the CIA's paramilitary service even though he had a record of abusive behavior and had been fired by a Connecticut police department. Passaro was convicted of felony assault earlier this year in federal court in North Carolina for his role in the beating of a detainee who died in Afghanistan in 2003.

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Another worry is that the reliance on contractors is eroding agency budgets. Sanders said a recent personnel study by the Senate Intelligence Committee found that contractors were typically paid 50% to 100% more than staff officers to perform comparable work — a disparity that can create internal tensions.

"It's a serious morale problem when you've got a guy in the field making $80,000 and a contractor making $150,000," said the former case officer who served in Iraq. "And the [staff employee] is supposed to supervise the guy making twice the money."