Yet conversations with current and former employees of Booz
Allen and U.S. intelligence officials suggest that these contractors
aren’t going anywhere soon. Even if Snowden ends up costing his former
employer business, the work will probably just go to its rivals.
Although Booz Allen and the rest of the shadow intelligence community
arose as stopgap solutions—meant to buy time as shrunken, post-Cold War
agencies tried to rebuild after Sept. 11—they’ve become the vine that
supports the wall. As much as contractors such as Booz Allen have come
to rely on the federal government, the government relies on them even
more.
Edward Snowden was not hired as a spy. He’s a mostly
self-taught computer technician who never completed high school, and his
first intelligence job was as a security guard at an NSA facility. In
an interview in the Guardian, he says he was hired by the
Central Intelligence Agency for his computer skills to work on network
security. In 2009 he left for the private sector, eventually ending up
at Booz Allen. The job he did as a contractor for the NSA appears to
have been basic tech support and troubleshooting. He was the IT guy.
People
in intelligence tend to divide contract work into three tiers. In the
first tier are the least sensitive and most menial jobs: cutting the
grass at intelligence facilities, emptying the trash, sorting the mail.
In classified facilities even the janitors need security clearances—the
wastebaskets they’re emptying might contain national secrets. That makes
these jobs particularly hard to fill, since most people with security
clearances are almost by definition overqualified for janitorial work.
Snowden,
with his computer expertise, fit in the middle tier: people with
specialized skills. When the U.S. military first began ramping up its
use of contractors during the Vietnam War, these jobs made up much of
the hiring—the Pentagon was desperate for repairmen for its increasingly
complex weapons and transport systems. Also in this tier are
translators, interrogators, and investigators who handle background
checks for government security clearances. Firms such as
CSC (CSC) and
L-3 Communications (LLL)
specialize in this tier. Booz Allen competes for some of that work, but
it tends to focus on the highest tier: big contracts that can involve
everything from developing strategies to defeat al-Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb to designing software systems to writing speeches for senior
officials. Tier three contractors often are, for all intents and
purposes, spies—and sometimes spymasters.
William Golden heads a recruiting and job placement company for
intelligence professionals. In mid-June, he’s trying to fill three
slots for contractors at the Defense Intelligence Agency. As it happens,
Booz Allen isn’t involved, but these are the sort of jobs the firm has
filled in thousands of other instances, Golden says. Two postings are
for senior counter-intelligence analyst openings in Fort Devens, Mass.,
one focusing on the threat to federal installations in Massachusetts,
the other on Southwest Asia. The contractors would be trawling through
streams of intelligence, from digital intercepts and human sources
alike, writing reports and briefings just like the DIA analysts they
would be sitting next to. Both postings require top-secret clearances,
and one would require extensive travel. The third job is for a senior
linguist fluent in Malayalam, spoken mostly in the Indian state of
Kerala, where there’s a growing Maoist insurgency. That the Pentagon is
looking for someone who speaks the language suggests American
intelligence assets are there. The listing specifies “austere
conditions.”
Golden says he constantly sees openings at Booz Allen
and other contractors for “collection managers” in posts around the
world. “A collection manager is someone at the highest level of
intelligence who decides what assets get used, how they get used, what
goes where,” he says. “They provide thought, direction, and management.
They basically have full status, as if they were a government employee.
The only thing they can’t do is spend and approve money or hire and fire
government workers.”
The pay fluctuates widely, depending on the
candidates’ skills and experience. “This money comes from the
intelligence budget, so there isn’t much oversight,” Golden says. He
estimates that the Malayalam translator job, for example, will pay
between $180,000 and $225,000 a year. That’s partly to compensate for
the austere conditions as well as insurgents’ tendency, unmentioned in
the posting, to target translators first. The pay is also a reflection
that the past 10 years have been boom times for private spies.
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