"Top Secret America": (1) Why you absolutely have to read the WaPo series

Welcome to the post-9/11 American national-security state: "The brick warehouse is not just a warehouse. Drive through the gate and around back, and there, hidden away, is someone's personal security detail: a fleet of black SUVs that have been armored up to withstand explosions and gunfire." (Original caption from Part 3, "The secrets next door," of last week's "Washington Post Investigation," "Top Secret America.")

by Ken

Officially, the reason we're talking tonight about the national-security state we're lately informed the U.S. has turned into is as a way of getting our minds off the country's falling bridges and failing dams. Of course, unless there happens to have been a recent bridge or dam failure in your neck of the woods, you don't need help changing this subject. Research shows that it's humanly impossible for the average American to think about crumbling infrastructure for more than about 20 minutes at a stretch without veering off into Lady Gagaland or equivalent. Hence the old saw known to every patriotic American schoolchild:

"There's no constituency for infrastructure."

(Rachel Maddow, bless her, has a self-professed fascination with the subject. But in a way that kind of proves the point, doesn't it? Regular folks don't want to think about infrastructure, and you can't make 'em. It's just those, you know, infrastructure geeks.)

It may have seemed frivolous when I suggested, for last night's post: "While we're gearing up to talk about 'Top Secret America,' shall we agonize briefly over falling bridges and bursting dams?" Because, after all, the only direct connection I proposed between the subjects was that they're both excellent for changing the subject -- including away from each other, in either direction. And along these lines, the outstanding new scandal of the week (or the day, or the hour), the WikiLeaks intelligence-document dump concerning the Afghanistan mess, is a vibrant new entrant in this attention-diversion derby.

However, there is an all-too-real-world connection between the neglect of our crumbling infrastructure and the emergence of the shiny new American national-security state. While we aren't spending quite nothing on infrastructure; as Scholars & Rogues' Dr. Denny noted in his fine post "Drive with care over those 151,394 obsolete, unsafe bridges," we actually are making a dent in the crumbling-bridge problem, but we aren't doing much more than making a dent, because it would cost too much, and as we all know (feel free to join in), there's no constituency for infrastructure. (As I noted last night, Dr. Denny has done a fine follow-up piece: "The nation's' 120,000 dams: Much more inspection, repair needed." Don't hold your breath for the purse strings to loosen up there either.)

By contrast, as the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William M. Arkin make clear in the "Top Secret America" series, when it comes to any expenditure that can by any stretch of the imagination be funded under the heading of "national security," by budgetary hook or crook there is essentially a blank check, or rather a whole stack of blank checks, which continue to be cashed at a rate that is leaving us increasingly unable to afford to do any of the things we need to do to genuinely improve our national security, like fixing those damned bridges and dams. Or funding our schools. Or maintain the social safety net expected of any civilized industrial nation.

And the point that Priest and Arkin make about as forcefully as you can ever imagine seeing in a Beltway-centric rag like the Post is that this vast national-security state that we've already built in the wake of 9/11 is mostly making us less, not more, secure.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I find it hard to imagine there's any Down With Tyranny reader who isn't acquainted with the basic facts of the three-part "Top Security America" series, which was prepared over a two-year period by "more than a dozen Washington Post journalists." (Am I the only one who wonders, how many more? Is it, like, 13 altogether? 14? 15? Shouldn't someone know?). For convenient access, not just to the series' three parts themselves, but to a whole range of ancillary goodies as well as ongoing contributions and discussion, the Post has created a "Top Secret America" webpage.

The three installments of the series were:

* Monday, "A hidden world, growing beyond control"

* Tuesday, "National Security Inc."

* Wednesday, "The secrets next door"

And as I outlined last night, we're going to approach the series in two installments. Our subject tonight in Part 1 is: "Top Secret America": (1) Why you absolutely have to read the WaPo series. Tomorrow night in Part 2 we will move on to: "Top Secret America": (2) Why you'd be totally nuts to read the WaPo series

Now if you're anything like me (and that's not an accusation; I'm just thinking that in this regard you might possibly be), you spent last week, while everybody (well, the political junkies, anyway) was talking about the series, wondering if you were really going to have to suck it up and read the damned thing. The answer, I'm afraid, at least the answer for tonight, is: Yes, you really do have to.

Hey, I did, finally, when I couldn't put it off any longer. By which I don't mean to suggest some sort of "well, I suffered, so you should too" deal. I'm thinking only of your own good. In fact, I can offer one bit of consolation based on my week-plus of mulling the thing over. I think I'm in position now to tell you why you have to read the thing yourself.

For a service like this you're probably thinking it will be necesssary to upgrade your DWT membership to at least the Gold if not actually the Platinum level. But no! It's going to be included in the basic package! You just have to put up with a bit more chatter.

First things first. Ever so thoughtfully, the Post writers led off with a pretty clear, bullet-point-equipped summary. Everone else has quoted it, so why shouldn't we?

The top-secret world the government created in response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.

These are some of the findings of a two-year investigation by The Washington Post that discovered what amounts to an alternative geography of the United States, a Top Secret America hidden from public view and lacking in thorough oversight. After nine years of unprecedented spending and growth, the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

The investigation's other findings include:

* Some 1,271 government organizations and 1,931 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in about 10,000 locations across the United States.

* An estimated 854,000 people, nearly 1.5 times as many people as live in Washington, D.C., hold top-secret security clearances.

* In Washington and the surrounding area, 33 building complexes for top-secret intelligence work are under construction or have been built since September 2001. Together they occupy the equivalent of almost three Pentagons or 22 U.S. Capitol buildings - about 17 million square feet of space.

* Many security and intelligence agencies do the same work, creating redundancy and waste. For example, 51 federal organizations and military commands, operating in 15 U.S. cities, track the flow of money to and from terrorist networks.

* Analysts who make sense of documents and conversations obtained by foreign and domestic spying share their judgment by publishing 50,000 intelligence reports each year - a volume so large that many are routinely ignored.

It's important to keep in mind

* The Post team confined its investigation to material -- and clearances for material -- at "top secret" grade, for the simple reason that the quantity of it is so mind-numbingly vast that it would have been impossible to contemplate considering any lower grade of secrecy.

* That said, the team didn't itself violate any secrecy restrictions. The material gathered in those two years was culled from public records -- with the basic division of labor that Dana Priest is a master of the old school of shoe-leather-type reporting, while William Arkin does his sleuthing at the computer. Beyond what was dug up in public records, the team conducted extensive interviews, and many of the people quoted in the series, and quoted by name, are (or were) part of the very national-security establishment that was under investigation.

And so, for example, following the above-quoted introduction, the writers continued:

These are not academic issues; lack of focus, not lack of resources, was at the heart of the Fort Hood shooting that left 13 dead, as well as the Christmas Day bomb attempt thwarted not by the thousands of analysts employed to find lone terrorists but by an alert airline passenger who saw smoke coming from his seatmate.

They are also issues that greatly concern some of the people in charge of the nation's security.

"There has been so much growth since 9/11 that getting your arms around that - not just for the CIA, for the secretary of defense - is a challenge," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said in an interview with The Post last week.

In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

"I'm not going to live long enough to be briefed on everything" was how one Super User put it. The other recounted that for his initial briefing, he was escorted into a tiny, dark room, seated at a small table and told he couldn't take notes. Program after program began flashing on a screen, he said, until he yelled ''Stop!" in frustration.

"I wasn't remembering any of it," he said.

Next we hear from retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, "who was asked last year to review the method for tracking the Defense Department's most sensitive programs." And so on and so on.

I gave up on the idea of providing any kind of coherent summary of the series, and decided that instead i would yank out chunks I highlighted in the course of my reading, either for their substance or for an especially pertinently expressed observation.

One of the early questions dealt with, in connection with the vastness and unwieldiness of our intelligence operations, is the matter of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, created in response to 9/11 with the theoretical objective of bringing some order and cohesion to the welter of federal intelligence bureaucracies. Of course you didn't have to have a rank higher than Ordinary Civilian to know that that didn't have a chance in hell of working, but the investigation documents rather depressingly just how badly it didn't work.

Today, many officials who work in the intelligence agencies say they remain unclear about what the ODNI is in charge of. To be sure, the ODNI has made some progress, especially in intelligence-sharing, information technology and budget reform. The DNI and his managers hold interagency meetings every day to promote collaboration. The last director, [retired Adm. Dennis] Blair, doggedly pursued such nitty-gritty issues as procurement reform, compatible computer networks, tradecraft standards and collegiality.

But improvements have been overtaken by volume at the ODNI, as the increased flow of intelligence data overwhelms the system's ability to analyze and use it. Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work.

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

There is a long explanation for why these databases are still not connected, and it amounts to this: It's too hard, and some agency heads don't really want to give up the systems they have. But there's some progress: "All my e-mail on one computer now," Leiter says. "That's a big deal."

Throughout the new national-security empire, both inside and outside government, a fortune is being spent to prop up fragile egos. This has led to not just a nationwide building boom but an edifice complex of almost unimaginable size and frills, including the now-mandatory "sensitive compartmented information facility," or SCIF, "impenetrable to eavesdropping tools and protected by alarms and a security force capable of responding within 15 minutes." Every building has at least one SCIF. "Some are as small as a closet; others are four times the size of a football field."

SCIF size has become a measure of status in Top Secret America, or at least in the Washington region of it. "In D.C., everyone talks SCIF, SCIF, SCIF," said Bruce Paquin, who moved to Florida from the Washington region several years ago to start a SCIF construction business. "They've got the penis envy thing going. You can't be a big boy unless you're a three-letter agency and you have a big SCIF."

SCIFs are not the only must-have items people pay attention to. Command centers, internal television networks, video walls, armored SUVs and personal security guards have also become the bling of national security.

"You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

With so many rival agencies patrolling the same intelligence turf, vast quantity of material is produced, but much of it turns out to be redundant -- everybody investigating the same subjects -- and hardly any of it gets looked at.

The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. "Like a zombie, it keeps on living" is how one official describes the sites.

The problem with many intelligence reports, say officers who read them, is that they simply re-slice the same facts already in circulation. "It's the soccer ball syndrome. Something happens, and they want to rush to cover it," said Richard H. Immerman, who was the ODNI's assistant deputy director of national intelligence for analytic integrity and standards until early 2009. "I saw tremendous overlap." . . .

The overload of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports is actually counterproductive, say people who receive them. Some policymakers and senior officials don't dare delve into the backup clogging their computers. They rely instead on personal briefers, and those briefers usually rely on their own agency's analysis, re-creating the very problem identified as a main cause of the failure to thwart the attacks: a lack of information-sharing.

The writers provide graphic examples of intelligence needs falling through these various cracks: reports never read, connections never made, alerts never followed up. And the solution most often proposed within the intelligence establishment, despite the astronomic growth of that establishment since 9/11? More personnel, more teams, more analysts -- and, no doubt, an even larger body of indigestible, uncoordinated material.

Now we're just reaching Part 2, "National Security Inc.," which deals with the astonishing role of nongovernmental companies and employees who are an integral part of the new security establishment. "The Post estimates that out of 854,000 people with top-secret clearances, 265,000 are contractors."

We may not have known how vast the ranks of the contractors has swollen, but we did know that that the swelling occurred in the frenzied years, and out of the demented minds, of the geniuses of the George W. Bush regime. Officially, the idea was that it would save money, but again, it boggles the mind that anyone with, say, a high school education could have believed that. Personally, I don't believe that people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld imagined it for a second -- it was just a convenient lie they told to build the kind of streamline empire, accountable only to themselves (meaning unaccountable) they really craved. The reality, of course, has been that far from saving money, it has added staggering costs.

What's more, in the process of outsourcing what are properly government functions to nongovernment employees, with seemingly unlimited funds available, private-sector salaries have skyrocketed, creating an overwhelming drain of skills from the government workforce. More and more, the government agencies are staffed by rookies looking to acquire enough knowledge and experience to sell their services in the private sector. Even worse, the responsiblity of those corporate contractors is not to the U.S. government but to their shareholders, "and that," says CIA Director Leon Pannetta, does present an inherent conflict." And of course the government has virtually no control over those private employees.

Across the government, 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 the historians, the architects, the recruiters in the nation's most secretive agencies. They staff watch centers across the Washington area. They are among the most trusted advisers to the four-star 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.

A lot of the government people interviewed talk wishfully about cutting back on the contractors, but whatever tiny bit of trimming is done is bound to be wildly offset by the uncontrollable growth of companies, whole industries, that either exploded in size or actually came into existence in response to the limitless font of post-9/11 funding. "Private firms," we're told, "have become so thoroughly entwined with the government's most sensitive activities that without them important military and intelligence missions would have to cease or would be jeopardized," and this is followed by actual examples, which we can't get into.

There's an important section discussing the emergent dominance of the giant companies that the national-security boom has created. "Of the 1,1931 companies identified by The Post that work on top-secret contracts, about 110 of them do roughly 90 percent of the work on the corporate side of the defense-intelligence-corporate world." The writers look in particular at the evolution of General Dynamics ("based on one simply strategy: follow the money").

General Dynamics' bottom line reflects its successful transformation. It also reflects how much the U.S. government - the firm's largest customer by far - has paid the company beyond what it costs to do the work, which is, after all, the goal of every profit-making corporation.

The company reported $31.9 billion in revenue in 2009, up from $10.4 billion in 2000. Its workforce has more than doubled in that time, from 43,300 to 91,700 employees, according to the company.

But the new national-security establishment has room for companies of all sizes.

The government is nearly totally dependent on these firms. Their close relationship was on display recently at the Defense Intelligence Agency's annual information technology conference in Phoenix. The agency expected the same IT firms angling for its business to pay for the entire five-day get-together, a DIA spokesman confirmed.

And they did. . . .

These types of gatherings happen every week. Many of them are closed to anyone without a top-secret clearance. . . .

Such coziness worries other officials who believe the post-9/11 defense-intelligence-corporate relationship has become, as one senior military intelligence officer described it, a "self-licking ice cream cone."

Another official, a longtime conservative staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described it as "a living, breathing organism" impossible to control or curtail. "How much money has been involved is just mind-boggling," he said. "We've built such a vast instrument. What are you going to do with this thing? . . . It's turned into a jobs program."

The final installment of the series, "The secrets next door," deals with the actual physical and human apparatus that has sprung up around the country as part of this evolution, security-industry-based clusters of development around the country that comprise "an alternative geography of the United States, one defined by the concentraion of top-secret government organizations and the companies that do work for them." The Fort Meade cluster outside Washington "is the largest of a dozen such clusters."

Other locations include Dulles-Chantily, Denver-Aurora and Tampa. All of them are under-the-radar versions of traditional military towns: economically dependent on the federal budget and culturally defined by their unique work.

The difference, of course, is that the military is not a secret culture. In the clusters of Top Secret America, a company lanyard attached to a digital smart card is often the only clue to a job location. Work is not discussed. Neither are deployments. Debate about the role of intelligence in protecting the country occurs only when something goes wrong and the government investigates, or when an unauthorized disclosure of classified information turns into news.

The existence of these clusters is so little known that most people don't realize when they're nearing the epicenter of Fort Meade's, even when the GPS on their car dashboard suddenly begins giving incorrect directions, trapping the driver in a series of U-turns, because the government is jamming all nearby signals.

One of the that separates this "alternative geography" from the rest of the country is its (taxpayer-paid-for) prosperity, even through these terrible economic times. "Affluence is another attribute of Top Secret America. Six of the 10 richest counties in the United States, according to Census Bureau data, are in these clusters."


As I said, these are just some of the bits I highlighted in my reading. I don't know whether they convey anything. But they lead me to that reason I promised you: the reason why you really do need to read the series for yourself. Because it's only through the layout and accumulation of detail that the subject matter is likely to move for you from the realm of the abstract to that of the personal.

As I mentioned earlier, everyone who has written about "Top Secret America" has quoted that bullet-pointed introductory summary, and since most readers understand English, we all grasp the subject matter -- in a generalized, abstract way. But in order to appreciate the genuine transformation that has been brought about, both in the workings of our government and the workings of our society, you've got to have the detail. And the detail that makes it real is probably going to be different for everyone. But until you've had the subject penetrate your consciousness in this way, I don't think you're likely to grasp the dimension of the problem that has been created.

Of course, once you do grasp that dimension, that still leaves the question: And just what do we propose to do about it? Which is why tomorrow we need to look at the case for not reading the series.

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