Former U.S. Officials Defend Use of Contractors

Ex-CIA Director Hayden Notes Sensitivity on Alleged Blackwater Role

Aug 30, 2009

U.S. government use of surrogates is routine, though CIA outsourcing has declined. In the wake of reports citing Blackwater, ex-officials note some needs for contracting.

Reports of the Central Intelligence Agency using private contractors to conduct covert operations involving al-Qaeda may have led to some misunderstanding about contracting in general and its use in this particular case, in the view of one-time U.S. government officials.

The CIA routinely uses a variety of surrogates in different missions for a number of purposes, former CIA Director Michael Hayden told an Aug. 20 panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington. “We go to contractors because they possess a certain experience or certain knowledge that we don’t have inherently inside our workforce or at least we don’t have it inherently at that time,” he said.

But the disclosure of the agency’s decision in 2004 to let Blackwater, a private security contractor, help manage its sensitive effort to track down senior al-Qaeda members set off a wave of criticism. The agency eventually terminated Blackwater’s participation in this program before Hayden became director. Now renamed Xe Services, the firm is under investigation for civilian deaths in Iraq.

CIA Director Panetta Made Urgent Briefing to Congress on Blackwater Involvement

However, the New York Times reporting that Blackwater was once involved may have prompted current CIA Director Leon Panetta to report to Congress June 24 about it. If Panetta felt a covert action was under way about which he had to inform Congress, Hayden told the Press Club forum he was initially puzzled about what Panetta would need to discuss and the urgency surrounding his briefing, knowing what Hayden did about the program. “We were very aggressive in briefing the Hill during my time there,” he said.

Hayden stated he believes Panetta called the emergency meeting because of the political sensitivity of the program rather than concerns about its legality. In his opinion, Hayden said these were recurring efforts under several directors to deal with a well know situation.

Author Joseph Finder, who moderated the Press Club discussion, speculated that the New York Times story emanated from a leak by the CIA in response to a piece Finder wrote in the Aug. 18, 2009 DailyBeast saying Panetta’s urgent June appearance before Congress saying that the agency had mislead Congress for eight years was based on a mistake. The program with Blackwater was little more than training and intelligence collection, Finder said.

Another panelist, Jack Devine, a 32-year veteran of the CIA’s clandestine operations office, said the government should exercise enormous caution in outsourcing highly sensitive agency operations, because it needs to develop some skills in-house and due to the risk of adverse public reaction to some activities such as interrogations becoming publicly known.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, another Press Club speaker, pointed out it is possible to hire contractors fairly quickly. But the process of hiring, clearing, and training employees is a slow one. Although the Department of Homeland Security performs some operational intelligence collection, much of what it does is analytic, Chertoff said.

Contracting makes sense in analysis because many civilian skills are needed that are fairly well developed there, he noted. Most of the individuals held as immigration violators end up in detention facilities operated by private contractors, Chertoff said. “It would be foolish to invest in building a detention facility, let’s say, in western Arizona and then the flow stops there and we wind up seeing a greater flow in the southeastern United States,” he said.

Former CIA Director Hayden Opposed to Release of U.S. Government Documents on al- Qaeda Suspects

Hayden, in an Aug. 20, 2009 guest column in the Washington Times, wrote of the Obama administration’s subsequent release of documents on the U.S. government's detention and interrogation of al Qaeda suspects, including a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the program. Hayden, currently a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy co-founded by the former secretary, favors looking forward, not at the past because of a possible deterrent effect. “We will teach timidity to a workforce that we need to be vigorous and active,” he said at the Press Club.

Attorney General Eric Holder has appointed John Durham as a special prosecutor to investigate possible CIA criminal activity, including private contractors, involving interrogations of suspects. Hayden questioned why the release of the IG report would prompt the need for a special prosecutor. While he opposes the report’s release, he said the document brings “a bit more balance to the discussion” regarding the significance of the interrogation program in learning about the structure of al-Qaeda and enabling an agency counterattack against the leadership.

Contractors currently make up approximately 30% of the spy agency’s workforce. At one point, the CIA probably had too many contractors and was likely competing to hire contractors, Hayden said. The excess was the result of government, not contractor inefficiency, he underscored.

Some personnel were resigning from the agency, not retiring, and then being hired by contractors and being sold back to the CIA by those contractors. Hayden said he stopped that practice by determining the agency would not grant clearance to contract employees who had resigned from the agency for at least 12 months after their resignation date.

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