GOD Never Sleeps - TWISTED DESCENT
GOD NEVER SLEEPS 1 - Oil - Twisted Descent
A TRUTH FOR REEL Production
TITLE: Twisted Descent - Spy 1099 - A high-concept film of a moonlighting NOC caught in a double-cross between superpowers in the Caribbean.
Release Date: to be announced Status: Pre-production Genre: Spy Thriller -a political thriller about possible conspiracies
Production Company: Truth For Reel
Cast:
Director:
Screenwriter:
“Intelligence ends with the first shot fired. Real intelligence much more resembles a fascinating chess game, much complicated by the fact that the figures and their positions are not known to the players…” - Victor Sheymov, former KGB officer who defected to the United States
Timeliness: The May 2010 blowout of BP horizontal drilling oil rig in the Caribbean makes this feature more timely than ever, and can be effortlessly worked into the basis of the storyline that, in fact, virtually anticipated such imminent disaster.
27,000 Abandoned Gulf Oil Wells May Be Leaking
July 7, 2010, CBS News/Associated Press
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/07/07/national/main6653016.shtml
More than 27,000 abandoned oil and gas wells lurk in the hard rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico, an environmental minefield that has been ignored for decades. No one - not industry, not government - is checking to see if they are leaking, an Associated Press investigation shows. The oldest of these wells were abandoned in the late 1940s, raising the prospect that many deteriorating sealing jobs are already failing. The AP investigation uncovered particular concern with 3,500 of the neglected wells - those characterized in federal government records as "temporarily abandoned." More than 1,000 wells have lingered in that unfinished condition for more than a decade. About three-quarters of temporarily abandoned wells have been left in that status for more than a year, and many since the 1950s and 1960s - even though sealing procedures for temporary abandonment are not as stringent as those for permanent closures. As a forceful reminder of the potential harm, the well beneath BP's Deepwater Horizon rig was being sealed with cement for temporary abandonment when it blew April 20, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation's history. BP alone has abandoned about 600 wells in the Gulf, according to government data.
Leuren Moret
Host: Alfred Lambremont Webre, JD, MEd
The New 9/11: BP's false flag operation in the Gulf to Wreck the Environment
BP + Halliburton + Department Of Energy + University Of California
May 31, 2010
Disaster Capitalism: Energy Competitors In Caribbean
• Medvedev In Cuba – Oil Contracts With Cuba
• Putin In Venezuela – China Russia Contracts With Chavez
• Squeezing Out Smaller Competitors In Caribbean
• Haiti Disaster Capitalism
• Us Losing Grip On Caribbean And South America
Obama And The American Power Act
• Ultimate Prize For Big Oil – 27 Deepwater Leases Since April 20, 2010 – Oil Rig Disaster
• Offshore Drilling Ban Lifted – Democratic President Authorized Drilling 85% Shoreline
• 2008-2009 Oil Lobbying - $300 Million In 2 Years
• Nuclear Power To Expand The Most Of All Energies By 2030
Agency + BP Cozy Relationships
• Department Of Energy And BP – Dr. Steven Chu/Dr. Koonin
Stanford-Ucberkeley-BP
BP Helios Project - Lawrence Berkeley Lab (Lbnl)
$500 Million BP Grant To Chu At Lbnl
[Similar To 911 And Christy Todd Whitman At Epa]
• Minerals Management Service – Elizabeth Birnbaum
MMS Personnel Taking Perks/Gifts From Oil Cos.
• BP Safety Plans/Documents Inadequate
Foreshadowing: Coast Guard + BP Drill
Oil Rig Disaster – April 20, 2010
• Drilling Too Fast, Disregarding Workers Warnings
• BP History Of Disasters (Penny Pinching For Profits)
(Bean Counters Should Not Be Involved In Operations)
• Holding Employees Hostage On Boats Until They Signed Insurance Waivers With BP
• BP Self Insured
• Failed Response - Just Like Hurricane Katrina Disaster Response
BP + Coast Guard + Fed Govt + Doe + Dod + Epa
Environmental Impact – Short/Long Term Damage
• Caribbean Destroyed – Coral Reefs, Marine Biota, Beaches, Fishing, Tourism
• Caribbean Current
• Atlantic Current
• Toxic Dispersants – Epa Banned Dispersant, BP Ignored Epa
• East Coast Impact
• Intense Hurricane Season – NOAA Warning
• Impact On East Coast – Radiation + Chemicals
• Atlantic Great Conveyor Belt Current – Arctic/Global
HAARP Black Sea Storm 2007 –
• Environmental Devastation Of Black Sea Created At UK HAARP Facility At Aquiteria, Cyprus, As Payback For Putin's Pipelines To Italy And Southern Europe
Jason Scientists
• Gordon Macdonald “How To Wreck The Environment”
SPY 1099 Trilogy Working Title: TWISTED DESCENT: Spy 1099 - "Lions for Lambs" (2007) meets "The Recruit" (2003) A stand-alone film that can be franchised into a SPY 1099 trilogy.
Three major forces collude today to control the world - Intelligence, Mega-Criminal Enterprise, and the Power Elite. They are related to one another in draconian ways. Most intel operations are now outsourced to private contractors, who also employ independent contractors. They have penetrated the CIA and CIA has penetrated them, changing the Rules of Engagement. Multinational corporation and crime organizations lurk in the shadows and in the well-lit haunts of the Power Elite.
THE STORY: OUTSOURCED INTELLIGENCE
Part 1 - TWISTED DESCENT: Spy 1099 OIL -- "Lions for Lambs" (2007) meets "The Recruit" (2003) A stand-alone film that can be franchised into a SPY 1099 trilogy. An international thriller based on Outsourcing in today's transnational Intelligence Community.
As the US looses its foothold in Central and South America, the SPY 1099 team fights corrupt governments and the mysterious G.O.D.S. in the Caribbean to keep cheap oil flowing. Opening credits takes us in a slow slide down the crooked shaft of a newly-drilled oil well, which makes a TWISTED DESCENT through the ocean floor to the buried treasure of light oil.
A violent eruption, a mega-leak that cannot be stopped foreshadows our own "twisted descent" into the underworld of our protagonists, the Spy 1099 group. Hired for 'risk management' of the Cuba-Haiti oil exploration, they soon discover the main risk is the G.O.D.S. at the top of the food-chain -- their own employers' clandestine involvement in global drugs, money laundering, and black gold trade.
Rival factions and governments collude in transnational criminal enterprise. Tricksters trick tricksters and Watchers watch the Watchers. Each struggles with conflicting moral problems. Pressured from all sides by conflicting desires, loyalties in the "Spy in the Box" group are compromised and divided in the process. Heroes and opponents do an intricate dance, sometimes switching roles with 7-10 major reveals. A complex sequence of tricks surprises not only the opposition, but also the audience.
Spy games and operations are outsourced to private contractors, who subcontract more independent contractors. They have penetrated the CIA and the moonlighting CIA has penetrated them, changing the Rules of Engagement. Multinational corporation and crime organizations lurk in the shadows and in the well-lit haunts of the Power Elite. Their operations are clandestine, but we have "a need to know" more.
Sometimes the relatively unbelievable turns out to be true. Conspiracy theories are like black holes--they suck in everything that comes their way, regardless of content or origin...Everything you've ever known or experienced, no matter how 'meaningless', once it contacts the conspiratorial universe, is enveloped by and cloaked in sinister significance. Once inside, the vortex gains in size and strength, sucking in everything you touch.
The SPY 1099 team battles rival factions, seemingly against all odds. Perhaps as much as 50% of CIA work is outsourced. In 2010, 188,000 contractors outnumber full-time workers at Homeland Security. Congress calls it "unacceptable, untenable and unsustainable." But it is a runaway trend impossible to halt. Private security contractors also backup the military and US overseas interests.
Haiti and Cuba is the setting; oil is the prize. Since the transfer of power from Fidel to Raúl Castro in 2006,
The U.S. 4th Fleet has been reestablished. U.S. Navy ships, aircraft and submarines are operating in the U.S. Southern Command (SOUTHCOM) area of focus, which encompasses the Caribbean, and Central and South America and the surrounding waters. China is backing the widening of the Panama Canal for supertankers with capacity of a million barrels of crude oil and liquified natural gas. That, in turn, will open new routes whereby oil and mineral resources from West Africa can be taken directly to China -- deepening political bonds that Beijing has carefully fostered in that region.
The same dynamic bolsters China's influence in the Caribbean, expected to develop as a storage hub for oil before it heads west through the canal and on to China. Economists at Goldman Sachs believe that the new canal could play a pivotal role in its Bric (Brazil, Russia, India, China) investment story -- as a channel more directly linking the Chinese and Brazilian markets.
The Cold War has become a tightly wound COILED war - covert action for oil rights. The state-owned Cuban oil company says the country may have more than 20bn barrels of oil in its offshore fields - more than double the previous estimate. Oil exports are now Cuba's second leading export. Meanwhile the G.O.D.S. (GoldOilDrugs Syndicate) observe from their global sanctuaries.
Can nations coerce adversaries to change policies by threatening their access to oil? Oil coercion affords great potential leverage over states, not because of oil’s economic importance as many assume, but because of the devastating effect cutoffs can have on the target’s military power. Three variables determine how vulnerable a state is to oil coercion: the percent of total oil imported, the number of supply sources it has, and the number of oil transportation routes. Potentially vulnerable states, acting strategically, to recognize the danger of oil cutoff and take anticipatory measures to avert it, including preventive war. Preventive conflict usually breaks out before coercive threats are made. Oil factored into Japan’s surrender in WWII.
DEEP BACKGROUND
In the 1920's an insider secret became known to a few people. It was published in an exhaustive world resources survey book written by a renowned world-traveling geologist named Hoover, who later became a US President. Not many copies were printed and few people read the book. The secret was that one of the world's largest potential oil fields ran along the coast of the South China Sea right off French Indo-China, now known as Viet Nam. But in the 1920's the method of deep sea oil drilling had not yet been developed. In 1945, the French still held small oil-poor Viet Nam as a colony.
Laurence Rockefeller thought he could trick Ho Chi Minh by offering him the weapons to drive out the French and then in return Standard would take over the as yet undeveloped offshore fields. But in 1954 when Vietnamese General Giap finally defeated and drove out the French at Dien Bien Phu, Ho reneged on the deal. Since by then, everybody including the French, the Vietnamese, the Japanese and the Chinese had all read the same Hoover resource book and knew there was a vast supply of oil off the Vietnamese coast. Many people have wondered why the French have been so recalcitrant toward the US ever since French President Charles DeGaul wanted to pull out of NATO in the mid-1950's.
Ho Chi Minh would not let Standard Oil simply walk in and walk off with all the Vietnamese oil. So as before, any country which owns the oil is branded as "communist" since they hold the oil as "community property" and won't allow private corporations, like Standard, to develop the fields and steal the oil. In this case, young American's themselves where "hired" directly to be the "fascists" to go fight the Vietnamese "communists."
The whole 20 year Viet Nam �war� from 1955 to 1975 was an oil scam. And all during the "war," Vietnamese General Giap fought the Americans with weapons he got from Laurence for a dollar. Did you ever wonder why the US, despite, greatly superior weapons, and the loss of 57,000 Americans and half a million Vietnamese, never won the "war?" Ever wonder why the US President issued such strange �rules of engagement� for the American troops that made sure they didn�t win? Ever wonder why Henry Kissinger, a personal assistant to Nelson Rockefeller spent so much time in the Viet Nam/Paris Peace talks which never went anywhere but simply dragged on for years. Maybe winning the �war� wasn�t part of the plan of the Empire of Energy. Maybe the timing of the �war� was more important.
In the 1950's a method of undersea oil exploration was perfected which used small explosions deep in the water and then recorded the sound echos bouncing off the various layers of rock below. The surveyor could then determine the exact location of the arched salt domes which hold the accumulated oil beneath them. But if this method were used off the Viet Nam coast on property Standard didn't own or have the rights to, the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Japanese and probably even the French would quickly run to the United Nations and complain that America was stealing the oil, and that would shut down the operation.
In 1964, after Viet Nam was divided into North and South, and the contrived Gulf of Tonkin incident, several US aircraft carriers were stationed offshore of Viet Nam and the "war" was started. Every day jet planes would take off from the carriers, bomb locations in North and South Vietnam, and then using normal military procedure when returning would dump their unsafe or unused bombs in the ocean before landing back on the carriers. Safe ordnance drop zones were designated for this purpose away from the carriers.
Even close-up observers would only notice many small explosions occurring daily in the waters of the South China Sea and thought it was only part of the "war." The US Navy carriers had begun Operation Linebacker One, and Standard Oil had begun its ten year oil survey of the seabed off of Viet Nam. And the Vietnamese, Chinese and everybody else around, including the Americans, were none the wiser. The oil survey hardly cost Standard Oil a nickel, the US taxpayers paid for it.
In 1995, in a multi-hour BBC TV documentary broadcast about the oil industry, the president of one of the oil companies, a spin-off of Standard, stated, ".. It was quite a coincidence, that we finished our offshore oil survey on the very last day of the war, just as the last helicopter was leaving the roof of the embassy in Saigon." A coincidence?
Fifteen years later, after North and South Viet Nam were unified and all the dust settled and most people had forgotten about the "war," the Vietnamese decided they needed some cash and would allow offshore oil exploration. They divided up their coastal area into many oil lots and let foreign companies bid on the lots, with the proviso that Viet Nam got a cut of the action.
Oil companies from 12 countries put in bids. Norway's Statoil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, even Russia, Germany and Australia all put in bids. But when those countries drilled in their oil lots they all came up with dry holes. Only the "American" company had gushers and since 1990 has pulled billions of dollars out of their Golden Dragon, Blue Lotus, and White Tiger oil fields in the South China Sea off Viet Nam. Coincidence? Were they just lucky? Or did they know something those other oil companies didn�t?
In order to cover for the fact that the Viet Nam �war� was a "phoney" war with the Vietnamese branded as "communists," and the US as a country having no intention of winning, the US would need to withdraw as soon as the oil survey was done. A reason would be needed to explain the withdrawal. In the late 1960's Standard recruited large numbers of idealistic youth who were against the war and the military draft. The oil companies supplied them with monetary assistance and organization.
Those oil-backed and organized youth became the large anti-war demonstrations of the 60's and 70's. Almost none of the demonstrators knew they were being used. Most people still believe the �war� ended because of the strong US sentiment against the �war,� and President Nixon's withdrawal plan was a reaction to the demonstrators. There is too much information which explains the strange relationship between Richard Nixon and Nelson Rockefeller, the Nixon withdrawal plan and the resulting Watergate incident and Nelson's rise to power to become Vice President after Nixon resigned, so I will explain that later.
So it appears there are many oil companies but they are, in fact, all under one controlling marketeer, BP also known as Standard Oil, which sets the world price of energy. Ever wonder why President G.W. Bush wanted to open up new drilling in Alaska? There is a vast new undeveloped oil field discovered in 1989 around and under the Caspian Sea in central southern Russia. This one oil field is larger than any other field ever discovered. This oil could be sent out through the Siberian Pipeline to the Arctic Sea, then down the Alaska Pipeline, as is the Black Sea oil. Something would need to account for the greatly increased and continuous flow of oil in the Alaska pipeline.
New drilling in Alaska, whether oil is found or not, could be used to explain why so much oil is still coming from the Alaska pipeline. Nobody ever mentioned that the North Slope Alaska oil fields, around the Duck Island Western Facility, operated by BP, were running dry and that was the reason why new drilling was needed. Maybe because its not true. Nobody ever mentioned that the Prudhoe Bay Eastern Facility, just a mile or so east of Duck Island, also operated by BP, at the very top of the Alaska Pipeline is a harbor. Maybe nobody wanted you to know.
And exactly where is this new freshly discovered mother of all oil fields in southern Russia? In a province called Chechnya. Is it any wonder the Chechens wanted to become an independent state? Is it any wonder there had been an ongoing ten year war between the Russian and Chechen troops. Did the Russians �brand� the Chechen rebels as �communists� because they want to keep their own oil? Most Russian mothers have no clue why their sons were sent to die in Chechnya. The same was true of the many Russian mothers whose sons died in Afghanistan. And also the very same is true of many American mothers whose sons died in Viet Nam.
The vast new oilfield under Chechnya, by itself, could meet the world�s needs for energy for several hundred years. This new oil supply was far more than could be handled by the aging Trans-Siberia and Alaska pipelines. With the collapse of the USSR in 1991, the Russian oil could then be marketed directly. A new overland transport method needed to be built. An obvious and short method would be to build a pipeline westward from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea and then existing oil tanker ships could take the oil across the Black Sea, through the narrow Bosporus channel at Istanbul, Turkey to the Mediterranean Sea and then on to the rest of the world.
There was only one problem with that route. The older Russian oil fields around the Black Sea still produced enough oil to create a daily traffic jam of tanker ships through the narrow Bosporus channel. That long channel is barely wide enough in some places for two ships to pass each other. The Turks live in constant fear of an ecological disaster caused by an oil tanker accident on the very doorstep of Istanbul, which surrounds the channel.
The Bosporus Channel was already beyond the safe limit for tanker traffic so the massive supply of new Chechen oil could not be shipped that way. Seven other long pipeline routes had been proposed in the 1990's. All of them required reaching the Mediterranean Sea by going through politically unstable regions such as eastern Turkey, Syria or Lebanon, all of which are areas of unrest and open to terrorist attack. None of those routes were viable.
In 1995 a seemingly safe and short alternative route was discovered to get around the unsafe overloaded Bosporus Channel in Turkey. The oil tankers on the Black Sea, instead of going south through the narrow Bosporus, would turn northward up the wide Danube River toward Europe. But then at Belgrade, in Serbian Yugoslavia the tankers would make a quick left turn up a tributary river, unload the oil, and with only a short 50 mile pipeline could reach the large Mediterranean seaport of Tirana, Albania and then on to the world. It looked cheap and easy. And where would that short pipeline be built? Across a small province called Kosovo. If only Kosovo could be placed under some international control to eliminate terrorist attacks and ensure a safe pipeline.
The US Air Force tried to put Serbia and Kosovo under NATO control in 1999. It almost worked. But, Albania was unlike all the other old Yugoslavian ethnic states which had been client states of the USSR under the dictator Tito. Albania, alone in that region, had been a client state of China since 1949. The Chinese had long used Tirana, Albania as a European opium and heroin shipping point, in an operation far larger than the �French Connection� in Marseilles. The Albanians still maintain ties with China.
The Chinese, did not want to see large amounts of new energy supplies flowing to the west under BP-Standard control. The Chinese supported and used the �ethnic-Albanian rebels," since the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990's, to ensure continuous unrest in the whole region around Kosovo, Serbia, Bosnia and Macedonia, and thus no pipeline. Ever wonder why the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was "accidently" bombed and obliterated in 1999? The US Air Force claimed the old street maps their pilots were reading didn't show the Chinese Embassy. You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not always. Within a year the Empire of Energy would find an alternative. To most Americans and to the rest of the world that alternative would look like a very strange Presidential election.
SYNOPSIS:
Opening Scenes with Credits takes us down the shaft of a newly-drilled oil well, which makes a TWISTED DESCENT throgh the ocean floor to the buried treasure of light oil. It foreshadows and mirrors the "twisted descent" into the underworld of our protagonists. That pipe begins to quiver, shudders and burst in multiple places with an eruption of gas and crude oil like no one has ever seen. Fade to...
ACT 1 - ACT 1 of SPY 1099 opens at a job fair with a highly-experienced team of intelligence recruiters with placements for linguists, translators, interrogators, risk assessment, damage control, even counter terrorism analysts. Required skill sets allow us to deduce what kinds of activities are being conducted. Everybody, from the well-dressed applicants to the stern-faced recruiters, wears a badge reading “Secret” or “Top Secret,” TS/SCI-cleared (Top Secret / Sensitive Compartmented Information).
This event is open only to candidates with an intelligence background and a government security clearance -- the more high-level, the better to protect information and personnel. Special Access Programs (SAP) and special access budgets (SAB) are the Pentagon's terminology when used to refer to black (covert) programs and black budgets, respectively
There’s only one thing missing: the U.S. government. Every one of these jobs is being advertised by a private company -- one of hundreds of firms that contract with the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, or the Pentagon to provide everything from urine testers to supervisors of clandestine operations overseas. The people hired for these jobs may be doing government work in Washington or Baghdad, but they will be paid by firms including the international consulting giants.
The job fair is sponsored by an online recruitment firm headed by a former Intelligence Officer from CIA with contacts in all branches of the IC. He claims his company can hardly keep up with the demand for intelligence contractors. “The government has become addicted to the use of private industry in the world of intelligence,” he says. “In fact, they’ve made a science of it.” Indeed they have.
Both the government and private sector now engage in domestic and foreign Covert Action, or "dirty tricks." Corporate involvement in clandestine programs raises operational security concerns that only exist because these companies market their services to the private sector, capitalizing upon their exotic experience with the US government.
The momentum of the SPY 1099 plot builds through cause and effects that have to happen, to a natural but unpredictable climactic ending. The connective tissue is revealed as each event causes the next. Strong connections build momentum and intensity. Tension builds pushing towards a surprising yet satisfying resolution. Build scenes through ominous music, the rhythms of editing, a heightened sense of place and a central figure, an innocent, who struggles to gain control of a living nightmare.
ACT 2 - The Adversaries. 15% of global economy is multinational organized crime. Of this, 70% is transnational drug traffic. Corporate raiders in the Third World include OIL among their primary targets. What begins as a normal assignment for the Spy 1099 team turns into a twisted descent into the dark legacy of clandestine operations.
ACT 3 - The "Show" - Covert Action. Villain-driven plot the hero [team] overcomes
ACT 4 - The Consequences, CI and tradecraft
ACT 5 - Blowback
ACT 6 - Buildup
ACT 7 - Reveal and Resolution; neutralize adversary
What's New with My Subject?
BACKSTORY:
Spy In the Box
Today's spies for hire can be found online. Independent contractors are the 'fast food' of Intelligence. Clients can order from their service menus. Traditionally, spies have always been outsourced, rather than official employees of intelligence agencies, such as Case Officers or "spy masters."
There are 16 official members of the Intelligence Community, an assemblage of separate agency intelligence organizations which gather, evaluate, and distribute information, most of which is secret. Made up of 16 organizations, its activities are controlled and coordinated by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), who reports to the President.
The DNI is charged primarily with developing the overall intelligence budget, designing procedures to govern large intelligence acquisitions, setting priorities and coordinating policies/activities for the 16 intelligence agencies, monitoring covert operations, setting policy for working with foreign intelligence services. DNI has authority to request information from nonintelligence agencies, and perform joint planning for counterterrorism operations for all 16 intelligence agencies. Also reporting to DNI are the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), which is staffed by terrorism experts from the CIA, FBI, and the Pentagon; the Privacy and Civil Liberties Board; and the National Counter Proliferation Center.
Minimize Risks; Maximize Payoffs
Now current and former Intelligence employees are outsourcing themselves and their private CIA-style security companies. Security is composed of highly trained former military, special operations, intelligence and law enforcement personnel as well as professional private security and investigative personnel.
In terms of "deep politics" war is fraud, a manipulated and lucrative commodity that intentionally perpetuates itself in the Long War. That includes "silent" or asymmetric war, drug war, terror war, oil war, economic war, corporate espionage and the myths of war that our culture lives and dies by. Even the classic Cold War is back, in economics rather than an arms race.
Strategic Intelligence
Online security businesses deploy both Blue Badge (Govt.) and Green Badge (Civilian) personnel. Most security and intelligence jobs are now subcontracted to private security agencies, giving rise to the phenomenon of SPY 1099, the Intelligence contractor. They are paid more for private sector work than government work to make the economy scream.
"NOAH" is one such intelligence-gathering and risk management firm providing companies with both information and analysis to enable them to identify, manage and mitigate risks that can arise either from the normal flow of business or from unanticipated contingencies. LOA responds to threats posed by organized crime, and those directed toward critical infrastructure with emphasis on prevention as well as reaction. NOAH safeguards information security, market entry, critical assets, verifies investment theses, and develops critical acquisition data.
NOAH mitigates risk of reputation threat, ensures brand and intellectual property protection, and eliminates fraud and personnel issues. Other services include strategic crisis consulting, due diligence of complicated transactions, business intelligence, solutions to regulatory challenges, encryption, strategic crisis consulting, security and preparedness, investigations and forensics, as well as open-source and intelligence-based geopolitical risk assessment. Investigative capabilities include asset tracing, forensic auditing, forensic data recovery and analysis, audio forensics, handwriting analysis and psychological profiling.
The firm’s mission exercises the founders’ expertise, experience and network of relationships to provide clients with a higher standard of business intelligence and analysis, risk assessments and due diligence support for transactions, even in the most challenging emerging markets. NOAH consists of professionals drawn not only from the intelligence world, but also from value-added disciplines, such as the legal profession, financial regulation, investment banking, investigative journalism, diplomacy, forensic science and law enforcement. This well-rounded team is based in offices in Washington, DC, and Annapolis, MD. with continued worldwide growth.
*
Mentor-Protege Program
The Mentor-Protégé program is designed to motivate and encourage large business prime contractor firms to provide mutually beneficial developmental assistance to small business, veteran-owned small business, service-disabled veteran-owned small business, HUBZone small business, small disadvantaged business, and women-owned small business concerns.The program is also designed to:
- improve the performance of contracts and subcontracts,
- foster the establishment of long-term business relationships between large prime contractors and small business subcontractors, and
- strengthen subcontracting opportunities and accomplishments
Mentor Firm – open to any large business firm that demonstrates the commitment and capability to assist in the development of small business protégés.
Protégé Firm - All small businesses that meet the definition of small business concern at FAR 19.001, based on their primary NAICS code, are eligible to be protégé firms. This includes small business, veteran-owned small business, service-disabled veteran-owned small business, HUBZone small business, small disadvantaged business, and women-owned small business concerns. Protégés may receive technical, managerial, financial, or any other mutually agreed upon benefit from mentors including work that flows from a government or commercial contract through subcontracting or teaming arrangements.
Benefits of moving from the traditional large business prime contractor/small business subcontractor model to a mentor-protégé relationship model based on mutual agreement, trust, and meaningful business development. Additionally, mentor-protégé arrangements may provide greater assurance that a protégé subcontractor can perform under a contract than a similarly situated non-protégé subcontractor. Further, protégé firms gain opportunities to seek and perform government and commercial contracts through the guidance and support of mentor firms that may not have been available to them without the mentor-protégé program.
Outsourcing Citizenry
The Citizen Corps Program engages citizens in personal preparedness, exercises, ongoing volunteer programs, and surge capacity response. Citizen Corps is FEMA's grassroots strategy to bring together government and community leaders to involve citizens in all-hazards emergency preparedness and resilience related to Homeland Security.
InfraGard is a private non-profit organization run as a public-private partnership with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It is an information sharing and analysis effort serving the interests and combining the knowledge base of a wide range of members. At its most basic level, InfraGard is a partnership between the FBI and the private sector.
InfraGard is an association of businesses, academic institutions, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other participants dedicated to sharing information and intelligence to prevent hostile acts against the United States. All InfraGard members are associated with a local chapter. There is no 'National membership.' Protection of our nation’s infrastructure cannot be accomplished by the federal government alone. It requires coordinated action from numerous stakeholders – including government, the private sector, law enforcement, academia and concerned citizens. A fictionalized version could be called "IntraGuard."
More than 23,000 representatives of private industry are working quietly with the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to collect and provide information on fellow Americans. In return, members of this rapidly growing group, called InfraGard, receive secret warnings of terrorist threats before the public, and at times before elected officials. “There is evidence that InfraGard may be closer to a corporate Total Information Awareness program (TIPS), turning private-sector corporations—some of which may be in a position to observe the activities of millions of individual customers—into surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI,” according to an ACLU report titled “The Surveillance-Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society.”
InfraGard, with members from 350 companies of the Fortune 500, started in Cleveland back in 1996, when the private sector there cooperated with the FBI to investigate cyber threats. “Then the FBI cloned it,” says Phyllis Schneck, chairman of the board of directors of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, and the prime mover behind the growth of InfraGard over the last several years. FBI Director Robert Mueller addressed an InfraGard convention on August 9, 2005. “To date, there are more than 11,000 members of InfraGard . . . from our perspective, that amounts to 11,000 contacts . . . and 11,000 partners in our mission to protect America.” He added a little later, “Those of you in the private sector are the first line of defense.”
Intel: Raw & Cooked
The government has outsourced everything from spy satellites to covert operations. They even outsource buildings. Outsourced contractors set up black sites, design programs and create mobile, hand held covert communications devices and the latest must-have spy-tech accessories. They also do data mining and intelligence analysis work.
Today, the ties between intelligence agencies and the private sector -- the "shadow intelligence community" -- are so close, it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference. After leaving government, these officials keep their high-level security clearances, which makes them extremely valuable to their new employers. “You can’t do any business without having the clearances,” says former Spy Master Jake Stockwell. “How else would you know about the contracts?” The most secretive contractors are the Intelligence Community's A-team. Even the military is gearing up to invade our daily lives through domestic deployment.
Re-Tooling Intelligence
Who are these guys; what are they up to and what do they do? A handful of government agencies require TS/SCI contractor access and really only two major intelligence agencies do so. One of them is located in Langley, Virginia a couple of miles from the eastern entrance to the Dulles Toll Road with satellite offices stretching to the west. The other is located in Ft. Meade, Maryland. So, one serves CIA and another NSA.
They have staff co-located at an Annapolis Junction Maryland facility. To the uninitiated, that means they contract with the CIA, work extensively with Army and Navy tier-one Special Forces Teams as well as Special Operations Command (SOCOM) with a little NSA thrown in. Geography tells the tale of who is working for whom.
Employees have experience working in hostile and denied areas and have immediate availability to deploy as part of a team or alone to ply their trade abroad or in the US. (Private domestic spying, anyone?) Go-bags packed, ready to deploy with teams raises the obvious follow up question: which teams?
They tag along along with Special Forces teams to foreign hostile or denied areas with comm equipment that has offensive and defensive capabilities --for ELINT and SIGINT collection. They set up in a house that happens to be in the path of a highly directional signal or on top of just the right cable. The metaphorical houses are probably in such friendly spots as Iran or wherever the yellow brick road of GWOT contracting leads.
They set up covert listening posts and surveillance. Teams stand ready, custom-designed high-tech gadgets in hand, for clandestine missions in enemy territory to covertly and remotely intercept foreign communications or penetrate information systems. This can be done independently or in conjunction with SEAL or Delta or other secret squirrel teams on behalf of SOCOM and the CIA.
Private CIA
CIA officials won't say how much of the agency’s work is done by private companies, but admit that outsourcing has increased substantially since 2001. Of the estimated $40 billion the United States is expected to spend on intelligence this year, experts say at least 50 percent will go to private contractors. An even bigger piece of the pie now goes to domestic security companies serving Fusion Centers.
Intelligence and law enforcement have merged and work together at home and abroad. Police departments across the country have created networks of databases called "fusion centers" in an effort to detect and prevent acts of terrorism. The ultimate objective is to create a nationwide reporting system of suspicious behaviors so that the authorities can "connect the dots" before an attack can occur.
Civil liberties groups claim these fusion centers are beset with legal and practical problems. One legal problem is that the police should not be opening files on people because they exercised their right to free speech, such as demonstrating against the foreign policies of the United States. One practical problem is that the police are gathering so much mundane information that practically anyone could end up on a list of "suspicious" persons because some official arbitrarily decided to fill out a tip sheet. Join us for a discussion of the pros and cons of this newly proposed system of policing.
Teams of military and law enforcement veterans and other motivated, capable Americans protect diplomats, provide training, and offer logistic services. They do those things in support of friendly nation peace operations around the world, including support of some of our Muslim allies.
Underworld to Overworld
These Ops are special and not necessarily accountable to anything but the bottom line. Operations range from the Underworld of black markets, black gold and money laundering to the Overworld of global controllers and Corpoglomerates. They know how things operate and how to get the job done while protecting the clients assets and secrets.
"Intelligence services" represent an unprecedented concentration of military expertise and force in the hands of private corporations. They evaluate clients through research and due diligence, to ensure they are legitimate actors who support freedom and security. They only take on work that is sanctioned by the U.S. government, or so they say.
Halliburton will probably never shake its bad reputation. Blackwater became so infamous, it changed its name to Xe, much like the maligned Whackenhut changed to "The GEO Group, Inc." GEO is now a world leader in the delivery of correctional and detention management, health and mental health, and other diversified services to federal, state and local government agencies around the globe. GEO offers a turnkey approach that includes design, construction, financing and operations. GEO represents government clients in the United States, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada,
Substantive Deliverables
With mixed personnel, they circumvent the turf war between Police, CIA and the Pentagon. Services include Acquisitions, National and International Emergency Response, Think Tanks, Field Security, Action Teams, Fusion Analysis, Cyber Forensics, Network Security, Data Analysis, Transactional Auditing, Tutorial Assisstance and Systems Transformation.
Also, counter measures, anti-terrorism evaluation, technology and development training, theater-wide communications operations, intelligence liason, clandestine procedures and training, incident management and protective operations. Encryption methodologies and the design of secure communications networks within a defense environment. COMSEC, INFOSEC, and SIGSEC. EMF risk assessment and reduction.
* Counter-Intelligence Services
* All-Source Fusion Analysis Services
* Strategic Debriefing
* Translation Services
* Tactical Translation Services
* HUMINT Support
* Imagery Analysis Support
* Topographic Support
Intellipedians
The CIA has grown wise to the power of open-source collaboration, and Intellipedia—a classified version of Wikipedia—is humming with activity 3 years after its debut, Time reports. The site boasts 900,000 pages of content written by 100,000 identified intelligence professionals. Advocates cite the rapid treatment of questions as evidence of Intellipedia’s effectiveness.
For example, an agent posted a page asking how to collect evidence from a chlorine-based IED after coming across one in Iraq. "Twenty-three people at 18 or 19 locations around the world chimed in on this thing, and we got a perfectly serviceable set of instructions in two days," says one user. Some hardliners have questioned the site’s security, but other say a rapidly evolving database is exactly what the intelligence community needs to combat the ever-changing face of terrorism.
Moonlighting Intel
In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side -- a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation's top-level intelligence talent.
In one case, these active-duty officers moonlighted at a hedge-fund consulting firm that wanted to tap their expertise in "deception detection," the highly specialized art of telling when executives may be lying based on clues in a conversation.
But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.
A government official familiar with the policy insists it doesn’t impede the CIA’s work on critical national security investigations. This official said CIA officers who want to participate in it must first submit a detailed explanation of the type of work involved and get permission from higher-ups within the agency.
If any officer requests permission for outside employment, those requests are reviewed not just for legality, but for propriety. There is much about the policy that is unclear, including how many officers have availed themselves of it, how long it has been in place and what types of outside employment have been allowed. The CIA declined to provide additional details.
Generally, federal employees across the vast government work force are allowed to moonlight in the private sector, but under tight guidelines, that can vary from agency to agency, according to the federal Office of Government Ethics.
“In general, for most nonpolitical employees, they may engage in outside employment, but there are some restrictions,” said Elaine Newton, an attorney at the Office of Government Ethics. She explained that agencies throughout the federal government set their own policies on outside employment, and that they all typically require that the employment not represent a conflict of interest with the employee’s federal job and that the employee have written approval before taking on the work.
But the close ties between active-duty and retired CIA officers at one consulting company show the degree to which CIA-style intelligence gathering techniques have been employed by hedge funds and financial institutions in the global economy.
The firm is called Business Intelligence Advisors, and it is based in Boston. BIA was founded and is staffed by a number of retired CIA officers, and it specializes in the arcane field of “deception detection.” BIA’s clients have included Goldman Sachs and the enormous hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, according to spokesmen for both firms.
BIA has employed active-duty CIA officers in the past, although BIA president Cheryl Cook said that has “not been the case with BIA for some time.”
But the ties between BIA and the intelligence world run deep. The name itself was chosen as a play off CIA. And the presence of so many former CIA personnel on the payroll at BIA causes confusion as to whether the intelligence firm is actually an extension of the agency itself. As a result, BIA places a disclaimer in some of its corporate materials to clarify that it is not, in fact, controlled by Langley.
BIA’s clients can put the company on a retainer for as much as $400,000 to $800,000 a year. And in return, they receive access to a variety of services, from deception detection to other programs that feature the CIA intelligence techniques.
The tactics that BIA officials such as these teach hedge fund clients are based in a program it calls “Tactical Behavior Assessment."Unlike polygraph machines, the TBA technique allows examiners to work without hooking up their subject to a series of wires. The subject never knows he’s being scrutinized.
Polygraph machines work by measuring a person’s physical responses, such as heart rate, that indicate stress. Analysts using the machine need to sit with their subject for a long time. They have to establish a person’s physiological baseline, so they begin with a “control” conversation about neutral topics, before they can begin grilling the subject. Conducting an interview and doing a thorough analysis of polygraph results can take hours.
TBA focuses on the verbal and nonverbal cues that people convey when they aren’t telling the truth. Psychologists familiar with the method say it works because human beings just aren’t hard-wired to lie well. Holding two opposing ideas in your brain at the same time — as you have to do in order to tell a lie — causes a phenomenon they term “cognitive dissonance,” which creates actual physical discomfort. And when people are uncomfortable, they squirm. They fidget ever so slightly, they pick lint off their clothes, they shift their bodily positions.
Agents look for the physical indicators of lying. They watch for a person shifting anchor points. If the person is leaning forward on one elbow, does he switch to the other one? Interrogators watch for grooming gestures such as adjusting clothes, hair or eyeglasses. They look to see if the person picks at his fingernails or scratches himself. They watch for the person to clean his surroundings — does he straighten the paper clips on the table or line up the pens? If he does, he could be lying.
To obtain verbal clues, agents listen for several kinds of statements. They’ll listen for qualifying answers, phrases that begin with words like “honestly,” “frankly” or “basically.” The agents will be listening for detour phrases like “as I said before ...” They’ll want to hear if the person invokes religion — “I swear to God” — or attacks the questioner: “How dare you ask me something like that?”
Other red flags: Complaints —“How long is this going to take?” Selective memory —“To the best of my knowledge.” Overly courteous responses —“Yes, sir.”
BIA doesn’t just offer training, though. For a fee, its officers do the analysis themselves.
Read more: www.politico.com/news/stor...z0fpSZdMbN
HUMINT
Human intelligence. The collection of intelligence from human sources, including defectors, voluntary sources, spies recruited to betray their country or organization, prisoners, diplomats, information from allied or liaison intelligence services.
The US needs to reconfigure how it uses HUMINT tools by examining their effectiveness in the recruitment-centered model. When using this tool, the collecting agency finds a member of an adversarial group with access to important information. He then turn him or her into a spy by building a personal relationship and eventually popping the question, “Will you spy for me?”
Back pocket agents are nefarious agents or assets, loosely associated to the Company. The key is an "agent" has a narrow meaning and in the espionage business one ought not use words and terms that are loosey-goosey. An agent generally is paid and proven. An asset may not be paid nor in agreement with the nation state.
This model dominates since the Cold War, when spying followed fairly predictable guidelines. The organizational solution to the question of penetration was to rely on finding agents ‘in-place’ and to develop an approach in which agent recruitment played the fundamental role in HUMINT operations. However, even using ‘in-place’ sources had its difficulties. The normal process of developing and managing a HUMINT source consists of a cycle of Spotting, Assessing, Recruiting, Handling, and Terminating an asset In the Recruitment Cycle.
Driving this is an organizational culture that elevates recruiting in the hearts and minds of the Clandestine Service cadre. Career paths are driven by asset and agent recruiting, ‘hallway reputation,’ and ‘scalp-hunting,’ which measures performance for promotions. The highest value is given to recruiting and personality traits that facilitate it. In the Cold War that meant infiltrating the diplomatic scene of embassies and consulates under the guise of ‘official cover’ – cover where an officer’s affiliation with the US is not concealed, but his or her status as an intelligence officer is.
Intelligence liason in the War on Terror is necessarily more difficult, due to access to cultural groups, de-centralization of authority, and heavy need for collection on terrorist targets. Liason with foreign security units is crucial, actually better understood as a form of subcontracted intelligence collection based on barter.
Thus, liaison for the purpose of HUMINT collection is essentially “outsourc[ng the task of penetration,” an approach upon which the CIA appears to regularly lean when collecting on terrorists. Herein lies liaison’s greatest weakness - that we cannot control it. In a liaison partnership, HUMINT officers may be afforded access to a captured terrorist, or made aware of or allowed to participate in the partner service’s surveillance.
NOC, NOC, who's there?
Only a small percentage of the CIA's employees (perhaps less than 10 percent of the agency's estimated 10,000 to 20,000 workers) are clandestine officers involved in operations—the traditional spy stuff that includes recruiting sources, executing covert missions, and gathering intelligence. The remaining 90 percent are analysts, managers, scientists, and support staff. Because of their various roles, CIA employees require different levels of protective cover:
No cover. Upper management, college recruiters, congressional liaisons, Director George Tenet: These men and women are publicly acknowledged CIA employees.
Light cover. Many of the CIA's analysts and scientists fall under this category. Their families and friends might know who they really work for, but publicly, they claim to be employed by some other innocuous government agency or group. One former intelligence officer described this as "the cover you use if your airplane gets hijacked": It's safe enough to use on a quick visit overseas, say to meet with intelligence counterparts in a friendly country, but insufficient cover for spies stationed abroad.
Official cover. Most CIA employees engaged in operations overseas are given official cover: a sham job in the U.S. embassy (or working for another government agency) that affords them diplomatic immunity. These spies work under varying degrees of secrecy—the CIA station chief in a major ally nation may be well-known on the diplomatic cocktail circuit, but his subordinates, who actually recruit new informants, may not be. Such spies probably confide in their immediate families, but otherwise are unlikely to reveal their true occupation. (Although some operatives working in allied nations are "declared" officers, which means the CIA informs the host government that they are spies.) The advantage of official cover is that if officers are caught, they enjoy the benefits of diplomatic protection; at worst, they'd be publicly outed and sent home in disgrace.
Nonofficial cover. NOCs (the word rhymes with "rocks") are the most covert CIA operatives. They typically work abroad without diplomatic protection (often they pretend to work for some commercial enterprise). If these spies are caught, there's no guarantee that the United States would admit their true identities. When using official cover could put a spy's life and work at risk, NOC is the only alternative.
A little-noticed provision in the public section of a mostly-classified Senate intelligence bill signals that the Central Intelligence Agency is more serious than ever about plans to expand its program of setting up cover jobs for CIA officers outside of the usual posts in the State Department and other government agencies. Some believe the CIA's non-official cover, or NOC (pronounced KNOCK), program is the likeliest way for the agency to penetrate terrorist organizations or even, say, the nuclear program of Kim Jong Il's closed regime in North Korea.
"With terrorism, counter-proliferation — the kinds of threats that we face — you have to be more inventive in the way you deploy people overseas," said a knowledgeable U.S. official. "So you are going to have a lot of people who are not under official cover." America's most famous NOC is Valerie Plame, the CIA operative exposed last summer after a columnist reported that Bush administration officials had said she was behind a 2002 trip by her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, to Africa to investigate claims that Saddam had sought to buy uranium from Niger.
NOCs have traditionally been a tough position to fill. Though not a complete solution to the CIA's problem of gathering human intelligence, the NOC program can help. It's extremely expensive and dangerous to build a credible non-official cover by planting someone in, say, a corporate executive post in Islamabad or as a cell phone salesman in Madrid — positions in which a CIA officer would have no diplomatic immunity from arrest by the host government and little protection from deadly retribution by terrorists. Worse, the CIA has faced major bureaucratic hurdles in setting up an infrastructure to ensure that an NOC appears to be paid by a cover employer while actually being paid a government salary but at the same time only liable for taxes on a — often much lower — CIA officer's wage.
The Senate intelligence committee quietly passed a measure early this month that would make it clear that the CIA can "pay salaries, allowances, retirement, insurance, and other benefits to CIA employees under non-official cover in a manner consistent with their cover." This also suggests that a NOC might be allowed to keep at least some of the larger salary that goes with their fake job.
Although some experts believe CIA Director George Tenet already has much if not all of this authority, this legislation would give the CIA additional flexibility. "This is intended to sort of cut through some of the paperwork," the U.S. official said. "There shouldn't be any excuse for not doing these kinds of things." Demonstrating the importance of non-official cover across the entire U.S. intelligence community, the Senate bill also makes permanent the authority for the Pentagon to use front companies in its intelligence gathering, an authority that until now has been subject to renewal.
CIA continues to expand its NOC program. Intelligence officials say several hundred NOCs are now in the field, and the number is growing. Senior officials from the agency's National Collections Branch have been quietly approaching businesses doing overseas work to ask if they will provide covers for CIA case officers. Energy companies, import-export firms, multinational concerns, banks with foreign branches and high-tech corporations are among those being approached. Usually the company president and perhaps another senior officer, such as the general counsel, are the only ones who know of the arrangement. ``The CEOs do it out of a sense of patriotism,'' says former deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman.
In effect, the companies get free executives. For the cover to be plausible, the CIA must recruit business-school graduates who can put in a productive day's work with the firm and then spy during their off-hours. The CIA has even begun experimenting with recruiting mid-level corporate executives who yearn for adventure, then placing them in overseas firms as ``NOCs of convenience'' to penetrate a target for several years.
When the mission is over, the execs return to the business world. But while they are NOC officers, the CIA pays them a government salary. The company pays them a corporate salary-- usually much larger--to keep up the cover, but that money is quietly returned to the company. In fact, the agency's Covert Tax Branch has a secret relationship with the IRS to resolve the two W-2 forms an officer gets each year.
NOCs are out in the cold. But the CIA believes NOCs are the best way to carry out many clandestine operations. A foreign-intelligence service usually has no trouble spotting CIA officers operating under an embassy's cover. Not so for NOCs. ``If you're working drugs, thugs or tech transfers, you're going to be in banks all the time looking at financial transactions''--jobs often better suited for an officer under corporate cover, says a CIA contractor. NOC officers also have had more luck spying on ``hard targets'' such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea, where the U.S. has no embassies in which to hide CIA operatives. In some countries, CIA is even experimenting with setting up two stations. One would be under the traditional embassy cover to serve as a decoy, while another much more secretive station would handle the NOCs.
CIA sources report NOCs sponsors overseas include: RJR Nabisco, Prentice-Hall, Ford Motor Co., Procter & Gamble, General Electric, IBM, Bank of America, Chase Manhattan Bank, Pan Am, Rockwell International, Campbell Soup, and Sears Roebuck.In some cases, flamboyant conservative businessmen like Ross Perot and the late Malcolm Forbes have actively cooperated with the CIA in stationing officers worldwide. In other cases, obscure U.S. companies doing business abroad--such as a tiny Texas firm that deals in spare tractor parts in Latin America, cited by a former CIA officer--have taken part in the NOC program. Shipping lines, mineral and oil exploration firms, and construction companies with international operations, like the Bechtel Corp., often house NOCs.
By joining the CIA in clandestine activities, a company tacitly accepts that some of its employees could routinely break the law in another country and, if exposed, embarrass the company and endanger its other overseas employees.
Unlike most CIA officers, who are stationed abroad disguised as State Department employees, military officials, or other U.S. government personnel attached to an American embassy, NOCs operate without any apparent links to the U.S. government. They are able to approach people who would not otherwise come into contact with a U.S. embassy official. The CIA's operations within terrorist, drug trafficking, and arms dealer networks often involve NOCs, who can move more easily in such circles without raising suspicion.
In recent years, according to several CIA sources, NOCs have increasingly turned their attention to economics. Using their business covers, they seek to recruit agents in foreign government economic ministries or gain intelligence about high-tech firms in computer, electronics, and aerospace industries. They also help track the development of critical technologies, both military and civilian.
NOCs frequently stay 5, 10, or more years in one place. During that time, the NOC is truly "out in the cold." Their contacts with control officers in the CIA station are strictly limited; they do not have access to embassy files; and they must report through secret communications channels and clandestine meetings.
"As a NOC officer you are truly alone," says John Quinn, who spent much of the 1980s as a NOC in Tokyo. "The sense of isolation and loneliness is difficult to describe to those who have never experienced it." Because NOCs do not have the diplomatic immunity that protects CIA officers operating under embassy cover, if they are exposed they are subject to arrest and imprisonment--and they can be executed as spies.
CHARACTERS
Spooks really ARE spooky, even if they often stick to just one area of the paranormal. The nature of spying is looking for the ghost in the machine. They are as much or more fascinated by the Great Unknown than the general public and as likely to consult Edgar Cayce as Jane’s Intelligence Review. How different is scenario modelling from foretelling the future?
2007-(The Nation) This column was written by R.J. Hillhouse.
The unprecedented involvement of private corporations in the Iraq War has been well documented. Private soldiers working for Blackwater USA, Triple Canopy and others provide security services against military-level threats, and they regularly engage in combat. But what is not generally known is that the secret side of the Iraq War and the larger "war on terror" is also conducted by private corporations, fielding private spies. The reach of these corporations has extended into the Oval Office. Corporations are heavily involved in creating the analytical products that underlie the nation's most important and most sensitive national security document, the President's Daily Brief (PDB).
Over the past six years, a quiet revolution has occurred in the intelligence community toward wide-scale outsourcing to corporations and away from the long-established practice of keeping operations in U.S. government hands, with only select outsourcing of certain jobs to independently contracted experts. Key functions of intelligence agencies are now run by private corporations. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) revealed in May that 70 percent of the intelligence budget goes to contractors.
For all practical purposes, effective control of the NSA is with private corporations, which run its support and management functions. As the Washington Post's Walter Pincus reported last year, more than 70 percent of the staff of the Pentagon's newest intelligence unit, CIFA (Counterintelligence Field Activity), is made up of corporate contractors. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA's most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.
Employees of private corporations — "green badgers," in CIA parlance — provide sensitive services ranging from covert CIA operations in Iraq to recruiting and running spies. They also gather human intelligence on behalf of the CIA and analyze it, creating intelligence products used by the intelligence community and also shared with other branches of government.
Corporate intelligence professionals from companies such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC and others are thoroughly integrated into analytical divisions throughout the intelligence community, including the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. It is the ODNI that produces the final document of the President's Daily Brief.
The President's Daily Brief is an aggregate of the most critical analyses from the sixteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. Staff at the ODNI sift through reports to complete the PDB, which is presented to the President every day as the U.S. government's most accurate and most current assessment of priority national security issues. It was the PDB that warned on August 6, 2001, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."
It's true that the government pays for and signs off on the assessment, but much of the analysis and even some of the underlying intelligence-gathering is corporate. Knowledgeable members of the intelligence community tell me that corporations have so penetrated the intelligence community that it's impossible to distinguish their work from the government's. Although the President's Daily Brief has the seal of the ODNI, it is misleading. To be accurate, the PDB would look more like NASCAR with corporate logos plastered all over it. If a corporation wanted to insert items favorable to itself or its clients into the PDB to influence the U.S. national security agenda, at this time it would be virtually undetectable. These companies have analysts and often intelligence collectors spread throughout the system and have the access to introduce intelligence into the system.
• Nearly 50% of contractors perform management and planning tasks, computer upgrades and maintenance functions or work as personnel or payroll officers.
• About a quarter of private contractors were employed to skirt federal hiring limits.
• Contractors are typically paid more than government employees.
• The discrepancy has caused some "talented individuals" to quit government jobs but has not caused a "mass exodus."
"Contractors allow us to expand quickly and contract quickly," Sanders said. "I don't believe we're overly reliant on contractors."
CIA Director Michael Hayden said his agency needed to guard against becoming a "farm system for contractors."Hiring higher-paid contractors raises a "fairness issue" and can impact morale. Hiring contractors saves the federal government money on retirement benefits.
oilgiant http://www.kbr.com/
OVERVIEW
TRUTH FOR REEL Productions is an entertainment enterprise seeking production companies and investment for feature-length films for theatrical release. Our stories can be produced as “headline-based” fiction -- docudramas -- or factually-based documentaries. Our group of insightful investigative insiders has a unique perspective on world events, clandestine activity and “deep politics.” Distinct from the main line of historical fiction, in which the historical setting is a mere backdrop for a plot, docudramas demonstrate some or most of the following characteristics: Sub-genres include:
- Action thriller: In which the work often features a race against the clock, contains lots of violence, and an obvious antagonist. These films usually contain large amounts of guns, explosions, and large elaborate set pieces for the action to take place. These films often have elements of mystery films and crime films but these elements take a backseat to action. Notable examples are the James Bond films, The Transporter, and the Jason Bourne novels and films.
- Conspiracy thriller: In which the hero/heroine confronts a large, powerful group of enemies whose true extent only he/she recognizes. the Chancellor Manuscript and The Aquitane Progression by Robert Ludlum fall into this category, as do films such as Three Days of the Condor, Capricorn One, and JFK.
- Spy thriller (also a subgenre of spy fiction): In which the hero is generally a government agent who must take violent action against agents of a rival government or (in recent years) terrorists. Examples include From Russia, with Love by Ian Fleming, The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum, and television series such as Mission: Impossible , The Company and 24 .
TRUTH FOR REELE Enterprise is currently seeking private funding for production of the dramatic motion picture property TWISTED DESCENT: Spy 1099. The film is commercially exploitable to a mass audience through theatrical exhibition, pay-per view, cable broadcast and all home-video formats, including HD and Blue Ray. Outstanding funding required for completion.
