Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing by Shorrock Tim

Author:Shorrock, Tim [Shorrock, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

The idea for a foundation to promote the interests of the NGA’s contractors first emerged in 2003 in discussions between K. Stuart Shea, then a senior executive in Northrop Grumman’s intelligence unit; Steven Jacques, a former Air Force officer and a lobbyist for Raytheon; and John Stopher, a former CIA officer who was until January 2007 the budget director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Shea was on friendly terms with the Republican leadership in the House at the time, and had been appointed to a twelve-member national commission studying the research and development programs of U.S. intelligence agencies by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois.

Initially, the three men wanted to replicate the Space Foundation, an organization of NASA and NRO contractors based near the U.S. Space Command in Colorado. “Their purpose in life is to try to bring together the space community, whether it’s the national security community, black or white, with the civil and commercial community,” Jacques told me. “We thought, we don’t have that for the geospatial intelligence community, and maybe that should be our focus, too.”16 In 2004, when I first inquired about the purpose of the organization, Shea told me in an e-mail that the USGIF had no intention of trying to influence policy. “Quite frankly, we are simple in our focus: to build an organization that served the many disparate disciplines involved in the geospatial intelligence community, and to develop a stronger partnership between government, industry, academic and professional organizations and individuals involved in the development and application of geospatial intelligence data and the deployment of geo-processing resources to address national security objectives,” he wrote. “We are doing good things for the community at large.”17

Shea and Jacques’s first move was to organize a conference of NGA contractors; that event attracted more than 1, 200 people and proved the need for an umbrella organization to represent the industry. So they put together a three-person board—Shea, Jacques, and, initially, Stopher—and soon more than a dozen companies had signed up. Charter members, who initially ponied up at least $800, 000 each for the first year, included their own companies, plus SAIC, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, the satellite company DigitalGlobe, and other major contractors. The USGIF was born in 2003.

But a month before the foundation was to be formally announced, it ran into its first crisis. Roll Call, the newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, reported that Stopher had written a provision into the classified section of an intelligence bill providing $500, 000 to establish a new foundation to promote satellite imagery, and had not disclosed his role on the USGIF’s board to the House committee. After the story came out, he was asked by the committee to resign from the board, and although the committee’s seed money had been dropped from the final bill, the episode proved embarrassing to both the foundation and the staffer. “Stopher’s involvement in creating and championing a foundation funded by the very same contractors who support the national security efforts he

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