‘Top Secret America’ Washington Post Investigation Reveals
Massive, Unmanageable, Outsourced US Intelligence System
An explosive investigative series published in the Washington Post begins, “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.” Among the findings: An estimated 854,000 people hold top-secret security clearances. More than 1,200 government organizations and nearly 2,000 private companies work on programs related to counterterrorism, homeland security and intelligence in 10,000 locations. Excerpts from an interview with one of the coauthors of the series, Bill Arkin. Amy Goodman: What is it they did not want you to print, Bill? William Arkin: Well, they always don’t want you to do whatever it is that’s going to bring them—you know, that’s going to disrupt their day. You know, the government, we asked them repeatedly to give us specifics, to tell us what it is that they didn’t want us to show. And only one government agency was actually able to come back to us and specifically explain to us why they didn’t want us to reveal something, and they made a reasonable argument to the editors, and the editors decided that we wouldn’t. This is such a rich area that we felt that really to diminish it by somehow not looking at these requests from the government seriously was a mistake. We’re giving you information on 1,931 corporations, on 1,271 government entities across forty-five different departments and agencies. I mean, this is an enormous amount of information. And Secretary Gates himself said to us in an interview that he can’t even get this type of information about his own office and who contracts all of the contractors within his own office. People recognize that this is a problem, and I think that the Washington Post should really be given an enormous amount of credit for putting the resources into this over a two-year period in order to present something that I hope will be the foundation of a new national debate about this whole question. Amy Goodman: Bill Arkin, what’s Liberty Crossing? William Arkin: Liberty Crossing is the name, the nickname, for the new complex of buildings that has gone up in McLean, Virginia, that is home to the Director of National Intelligence, the CIA’s National Counterterrorism Center, other counterterrorism task forces, and the National Counter-proliferation Center. We highlight the buildings around Washington that have been created since 9/11, because we thought that it was a very tangible representation of government. It’s often hard to really talk about government in terms of money, because the billions, after a while, begin to just glaze over. But we thought—you know, our approach was going to be, we know that everything that happens somewhere, and we’re going to find out where it happens. And lo and behold, as we began to map this alternative geography of America, one of the things we discovered was that these guys have been on a fabulous building spree since 9/11. There have been over thirtythree buildings in the Washington, DC area alone, encompassing 17 million square feet, which is four times the size of the Pentagon, and there are more underway. The NSA and others are building and planning to build even more office space. So the reality is that—I think in my research I found that there was only one civilian agency that’s had the privilege of building a new headquarters since 9/11 in Washington, and that’s the Department of Transportation. But this is a very tangible way of seeing this in your backyard, in reality, in a real physical location. And one of the phenomena that is also associated with 9/11 is that these locations, like Liberty Crossing, are undisclosed locations, meaning you can’t look them up in a phone book. It has a cover address. It’s not publicly bragged about, in terms of where it is, although it’s obvious where it is to anyone who goes by. And that in itself is sort of an odd manufacture from 9/11, which is that these government agencies, on their own, with really no consideration of national security, can just decide what’s going to be disclosed, what’s going to be undisclosed. And as far as I can see, it’s random to the agency and its power, and it has nothing to actually do with the security of the buildings or the people who work inside them. Amy Goodman: The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, the new $1.8 billion headquarters, the fourth-largest federal building in the area, in Springfield, right near Dulles Airport? William Arkin: No, in Springfield, Virginia, it’s down south near Fort Belvoir. This is a gigantic facility that’s going to—that’s going up right now. It’s going to house 8,500 workers of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. I mean, they are going to leave their older buildings that are scattered throughout Washington. But you know what? They’re going to be in well-appointed offices, and they’ll be in one facility in Washington, and they will obviously, I assume, be able to do their work better. But it’s just one of many. It’s just one of many agencies that probably most Americans have never heard of within the national security and intelligence establishment. And as we found, you know, there are thirty-nine new construction starts this year alone nationwide of buildings going up for various pieces of the intelligence, homeland security and military communities. Amy Goodman: The growth of the military budget, Bill Arkin, since 9/11? William Arkin: Well, you know, it’s hard to say even what we spend on national security anymore, Amy. I guess we say we spend a half-atrillion dollars now on national security. But with supplemental budgets and secret budgets and all that, I mean, it’s really impossible to be able to put a true figure on it. And more importantly, it’s really impossible to gauge where this money is actually going and how effective it is. We’ve talked to people on the Hill who have said to us that the budget documents get thinner and thinner as the budget gets bigger and bigger. There’s no way that Capitol Hill has the resources or the ability to oversee all of this activity. And all sorts of workarounds and devices have been created since 9/11 to essentially put as much as possible into secret programs or off-thebooks programs so that they’re beyond scrutiny. Maybe there’ll be eight people in the Congress who have the authority to see the information, but, you know, that’s not oversight as it’s written in the Constitution. Those are people who are co-opted into the system. And I think that really this is an issue that we, as Americans, need to ponder, that we have created a government apparatus that really does not comply with our very precept of the balance of powers. And that’s something that I hope that our series will provoke Congress to take a hard look at, in terms of thinking about better ways in which it can exercise its oversight responsibilities over the executive branch. Amy Goodman: Bill, you’ve been doing this kind of work for years. What were you most shocked by in this latest investigation? William Arkin: I remember having a conversation with Dana, my writing partner, in the summer of 2009. We had sort of started by looking at the government and then shifted our attention to looking at the contracting base. And I said, “Wow! There’s 200 companies that do top-secret work for the government.” And now we’re at 2,000. I mean, it is the sheer magnitude of it, Amy, that is stunning. And to me, you know, it’s not that there might not be redundancies that are necessary or that there might not be overlap which is necessary and disparate departments doing disparate things. And many of the conclusions that we draw, I think, are ones that your readers and listeners would accept readily and are part of their normal discussions of government. But the truth is that no one really has a handle on it all. No one really does. We’ve talked to the people at the highest level. We’ve talked to the principals involved, and they have all readily admitted that, yes, this “ad hoc” crazy system was created after 9/11. We threw money at the problem. We did it the American way, Admiral Blair said to us. You know, if it’s worth doing, it’s worth overdoing. I mean, ha ha, but the truth of the matter is that now we’re two years into the Obama administration, and the basic system really has not been reformed at all. Amy Goodman: Lay out for us what we will see over the next days—this is a three-part series— and also the database that you have collated. William Arkin: Well, this is a very rich digital journalism project. I would almost go as far to say that this is a digital product with a small print component to it. As much as the Washington Post has allocated five pages to the newspaper to our first in this series, the online presentation includes a link analysis application, which will allow you to look at government agencies and look at functions and see how many contractors work for them at the top-secret level and at how many locations and to look at some of the featured companies that we discuss in the article series and look at who they work for and some of their locations. There’s also a mapping application that allows you to delve into the presence of Top Secret America in your own community. And then there is a profile of each of those 3,000-plus entities, where you can look in more detail at their revenue, the size of the companies, and what it is that they do in this field. So we’ve provided, as is the nature of the internet, the actual backup material to do it. But it wasn’t a second thought to the stories. It wasn’t like we wrote stories and then said, “Let’s put a web presentation together.” From the very inception of this project, we have worked in unison with the website, and we’ve had a team of over thirty people working with us, and that’s an enormous amount of resources these days in the mainstream media, to be able to have really what we consider to be the future of investigative journalism displayed in these various multimedia ways with documentary footage, with photo galleries, with a database that’s searchable.
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