Nominee for intelligence chief: ‘It is under control’

WASHINGTON — The man chosen to be the nation’s next chief of intelligence rejected allegations that national security agencies had gone out of control hiring expensive private contractors to do the government’s work.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, President Barack Obama’s nominee for Director of National Intelligence, took the hot seat Tuesday when the Senate Committee on Intelligence grilled him about this week’s Washington Post investigation, Top Secret America. The story alleges waste, mismanagement and the overuse of private contractors by the national security community in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“You have entered into the most deadly minefield in Washington D.C.,” Sen. Christopher Bond, D-Mo., cautioned Clapper.

Clapper rebuffed the Washington Post’s claims, saying budget restrictions imposed limits on private contracting at intelligence agencies.

“I believe that it is under control,” Clapper said. “The intelligence community can do many things, but printing more money is not one of those things.”

National security spending has risen to such levels that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates recently called it a “gusher.” Clapper tried to explain that funding is guaranteed for only one year at a time, which makes hiring full-time government employees difficult. There is a demand for more people to move more top-secret information, he said, but not enough long-term funding.

“So the obvious outlet for that has been the growth of contractors,” Clapper said.

The Washington Post investigation, a three-part series that began Monday, claims private contractors are hired for every conceivable job in intelligence and occupy close to 30 percent of the workforce at intelligence agencies and almost half the total personnel budget.

Senate Committee on Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called for a 10 percent reduction in one year in private contractors, although she acknowledged, “I don’t know that that’s quite achievable.”

The Senate committee issued a report last year that called for the reduction in contractors, based on a 2008 case study by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that found contractors were being used in jobs that could be successfully done by government employees for cheaper.

Clapper said he supported a reduction in private contractors for intelligence work, but declined to set a specific goal. Clapper spent six years as a private contractor for government intelligence after he retired from the military.

Senate committee members had additional questions for Clapper on Wednesday but indicated they would easily approve his nomination, which will then go to the full Senate for confirmation. In his new role, Clapper, 69, would oversee the office in charge of coordinating 16 different intelligence agencies.

Clapper will need more authority than allowed previous directors to get the job done, senators said.

“We don’t need our top spy chief to be a figurehead,” Bond said. “We need someone who can throw some elbows and take back control of our intelligence agency.”

Clapper, who serves as under-secretary of defense for intelligence, would be the fourth director of intelligence since the position was created five years ago. Former intelligence director U.S. Navy Adm. Dennis Blair reportedly resigned because of frustrations over a lack of authority to coordinate intelligence activities across several departments, according to national security experts.

The national intelligence director “is operating at the 50,000-foot level, making sure everyone has the resources needed,” said Mark Lowenthal, president of the Intelligence and Security Academy in Washington and a former intelligence analyst for the State Department and CIA. “The problem is that the DNI has very little enforcement mechanism.”

The law that created the Director of National Intelligence in 2004 limits the director’s authority over other intelligence agencies. A last-minute provision, included at the behest of former Vice President Dick Cheney, kept much of the intelligence authority to the Department of Defense, said Tim Shorrock, an author and expert on government outsourcing and contracts.

“The ODNI was very much weakened,” Shorrock said.

The military still commands much of the nation’s intelligence activities, limiting the intelligence director’s oversight of other agencies, particularly the CIA, Shorrock said.

Any change in the command chain, though, won’t come at Clapper’s initiative. When pressed about confusion over the intelligence director’s authority, Clapper told senators that he was satisfied with the law, ambiguous as it is, and would not want to reorganize the agency.

“I have no intent of shaking up the DNI,” Clapper said.