Rent a Spy

Wow, the Bush Administration is really going crazy over outsourcing. Mercenaries up the wazoo in Iraq, and now we find out even spies are getting into into the pork provided by a government in love with the idea of private enterprise as the be all and end all to perfect existence.

Private contractors are taking over jobs once reserved for highly trained agency employees: regional desk officers who control clandestine operations around the world; watch officers at the 24-hour crisis center; analysts who sift through reams of intelligence data; counterintelligence officers who oversee clandestine meetings between agency officers and their recruited spies; and reports officers who act as liaisons between officers in the field and analysts back at headquarters. While there is nothing inherently wrong with the intelligence community working closely with private industry, there is the potential for trouble unless the union is closely monitored. Because the issue is hidden under the CIA's heavy layers of secrecy, it is impossible for even Congress to get accurate figures on just how much money and how many people are involved. But many expertss, after spending millions of dollars training people to be clandestine officers, taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies.

"The money is incredible," one agency veteran, who handled spies overseas for years, told me. "I doubled my salary to go out and come back in and continue doing what I was doing." (click here for the full article)

What's next? Maybe US politicans will outsource their positions. I can just see it, Dubya will outsource the presidency so he can go on vacation and golf more often. Besides it would be a more "efficient" use of tax payer money, because we all know business does everything better than government.