Top Rumsfeld Aide Wins Contracts From Spy Office He Set Up

[Orwellian_Ghost]

QinetiQ Goes Kinetic: Top Rumsfeld Aide Wins Contracts From Spy Office He Set Up

by Tim Shorrock , Special to CorpWatch
January 15th, 2008


A Pentagon office that claims to monitor terrorist threats to U.S. military bases in North America -- and was once reprimanded by the U.S. Congress for spying on antiwar activists -- has just awarded a multi-million dollar contract to a company that employs one of Donald Rumsfeld’s former aides. That aide, Stephen Cambone, helped create the very office that issued the contract.

On January 7, QinetiQ (pronounced “kinetic”) North America (QNA), a major British-owned defense and intelligence contractor based in McLean, Virginia, announced that its Mission Solutions Group, formerly Analex Corporation, had just signed a five-year, $30 million contract to provide a range of unspecified “security services” to the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office, known as CIFA.

....

Duane Andrews

Duane Andrews, QNA’s CEO and Stephen Cambone’s boss, got his baptism in information technology during the first Gulf War in 1991, when he was assistant secretary of defense for communications, command, control and intelligence under Dick Cheney, then defense secretary. His job included managing the Pentagon’s Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance operations. “Too many people -- even today -- think of (information) as something IT guys worry about, when really it is something that warfighters and commanders need to worry about,” he told Government Computer News in 2002. “If they pick up the phone to give a command to go to war and there’s no dial tone, or they send an ops order and it gets garbled or misread or doesn’t go to its intended recipients, the war slows down.”

Andrews left the Pentagon in 1993 to become chief operating officer of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). During that time, he was a key figure in developing SAIC’s extensive business -- worth about $8 billion in 2006 -- with the intelligence community and the Pentagon.

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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=14898

[gratuitous]

1. Five years, $30 million

To do . . . well, to do something, I'm sure. But you rabble wouldn't understand the super-secret stuff they're doing, so just don't worry about it.