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Intelligence Percent of Revenue
Summary
BOEING’S NICHE. Boeing Integrated Defense Services (IDS) is the intelligence unit of the Boeing Company. Based in Chicago, Boeing is a $61.5 billion aerospace company with more than 161,000 employees, and makes commercial jetliners and military aircraft, satellites, and advanced information and communications systems. IDS has close ties with the NSA and the intelligence community’s signals intelligence units. It has an important office about a mile from the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland, in an industrial park filled with NSA contractors. Boeing was involved in some of the Bush administration’s most secretive programs: Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a Boeing subsidiary, handled computerized flights plans for the CIA when it kidnapped (rendered) suspected terrorists and flew them to secret prisons around the world. Boeing also has a major stake in domestic intelligence as the prime contractor for the DHS surveillance system, SBInet, which is designed to monitor the U.S.-Mexico border with a “virtual fence” network of surveillance systems and communications towers.
FINANCES. Boeing IDS, with $32.1 billion in revenues, earns slightly more than half of Boeing’s total annual revenues. Its 71,000-person business unit provides solutions “to meet the enduring needs of defense, space, and intelligence customers in the United States and around the world,” according to the company’s website. The division is headquartered in St. Louis, and has “concentrated operations” in Southern California; Seattle; Houston; Philadelphia; Mesa, Arizona; Huntsville, Alabama; the Space Coast of Florida; San Antonio; and Washington, D.C..
Corporate Information
INTELLIGENCE MISSION. According to Boeing’s website, its most important intelligence unit is its Mission System Group. This organization “provides the subject matter expertise, technical excellence, and operational experience required to lead Boeing's effort to support the horizontal integration of the Intelligence Community (IC). We are organized, not by customer, but by capability to provide the NGA, CIA, DIA and NSA an enterprise level approach to global situational awareness, content management and knowledge capture. Our architectural solutions facilitate the seamless integration of military and intelligence missions by leveraging open standards and commercial technology.” Capabilities include: Mission Infrastructure (“providing secure, integrated network solutions that support intelligence and command systems”); Intelligence Analysis & Services (“integrated, analytical intelligence support to the warfighter”); and commercial imagery solutions to “produce, manage and visualize geospatial information.” Key customers of the unit, the company says, include the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency.
Boeing’s geospatial intelligence offerings are provided through Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which also holds contracts with the NSA. It allows agencies and military units to map global shorelines and create detailed maps of cities and battlefields, complete with digital elevation data that allow users to construct three-dimensional maps. Other agencies are served through Boeing’s Advanced Information Systems (AIS) unit headquartered in Anaheim, California. AIS is part of the company’s Intelligence and Security Systems, the Boeing division “that is dedicated to providing ground-based and other integrated intelligence and security solutions for a variety of U.S. government customers. More than half of the work performed by AIS supports classified government programs.”
In December 2007, Boeing formed a new Intelligence and Security Systems (I&SS) division that appears to combine many of the company’s services for foreign and domestic intelligence. Based in Washington, D.C., I&SS has a workforce of about 2,000 people at nine locations nationwide, and includes four program areas: Advanced Information Systems; Mission Systems; Security Solutions, which includes SBInet (the electronic wall being built on the US-Mexico border); and Advanced I&SS. According to a company press release, the new division “enables increased focus on the complex challenges faced by our homeland security and intelligence community customers. …I&SS will improve our ability to bring comprehensive, net-enabled capabilities to meet our customers' dynamic requirements."
DOMESTIC SECURITY. AIS is also home to Boeing’s SBINet contract for the US government’s Secure Border Initiative. As described by the company, SBI is “a comprehensive plan by the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to gain operational control of the US borders through the integration of increased staffing; interior enforcement; detection technology and infrastructure; and coordination on federal, state, local, and international levels.” Boeing’s contribution, through a contract worth at least $2.5 billion, is SBINet, “a program focused on transforming border control through technology and infrastructure. SBINet will provide frontline personnel advantages in securing the nation's land borders through the most effective integration of current and next generation technology, infrastructure, staffing, and response platforms.” SBINet is managed and executed by the US Customs and Border Protection agency and contracted out to the Boeing team, which includes key intelligence contractors DRS Technologies, L-3 Communications, Unisys Global Public Sector, and USIS (formerly a Carlyle Group company).
The Boeing consortium, the company says, “will detect, monitor, and classify potential and actual crossers [of the border]. At that point, the system will enable sector command centers to dispatch the right agents and resources to respond to the scene.” The equipment will include ground-based and tower-mounted sensors, cameras and radars; fixed and mobile telecommunications systems; ground-penetrating detecting systems; command and control center equipment; and information database and intelligence analysis systems.
CorpWatch Analysis
SUMMARY. Boeing’s intelligence division, while little known outside of the military establishment, plays a critical role in the so-called war on terror. In 2006, IDS began testing for its defense and intelligence clients a new product that downloads signals and imagery from military satellites and sends the data instantly to analysts in ground stations. “For the first time,” said Boeing, “signal intelligence receivers proved that they could automatically identify the target -- a mock terrorist -- and trigger airborne surveillance assets to track the target on the ground, while capturing full-motion imagery and broadcasting it instantly to analysts several hundred miles away.” [1] The system will eventually become part of the US Army’s array of high-tech weaponry. One of IDS’s most important units is its Mission Systems group, which supports the national collection agencies “with solutions that allow them to acquire, manage, visualize and communicate intelligence from multiple sources.”
CIA OPERATIONS. A Boeing subsidiary played a key role in the secret “extraordinary rendition” program that sent many terrorist suspects to CIA-operated interrogation cells outside the United States. According to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, Jeppesen International Trip Planning, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boeing, handled “many of the logistical and navigational details for these trips, including flight plans, clearance to fly over other countries, hotel reservations, and ground-crew arrangements.” [2]
In her 2008 book The Dark Side (Doubleday/2008), Mayer added details. Quoting Sean Belcher, a former Jeppesen employee, she reported that, “while the Bush administration was insisting that it did not render suspects to be tortured, executives at Jeppesen had no such illusions. [Belcher] described a meeting in which one of his bosses, Bob Overby, the managing director of Jeppesen International Trip Planning, said, ‘We do all of the extraordinary-rendition flights – you know, the torture flights. Let’s face it, some of these flights end up that way.’” (Mayer, page 129). Jeppesen is also involved as a contractor in geospatial intelligence. A Boeing handout at a 2007 intelligence symposium in San Antonio lists “Jeppesen Government and Military Services” as one of four subsidiaries of Boeing’s Space and Intelligence Systems unit, which provides “prime contractor support to government customers that require diverse geospatial intelligence services.” That designation could include the CIA as well as the NGA and other Pentagon agencies. Jeppesen and the other subsidiaries, Boeing says, work “in specialized organizations with broad resources to meet the time-critical requirements of today’s warfighter.”
At GEOINT 2007, Boeing, one of the intelligence community’s biggest suppliers of satellites, displayed its “information sharing environment” software. It is designed to meet the Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s new requirements that agencies stop buying “stovepiped” systems that cannot talk to each other and start focusing on products that allow the NGA and other agencies to easily share their classified imagery with the CIA and other sectors of the community. “To ensure freedom in the world, the United States continues to address the challenges introduced by terrorism,” a Boeing handout said. Its new software, the company said, will allow information to be “shared efficiently and uninterrupted across intelligence agencies, first responders, military and world allies.”
Recent Contracts/Events
In April 2008, Boeing and CSC, another major intelligence contractor, joined forced to pursue a multi-billion dollar contract with the US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) “to execute the Special Operations Forces' global mission.” "The combined technical, integration, and sustainment strengths of Boeing and CSC offer the best possible team to support USSOCOM worldwide, and to bring SOFSA new capabilities that offer enhanced performance while establishing cost-saving efficiencies for operations," Jim Sheaffer, president of CSC's North American Public Sector, wrote in a press release.
SOURCES
[1] “Boeing Demonstrates Anti-Terrorism Integrated Tactical Solutions,” Boeing company press release, June 22 2006.
[2] Jane Mayer, “The CIA’s Travel Agent,” The New Yorker, October 30, 2006.
