CACI International Inc.

IDEOLOGY. Since 9/11, CACI defined itself as a virtual extension of the Bush administration’s foreign policy and the global war on terror. “CACI supplies one of the most vital weapons in the war on terrorism: cleared, qualified experts in intelligence gathering, analysis, operations and support,” the company declared in its [2004 annual report. “Working with the intelligence community in its mission to preeempt, disrupt, and defeat terrorism worldwide" - notice the careful placement of that word preempt, lifted directly from the Bush lexicon - "our people provide counter-terrorism intelligence analysis and terrorist targeting support. They assist with intelligence collection. And their unique skills help thwart terrorist attacks against the United States."

From the first days of the invasion of Iraq, CACI positioned itself as utility player for the Department of Defense, which provides the company with more than 70 percent of its revenue. Days before U.S. troops rolled into Iraq in 2003, London boasted to the Washington Post that CACI is “playing a role in a large choreography to make sure the president and Rumsfeld have the right information at the right time and can disseminate their decisions back to the battlefield. We’ll be ahead of the enemy’s ability to outmaneuver us.” [6] This included “enemies” at home as well.

CIFA. Until recently, one of CACI’s key Pentagon clients was the Counterintelligence Field Activity office (CIFA), which uses CACI’s “Highview” document and records management software to “help combat the growing foreign adversary intelligence collection threat.” In 2005, Rumsfeld’s office rewarded CACI for its contribution to the war effort with two contracts worth nearly $20 million to streamline its IT operations. The two one-year projects supported the Pentagon’s transformation initiatives and allowed Rumsfeld’s staff to manage its classified and unclassified computer networks supporting homeland security and the war on terror. [7]

MANICHEAN VIEW OF THE WORLD. London’s political philosophy closely matched the imperial visions of Rumsfeld and the neocons he brought into the Pentagon. His world is a Manichean one, divided between the United States and the forces of evil. He stands out among his peers in the business of intelligence for his fanatical views on terrorism and his almost religious allegiance to the Bush-Cheney agenda of pre-emptive war and global military dominance. Like George Bush, he sees evil lurking throughout the developing world, where he points to a “rising environment” of extremist individuals and organizations. “It seems that nobody (in the Middle East) has organizational self-control; everything flips into an aggressive violent reaction,” he told Washington’s WMAL radio in 2006. [8]

In 2002, London came up with a “simpler way” to define the “asymmetric warfare” practiced by the Palestinians and other Arab groups in their resistance to the United States and Israel: “Not fighting fair.” He added: “Precisely, asymmetric warfare means facing a cunning and conniving adversary of inferior strength, who finds ways to exploit vulnerabilities to radical extreme, and frequently with frightening psychological effect.” In a speech to the Northern Virginia Technology Council, which has honored him twice for his contributions to IT, London laid out his analysis of the “war on terror.” Today, he said, “instead of warring against a single empire, we’re facing” not only Al Qaeda but “groups like the Islamic Resistance Group, or Hamas; the Islamic Jihad; Hizbullah; the Liberation Tigers of Sri Lanka” – as if they were all connected. He informed his audience that “some of the Al Qaeda leadership is now believed to be in Lebanon with the Hizbullah.” If so, that would be news to U.S. intelligence, which has never mentioned any such connection.

London locates the origins of today’s troubles to the Iranian revolution of 1979, and argues that the current confrontation between the United States and Islamic groups in the Middle is “not only a global war but a culture clashing kind of situation.” He seems easily frightened by the prospect of even peaceable protest. In 2006, alerted by a friend, he watched a website broadcast from London of a demonstration by Moslems carrying “incredible placards and posters” about “what Islam meant and how it was going to resist Western culture, and ‘don’t pick on us.’ It was a very scary kind of thing. That’s a small group of people, but it’s an idea that is taking hold and getting some traction and is a serious concern for us going forward.” CACI’s position as a contractor in the Intelligence Community, he went on, is to “provide solutions that the politicians and military organizations can use to either suppress or redirect some of those aggressive energies.” [9]

HISTORY. CACI didn’t start out as an intelligence company. From the time of its founding in 1962 until the late 1990s, CACI grew primarily by selling proprietary software, including an optical scanning technology it developed for the Navy, to various agencies of the federal government, including the Departments of Justice, Commerce and Transportation. In 1972, the company moved its headquarters from California to Washington, D.C., and hired London, a former Navy pilot, as a program manager. A year later, it shortened its name from California Analysis Center Inc. to CACI International. London moved steadily up the company’s ranks and was named president and CEO in 1984. He moved methodically to capture software markets in the areas of law enforcement and the military. He also gave the company its motto: “Ever Vigilant.”

CACI’s optical scanning technology has been a particularly profitable niche. Used extensively by the Justice Department and the FBI, it can scan up to 26 million documents a month, transform the data into digitized information, translate foreign text into English, and then search for concepts and ideas within the data. “What it does is eliminate the need for a person to actually look at the stuff and try to interpret it,” says Dave Dragics, CACI’s vice president for investor relations. “So they can do analysis a lot quicker than they did before.” [10] After U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001, CACI’s technology was used to read and analyze the thousands of Al Qaeda documents found in caves and other hiding places, CACI has said. [11]

London first began eyeing the intelligence market in the late 1990s, when his company identified defense outsourcing as a “business opportunity trend line” and made a specific decision to move into the area of classified intelligence contracts. [12] As he bought into the intelligence market, London began hiring as advisers people with extensive experience in defense and covert operations. His first big catch was Richard Armitage, who served on CACI’s board of directors from 1999 to 2001. At the time, Armitage was a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and had recently joined the private sector after a long career in defense, intelligence and covert operations.

Once CACI was committed to defense, it changed the makeup of its board of directors. London’s board recruits included retired Navy Admiral Gregory G. Johnson, the former commander in Chief of NATO forces in Southern Europe; Arthur Money, a former assistant secretary of defense for command, control, communications and intelligence; Larry Welch, the former chief of staff of the Air Force and former Commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command; former NSA deputy director Barbara McNamara; and retired Army General Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Shelton’s “unsurpassed knowledge of our military markets and clients will be extremely valuable as an asset to CACI,” London told investors after his appointment in 2007. Shelton was also a director of Anteon before it was sold to General Dynamics.)

DEFENSE INTELLIGENCE AGENCY & THE REVOLVING DOOR. Meanwhile, as the Defense Intelligence Agency expanded its outsourced activities during the Rumsfeld years, CACI concentrated heavily on building relationships with that agency. In January 2006, CACI appointed Lowell Jacoby, a former Navy admiral and former DIA director, to be executive vice president for strategic intelligence opportunities. A year later, CACI hired Louis Andre, Jacoby’s chief of staff at the DIA, to be Jacoby’s deputy – in effect, transferring the former top two officials at the DIA to CACI. (Andre’s official title is senior vice president of intelligence business strategy.)

ABU GHRAIB. CACI got involved in Abu Ghraib through an IT contract it obtained when it acquired a company called Premier Technology Group in 2003. PTG was formed in the late 1990s by a group of former Army intelligence officers who had worked in Bosnia. By acquiring PTG, Defense News reported, CACI expanded its activities “to a whole host of tactical units in country and in other theaters of operations” around the world. [13] Best of all for CACI, PTG had existing contracts with the Pentagon for intelligence analysis and security services, IT, training, program management and logistics, and 360 employees with high-level security clearances.

At the time of CACI’s acquisition, all of PTG’s contracts were being administered by the Department of Interior. Two of the contracts, one worth $19.9 million, the other $21.8 million, required CACI to supply “screening, interrogation and support functions” and “human intelligence” at an unspecified site in Iraq. Because CACI was also being asked to screen Iraqis captured by U.S. forces, the contracts also called for biometric software that could identify suspects through facial characteristics and fingerprints. According to Frank Quimby, a Department of Interior press officer, the Army justified these IT requests because “enormous amounts of information had to be integrated in order to prepare for interrogations and make maximum use of the information gathered.” [14] It was through this convoluted – and virtually untraceable – route that CACI ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. Altogether, CACI hired 31 interrogators under its two IT contracts.

The interrogators arrived at the prison at a critical time. For the first few months after U.S. forces took control of the prison, U.S. military intelligence officers conducted interrogations. But their efforts didn’t yield the kind of information on the insurgency sought by Rumsfeld and Cambone. Their solution, Seymour Hersh reported in The New Yorker, “was to get tough with those Iraqis in the Army prison system who were suspected of being insurgents.” Cambone ordered Major General Geoffrey Miller, the commander of the detention center at Guantanamo, to visit Baghdad to review interrogation procedures.

His solution “was to ‘Gitmoize’ the prison system in Iraq – to make it more focused on interrogation” by using techniques of sleep deprivation, exposure to extreme temperatures and placing prisoners in stress positions for lengthy periods of time. Miller and his new recruits, Hersh wrote, brought “unconventional methods to Abu Ghraib.” [15] CACI was brought in precisely at the time that Miller’s “unconventional methods” were being introduced. (NOTE: for the full story of CACI and Abu Ghraib, consult Chapter Eight ("The Pure Plays") of Tim Shorrock, SPIES FOR HIRE: The Secret World of Outsourced Intelligence.