MZM Had Employees at Secret U.S. Data HubThe company belonging to Mitchell Wade — the guy who helped Duke Cunningham get laid — had a contract to provide staff to the National Counterterrorism Center, and may still, according to former employees. NCTC is the hub of the intelligence community’s counterterrorism efforts, and keeps a master list of over 200,000 names associated with terrorists or terrorist organizations.
NCTC is a super-secret place, for good reason: its computers have access to more classified data than those of any other government installation in the world. It was created in large part to “fuse” the reams of intelligence generated and held separately by the many different U.S. spy agencies, and it does a respectable job at it, from what I hear. It looks kind of like a bigger, fancier version of CTU from the TV show “24” — although, I’m not kidding you, it has a Starbucks.
The employees once placed in NCTC by Wade’s company, MZM Inc., may still be there under the corporate banner of Athena Innovative Solutions — that’s what MZM was renamed after Wade left. Athena has not returned my call, and NCTC declined to comment.
In addition to NCTC, MZM is known to have had employees working at CIFA, the Pentagon’s domestic spying operation; CENTCOM, from where the military ran the Iraq invasion; the FBI’s Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force; the Department of Energy’s Counterintelligence Office; the White House’s Robb-Silberman Commission to study WMD intelligence; the Homeland Security Department’s watch center; the Army’s National Ground Intelligence Center; and the Pentagon’s Defense Security Service.
I’ll repeat my earlier question: how did MZM, which had no federal contracts until 2002, manage to place handfuls of employees in some of the country’s most sensitive defense and intelligence operations?
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