Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball has an interesting and important new article noting that the Pentagon is considering the merger of two security offices, raising fears that they are creating a “military secret police” with too much information and too much power.
But there’s more to the story.
Hosenball reports that one of the outfits is CIFA — Counterintelligence Field Activity — which has gotten into hot water for spying on Americans engaged in political protests, among other things. MZM held numerous contracts with that operation, thanks to the earmarking efforts of Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who took $1.4 million in bribes from MZM’s founder, admitted felon Mitchell Wade.
The other outfit is the Defense Security Service, which handles security clearances and sensitive personal information for 4.5 million defense and intelligence workers.
According to Newsweek, DSS has turned down several inappropriate requests from CIFA for sensitive information on individuals.
What Newsweek doesn’t mention is that MZM had employees working at DSS as well as CIFA. In fact, the company continues to provide employees to DSS under its new name, Athena Innovative Solutions, according to news accounts and former employees.
MZM provided around 30 employees to the center, a onetime MZM employee told me. Rep. Katherine Harris’ (R-FL) former scheduler, Mona Tate Yost, was in their number, Florida’s Lakeland Ledger reported last month.
Here are some interesting questions: if DSS has rejected “a handful” of inappropriate requests from CIFA, how many has it allowed? How many requests went from one MZM employee at CIFA to one at DSS? And 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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