MZM and General Hayden

Ooh, this is lovely! Justin Rood discovers that DCI nominee General Michael Hayden contracted with Mitchell Wade's MZM.

Hayden, President Bush's pick to replace Porter Goss as head of the CIA, contracted with MZM Inc. for the services of Lt. Gen. James C. King, then a senior vice president of the company, the sources say.

And:

Before joining MZM in December 2001, King served under Hayden as the NSA's associate deputy director for operations, and as head of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

King worked at NSA Headquarters in Ft. Meade, Maryland, in 2004 and 2005, both sources told me. "King was out there working on same floor as Hayden," one former employee with firsthand knowledge of the arrangement said. "He was doing special projects for Hayden as an MZM employee." Neither former employee knew details of King's work for Hayden; one said he thought he was doing "special projects" for the director, while the other speculated it was "high-ranking advisory work."

These "former" intel guys sure get some interesting work, don't they...? Once they're done, they can just waltz right back into the intelligence community. We need to come to a new understanding of what "leaving the agency" really means. And the mainstream media has to stop regarding Wilkes and Wade as just "defense contractors." This is an intelligence scandal.

King is now the president of the "new" MZM, which has re-branded itself as Athena:

As an MZM employee, King was involved in a number of controversial projects. In 2002, he was a key adviser to the team creating CIFA, the Pentagon's domestic surveillance operation. In 2004, he was one of three MZM staffers who worked on the White House Robb-Silberman Commission, which recommended expanding CIFA's powers.

From Walter Pincus' famous piece (by way of Laura Rozen):

In late 2002, Cunningham made the contract for Wade's company, MZM, one of "his top priorities" in the defense appropriations bill, according to the prosecutors' pre-sentencing filing. After Congress approved the money, Wade told unnamed Defense Department officials they had to "work something up" that would provide a "real benefit to CIFA," according to the prosecutors' documents.

The resultant program saw more than $6 million spent for a mass data storage system supposedly for CIFA that, according to the prosecutorial document, included almost $5.4 million in profit for MZM and a subcontractor. "Adding insult to injury," the prosecutors wrote, "the final system sold to the government was never installed (as it was incompatible with CIFA's network system) and remains in storage in Arlington, Va."

In January 2004, Cunningham sought about $16.15 million to be added to the defense authorization bill for a CIFA "collaboration center." A month later, Cunningham wrote Burtt his thank you note about the center, adding: "I wish to endorse and support MZM, Inc.'s work." He concluded, "As the Collaboration Center is completed, I hope to help you inaugurate the center as I did at the inception of CIFA." Defense spokesman Hicks said he was unaware of a CIFA collaboration center.

MZM still gets cudos and cash after turning in shoddy work -- and for a "center" that appears to be non-existent? What an obvious scam. As Paul Kiel wrote:

CIFA has spent more than $1 billion since its inception, most of it on contracts. Prosecutors are looking into the agency's contracting, and the Defense Department is conducting its own internal review.

When are people going to recognise these schemes for what they are? From MZM to Katrina relief, the outlines are always the same: G.O.P.-friendly "businessmen" (who tend to be spookier than Caspar) get fat contracts related to homeland security. They often toss the actual work to low-ball subcontractors, who perform shoddily. The profits head into political war chests -- and into pockets.

Will the general public catch on? I doubt it. The bad guys need merely wave a flag, and the red staters will fall into such a deep trance that they will never comprehend that they are being robbed blind.