National Intelligence Folly: How a Tragic Unsolved Murder Led to Billions of Dollars of Program Fraud, Waste and Abuse Part 3

In part 2 I covered the power play attempted by Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) Donald Rumsfeld as he executed a black belt level or grandmaster’s political strategy to finesse, offset to a degree, and shape the ongoing debate in congress that would lead to the establishment of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI.)

I also touched upon the murder of Federal Security Guard Tina Ricca out in the seeming hinterlands of Fairfax County, in the middle of nowhere: we will return to that cataclysmic event shortly.

You may be hearing this story for the first time about the real motivation behind the establishment of the USDI. I didn’t further develop the above SECDEF action earlier out of brevity concerns (well, a certain infantry guy threatened to bayonet me over my continuous, non-relevant historical “side trips.”) But this “tidbit” meets-in my mind-the criteria I was somewhat warning or cautioning or pointing out in the seemingly weird and-yes, tortuous or ambiguous verbiage I offered up in Part 1 of this series early-on and is the raison d’etre behind my mind-numbing detail that may have seemed a bit out of place about the emergence of the USDI and the disastrous program meeting conducted by Dr. Stephen Cambone in Part 2.

For those of us inside the wire during this time, this move could not have been more transparent if Dr. Cambone started introducing himself as “Acting DNI.” Also dear reader, not to again take up the cause of self-horn tooting (but woot, woot,) but it is my belief based on the feedback I’ve gotten since I’ve told this story to many of my colleagues, peers and acquaintances over the years, that this may have bypassed a lot of people at the time-none of the insiders on the hill, certainly-but it still may be solely my “conspiracy theory” as to what took place during the timeframe discussed: I’ve actually stopped explaining it to people because it takes too long to set up, and it sounds like I’m name dropping when I relate it.

Now that’s not to say it’s actually my delusion or conspiracy theory: but more to advise that many find it hard to draw such an inference when they weren’t at these meetings. It wouldn’t surprise me if only 1 in the next 10K people or more-and I may have that misunderestimated by a factor of 10KX or so, will believe it due to the “inside baseball” nature of the fact patterns-the clearance requirements and the rarified air in those senior “kabuki chambers.”

All to say it won’t hurt my feelings if I get the “crazy cousin treatment” over some of this story. It also somewhat explains-again-in my mind, why congress was shocked: shocked I tell you, when the DNI/CMS planning team establishing the base mission, requirements, deconfliction of responsibility vis a vis the CIA and DNI, submitted the DNI manning document with a plan that called for some 1500 people, whereas the CMS had about 450: congress was thinking in the 750 to 1100 range or so.

So yes, it may be my theory, but I have the “detes!”

Rumsfeld has never really gotten the credit he deserved for this masterful gambit attempt to undermine the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-likely a strategy approved and then pursued behind the scenes by both Vice President Richard Cheney and Rumsfeld-while at the same time bolstering the influence of the Pentagon in the control and management of both national and tactical Intelligence Community (IC) affairs, which was really about budget/program funding: it is all about the dollars.

The distinction has always been somewhat murky between these two programs (budget) funding categories that today consist of the DNI National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Department of Defense (DoD) Military Intelligence Program (MIP,) and never so much as the present with the ODNI at 17 years and counting.

Largely gone are the “good ole days” before the ODNI, when any pocket change, cushion harvesting or found program money would do the “electric slide” from the CMS coiffeurs on one side of the CIA HQs building to the other side-same floor-to the CIA budget office for “winky, winky” program reprocessing.

That may not sound like much of a thing, but when you think about an agency getting-oh-say just 5 billion dollars a year, ~30% of which might be Operations & Maintenance (O&M) colored money, that’s a little over 100 million a month being expended and if we were off with the execution for a few months, or had to finesse the execution because of continuing resolutions where we had limited execution authority pending congressional action-where the payroll expenditures were happening, but maybe new hires were frozen or whatever, or we had greater personnel losses-again, whatever-it can amount to a good chunk of money accrued to the end of the year.

Being off by only 5% equates to a pretty good chunk of change (over 75 million.) When I was managing execution of a little more than that (well, a lot, maybe three times), I was thrilled if our budget execution team came in on all budget categories (e.g., O&M, R&D, and Reconstitution/Recap dollars, 1-, 2- and 3-year money) within 1-3% of our target budget caps a year (because schtuff happens.)

If I were in a position to be aware when we got close to the end of the year and unexpended program dollars from some of these big agencies were about to “splat” against the wall and expire-like Operations and Maintenance dollars (O&M-one year money,) and I was the agency congressional liaison-I would have the congressional budget representative from both houses (like current Principle Deputy Director of the DNI (PDDNI)) Dr. Stacey Dixon, at one time a former House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence budget staff member after she worked at the NRO-back before the NRO had any actual employees on the books and was manned by existing agencies like the NSA or CIA (winky, winky,) on speed dial to get help (cooperation/approval) finessing the recoloring of money to enable a worthy cause to be funded (that hopefully) I was savvy/strategic enough to have staged during the year in the event there was any “opportunity money” freed up.

We (insiders) gained significant insight into some of the changes that came to this murkiness with the DNI establishment, cleared up quite a bit when the congressionally approved, ObamaLinsky inspired “Sequestration scheme” played out from 2012-2015 or so, as he attempted to finesse the Iraq declaration equivalent of Kissinger’s infamous Paris Declaration about “peace at hand” and subsequent drawdown, with faux budget savings via “marginalia tricks” on the margins targeted against our supposed most valuable resource, “our people.”

I’ve covered it before in some detail and I don’t want to get sidetracked or bogged down from the main story (albeit, too late for that thought,) but DNI Clapper (the NIP Program Authority) and SECDEF Chuck Hagel (the MIP Program Authority) sought a reported three meetings-went to the mat over the issue-with the Office of Management and Budget to clarify who had what authority to “furlough” federal employees when Sequestration kicked in, a rat basswich, dirty rotten Pelosi congress and Obama scheme that resulted in some of our poor employees who happened to be legacy funded under the MIP or Pentagon payroll, to miss at least one pay day per pay period (two weeks) over the course of at least a quarter. DNI Clapper won a lot of respect back from me (didn’t change the overall scales, but….) over his insistence that no NIP funded employee would be furloughed: none!

Whereas SECDEF Hagel, some agency Directors and other leaders were “exposed and outed” as overpaid sycophants by furloughing our personnel. NRO Director (Dir) Betty Sapp-in the murky state of reporting betwixt and between the Pentagon and the DNI-and adroitly working the ambiguity when and as needed-had the most bagels of all of them when she basically said from the outset: no furloughs, we will take it out of program or contract dollars-we will not do that to our people.

Betty ran a tight shop at the NRO, was really a budget and not a space person, was the first NRO senior executive-when she ran the budget shop-to admit that the Future Imagery Architecture (debacle) was on the government-NRO-a disaster that they were responsible for the failures (and we are going to get to that discussion in the coming articles.)

She became the Dir NRO after retired USAF General and DIR NRO Bruce Carlson-a great leader who brought the NRO back from also ran-ship, resigned after he grew tired of being involved in a game of liars poker between the Principle Deputy Director of the DNI (PDDNI)-Stephanie O’Sullivan-and the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence (SSCI)-reportedly Maryland’s Senator Barbara Mikulski and California’s Senator Diane Feinstein-several years in a row-after he had received DNI assurances that they would not trim the NRO budget some ~$500 million to over a ~billion dollars (again) to fund projects that were not approved in the DNI NIP Program: and they lied to him while finessing congress against itself.

In case that needs a “spell out,” I’m belaboring this point because this is another exemplar of the “folly” or worst government practices and an absolute main road-not a detour-to fraud, waste and abuse. From a programmatics and best practices standpoint, a sin, a travesty and it should be a fireable offense, when government officials are talking out of both sides of their mouths like this, having their cake and eating it too.

The DNI had not approved these projects as programs-year after year-in the DNI NIP budget. There was no DNI approved acquisition program documentation on these projects: no Independent Cost Estimate, no Independent Life Cycle Cost Expenditures that typically run out through a program life, like ~20 years or so for a satellite development with multiple articles across multiple Five Year Defense Program (FYDP) cycles,) no Cost as an Independent Variable (CAIV) report on the veracity of the program documentation: only the equivalent project documentation which does not meet DNI acquisition documentation sufficiency requirements: nor-more importantly-those of congress.

These are not stupid people on any side of this issue and there was the perception (winky, winky) that somebody at the ODNI was selling woof cookies on the matter because it kept happening despite assurances from the DNI, but mainly the PDDNI, who wielded the ODNI Acquisition, Milestone Decision Authority (MDA), although the actual DNI Acquisition lead was Alden Munson and Deputy Mel Heritage. In the final analysis, the DNI went to the well once too many times over this issue and the IC lost one of the greatest leaders of the NRO ever, perhaps the best of the last 40 years, but definitely the best in the 21^st century.

Oh the bayonet is wagging at me-in order to close gracefully on this issue and present another insinuation that relates to my premise of IC folly or malfeasance, I almost suffered a rupture at some later point in this story after Betty Sapp reportedly announced at an NRO staff meeting that she had “gotten assurances from the PDDNI that there would be no budget cuts in FY 2013 to support any projects:” there was actually the smattering of applause in the staff meeting, particularly from the AS&T staff.

Lo and behold, it wasn’t a month later when the congressional liaison reported-with the staff officer’s version of the “glum, don’t hurt me, face”-which I always jokingly called the “lost my dog, face” (which was never funny, but hey-Army,) that they had received a call from the DNI that congress was looking at close to a billion dollar (with a B) budget adjustment to the NRO bottom-line in order to fund some “congressional high priority interest items” that had not made the DNI program submission.

I honestly almost lost it, “like c’mon man!” I wish I had a nail in my pocket, because there was no doubt that Betty could have chewed it: but she was a total pro-and asked who the POC was (and I felt sorry for that person, who one would hope had the asbestos underwear on, cause Betty could give a great chew and a lot of heat when she was riled.)

To close on Sequestration, we raised money in our agency to help make up for this injustice to our people. But how would you like to be the definition of taking it for the team-living in one of the highest cost living areas in the country, Washington DC metropolitan area, for our government-with a cost of living allowance that has topped 35-40K a year routinely, and because of shenanigans-congressional malfeasance-or a scheming president’s reindeer games-give up 10% of your pay (1 full day out of every 10) for three months-having done nothing wrong-the definition of a drive-by victim..

There were some provisions talked about that would prevent somebody from going on leave for one day or using sick leave-because neither of those would technically represent a “savings,” but it is hard to imagine the government doing a crappier thing to our workers that we “cherish so highly.” Unless it was making the yearly COLA supplement decisionable, as if it was part of the bonus or performance deliberations: there was that, also….

We left off in part 2 with the murder of Tina Ricca, recently re-opened as a Fairfax County police cold case of the last six decades, from the piece: Nov. 6, 1993 27-year-old Tina Frances Ricca was a security guard. She was found shot to death in a temporary office trailer located in the 14600 block of Lee Road in Chantilly.

Because she was a Federal Security Guard, part of the government civilian service, her murder was reported through the local Fairfax County system. Shortly thereafter the United States House of Representative’s committee on Health and Labor (today’s name) took up routine business and discovered that a federal government worker had been killed at a construction site out in the relative “hinter lands” of Fairfax County, Va. The problem being that no one on the committee knew anything about a federal government facility located at or near the area. Since it was a construction site, questions ensued and the responsible committees compared information and discovered that nobody responsible for budget, military major or minor construction, safety, etc., knew anything about any federal efforts ongoing in the reported area. How and why was this reported as a federal government worker fatality by Fairfax County?

End of Part 3

Maxdribbler77@gmail.com

 

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