The CIA? The NSA you say? Maybe the FBI? Nope!

The real spook of spooks is Science Applications International Corporation and few have even heard of them but they're eating your taxes for breakfast, for lunch and for dinner. They are very, very secretive. Ask ten people on the street who are the largest government contractors and you'll hear names like Bechtel, KBR, Grumman, General Electric and Northrop but few will mention S.A.I.C.

SAIC has been awarded more government contracts then any other private company in American history. Not dozens, not scores or hundreds but THOUSANDS, currently holding some 9,000 active government contracts in all. More then 100 of them are worth over 10 million dollars apiece and 2 of them are worth more then a BILLION dollars each. If "contract backlog" is any measure of success, that is contracts negotiated and pending, the future seems assured. The backlog stands at 13.6 billion dollars.

The mega-contractors Haliburton, KBR, Bechtel, Grumman and Northrop are the suppliers of brawn. They pour concrete, roll out concertina wire, build infrastructure and electrocute soldiers in poorly wired shower stalls. They provide beefy thick-necked brutes with drug and drinking problems for security purposes who then go on rampages shooting innocent civilians, but not SAIC. Science Applications International Corporation is in the brain business and they sell knowledge. Let's look at how that works, or doesn't.

SAIC's biggest projects have turned out to be colossal failures and they've failed in public but you wouldn't know it and the enormous profit wasn't sacrificed. One such failure involves The National Security Agency, America's electronic ear and for many years SAICs biggest customer. Telephone, email and electronic intercepts worldwide by the NSA are so massive that they urgently need a new computer system to store, sort, file and make sense of it all and SAIC won the $280 million 26 month contract. Four years and more then a billion dollars later the project has been abandoned. We paid for that, you and me.

The FBI entered into a similar agreement which paid SAIC 124 million dollars to update their computer system, one of the most primitive in American law enforcement. Three years and a million lines of garbled computer code later the system has been written off as the greatest software failure in history. We, you and me, paid for this too.

If it turns out that a contract can't be delivered new contracts are drawn up. That's how they do.

And if you think these guys are going to face government scrutiny, think again. Everyone in out government is connected to them in one way or another.

Worse, and much to the embarrassment of a company entrusted with the nations most precious secrets, like Osama's home address and phone number or the 9/11 perpetrators cell phone numbers, SAIC was burgled in 2005 and it remains unsolved, another secret unrevealed. Yup, guarded by Department of Defense certified security and motion sensing interior lights in their offices burglars managed to break in, pry open 13 private offices and walk out with a desktop computer hard drive and four laptops.

The entire story is terribly intriguing, from SAIC maintaining their own stock to the brown paper envelopes that stock is delivered in to their employees most of whom are retired government workers, generals and influential members of the national security apparatus. To read the entire story click the link below. It's worth reading about SAIC just to know where your tax money goes since they absorb about 90% of all taxes collected from people earning under 100,000 dollars yearly, along with the rest of the private security contractors. The story could have been scripted by Hollywood but sadly it's real life in the United States of corruption, kickbacks and graft.

This is the new face of American spies. Nondescript unknown corporations without faces and without oversight that answer to stockholders who are the very employees themselves. That's another piece of the story I didn't write about here. The stockholders. Read the full story.

The story appears here, in a 2007 issue of Vanity Fair:

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2007/03/spyagency200703...

By the way, and in case you don't click the link, one of the biggest contracts ever for SAIC is in the works as of this writing which was a few years ago (2007) so perhaps it's now a done deal. The contract runs into the billions of dollars. The man who helped craft this meaty contract at the Pentagon is General Daniel R. Zanini. He recently retired from the US Army and his cushy Pentagon job. Any guesses where he works now?