Spider and the Flies

An Army general switches hats and helps one company chase big intelligence business.

When men like Spider Marks leave notable military careers and land in the job market, an E.F. Hutton-like cachet attends their résumés. When Marks talks, people listen. That's why, if you run a company in need of a former Army general with some key contacts in military intelligence-someone like Marks-you snatch him up before the competition cashes in on his expertise and his Rolodex, which acts like a trail of bread crumbs through the procurement channels leading to big-dollar contracts.

In December 2004, McNeil Technologies Inc., a fast-growing military intelligence contractor located in Springfield, Va., just outside Washington, hired Spider Marks (whose rarely used first name is James) to hunt some very juicy flies, primarily in the burgeoning language services market. The military's demand for skilled translators is peaking, and McNeil, which promises "translation, interpretation and intelligence analysis" in 95 percent of the world's spoken tongues, is riding the wave. A link on the company's home page proclaims, "Arabic linguists urgently needed!"

The top target on McNeil's list now is the Army's worldwide contract for linguistic support, worth nearly $700 million. It's currently held by The Titan Corp., which came under scrutiny after revelations that civilians working for the company were involved in prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Marks has valuable insight into how the Army would probably prefer its linguists operate in wartime. On Sept. 11, 2001, he became commanding general of the Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., the service's training school. And before retiring, Marks was the senior intelligence officer for all U.S. land forces during combat operations in Iraq.

Marks, a 1975 West Point graduate and honor graduate of the Army Ranger School, now takes the title of senior vice president of intelligence and security at McNeil, where, according to a company statement announcing his hire, he will "assist in the transformation and restructuring of intelligence in support of national security objectives, including a growing demand for homeland security." In other words, as the war on terror expands, and with it government spending, Marks is expected to make rain.

His ideas on where military intelligence should go will doubtless guide McNeil. The former general is an amalgam of warrior, analyst and military scholar. He speaks with professorial conviction about how the military must evolve beyond its capacity to fight large-scale, armored wars on the battlefields of Eastern Europe to more intimate, asymmetric conflicts like the street fights of Somalia, and now Iraq, where Marks believes a lack of understanding about how to navigate Arabic and Muslim culture translates to a tactical deficiency.

After his Iraq tour, Marks returned to Fort Huachuca and established a program of "cultural and sensitivity training," as he calls it, for intelligence personnel. That may sound flowery for spies and interrogators, but he adheres to a Dale Carnegie-esque idea about how to win friends and influence people: Just as important as knowing your enemy is knowing the mind-set of the civilians whose front doors you might be knocking down in house-to-house battles like those in Fallujah or Najaf.

Marks wants every person in the military chain-from intelligence to military police and the infantry-to be injected with his brand of training. Maybe he can't influence that doctrine so directly anymore, but he figures companies like McNeil can help the Army more than it can help itself right now.

"I wish I knew that a McNeil existed about 18 months ago," Marks says, alluding to his days fighting in Iraq, when he was desperate for Arab-sensitive personnel. "I would have asked my bosses for a half-a-million dollars to get a sole source [contract] from these guys."

Today, McNeil has what it needs most to start hunting big linguistics business: financial backing. In June 2004, the company was purchased by Veritas Capital, a privately held New York investment firm. Veritas has sunk money almost exclusively into niche military contractors. To name a few, there's the Wornick Co., which manufactures MREs (meals ready-to-eat) for U.S. forces; Vertex Aerospace (formerly Raytheon Aerospace), which provides technical services to the Air Force and Navy, as well as components of the Homeland Security Department; and Integrated Defense Technologies, whose plethora of subsidiaries make, among other things, electronic warfare and signals intelligence systems.

That impressive array of outfits is matched by the roster of retired military officers on Veritas' Defense and Aerospace Advisory Council, a seven-member panel that gives the company "high-level insight into the direction the armed forces are moving." The pantheon includes retired Gen. Richard E. Hawley, the former commander of Allied Air Forces in Central Europe; retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, former commander in chief of U.S. Southern Command and ex-drug czar; retired Adm. Joseph W. Prueher, who was commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Command and the American ambassador to China; and retired Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the Marine who led U.S. Central Command. The council includes one private sector member from Korn/Ferry International, the well-known executive recruitment firm. The presence of so many former government luminaries invites comparisons to another well-stocked investment house that plays heavy in the government market-The Carlyle Group, whose former advisers and members have included ex-Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci, former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and President George H.W. Bush.

Veritas is now on the move like never before. In December, it announced it would purchase legendary megacontractor DynCorp International from its parent, Computer Sciences Corp. DynCorp, with more than $2 billion in government contracts, is one of the top paramilitary body shops, supplying private security forces for operations in Afghanistan, Iraq and along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Doubtless the capabilities of McNeil and DynCorp will make an advantageous pairing. "We are working with DynCorp on several business opportunities," says Gerry Decker, McNeil's chief operations officer. "I was a long-term DynCorp employee [he spent 14 years there chasing large contracts] and know many of their current senior management, which makes working together easier for a variety of reasons."

For Marks' part, all those years in the intelligence business gave him a keen appreciation for what McNeil's competitors are capable of-and the aspects of their performance with which the military might be less than pleased. He knows the demand for trained linguists-regardless of their capacity for cultural sensitivity-will only increase. While only months ago he saw that need as a soldier, now he has switched hats, and with that comes a whole new jargon: "It's nothing but a growth industry."