Another company, the Science Applications International Corporation of San Diego, is one of the top five C.I.A. contractors and a particularly favored vendor of the National Security Agency, the book says. Mr. Shorrock says that “so many N.S.A. officials have gone to work for S.A.I.C. that intelligence insiders call it ‘N.S.A. West.’ ”

Mr. Shorrock has a major concern with the sheer extent of intelligence outsourcing and whether it increases the potential for sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands. Even the task of administering the government’s database for tracking outside contracts, he says, has been outsourced to a private-sector contractor. But the government has yet to identify which intelligence functions are safe to outsource and which aren’t, he says. “As a result,” he writes, “ decisions about contracting are still being made on the fly with little regard to their short- and long-term consequences.”

MUCH of Mr. Shorrock’s terminology may seem to have a left-wing taste to it, but plenty of it comes directly from conservatives. In fact, he says the term “intelligence-industrial Complex” was coined (with a nod to Dwight D. Eisenhower’s 1961 reference to the nation’s “military-industrial complex”) by Herbert A. Browne. Mr. Browne is a retired vice admiral turned AT&T executive and a former executive director of the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, an industry trade group.

“The fact that we can have a professional intelligence organization outside of the government to support the government is no more offensive to me than the fact that we have 80 percent of our military communications traveling on commercial satellites or commercial fiber optics,” Mr. Browne tells the author. “In fact, I find it very healthy for the nation.”

Mr. Shorrock unequivocally believes otherwise. “In the end, if America is to reform its intelligence apparatus, decisions about resources and structure must be made by its citizens through the government they elected  not by outside contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton and S.A.I.C.,” he writes. “The spies for hire may not like the idea of subjecting the intelligence process to more oversight, but they’re not the ones paying the bill. It’s high time that we returned intelligence to its rightful owners, the American public and its representatives in Congress.”

Meanwhile, it appears that there’s no business like the spy business, and the spy business is nobody’s business but its own.