Mr. McConnell himself has been among the most vocal in warning about the risks to contractors. “The defense industrial base needs to address security,” he said in an interview with The New York Times last year, months before Booz Allen hired Edward J. Snowden, its young systems administrator who has admitted to leaking documents describing secret N.S.A. programs. “It should be a condition for contracts. You cannot be competitive in the cyber era if you don’t have a higher level of security.”

Booz Allen is saying little about Mr. Snowden’s actions or the questions they have raised about its practices. Mr. McConnell, once among the most accessible intelligence officials in Washington, declined to be interviewed for this article.

“This has to hurt Mike’s relationship with the N.S.A.,” said a business associate of Mr. McConnell’s who requested anonymity. “He helped set up those contracts and is heavily engaged there.”

Indeed, few top officials in the intelligence world have become greater authorities on cyberconflict than the 69-year-old Mr. McConnell, who walks with a stoop from a bad back and speaks with the soft accent of his upbringing in Greenville, S.C. He began his career as a Navy intelligence officer on a small boat in the backwaters of the Mekong Delta during the Vietnam War. Years later he helped the American intelligence apparatus make the leap from an analog world of electronic eavesdropping to the new age of cyberweaponry.

President Bill Clinton relied on Mr. McConnell as director of the N.S.A., a post he held from 1992 to 1996. He then moved to Booz Allen as a senior vice president, building its first cyberunits. But with the intelligence community in disarray after its failure to prevent the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the fiasco of nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the toll of constant reorganization, President George W. Bush asked him to be the second director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009.

That was when he made his biggest mark, forcing a reluctant bureaucracy to invest heavily in cybercapability and overseeing “Olympic Games,” the development of America’s first truly sophisticated cyberweapon, which was used against Iran’s nuclear enrichment program. When Mr. Bush needed someone to bring President-elect Barack Obama up to speed on every major intelligence program he was about to inherit, including drones and defenses against electronic intrusions from China, he handed the task to Mr. McConnell.