Abraxas Corporation
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Abraxas Corporation is a private intelligence company founded in the 1990s by a group of retired senior CIA officers, men John Kiriakou says he used to work for, and set up, legitimately, as a limited-liability tax pass-through.

What it was for

Kiriakou is unsentimental about the original purpose: these vehicles existed so that retired officers "could go smoke cigars and drink coffee and tell stories with their friends and hang out all day." Abraxas was where the retired operations people went; its counterpart, The Analysis Corporation of Arlington, Virginia, was where the Senior Intelligence Service analysts went.

What 9/11 made of it

Then, in his phrase, "lo and behold, they started making money after 9/11." Abraxas was bought, Kiriakou believes by IBM, for well over a billion dollars, and its founders became not merely rich but "Mega Millions Lotto kind of rich." He contrasts that outcome with the fate of private analysis, which he says never succeeds, because anyone expert enough in a subject can do analysis and a professor will do it for five thousand dollars.

Where it sits in the argument

Abraxas recurs in Kiriakou's account of the revolving door as one name in a short list. It appears alongside Palantir, the company In-Q-Tel seeded with its first investment, when he asks where American intelligence is not present in technology and government, a question he says genuinely worries him. It is among the contractors whose complicated agreements the CIA's Office of General Counsel negotiates, alongside Palantir, Musk's organisations and Amazon's cloud services. And it marks the lower rung of the post-agency career ladder: the senior people go on to something bigger and more lucrative, Kiriakou says, and let the lower-level officers end up at Booz Allen or Abraxas, though he adds that the word former in front of their titles means little, since they retain as much access to people as they ever had.

See also

- The Analysis Corporation
- In-Q-Tel
- Palantir Technologies
- Private Intelligence
