According to a revealing report in Vanity Fair magazine (March, 2007), the biggest and most influential company no one has ever heard of has 44,000 employees working on over 9,000 active contacts with the federal government—that is more contracts than any other company in America. The company’s past and present board members are a who’s who of vested military brass, high-level intelligence operatives and politicians.

Science Applications International Corporation (S-A-I-C) Chairman J. Robert Beyster started the company in 1969. Headquartered in San Diego, it’s main office (pictured) is in northern Virginia—not too far from CIA headquarters. The relationship between the two is rather close; over half of SAIC employees have security clearances.

Nearly all of SAIC’s revenues come from government contracts. Last year the company brought in $8 billion for playing its role in erecting the national security state in America. SAIC has a guaranteed future with $13.5 billion in pending contracts.

While Bechtel, Halliburton and now Blackwater get the headlines, usually bad ones, SAIC is back in the shadows. Instead of building and soldiering on the frontlines, providing information dominance and waging information warfare secretly behind the scenes are its particular areas of expertise.

SAIC negotiated a $280 million/26-month contract with the National Security Agency to develop a system called "Trailblazer" to store, sort and translate the immense volumes of data the agency intercepts from everywhere everyday. "Four years and a billion dollars later, the effort has been abandoned," Vanity Fair reported.

SAIC also failed to deliver on a $124 million contract to upgrade the FBI’s antiquated computer system with "EcecuteLocus." Regardless of its failures, SAIC influence just keeps growing.

"SAIC...is the invisible hand behind a huge portion of the national security state—the one sector of the government whose funds are limitless and whose continued growth is assured every time a politician utters the word ‘terrorism,’" Vanity Fair observed.