SpyTalk

It snuck up on cat's feet -- a modest press release here, a short news announcement there.

But overnight, it seems, DC Capital Partners has become an intelligence and security powerhouse.

The firm, with offices downtown and in Alexandria, Va., was founded in 1988 by venture capitalist Thomas J. Campbell as a private equity investment company. Since then it has expanded from capitalizing middle market firms with military contracts into acquiring major players in U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism consulting.

Its board includes heavy hitters like Richard Armitage, the former deputy Secretary of State, Eric Shinseki,  the Army chief of staff who clashed with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over troop needs for an invasion of Iraq, Jeffrey Smith, former general counsel of the CIA, and Henry Crumpton, the State Department's former counterterrorism coordinator.

But its recent hiring of Jose Rodriguez, the controversial former head of the CIA's National Clandestine Service, signaled that DCCP had gone big-time into the spook world, with its tentacles deeply wound up in the work of U.S. intelligence agencies and the departments of defense, energy and homeland security. 

The new issue of Intelligence Online, the Paris-based newsletter, has a chart showing the hydra-headed conglomerate.