From: baldwin@csservera.usna.navy.mil (J.D. Baldwin)
Subject: National Reconnaissance Office Redux
Organization: NCR Corporation - Law Department
Date: Wed, 30 Sep 1992 12:33:57 GMT


From baldwin@csservera.usna.navy.mil (J.D. Baldwin)

I have gotten a bit of response to my recent article on the National
Reconnaissance Office (including one-liners like, "Are you kidding?" and
"That isn't funny, this is the national security you're playing around
with here.").

So, here I offer the relevant article from the Saturday, September 19th,
1992 edition of the Washington Post, page A4:

"REMEMBER, YOU DIDN'T READ IT HERE"

Pentagon Officially Lifts Secrecy Veil on Spy Satellite Office

By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer

Psssst.

You didn't hear it here, but the U.S. government operates satellites--
spy satellites--pointed at other countries.

Decades after that became common knowledge, the Defense Department
'fessed up yesterday in a news release, another marker of the Cold
War's segue to a new world order.

Sort of.

Actually, all the Pentagon did was acknowledge existence of the
National Reconnaissance Office, which its statement defined as "the
single, national program to meet U.S. government intelligence needs
through spaceborne and assigned airborne reconnaissance."

Even the name--National Reconnaissance Office--was sensitive,
compartmented information before that, classified "Top Secret TK."
TK, for Talent Keyhole, is the basic level of classification for
satellite data.

Someone managed to draft yesterday's seven-paragraph news release
without once using the word "satellite."

Nor did the release mention the estimated $5 billion to $6 billion
spent every year in designing, building, launching and operating all
that hardware, by far the largest budget among all U.S. intelligence
agencies.

"We're not going to talk about the budget," said Air Force Capt. Renee
Strickland, reached at the NRO's hastily established "office of
external relations."

There was a time, briefly, when the 32-year-old NRO was a genuine
secret.  In the early 1960s, when the Soviet Union considered overhead
espionage an act of aggression, the United States tried to hide the
extent of its program.

The superpowers eventually came to see advantages in their mutual
surveillance, although the subject remains diplomatically sensitive
with other nations.

In 1987, Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Calif.) was forced to resign from
the House intelligence committee after referring to the NRO by name in
a floor speech.  Brown noted that its existence was "officially
classified, although anyone can read about [it] in various
unclassified articles, reports and books."

Watchdog groups and outside analysts have long since learned many
details, down to the NRO's Pentagon room number--4C958.  Cognoscenti
tracked the NRO's funding by watching the Air Force budgets for
procurement "Special Programs" and research and development "Special
Activities," and they knew who ran the NRO by checking the Pentagon
phone book for "who Jimmie Hill was working for," as John Pike of the
Federation of American Scientists said.

Hill was acknowledged yesterday to be the long-time deputy director of
the NRO.

Pike and colleague Stephen Aftergood said bureaucratic politics appear
to have driven the NRO out of the closet.

House and Senate intelligence reorganization plans have called for
abolishing the office or incorporating it in another agency, and this
year for the first time its budget was cut.

"When a secret program gets in trouble, you've got to bring it out in
the open to try to defend it," Pike said.

			30

[All typos are mine, not the Post's. --JD]
--
 From the catapult of:              |+| "If anyone disagrees with anything I
   _,_  J. D. Baldwin, Comp Sci Dept|+| say, I am quite prepared not only to
 _|70|___:::)=}-  U.S. Naval Academy|+| retract it, but also to deny under
 \      /   baldwin@usna.navy.mil   |+| oath that I ever said it." --T. Lehrer
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