Washington Post
August 9, 1999
Pg. 13

By Walter Pincus and Vernon Loeb, Washington Post Staff Writers

Ever since last summer's cruise missile strikes against targets associated with terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, Clinton administration policymakers have shown a fondness for releasing imagery from classified spy satellites to depict the success of U.S. military operations.

The practice reached a crescendo during NATO's bombardment of Yugoslavia, when NATO, Pentagon and State Department officials relied on spy photos to depict burning villages and mass graves with devastating effect, leaving little doubt about the value of the billion-dollar birds.

"If you're going to spend $6 billion a year on the National Reconnaissance Office, you'd be stupid not to do this, given . . . how effective this imagery is," John Pike, an intelligence expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said in an interview. "The public's understanding of the Kosovo air war would have been vastly diminished without the release of this imagery."

Imagery that once was highly classified has been downgraded to "secret" since it's now commonly used in bomb targeting. It's no longer much of a stretch to declassify the photos outright, Pike said.

NRO Director Keith Hall recently noted with some concern that so much public use of imagery has the effect of educating "the rest of the world . . . about your capabilities."

"We already see some evidence of people deriving lessons from the gulf war and applying it to make our job tougher," Hall said.

There are limits, of course, to the new openness: All of the images released have been degraded to a resolution of about one meter, meaning objects at least one meter in size can be distinguished. The full capability of the NRO's most advanced KH-11 satellites is still being kept from public view.