By Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(11/27/00, 5:35 p.m. EST)
The National Commission for the Review of the NRO recommended that an Office of Space Reconnaissance be established that would be granted top-secret procurement status, with oversight by only the highest levels of government.
The plan is drawing criticism from some groups, who warn that increasing the secretive nature, scope and budget of the NRO without instituting new accountability measures is risky.
Created in 1960 to manage space-based reconnaissance programs, the NRO today commands a classified annual budget believed to exceed $6 billion, placing it ahead of the CIA and the National Security Agency in fiscal size, although not in head count. The NRO review commission, co-chaired by Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) and Rep. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), was created in response to a budget scandal in 1995-96 that prompted the resignation of the NRO's director and deputy director after the organization was unable to account for more than half its annual budget. The secrecy regarding the budget at the time was deemed excessive.
In its executive summary, the commission report suggests that the NRO faces unprecedented threats to its mission from the global pace of technological advancement and the agency's increasing exposure to public scrutiny. The government did not publicly acknowledge the agency's existence until 1992, although published reports on the NRO and its structure have surfaced periodically for more than 20 years.
"Widespread knowledge of the NRO's existence and public speculation on how NRO satellites are used [have] aided terrorists and other potential adversaries in developing techniques of denial and deception to thwart U.S. intelligence efforts," the report states. "Similarly, other technologies, such as fiber-optic communications, render certain NRO capabilities obsolete."
The only way to maintain a lead in space technology, the commission concluded, is to get key White House officials directly involved in the creation of an Office of Space Reconnaissance, which would operate in separate, secure facilities away from the NRO's Chantilly, Va., headquarters. In short, the commission said the NRO must have the consistent attention of the U.S. president, the secretary of defense and the director of central intelligence if it is to succeed.
Early spy-satellite missions were successful precisely because the president and the CIA director played a direct role in shepherding them through the budget process, the report states. "This would require that the secretary of defense grant this [new space reconnaissance] office special exemptions from standard DOD acquisition regulations," the report concludes. "It would rely heavily upon the DCI's [director of central intelligence] special statutory authorities for procurement.
"It would be under the direction of the NRO director but would operate in secure facilities separate from NRO activities. It would create and defend a separate budget element within the National Foreign Intelligence Program and have its own security compartment."
One option the commission rejected was the development of an "NRO statute" in Congress that would give the agency special authority in Washington. Getting Congress involved in defining such a statute might make matters worse, the commission concluded.
The Federation of American Scientists was quick to react to the report. Steve Aftergood, director of FAS' Secrecy Project, warned that a call for expanding the agency's size, without explicitly spelling out how accountability will be improved, lays the groundwork for future abuses of the classification process.
"There is a good rule of thumb that if you are going to increase the power and authority of a government organization, then you also need to increase its accountability accordingly," he said. "The commission proposes to increase the NRO's budget and procurement authorities but fails to provide any corresponding increase in accountability."
The commission cited recent terrorist acts, such as the Nairobi embassy bombing and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, as evidence that intelligence needs have expanded significantly in scope and complexity since the end of the Cold War. But the absence of a unified adversary like the Soviet Union has made it difficult for the agency to get the budget it needs, the commission concluded.
"The disappearance of a single large threat has provided a false sense of security, diverting our attention from national security issues and, for the NRO, resulting in underinvestment," the report states. "Unfortunately, this false sense of security has been accompanied by a particularly ill-timed lack of policy direction to the NRO from senior officials."
At the same time, the report goes on, various military and nonmilitary customers of NRO intelligence have been demanding levels of information from the agency that far exceed Cold War requirements.
While independent analysts said they were pleased to see the issues discussed by the commission, many expressed concern that creation of another NRO level might yield an "untouchable" segment of the intelligence community.
Aftergood of FAS said the commission had responded to the real problem of too many low-level government officials demanding intelligence information from an agency stretched to the limit. But "there is something a little naive in the assumption that by replicating the secrecy and the independence of the NRO's early days one can also replicate its early successes," he said.
Tech plans
Under the plan, the NRO would likely expand its work in technology such as extremely advanced electro-optical imaging, including semiconductor sensors and charge-coupled device arrays, holographic imaging techniques and multispectral fusion (the process of creating images that fuse several imaging frequency bands at once).
In signal intelligence, the NRO's expanded efforts could embrace work on smart antenna arrays, extremely sensitive wideband antennas, very low-power antennas and parallel processing for intelligence collection and distribution. In all cases, the commission said, the work should place the NRO at least two technological generations ahead of other nations' intelligence agencies.
NRO director Keith Hall has sought to balance the need for secrecy in advanced programs, particularly in space-based signals intelligence, with the need to provide more open contacts to commercial industry. For example, some in the intelligence community have argued for years that the government should practice "shutter control" to ban commercial companies from developing imaging satellites with resolution below 1 meter. But Hall has succeeded in encouraging the NRO to purchase such imaging products from private companies, in essence outsourcing part of the nation's intelligence arsenal.
The review commission encouraged the NRO's partnerships with private industry, recommending the continued purchase of 1- and 0.5-meter images from commercial companies. It even called for greater efforts to open up reconnaissance programs — particularly mature programs supporting tactical missions of the U.S. military — to improve the transparency and overall accountability of the NRO. And it suggested that Presidential Directive-23, which limits the exports of intelligence information, be reassessed to take into account the global availability of imaging data.
At the same time, the commission warned that too many government customers of the NRO consider its intelligence images to be "freebies." Intelligence customers must be re-educated to understand that all images, whether generated from government satellites or outsourced from commercial satellites, carry with them an associated cost.
Creation of a space reconnaissance office within the NRO could prove to be a vehicle for increasing the competition among corporate contractors for NRO business, said John Pike, a former FAS space analyst who has formed a space analysis company, Pike Consultants Inc.
The leading corporate players in the satellite intelligence business are Boeing Corp., Harris Corp., Lockheed-Martin Corp., Raytheon Corp. and TRW Corp. In recent years, however, Lockheed-Martin has fallen out of favor, particularly on the imaging side, as a string of problems have beset its satellites and launch platforms.
In September 1999, a team comprising Boeing, Hughes, Raytheon, Harris and Kodak won a contract for the NRO's Future Imagery Architecture, the design for a next-generation imaging satellite. Lockheed-Martin protested the award to the General Accounting Office and warned that layoffs could result at its Waterton Canyon facility, near Denver.
Pike said that the commission report contained some none-too-subtle criticisms of the Future Imagery Architecture program, which he believes could include three electro-optical imaging satellites and up to 24 associated radar satellites. If the space reconnaissance office is created, he said, Lockheed-Martin and TRW might be able to leverage the controversy to bring their sidelined Discoverer II satellite program back into play.
Discoverer II was a space-based radar network platform that the NRO was to have developed with help from NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.