THE NRO: INSIDE OUR MOST SECRET SPY AGENCY

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260034-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 21, 2011
• Sequence Number: 34
• Publication Date: April 5, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

SST Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260034-9
WASHINGTON POST
5 April 1987
The NRO: Inside Our
Most Secret Spy Agency.
' - By William & Burrows
THE NATIONAL Reconnaissance Of-
fice, which offically does not exist, is
headquartered in a guarded sanc-
tum--4C-956-inside the Pentagon. The
NRO's cover, according to a small sign on
the outermost of its several doors, is that of
the Office of Space Systems, which, in turn,
reports to the undersecretary of the Air
Force for space systems.
The NRO's cover may be suitably ambig-
uous, but its mandate is explicit. It is re-
sponsible for the design, development and
procurement of all U.S. reconnaissance sat-
ellites and for their management once in or-
bit. It does this with the largest budget of
any intelligence organization-close to $5
billion in 1985-and from under a cloak of
secrecy so pervasively tight that it is the
"blackest" of all of the nation's covert intel-
ligence-related ooeratinna
Besides its headquarters in the Pentagon,
the NRO maintains small offices elsewhere
in the country from which its employes,
mainly engineers trained in the astronau-
tical sciences who also possess security
clearances that are among the most strin-
gent obtainable, work with reconnaissance
systems' manufacturers, the National Se-
curity Agency, the Navy and the Air Force
to develop new spy satellites, modify exist-
ing ones and make certain that those al-
ready in orbit are doing what they are sup-
posed to do.
One NRO site is the Air Force's Satellite
Control Facility at Sunnyvale, Calif., about
an hour's drive south from San Francisco.
The "Big Blue Cube," as it is sometimes
called, is the place from which all U.S. mil-
itary satellites are controlled. Another is
the Air Force's Special Projects Office at El
Segundo, Calif., which is technically subsid-
iary to that service's Space Division, also
located at El Segundo. In fact, Special Pro-
jects is an NRO field office whose engineers
work closely with the satellites' contractors
and subcontractors on the design level, as
well as with the Aerospace Corp., which is
located nearby and serves as a think tank
William & Burrows is a journalism
professor at New York University, a veteran
aerospace journalist and author of "Deep
Black; Space Espionage and National
Security,' from whisk this is adapted.
for military space projects, inc gLt
nai nce and surveillance.
Vhen the Air Force's Consolidated Space
Operations Center near Colorado Springs
becomes fully operational around 1992, the
NRO will be there, if only as an occasional
visitor. Since Sunnyvale's Big Blue Cube
not only stands above a fault that is consid-
ered ripe for a major earthquake but is also
within bazooka range of a busy thorough-
fare, CSOC has been designed as a second
satellite-control facility.
Finally, the NRO has direct ties to the
CIA's Directorate of Science a
ogy, its ice of [ IN Signals Intelli-
gence] Operations, the Navy Space Project
office and the NSA, all of which either send
it reconnaissance satellite technical require-
ments or contribute ideas for improving
technical collection systems.
he NRO's budget, which is for the
T most part buried in Air Force ex-
penditures and to a lesser extent in
Nary and CIA programs, is immense even
by'Pentagon standards. Of a total national
intelligence budget estimated to be about
$200 billion for the decade of the 1980s,
upward of 15 percent, or $30.8 billion, has
been spent or is earmarked for the NRO/Air
Force alone. And that does not include an-
other $2.9 billion spent exclusively by the
CIA for research, development, testing and
evaluation of new reconnaissance systems
as part of its contribution to the NRO, and
another $1.8 billion that will have been
spent by the Navy Space Project on its
Waite Cloud ocean reconnaissance satellite
systems, another NRO enterprise.
A close reading of federal government
budgetary items bearing the program ele-
ment number 34111 shows that between
1980 and 1989 the NRO/Air Force alone
will have spent about $14.8 billion on pro-
curement (mostly on satellites and the
boosters on which they ride to orbit), and
close to $11 billion more on research and
development.
The NRO was created on Aug. 25, 1960
in an effort to focus what until then was a
technologically fragmented and administra-
tively muddled collection system that was
evolving erratically and against a back-
ground of internecine warfare-not only
inside the Air Force over appropriations but
also, far more important, between the Air
Force and the CIA. The contest was over
"turf'-that part-physical, part-psycholog-
ical wellspring of power. The players in that
game-and to a significant extent that is
exactly what it was-competed for control
of the nation's sensory system because that
was where the power lay.
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Throughout 1959 and well into 1960, the
Discoverer satellite program (code named
Corona) and the Satellite and Missile Ob-
servation System (SAMOS), championed by
the CIA and Air Force respectively, had
competed not only for funding but for the
honor of becoming America's preeminent
reconnaissance system in the new, wide-
open realm of space. Having been forced to
share space with NASA when the pur-
portedly civilian space agency was formed
in 1958, the Air Force then faced the spec-
ter of yet another civilian agency trying to
muscle into what it took to be its just do-
main. The airmen, who had been bruised by
the CIA in the acquisition of the first U2s,
remained "contemptuous" of the agency and
prepared during the spring of 1960 to pro-
tect SAMOS, whatever its faults, from the
CIA at all costs. The pathetically bungled
response to the downing of Francis Gary
Powers's U2 on May 1, 1060, further dra-
matized the need for a tightly coordinated
strategic reconnaissance program.
President Eisenhower had been mindful
of this. And he also recalled quite clearly
that it was the Air Force that had invented
the bomber gap and, following that, a mis-
sile gap that he was convinced did not exist
but which at the moment was causing him
serious political problems. The missile gap
was another problem, he doubtless re-
flected ruefully, that would not have hap-
pened were it not for the exuberant imag-
ination of senior officers in Air Force intel-
ligence and a seemingly insatiable craving
for funding and power by their superiors in
the Strategic Air Command and on the Air
Staff.
Exasperated, Eisenhower had ordered
Thomas S. Gates Jr., his secretary of de-
tense, to have the SAMOS program eval-
uated and to report the results to the Na-
tional Security Council. Gates in turn had
appointed a panel consisting of Dr. Joseph
Charyk, the undersecretary of the Air
Force; John H. Rubel, the deputy director of
the Defense Department's Directorate of
Research and Engineering; and Dr. George
B. Kistiakowsky, the Harvard chemist and
Los Alamos veteran who had succeeded
James Killian as Eisenhower's science ad-
viser.
The most obvious target for the pan-
el 's scrutiny was the Air Force's Di-
rectorate for Advanced Technology,
which coordinated satellite development.
What quickly became clear to the panel,
however, was that the tangled space recon-
naissance situation was a managerial, not a
hardware, problem. And the remedy was
just as apparent: Create an organization
that would oversee the development of
space-reconnaissance systems after inde-
pendently identifying whatever tasks
needed to be accomplished and matching
them with technologically feasible solutions.
This amounted to a thorough administrative
shakeup.
The National Security Council, with Ei-
senhower in attendance, was duly briefed
on the morning of August 25, 1960, just six
days after the CIA's Discoverer 14 became
the first satellite to have its film capsule
snatched in midair. The SAMOS panel's
recommendations, as amended by CIA di-
rector Allen Dulles and perhaps a few oth-
ers, formed the basis for the creation of the
National Reconnaissance Office. Eisenhow.
er approved the panel's suggestions on the
spot. The Air Force was, given responsibil-
ity for launching and controlling the satell-
ities and for recovering capsules ejected out
of orbit by the Discoverer satellites and
their descendants. This seemed entirely
appropriate because the Air Force owned
the rockets and associated hardware and no
one dreamed of changing that. But the CIA
was theoretically the nation's paramount
intelligence-gathering organization (and its
leader was nominally in charge of all for-
eign-intelligence collection), so it was given
responsibility to develop the satellites
themselves.
The composition of the NRO's leadership
had been another knotty problem. The dis-
trust that Ike felt toward some of his for-
mer comrades-in-arms and the SAMOS pan-
el members' suspicion of them led to a rec-
ommendation that the director of the NRO
come from the CIA. But Allen Duties's po-
litical instincts told him that such an ar-
rangement would be dangerous and he
therefore would have none of it. It was clear
to him that any CIA man who directed the
NRO would be a potential scapegoat for the
Defense Department in the event of some
serious foul-up. As a result, it was decided
that the head of the NRO should be the un-
dersecretary of the Air Force and that the
organization's second in command would
come from the agency.
Three decades and billions of dollars lat-
er, the NRO's space-imaging capability has
evolved into a pervasive, highly sophisticat.
ed intelligence tool. The KH-11 satellite,
one of the last of which is now in orbit, can
distinguish objects the size of a basketball
from 500 miles. And it can do it in a "near-
real time"-engineers' jargon for "virtually
instantaneous." Its successor, the KH-12,
has vastly improved imaging power for
night and all-weather observation. It is also
highly maneuverable because it can be re-
fueled from space shuttles, making it a
harder target to hit and complicating oppo-
nents' attempts to keep secrets from its
probing eye.
CX.
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3
In the process, NRO's surveillance pro-.
jects have become intimately connected to
Star Wars technology, at least theoretically,
according to Robert S. Cooper, a former
director of the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency. In his April 1985 keynote
address to the American Institute of Aero-
nautics and Astronautics' annual meeting in
Washington, Cooper said that the early-
warning spacecraft now on line--too inac-
curate or slow for the new order of battle-
would be replaced by a "system based on a
staring sensor." That is, a spacecraft placed
22,300 miles from earth will scrutinize one-
quarter of the planet at all times, each of its
pixels (miniature electronic eyes, 640,000
of which form a mosaic the size of a postage
stamp) concentrating on a tract of land or
water measuring only about 1,100 yards to
a side. It would be able to track thousands
of missiles while simultaneously separating
them from such extraneous clutter as re-
flected sunlight, brushfires and moving
steam locomotives. It is also expected to be
able to make distinctions between real mis-
siles and decoys.
The vulnerability of such satellites' up-
links, downlinks and tracking stations to
attack or to natural disaster has been a
source of concern fora member of years.
Because of this, Cooper said, the "umbilical
cord" connecting control facilities on earth
to the satellites is going to have to be cut,
and it will be necessary to "emulate [the
human controllers'] capability on board. We
have programs now in artificial-intelligence
technology that can take expert knowledge
and codify it into intelligent machines."
Were a moveable antenna to jam, for exam-
ple, a self-repairing control system would
analyze the problem, study the design of the
antenna and its drive components, and then
try to get it moving again, perhaps by over-
riding the drive. Failing that, the computer
would weigh the importance of that seg-
ment of the mission and, if necessary, fire
the thrusters so that the entire spacecraft
would reposition itself to point the stuck
antenna in the right direction.
j n the 21st century and beyond, as NRO
staff envision it, U.S. reconnaissance
and surveillance devices will be respon-
sible for seeing and hearing everything of
importance to the national security every-
where on earth and in space, day and night,
regardless of the weather. And they will be
expected to send their intelligence not only
to Washington for dissemination to the Na-
tional Command Authority, but directly to
military units in the field as well.
There will be new types of satellites. One
is being designed to, watch for laser tests.
Another will carry a nuclear-powered radar
able to peer through cloud cover by using a
giant array the approximate size of a foot-
ball field that is built of ribs and a mem-
brane thin as tinfoil. The rectangular anten-
na would be carried to its orbital point in
the shape of a cylinder and then unrolled
like a giant window shade. Another space-
craft, whose heart is to be a large mosaic of
infrared sensors, will stare down from its
celestial perch and track individual aircraft
and cruise missles by following the heat
they emit.
And plans for an unmanned'space station
have been in the works for several years,
though if they have been finalized, they
surely constitute one of the blackest of the
NR(Ys Programs. The station would fly a
pattern that crosses both poles. "That kind
of orbit is well suited to weather forecast.
ing," one Grumman engineer noted.
"And to reconnaissance," someone point-
ed out.
"Yeah. That, too," the engineer acknowl-
edged before abruptly changing the subject.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/21: CIA-RDP90-00965R000100260034-9