Inside the CIA

by Kessler, Ronald

  When measured against the importance of the CIA and its effectiveness at carrying out its mission, the abuses—outrageous though each one may have been—seem relatively small. More than anything, the mission of the agency has been to uncover military developments in foreign countries so the U.S. can defend itself. To that end, no component of the CIA has been more effective than the Directorate of Science and Technology.

  PART II

  The Directorate of Science and Technology

  9

  Seeing Through Clouds

  THE MOST CRITICAL QUESTION FOR THE UNITED STATES since the beginning of the Cold War has been the size and nature of Soviet weapons and military force. Only aerial reconnaissance can answer the question consistently with accuracy and precision. In many ways the most important task of the CIA, this job is carried out by the Directorate of Science and Technology, which has five thousand employees.

  Besides watching from space, the Directorate of Science and Technology, through the Office of SIGINT Operations, monitors the Soviet military with radar and sensors that pick up radio transmissions, called telemetry, from missiles being tested. The office also intercepts communications within countries and inside foreign embassies and messages sent by terrorists and drug cartels. While the office often works with the National Security Agency (NSA), it specializes in tactical interceptions to supplement operations within the CIA. More generalized interception and analysis of communications is performed by NSA.*

  The directorate’s Office of Special Projects uses sensors to determine locations of nuclear devices and facilities and does other special collection projects.

  Through the Office of Technical Service, the directorate supplies the James Bond equipment of the spy trade—the clandestine recording devices, the transmitters that bounce encrypted messages in bursts off satellites, secret-writing papers, and disguises that are essential to the job of the human spy. The directorate’s Office of Research and Development conducts research for all the directorates, attempting to develop prototypes and go beyond the state of the art in such areas as communications, sensors, artificial intelligence, management of data bases, and high-speed computing. Through the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), the directorate monitors and translates foreign media so that the government and the public will have accurate translations and transcripts of foreign newspaper articles and radio and television news programs. The FBIS also picks up and translates broadcasts of clandestine radio stations. Finally, the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), also housed within the Directorate of Science and Technology, analyzes the take from aerial reconnaissance and helps determine the meaning of the images.

  None of the offices is more important than the Office of Development and Engineering, which develops the major satellite systems. Its predecessor in 1954 developed the U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, a desperate attempt to find out what the Soviet Union was up to when practically every other effort had failed. Meanwhile, clandestine Soviet agents could walk into any airport, rent a plane, and fly all over the U.S.—but not over military installations or the White House.

  The idea for the U-2 originated with the Technological Capabilities Panel, a committee headed by MIT president James R. Killian, Jr., one of President Eisenhower’s science advisers, to improve U.S. safeguards against surprise attack. The panel’s intelligence committee, headed by Polaroid founder Edwin H. Land, reviewed a number of proposals, including several submitted by the Air Force, to peek at denied Soviet territory.

  Over the short term, the panel recommended a high-flying plane that would come to be called the U-2. Killian and Land met with President Eisenhower to push the idea. The project was approved, and the CIA had the job of carrying it out. If a pilot was shot down, the government wanted him to be a civilian who could claim to be conducting meteorological research. Over the long term, the panel recommended lofting satellites into space.80

  Allen W. Dulles, then director of Central Intelligence, asked Richard Bissell, who would later go on to oversee the Bay of Pigs invasion, to direct the U-2 project. Bissell got in touch with Kelly Johnson, who ran Lockheed’s Advanced Development Projects office, and he came up with the design for a plane that would fly as high as seventy thousand feet.

  “Before that, we didn’t have many successful spy operations into Soviet territory,” Bissell recalled. “They were too tough and too good. When a society is that regimented, it is very hard for an outsider to move in and move around.”

  What never came out at the time was that midway through the program, the British began participating in the flights, often alternating their pilots with American pilots. Eisenhower approved American flights only reluctantly, and Bissell said he approached the British as a way of getting more flights.

  “There wasn’t a fixed arrangement, but there were some British pilots,” Bissell said.81 “I arranged it. I thought it would improve our chances of being allowed to fly reconnaissance missions.”

  Aware of the flights almost from the beginning, Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader, protested secretly through diplomatic channels. At times, the Soviet military tried to knock the planes out of the sky, but its MiGs and surface-to-air missiles could not reach the altitude of the U-2.

  The flights continued for four years. Near the end, their goal was to determine if the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in producing the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

  “The question was, ‘Do they have them and where are they?’” a former CIA officer who worked on targeting the U-2 said. “We watched them test them on radar. . . . We were hoping to get the capability sooner or later. But it was terrifying to Americans. The thought of coming under the bomb was terrifying.”

  Khrushchev had boasted that the Soviets had ICBMs that could hit U.S. targets. The claim was given added credibility by the Soviet launch on October 4, 1957, of Sputnik I, earth’s first artificial satellite. Then came the “missile gap,” a perception that the Soviets were ahead of the U.S. in missile production. During the 1960 presidential campaign, John F. Kennedy had claimed a great gap existed in the numbers of operational ICBMs each country had. Previously, a controversy had erupted over a “bomber gap.” This misperception was a new twist on an old military ploy—fooling the enemy by marching the same regiment through a clearing over and over. Only in this case, the Soviets ordered the same plane squadrons to fly repeatedly overhead during parades.

  At the time, neither the U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. had any missiles in production. The U.S. Air Force estimated the Soviets would soon have many more than the U.S., while a more conservative view of the Army, Navy, and CIA proved to be far more accurate. By 1963, the Air Force was estimating that the Soviets had 1,500 ICBMs, while the CIA said they had 400 to 500. In fact, the Soviets had 150 ICBMs in 1963, while the U.S. had 400.82

  This illustrates a common problem when the military assesses the strength of opposing forces. Each service wants to use intelligence to support its own budget requests.

  “The Air Force came in with an estimated number [of missiles] several times higher than ours, standard practice in the 1950s that became traditional over the next two decades,” according to R. Jack Smith, the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence from 1966 to 1971. “Theirs, as usual, was the worst-case stance, quite defensible in military tradition in determining what is the worst threat the enemy can pose. The CIA approach was to search out the most likely, not the worst possible, and then leave it to the president and his advisers to decide whether it was better to prepare defenses for the conceivable worst, the most likely, or something in between.”83

  On May 1, 1960, on the eve of summit talks with Khrushchev, the Soviets shot down a U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers, who had been an Air Force pilot. One of the targets of the night was a suspected ICBM site at Plesetsk in northwest Russia.

  The CIA had assured Eisenhower that evidence that the plane was on a spy mission would never be recovered. Based on that assurance, he issued a public denial that th
e U-2 had been spying. Khrushchev promptly displayed reconnaissance photographs taken by the U-2, and the Soviet leader canceled the summit. After being captured, Powers was imprisoned and later traded for KGB officer Rudolph Abel. Powers died on August 1, 1977, when the Cessna he was piloting as a traffic reporter for WGIL radio in Los Angeles crashed.84

  Eisenhower ordered a halt to the U-2 program, but by then the CIA had already begun development of its first satellite program, code-named CORONA. The first satellites could see for two hundred miles in any direction, whereas the U-2 could see only for twenty-five miles. Resolution was inferior to that of photos taken from the U-2, so the CIA employed analysts to decipher the images. A satellite indeed located a Soviet missile site in Plesetsk, the area where the U-2 was headed when it was shot down.

  From then on, the CIA successfully tracked the development of every Soviet weapon. The agency could see Soviet military hardware while it was being made and could predict how long it would take before it was deployed.

  “The first satellite increased our knowledge fifty percent,” a former CIA officer involved in the project said. “We were seeing things we had never seen before, the military and scientific installations. It was virginal information on their shipyards. We watched submarines, ships come on.”

  While the U.S. agreed not to fly the U-2 over the Soviet Union, it did not agree to ground it. It was the U-2 that spotted Soviet missiles being installed by the Soviets in Cuba, leading to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

  The first satellites catapulted the film toward earth by parachute. Planes scooped up the exposed film in midair with buckets. Each successive satellite system improved resolution and range. The latest satellites, called KH-11s, transmit images electronically to earth. At any given time, the U.S. has at least two KH-11s working. More recently, the U.S. has begun launching KH-12s, a more advanced satellite that takes in a wider swath of the electromagnetic spectrum. While they can read numbers on license plates, the satellites are usually set to spy on a wider area with resolution that is not as great.

  The Soviets have never come close to American ingenuity in developing satellites. The U.S. compensated for motion by rotating the cameras within the satellites. The CIA generally takes thirty to forty shots for every three taken by the Soviets, making better use of satellite time.

  Meanwhile, the Directorate of Science and Technology developed methods for snooping on the Soviets underwater. One of the more ingenious projects was the Glomar Explorer, a ship built by the CIA to raise a Soviet submarine that had sunk in 1968 in 17,500 feet of water off the coast of California.

  As a cover, the Glomar was outfitted to gather manganese nodules from the ocean floor. In fact, it contained elaborate machinery for raising the Soviet submarine.

  In 1974, the Glomar set out for the site where the Soviet submarine had gone down. Because of undersea listening devices, the CIA had heard the ship go down and knew exactly where it was on the ocean floor. The Glomar lowered a recovery vehicle with several sets of claws to grab hold of the submarine. The recovery vehicle was lowered by extending twelve-inch-diameter pipes that were screwed together by the crew end to end and attached to the vehicle. When the submarine had been raised to the mother ship, a chamber in the hull of the Glomar opened up and allowed the vehicle carrying the submarine to enter the ship. Meanwhile, television cameras monitored the project. After the sub was inside the hull, the water was pumped out.

  When Jack Anderson publicized the story, the CIA put out the word that the mission had been largely unsuccessful and that most of the important parts of the submarine had been lost when the sub broke in two. The submarine had broken in two, and half of it sunk once again to the bottom of the sea. But from the portion retained, the CIA recovered a number of key components, including two nuclear-tipped torpedoes, cryptographic machines, and parts of missiles.

  “You got the sense of the state of the art of the Soviets—electronics, code books, nuclear devices. What wasn’t pulled up was more of the same,” said a former CIA officer with knowledge of the take. “The stories saying it was unsuccessful were part of the cover. Were you going to say, ‘We did a great job’?”

  In 1976, the Navy took possession of the Glomar Explorer, and now it is in mothballs in Suisun Bay, near San Francisco, as part of the National Defense Reserve Fleet.

  Today, the Directorate of Science and Technology controls billion-dollar satellites that see through clouds and even buildings with radar and infrared imaging that senses heat. Other satellites can intercept conversations of terrorists, trace narcotics dealers’ electronic transfers of money between bank accounts, and see mobs in places such as Iraq, a machine gun under a tent, and water or oil under the desert. The satellites pick up virtually every part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Most important, they can see and transmit in real time any hostile moves by the Soviets or other countries.

  The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), started in 1960, determines what types of satellites to develop and how they will be used. The NRO is, in fact, a committee that consists of representatives of the dozen agencies that make up the intelligence community. It has staff offices behind a locked door in Room 4C-1000 of the Pentagon, and in other locations. Its members often meet in the office of the deputy secretary of defense. Despite repeated references to the NRO in the press, it is still considered a “black” program, meaning that from the standpoint of the U.S. government, it does not exist.85

  The critical decisions are made by the NRO’s executive committee, which consists of the deputy secretary of defense, who is the chairman; the science adviser to the president; and the director of Central Intelligence. It is the DCI, in his role as director of the intelligence community, who is in charge of requirements. This gives him the authority to control the satellites, assigning them to different areas of the world and making the decision to turn them on and off. The NRO receives proposals for new systems from each of the intelligence agencies. Larger projects must be approved by the president. Once the NRO approves a project, it is carried out either by the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology or by the Air Force Space Command.

  Some 70 percent of the funding for the projects comes from the Defense Department, while the rest comes from the CIA funneled through Defense Department accounts.

  Day-to-day tasking of the imagery satellites is done by the director of Central Intelligence through the Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation (COMIREX), which is headed by a CIA officer. Usually, the committee meets at the office of the intelligence community staff at 1724 F Street NW in downtown Washington. The staff of 240 helps the director of Central Intelligence coordinate the dozen agencies that make up the intelligence community.

  In effect, while the NRO operates the satellites, it is the director of Central Intelligence who clicks the shutter. It is also the CIA, along with the military, that analyzes the results through the National Photographic Interpretation Center.

  10

  Crateology

  BUILDING 213 NEXT TO THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD IS a seven-story, concrete complex that consists of three cubelike buildings covering two city blocks. Surrounded by a Cyclone fence topped with triple rows of barbed wire, the complex, at First and M Streets SE in Washington, is manned around the clock. What few windows the buildings have are tinted brown so outsiders cannot see in. Nearly two thousand people go in and out every twenty-four hours.

  This is the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), a component of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology that analyzes and interprets images. The center was started by Arthur C. Lundahl, a brilliant former Navy man and University of Chicago graduate who went to work for the CIA in 1953 when the agency was located in dusty temporary buildings at Twenty-third Street and Constitution Avenue NW. Lundahl became chief of the Photographic Interpretation Center. In 1961, the division became NPIC. The CIA runs the center, but all the military intelligence services participate in it. For many years, it was located on th
e four top floors of the Steuart Motor Co., a huge, factory-like brick building at Fifth and K Streets NW in Washington.

  At first, the photo interpreters used nothing more than magnifying glasses and measuring devices to help them analyze aerial photographs. Slowly, they built up a library so they could compare one frame with a similar frame taken a year or two earlier, allowing them to pinpoint changes.

  “You look at a place and then what was it like last year or yesterday,” Lundahl said. “It’s like looking at a movie. The frames are further apart, but you can infer much more of the intentions by seeing the changes on the ground than by doing it one frame at a time.”86

  To bring out small differences in elevation, NPIC had CIA reconnaissance pilots take pictures separated by dozens of yards of the same area. By using stereo techniques, NPIC could use the exaggerated dimensionality of the pictures. For example, depressions in the grass from tires or people walking would leap out of a photograph when viewed in this way.

  For the most part, NPIC concentrated on strategic intelligence and research that could be used to predict long-range trends. Tactical intelligence, which could be used to pinpoint targets for bombing missions, was left to the military.

  Whether it happened on earth, in the air, or in the sea, NPIC learned to interpret and make sense of it. For example, photo interpreters looking at Virginia could tell that the people were meat eaters because they could see hog pens and cattle. They could pick out the industrial plants where rail lines enter. They could draw a floor plan of each house based on outside clues: the kitchen is under the exhaust vent on the roof. There is a sewer vent over the bathroom. The living room has a chimney. Everything else in the house is bedrooms. Based on the growth of the cemeteries, photo interpreters could tell how many people died each year. From that, they could estimate the area’s population.