The Wizards of Langley

by Jeffrey T Richelson

  After his confirmation, Deutch established a National Imagery Agency (NIA) steering group, which in turn chartered an NIA task force. The terms of reference for the task force included among its key assumptions that “at a minimum, the NIA will be formed from the Central Imagery Office, Defense Mapping Agency, National Photographic Interpretation Center, and portions of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Services.”47

  In late November 1995, Deutch and Secretary of Defense William Perry sent a joint letter to congressional leaders and relevant committees on their plan to establish NIMA as a combat support agency within the Department of Defense on October 1, 1996—thus ensuring that the Secretary and JCS chairman would not lose control of the mapping function. Their letter noted that the proposed agency would be formed by consolidating the DMA, CIO, NPIC, the imagery exploitation element of the Defense Intelligence Agency, and portions of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office and NRO that were involved in imagery exploitation and dissemination.48 The planned agency would thus leave the acquisition and operation of space systems and their ground stations to the NRO, and would also leave untouched the imagery exploitation activities of the service intelligence organizations and unified combat commands.

  According to the letter, the task force recommended the consolidation for three basic reasons. It argued that a “single, streamlined and focused agency” could best serve the imagery and mapping needs of the growing and diverse customers throughout the government. The task force also contended that the dispersion of imagery and mapping responsibilities that then existed did not “allow one agency to exploit the tremendous potential of enhanced collection systems, digital processing technology and the prospective expansion in commercial imagery.” Finally, the panel felt that developments in information technology made it possible to conduct imagery intelligence and mapping as joint enterprises, which could be best realized through more centralized management.49

  The wisdom of the plan was questioned by both former intelligence (particularly CIA) officials and many within Congress. Former deputy DCI John McMahon was “dead set against it” and argued with Deutch, telling him he was taking DCI prerogatives and placing them where they didn’t belong—in the Defense Department. Such a move would represent an “erosion of DCI independent responsibility for national intelligence.” Of course, McMahon and others believed Deutch wanted to ensure that NPIC would be reporting to him when he moved on (he hoped) to become Secretary of Defense.50

  When Deutch asked Jim Hirsch for his view, the deputy director for science and technology told him it would be a good idea to consolidate development and operation of imagery satellites with interpretation, as suggested in 1992. He was concerned, however, that the quality of each of the three pillars of imagery interpretation—mapping and geodesy, military support, and intelligence analysis—not be compromised as a result of a merger, and that each be preserved as a distinct function. Mapping and geodesy is geared to the measurement and depiction of terrain as well as the atmosphere. Military support functions largely involve describing what is in a picture and counting, for targeting, order-of-battle or battle-damage assessment purposes. The questions are how many objects (aircraft, missiles, tanks) there are, where they are, and how many have been destroyed. Intelligence analysis is a multidisciplinary approach in which the analysts use other data, along with the imagery, to determine the function of a facility, to describe a nation’s nuclear weapons program, or to estimate the likelihood that a country will attack its neighbor or conduct a nuclear test.51

  Although Hirsch saw some potential gains in the creation of a unified agency—including being able to achieve the military’s coveted goal of information superiority and “dominant battlefield awareness”—he was also concerned that the intelligence analysis function might be shortchanged in a unified military agency. He believed that rather than such a unified agency, a unified program with three elements, NPIC being one, would be a reasonable alternative.52

  When the Defense Department insisted that the military services retain their imagery interpretation capabilities, Hirsch unsuccessfully suggested that the CIA should maintain the intelligence directorate’s Office of Imagery Analysis (OIA), which supported the intelligence and operations directorates—albeit with equipment and analysts on loan from NPIC.53

  Evan Hineman, who had been asked by Deutch to chair a task force on national imagery, believed the proposal had merit, but he also had reservations. He hoped that NPIC’s relation to the new agency would be similar to OD&E’s relationship to NRO—still officially part of the CIA, even though it reported to another boss. He also recommended that the head of the new agency be someone from the CIA, selected by the DCI with the Secretary of Defense’s concurrence.54

  At the analyst level, there were also concerns. Patrick Eddington joined the CIA in 1987 after graduating from Southwest Missouri State. After attending the agency’s National Imagery Analysis Course, he reported to NPIC in February 1988. Over the next seven years, he served in both the Priority Exploitation Group at Ft. Belvoir and the Imagery Exploitation Group at the Washington Navy Yard, as well as with the intelligence directorate’s Office of Scientific and Weapons Research. Over those years, his interpretation efforts had been focused on imagery of the Soviet Union and Iraq.55

  He later wrote that NIMA was “derisively referred to as ‘the Enema’ by NPIC analysts” and “was seen as little more than a power grab by the Pentagon, orchestrated by Deutch to gain a monopoly over the national imagery system.” “No self-respecting imagery analyst,” Eddington wrote, “wanted to become a ‘human photomat’ producing a mountain of meaningless briefing boards for the Joint Chiefs of Staff or any other Pentagon ‘customer.’”56

  Objections also came from the vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Robert Kerrey (D.–Nebr.), and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. The primary concern was that as a result of the transfer of NPIC personnel from the CIA to DOD, imagery support to national policymakers would suffer in order to support the requirements of military commanders. Although the opposition was unable to block the creation of the new agency, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence did persuade the Senate Armed Services Committee to amend the legislation creating NIMA. Thus, the final legislation stipulated that the DCI retained tasking authority over national imagery systems, and that the Secretary of Defense must obtain the DCI’s concurrence before appointing the NIMA director or note the DCI’s lack of concurrence before recommending a candidate to the president. In addition, the Armed Services committee agreed to modification of the National Security Act to explicitly state NIMA’s responsibility to provide intelligence for national policymakers.57

  When NIMA came into being on October 1, 1996, it incorporated all the elements mentioned in the late November statement as well as the Air Force’s Defense Dissemination Program Office, which disseminated satellite imagery, and the CIA’s Office of Imagery Analysis—effectively removing from the CIA any responsibility for imagery interpretation. Heading the agency was Rear Admiral Joseph Dantone, with former NPIC director Leo Hazelwood as deputy director.58

  LEGACY

  At approximately 10 a.m. on December 20, 1996, a Titan 4 rocket, with about 3 million pounds of thrust, blasted off from its launchpad at Van-denberg AFB in California. To some extent, there was no mystery as to what was sitting atop the rocket as it headed for outer space. NRO spokeswoman Katherine Schneider acknowledged that the payload was a reconnaissance satellite, the first time NRO acknowledged such activity within two decades of its taking place. Other details, such as orbit and mission, remained classified.59

  However, it was soon clear to observers that the payload was the third and final piece of the advanced KH-11 constellation, satellites whose numerical designations were 2104, 2105, and 2106. It was operating in an orbit of 155-by-620 miles and at an inclination of 98 degrees. Its two predecessors had been launched on November 28, 1992, and December 5, 1995, also using Titan 4 boo
sters, and were operating in similar orbits.60

  Although in late 1997 they were “owned” by the NRO, they were the legacy of the Office of Development and Engineering and the work of Robert Kohler, Julian Caballero, Ed Nowinski, and Jeffrey Harris. Each satellite, often referred to as an Improved CRYSTAL, was enhanced in four ways: It had greater resolution than the KH-11 models (better than six inches); it was better able to perform area surveillance missions; it carried an infrared imagery capability, code-named DRAGON, which allowed it to image targets at night; and it carried the Improved CRYSTAL Metric System that allowed “fiduciary marks” to be incorporated in imagery—marks that enhanced the ability to use the imagery for precision mapping.61

  By the time the third advanced KH-11 was launched, its two predecessors had provided the intelligence community and its customers with high-resolution imagery of an array of global targets—a massacre site in Bosnia, Chinese military deployments, Indian preparations for a nuclear test in 1995, Iraqi military facilities, a Libyan chemical weapons plant, and North Korean missile test preparations.62

  DEMISE

  In the mid-1990s, the vision statement of the Office of Research and Development promised that “when the future arrives ORD will have been there.” Few people expected in 1995 that the office had a very limited future. But in addition to creating three new offices in 1996, in 1998 Ruth David abolished ORD—the only surviving original office.

  Part of ORD’s mission had been to “fail”—to separate ideas that would work from those that wouldn’t before millions of dollars were wasted. But it had a number of outright successes and made contributions to the technical collection, clandestine collection, and analytical activities of the CIA and intelligence community—as well as to other parts of the government and private sector.

  In 1984 and 1985, ORD sponsored the development of a “problem structuring aid” that was to be a tool to help researchers organize their ideas. The project evolved into a research program producing dozens of technical publications, and it produced one of the first hypertext systems. Although this hypertext system never became a product, its features were incorporated into software available to millions of owners of personal computers.63

  In approximately 1985, the CIA decided to invest in the development of new tools and techniques to support the analysis of data. ORD identified information retrieval as a research topic of importance to the intelligence community that was receiving relatively little government funding. The office sponsored a project that, according to the agency, was so successful in achieving more accurate information retrieval that it was copied and incorporated into several commercial systems for automatic screening and sorting of news wires.64

  Beginning in 1987, ORD led in the development of image perspective transformation modeling and visualization tools. The system took overhead imagery and, through use of image modeling and rendering tools, warped the images to appear as if the perspective were on the ground. This system proved extremely useful in the civil engineering and urban planning fields to create “what if ” scenarios. The operator could artificially insert and visualize new buildings or facilities on empty lots, or place new roads or interstates into a scene to see the impact on local communities. 65 It is also used to familiarize intelligence officers with an area place new roads or interstates into a scene to see the impact on local communities.65 It is also used to familiarize intelligence officers with an area where they will be operating, or arms control inspectors to become familiar with a facility to be inspected.

  A joint project conducted by ORD and a component of NSA’s research and development directorate developed natural language processing (NLP)—which permitted computer processing of cables arriving at the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center to weed out irrelevant ones. Cables that took people one to three hours to sort through took a computer a mere ninety seconds. NLP could be used to locate documents containing the type of information the user desired or locate specified information from within a text. It could also be used to automate the construction of databases. By June 1995, it was being used by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).66

  Facial recognition, another ORD-developed technology, found use outside of the intelligence community by 1995. The facial-recognition program could be used to identify an unknown person against a set of known people. The technology was created to address a problem common to many agencies—databases with large collections of images, sometimes numbering in the millions, and collateral information. ORD wanted to be able to automate the process of identifying individuals using photographs and other existing databases. By mid-1995, users included the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI, the Customs Service, and the DEA. In mid-1995, the INS arrested the first criminal to be identified by facial recognition, a convicted rapist who crossed from Mexico into Texas. The facial-recognition system enabled the INS to obtain positive identification of the individual within thirty minutes.67

  More important, according to Gene Poteat, was ORD’s role in achieving major breakthroughs vital to carrying out the overhead reconnaissance mission. The breakthroughs, which he would not specify in detail, included advances in optics, imagery interpretation, and a unique fusion of collection and analysis. ORD’s contributions in that area had often been the work of the office’s Applied Physics Division, which was funded through the Reconnaissance Technology budget of the NRO. ORD’s accomplishments led Julian Caballero, sometime after he became OD&E head in 1985, to permit ORD to compete with OD&E for funds for proposed reconnaissance technology projects on an equal footing.68

  David explained that her decision to abolish ORD and establish a small Technology Investment Office (subsequently known as the Investment Program Office, IPO) in its place was based on her belief that because the directorate subcontracted a vast amount of its research and development work (as it had from its inception), with little being done in-house, it did not make sense to maintain a centralized R&D organization. As a result, she decided to distribute ORD’s personnel among the offices it supported, while protecting the long-term budget by creating the IPO. The investment office was to ensure that research and development funds were spent on long-term research projects and not shifted by individual offices to cover areas of immediate concern. It was, she acknowledged, a “controversial decision.” There were “people who hated it,” as well as people thought it a great idea, according to David. Not surprisingly, ORD members hated it, believing it devalued their contribution.69

  John McMahon noted that the abolition was a “sign of the times” and a reflection that commercial technology was often far ahead of the gov-ernment’s—a dramatic change from 1962. Yet he believed ORD’s abolition would “narrow the agency’s knowledge into a lot of new technology,” and that the agency would still need an organization like ORD. According to Gene Poteat, David did a “great disservice by wiping out the only organization of R&D people who knew the intelligence business.”70

  Both of David’s immediate predecessors also questioned her decision to abolish ORD. Evan Hineman called it a “great mistake,” but one that would not be noticed for some time. He noted that there was some discussion in the late 1970s and early 1980s about doing away with the office, but the argument that the other offices conduct R&D activities was a false argument. He expressed concern that “today’s” activities would take budgetary precedence—which David hoped to prevent through the IPO—and noted that during his tenure, 2.5 percent of the agency’s budget was devoted to R&D, but rather than the figure reaching 5 percent as he envisioned, the practice of reserving a specific percentage of the budget for ORD fell victim to budgetary pressure and was ultimately done away with.71

  James Hirsch also believed the decision was a mistake. He argued that technical experts needed to talk with other technical experts and maintain a certain distance from their customers (the individual offices). He also noted that ORD would usually spend twice its allotted budget, because it received funds from other agencies to manage projec
ts.72

  The abolition of ORD had a ripple effect, leading to the disestablishment of the Office of Advanced Projects shortly before David left office. According to David, the advanced projects office was no longer needed as a bridge between ORD and its consumers.73

  11

  UNCERTAIN FUTURE

  In late June 1998, a CIA press release announced that Ruth David’s tenure as Deputy Director for Science and Technology would end that September. She would be departing to become the President and Chief Executive Officer of ANSER, a nonprofit research institute established in 1958 to conduct studies for the Air Force; it subsequently added the Defense Department and other federal agencies to its list of clients.1

  The press release contained praise from David’s boss, DCI George Tenet, who expressed his gratitude for “the wise counsel she has given our intelligence collectors and analysts.” He explained that “Dr. David came to the Agency at a time when we needed a leader who could guide the DS&T through major geopolitical transformations that are profoundly affecting how we conduct our mission.” The DCI credited her with developing and delivering “the capabilities our collectors and analysts need to do their critical work in this new and fast-changing environment.”2

  Tenet may have been pleased with David’s accomplishments, but many in the directorate were not. The controversy over FBIS, the loss of NPIC, and the closure of ORD could not but help hurt morale in at least some segments of the directorate. Many veterans undoubtedly would echo the question of one retired directorate official, who wondered, “How can you have any morale if you keep giving everything away?”3

  Of course, David came into office with a restructured NRO a fait accompli, and she did not give away NPIC—John Deutch did. In addition, her outsider status, and possibly her gender, made it even more difficult for her to lead the directorate. Perhaps a longtime, well-respected directorate veteran might have made what has been not only a transformation but a decline in its status easier for the rank and file to accept.