U.S. Spy Office Dying, Group Says
Reuters
1:30 p.m. Nov. 14, 2000 PST
WASHINGTON -- A U.S. commission on Tuesday recommended creating an office
cloaked in secrecy
to pursue innovative technology for spying from space, saying the existing
agency was not
sufficiently clandestine for the task.
The National Commission for the Review of the National Reconnaissance Office
said the NRO, the
agency that designs, builds and operates U.S. spy satellites, had lost some
of its luster since the end
of the Cold War due to inadequate funding and declining attention from the
president, secretary of
defense and CIA director.
The commission, established by Congress in legislation that went into effect in
December 1999, warned that if current trends continued the NRO
might lose its edge
in providing the nation its "eyes and ears" for monitoring the
proliferation of weapons
of mass destruction and tracking international "terrorists."
"Without bold and sustained leadership, the United States could
find itself deaf and
blind and increasingly vulnerable to any of the potentially
devastating threats it may
face in the next ten to twenty years," the report said.
Rep. Porter Goss, a Florida Republican, and Sen. Bob Kerrey, a
Nebraska Democrat,
served as co-chairmen of the 11-member bipartisan commission.
The panel did not recommend abolishing the NRO, but said the
agency had "become a
publicly acknowledged organization that openly announces many of
its new program
initiatives," which in turn hindered its ability to tackle
intelligence problems.
The commission recommended creating a new Office of Space
Reconnaissance to
work on super-secret projects to gain technological advantage in
space-related
spying.
"Evolution is continuously moving forward in technology, and I
think that those
things should be done very discreetly and with boldness and
risk-taking. And we
need (is) to create a mechanism that can allow those things to
happen," Goss,
chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence
Committee, told Reuters.
"There are so many new things on the horizon that have such
promise and they need
to be pursued, but they need to be pursued in a way that we dont
give the
advantage to others of knowing about them, or sharing some of the
things weve
learned," Goss added.
The National Reconnaissance Office, which marked its 40th
anniversary this year, has
evolved away from its original mission "to go out and do things
that had never been
dreamed of before, and we need that," Goss said.
It also used to be given the highest level attention from the
president and top U.S.
officials, the congressman added.
"Its been taken for granted and its lost some of its punch," Goss
said of the NRO.
"We need to get on to the next generation," he added.
Budget constraints have delayed modernization while the
proliferation of commercial
imaging technologies has provided U.S adversaries with
"unprecedented insight within
our national borders, as well as into our overseas activities,"
the commissions report
said.
"Equally problematic, widespread knowledge of the NROs existence
and public
speculation on how NRO satellites are used has aided terrorists
and other potential
adversaries in developing techniques of denial and deception to
thwart U.S.
intelligence efforts," the report added.
In addition, other technologies such as fiber-optic communications
"render certain
NRO capabilities obsolete," the report said.
The report warned that the agencys resources were being stretched
"and the result
is a prescription for a potentially significant intelligence
failure."
The NRO is overseen by the Defense Department and the CIA
director.
An NRO spokesman said the commissions recommendations were
"valuable" and the
agency would look at them. The CIA declined comment.
