The Wizards of Langley (45 page)

But despite MISTY’s intended stealthiness, when the shuttle placed it into orbit, four civilian space observers—Russell Eberst, Daniel Karcher, and Pierre Neirinck in Europe and Ted Molczan in Canada—were able to determine that the satellite was in a 494-by-503-mile, 65-degree orbit, an orbit that did not match any other U.S. military spacecraft. In addition, the civilian observers were able to monitor a series of maneuvers performed by the satellite—including the “explosion” that may have been a tactic to deceive those monitoring the satellite or may have been the result of the jettisoning of operational debris.
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The satellite did finally disappear around November 1990. In 2000, one space observer, examining orbital data from the North American Defense Command, came to the conclusion that in May 1995, the satellite was in a 451-by-461-mile orbit. Where the satellite is today is unclear, as is how much additional intelligence MISTY has yielded.
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In addition to satellites, the United States relied on several other intelligence assets, which were either deployed to Saudi Arabia or were traditionally operated from territory close to Iraq. U-2s flew imagery and SIGINT missions lasting up to ten hours. RC-135 RIVET JOINT aircraft deployed to Riyadh monitored Iraqi communications. RF-4C Phantoms, F-14s with tactical reconnaissance pods, P-3 Orion ocean surveillance aircraft (flown over land), and unmanned aerial vehicles also gathered imagery. Further, U.S. and British ground-based SIGINT collection sites in the vicinity—on Cyprus and in Turkey, Italy, and Oman—were undoubtedly targeted on Iran and Kuwait.
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The United States used these and allied assets, along with human intelligence, to update its database on the Iraqi military, economic, and political systems as a prelude to target selection for an air war and planning for a possible ground offensive. Imagery played a key part in intelligence support to the air war. It provided information about the deployment of Iraqi forces in Iraq and Kuwait, enabled identification of facilities to be attacked, and was vital in assessing the damage caused by the attacks. Imagery revealing the location of Iraqi troops also let the Central Command’s war planners devise the “Hail Mary” strategy by which allied forces entered Iraq with minimal resistance. The task of interpreting the imagery was divided between theater organizations such as the Central Command’s Joint Intelligence Center, the DIA and military service imagery interpretation units in the United States, and, of course, the National Photographic Interpretation Center. Within a month of the Iraqi invasion, some interpreters working at NPIC’s Washington Navy Yard headquarters were working eighteen-hour days to provide a steady flow of intelligence to the President and other senior officials as well as U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia. When a reporter surveyed the NPIC parking lot one midnight in late August, he found more than 100 cars.
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Meanwhile, the NPIC’s Priority Exploitation Group at Ft. Belvoir was also working at a more intense pace. Normally, the work of examining incoming imagery was handled in two or three shifts, with analysts working ten-and-a-half-hour shifts, four days a week. For those working the day shift, a typical day began at 7 a.m. and ended at 5:30 p.m. After a
half-hour “shift change” meeting, the day interpreters went to their Dilbert-style cubicles and, using either a light table or a computer (the Imagery Data Exploitation Station), extracted intelligence from the overhead imagery.
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Once Iraqi troops began moving, six to seven ground forces analysts were selected to cover Iraq. Their shifts increased to fourteen to sixteen hours a day. Not surprisingly, people grew tired and made mistakes, including incorrectly entering the coordinates of SA-6 antiaircraft missile sites into the database.
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Meanwhile, back at Building 213, the interpreters were being overwhelmed by the flood of incoming imagery. Further complicating matters was the lack of sufficient broad-band transmission capability to send much of the imagery to Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters in Riyadh electronically. Thus, a message based on KH-11 imagery would normally take over an hour to get to the field, and an actual image would take between four and fourteen hours to arrive. Messages based on radar imagery would take two to three hours, whereas images would take between six and twenty-four hours. Those images that took the longest to arrive might arrive via aircraft rather than the airwaves. An Air Force jet was dispatched each evening carrying overhead images.
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The war also revealed differences in the interpretation cultures at NPIC and the theater with respect to bomb-damage assessment. NPIC judged aircraft or tanks to be destroyed if destruction was clearly shown by satellite or aerial photography, whereas CENTCOM analysts factored in pilot reports in assessing the impact of bombing raids. In addition, many of the small holes on the outside of a target, which meant serious internal damage, were not detectable—even by high-resolution U.S. imagery satellites. As a result, CENTCOM concluded that 1,400 of the 4,280 Iraqi tanks believed to be deployed in Kuwait were destroyed, but NPIC could confirm only 358 as destroyed.
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The late 1980s ushered in the beginning of what eventually would be a wide-ranging restructuring of the NRO, a restructuring that would have significant implications for the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. In a November 1988 letter to Senator David Boren, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, NRO director Pete Aldridge observed:

Aldridge reported that he had discussed the study’s recommendations with Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and Director of Central Intelligence William Webster and he was directing the development of plans to implement the recommendations. Specific changes would include the creation of a centralized systems analysis function “to conduct cross-system trades and simulations within the NRO”; creation of a “User Support” function to improve NRO support to intelligence community users as well as to the growing number of operational military users; and the dispersal of the NRO staff to the new units, with the staff being replaced by a group of policy advisers. In addition, Aldridge foresaw the establishment of an interim facility “to house the buildup of the new functions and senior management.” The ultimate goal, projected for the 1991–1992 period, would be the “collocation of all NRO elements . . . in the Washington, D.C., area.”
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Not planned, and Aldridge pointed this out in his letter, was any change in the nature of Programs A, B, and C as “distinct elements” of the NRO. A study of the NRO conducted by former OSO director Barry Kelly and Rear Admiral Robert K. Geiger, former head of the NRO’s Program C, and completed in July 1989 had not recommended any change in that twenty-year-old arrangement.
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But they did recommend collocation as a means of increasing the DNRO’s authority—as well as installing the Director of OD&E as the head of Program B. They noted that “because the DDS&T reports directly to the DCI, there are real and perceptual problems regarding his willingness to support a DNRO decision that is unfavorable to the CIA, or to appeal it with the DNRO. Instead, the DDS&T can . . . take the issue directly to the DNRO’s boss, the DCI.” In addition, they noted that “the proximity of the DDS&T to the DCI also tends to cause the DCI to look first to the DDS&T for support regarding NRO issues.” Finally, they observed that “the DDS&T is limited by other responsibilities and can spend only about 20 percent of his time on NRO and Program B matters,”
but that “the effective management of . . . Program B requires . . . someone who spends the majority of his time working Program B and NRO issues.”
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In July 1989, Webster and Cheney wrote Boren a joint letter reporting on further plans for restructuring NRO’s internal operations. The proposed changes, which were largely based on the Geiger-Kelly study, would include establishing a planning, analysis, and evaluation capability within the NRO to support program decisions; creating a deputy director for military support; and formally designating the CIA’s Director of the Office of Development and Engineering as Director of Program B in order “to provide a full-time manager for Program B.”
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Cheney and Webster also informed Boren that the Program A, B, C structure would remain in place:

However, the policy of maintaining the traditional structure would not last through the Bush administration. In the late 1980s, Congress, particularly the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and chairman David Boren, had suggested the need for NRO to reorganize and consolidate. The feeling, as described in 1994 by DCI James Woolsey, was that the “NRO . . . was a somewhat decentralized organization, and the various parts of it, from time to time, fell into competition with one another. And that involved, sometimes, competing . . . satellite programs.”
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Thus, in October 1991, Senator Boren and committee Vice-Chairman Frank Murkowski, in correspondence with the DCI and Secretary of Defense, noted that their committee “recommends reorganization into several directorates and collocation of major NRO elements as expeditiously as possible.” The proposal was approved by Robert Gates, who had replaced Webster as DCI in 1992, Cheney, and Bush.
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The President formally ordered the restructuring in National Security Directive 67, “Intelligence Capabilities, 1992–2005,” which he signed in late March.
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By the time Bush signed the directive, he had been apprised of the suggestions of a task force chaired by former Lockheed CEO Robert Fuhrman. Its members included four former senior intelligence community officials—Lt. Gen. Lincoln Faurer (NSA), Lt. Gen. Edward J. Heinz (Intelligence Community Staff director), Maj. Gen. Ralph Jacobson (Program A), and Evan Hineman—and two serving intelligence officials, John P. Devine, the NSA’s Deputy Director for Research and Engineering, and NPIC director Leo Hazelwood.
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Among the panel’s recommendations was the termination of the Program A, B, C structure. The panel observed that the traditional organizational arrangement did not “enhance mission effectiveness.” Rather, it had led to “counterproductive competition,” which “makes it more difficult to foster loyalty and to maintain the focus on the NRO mission.” They recommended, “in order to foster an improved NRO corporate spirit, and to better serve the intelligence needs of the nation,” that the NRO be organized around the imagery and SIGINT disciplines. The panel noted that “such a restructure will lessen competition between NRO program offices as a driving force for creativity,” but believed that the NRO director would be able to find “other and more effective ways of eliciting the most creative and effective ideas for meeting the nation’s intelligence needs.”
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Gates publicly announced the restructuring before a joint public hearing of the Senate and House intelligence oversight committees in April 1992, at a time when the NRO’s existence was still officially secret. Gates told his audience that there would be a “far-reaching internal restructuring of the Intelligence Community organization responsible for designing, building, and operating our overhead reconnaissance assets.”
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The restructuring that Gates referred to took effect the following month. Initially, imagery activities were assigned to the CIA’s Office of Development and Engineering, and SIGINT became the responsibility of the Air Force Office of Special Projects. Two tasks that remained were the transfer of all 700 Program A personnel from Los Angeles to Washington—a prospect that perturbed some southern California congressmen and no doubt many of Program A’s staff—and the creation of NRO imagery and SIGINT directorates that were purely NRO entities (and that fully integrated Air Force and CIA personnel, along with personnel from the Navy, NSA, DIA, and other organizations).
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A major question not yet resolved in late 1992 concerned the impact of the restructuring on the Office of Development and Engineering. It was
clear that it would continue to be the source of personnel to work on NRO programs. And in accord with McMahon’s instructions to Kohler, it had often functioned more as a component of the NRO than of the CIA. The distinction was emphasized by its having its own building, as well as its own career service—distinct not just from the agency’s but from that of the rest of the science and technology directorate. But the restructuring meant that eventually there would be no more CIA/Program B satellite programs, only NRO programs that CIA personnel participated in—which had been Charyk’s and McMillan’s vision three decades earlier.