The Wizards of Langley (48 page)

David felt that if she could explain her views and how important the new offices were, the animosity could be neutralized. To get those views across, she began holding a series of town meetings. Fifty to sixty FBIS members were in attendance at one, and after her opening speech they launched a verbal assault, objecting that she had just arrived at the agency and didn’t know what she was doing. David, Phillips recalled, was “almost in tears.” In his view, the situation could have been alleviated if her deputy, Pete Daniher, who had been in the agency for over twenty years and had credibility with the dissidents, had spoken up in her defense. But Daniher, who was sitting with her, “never said a word.”
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And it was not only agency insiders who objected to the planned cutbacks. Academics, who made great use of the unclassified digests of the foreign press, were not pleased.
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Congressional oversight committees
were also supporters of FBIS, noting in 1997 that “comprehensive open source collection, translation, and analytic effort is crucial to the [intelligence community’s] ability to maintain global coverage,” and that “careful scrutiny of ‘closed society’ media . . . can also reveal valuable information on trends, new developments, and leadership plans.”
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Earlier in the year, David backed off on plans to cut the broadcast service, and a CIA spokeswoman announced that FBIS would be spared from proposed funding cuts. She also noted that FBIS would continue to monitor, translate, and publish accounts from about 3,500 foreign broadcast and press outlets in fifty-five languages and newspapers—which represented “virtually 100 percent” of current coverage.
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Congressional concern and interest were expressed in the House intelligence committee’s report on the 1998
Intelligence Authorization Act
, published in summer 1997. The committee noted that FBIS’s “re-engineering strategy” called for “using more modern and commercially available technologies as FBIS’s operational linchpin and to transition from traditional large-scale, static collection and processing centers toward a more agile and less expensive architecture.” The committee applauded the effort to “adapt FBIS’s infrastructure and operating practices to incorporate new technologies and to meet intelligence requirements more efficiently.”
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The committee did express concern about resource-allocation decisions that were being made “without fully taking into consideration ‘customer’ requirements.” In short, it was unclear to many FBIS customers what regions of the world would be “affected by significant decreases in collection, translation, and analytical activities.” It was necessary, the committee believed, that “open source collection . . . be driven by the direct input of major customers, particularly the all-source analysts who best understood where their information gaps lie.”
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In a brief statement in April 1996, the CIA announced that ORD’s John Craven, then fifty-seven, had been named the agency’s best scientist. The statement said his “breakthroughs in areas of computer logic, digital signal processing and laser technology are truly remarkable.” The following year he was named one of the fifty CIA trailblazers.
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That Craven was able to contribute even a fraction of what he has is astonishing. In 1968, he received a doctorate in solid-state physics from the University of Chicago; his dissertation topic was “The Fermi Surface and
Band Structure of White Tin as Derived from de Haas–van Alphen Data.” After Chicago, he joined the CIA and was placed in a special career-development track for the agency’s top prospects. The six-month program took him from Cape Cod to a U-2 base to Strategic Air Command headquarters and onto a nuclear submarine. Then in 1971, a swimming accident left him paralyzed from the neck down.
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Today, Craven lives in a modest apartment in a Maryland suburb of Washington, where he has an around-the-clock caregiver. Once or twice a week, he travels to the CIA for briefings. Mostly, he works at home, relying on a computer, a voice-activated phone, and a fax machine. He holds a pointer in his mouth to tap out letters, never more than fifteen a minute, on his computer keyboard. His phone has special encoding devices that allow him to conduct secure conversations with colleagues.
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Those circumstances did not prevent Craven from doing award-winning work on three projects, one of which is classified. One project involved the use of microwave technology to create a 100-fold increase in the speed at which computers could operate. The speed of computers is limited by the power they consume and the heat they generate while operating. Microwave technology could operate at much lower power levels, conserving energy and reducing heat.
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The focus of the second project was laser cross-links. One problem with using laser beams as communication devices over long distances was that they had to be perfectly aimed and were easy to interrupt, with even a slight misalignment resulting in the loss of the signal. Craven led a team of scientists who figured out a way to reduce those problems.
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Craven told an interviewer, “Our charter is to push the state of the art,” whereas his “goal is not to nudge the state of the art but to try to make a quantum leap.”
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On October 1, 1996, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) opened its doors with a staff of 9,000—more than any intelligence agency other than CIA and NSA. That day marked the conclusion of over five years of studies and debates over the organization of the U.S. imagery intelligence effort.

In his April 1992 testimony before the House and Senate intelligence committees, then DCI Robert Gates noted that the Imagery Task Force he had established upon becoming DCI had recommended the creation of a National Imagery Agency (NIA), which would absorb the CIA’s National
Photographic Interpretation Center as well as the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA).
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The task force’s vision for an NIA was not as broad as what had been recommended by some people in congressional hearings and written into proposed legislation by both the House and Senate intelligence committees. The broader vision would have created an agency that would control the entire range of imagery intelligence—research and development of future collection systems, operation of current systems, tasking (the selection of targets), and analysis of the images collected.
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During his testimony, Gates rejected the recommendations of both his task force and the congressional committees, noting he had no desire to establish a new, large agency. Gates was not alone in his reluctance to merge NPIC with DMA. Joint Chiefs chairman Colin Powell did not want to relinquish authority over DMA, which was vital to providing support to military operations.
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Gates and Powell did agree to the creation of a small Central Imagery Office (CIO), which was established within the Department of Defense in early May. The new office was to address the problems perceived to exist within the imagery intelligence effort, particularly by many in Congress and the military. Those problems included a lack of coherent imagery management, imagery collection and dissemination difficulties, budgetary constraints, and changing requirements for the support of military operations.
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The CIO was officially a joint CIA-DOD enterprise, chartered by both DCI and Defense Department directives.
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In contrast to the alternative national imagery agencies that had been proposed, the CIO was not designed to absorb existing agencies or take on their collection and analysis functions.

Rather, the mission of the CIO included tasking of national imagery systems (assuming that role in place of the DCI Committee on Imagery Requirements and Exploitation, or COMIREX) to ensure more effective imagery support to the Department of Defense, combat commanders, the CIA, and other agencies; advising the Secretary of Defense and the DCI regarding future imagery requirements; and evaluating the performance of imagery organizations. The most important role assigned to the new office was ensuring that imagery dissemination systems were “interoper-able”—that an image transmitted on one system (an Army system) could be received on another system (a Navy system). During the Gulf War, there had been fourteen different imagery transmission systems in the Middle East theater, only a few of which were interoperable.
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Creation of the CIO delayed, but did not prevent, creation of NIMA. In April 1995, then DCI-designate John Deutch told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that, if confirmed, he would “move immediately to consolidate the management of all imagery collection, analysis, and distribution.” He argued that “both effectiveness and economy can be improved by managing imagery in a manner similar to the National Security Agency’s organization for signals intelligence.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 simi
lar 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.
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