extracted from:
The Washington Post
Sunday, 2 January 1994
pages C1, C2
Outlook; Commentary and Opinion
The Pentagon's Secret Garden
With Inman's Arrival, Will The 'Black Budget' Grow?
by Bill Sweetman
Bobby Ray Inman, defense secretary-designate, is not merely the
first career military man to hold that position. He is also a
lifetime intelligence professional, with a background in
cryptography -- which, apart from the operation of covert agents
in hostile territory, is the most jealously guarded of all
intelligence activities. When Inman ran the National Security
Agency, it was a felony to disclose that the multibillion-dollar
agency existed.
Inman will not find himself lonely in this latest of the several
administrations in which he has served. Indeed, the rapid tapping
of Inman to replace Les Aspin follows other signs that the
Clinton administration shares the previous regime's enthusiasm
for secret weapons and covert operations.
Since the Berlin Wall came down, the Pentagon has lifted the
curtain an inch on a couple of secret projects (a Stealth ship
and a tactical missile) but dozens remain hidden -- including,
probably, the 4,000-mph spy plane called Aurora and other exotic
aircraft.
Inman's rise parallels the growth of the secret military, the
so-called "black world" that exists within the Pentagon and the
defense industry. Although estimates vary, it is likely that more
than $15 billion of the Pentagon's annual research, development
and production budget is spent on secret projects: about 16
percent of the total and much more than most countries spend to
equip their entire armed forces.
Secrecy costs billions. The fortified buildings, guards and the
vetting bureaucracy are only the start. Newly hired people spend
weeks doing nothing, waiting for their clearances. The cost of
shuttling workers from Las Vegas and California into remote sites
is enormous. Documents and data must be tracked with maniacal
care from the printer to the shredder. Ben Rich, former chief of
the Lockheed Skunk Works, reckons that the toughest "special
access" security rules add 10 to 15 percent to the cost of a
project, implying that the Pentagon spends $1.5 billion or more
per year on enforcing those rules.
The Soviet Union has come apart. Iraq was defeated using
(apparently) unclassified technology. If the black world has
invented anything newer and more exotic -- which it certainly
should have done, with all that money -- America's future
adversaries will probably not be able to do much about it even
if they know it exists.
When the Senate holds hearings on the Inman nominations later
this month, it will no doubt wish to consider more than the
defense secretary-designate's tax liabilities, "comfort level"
with the president or even his prior record in the service of his
country. One question in particular that should be asked of Inman
is, quite simply: From whom, exactly, is the black world still
keeping secrets?
Whether we will get an answer is uncertain. Inman is, as a former
intelligence officer notes, "steeped in the cult of
intelligence." He was the first intelligence professional to be
appointed special assistant to the chief of naval operations. He
is one of only two Navy intelligence men to be made full
admirals. He has been head or deputy chief of four intelligence
agencies: NSA, CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the
Office of Naval Intelligence.
In the early Reagan years, Inman's differences with his boss at
the CIA, Bill Casey, have been attributed to Casey's covert
operations. The codebreaker Inman, by contrast, leans toward
"technical means" of intelligence-gathering: satellites and
massive computer data banks.
Inman's links to James Guerin, the now-jailed arms
wheeler-dealer, and to Guerin's failed International Signal &
Control (ISC) conglomerate, provide interesting fodder for Aurora
observers. Inman went from the CIA to ISC as a member of an
independent proxy board responsible for ensuring that no military
secrets passed from ISC's U.S. subsidiaries to its non-U.S.
headquarters. In 1992, Inman wrote a letter to the sentencing
judge attesting to Guerin's "patriotism," and other ISC
defendants have claimed that the company's actions were
influenced by the CIA.
Although ISC is usually described as a maker of cluster bombs,
one of its major subsidiaries was the Marquardt Company. Now owned
by Kaiser, Marquardt is the most experienced U.S. developer and
producer of ramjets -- engines exclusively used for hypersonic
aircraft and missiles.
Inman, of course, got his first high-level job, the NSA
directorship, from Jimmy Carter. It was Carter, not Reagan, who
started the black world's expansion; and when Inman arrives at
the Pentagon he will find, in the next-door office, William J.
Perry, the Carter appointee who was most closely associated with
the black world's growth.
In 1976, before Perry was undersecretary of defense for research
and engineering, the Stealth project was not even classified.
Perry, who earned the title of "the godfather of Stealth," was
instrumental in the decision to fast-track Stealth into service,
over the doubts of many service chiefs -- and to bury in the
Pentagon basement. The new administration promptly removed the
project from the civilian-headed Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency and gave it to the Air Force, which concealed its
existence.
By 1978, Lockheed had a contract for an operational stealth
fighter, the F-117, and the Air Force was writing requirements
for a Stealth strategic bomber, to become the B-2. Although
fighter and bomber projects had never been secret in peacetime,
Carter's Pentagon hid both of them.
After Reagan's inauguration in 1981, Perry was the only senior
Carter appointee to remain at the Pentagon, serving for several
months as an advisor to incoming Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger and helping to get the B-2 project rolling.
Perry, who returned to the Pentagon in January 1993 as Clinton's
deputy defense secretary, should have a comfortable relationship
with Inman, for Perry has long-standing connections to the secret
world. In 1964, Perry helped found ESL Inc. (now part of TRW), to
develop and produce the electronic eavesdropping equipment that
provided Inman and his codebreaking colleagues with their raw
material. Perry was ESL's president until he went to Washington
in 1977.
Perry and Inman are not the only Clinton appointees with
black-world credentials. Air Force Secretary Sheila E. Widnall
was, for six years, a trustee of the Aerospace Corp., a unique
half-billion-dollar-per-year nonprofit organization that provides
management and technical support to the Air Force space program
-- well over half of which involves black reconnaissance projects
that support the CIA and NSA.
Secrecy is sometimes necessary, in military affairs, to protect
lives in combat. In the intelligence world, lives are often at
stake, even in peacetime. But the intelligence community still
tags as "secret" information that has already been revealed or
can be inferred from observations and from physics (such as the
orbits and basic capabilities of spy satellites). The
professionals argue that any doubt in an adversary's mind about
what you know helps them do their jobs -- which is why the
details of "technical means" are so carefully protected. But why
they do not consider, and should be made to consider, is the
damage that secrecy does to the credibility of the military and
hence to its effectiveness in an open society.
One example concerns 3,900 acres of public land in the Nevada
desert that the Pentagon wants to close under armed guard. The
land is adjacent to the Switzerland-seized tract that the Air
Force uses for training and where the Department of Energy tests
nuclear weapons.
A letter from Air Force Secretary Widnall to Interior Secretary
Bruce Babbitt says that the land is needed "for the safe and
secure operation of the activities on the Nellis range."
Widnall's explanation is vague to the point of deceptiveness. The
land grab has nothing to do with safety, and everything to do
with preventing ordinary U.S. citizens -- who can now easily take
a hike to a vantage point on the adjacent public land -- from
seeing an Air Force flight-test base known as Groom Lake.
But Widnall can't tell Babbitt that, because, officially, Groom
Lake does not exist -- never mind that a Russian satellite photo
of the base is reproduced in the instructions for the Testor
Corp.'s newest Aurora hobby-kit model. No material cleared by the
Air Force, even if it concerns events of almost 30 years ago, can
mention the base as anything other than "a remote facility."
The seizure confirms that Groom Lake is not a monument to the
Cold War, but an active flight-test center. It also confirms that
the Soviet Union -- as the only nation that posed a direct threat
to the United States -- never was the only target of the
ultra-tight security that surrounds the Pentagon's gigantic
secret or "black" budget.
In the Pentagon, however, secrecy is often equated with
efficiency. A high-ranking defense executive, an engineer who has
worked with the CIA and on Stealth projects, observes that "Bill
Perry is in favor of skunk-works projects, created and developed
by small teams." Given the Pentagon's own massive bureaucracy,
the maze of procurement rules and Congress's insatiable
appetite for oversight, secrecy may be the only way for this to
work, as it was when Lockheed's Skunk Works created the U-2,
SR-71 Blackbird and F-117.
Some projects are also concealed for their own protection, the
same executive explains: "When you have really radical solutions,
the inertia of the establishment is so great that spend all their
energy fighting to stay alive." The tank and the submarine, for
example, are classic examples of breakthrough ideas that faced
strong opposition. The executive compares the black world to
Australia -- a place where unique creations can evolve to their
full potential without being gobbled up by an established
predator.
The 535-member board of directors on Capitol Hill does not always
help. Some people in Congress try hard to come to grips with the
issues. Some find that a new weapon's military utility correlates
to the number of jobs it brings to their district. Others are
know-nothings who regard military leaders as incompetent, but who
would have a hard time explaining how an airplane stays up, let
alone how it could be made invisible to radar. Given the erratic
behavior of the Washington machine, it is hardly surprising that
the professionals sometimes feel justified in stringing razor
wire across the kitchen door, the better to keep a hundred
amateur cooks away from the soup kettle.
Inman's appointment could be good or bad news for those pressing
for fewer secrets in the post-Soviet world. Like many
intelligence professionals, Inman may believe that unlocking the
vaults would be a mistake; his "comfort level" discussions with
Clinton may have included an understanding that the White House
would respect that view.
On the other hand, Inman may have decided that the demise of the
Soviet Union does permit more openness, or that it requires
radical change to the intelligence structure. In that case, Inman
-- as a military man and intelligence professional -- is in a
much better position to lead the spooks and soldiers through such
changes than Aspin would have been.
Inman's confirmation hearings are our only chance to find out
which way he plans to go. The opportunity should not be missed.
