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.