CDR: Going secret again
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.
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