The Wizards of Langley (50 page)

A third In-Q-Tel investment may make it easier for the CIA to cover its tracks when collecting information off the Internet. The investment is intended to enhance a piece of software called Triangle Boy, which is produced by SafeWeb of Oakland, California. The commercial version of Triangle Boy allows users who want to examine a website without being
detected to go to SafeWeb’s website, which acts an intermediary. Anyone monitoring the user’s activity would see the traffic between the user and SafeWeb, but not between SafeWeb and the user’s ultimate destination. What interested the CIA was the ability of Triangle Boy to permit users to go to any number of innocuous addresses before going on to the actual site of interest. “We want to operate anywhere on the Internet in a way that no one knows the CIA is looking at them,” according to a senior CIA official.
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SafeWeb also has suggested that the CIA could use the same technology to allow its officers and assets in the field to communicate securely with Langley. Such an application may be part of the CIA’s plan, as described by George Tenet, “to take modern Web-based technology and apply it to our business relentlessly.”
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As another part of the reorganization, most of the responsibilities of the Clandestine Information Technology Office, the joint DS&T-operations directorate office, have been reassigned to the newly created Directorate of Operations Information Operations Center—a center that at one point was going to be assigned to the DS&T. The technical operations element of the CITO was transferred to the DS&T Office of Technical Collection.
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The plan to revitalize R&D has resulted in two organizational changes. A chief scientist “will encourage collaboration among the top scientists, engineers, and technologists from across the Intelligence Community, private industry, and academia.”
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In addition, the Office of Research and Development has been resurrected under a new name—the Office of Advanced Technologies and Programs (ATP). ATP is responsible for overseeing the transfer of new technologies from the drawing board and putting them into operational use. It is to “focus R&D on the CIA’s most difficult problems and core mission.”
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Over the almost forty years of its existence the Directorate of Science and Technology has made an enormous contribution to U.S. intelligence capabilities and national security.

Its development of collection systems, as well as its assorted collection and analysis activities, proved vital to the assessment of Soviet strategic capabilities and intentions during the Cold War. With key assistance from
its contractors, the directorate developed and deployed the HEXAGON (KH-9), RHYOLITE, and KENNAN (KH-11) systems and their successors. Each of those systems represented a quantum leap in U.S. intelligence capabilities.

The directorate also guided the development of the A-12/OXCART program. Although that program had a short life, without it there would have been no Air Force SR-71 aircraft, which operated for over two decades and provided valuable intelligence to U.S. national security officials. The agency’s efforts in the collection of telemetry intelligence, both from space and ground platforms, were vital to understanding Soviet missile capabilities during some of the darkest days of the Cold War.

Certainly there were missteps—attempting to turn cats into microphones and recruiting psychics are two notable examples. Undoubtedly there were others. But such cases are insignificant compared with the overall accomplishments of the directorate.

The winding down of the Cold War and the emergence of a new world environment have not eliminated the value of the DS&T’s contributions. Although the successors to RHYOLITE and the KH-11 are today formally assets of the NRO, they are unmistakably products of the Directorate of Science and Technology. Included are the three advanced KH-11 satellites in orbit, each with greater resolution, area coverage capability, and nighttime capability than those of the first generation. The upgraded version of the MAGNUM/ORION SIGINT satellite, which Bob Kohler fought so hard for and which was temporarily canceled, eventually made it back into the budget and was first launched into its geosynchronous orbit in 1995. Those SIGINT satellites also possess some of the relay capabilities intended to be part of the KODIAK system.

In addition, a number of scientific advances that emerged from the directorate, including its research and development office, not only have augmented U.S. intelligence capabilities but also have aided the work of those outside the national security establishment, including the medical community. Lithium batteries for pacemakers and automatic change recognition applied to the detection of breast cancer are two prominent examples.

It is important to note, both for the sake of history and in charting the directorate’s future, that such successes were not simply the result of the directorate carrying out its assigned duties, with the full support of the rest of the agency and intelligence community. Nor were they the result of a cautious, incremental approach.

One element of success was the outside pressure by far-sighted scientists such as James Killian and Edwin Land to develop the agency’s scientific capabilities. They were the prime movers in establishing first the Directorate of Research and then the Directorate of Science and Technology.

Another element was the willingness of managers to fight for roles and programs that they believed vital to national security, or to oppose programs they considered useless—even if that meant bureaucratic bloodshed. Had Bud Wheelon not passionately battled Brockway McMillan and the NRO, there would have been no HEXAGON or RHYOLITE. Carl Duckett’s lobbying to oppose the Secretary of Defense’s choice of FROG was one factor in ensuring that the first KH-11 was launched in 1976 and not 1986.

The DS&T’s achievements also required a collection of individuals with advanced technical skills and a sense of adventure—some willing to search for new technical solutions to problems and possibly fail, others willing to man primitive outposts in the Iranian mountains in order to uncover Soviet missile secrets. Leslie Dirks and Lloyd Lauderdale helped bring into being programs that Wheelon and Duckett conceived and fought for.

Another element of success was having an organization that sought to fill important gaps in U.S. collection and analysis capabilities. The DS&T did not try to duplicate what the National Security Agency was doing with regard to COMINT collection, but it did come up with novel ways to provide information that NSA or its military subsidiaries were not collecting—either because of their priorities or their technical approaches to collection problems. As a result, it was the CIA that developed the first telemetry intercept satellite and that deployed personnel to Iran to monitor telemetry from the TACKSMAN sites. Much of the CIA’s success resulted from identifying important gaps or shortcomings in other organizations’ programs and seeking to fill them.

The directorate’s connection to intelligence production—strongest when the agency’s nuclear and missile intelligence analysts were part of the directorate, but still strong after their transfer to the intelligence directorate—also helped produce success. The link between satellite developers and analysts that existed at CIA but not at the Air Force Office of Special Projects helped guide the developers’ work and motivate them to develop new capabilities that would solve old intelligence problems.

Of course, one factor underlying much of these gains was the presence of a major and very apparent enemy. Despite all the problems that the So
viet political and economic systems imposed on the nation, the USSR was still a formidable military threat—capable of deploying thousands of ICBM warheads and a massive army that could have, at the very least, destroyed Western Europe and the United States as modern civilizations. That threat helped attract many of the best and brightest to service in the CIA.

In addition, during much of the Cold War, CIA science and technology operated at the cutting edge, substantially in advance of what was being done in either the private sector or other parts of the government. For many who liked tough challenges, the CIA was an exciting place to be.

How the DS&T will meet the challenges of the future is a chapter of its history yet to be written. It will never be the bureaucratic empire that it was in 1972. Nor should it be. Clearly it is a vastly different world from 1972. The demise of the Soviet Union, the concern about transnational threats including terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to rogue states (with their sophisticated secret police and denial and deception programs), the shift of the development of cutting-edge technologies to the private sector, the deployment of high-resolution commercial imagery satellites, and the shift in the volume and means of international communication mean that priorities and targets have shifted. The volume of information has also increased dramatically, making it harder to find useful information among the flood of data. New collection and processing capabilities have been developed, but much work still needs to be done to enhance collection, processing, and analytical capabilities.

It is clear that the directorate should continue to devote significant attention to how to employ information technology to ease the burden on intelligence analysts. In an April 1999 speech to a technology conference in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, Basil Scott, a senior DS&T official, addressed both subjects. He enumerated a number of factors that made it harder to monitor foreign communications—including the spread of fiber-optic systems, the explosion of cellular phones, and encryption. At the same time, he suggested how information technology could be used to help analysts identify biological and chemical weapon activities, although information indicating such activities may be buried in a mass of data. Scott discussed an assortment of data-mining and data-retrieval
techniques that could be employed, including clustering techniques that enable analysts to mine the most useful data sets first, link analysis to establish relationships, time-series analysis to identify time trends, and visualization—which lets analysts see “non-traditional presentations of data” that “can help [them] deal with large and complex data sets.”
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Exploiting information technology will undoubtedly be a key activity for the directorate, but that should not be its only reason for being. Indeed, if the only significant directorate activities were to be information technology and support to clandestine human intelligence operations, there would be little reason for it to exist as a separate directorate—for the offices involved could be placed comfortably in the intelligence and operations directorates.

But outside those activities there remain many potential challenges. Although analysts have a flood of information to deal with, there can also be a paucity of information concerning topics of crucial importance—including foreign weapons of mass destruction programs and terrorism.

As long as the Office of Technical Collection and the Office of Development and Engineering remain part of the directorate, it retains the potential to make a significant contribution to the technical collection of intelligence. With nations adopting increasingly sophisticated denial and deception strategies to foil collection of information by U.S. imagery and signals intelligence satellites, OTC development of emplaced sensor systems to detect nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons activity and OTC participation in the Special Collection Service may prove to be among the directorate’s most productive activities.

As previously noted, the Office of Development and Engineering, particularly as a result of the NRO restructuring, serves as a funnel for CIA personnel into the NRO rather than as a separate program element of the reconnaissance office. But the OD&E can ensure that some of the advantages that resulted from the directorate’s dual identity as the NRO’s Program B not be lost. The office recruited people from the Directorate of Intelligence, particularly the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research; this influx of personnel helped ensure that those developing reconnaissance satellites did not lose touch with the requirements of the analysts. In 1999, former OD&E director Robert Kohler said that the office felt like an “outcast,” with the connection to the rest of the agency being a tenuous one. If the CIA were to back away from the OD&E and the NRO, it would be a “huge loss” to the reconnaissance effort, according to Kohler.
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Likewise, Gordon Oehler, former director of the Non-Proliferation
Center, has complained that “the centralization of the . . . NRO . . . , where the only major pot of development money remains, removed many of the CIA’s best technologists from day-to-day contact with operators and analysts in the rest of the CIA.”
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To reverse or limit such disengagement will require leadership from the top of the directorate.

Another factor in determining the extent to which the directorate prospers in the next decade is whether it continues to identify areas where the activities of other CIA and intelligence community components are deficient and moves to fill those gaps. As already noted, the directorate did not rise to empire status by attempting to duplicate what other agencies or CIA components did well.

Of course, people are another vital element in any future directorate successes. Over the almost forty years since it was created, the directorate has employed exceptional managers and scientists—as demonstrated by the directorate personnel named as CIA trailblazers in 1997, including the first four chiefs of the DS&T (Wheelon, Duckett, Dirks, and Hine-man) as well as analysts, scientists, and technical service personnel. Recruiting and retaining such people today—when the technological frontier is often found in Silicon Valley and when corporate salaries far exceed government compensation—are far more difficult tasks than in the past.