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National Reconnaissance Office
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The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), located in Chantilly, Virginia, is one of the 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. It designs, builds and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the United States government. It also coordinates collection and analysis of information from airplane and satellite reconnaissance by the military services and the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program, which is part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program.
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Encyclopedia
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), located in Chantilly, Virginia, is one of the 16 intelligence agencies in the U.S. It designs, builds and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the United States government. It also coordinates collection and analysis of information from airplane and satellite reconnaissance by the military services and the Central Intelligence Agency. It is funded through the National Reconnaissance Program, which is part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program. The agency is part of the Department of Defense.
The NRO works closely with its intelligence and space partners, which include the National Security Agency (NSA), the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the United States Strategic Command, Naval Research Laboratory and many other high level agencies and organizations. It has been proposed that the NRO share imagery of the United States itself with the newly-created National Applications Office for purposes of domestic law enforcement.
The NRO is responsible for operating ground stations around the world which collect and distribute intelligence gathered from reconnaissance satellites.
History
Due to management problems and insufficient progress with the USAF satellite reconnaissance program (see SAMOS and MIDAS), the NRO was established on August 25, 1960. The formation was based on a 25 August 1960 recommendation to President Eisenhower during a special National Security Council meeting, and the agency was to coordinate the USAF and CIA's (and later the Navy and NSA's) reconnaissance activities. The NRO's first photo reconnaissance satellite program was the Corona program, the existence of which was declassified February 24, 1995, existed from August 1960 to May 1972, although the first test flight occurred on February 28, 1959. The Corona system used (sometimes multiple) film capsules dropped by satellites, which were recovered mid-air by military craft. The first successful recovery from space (Discoverer XIII) occurred on August 12, 1960, and the first image from space was seen six days later. The first imaging resolution was 8 meters, which was improved to 2 meters. Individual images covered, on average, an area of approximately 10 by 120 miles (16 by 190 km). The last Corona mission (the 145th), was launched May 25, 1972, and this mission's last images were taken May 31, 1972.
From May 1962 to August 1964, the NRO conducted 12 mapping missions as part of the "Argon" system. Only seven of these missions were successful.
In 1963, the NRO conducted a mapping mission using higher resolution imagery, as part of the "Lanyard" program. The Lanyard program flew one successful mission.
Missions of the NRO subsequent to 1972 are still classified, and portions of many earlier programs remain unavailable to the public.
In 1985, a New York Times article exposed the existence and operations of the NRO.
The existence of the NRO was declassified by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, as recommended by the Director of Central Intelligence on September 18, 1992.
A Washington Post article in September 1995 reported that the NRO had quietly hoarded between $1 billion and $1.7 billion in unspent funds without informing the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon, or Congress. The CIA was in the midst of an inquiry into the NRO's funding because of complaints that the agency had spent $300 million of hoarded funds from its classified budget to build a new headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia a year earlier. The presence of the classified new headquarters was revealed by the Federation of American Scientists who obtained unclassified copies of the blueprints filed with the building permit application. After 9/11 those blueprints were apparently classified. The reports of an NRO slush fund were true. According to former CIA general counsel Jeffrey Smith, who led the investigation: "Our inquiry revealed that the NRO had for years accumulated very substantial amounts as a 'rainy day fund.'"
In 1999 the NRO embarked on a project with Boeing entitled Future Imagery Architecture to create a new generation of imaging satellites. A November 11, 2007 investigative report by The New York Times found that in 2002 the project was far behind schedule and would most likely cost $2 billion to $3 billion more than planned, according to NRO records. The government pressed forward with efforts to complete the project, but after two more years, several more review panels and billions more in expenditures, the project was killed in what the Times report calls "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects."
In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, NRO was planning an exercise [on] Sept. 11 [2001] in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings. But the cause wasn't terrorism it was to be a simulated accident.
Officials at the Chantilly, Va.-based National Reconnaissance Office had scheduled an exercise that morning in which a small corporate jet would crash into one of the four towers at the agency's headquarters building after experiencing a mechanical failure.
The agency is about four miles from the runways of Washington Dulles International Airport. ... Adding to the coincidence, American Airlines Flight 77 the Boeing 757 that was hijacked and crashed into the Pentagon took off from Dulles at 8:10 a.m. on Sept. 11, 50 minutes before the exercise was to begin. It struck the Pentagon around 9:40 a.m., killing 64 aboard the plane and 125 on the ground.
In charge of the "exercise" was CIA man John Fulton, head of the NRO's "Strategic War Gaming Division". [See below.]
In January 2008, the government announced that a reconnaissance satellite operated by the NRO would make an unplanned and uncontrolled re-entry into the earth's atmosphere in the next several months. Satellite watching hobbyists said that it was likely the USA-193, built by Lockheed Martin Corporation, which failed shortly after achieving orbit in December 2006. On February 14, 2008, the Pentagon announced that rather than allowing the satellite to make an uncontrolled re-entry, it would instead be shot down by a missile fired from a Navy cruiser.
The intercept took place on February 21, 2008.
In July 2008, the NRO declassified the existence of its Synthetic Aperture Radar satellites, citing difficulty in discussing the creation of the Space-Based Radar with the United States Air Force and other entities.
Organization
The NRO is part of the Department of Defense. The Director of the NRO is appointed by the Secretary of Defense with the consent of the Director of National Intelligence, without confirmation from Congress. Traditionally, the position was given to either the Undersecretary of the Air Force or the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space, but with the appointment of Donald Kerr as Director of the NRO in July 2005 the position is now independent.
The NRO is staffed by personnel from the CIA, NSA, NGA, DIA, the military services, and civilian defense contractors.
The Agency has the following directorates:- SIGINT Systems; Communications Systems; IMINT systems; and Advanced Systems and Technology. (SIGINT=signals intelligence; IMINT=imagery intelligence.)
"Strategic War Gaming Division"
According to a pamphlet advertising a security conference in 2002, the NRO has a "Strategic Wargaming Division", then headed by John Fulton, who was "on staff for the CIA".
Spacecraft
The NRO spacecraft include:
See also
External links
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