National Reconnaissance Office (NRO)

For thirty-one years the National Reconnaissance Office did not officially exist. It ran the most expensive intelligence systems the United States owned, and its satellites photographed every Soviet missile field, but its name was classified until 18 September 1992^1,2. The first known mention of it in the press came in a New York Times article in January 1971; a Senate committee report let the name slip again in October 1973¹.

Origins: satellites without an owner

By 1960 the United States had three overhead programs pulling in different directions: the CIA's U-2 aircraft, the CIA–Air Force CORONA satellite, and the Air Force's own SAMOS satellite. The Navy had a fourth, Grab, a small signals-intelligence satellite built by the Naval Research Laboratory and first launched on 22 June 1960; it collected Soviet air-defense radar signals and was not declassified until 1998¹.

The loss of a U-2 over the Soviet Union on 1 May 1960 made satellites the only way to look deep into Soviet territory. That summer Eisenhower ordered a review, and on 31 August 1960 the Air Force created a civilian-led Office of Missile and Satellite Systems under Under Secretary Joseph Charyk. That office became the core of the NRO¹.

On 6 September 1961 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles agreed to establish the NRO, run jointly by Charyk and the CIA's Richard Bissell. It managed a new National Reconnaissance Program covering both CORONA and SAMOS¹.

The alphabet programs

Bissell left the CIA in February 1962 after the Bay of Pigs, and a second Defense–CIA agreement on 2 May 1962 gave the NRO a single director and brought in the Navy's Grab. On 23 July 1962 Charyk organized the office into four parts that lasted thirty years¹:

• Program A, the Air Force satellite effort, in El Segundo, California.
• Program B, the CIA satellite effort, in the northern Virginia suburbs.
• Program C, the Navy effort, drawing on the Naval Research Laboratory and the NSA.
• Program D, the U-2 and the A-12/SR-71 aircraft (see Project Oxcart).

The NRO's own history describes the result as "a highly decentralized federation." The director acted like a corporate chief executive deciding budgets and new starts, while most staff thought of themselves as Air Force, CIA or Navy people first¹. Two more agreements, of 13 March 1963 and 11 August 1965, shifted authority back and forth between the Secretary of Defense and the DCI. The 1965 agreement made the Defense Secretary responsible for the NRO's operation, gave him final approval of its budget, and created an executive committee to oversee the program¹.

What it flew

CORONA returned its first film in August 1960 and flew until May 1972³. About a year after the first CORONA launch the NRO began GAMBIT, a high-resolution system first launched in 1963 with the KH-7 camera; GAMBIT 3, with the KH-8, followed in 1966. HEXAGON, a broad-area search system that sometimes carried a mapping camera, replaced CORONA from 1971⁴. Grab's successor, Poppy, flew seven missions between 1962 and 1971¹.

The NRO's machinery also had a part in the Cuban Missile Crisis. In early October 1962 the State Department won agreement for an NRO report on whether anything could substitute for U-2 flights over Cuba, one of the delays before the flight of 14 October found the missiles⁵.

On 1 October 1974 Program D was disbanded and its aircraft were handed to the Air Force¹. President Ford's Executive Order 11905 of 18 February 1976 listed the NRO in the intelligence community only as "special offices for the collection of specialized intelligence through reconnaissance programs"¹. On 1 October 1978, to support the SALT II treaty, President Carter confirmed publicly that the United States used reconnaissance satellites^1,3.

Coming into the open

After the Cold War a task force chaired by the former Lockheed chief executive Robert Fuhrman recommended abolishing the alphabet structure and admitting that the NRO existed. National Security Directive 67, signed on 30 March 1992, approved the reorganization, which took effect on 31 December 1992 with separate directorates for signals intelligence, imagery and communications¹. The fact of the NRO was declassified that September, partly because the Senate intelligence committee said it would do so itself unless the President certified serious damage¹.

Openness brought scrutiny. In 1994 Senate leaders said the cost of the new headquarters at Westfields in Chantilly, Virginia, had not been properly disclosed; a joint Defense–CIA review found no intent to mislead but faulted the NRO's budgeting. In 1995 the Senate committee found that the agency had built up large unspent "forward funding," eventually estimated at $3.7 billion, and in February 1996 DCI John Deutch removed the director and deputy director¹. CORONA imagery was released in 1995 and Grab declassified in 1998^3,1. A national commission reported in 2000 that the NRO, once a small organization serving a few strategic customers, had become a large agency supplying data to the NSA, the imagery agency and military users².

Operations in these files

February 1958 – 31 May 1972 CORONA America's first photographic reconnaissance satellite, run by the CIA and Air Force from 1958 to 1972. Its film buckets, caught in midair, ended the missile-gap guesswork and stayed secret until 1995. 10 August – 20 November 1962 Intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis How US intelligence missed, then found, Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962: a wrong estimate, a five-week gap in U-2 coverage, the 14 October flight over San Cristóbal, and what the photographs never showed.