In late June 1998, a CIA press release announced that Ruth David’s tenure as Deputy Director for Science and Technology would end that September. She would be departing to become the President and Chief Executive Officer of ANSER, a nonprofit research institute established in 1958 to conduct studies for the Air Force; it subsequently added the Defense Department and other federal agencies to its list of clients.1
The press release contained praise from David’s boss, DCI George Tenet, who expressed his gratitude for “the wise counsel she has given our intelligence collectors and analysts.” He explained that “Dr. David came to the Agency at a time when we needed a leader who could guide the DS&T through major geopolitical transformations that are profoundly affecting how we conduct our mission.” The DCI credited her with developing and delivering “the capabilities our collectors and analysts need to do their critical work in this new and fast-changing environment.”2
Tenet may have been pleased with David’s accomplishments, but many in the directorate were not. The controversy over FBIS, the loss of NPIC, and the closure of ORD could not but help hurt morale in at least some segments of the directorate. Many veterans undoubtedly would echo the question of one retired directorate official, who wondered, “How can you have any morale if you keep giving everything away?”3
Of course, David came into office with a restructured NRO a fait accompli, and she did not give away NPIC—John Deutch did. In addition, her outsider status, and possibly her gender, made it even more difficult for her to lead the directorate. Perhaps a longtime, well-respected directorate veteran might have made what has been not only a transformation but a decline in its status easier for the rank and file to accept.
It can also be argued that increased attention to information technology, as recommended by one of Jim Hirsch’s blue-ribbon panels, should be pursued aggressively in order to cope with the information revolution that has resulted in the availability of an overwhelming volume of data. If the increased emphasis on information technology provides innovative solutions to that problem, it could prove to be at least one significant accomplishment on David’s part.
At the same time, there may be merit to the complaints that she did not appreciate the CIA’s culture or the DS&T’s history. David’s decisions with regard to FBIS and ORD clearly rubbed salt in existing wounds. In the view of one former ORD director, she failed to appreciate that there was more to the directorate than “getting into people’s computers”—that the directorate involved dozens of specialties.4
However much Tenet may have valued David’s leadership, the DCI apparently did not consider finding a replacement to be a matter of great urgency. The directorate was left in the hands of an acting deputy director—Joanne Isham, who had served as David’s deputy since February 1996, initially focusing on resource management issues. Isham, with a B.A. in government and international studies from Notre Dame, had begun her career at the CIA in 1977. Her assignments included several in the Office of Development and Engineering—as chief of security for the Collection Systems Group, as a reconnaissance program manager, and with the Data Communications Group. She also served as the first head of NRO’s public affairs office as well as head of its legislative affairs office. In 1993 and 1994, she was deputy director of resource management for the Community Management Staff. Prior to rejoining the S&T directorate, she served as the CIA’s Director of Congressional Affairs.5
That Tenet did not consider the DS&T as critical a component as it once was possibly explains why the strategic plan that he introduced in spring 1998 focused on the operations and intelligence directorates. At one point, as the days and weeks and then months dragged on without David’s replacement being chosen, Evan Hineman suggested to Tenet that he should either find a new head for the directorate or abolish it.6
Tenet chose the first alternative. In late March 1999, the CIA announced that Dr. Gary L. Smith, the recently retired director of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL), would join the agency later that spring as the new deputy director for science and technology. Smith, who received bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees from the University of California at Davis, joined APL in 1970, where he initially was involved in theoretical and experimental research on detecting submerged submarines.7
Smith was coming from a position that seemed to provide perfect training for leadership of the science and technology directorate. APL has a staff of about 2,700, over 60 percent of whom are engineers and scientists. The laboratory describes itself as “a technical resource to the Department of Defense . . . for innovative research and development.” It designed, for example, the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite, which was orbited in April 1996. The MSX carried three sensors whose primary mission was to collect data on ballistic missile signatures.8
But Smith’s particular background and the CIA press release concerning his appointment suggested that developing collection systems would not be Smith’s primary focus. The release noted that in his tenure at APL, Smith had forged “strong ties with the national security community, including operating forces of the military, with senior decisionmakers in a broad range of government agencies, and with Congress.” Even more to the point was the praise for Smith’s building of “new relationships with commercial and industrial research sponsors” and his role in “commercializing [the lab’s] technology breakthroughs.”9
In the release, Tenet expressed his confidence that Smith would “lead the Directorate of Science and Technology into the next century with equal foresight, boldness and agility” as he displayed at APL. Tenet added that he had no doubt that under Smith’s leadership, the directorate “will carry on its proud tradition of putting technology to work enhancing the effectiveness of clandestine collection and all-source analysis.”10
But Smith would not be leading the directorate into the next century with boldness or any other quality. On January 12, 2000, DCI George Tenet announced that Smith, after only nine months in office, had turned in his resignation. The DCI explained that Smith would “like to continue his interrupted retirement.” Tenet told CIA employees that “Gary has facilitated an effective transition . . . I know you all join me in thanking Gary for his contributions.” 11
Smith’s sudden departure raised eyebrows both within and outside the CIA, as some wondered if there was something more to the abrupt resignation than a desire to return to retirement—Smith left without either cleaning out his office or submitting a letter of resignation. The story that circulated among a number of present and former CIA personnel is that Smith was never welcomed into the agency’s inner circle, and was abruptly fired by DCI George Tenet for pushing him in directions he did not want to go.12*
This time there was no delay in finding a new deputy director. Along with his announcement of Smith’s departure, Tenet informed the CIA’s employees that Joanne Isham would replace Smith—as deputy director, not acting deputy director. Of Isham, he said, “I have no doubt that under Joanne’s leadership, the DS&T will carry on its great tradition of putting technology to work to enhance the effectiveness of clandestine collection and all-source analysis—the key components of our Strategic Direction efforts here at CIA.”13 Significantly, he made no reference to directorate efforts with regard to the development of collection systems or the collection of intelligence—which in the past were the key components of the directorate’s activities.
In explaining Isham’s selection, a CIA spokesman noted that Tenet was comfortable with her, that she was well-respected, and that she had been “outstanding” as David’s deputy. In addition she had both CIA and community experience.14 Mark Lowenthal, former State Department intelligence official and House intelligence committee staff director, praised the appointment, observing that “she understands collection . . . what the systems are designed to do, and . . . the use to which the intelligence is being put.” However, Gordon Oehler, former head of the CIA’s Non-Proliferation Center, characterized Tenet as not understanding the importance of science and technology and his appointment of Isham, a nonscientist, as sending the message that he was “no longer interested in S&T.” Today, the directorate, Oehler laments, is a “mere shadow of itself.”15
With Isham moving up to the top job, James Runyan, the director of the Office of Technical Collection, became her associate deputy director. Run-yan joined the CIA in January 1997 as deputy director of OTC and became its director in September 1997. Before joining the agency, he had spent thirty years with the National Security Agency, during which time he “developed and deployed collection systems, and managed NSA efforts concerned with field, remote, and special collection responsibilities.”16
The bureaucratic loser was Dennis Fitzgerald, who served simultaneously as the head of OD&E and the NRO’s SIGINT directorate, and whose operation of collection systems. Fitzgerald had been passed over for the top DS&T job twice in a short period of time—first, in favor of Smith, and then in favor of Isham.17
By the end of September 2000 when one former senior DS&T official spoke to some current employees of the directorate, they expressed the fear that abolition of the directorate might be no more than two weeks away.
It is not clear that abolition was ever a serious possibility. In any case, two weeks later, a letter from Isham to former senior S&T leaders noted that she and her deputy had been assessing the state of the DS&T and that “it has become clear to us that some changes are necessary if we are to operate successfully in tomorrow’s dynamic environment.”18
Those changes focus on achieving “five essential goals” and are to be implemented through some significant organizational changes. The goals include establishing “a single point of entry” into the directorate for new requirements and a central hub for monitoring DS&T responsiveness, combining complementary activities (so as to increase communication and collaboration across organizational lines), integrating information technology activities, revitalizing research and development, and “develop[ ing] the work force of the future.”19
Achieving those goals are the responsibility of several new positions and offices. The Program Analysis and Systems Engineering Staff will receive new requirements and monitor the DS&T’s performance. Meanwhile, the Office of Advanced Analytical Tools (AAT) has been supplanted by the Office of Advanced Information Technology (AIT). Unlike the analytical tools office, AIT will not be a joint enterprise with the Directorate of Intelligence. AIT is a combination of AAT, the DS&T Information Services Center, and In-Q-Tel.20
In February 2001, Larry Fairchild, the director of AIT, noted that the CIA was not growing at a fast rate, but “the amount of information that comes into this place is growing by leaps and bounds.” Among the information tools AIT had under development, Fairchild disclosed, was a computer tool designated “Oasis,” which converted audio signals from television and radio broadcasts into text. Oasis can differentiate accented English to produce more accurate transcripts and distinguish between male and female speakers and among different individuals.21
Another AIT computer tool is FLUENT, which allows a user to conduct computer searches of documents in a number of foreign languages—including Chinese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Serbo-Croatian, and Ukrainian. An analyst can enter English words into the search field and receive relevant foreign-language documents in response. The system then translates the document into English and gives the analyst the option of sending it on to a human translator for more precision.22
In-Q-Tel is a nonprofit venture-capital firm that the CIA created in late 1999 and gave $28.5 million in agency funds. It is a legacy of Ruth David, who has recalled that the agency was accustomed to working with large defense contractors but not with the newer, smaller firms involved in information technology innovation. In 2000, In-Q-Tel heard from about 500 vendors who proposed projects that they believed would benefit the agency. Twelve development projects were actually funded.23
One In-Q-Tel–assisted project involved a commercial search engine named NetOwl, developed by SRA International in Fairfax, Virginia. NetOwl uses natural-language processing in place of keywords to locate information, and can deduce that a word is a name, an organization, or a place. In-Q-Tel funding has permitted SRA to increase the power of NetOwl—allowing it to identify events and relationships and create structured data from unstructured text. According to SRA’s vice-president, Hatte Blejer, it could search the Internet to provide an answer to a question such as “Which high-tech companies were established in northern Virginia last year?”24
In-Q-Tel funding was also instrumental in allowing companies to develop the Presidential Intelligence Briefing System (PIDS), which is used to produce the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) that only sixteen senior government officials are permitted to read. Previously, CIA analysts had to shuffle hundreds of intelligence cables every day to produce the PDB. The PIDS brings the cables into a Lotus Notes database, performs a variety of search and analysis functions, and then places the brief on a notebook computer. According to Lou Clark, a program manager at In-Q-Tel, PIDS delivers briefs that are more timely because information can easily be added up to the last minute.25
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.26
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.”27
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.28
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.”29
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.”30
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 Soviet 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.”31
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.32 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.”33 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.
It will be up to the leadership of the agency and directorate to ensure that the DS&T’s mission involves more than helping analysts sort through data, as well as to make talented individuals realize that there are challenges to be met in the directorate that cannot be matched elsewhere. Robert Kohler does see some hope for the directorate. In early 2001, he noted that Joanne Isham was “trying very hard” and boosting morale, and George Tenet seemed to be listening to her. Kohler was “moderately encouraged.” 34 It is hoped that in the succeeding years, the reasons to be encouraged will increase, and the next set of wizards will be up to the challenges that will face them.
*Smith declined to be interviewed for this book.