National Reconnaissance Office

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) builds and operates the reconnaissance satellites of the United States. It was created without a statute: "acting CIA Director, Gen Charles Cabell established the National Reconnaissance Office by concurring with Deputy Secretary of Defense, Roswell Gilpatric's 6 September 1961 memorandum." Richard Bissell of the CIA and Joseph V. Charyk of the Air Force were its first co-directors.¹

Agreements Between the Pentagon and the CIA

The office's authority was set by a sequence of agreements between the Department of Defense and the CIA. The second, of May 2, 1962, gave it a single director appointed by the Secretary of Defense with the concurrence of the Director of Central Intelligence. The third, of March 13, 1963, made it "a separate operating agency with the Defense Department," with a deputy director appointed by the DCI. A fourth, of August 11, 1965, signed by DCI William Raborn and Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance, removed the requirement for the DCI's concurrence in the choice of director.¹

On July 23, 1962, Charyk organized the satellite and aircraft work into lettered programs: Program A for Air Force satellites, Program B for CIA satellites, Program C for Navy satellites, and Program D for Air Force and CIA reconnaissance aircraft. Its programs included Corona, whose first imagery, of a Soviet bomber base at Mys Shmidta in Siberia, was taken on August 18, 1960; Grab, the first signals intelligence satellite, launched on June 22, 1960; and the U-2.¹

On December 22, 1978, William Kampiles, a former CIA employee, was sentenced to 40 years for stealing a manual for the KH-11 satellite and selling it to Soviet officials in Athens for 3,000 dollars.¹ The office's support to arms control verification under START-1 and to domestic disaster relief, including after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, ran through the Civil Applications Committee, chartered by President Gerald Ford in October 1975.¹

Directors

The office's own history lists its directors as follows:¹

• Richard M. Bissell Jr. and Joseph V. Charyk, co-directors, September 1961 to April 1962
• Joseph V. Charyk, April 1962 to March 1963
• Brockway McMillan, March 1963 to October 1965
• Alexander H. Flax, October 1965 to March 1969
• John L. McLucas, March 1969 to December 1973
• James W. Plummer, December 1973 to June 1976
• Charles W. Cook (acting), June 1976 to August 1976
• Thomas C. Reed, August 1976 to April 1977
• Charles W. Cook (acting), April 1977 to August 1977
• Hans M. Mark, August 1977 to October 1979
• Robert J. Hermann, October 1979 to August 1981
• Edward C. Aldridge Jr., August 1981 to December 1988
• Jimmie D. Hill (acting), December 1988 to September 1989
• Martin C. Faga, September 1989 to March 1993
• Jimmie D. Hill (acting), March 1993 to May 1994
• Jeffrey K. Harris, May 1994 to February 1996
• Keith R. Hall, February 1996 to December 2001
• Peter B. Teets, December 2001 to March 2005
• Dennis Fitzgerald (acting), March 2005 to July 2005
• Donald M. Kerr, July 2005 to October 2007
• Scott F. Large, October 2007 to April 2009
• Bruce A. Carlson, from April 2009

Hans Mark, son of the chemist Herman F. Mark, was also Secretary of the Air Force in the administration of Jimmy Carter.²

Declassification and Reorganization

A commission chaired by Robert Fuhrman, formerly chief executive of Lockheed, led to the replacement of the lettered programs with three functional directorates, for signals intelligence systems, imagery systems, and communications, under National Security Directive 67, signed by President George H.W. Bush on March 30, 1992, and effective December 31, 1992. A fourth directorate, Advanced Systems and Technology, was added in March 1997. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence then "informed the Intelligence Community that it wanted to declassify the existence of the NRO unless the President could certify that it would cause 'serious damage' to the nation." The existence of the office was declassified on September 18, 1992.¹

The Westfields Headquarters

On August 8, 1994, the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate committee, Dennis DeConcini and John Warner, released a letter saying they were "shocked and dismayed to learn that the cost of the new NRO headquarters at Westfields may reach $350 million by completion, nearly double the amount most recently briefed to the committee." Warner said: "I was absolutely astonished at the magnitude and proportions of this structure." The chairman of the House intelligence committee, Larry Combest, answered that "charges of CIA or NRO deception are absolutely erroneous." A joint Defense Department and CIA review "found no intent by NRO officials to mislead Congress," and found that "the NRO failed to follow Intelligence Community budgeting guidelines" by carrying the building's funds in its base operating budget.³

Forward Funding

In September 1995 Senator Arlen Specter, then chairman of the Senate committee, said the office had failed to eliminate excessive forward funding. "An initial survey that summer estimated that carryover funds across the entire NRO totaled $1.7 billion. After further review, this estimate rose to $3.7 billion." Senator Richard Bryan called it "rampant mismanagement." DCI John Deutch said he had not known of the surplus, as did the White House chief of staff, Leon Panetta. "Secretary of Defense William Perry and Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch directed Director Harris and Deputy Director Hill to resign." Congress recovered the money and applied it to operations in the Balkans, the B-2 bomber, and other defense projects.⁴

The Future Imagery Architecture

Boeing won the Future Imagery Architecture satellite contract over Lockheed Martin on September 3, 1999. The program ran into "technical problems, leading to a major spacecraft redesign, resulting in delays and overruns." In May 2003 a joint task force of the Defense Science Board and the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board found it "significantly underfunded and technically flawed," and in 2005 the Director of National Intelligence, John Negroponte, ended it as originally constituted. The National Commission for the Review of the NRO, chaired by Senator Bob Kerrey and Representative Porter Goss, had reported in November 2000 that the office was "supporting a growing number of users and missions with a budget that had not grown proportionately," and recommended that it "strike a more nuanced balance between openness and secrecy." Under the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, signed on December 17, 2004, the director reports to the Director of National Intelligence as well as to the Secretary of Defense.¹

Later Associations

In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture fund, lists the office as a partner from 2009.⁵ David Grusch, an intelligence officer of the NRO and of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, served as the NRO's representative on the UAP Task Force.⁶ He testified to a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee on July 26, 2023, that officials had told him of waived special access programs for the retrieval and reverse engineering of UAP that had not been disclosed to Congress.⁷