Beijing's spy masters are said to gather secrets brought home by thousands of traveling government officials, students and businessmen. Well, the Central Intelligence Agency has its own operation, the National Resources Division, for collecting nuggets of information and bits of insight from American tourists, scholars and executives returning from overseas.
"Even during the Cold War, by far the most useful source of information about the details of matters in the U.S.S.R. was the interagency emigre exploitation program coordinated by the CIA's Domestic Collection division, later called the National Resources Division," according to Allen Thomson, a retired CIA scientist. "Overhead photography was wonderful for some things, but there's a limit to what you can tell by looking down from several hundred miles up. . . . And classical espionage, despite its theoretical promise, came in a dead and distant last in terms of actual performance."
One irony, as a House select committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) prepares to release an unclassified version of its report on technology transfers to China and Chinese espionage, is that the NRD has been busy debriefing executives from U.S. satellite companies as they return from China about Beijing's missile capabilities and satellite needs.
During the Cold War, Thomson recalled, Soviet emigres rarely provided intelligence blockbusters. "But the little bits and pieces, patiently collected and collated," Thomson said, "were of enormous value in understanding the Soviet Union."
A New Wizard at Langley
Gary L. Smith, director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University, is the newest "wizard" of Langley, set to take over the CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology this month. The DS&T is the agency's "Q branch," the place that dreams up, disguises and invents gadgets for far-flung spies. But it's hardly the empire it once was in the 1960s and early 1970s, when CIA scientists designed the agency's own spy satellites and CIA pilots flew U-2 reconnaissance missions.
"For a very significant period of time during the Cold War, it was really the most significant component of the intelligence community," said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence expert and author now hard at work on "The Wizards of Langley," a book about the DS&T.
But the directorate's mission has dwindled as other parts of the intelligence community more closely controlled by the Pentagon have grabbed pieces of the DS&T empire.
The U-2 program went to the Air Force in 1974 and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) got rid of "Program B," a CIA management component, in 1992. Four years later, the Pentagon created the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA), taking control of the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center, the agency responsible for analyzing aerial imagery.
Richelson called the CIA's removal from imagery analysis "a very unfortunate move--the whole intelligence community, and country, is worse off because of that."
Keeping Budget Secrets Too
Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet, continuing to fight further disclosure of CIA budget information, asked a federal judge last week to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the Federation of American Scientists seeking the fiscal 1999 budget request and Congress's appropriation for intelligence.
Having previously disclosed overall intelligence spending of $26.6 billion in fiscal 1997 and $26.7 billion in fiscal 1998, Tenet has refused further disclosure for the past year and now argues that releasing the 1999 total would damage national security by revealing spending trends of interest to foreign spies.
"Now is an especially critical and turbulent period for the intelligence budget," Tenet said, "and the continued secrecy of the fiscal year 1999 budget request and total appropriation is necessary for the protection of vulnerable intelligence capabilities."
Steven Aftergood, director of the federation's project on government secrecy, called Tenet's argument "silly and infuriating." He has also filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the fiscal 2000 budget request and, if denied, promises to make that part of the lawsuit.
Vernon Loeb's e-mail address is loebv@washpost.com