The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense and a member of the U.S. Intelligence Community which designs, builds, launches, and operates the intelligence satellites of the U.S. federal government. It provides satellite intelligence to several government agencies, particularly signals intelligence (SIGINT) to the National Security Agency (NSA), imagery intelligence (IMINT) to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and measurement and signature intelligence (MASINT) to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The NRO announced in 2023 that it plans within the following decade to quadruple the number of satellites it operates and increase the number of signals and images it delivers by a factor of ten.
NRO is considered, along with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), NSA, DIA, and NGA, to be one of the "big five" U.S. intelligence agencies.Intelligence Agencies Must Operate More Like An Enterprise The NRO is headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia,"Contact the NRO " "National Reconnaissance Office Office of Public Affairs 14675 Lee Road Chantilly, VA 20151-1715" south of Washington Dulles International Airport. Historically, the NRO has maintained a close relationship with the CIA, and CIA officers and interns are often assigned to the NRO.
The director of the NRO reports to both the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense.Official NRO Fact Sheet via http://www.nro.gov, accessed March 2012 The NRO's federal workforce is a hybrid organization consisting of some 3,000 personnel including NRO cadre, Air Force, Army, CIA, NGA, NSA, Navy and U.S. Space Force personnel. A 1996 bipartisan commission report described the NRO as having by far the largest budget of any intelligence agency, and "virtually no federal workforce", accomplishing most of its work through "tens of thousands" of defense contractor personnel. From its founding in 1961 the NRO's existence was classified and not revealed publicly until 1992.
Mission The National Reconnaissance Office develops, builds, launches, and operates space reconnaissance and surveillance systems and conducts intelligence-related activities for U.S. national security.
The NRO 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 Intelligence Program (formerly known as 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, the United States Space Command, Naval Research Laboratory, and other agencies and organizations.
History
On 1 May 1960, a Central Intelligence Agency Lockheed U-2 was shot down over the Soviet Union, limiting reconnaissance flights to the edges of the Soviet Union and sparking Congress to increase funding for space based reconnaissance such as SAMOS and Missile Defense Alarm System - MIDAS. On 10 June 1960, President Eisenhower directed secretary of defense Thomas S. Gates Jr. to reassess space-based intelligence requirements, concluding that Samos, the Corona program, and U-2 all represented national assets and that they should be organized under a civilian agency in the Defense Department, not a single military service. There had been management problems and insufficient progress with the USAF satellite reconnaissance program. Forming NRO was based on a recommendation on August 25, 1960 to President Dwight D. Eisenhower during a special National Security Council meeting. The agency was to coordinate the USAF and CIA's (and later the navy and NSA's) reconnaissance activities. On 31 August 1960, Secretary of the Air Force Dudley C. Sharp created the Office of Missile and Satellite Systems under the Assistant Secretary of the Air Force to coordinate Air Force, Central Intelligence Agency, Navy, and National Security Agency intelligence reconnaissance activities. On 6 September 1961, the Office of Missile and Satellite Systems became the National Reconnaissance Office, taking over all space reconnaissance programs, such as Samos and Corona. Only MIDAS and the Vela nuclear detonation detection satellites remained in the Air Force's satellite inventory.
The NRO's first photo reconnaissance satellite program was the Corona program, the existence of which was declassified February 24, 1995, and which 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 about . 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 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.
NRO missions since 1972 are classified, and portions of many earlier programs remain unavailable to the public.
On August 18, 2000, the National Reconnaissance Office recognized its ten original Founders. They were: William O. Baker, Merton E. Davies, Sidney Drell, Richard L. Garwin, Amrom Harry Katz, James R. Killian, Edwin H. Land, Frank W. Lehan, William J. Perry, Edward M. Purcell. Although their early work was highly classified, this group of men went on to extraordinary public accomplishments, including a Secretary of Defense, a Nobel Laureate, a president of MIT, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Science, a renowned planetary scientist, and more.
Existence The NRO was first mentioned by the press in a 1971 New York Times article. The first official acknowledgement of NRO was a Senate committee report in October 1973, which inadvertently exposed the existence of the NRO. In 1985, a New York Times article revealed details on the operations of the NRO.
Despite news coverage of NRO's existence, the United States intelligence community debated for 20 years whether to confirm the reports. The existence of the NRO was declassified on September 18, 1992, by the Deputy Secretary of Defense, as recommended by the Director of Central Intelligence. The brief press release did not mention the word "satellite", and the agency did not confirm for several more years that it launched satellites on rockets.
Funding controversy 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.
In total, NRO had accumulated US$3.8 billion (inflation adjusted US$ billion in ) in forward funding. As a consequence, NRO's three distinct accounting systems were merged.
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'."
Future Imagery Architecture In 1999 the NRO embarked on a $25 billion project with Boeing entitled Future Imagery Architecture to create a new generation of imaging satellites. 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 a New York Times report called "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects."
Mid-2000s to present
On August 23, 2001, Brian Patrick Regan, a civilian employee of TRW at NRO, was arrested at Dulles International Airport outside Washington while boarding a flight for Zurich. He was carrying coded information about Iraqi and Chinese missile sites. He also had the addresses of the Chinese and Iraqi Embassies in Switzerland and Austria. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole for offering to sell intelligence secrets to Iraq and China.
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 while still in one piece, it would instead be shot down by a missile fired from a Navy cruiser. The intercept took place on February 21, 2008, resulting in the satellite breaking up into multiple pieces.
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. In August 2009, FOIA archives were queried for a copy of the NRO video, "Satellite Reconnaissance: Secret Eyes in Space."The Black Vault, "Download the declassified Satellite Reconnaissance: Secret Eyes in Space", NRO, August 2009. The seven-minute video chronicles the early days of the NRO and many of its early programs. It was proposed that the NRO share the imagery of the United States itself with the National Applications Office for domestic law enforcement purposes. The NAO was disestablished in 2009. The NRO is a non-voting associate member of the Civil Applications Committee (CAC). The CAC is an inter-agency committee that coordinates and oversees the Federal- Civil use of classified collections. The CAC was officially chartered in 1975 by the Office of the President to provide Federal- Civil agencies access to National Systems data in support of mission responsibilities. According to Asia Times Online, one important mission of NRO satellites is the tracking of non-US submarines on patrol or on training missions in the world's oceans and seas.
At the National Space Symposium in April 2010, NRO director General Bruce Carlson, United States Air Force (Retired) announced that until the end of 2011, NRO is embarking on "the most aggressive launch schedule that this organization has undertaken in the last twenty-five years. There are a number of very large and very critical reconnaissance satellites that will go into orbit in the next year to a year and a half."