The Wizards of Langley (41 page)

The first victim was a Japanese ship that struck a mine outside Corinto on January 3 and had to be towed back into port. On the night of February 29, the CIA’s Latino assets placed four magnetic mines in Corinto’s harbor. ARDE’s “Barracuda Commandos” took credit for the operation. As NSC staffer Oliver North wrote to national security adviser Robert McFarlane, “our intention is to severely disrupt the flow of shipping essential to Nicaraguan trade during the peak export period.” There was also the desire to “further impair the already critical fuel capacity in Nicaragua.” North noted that in one particular case, “while we could probably find a way to overtly stop the tanker from loading/departing, it is our judgement that destroying the vessel and its cargo will be far more effective in accomplishing our overall goal of applying stringent economic pressure. It is entirely likely that once a ship has been sunk no insurers will cover ships calling in Nicaraguan ports.”
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By early April 1984, ten commercial ships had been hit by CIA mines—four Nicaraguan and six non-Nicaraguan (registered to Japan, the Netherlands, Liberia, Panama, and the Soviet Union). At least eight merchant marine vessels turned back from Nicaraguan ports to find safer waters, including a Mexican oil tanker carrying 75,000 barrels of much-needed fuel. The mining operation cost the Nicaraguans more than $10 million—cotton and coffee piled up on the docks, and imports and exports had to be trucked to and from ports in neighboring Central American countries.
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OTS had been responsible for establishing the technical requirements for the demolitions. Its Weapons Group produced the mine casings from sewer pipes, and the fuses were apparently provided by the Naval Surface Weapons Center in Silver Spring, Maryland. The mines were designed not to sink ships but to damage and disable them.
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Among those attending Hineman’s off-site meeting in September 1982 was Gen. Rutledge Parker Hazard, also known as “Hap” Hazard. A 1946 West Point graduate, Hazard spent the next twenty-seven years in the U.S. Army, including tours of duty as missile intelligence officer, an artillery group commander in Vietnam, and the manager of three different guided missile systems. When he retired from the Army in late 1973, he immediately joined the CIA. In 1978, he became the director of NPIC.
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Hazard’s tenure as NPIC director ended in February 1984, shortly after Robert M. “Rae” Huffstutler received a call from Hineman. At the time, Huffstutler was a twenty-five-year veteran of the agency and head of the intelligence directorate’s Office of Soviet Analysis. From 1967 to 1982, he had served in the Office of Strategic Research.
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Hineman believed that it was necessary to upgrade NPIC. Just as the advent of the KH-9 had required changes, so had the arrival of the KH-11—only more so. Part of that transition had been the creation of a Priority Exploitation Group (PEG) at Ft. Belvoir that could scan incoming imagery. Meanwhile, at NPIC headquarters, Building 213 in the Washington Navy Yard, the Imagery Exploitation Group (IEG), except in crises situations, waited, as in the past, for the product to arrive. But the transition had not been fully made, which was not surprising. There had always been more emphasis on funding expensive collection systems and less on assuring that resources had been earmarked for the processing and exploitation of the data collected. But in 1984, with the end of the KH-8 and KH-9 film-return programs in sight, the need to adjust to the digital world was even more pressing.
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Early in his tenure, Hineman went to NPIC for a briefing on the center’s ability to exploit “soft-copy” data—KH-11 digital imagery that resided in an interpreter’s computer rather than in “hard-copy” form on a light table. He discovered that NPIC was unable to transfer the digital signals into a computer so that imagery analysts could fully exploit the data using a variety of algorithms. It was still necessary to use the digital signals to produce a hard-copy image, and then scan the image into the computer—a time-consuming, expensive process that also limited the extent to which the images could be enhanced.
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At the time Hineman called Huffstutler, NPIC was about eighteen months into the major modernization program required but clearly was not going to meet its 1986 target date. The deputy director told Hufstutler that NPIC was having some problems and he would like him to move
into the director’s chair. Huffstutler had served as deputy to Hineman in the weapons intelligence office, they had gotten along, and they thought alike in approaching problems. And after working on Soviet issues for fifteen years, Huffstutler was ready for a change. He was also quite familiar with NPIC’s product, since the strategic affairs and Soviet analysis offices had been among the interpretation center’s biggest customers.
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In addition to getting the modernization plan back on track, NPIC’s new director had two other concerns—ensuring that NPIC’s products could be used effectively by its customers and straightening out internal procedures. One of Huffstutler’s first acts was to review all of NPIC’s reporting. He concluded that imagery analysts did not really understand their role in the analytic process, that they didn’t quite have the proper feel for how their products were used by analysts in the intelligence directorate. Their reporting did not “separate in consistent and clear ways” what imagery analysts actually saw from their inferences. They might see a group of tanks but state without further explanation that the picture “showed” a military exercise taking place. A reader could not separate what the interpreter actually saw (the tanks) and what he inferred (the exercise) from the picture. Only three days after Huffstutler informed NPIC analysts of his views, their reporting began to change.
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He also addressed two other problems. One was the standard usage of “NPIC believes” in imagery interpretation reports, which he noted “made everyone mad” because it appeared to allow no room for dissent. He told his analysts they could say anything they wanted that met the standards of professionalism and reporting, but they could not turn their conclusions into NPIC’s conclusions. Huffstutler assured them that others would take their advice more often than not. There were no further complaints about NPIC reporting after that time, according to Huffstutler.
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He also moved to alleviate a feeling by his imagery interpreters that they were second-class citizens in the intelligence community, an effort that took most of his first year in office. The interpreters were referred to, both by analysts in the intelligence directorate and themselves, as “onesource” analysts. On the analytical totem pole, this seemed to place them under the “all-source” analysts in the intelligence directorate who worked with imagery, SIGINT, human intelligence, and open source data. Huff-stutler argued that it was really a question of different jobs. The imagery analysts had access to data from all sources and used that data in moving from what they saw to what they inferred. They were not simply describing what was in a picture but analyzing the significance of the picture.
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It took far longer than a year to complete the modernization process—indeed it extended into the terms of Hineman’s and Huffstutler’s successors. Two major aspects to the modernization program were causing the delays. One factor was changes in requirements coming out of the program office. The second was software problems.
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The program itself involved new work stations, new data bases, new connectivity to facilities (such as DIA and field activities), and new measurement equipment. Other steps needed were to put the Priority Exploitation Group at Ft. Belvoir on a twenty-four-hour-a-day basis, to ensure that all data came down in a usable form, and to update the requirements process.
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In addition to pursuing the modernization program, Huffstutler launched what he dubbed the National Exploitation Initiative, which involved the creation of a National Exploitation Laboratory (NEL). The concept was to create a “users program office” to speak with a unified voice with the procurement program office—the NRO. An early part of the initiative was to invite the directors of the military service’s imagery interpretation units to NPIC, update them on the modernization program, and try to establish a dialogue. The NEL, in addition to serving as a single voice for users in evaluating proposals from the Air Force and CIA elements of the NRO, served as a center for the development of equipment to be used in the exploitation process—helping create the best monitors, software, and other components of modernization.
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Huffstutler also initiated a database audit to determine the adequacy of the national imagery files, which had never been graded. The NPIC director arranged with the other imagery centers—those in DIA and the military services—to go back and sample past imagery and evaluate the accuracy of the reporting in the written cables. The Strategic Air Command assumed responsibility for the process with respect to air defense imagery, and NPIC took the leadership role for the remainder of the imagery. The audit revealed 96 percent accuracy. Plugging some of the holes discovered in reporting raised accuracy another 1 percent two years later, according to NPIC’s customers.
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Beyond the problems of modernization, Huffstutler’s NPIC had one major world crisis to deal with—one that required around-the-clock operations.
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On Saturday, April 26, 1986, a nuclear accident occurred eighty miles from Kiev, at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s reactor No. 4. As the result of a series of safety violations—including running the reactor
without the emergency cooling system and removing too many control rods—a small part of the reactor went “prompt critical.” The effect was the equivalent of a half ton of TNT exploding on the core. Four seconds later, a second explosion blasted the 1,000-ton lid off the reactor, destroyed part of the building, and brought the 200-ton refueling crane crashing down on the core. A “fireworks” display of glowing particles and fragments escaping from the units followed, setting off thirty fires in the building. In addition, the huge blocks of granite in the reactor core also caught fire, spewing out plumes of highly radioactive fission products.
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The first solid indication that the United States received concerning the accident was from an official Soviet statement on Monday, April 28. There had been signs of unusual activity around Kiev on Sunday, probably from communications intelligence, but what was happening was unclear. Only the following day was the situation clarified.
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Once alerted to the disaster, the intelligence community responded by turning its full set of resources on the Kiev area. A VORTEX signals intelligence satellite sucked up all military and relevant civilian communications within several hundred miles of Chernobyl. Due to launch failures in August 1985 and earlier in April, the U.S. space imagery capability consisted of a lone KH-11, 5506. It was reprogrammed to obtain photography of the nuclear reactor at the first opportunity. Its last visit had been almost two weeks before, and the first chance for 5506 to provide imagery came on Monday afternoon. However, given its orbital path, the image had to be obtained from a considerable distance and even with computer enhancement didn’t show much. Even had 5506 been closer to its target, the smoke hovering over the reactor area probably would have obscured the site. The following morning, the distance was still too great to produce a good photo, but by evening the KH-11 had approached close enough to return the first good imagery of the accident site. The picture was reported to be “good and overhead.” Huffstutler recalled the imagery as being “right down the core,” showing the concrete cap blasted right out and helicopters and firemen trying to deal with the consequences of the accident.
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With the photos in hand, analysts at NPIC began assessing the situation. The photos revealed that the roof of the reactor had been blown off and the walls were pushed out, “like a barn collapsing in a high wind,” said one source. Inside what was left of the building, there was an incandescent mass of graphite. Some tendrils of smoke and the blackened roof of the adjoining building indicated that at some point the fire had been more active. The graphite settled down into a glowing mass, while ra
dioactive material from a pile that had contained 100 tons of uranium was still being vented through the open roof and into the atmosphere.
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The photos revealed activity in the surrounding areas, activity that was quite remarkable given the perilous situation at Chernobyl: A barge was sailing peacefully down the Pripyat River, and men were playing soccer inside the plant fence less than a mile from the burned-out reactor. The photos of the town of Pripyat showed that there had been no evacuation.
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Among those briefed by NPIC with the satellite photos was the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “We were shown satellite pictures of the reactor building from before and immediately after the explosion,” committee member George D. Brown Jr. (D.–Calif.) said after a closed-door hearing on Thursday, May 1. “They were dramatic, with the roof beams collapsed and debris scattered around the plant. No bodies were visible,” he added.
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KH-11 photos taken on Thursday morning May 2 showed no smoke at all, leading an interagency panel to believe that it was possible the fire had been put out. Only the day before, despite Soviet claims that the fire had been extinguished, the panel had predicted that it might burn for weeks. Some analysts believed they detected shimmering over the reactor, suggesting that the graphite was still burning. It appeared that the Soviets were dumping dirt or sand on the fire from helicopters. One KH-11 photo showed a helicopter hovering directly in the plume of the radiation.
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