Small Cuts in Intelligence Spending Seen : Budget: White House’s $30-billion proposal is unchanged from peaks of Cold War. Congress is expected to make deeper reductions.

The White House plans only marginal cuts in the U.S. intelligence budget despite the disappearance of the nation’s chief enemies, the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, intelligence and congressional officials said Monday.

The Bush Administration has proposed a 1993 intelligence budget of about $30 billion--virtually unchanged from the current year or from the peak years of the Cold War, officials said.

The exact figures are classified, but Central Intelligence Agency officials and congressional aides said intelligence spending would be reduced next year by only about 2% to 3%.

Sources said the Administration has proposed a 10% overall cut in intelligence spending over the next five years.

The Pentagon budget, by contrast, is expected to shrink by 6% or 7% in each of the next four years to yield a 25% to 30% cut in military spending by 1996.

On top of those reductions, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney announced in January that he was trimming Pentagon spending by an additional $50 billion over the next five years, including the cancellation of a number of major weapons systems, such as the B-2 bomber and the Seawolf submarine.

But sources said none of the $50 billion would come from intelligence programs, over which the Pentagon has spending authority. “We’re not taking a nickel cut,” a senior intelligence agency official said. “He (Cheney) asked nothing of intelligence.”

The intelligence budget--which includes funding for the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office and several smaller agencies--has never been openly discussed. Spending for intelligence programs is hidden in the Defense Department budget, which is $285 billion in the next fiscal year.

Congress is almost certain to cut deeper than the Administration has proposed when it begins its closed-door debate on the 1993 intelligence budget this spring.

A congressional aide who tracks intelligence said: “I can’t imagine that it would hold in committee.” He suggested that the Administration may be sending an unrealistically high budget to force the Senate Intelligence Committee to make the hard decisions about where to cut U.S. espionage capabilities.

“The committee will seek additional cuts but it will not be a partisan issue,” the aide said. “This committee does not operate that way. I doubt the Republicans will take this (budget proposal) any more seriously than the Democrats will.”

CIA Director Robert M. Gates has argued that the collapse of the Soviet Union has created new and difficult intelligence problems, such as tracking the movement of 30,000 nuclear weapons and keeping up with developments in the 15 newly independent republics.

The agency is also placing new emphasis on the proliferation of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, on drug-trafficking and on international terrorism.

“Moreover, while recognizing the need to protect research and development and thus future capabilities, the intelligence community already has reduced its projected budget over the next several years by billions of dollars,” Gates told CIA employees in a December speech.

The cuts will require a 15% reduction in CIA personnel, which the agency expects to achieve solely through attrition. The agency does not plan any layoffs, nor will it offer an early retirement program, officials said.

Sen. Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio), a member of the Intelligence Committee told the Associated Press: “The intelligence budget has got to reflect developments in the world. There’s a general consensus that there should be some cuts.”

U.S. intelligence agencies benefited from a large increase in funding in the 1980s. Experts say there are more spy satellites aloft today than at any previous period and that spending on new surveillance technology continues to be robust.

Critics in Congress and outside the government argue that, with the Soviet Union and its allies no longer posing a military threat, spending for expensive reconnaissance systems can be substantially reduced.

What is needed, intelligence professionals say, are more trained agents who can live and work overseas, watching political and technical developments that are not readily detectable from space.

Such agents are difficult to recruit and train, but they are far less expensive than spy satellites, which can cost as much as $3 billion apiece.