Intelligence Spending Still a Secret : Budget: CIA director reverses predecessor’s promise to disclose amount with end of Cold War. He is supported by Administration.

During stormy confirmation hearings on his nomination to become CIA director two years ago, Robert M. Gates pledged to end decades of secrecy by making public how much money the United States spends each year on intelligence.

Doing this, Gates said, would be a “symbolic step that the (CIA) could take . . . that would suggest that the mentality of the Cold War has changed (and) that would suggest to the American people that there is a greater sense of openness.”

But Gates left office before carrying out the pledge. R. James Woolsey, the new CIA director, is fighting a determined battle--with the support of the Clinton Administration--to keep classified the overall spending figure for the U.S. intelligence community.

When the House approved the intelligence budget last week, it did so without saying how much money it was authorizing. Rep. Larry Combest (R-Tex.) said that Woolsey has told House members on numerous occasions that he is “vigorously opposed” to making the number public.

In practical terms, the CIA’s resistance to declassifying its budget makes it impossible for the public to compare how much the nation spends on intelligence with how much it spends on such things as defense, housing or job training.

Rep. Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), a defender of the secrecy, contended this week that the overall spending figure for intelligence “is meaningless unless you know what it (the money) is spent for.”

Congressional critics dispute this argument. “For knowing what percentage of America’s resources go to intelligence, it (the total annual budget) is useful,” observed Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.).

Those who back secrecy say that intelligence budget details must remain classified as well.

The CIA’s tight lid serves to keep hidden exactly how much incidents such as this week’s Titan IV rocket explosion in California may cost taxpayers. After the rocket blew up when it was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, outside estimates of the loss ranged from $1 billion to $2 billion.

More broadly, the continuing budget secrecy demonstrates that, while the intelligence agencies are fast altering their missions with the end of the Cold War, they are resisting making similarly dramatic changes in how they do business with Congress and the public.

“These are top-level policy questions that the public is excluded from. We’re not permitted to know the budget numbers, and the larger question of what is the role of intelligence in the current era is therefore off limits,” said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which has been pushing for more openness at the CIA.

“To my mind, Mr. Woolsey represents a step back from the previous CIA director, Robert Gates. He has shown little recognition of any public interest in intelligence information. He’s very much a representative of the status quo.”

Lawmakers seem to be losing enthusiasm for the issue, too. The House this week rejected, 264 to 169, a motion to require public disclosure of an overall annual spending figure for the intelligence community--even though it had approved similar measures twice in the past two years. The Senate is expected to consider a similar declassification proposal when it takes up the intelligence budget in the fall.

For years, the CIA’s rationale for keeping the intelligence budget secret was that its Cold War rival, the skillful and omnipresent Soviet KGB, might be able to glean from the numbers information about U.S. espionage operations--such as personnel levels or new surveillance systems.

“Disclosing that (budget figure) and the ensuing public debate means disclosing it to the people overseas who we target our intelligence assets on,” Woolsey testified in March. “Proposals to either reduce or to increase that number would require a public debate. And in such a debate, it is inconceivable to me that we wouldn’t release information and details that (were) damaging.”

But none of the post-Cold War security threats cited by the CIA--whether they be aspiring nuclear powers such as North Korea or terrorist groups like Hezbollah--has a worldwide intelligence service comparable to that of the Soviet Union.

In its latest effort to head off divulging any numbers, the CIA is offering to supply Congress with an annual public “report,” but not a public budget.

Members of Congress do get to see intelligence budget figures, but only on a hush-hush basis. Legislators who want to learn the numbers are told to go to H-405, a guarded room in the Capitol, above the House floor.

To see the numbers, lawmakers must agree not to talk about them in public. When it comes to spending money on intelligence, members of Congress therefore are immunized from the sort of public debate and pressures--such as opinion polls and radio talk shows--to which they are subjected on most other issues.

Figuring out roughly how much money the United States budgets each year for intelligence is a relatively simple task--one that would require not so much the mathematicians of the KGB as it would the patience of listening through a congressional debate.

When the House took up the intelligence budget this week, Rep. Dan Glickman (D-Kan.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said the panel had cut 3.7% from President Clinton’s budget request this year. Later, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), saying that she hoped she wasn’t divulging some secret, described this cut in the President’s request as a little over $1 billion.

One billion dollars is 3.7% of what? It works out to about $27 billion. And the public, unclassified handout to members of Congress from the Democratic Study Group mentions that intelligence funding is about $28 billion. That is the range of the annual intelligence budget.

Adm. William O. Studeman, the CIA’s deputy director, acknowledged last year that the figure for the overall intelligence budget “seems to be the approximately worst kept secret in town.”

So why do the new President and CIA director resist any public acknowledgment of the amount the nation spends on intelligence?

For Woolsey, the answer may be that he is engaged in some hard bargaining. If he fights to avoid release of an overall spending figure for espionage--even if he eventually loses this skirmish--he will delay the time when the nation’s intelligence agencies are required to make public other details about spending.

If a number for overall spending on intelligence is released, Combest told fellow lawmakers this week, “then (the next question) becomes: ‘How is this money expended? For what purpose is this money expended?’ ”