Report Reveals Spy Agencies’ Budget Plans

The Defense Department intends to ask Congress to approve a $27-billion, six-year spending plan for the super-secret National Security Agency and two other intelligence groups, a trade publication reports.

In a story published in this week’s edition, Defense Week said it obtained internal Pentagon documents that spelled out the budget requests as approved by John M. Deutch, the deputy defense secretary.

The figures are for the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Imagery Office. They do not include budgets for the two other main intelligence agencies--the CIA and the National Reconnaissance Office, which develops and operates the nation’s spy satellites.

Not only are the budgets of these individual agencies classified secret, but the government’s overall intelligence budget is secret too. Defense Week apparently is the first to publish official figures for budgets of the NSA, the DIA and the imagery agency.

Defense Week said it got the budget figures from an Aug. 16 memorandum signed by Deutch.

It said the National Security Agency, which is responsible for intercepting and processing foreign communications as well as safeguarding U.S. voice transmissions, had a fiscal 1995 budget request of $3.47 billion. For the six-year period of 1996 through 2001, the Pentagon will ask that NSA get a total of $21.4 billion, Defense Week said.

The request for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which is responsible for the collection and processing of military intelligence, totals about $4 billion for the 1996-2001 period, Defense Week said. Its 1995 request was $621.9 million.

The Central Imagery Office, which coordinates the dissemination of satellite imagery for military use, asked for $122.6 million in 1995. The Pentagon wants it to get $1.5 billion for the 1996-2001 period, Defense Week said.