A recently revised Defense Department regulation (pdf) provides new detail on the preparation of the annual intelligence budget request, and on the documentation needed to support it.

The U.S. intelligence budget is comprised of two spending “aggregations”: the National Intelligence Program (NIP) and the Military Intelligence Program (MIP). (This configuration replaced the former National Foreign Intelligence Program, Joint Military Intelligence Program, and Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities.)

The NIP budget, which totaled $43.5 billion in 2007 according to last week’s official disclosure, funds intelligence to support national policy makers. The MIP budget, which probably amounts to at least another $10 billion, supports the Secretary of Defense, the military services, and military commanders in the field.

In practice, the distinction between the NIP and the MIP is not crystal clear, and several large “national” intelligence agencies — including NSA, DIA, NGA, NRO — also receive funding through the MIP.

A Defense Department Financial Management Regulation on “Intelligence Programs/Activities,” dated June 2007, presents the definitions of the intelligence budget aggregations, explains their classification levels, and describes the documentation that must be submitted to Congress to justify their appropriations.

Notable new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (all pdf).

“Renditions: Constraints Imposed by Laws on Torture,” updated October 12, 2007.

“Director of National Intelligence Statutory Authorities: Status and Proposals,” November 2, 2007.

“Burma and Transnational Crime,” October 25, 2007.

“The Army’s Future Combat System (FCS): Background and Issues for Congress,” updated October 11, 2007.

“Coast Guard Deepwater Program: Background, Oversight Issues, and Options for Congress,” updated October 10, 2007.

If you find Secrecy News useful and informative, please consider supporting our work with a financial donation.

The value of a publication like this can sometimes be hard to define, and its impact difficult to trace. Yet we believe that Secrecy News has made an identifiable contribution, particularly by introducing significant government information and documents into the public domain.

So, for example, the Washington Post reported on October 16 that a controversial internal U.S. government report on Iraqi corruption had been made “widely available on the Internet.” In fact, a Google search indicates that the report was made available only on the Federation of American Scientists web site, where it was published by Secrecy News.

The New York Times reported on October 30 that “several advocacy groups” had filed legal challenges seeking disclosure of the intelligence budget total after September 11, 2001. But there is no record of such a legal challenge brought by anyone other than the FAS Project on Government Secrecy, Secrecy News’ publisher.

A widely-noted New Yorker article (February 19) on torture and U.S. government policy stated that the Intelligence Science Board had “released a report” criticizing coercive interrogation. In private correspondence, however, author Jane Mayer courteously acknowledged that she merely assumed the Board had released the report and that she had actually read it on the FAS web site after it was posted there by Secrecy News. (It has since been published elsewhere.)

What these stories indirectly confirm, even without crediting Secrecy News, is that we have succeeded in creating an effective conduit for transmitting restricted or inaccessible government information to the public.

With almost every issue of Secrecy News, we publish government records that members of the general public cannot readily locate elsewhere– unique resources on foreign affairs and domestic surveillance, psychological operations and special operations, and much more. And we make them available on demand and without charge to a large audience. (Less than a day after we published a U.S. Army Field Manual on “Survival” last week, it had already been downloaded more than 35,000 times.)

We were fortunate to have had support for this work over the past year from several philanthropic foundations– including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the HKH Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and the Stewart S. Mott Charitable Trust. But their assistance does not cover all of our costs.

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–Steven Aftergood

A federal court authorized issuance of subpoenas to more than a dozen current and former government officials to testify in the case of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who are accused of unauthorized receipt, transmission and disclosure of classified information.

According to the defense, the testimony of the subpoenaed officials will show that the defendants did “nothing more than the well-established official Washington practice of engaging in ‘back channel’ communication with various non-governmental entities and persons for the purpose of advancing U.S. foreign policy goals.”

The government disputes that claim and says such testimony is irrelevant to whether the defendants engaged in a conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified information.

The court, however, ruled (pdf) that circumstantial evidence of the official use of “back channel” communications could be probative of the defendants’ state of mind and could show a lack of criminal intent.

Judge T.S. Ellis III therefore authorized issuance of subpoenas to the following officials:

Condoleezza Rice, Secretary of State (then-National Security Advisor)

Richard Armitage, former Deputy Secretary of State

William Burns, U.S. Ambassador to Russia

Marc Grossman, former Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs

Lawrence Silverman, Deputy Chief of Mission of the U.S. Embassy to the Slovak Republic

Matthew Bryza, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State

Marc Sievers, Political Officer, U.S. Embassy to Israel

David Satterfield, Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State and Coordinator for Iraq (then-Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs)

Stephen Hadley, National Security Advisory (then-Deputy National Security Advisory)

Elliot Abrams, Deputy Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisory for Global Democracy Strategy Affairs

Kenneth Pollack, former Director for Persian Gulf Affairs for the National Security Council

Paul Wolfowitz, former Deputy Secretary of Defense

Douglas Feith, former Undersecretary of Defense

Michael Makovsky, former employee of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of Near East and South Asia

Lawrence Franklin, former Department of Defense employee

A copy of the November 2, 2007 Memorandum Opinion in the case of United States of America v. Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman is available here.

Noteworthy new reports from the Congressional Research Service include the following (all pdf).

“Nuclear Weapons in U.S. National Security Policy: Past, Present, and Prospects,” October 29, 2007.

“National Strategy for Combating Terrorism: Background and Issues for Congress,” November 1, 2007.

“China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities — Background and Issues for Congress,” updated October 18, 2007.

Broad classification restrictions on the disclosure of historical intelligence information are making it difficult or impossible to accurately represent the record of U.S. foreign policy, an official advisory committee warned in a report (pdf) to the Secretary of State last summer.

By law, the Department of State is obliged to publish “a thorough, accurate and reliable documentary record” of United States foreign policy in its official Foreign Relations of the United States series.

But due to official secrecy, “the credibility of the series… remains in the balance,” according to the newly disclosed report of the State Department’s Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation.

For example, “The blanket denial by the CIA of the right to quote or cite from the President’s Daily Briefs of the Nixon years and beyond will make it difficult to give a full and accurate rendering of the effect of intelligence assessments on the foreign relations of the United States…. [T]he continued exemption of the President’s Daily Briefs may cause serious harm to the intellectual integrity of the Foreign Relations series.”

Similarly, the Committee complained, the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board “has not allowed the historians of the [Foreign Relations] series access to its records [which] need to become accessible to the staff of the [State Department] Office of the Historian and be made available for inclusion in appropriate volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States.”

In short, “Committee members believe that unless policies consistent with respect for the right of the American people to be fully informed about their government’s conduct of foreign policy are adopted and implemented by the Executive Branch, it may become impossible for The Historian [of the State Department] to carry out his duties or for the committee to carry out its Congressionally mandated obligations.”

See “Report of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, January 1-December 31, 2006,” transmitted to the Secretary of State on June 19, 2007.

Although summary accounts of several National Intelligence Estimates have recently been declassified and published, this should not become standard practice, the Director of National Intelligence declared last week.

“It is the policy of the Director of National Intelligence that KJs [the Key Judgments from National Intelligence Estimates] should not be declassified,” DNI J. Michael McConnell wrote (pdf).

“No predisposition to declassify KJs should exist in drafting an NIE or its KJs. Any decision to declassify will be made by the DNI and only after he and other National Intelligence Board principals have reviewed and approved the entire NIE.”

“There is both a real and a perceived danger that analysts will adopt less bold approaches, or otherwise modify the way they characterize developments, and that the integrity of the NIE process could be harmed by expectations that all or portions of the NIE are likely to be declassified,” the DNI asserted.

See “Guidance on Declassification of National Intelligence Estimate Key Judgments,” memo to the Intelligence Community Workforce, October 24, 2007.

The new policy was first reported by Pamela Hess of the Associated Press.

Robert Jervis, the distinguished political scientist who advises the CIA on declassification policy, said that he supported the DNI’s position.

With declassification, “you make the pressures of politicization that much greater,” he told the Associated Press. “When you are writing an executive summary it’s hard not to ask ‘How is this sentence going to read in The New York Times?'”

But Michael Tanji, a veteran U.S. intelligence employee, disputed that view. “Having contributed to more than one of these in my career, I’m here to tell you, public opinion does not enter into the calculus,” he wrote in the Danger Room blog.

Noteworthy new publications that we haven’t had a chance to read closely yet include (all pdf):

“National Strategy for Information Sharing: Successes and Challenges in Improving Terrorism-Related Information Sharing,” National Security Council, October 2007.

“Army International Security Cooperation Policy,” Army Regulation AR 11-31, 24 October 2007.

“A.Q. Khan’s Nuclear Wal-Mart: Out of Business or Under New Management?” hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, June 27, 2007.

The Second Superseding Indictment of Noshir S. Gowadia, who was charged with unauthorized disclosure of classified information on stealth programs and technologies to China, Israel and several other countries, October 25, 2007.

“All of us were born kicking and fighting to live, but we have become used to the soft life…. What happens when we are faced with a survival situation with its stresses, inconveniences, and discomforts?”

That question is posed in a 2002 U.S. Army Field Manual (large pdf) on survival strategies and techniques in emergency situations.

Almost all of the contents will be familiar to students of wilderness medicine and first aid. (Except maybe “Prepare yourself to survive in a nuclear environment.”) Nevertheless, U.S. Army web sites do not permit public access to the document, which says that distribution is limited to government agencies and contractors. A copy was obtained by Secrecy News.

See “Survival,” U.S. Army Field Manual FM 3-05.70, May 2002 (676 pages in a large 20 MB PDF file).

As required by law, the Director of National Intelligence today disclosed (pdf) that the budget for the National Intelligence Program in Fiscal Year 2007 was $43.5 billion.

The disclosure was strongly resisted by the intelligence bureaucracy, and for that very reason it may have significant repercussions for national security classification policy.

Although the aggregate intelligence budget figures for 1997 and 1998 ($26.6 and $26.7 billion respectively) had previously been disclosed in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Federation of American Scientists, intelligence officials literally swore under oath that any further disclosures would damage national security.

“Information about the intelligence budget is of great interest to nations and non-state groups (e.g., terrorists and drug traffickers) wishing to calculate the strengths and weaknesses of the United States and their own points of vulnerability to U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” then-DCI George J. Tenet told a federal court in April 2003, explaining his position that disclosure of the intelligence budget total would cause “serious damage” to the United States.

Even historical budget information from half a century ago “must be withheld from public disclosure… because its release would tend to reveal intelligence methods,” declared then-acting DCI John E. McLaughlin (pdf) in a 2004 lawsuit, also filed by FAS.

Deferring to executive authority, federal judges including Judge Thomas F. Hogan and Judge Ricardo M. Urbina (pdf) accepted these statements at face value and ruled in favor of continued secrecy.

But now it appears that such information may safely be disclosed after all.

Because the new disclosure is so sharply at odds with past practice, it may introduce some positive instability into a recalcitrant classification system. The question implicitly arises, if intelligence officials were wrong to classify this information, what other data are they wrongly withholding?

Some historical background on U.S. intelligence spending may be found here.

And see “2007 Spying Said to Cost $50 Billion” by Walter Pincus, Washington Post, October 30.

“The United States Intelligence Community (IC) has an obligation to learn from its history and its performance and to document its activities,” Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell wrote in a newly disclosed Intelligence Community Directive.

Towards that end, “each IC agency/organization shall establish and maintain a professional historical capability… to document, analyze and advance an understanding of the history of the agency or organization and its predecessors.”

See “Intelligence Community History Programs” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 180, August 29, 2007.

Another new DNI directive instructs intelligence analysts that “disseminated analytic products must contain consistent and structured sourcing information for all significant and substantive reporting or other information upon which the product’s analytic judgments, assessments, estimates, or confidence levels depend.”

“Thorough and consistent documentation enhances the credibility and transparency of intelligence analysis and enables consumers to better understand the quantity and quality of information underlying the analysis.”

See “Sourcing Requirements for Disseminated Analytic Products” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 206, October 17, 2007.

Intelligence collection and analysis objectives are defined and ranked through something called the National Intelligence Priorities Framework (NIPF), which “is the DNI’s sole mechanism for establishing national intelligence priorities.”

Based on topics approved by the President, the NIPF provides a process for prioritizing competing intelligence requirements and allocating resources accordingly.

See “Roles and Responsibilities for the National Intelligence Priorities Framework” (pdf), Intelligence Community Directive 204, September 13, 2007.

Poorly considered security restrictions on unclassified research and limits on foreign scientists’ access to U.S. laboratories could erode U.S. scientific and engineering prowess, a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences concluded.

“The success of U.S. science and engineering has been built on a system of information sharing and open communication, not only among U.S. institutions, but also with the international science and technology communities.”

“Given the current diminishing rates of new scientific and engineering talent in the United States … the size of the U.S. research and development effort cannot be sustained without a significant and steady infusion of foreign nationals,” the report said.

See “To Maintain National Security, U.S. Policies Should Continue to Promote Open Exchange of Research,” NAS news release, October 18.