It's an old saw in Washington that nobody takes the new guy in charge all that seriously until he's fired someone. New Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell did one better at a briefing on Tuesday, saying he'd been told he had to "kill a multibillion dollar program" to show he had the stones for the job, and adding,
"Just did that." The sacrificial program was none other than Misty, the infamous $9-plus billion classified satellite boondoggle.
First revealed by
Jeffrey Richelson in 2002, Misty was a Lockheed contract that kept getting bigger. When the cost-overruns topped $4 billion in 2005, members of the Senate intel committee cried foul. Wasn't this sort of eye in the sky better suited to monitoring Soviet tank divisions than tracking terror cells? Could Misty really deliver intelligence not already supplied by other systems? Sen. Ron Wyden described the program as "unnecessary, ineffective, over budget and too expensive." Sen.
Jay Rockefeller went further, observing that such a huge budget allocation would short-change other priorities and actually be "dangerous to national security."
What good was a stealth satellite, anyway, when it's common knowledge that the U.S.
has over a hundred military and intelligence satellites in orbit, and it's a safe guess that anything the Iranians or North Koreans do above ground on a sunny day is something they want us to see?
Oh and one other thing. The whole
"stealth" feature? Not so much. The first generation of Misty, which was launched back in 1990, was spotted almost immediately – and not by Russian spooks, either, but by a bunch of amateur space observers, sitting on their balconies with binoculars.
Nevertheless, over the intel panel's objections, Misty continued getting funding, thanks to the good people on the appropriations committees. The numbers haven't leaked in the interim, but it seems likley the cost overruns continued, and the project managers at Lockheed never quite worked out how to stop the big shiny birds from reflecting the sun. So hats off to McConnell—if he's going to throw his weight around, this was a good place to start.
__-- __Patrick Radden Keefe
UPDATE: Does Misty's swan song mean that there's a "satellite gap"' opening up? Jeffrey Lewis lays out the case...
