WASHINGTON — 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.
