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The intelligence community, which includes the CIA as well as the Pentagon, the State Department and FBI intelligence services, hasa $28 billion-a-year budget. That is likely to shrink, given thecost-cutting mood in Congress. Its most expensive items are the billion-dollar spy satellites that former CIA Director James Woolsey, who had frequent funding battles with Congress, wanted to upgrade. But Senate critics complain that the CIA already has six photographic spy satellites sitting in warehouses, which, along with the ones in orbit, could take pictures for at least the next decade. New satellites for intercepting communications signals would be parked most of the time over the former Soviet Union. ``They should have been sent to the Air and Space Museum,'' argues John Pike, a space expert with the Federation of American Scientists.
Amid the debates about funding and organization, the CIA continues to expand its NOC program. Intelligence officials say several hundred NOCs are now in the field, and the number is growing. Senior officials from the agency's National Collections Branch have been quietly approaching businesses doing overseas work to ask if they will provide covers for CIA case officers. Energy companies, import-export firms, multinational concerns, banks with foreign branches and high-tech corporations are among those being approached. Usually the company president and perhaps another senior officer, such as the general counsel, are the only ones who know of the arrangement. ``The CEOs do it out of a sense of patriotism,'' says former deputy CIA Director Bobby Inman.
In effect, the companies get free executives. For the cover to be plausible, the CIA must recruit business-school graduates who can put in a productive day's work with the firm and then spy during their off-hours. The CIA has even begun experimenting with recruiting mid-level corporate executives who yearn for adventure, then placing them in overseas firms as ``NOCs of convenience'' to penetrate a target for several years. When the mission is over, the execs return to the business world. But while they are NOC officers, the CIA pays them a government salary. The company pays them a corporate salary-- usually much larger--to keep up the cover, but that money is quietly returned to the company. In fact, the agency's Covert Tax Branch has a secret relationship with the IRS to resolve the two W-2 forms an officer gets each year. The disparity in salaries, however, has already created a retention problem for the CIA. A NOC officer who discovered that his corporate earnings were making him a millionaire on paper recently left the agency to work in the company as an honest-to-goodness executive.