According to Richelson, in The U.S. Intelligence Community, 1 the NRO was proposed on August 25, 1960 in a meeting between President Eisenhower and representatives of an ad hoc group he had appointed to study what should be done with reconaissance gleaned from the new DISCOVERER satellites and the full time intelligence follow on program code named CORONA. This group consisted of the Under Secretary of the Air Force Joseph Charyk, Deputy Director of Defense Research and Engineering John H. Rubel, and Dr. George B. Kistiakowsky, the President's Science Advisor, who was also a member of the team who had worked on problems getting the DISCOVERER intelligence experiments functioning as well as helping to resolve difficulties on the SAMOS project, the Air Forces's radio relay satellite program.
There was a lot of pressure to move the SAMOS program into the hands of the CIA, and this concept spread to the care and feeding of the CORONA satellite program. Eisenhower needed little to convince him to provide a clear military responsibility for the satellite programs and a Secretary of the Air Force Order (Order 115.1) created the Office of Missile and Satellite Systems (OMSS) within the Office of the Secratary of the Air Force, on August 31, 1960. This became the cover for the NRO. Its primary responsibility was "assisting the Secretary in discharging his responsibility for the direction, supervision, and control of the SAMOS project." General Robert E. Greer was named Director of the SAMOS Project and under Order 116.1 he was directly responsible to the Secretary of the Air Force.
Later the OMSS became the Office of Space Systems, and the Office of the Director of the SAMOS Project became the Office of Special Projects.
According to Richelson, the NRO remains a "black" or secret office and only two occurances of public disclosure of it have occurred, once in an accidental disclosure in a Senate Committee hearing in 1973, the other in Marchetti and Mark's The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. 2
(Note: Richelson's work was released prior to the announcement cited at the beginning of the page, i.e. that the NRO was declassified. The student of such matters might also note that Richelson never disclosed the name of the program that provided the budget to the NRO, the NRP - National Reconnaissance Program, as either he didn't know of its existence, or his knowlege was at the time classified. The existence of the NRO was in fact a well known fact prior to the Gulf War (August 1990 thru February 1991), however U.S. DoD employees and civilian and military personnel "in the know" were not allowed to confirm or deny the existence of such an organization. This is attributed to the legal requirement persuant to the document signed for clearances that led to obtaining the knowlege of the actual existence of the N.R.O.)
Richelson also comments that an article in the Washington Post appeared a few months after the Senate Committee leak.
In The U.S. Intelligence Community, Richelson states that the NRO is referenced in the Department of Defense Annual Report as being charged with
In America's Secret Eyes in Space 3 , Richelson reports that one of the concerns that led to the formation of the NRO was the fact that the Air Force had already made up plans for the Strategic Air Command to operate and control the SAMOS project. As it turns out (again according to Richelson), the Air Force role remains very large, and the Under Secretary of Air Force is the Director of the NRO. This dual role is often referred to (referring to a busy manager's role of "wearing more than one hat") as "wearing the black hat".
(Note: At the time this page was originally written for the MILNET project, speculation was that Richelson's information was right on the nose. However, attempts to verify were coldly (if not gently) refused, and only since September 1992 have we been able to see Richelson's excellent (if not illegal) information was correct).
2 The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, Copyright 1974, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, N.Y., Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York, N.Y.
3 America's Secret Eyes in Space: The U.S. Keyhole Spy Satellite Program", Jeffrey T. Richelson, Copyright 1990, Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., Ballinger Division, New York, N.Y., ISBN 0-88730-285-8.