Historical Dictionary of United States Intelligence

This arrangement has worked relatively well but has not addressed

the bureaucratic competition over technical collection systems. The

NRO is actually a federation of intelligence and military organiza-

tions that maintain their separate identities and loosely cooperate in

the common task of exploiting imagery and other information de-

rived from its collection systems. Because the NRO spends large

sums of money on physical assets, each organization eagerly and

jealously guards its access to its portion of the reconnaissance pie.

The NRO’s existence was a closely held secret for much of its life-

time. In 1994, the White House made public the existence of the NRO,

but the organization remains, along with the National Security Agency

(NSA), one of the least known of the intelligence community agencies.

NATIONAL RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS CENTER (NROC).

Apart of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) that handles defector

resettlements.

NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1947.Considered to be the foun-

dation legislation for U.S. intelligence, the 1947 National Security

Act created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) under the au-

thority of the National Security Council (NSC), which it also cre-

ated. It also combined the war and navy departments along with the

newly independent air force into a single bureaucratic unit, the Na-

tional Military Authority, and provided for the position of a civil-

ian secretary of defense. It provided for unified military commands

but prohibited the merger of the military services into a single force.

As amended in 1949, it created the Department of Defense(DOD)

and institutionalized the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).

NATIONAL SECURITY ACT OF 1959.Enacted on 29 May 1959, the

legislation allowed the National Security Agency (NSA) to provide

employment incentives, without regard to the civil service laws, in or-

der to encourage the hiring of scientifically and technically capable in-

dividuals. Congress passed the act in the wake of the launching of the

Soviet Sputniksatellite, which alarmed the U.S. government that the

United States was falling behind in technical and scientific education.

In order to enable the NSAto compete effectively with the private sec-

tor, the act authorized the secretary of defense to set the pay of certain

officers in the NSAcommensurate with private sector standards.

134 • NATIONAL RESETTLEMENT OPERATIONS CENTER

05-398 (2) Dictionary.qxd 10/20/05 6:27 AM Page 134