The dark secret of the black budget.

• Author: Weiner, Tim
• Position: Pentagon's defense budget

THE DARK SECRET OF THE BLACK BUDGET

Rep. Larry Hopkins walks alone to a leadlinedchamber in the Capitol they call "the vault.' There, a uniformed officer briefs Hopkins about an expensive defense program. He's not allowed to take notes. When briefing papers are shown to him, he can't have copies. When he leaves he's allowed to talk to hardly anyone about what he's heard.

For about $35 billion worth of defense programs,this is what is known as "congressional oversight.' "You just sit there and get the hose treatment for several hours,' Hopkins says.

There have always been programs and weaponsthat were so top secret that public hearings were deemed inappropriate. But the Reagan administration has tripled spending for "black budget' programs that receive no public scrutiny at all. Spending on secret weapons has jumped nearly tenfold and spending on intelligence activities has doubled. The black budget is now more than federal spending on education, transportation, or the environment and roughly equal to all federal spending on health care. In fact, it is the fastest-growing major sector of the federal budget.

Obviously some of those programs should notbe debated on C-SPAN or analyzed in The Washington Post. But today, more than an dime of every defense dollar is concealed. If the few black budget projects we do know about are any indication, it has become a hiding place not just for weapons and operations that should be secret but for those that are poorly managed or conceived.

As Thomas Amlie, a civilian who works forthe Air Force as a financial watchdog and who has high security clearance, put it, the military has three reasons for having black projects: "One, you're doing something that should genuinely be secret. There's only a couple of those. Two, you're doing something so damn stupid you don't want anybody to know about it. And three, you want to rip the money bag open and get out a shovel, because there is no accountability whatsoever.'

Kamikaze dolphins

Putting a program in the black budget doesn'tjust mean Congress can't check up on it, but that its very existence won't be acknowledged, and that its price tag generally won't be revealed. Black programs are usually classified as "sensitive compartmented information.' There are more than 10,000 compartments, each with a specific codeword; someone who has the codeword for just one compartment cannot have access to information about a black program in another compartment. About 50 members of Congress know bits and pieces about particular programs. But only a handful of members and congressional staff--too few to enable serious congressional oversight--have broad access to information about the whole black budget.

Black programs include the Navy's advancedtactical fighter; the Stealth bomber, the most expensive military project in American history; and Milstar satellites, the new global switchboard for nuclear war, designed to relay the launch orders for nuclear weapons from 70,000 miles in space. These three programs together may wind up costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $100 billion. Black programs also include 155 mm nuclear shells, a host of covert special operations units, the neutron bomb, the advanced cruise missible, and gadgetry to make submarines quieter.

More than two-thirds of the money is hiddenin the Pentagon's research, development, and procurement budgets--which include operating funds for intelligence. At least half the Pentagon's black budget funds the CIA, the global listening posts of the National Security Agency, and the super-secret satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office. The rest of the money is distributed among Defense department operations, maintenance and personnel budgets, NASA, and other agencies. All these--and only God and Weinberger know what else--are shielded by the cloak of secrecy once reserved solely for the intelligence agencies.

Do these programs and weapons work? Arethey on schedule" Will they be ruinously expensive? Will they be...