‘Frightening’ Spying Cost

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32301, 20 May 1970, Page 17

‘Frightening’ Spying Cost

(N.Z. Press Assn.—Copyright)

WASHINGTON, May 19.

America was spending about $2900m on military intelligence this year, and a “frightening” amount on other spying, a Pentagon official said in testimony published yesterday.

Mr Robert F. Froelke, an Assistant Defence Secretary, disclosed the costs of Army, Navy and Air Force intelligence spending before a House appropriations subcommittee on March 23. The committee had the testimony printed and released after Pentagon censorship. 1

Mr Froehlke said that his figures did not include spending by the Central Intelligence Agency, which was secret.

Nor did it include intelligence spending by the State Department or the cost of tactical intelligence in day-to-day combat operations such as in Vietnam. He told a Democrat member of the House of Representatives, Mr George Andrews, of Alabama, that the amount spent by the Government in all the agencies for intelligence was “very considerable.”

“It would be frightening, would it not?” Mr Andrews asked. “Yes,” Mr Froehlke replied. Mr Froehlke's testimony

said that on June 30 military intelligence would be employing 136,114 people. By June 30, 1971, the figure would be reduced by 6575 positions, and costs for the new fiscal year would be brought down by about sloom. Since last August Mr Froehlke has had the job of controlling spending on overlapping intelligence. His assignment grew out of the same sub-committee’s charge two years ago that so many intelligence agencies were collecting so much information that nobody had time to look at it or learn what somebody else had already found. Mr Froehlke said his new “consolidated intelligence re-

sources information system” would try to remedy that. Mr Jamie L. Whitten (Democrat, Massachusetts) said that the Defence Intelligence Agency, one of the various military groups in the field, was itself set up for this same co-ordinating function in 1961.

Mr Whitten termed the new top-level agency another layer atop the existing intelligence complex. As one of his first steps. Mr Froehlke is trying to reduce the tendency to label everything in intelligence work “secret.” His efforts along this line —reflected most notably in his decision to publish the figures—“shook up” quite a Jew old intelligence hands, he told the sub-committee.