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Top 5 Intelligence Agencies You’ve Probably Never Heard Of
The NSA was once jokingly referred to as No Such Agency because of its penchant for secrecy. The National Reconnaissance Office, founded in 1961, was only declassified in 1992—before that, it didn’t officially exist. To show how much things have changed, today both of those agencies have children’s websites. (As does the FBI, CIA, and DIA.) Not every part of the intelligence community, however, has reached such lofty heights as offering lesson plans for schoolteachers. Here are a few lesser-known arms of United States intelligence:
National Underwater Reconnaissance Office
It took thirteen years for the public to learn about the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office, by way of a short piece in the Washington Post. The National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, on the other hand, remained a secret for twenty-nine years. Where the NRO began as a joint CIA-U.S. Air Force agency, the NURO is the intersection of the CIA and U.S. Navy.
The agency was pivotal during the Cold War, enabling the United States to spy on the Soviet Union using submarines and by tapping undersea communication lines. Its most famous operation (so far) is Project Azorian, in which a ship called the Glomar Explorer was constructed to retrieve a sunken Soviet submarine.
Special Collection Service
Sometimes the Utah Data Center isn’t enough and the NSA needs to get hands-on in foreign countries. To do this, it calls upon the men and women of the Special Collection Service, a joint CIA-NSA signals intelligence agency. The SCS is charged with placing high-tech bugs in impossible locations. To do this, the service can send in Special Collection Elements that are equipped with gear that would make Q jealous—umbrellas that unfold to parabolic antennas, satellite transmitters disguised as simple laptops, and lasers that can read conversations by recording the vibrations of windows.
And they’re not just bugging hotel rooms in Prague. They’re also on the ground in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, tapping communications infrastructure and spying on terrorist training camps. As John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists put it, “When you think of NSA, you think satellites. When you think CIA, you think James Bond and microfilm. But you don’t really think of an agency whose sole purpose is to get up real close and use the best technology there is to listen and transmit. That’s SCS.”
https://news.clearancejobs.com/2013/01/27/top-5-intelligence-agencies-you-ve-probably-never-heard-of/