National Reconnaissance Office Officials Accused of Crimes

Air Force Maj. Gen. Susan Mashiko, the deputy director of the National Reconnaissance Office — Chantilly's secretive neighbor on Lee Road — is accused of illegally threatening to retaliate against whistleblowers, and another official at the NRO is under criminal investigation, McClatchy Newspapers reported this week. 

Mashiko said she would like to "find" and "fire" four officials at the NRO who spoke with the inspector general this summer about potentially illegal actions by another senior official, according to the NRO's inspector general. 

For more details on the investigation, read the full report from McClatchy Newspapers. 

Mashiko's duties as deputy director of the NRO include helping manage the strategic and tactical operations of the NRO, according to her biography on the U.S. Air Force website. She is also commander of the Air Force Space Command Element, and manages all Air Force personnel and resources assigned to the NRO. 

McClatchy notes that this isn't the first time the NRO has found itself in hot water. "In 1996, the NRO's director and deputy director were fired in the wake of accusations that the agency had kept a slush fund and hadn't adequately informed Congress about the construction of its headquarters in Chantilly, Va.," the paper reported. 

The office's budget is classified (McClatchy notes that it could be up to $10 billion per year). During the 1996 controversy, hundreds of millions of dollars allotted to pay for the Chantilly headquarters were squirrelled away in the Pentagon's classified budget, The New York Times reported at the time.