SPIES IN CYBERSPACE

Within seconds, billion-dollar Pentagon spy satellites can deliver detailed photographs to ground stations. The National Security Agency's supercomputers can sort through intercepted phone calls with lightning speed. Even clandestine agents overseas can have instant access to CIA officials in the U.S. by using cellular phones. But until last year, the White House had to depend on the "pizza truck " for all this intelligence--even during a fast-breaking crisis. And the pizza truck--the agency's nickname for the delivery van bearing secret reports from the CIA's Langley, Virginia, headquarters--often became snarled in downtown Washington traffic.

Now, however, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies have entered the cyberspace age--to the benefit of the White House and the demise of the pizza truck. Last December the CIA and the Pentagon began full operation of Intelink, a worldwide computer network that has borrowed much of its technology from Internet, the global network that links universities, research institutions, individuals and commercial computer services. An exclusive club, Intelink has 35 intelligence organizations feeding it and so far more than 3,000 users, all with secret or top-secret security clearances to tap into the system. More important, Intelink allows White House aides, State Department analysts, Pentagon generals, even soldiers in the field almost instant access to secrets on any subject they choose from a menu on their computer screens.

The results are a dramatic improvement over conditions just four years ago. During the Gulf War, for example, ground commanders lacked timely satellite photos to prepare for combat because the four computer systems handling the pictures couldn't talk to one another. Today Intelink users can punch up on their computers the most recent satellite photos, as well as thousands of pages of classified reports from various intelligence agencies. White House aides monitoring the Chechnya crisis were able to dial into Intelink for daily CIA updates on the civil war. Advisers confused about conflicting news reports on the fighting referred to another menu item: an animated video, based on satellite photos, that showed how Russian and Chechen soldiers were maneuvering against each other in the capital city of Grozny.

The available information is immense--and spectacularly manipulatable. The agency's computer system at Langley stores more than 4 trillion bytes of secret information--equal to a stack of documents 30 miles high. Its computer-disk farms, which take up two floors the area of two football fields, have numbers and letters painted on the walls, like a parking lot, so technicians don't get lost in the mainframes. It once took cia analysts months to identify members of a terrorist group who might be recruited as informants. Now using an "link-analysis" program, the informants can be spotted in seconds with mathematical formulas that gauge an individual's standing and access in the organization. A covert operative who must infiltrate a dangerous place like Baghdad can practice his or her mission using a computer program called Envision, which takes millions of satellite photos and converts them to a virtual-reality video of the city. Rotating a computer joystick, the operative can manipulate the video to wander through streets, peer into alleys or reconnoiter buildings at ground level.