"The cost was greater than anticipated in the tune, I would say, in hundreds of millions," said Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden at a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing last week.

"I would say that we underestimated the costs by, I would say, a couple to several hundred million, in terms of the costs."

According to Hayden, the delays in developing the technology were even "more dramatic" than the costs.

"When we actually encountered doing this, it was just far more difficult than anyone anticipated," Hayden said.

A joint congressional intelligence inquiry into the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks issued last year warned the full implementation of Trailblazer was as much as five years away and "confusion still exists at NSA as to what will actually be provided by that program."

The same inquiry highlighted the reason why something like Trailblazer was so necessary. In June 2002 it was leaked to the media that the NSA had intercepted Arabic messages on Sept. 10, 2001. They were not translated until Sept. 12. They said: "The match begins tomorrow," and "Tomorrow is zero" day.

Trailblazer was conceived in 2000 as a program to organize and manage the vast amounts of data collected every day by the nation's signals intelligence system.

The NSA intercepts huge volumes of electronic signals put out by satellites, radios, telephones, fax machines, pagers, cell phones, and electronic messages and Internet sites, among other things.

"The more success you have with regard to collection, the more you're swimming in an ocean of data," Hayden explained last week.

"So what Trailblazer was essentially designed to do was to help us deal with masses of information and to turn it into usable thing for American decision makers."

Ironically, Trailblazer was supposed to be a model acquisition program that would transform the way the NSA did business, allowing it to ride the wave of technological innovation in the private sector.

The Trailblazer approach rejected the traditionally expensive government method of defining specific requirements and schedules in favor of allowing industry to be flexible and innovative.

In a 2001 news release NSA lauded its own "heightened level of acquisition discipline" that would be used as it pursued the development of the Trailblazer project.

It was an expensive lesson in how not to develop sophisticated new technologies, Hayden said.

"We learned within Trailblazer that when we asked industry for something they had or something close to what they already had, they were remarkable in providing us a response, an outcome. When we asked them for something that no one had yet invented, they weren't any better at inventing it than we were doing it ourselves," Hayden said.

The better approach is "far more cooperative," with the government customer closely involved in monitoring the progress of the program.

"There's a middle ground between doing it ourselves and just exporting the problem," he said.

In 2002 NSA was heading in the opposite direction. Hayden told a congressional committee he was increasingly relying on the private sector for technology development.

"In terms of 'buy vs. make' (the term Congress has used), we spent about a third of our SIGINT development money this year making things ourselves. Next year the number will be 17 percent," he said.

Trailblazer's diffic ulties also taught the NSA not to finance attempts to push technology too far.

"We don't profit by trying to do moon shots, by trying to take the great leap forward," he said. "We can do a lot better with incremental improvement, spiral development. And that's where we are now with the program."

An NSA spokeswoman said, true to the spiral development model, some intelligence products developed on the Trailblazer dime were already in use.

"Although we can't discuss specifics, several Trailblazer technologies and products have been used successfully by the intelligence community, as well as by the Department of Defense since 9/11," spokeswoman Mary Payne told United Press International.

"Trailblazer has contributed to this agency's success while the agency has been on a wartime footing."

She said the Trailblazer contract is being restructured to speed the development and deployment of its useful components to NSA projects worldwide. She would not say how much the restructuring would add to Trailblazer's bottom line or whether it would further slow the schedule.

Details of the highly classified Trailblazer program are few. Neither NSA nor the Senate Intelligence Committee will reveal exactly how large the cost overrun is, the total budget for the project or when it was supposed to be completed.

However, according to public records Trailblazer may already be costing the taxpayer twice what was originally expected.

NSA awarded several small contracts in 2001 of $10 million and $50 million to government contractors who were hired to help NSA define exactly what Trailblazer would do and how it would do it.

In 2002 a team led by Science SAIC won the first large contract of $280 million for 26 months to build a technology demonstration platform. Hayden indicated to the committee that the program already costs $200 million to $300 million more than that.

SAIC heads the "Digital Network Intelligence" team comprised of Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, The Boeing Company, Computer Sciences Corporation and an SAIC wholly owned subsidiary, Telcordia Technologies.

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