"We were caught off guard," said Mr. Patterson of Historic Hudson Valley, which runs the visitors program there.
"The visitors program is the whole thing that's driving this," said Mr. Fidell, the former Coast Guard judge.
The New York Police Department had a different kind of allure a decade ago, said Donna Shirreffs, who coordinates the State Department's own international visitors program in New York.
The article also noted that the visitors program "could figure prominently in the unlikely event of a court-martial and prove an embarrassment for the Navy".
The number of visitors may increase to 50,000 this year, up from 45,000 last year, said Susan Greenstein, director of the Kykuit program for Historic Hudson Valley, the nonprofit educational organization that administers Kykuit's visitors' program.
But with the submarine fleet declining and budgets tightening after the end of the cold war, Admiral Konetzni used the visitors program to make a case for rebuilding the fleet, working visits into submariners' busy training schedules, officials said.
The law said the moratorium could be lifted only after directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency determined that the foreign visitors program had safeguards to prevent the loss of nuclear secrets.
In his instructions to the admirals who will run the court, the Navy's Pacific commander, Adm. Thomas B. Fargo, called for a thorough investigation of the visitors program and what effects, if any, it had on the operation of the Greeneville the day it collided with the Ehime Maru.
The role of the visitors program in the accident that killed nine people aboard the Japanese vessel, the Ehime Maru, on Feb. 9 is still unclear for several reasons: *The court of inquiry was convened specifically because it was one of the few military panels that could compel civilian testimony, but none of the 16 civilians aboard the submarine were called before it.
And despite the Ehime Maru's sinking and the questions swirling around it, the Navy has defended its distinguished visitors program -- and continued to play host to civilians aboard its ships -- contending that it remains one of the most effective ways for the service to burnish its image.
