Spies for Hire

by Tim Shorrock

  From the start, the new imagery agency was an instrumental part of U.S. foreign policy. During the Balkans wars, satellite photos of destroyed mosques and mass graves in Bosnia helped the State Department make the case that the Serbian government was engaged in ethnic cleansing. The evidence led the Clinton administration, under cover of NATO, to launch air strikes against Serbia. NIMA mapping tools were also used by the administration to help resolve border disputes between Peru and Ecuador and Israel and Lebanon. And under the guidance of Al Gore, NIMA was tapped to provide imagery and intelligence about climate change, and its scientists produced the GPS “safety of navigation” effort that greatly improved aerial data available to airports and air traffic control agencies.

  On a strategic level, geospatial intelligence has deepened longstanding ties between U.S. and British intelligence. Booz Allen Hamilton’s Joan Dempsey, who managed relationships between the CIA and the rest of the Intelligence Community during the Clinton years, emphasized the importance of these ties in her remarks to GEOINT 2006. NIMA, she said, was “far and away the most aggressive agency in trying to find ways to cooperate with our international coalitions.” The current leaders of the NGA “believe very strongly in sharing intelligence, and that we had an obligation if we were going to operate on an international level to find ways to share intelligence.” Admiral Murrett exemplifies this trend.

  After taking the helm of the NGA in 2005, one of Murrett’s first tasks was to meet directly with his counterparts from the British commonwealth countries. “In terms of our future system architecture, we are fully imbedded,” he said in a press briefing. In the fall of 2006, the NGA held a series of exercises with its commonwealth allies at the Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. During the interoperability exercise, which was fittingly dubbed “Empire Challenge,” the English-speaking allies shared imagery and simulated battles in a desert environment with American-made UAVs and British-made Tornado jets. Under this multinational effort, the NGA explained, “we can downlink live data from a British aircraft directly to a US ground station, and then send it via satellite to another country to be analyzed. Capabilities like this will enable the US and its allies to share each other’s intelligence data, building a timely, more accurate picture on today’s battlefield.”14

  Domestically, NGA imagery has become an integral part of a set of tools used by the FBI, the Secret Service, and local police to establish security at National Special Security Events, designated as such because of the large numbers of ordinary people and officials drawn to events like the 2006 Major League All-Star Game in Pittsburgh and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah. The events predate 9/11: there have been more than thirty such events since the designation was invented in 1999. “We really do worry about special security events,” says Charles Allen, a longtime CIA official who was tapped in 2005 to be assistant secretary of homeland security for intelligence and analysis.15

  In fact, the NGA has been a steady, unseen presence in American skies since September 11. After the attacks on the Twin Towers, the NGA flew surveillance planes over the World Trade Center site in New York to survey the extent of the damage. In 2002, when a pair of snipers terrorized Washington by randomly shooting people in parking lots and gas stations, the NGA, at the request of the FBI, monitored nearby highways for signs of the criminals. During Hurricane Katrina, the NGA provided thousands of images that helped the National Guard, FEMA, and state officials in Louisiana and Mississippi determine the depth and extent of the flooding and allowed people who had fled the region to see if their homes had survived. That may have been the first time in U.S. history that a national intelligence agency provided information it had gathered for a domestic crisis (it has also raised significant questions about the use of military spy satellites at home).

  The NGA’s dual mission was underscored in the GEOINT 2006 exhibition hall by General Dynamics, which ran the largest booth in the conference center.* Most of its space was taken up by a huge van called a Mobile Integrated Geospatial Intelligence System, or MIGS. The NGA first deployed these portable intelligence and communications units with the U.S. Army in Baghdad. The MIGS are now being deployed by the NGA to disaster areas within the United States to download and transmit imagery that might be used by local law enforcement and first-responders—another sign of how intelligence tools developed for the global war on terror have become part of homeland security. “This is a good example of how we can take our Department of Defense experience and apply it to domestic support, and a good use of taxpayer dollars,” William Dennis, a General Dynamics staffer, told me after showing me through the vehicle. A similar vehicle, painted white so it didn’t look like a military vehicle, was deployed to New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. John Goolgasian, the director of the NGA’s Office of the Americas, told me that the imagery captured during Katrina was used to create a database of hospitals and schools in the hurricane zone and analyze industrial sites for potential chemical leaks and other hazards. When used domestically, the vans are called DMIGS, “but the tradecraft and the methodology stays the same,” Goolgasian said.

  Most of the exhibitors were displaying technologies designed to combat the Iraqi insurgency. Raytheon’s Intelligence and Information Systems, based in Falls Church, Virginia, was offering a visualization software called Enterprise Modeling and Simulation that provides three-dimensional views of urban centers loaded with data from airborne sensors. The program, said Raytheon, will “open up substantial new possibilities for mission planning, rehearsal of upcoming battles, and even tactical replanning during actual combat.” A U.S. commander will use the simulation software “to roam about and see the precise relationships among the various structures, enemy forces and his own force distribution,” allowing him to search for signs of “incipient terrorist activity” and even “look at the world from the perspective of their enemy.” The Enterprise software is part of the larger Distributed Common Ground System, described in Chapter 5, which Raytheon has designed to give Air Force commanders and fighter pilots instant access to imagery, signals intelligence, and measurement and signatures intelligence.

  At a nearby booth, Northrop Grumman was displaying its new “NGesture” video table. It is a giant plasma screen imbedded into a tabletop and loaded with satellite imagery and other data to create a 3-D view of any city on the planet. What makes it special is the control system: users’ hands and fingers manipulate the images. Two fingers in an outward movement, and your perspective shifts skyward; bring them together, and you move down to the ground. With a single finger, you can trace the route of a vehicle driving up a street, or circle a key building. Soon, I’m told, we’ll be seeing this device on television news broadcasts; Northrop Grumman, in a joint venture with GeoEye, has sold it to CNN.

  The idea for a foundation to promote the interests of the NGA’s contractors first emerged in 2003 in discussions between K. Stuart Shea, then a senior executive in Northrop Grumman’s intelligence unit; Steven Jacques, a former Air Force officer and a lobbyist for Raytheon; and John Stopher, a former CIA officer who was until January 2007 the budget director of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Shea was on friendly terms with the Republican leadership in the House at the time, and had been appointed to a twelve-member national commission studying the research and development programs of U.S. intelligence agencies by House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Illinois.

  Initially, the three men wanted to replicate the Space Foundation, an organization of NASA and NRO contractors based near the U.S. Space Command in Colorado. “Their purpose in life is to try to bring together the space community, whether it’s the national security community, black or white, with the civil and commercial community,” Jacques told me. “We thought, we don’t have that for the geospatial intelligence community, and maybe that should be our focus, too.”16 In 2004, when I first inquired about the purpose of the organization, Shea told me in an e-mail that the USGIF had no intention of trying to influence policy. “Quite fra
nkly, we are simple in our focus: to build an organization that served the many disparate disciplines involved in the geospatial intelligence community, and to develop a stronger partnership between government, industry, academic and professional organizations and individuals involved in the development and application of geospatial intelligence data and the deployment of geo-processing resources to address national security objectives,” he wrote. “We are doing good things for the community at large.”17

  Shea and Jacques’s first move was to organize a conference of NGA contractors; that event attracted more than 1, 200 people and proved the need for an umbrella organization to represent the industry. So they put together a three-person board—Shea, Jacques, and, initially, Stopher—and soon more than a dozen companies had signed up. Charter members, who initially ponied up at least $800, 000 each for the first year, included their own companies, plus SAIC, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, the satellite company DigitalGlobe, and other major contractors. The USGIF was born in 2003.

  But a month before the foundation was to be formally announced, it ran into its first crisis. Roll Call, the newspaper that covers Capitol Hill, reported that Stopher had written a provision into the classified section of an intelligence bill providing $500, 000 to establish a new foundation to promote satellite imagery, and had not disclosed his role on the USGIF’s board to the House committee. After the story came out, he was asked by the committee to resign from the board, and although the committee’s seed money had been dropped from the final bill, the episode proved embarrassing to both the foundation and the staffer. “Stopher’s involvement in creating and championing a foundation funded by the very same contractors who support the national security efforts he is supposed to watch over from his position on the oversight committee has alarmed individuals both inside and outside government who view the endeavor as an insurmountable conflict of interest,” Roll Call wrote.18

  Jacques, in an interview, dismissed the incident as a partisan political attack. He argued, convincingly, that it had little impact on the foundation, which now has a budget of about $1 million a year and draws more than double that in revenues from membership dues and conference fees.19 Jacques is now an independent consultant for the USGIF, and Shea, who is now president of SAIC’s intelligence, security, and technology group, is chairman of the foundation’s board of directors. The rest of the board consists of a combination of the NGA’s key partners in the corporate world and the defense community, and includes representatives from Raytheon, the U.S. Air Force, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing. Stopher is still a close friend of the foundation’s, and was a featured speaker at GEOINT 2006, where he gave a detailed preview of what the industry should expect from the new Democratic Congress. (He was there again in 2007, but with his party out of power, he sat in the audience as a mere observer.)

  To soldiers who’ve been around for a while, the advances in geospatial intelligence tools displayed at GEOINT are revolutionary. One of the most informative talks at the Orlando symposium was delivered by General William Boykin, the deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence (the same general reprimanded in 2003 for publicly expressing his strident views on Islam). During a panel discussion entitled “Warfighters: Saving Lives and Winning Wars,” Boykin compared today’s geospatial capabilities to what was available during the Cold War, and provided an extraordinary glimpse into how the contemporary sciences of imagery and information technology might have been employed during one of the most disastrous U.S. military expeditions of all time: the 1980 operation to free the fifty-three American hostages held by radical Muslim students in Iran.

  Boykin is one of three military men still on active duty who took part in the ill-fated mission, which was known as Operation Eagle Claw. As designed by President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Council, the operation involved flying U.S. Special Forces, carried by transport planes and attack helicopters, into Iran from an airbase in Egypt and an aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea. From those positions, they were to rendezvous at Desert One, a crude airstrip that had been scouted by the CIA, and another site in the mountains near Tehran. After that, the plan was to storm the embassy, grab the hostages, bring them to a nearby Iranian military base, and then fly them out of the country under cover of U.S. fighter jets. But the mission was aborted at Desert One due to mechanical problems that grounded some of the aircraft, and then lurched into tragedy when one of the helicopters crashed into a transport plane, killing eight U.S. soldiers. The disaster caused irreparable political damage to the Carter administration (and sparked the principled resignation of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who thought the mission was a mistake). As a result of the fiasco, Congress created the U.S. Special Forces Operating Command to better coordinate secret U.S. military missions.

  To Boykin, the failed undertaking underscored the critical importance of geospatial intelligence. Using the capabilities the NGA has today in multiple spectrum imaging, he said, “we would have known a lot more about what was inside that embassy compound than we knew then. We could have seen a lot more. We could have seen changes over a period of time that would have told us a lot about what those radical students were doing to defend that twenty-seven-acre compound that we were going into.” Moreover, overhead imagery and multidimensional maps available today would have given his crew much more information about Desert One. “We were on a wing and a prayer,” he recalled. “All we were looking at was first-generation imaging, and taking the word of people who’d been hunting up in that area”—presumably the Iranian CIA assets who were later exposed when the fleeing helicopter crews left behind classified documents in their ditched aircraft. The NGA’s current capabilities “would have given us a tremendous advantage—and, frankly, we might not have gone into either place,” Boykin concluded.

  These capabilities are now being enhanced in a new NGA unit called the Advanced Geospatial Intelligence office, which opened in January 2007. It uses commercially available software from ESRI, Intergraph Corporation, and other GEOINT companies to dig into the data behind the pixels imbedded in imagery to extract usable information. Like the operations in Iraq described by Admiral Murrett, the process combines imagery with other intelligence disciplines, including signals intelligence from the NSA and human intelligence from CIA and DIA operatives, to generate a fuller picture on the ground. (Using the techniques of measurement and signatures intelligence, for example, NGA analysts looking down at a truck convoy moving through the desert can analyze sounds from vehicles so precisely that they can actually identify the make and engine of the truck.)20 To speed these technologies to the warfighters, the NGA signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Joint Forces Command in December 2005. Under the agreement, they will jointly develop common procedures to help soldiers at the joint task level and below use geospatial intelligence.21 Donald Kerr, who is now the deputy director of national intelligence, told the GEOINT 2006 audience that the joint operations launched by the NRO, NGA, and NSA are creating a capability “that will provide the United States with an integrated and automated, worldwide tripwire capability to detect anything of intelligence or operational interest.”

  During the first stage of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the NGA won the support of U.S. troops when it distributed 250 megabyte hard drives loaded with maps and pictures of the region. That was easily downloaded onto laptops, and gave soldiers instant access to the NGA’s massive collection of imagery. “This was truly a defining moment” for the agency, said Lockheed Martin’s Lee. In just one quarter of 2004, according to Robert W. Burkhardt, the director of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Topographic Center, the Corps and the NGA transmitted over 3.5 million maps and seventy thousand images to the U.S. military, primarily to the Marines. “This is big business,” he says. “We have all the ISR [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] in the world today.”

  But commanders have discovered a downside to the new imagery technology. As more and more data are transmitted to the front lines, soldi
ers are suffering information overload. Brigadier General John M. Custer, the director of intelligence for the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM), explained. Just before U.S. troops crossed into Iraq from Kuwait, he said, a contractor showed up with several boxes “full of the most gee-whiz stuff that would supposedly revolutionize what we needed to do.” Custer looked it over and told the contractor it would do more harm than good on the eve of combat. “I can’t tell you how many people deliver what I would tell you are science-fair projects,” he complained. “There are some great tools you are producing—analytical processing and GEOINT tools which we need to embrace. But we want to be sure we don’t break the ability of our guys out there in the field to actually use it.” Custer also noted that, despite the advances in GEOINT, “we’re still issuing thousands and thousands of hard-copy maps.” They’re easier to use and, in many cases, far more reliable than electronic maps sent by computer, he said.

  Retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni, the former commander of CENTCOM, also cautioned the tech-oriented crowd at GEOINT on the limitations of technology. He spoke at GEOINT 2006 about how CENTCOM used intelligence during the period that followed the first Gulf War. While satellite imagery and intercepts helped his command locate Iraqi tanks and track the departures of Iranian submarines from their bases, he said, the technology couldn’t tell him what a particular group or organization was planning to do. “What I couldn’t get was intention,” he stressed. In other words, an army can buy all the fancy technology it wants, but it still takes people on the ground—human intelligence—to truly understand an adversary.