From Space

They are doing it again, second week in a row. There is not a flake of snow in the air and the schools are closed already. They say it is going to be a heavy snow day today, but it hasn’t started yet. They know that it will because they are looking down from space by satellites at the clouds, and the chances are that we are going to get slammed.

I am inching toward the shower, one eye cocked at the window to see if the snow had started yet. I glanced at the morning e-mail and saw a note piece from a friend. He forwarded an article by Bob Drogin, a staff writer for the LA Times who wrote a nice piece on the agency where his son has just started work. It is one of the three-letter agencies, if you know what I mean, and it is a going concern these days. They just hired 900 new employees.

It is called the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Drogin’s article was about the NGA analysts who supported security at the Superbowl, by tapping into imagery satellites on orbit.

My friend was curious about how the spies got into the championship football game, concerned that this was might be the camel’s nose coming in under the tent-flap of personal liberty.

I hastened to write him back, since it was either that or listen to the radio reports of the latest car-bomb at Hillal in Iraq. The bombers hit a long line of people waiting for civil service jobs. That is a favorite target of the Sunni murders, the lines of people. But they always come back. People need to work, just like my friend’s son, and civil service is secure, particularly if it is a civil service job that fights terrorists.

”No need for concern, ” I wrote. ”When a public event is considered to be at risk of terror attack- like the Superbowl of the political conventions- the White house can designate it a National Special Security Event, or NSSE. That permits Federal resources to help State and Local officials with protection. It is all legal and carefully regulated.”

I told him the article just didn’t say it that way. I also thought the piece was a nice bit of public relations for the Agency.

I told him that NGA has had a bit of an identity crisis, but that is was only to be expected, based on recent history.

The Agency was created out of the old Army Mapping Agency years ago, and become the Defense Mapping Agency- the buildings at the Bethesda campus still have the Army look.

DMA ran a huge print plant out at St. Louis and produced maps by the pallet-load- detailed air charts in different scales. I loved them. They came in fine detail for land movement and larger for aerial navigation. If you had to buy them, I think they went for $4 a pop- and we used thousands of them. We cut the pretty colored charts up merrily to fit the surface of the kneeboard map cases the pilots carried. The surface area was about the size of an eight-by-five note card.

I recall a cruise to the Mediterranean in which we used our entire stock of aerial charts for Egypt as  we conducted an exercise with them. We cut them up and threw away the stuff we didn’t need. Then we pulled into Haifa, Israel, and I realized to my growing horror that we were about to have an important exercise with the Israelis- and that was the country on the part of the maps we had thrown away.

In full panic mode, I shrieked for help and DMA came through with a thousand charts in 48 hours, all the way from St. Louis. They saved my professional life.

A map is a map, they say, but the dirty secret is the earth changes constantly. DMA published a message every month with the changes in text . The maps were only redone every decade or so, if that. So the maps only generally reflected the reality of the area over which our guys flew. To do the job right required pulling the message and then manually entering the changes.

To my knowledge, no one ever did. When I was responsible for mission planning I always went to bed hoping no one had erected a radio tower since the last time we had flown.

The changing earth is how the spooks got involved in the map business. Satellite imagery was once the most sensitive aspect of national intelligence. Our ability to do it was one of the reasons that our Human Intelligence- the real spy side of the house- was allowed to atrophy. People are messy. Bad people do bad things, and you still have to interact with them.

But the idea that our Ivy League Spy services were involved with thugs and killers became repugnant to our evolved Congressional sensibilities, and the real spies were fired or sent to jail.

But there came a serene confidence in Washington that we could do all our spying from orbit. It was nonsense, of course. Satellite imagery is a vital and necessary part of the picture but it is hardly all of it. But our rigid two-man control and amazing technical accomplishment helped us to rely on the pictures that came in the little pizza trucks. They were anonymous little vehicles configured to carry the images on large format flats, just like commercial delivery trucks.

The images were delivered to the highly classified locations around town. I can’t talk about the dramatic change that occurred in how we got the pictures, but when collection went digital, things changed. Once upon a time, analysts had to read out the images from real film. That were the days!

We had special C-130 aircraft that caught the re-entry canisters in a net out over the Pacific.  The called the mission “catch a falling star.” It sounds far-fetched, but it was quite routine.

The ancient building where the film was read out was called the National Photographic Interpretation Center. It was populated by a joint workforce from the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency. The CIA folks never let anyone forget who was who in the hierarchy, and their contracts and benefits were better, something the entire workforce was aware of and caused no small amount of discontent.

After the wall came down, the intelligence community was directed by Congress to take a 17% personnel reduction. I was one of the battalion of action officers in the Pentagon entrusted with the task. To accommodate the great convolution in the Intelligence Community, all sorts of innovative ideas were floated to do more with less. I worked for a few years on the substance of a 15 March 1992 memorandum from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. It contained paragraph after paragraph of hand grenades.

One of them was the merger of all the Service HUMINT organizations. Another mandated the elimination of back-up capabilities for an orbital system, bringing us to a single point of failure. We had all kinds of good ideas to save money.

The Central Imagery Office was established to manage satellite Imagery, from tasking to collection to exploitation and dissemination to the people that needed it. The classification of the images was lowered in some instances, and the existence of the older programs was acknowledged.

This was in the days when the existence of the National Reconnaissance Office was a secret. The outfit that did the day-to-day tasking of the vehicles was a joint committee on imagery. Slowly, the functions of managing and exploiting the imagery migrated from the hidden world into the CIO. It was under-funded and had no authority to tell the spooks or DoD what to do.

There was no champion. In the 1995 authorization, the Senate decided to help. They had been complaining that the system was screwed up for years, due to turf and other issues, the community had not acting swiftly enough to answer Congressional concerns. So, they directed the creation of a new agency in law.

That is always a dicey proposition, having the Congress tell you to do something that they do not fully understand. There are all sorts of unintended consequences. The current intelligence reorganization is just another example. NIMA was the poster child for Congressionally mandated changes.

We wondered what the new name would be. There was some dark humor about calling it the National Mapping Agency- pronounced “enema,” but naturally that a non-starter.

The National Imagery and Mapping Agency’s creation was the textbook case for confusion. NIMA was created by jamming the satellite folks into the Defense Mapping Agency and merging the two.

It was a chaotic mess. The budget streams were part intelligence and part olive-drab defense. CIA analysts did not want to be transferred to “NIMA,” not only because of the prestige, but because of the benefits.

NIMA was formally established on October 1, 1996, with the start of the new fiscal year. It was supposed to merge the functions of the mapping folks with the capabilities of the intelligence community.

There was more consolidation, of course. That was part of the reorganization to harvest the “peace dividend.” NIMA was supposed to manage the collection of national and commercial assets, and advise the Services and other agencies on the use of theater and tactical reconnaissance assets. That included aircraft and un-manned aerial vehicles that the agency didn’t pay for, and the qualifications of analysts who did not work for NIMA.

The turf wars were many, though generally people of good will made things work over time. NIMA needed a vision, and they got one with the appointment of retired Lt Gen Jim Clapper. He is a firecracker. I worked for him when he was Director of DIA and all the chaos was just starting. I know how dynamic he is for a fact.

When called from retirement to unscramble NIMA, he decided to ride the geopsatial pony as hard as he could. He changed the name of the agency as a symbolic way of saying farewell to the past.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency is what they call it now, and to demonstrate that they, too, are a real national three-letter organization, just call it “NGA.”

Part of the charter for NGA is to support civil customers. After 9/11, NGA had much more latitude in covering the United States. In the old days the national sensors had very specific restrictions on covering targets in America. We train here, of course, before going overseas, and it was frustrating in the extreme to get satellite coverage of our training areas in Nevada, so that the aircrews could practice the way we were really going to operate.

There was real sensitivity about taking images of sheep, since the Rancher’s house might be included.

Some of the restrictions remain. But there are so many ways to acquire pictures these days that do not require the use of orbital intelligence assets.

Anyhow, that is how the spooks came to be watching the Superbowl, and the political conventions. Anything that is designated a national special security event gets the full treatment. Soup to nuts.

All the way from space.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra 

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