Spy agency casts more watchful eye Intelligence unit has greater role
from got geoint?
BETHESDA, Md. -- Fans were not the only ones watching when the New England Patriots defeated the Philadelphia Eagles this month at the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla.
So was US intelligence.
Working at an FBI-led command post near the stadium, CIA-trained analysts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, or NGA, created nearly 200 aerial images, interactive maps, digital walk-throughs, and other computerized graphics in the event of a terrorist attack or other calamity.
The NGA team quickly downloaded data on Jacksonville bridges, roads, and hospitals when a large truck overturned two days before the game.
They studied schematics when a water main broke. And they accessed aeronautics charts when a small plane skirted a temporary no-fly zone just before kickoff. The plane landed without incident.
Even after the final touchdown, the intelligence team stayed in place.
''All these people were leaving through little Jacksonville airport the next morning," said Chris, a 32-year-old imagery analyst, the NGA's coordinator for national security events who asked not to be identified further for security reasons. ''We had to shift our attention there. We were still operational the next day."
The little-known NGA, previously called the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, once focused exclusively on foreign targets as both an intelligence service and a combat support group.
But it has played a growing domestic role since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, as part of its mission to identify the ''what and where" of anything on earth that could affect national security, even football.
Over the years, the agency has been transformed from a paper-based culture to a computer-based digital operation. It was the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 that pushed the change into high gear.
Using data from satellites, spy planes, and other high-tech surveillance systems, analysts began fusing disparate data on computers, from roads to rainfall.
They linked that information with other layers of data, including Soviet-era charts of caves in Tora Bora, the rugged mountainous area near the Pakistan border, and surface maps. Among their goals: finding flat spots in the rocky Afghanistan terrain where special forces helicopters could land.
For the first time, the NGA rushed scores of support teams into combat to help commanders use the new Web-based technology. By the time US-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, officials say, once-static maps looked like Xbox video games and the once-obscure discipline was gaining respect.
Customized Humvees carried communications bandwidth, satellite gear, and software so that NGA operators could help officers visualize the battlefield ahead as the Army's Third Infantry Division pushed from Kuwait into Baghdad.
Other NGA units analyzed video, radar, and infrared images fed from U-2 spy planes and unmanned surveillance aircraft such as Global Hawk and Predator drones.
The NGA copied all its digital data on Iraq -- from hilltop vegetation to chemical signatures of smokestack emissions -- onto 500-gigabyte hard drives and installed them in military command posts, updating the data daily. NGA teams now work with Army units conducting counterinsurgency operations in the so-called Sunni Triangle.
Before an offensive last fall in Mosul, for example, NGA teams helped the First Brigade, 25th Infantry Division, match overhead images with street photos and other data to create a three-dimensional ''fly-through" model of the city so that troops could preview each building and corner -- and see where insurgents might be hiding.
Before Iraq, ''you could have mentioned geo-intelligence to 99 percent of the people in the Army, and they'd go, 'Huh?' " said David H. Burpee, a spokesman for the NGA. ''Now people are getting to know us."
Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the independent Federation of American Scientists, said the NGA -- and those using it -- were at the onset of an evolving technology.
''This is a tremendously rich resource that has barely begun to be tapped," he said.
Outside war zones, the NGA, working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, last fall successfully used radar measurements collected by the space shuttle Endeavor to digitally map the elevation of nearly 80 percent of earth's landmass with more detail and accuracy than previously possible.
And after a tsunami roared onto Indian Ocean coastlines Dec. 26, NGA analysts marked satellite photos for the Navy and relief groups to show where bridges were wiped out, roads blocked, and villages erased. In the troubled Darfur region of western Sudan, the agency helped locate burned villages, track refugee flows, and identify possible mass gravesites.
For now, like most intelligence agencies, the NGA emerges from the shadows only when a problem hits the headlines.
But the NGA's domestic role is growing, especially in supporting the FBI and other federal agencies in what the Department of Homeland Security designates as national security events.
Since June, NGA teams have worked at the Group of Eight summit of leading industrial nations in Georgia, President Reagan's funeral in California, the Republican and Democratic national conventions, the Sept. 11 memorial service in New York, the opening of the UN General Assembly, and the Super Bowl.
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