Spies for Hire

by Tim Shorrock

  The NGA is by far the most open of the national intelligence agencies. At one point during the GEOINT 2006 conference, I asked David H. Burpee, the NGA’s easygoing director of public affairs, if he could give me a breakdown of the agency’s workforce. I was expecting the answer I’d gotten at the CIA and the NSA: sorry, classified. But to my utter surprise, Burpee provided the exact figure: half of its 14, 000-person workforce are government employees, and the other 7, 000 are “full-time equivalent contractors,” he said. Burpee’s willingness to answer questions and provide as much detail as he could was a pleasant change from the rest of the Intelligence Community.

  That openness is primarily due to the NGA’s relationship with commercial industry and technology, and the peculiar timing of the NGA’s emergence as a major discipline in intelligence. In the NGA’s earliest incarnation, when it was known as NIMA, the agency designed most of its software by itself or in cooperation with the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. In 1994, NIMA, using government-developed software, released a Joint Mapping Toolkit that was used by other intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense for visualizing geospatial data. Within a few years, however, commercial companies like ESRI and AGI were selling off-the-shelf mapping and integration software that was much faster and far more user-friendly than NIMA’s toolkit, which kept failing. To some observers, the developments in private industry made NIMA’s products look like a Model T.

  “Except for some really high-end stuff, like radiation-hardened circuits,” the government was no longer on the leading edge of imagery technology, says John Pike, the executive director of GlobalSecurity.org and a longtime user of imagery software, of the late 1990s. “For a lot of just plain vanilla IT stuff, they understood they were in danger of becoming a Mac in a Windows world. If they did not keep up with the commercial sector, they would get left behind irretrievably. And it turns out the commercial sector had a lot to offer in terms of hardware and software and imagery exploitation.”22

  Private sector vendors of satellites and imagery software also got a major boost from the Clinton administration. As we saw earlier, President Clinton and Vice President Gore came into office determined to use government incentives to boost U.S. industrial competitiveness in cutting-edge technologies. One of the most promising areas for commercial innovation was overhead imagery from satellites and aircraft. According to people in the industry, Clinton’s interest in promoting commercial imagery was communicated early in his administration by Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and Director of Central Intelligence Jim Woolsey. Brown and Woolsey “explained to us this was the course of action they wanted to take,” Northrop Grumman’s Richard Haver recalled in 2007.23 “It was our job [as a corporation] to figure out how to do it and drum up an industrial base for this.” (At the time, Haver was a senior executive with TRW, which was deeply involved in classified reconnaissance operations.) In 1994, the administration followed up with a presidential directive that granted operating licenses to U.S. companies to build high-resolution imaging satellites for both domestic and foreign sales.24 The administration’s commitment to the commercialization of space imagery was further spelled out in a 1996 memorandum announcing the establishment of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. In the pro-business language of Clinton and Gore, it noted that one of NIMA’s key thrusts would be “to promote the use of commercial solutions.”25

  As a result of these directives, NIMA stopped trying to develop software in-house and simply turned to the commercial market. For Pike, who was just starting to post satellite images on his popular Web site, the NGA’s selections helped him decide what to buy himself. “When I started to do imagery exploitation a decade ago, what did I do? I just identified which commercial products the agency had specified, and I went out and bought them,” he said. “I used the same imagery exploitation software that the NGA uses. And when I went out to get trained on the software, I had a dozen people in the class—me and eleven people from the agency.”

  In 2002, NIMA awarded one of its first commercial contracts for software when it hired AGI and the IT division of Northrop Grumman to redesign its toolkit with the latest commercial technologies. That product, now called Commercial Joint Mapping Toolkit, is used throughout the Department of Defense to transmit geospatial intelligence and data to commanders and soldiers on the ground in Iraq and other battlegrounds. After NIMA was rechristened as the NGA in 2003, CIA director George Tenet ordered the agency to use commercial imagery as its primary source for map-related products.26 Partly on the strength of its government contracts, privately held ESRI has grown into a $600 million corporation, and has sold its mapping software to more than 300, 000 organizations worldwide.27 AGI, the leading maker of three-dimensional animation software that helps users visualize geospatial data, is a $46-million company that claims the NGA, the CIA, and the NSA among its customers. It, too, is privately held.

  The names of both companies are unlikely to be recognized by most readers. But their products are. ESRI’s mapping software is employed in GM’s OnStar location devices installed in the company’s latest vehicle models. And AGI’s software was used to create the digital imagery that appeared on the computer monitors at the IMF, the fictional intelligence agency in the Tom Cruise thriller Mission: Impossible III. In the movie’s climactic scene, a computer geek at IMF headquarters in Washington monitors Cruise through his cell phone signal as he races through the streets of Shanghai, and tracks the hero’s moves with overhead mapping and images of the city. According to one of the film’s producers, the “animated intelligence scenarios” created by AGI for the movie are “used by real-world intelligence professionals for the exact purpose we wanted to depict in the film—it seemed like a natural fit.” In fact, AGI has considerable experience in this area: in addition to the NGA, it holds contracts with both the CIA and the NSA, which operate war rooms that probably look a lot like that of the fictional IMF.

  Not surprisingly, the satellite industry receives a big chunk of the NGA’s investments. Eighty percent of the NGA’s imagery is purchased from DigitalGlobe and GeoEye, the only two U.S. commercial imagery satellite operators. “We’re committed to a long-term engagement with the commercial industry,” Murrett declared at GEOINT 2007. DigitalGlobe, founded in 1992, is owned by an international consortium that includes Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation, Japan’s Hitachi, and the investment bank Morgan Stanley. Its QuickBird satellite, said to be the world’s highest-resolution commercial imaging satellite, was launched in 2001. In September 2007, DigitalGlobe successfully launched a new satellite called WorldView-1 capable of collecting nearly 300, 000 square miles of imagery a day at a half-meter resolution and spotting objects as small as a footstool or a license plate—four to five times the capacity of QuickBird. It also has more on-board storage and greater agility than the older model.

  “With this satellite, you’ll be able to map out a city much quicker than you could before,” says Chuck Herring, DigitalGlobe’s director of marketing communications. In an interview, he said WorldView-1 was partially funded by the NGA through its NextView satellite program under a contract with a total value of $500 million. “There is a lot of privatization of what used to be government functions,” Herring pointed out. But that’s not the case with commercial imaging satellites, he said, because “the government is not replacing anything. The things our satellites do are better filled by the private sector.” WorldView-1 was built by Ball Aerospace and ITT Corporation, an important intelligence contractor that built the sensors for CORONA, the CIA’s first spy satellites, and was launched at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

  GeoEye, DigitalGlobe’s only U.S. competitor, is the world’s largest commercial satellite operator, and earns over 40 percent of its revenue selling to the NGA, according to company officials. It was formed in January 2006, when a company called Orbimage acquired Space Imaging, a satellite operator that had recently gone bankrupt after losing a major NGA contract. Under its new name
, GeoEye operates a constellation of four earth-imaging satellites, including the IKONOS, which provides high-resolution images from its orbit five hundred miles above the earth. Sometime in 2008, GeoEye is scheduled to launch GeoEye-1, which will be able to locate an object to within three meters of its actual location on earth. The NGA financed half the cost of the new satellite and will use the same contract to buy imagery, NGA spokesman Dave Burpee told me. “That way, we get a terrific cut-rate price,” he said.

  Mark E. Brender, GeoEye’s vice president for corporate communications and marketing, told me that his company’s future is based largely on the expectation of NGA contracts, which now provide 40 percent of its revenues. “NGA is going to be a big customer for a long time,” he said. GeoEye’s satellites are built by General Dynamics, and use cameras designed and built by ITT. The total cost for GeoEye-1 will be $490 million. “That’s why two guys in a garage can’t do this,” said Brender. Just before the GEOINT conference, GeoEye scored a major coup by signing up retired Air Force General James Clapper, the first director of the NGA, for its board of directors (“It’s like hiring Colonel Sanders if you’re selling fried chicken,” Brender told me). But Clapper’s service for GeoEye was short-lived. In a sign of the fluidity of the intelligence industry, Clapper resigned in January 2007 to take the job as assistant secretary for intelligence for Secretary of Defense Robert Gates.

  Two of the biggest buyers of satellite imagery outside the government are Google and Microsoft. As mentioned earlier, Google Earth, the popular imagery product used by millions around the world, was first developed by a company funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital fund, and acquired by Google in 2004. Over the last three years, Google has moved heavily into the U.S. defense market, selling enhanced products such as Google Earth Fusion, which allows the NGA and other agencies to manipulate and integrate their own images with the company’s software. During that time, its government business increased from $73, 000 to $312, 000.28 Google Earth is now the standard mapping software used in geospatial intelligence.

  Google, however, has run into controversy: the detail in the high-resolution photographs that Google distributes to the public has alarmed governments in India, Russia, and South Korea, which have made their complaints known to the company.* The wide availability of its imagery has also raised concerns in the U.S. military, which believes that terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are using Google Earth as a tool for targeting attacks on U.S. soldiers. In 2007, British intelligence officials claimed to have found printouts of Google Earth images when they searched homes in Basra, the southern Iraq city occupied by British forces. (“The insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan are definitely using Google Earth,” warns Army Colonel Bill Harman, the chief of the NGA support team to the U.S. Central Command.) Speaking at a GEOINT 2006 panel on future challenges for the industry, Michael T. Jones, the chief technology officer for Google Earth, admitted that it would be easy for enemy soldiers to use Google. “Unfriendlies can use our commercial data because the barrier of entry is so low,” he said. But Jones, who stood out from the suited crowd with a stylish, high-collared Nehru jacket that he wore without a tie, argued that such incidents reflected the wide diffusion of modern technology. “As long as cell phones are on, Google Earth should be on,” he said.

  The GEOINT crowd also got to hear from musician Jeffrey “Skunk” Baxter. The former lead guitarist for the Doobie Brothers and Steely Dan, Baxter now works as an independent technology consultant for the Intelligence Community, the Missile Defense Agency, and the U.S. Air Force, and apparently makes a decent living advising several defense contractors (according to a biography posted on the Web site of the Potomac Institute, a military think tank he works with, he has also participated “in numerous wargames for the Pentagon” and advised leading Republican lawmakers on the issue of missile defense).29 Responding to Jones’s remarks on cell phones, Baxter argued that U.S. forces are “playing catch-up all the time” because “the enemy has outfoxed us.” But he cautioned the audience that he doesn’t “think like my colleagues in Hollywood” on issues of national security. Pointing to the NSA’s domestic surveillance program as an example, he argued that “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about.” Offstage, however, he was uncomfortable with reporters. One afternoon, I asked Baxter, who looked quite dapper in a tailored suit and a long gray ponytail tied neatly behind, what he actually did for the intelligence industry. “Can’t really talk about it,” he replied, adding without irony, “I’m into open source.” The next time I saw him, he was happily signing autographs in front of the Raytheon booth in the exhibition hall.

  Above all, GEOINT is a showcase for contractors. Every session at the symposiums is chaired by a master of ceremonies representing a major corporation doing business with the NGA. The opening session in 2006 was chaired by Keith Hall, the former director of the NRO, who played a key role in the formation of the NGA during the 1990s. As a senior vice president of Booz Allen Hamilton, he leads a “strategic intelligence initiative” that integrates activities across the firm’s intelligence community clients. His opening speech to the conference was a tribute to the contractors in the room. Imagery, he said, was essential in every U.S. military campaign of the last ten years, particularly in Kosovo, Iraq, and the global war on terror. “We can all be proud of the role the government-industry team has played in the advancement of a discipline so important to our national security,” he said, referring to the nearly seven thousand private contractors who work at the agency. “Those who wear the green badges play a critical role at the NGA.”

  Hall was followed as emcee by a parade of former officials who’ve gone through the government-industry revolving door—some of them two or three times. They included the aforementioned Joan Dempsey, one of Hall’s colleagues at Booz Allen; Richard Haver, of Northrop Grumman; and retired General Patrick Hughes, the former director of the DIA and recently designated as corporate vice president–intelligence and counterterrorism for L-3 Communications. Hughes, who retired from the U.S. Army in October 1999 after more than thirty-five years of military service, described the current outsourcing regime as the final step of a process that began during the 1960s. “We now have seen come to fruition a phenomenon that many of us saw developing in the Vietnam conflict forty-plus years ago,” he said. “That is, the government cannot act, especially overseas, without the involvement of American industry. And that industrial involvement now is so pervasive—you may call it invasive—that we are now speaking to each other about the employees of American companies who have died in combat.” Therefore, he continued, “American industry is no longer detached from the government in any of the endeavors of government, in my view.”

  The climax of the conference was a huge bash one evening at Universal City in downtown Orlando, where the NGA’s largest contractors had each rented one of six themed nightclubs lining a section of the amusement park called CityWalk. Everyone, from the highest-ranking former official to the lowest office flunky, drank, danced, and traded corporate pins late into the night. This was definitely not the CIA, I thought to myself as I nursed a beer outside one of the pavilions and tinkered with the General Dynamics pin someone had given me.

  The NGA operates at two levels—classified and unclassified. The imagery that the NGA buys from the GeoEye and DigitalGlobe satellites is all unclassified, and can therefore be widely distributed within government—to local, state, and federal agencies—as well as with the general public.* Most of the software is unclassified, too; as we’ve seen, the same software programs that the agency uses to analyze and manipulate imagery is commonly used by consumers and can be seen in everything from GM cars to motion pictures. But the NGA is, first and foremost, an intelligence agency focused on military operations. Admiral Murrett, NGA’s director, recently described the agency’s mission in the context of the Bush administration’s war on terror: “to provide the intelligence necessary to help predict, penetrate and pre-empt threats to our nat
ional security.”30 While much of the intelligence for this broad military mission may be acquired from the private sector, the NGA overlays it with data from spy satellites and sensors controlled by the NRO, the DIA, and other parts of the Intelligence Community. Here, the NGA’s imagery and its output enter the realm of classified, or black, information.

  According to the agency, imagery transmitted by U.S. military satellites is far more detailed than what is available from the commercial satellite vendors and therefore highly classified. “What’s classified is the detail,” Dave Burpee, the NGA spokesman, told me. But John Pike, who closely follows what satellites are launched and when, disputes that. Military satellites do provide higher-resolution photographs than what is available from companies like GeoEye, he told me.* But that’s not why they’re classified, he explained. The secrecy has to do with the flexibility of NRO satellites—that is, how quickly an agency like the NGA can get the image it’s looking for, and how quickly the NRO can respond to a request.

  “Most of these satellites are the size of a city bus,” says Pike. “You can go out in your backyard and watch them fly overhead at sunup and sundown. Any country that wanted to hide something from one of these satellites by running something indoors to hide it, is doing it.”31 Therefore, intelligence officials classify the information about the origin of certain images so the targets of U.S. surveillance don’t know they’re being watched. From studying the details of recent satellite launches, Pike claims that “there’s at least one spacecraft up there that is stealthy and not observable optically or by radar.” That’s kept secret for an obvious reason. “If somehow or another it got out that the Americans had an image of a particular place or time when none of the known spacecraft were in the sky, it would become apparent by deduction that they have a stealth satellite, and that’s where they got the image.” (“And now,” he said with a laugh, “I’ve come pretty close to the fun facts that can be acknowledged about these things.”) Information about military satellites, however, is not the only data that are classified. MASINT, the discipline of “sniffing” the air, picking up subtle changes in vegetation, and other forms of measurement, is one of the most classified areas of national intelligence. The overall picture obtained by merging imagery with SIGINT, MASINT, and HUMINT is where the real secrets of NGA are found.