Spy Agency Specializes in Lay of the Land

Fans weren’t the only folks watching when the New England Patriots defeated the Philadelphia Eagles this month at the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, Fla.

So was U.S. 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 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 Sept. 11 terrorist attacks as part of its mission to identify the “what and where” of anything on Earth that could affect national security -- even pro football.

Over the years, the agency has been transformed from a paper-based culture to a computer-based digital operation. It was the U.S.-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 U.S.-led forces invaded Iraq in March 2003, officials say, once-static maps looked like X-box video games and the once-obscure discipline was gaining respect.

Customized Humvees carried communications bandwidth, satellite gear and software so NGA operators could help officers visualize the battlefield ahead as the Army’s 3rd Infantry Division pushed from Kuwait and 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 -- including hilltop vegetation and 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 1st 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 troops could preview each building and corner -- and see where insurgents might be hiding.

Before Iraq, “you could have mentioned geo-intelligence to 99% of the people in the Army, and they’d go, ‘Huh?’ ” said David H. Burpee, the NGA spokesman. “Now people are getting to know us.”

Steven Aftergood, an intelligence analyst at the independent Federation of American Scientists, said the NGA -- and those who use 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 the war zones, the NGA, working with NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, last fall successfully used radar measurements collected by the space shuttle Endeavor to digitally map the elevation of nearly 80% of Earth’s landmass with more detail and accuracy than previously possible.

And after the 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 to 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.

That was the case in January, when the Navy’s nuclear-powered attack submarine San Francisco crashed into a rocky outcrop 500 feet beneath the surface of the western Pacific, killing one sailor and injuring 23. The undersea hazard was not marked on Navy navigation charts issued by the NGA’s predecessor agency in 1989.

Most of the western Pacific seafloor has not been surveyed, and Navy navigation charts of the area may be inaccurate, said Christian Andreasen, the NGA’s chief hydrographer.

“We still don’t know if it’s the top of a mountain or a long shoal,” he said of the crash site. The NGA is assisting the Navy investigation, he added.

As the NGA has revamped how it does its work, it has run into resistance from at least one quarter -- those who have relied on its information in the public domain.

More than 300 pilots, librarians and others wrote to complain after the NGA disclosed in November that it might bar public access to flight information publications, navigation planning charts and other material published since the 1940s. The chief problem, officials said, is some of the data have copyright protections in other countries.

Scott R. McEathron, a map librarian at the University of Kansas, noted in an open letter to the NGA director, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr., that faculty and graduate students used NGA maps last year to help track biodiversity of species, among other projects. Withdrawing the data would “cripple” such efforts, he wrote.

Jim Mohan, an NGA spokesman, said that most such data would be available for a fee. The Federal Aviation Administration will sell aviation charts to pilots in the United States, for example.

But the NGA is expanding on other fronts. Buoyed by huge funding increases, the agency plans to add 900 new analysts to a staff of 14,000. It also has broadened its mission, launching more than 30 joint operations with the far-larger National Security Agency, which conducts electronic surveillance.

The NGA’s domestic role is also growing, especially 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 8 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 U.N. General Assembly and the Super Bowl.

Each event has special needs. For the 2003 Super Bowl in San Diego, the NGA prepared a digital model of a motorcade winding through downtown from the waterfront -- and a yellow line pointing to every building where a potential sniper would have a clear view.

For Super Bowl XXXIX, no parade was planned in Jacksonville, and neither U.S. intelligence nor law enforcement had reported a terrorist threat at Alltel Stadium. After days of tracking house fires, road closures and other mundane events, the game itself gave the federal, state and local officials crammed in the command center a break.

“When the game comes on, a lot of things tend to get quiet,” said Chris, the NGA team leader. “Everyone is watching the game. There isn’t a whole lot moving.”