Ronald Kessler
Saturday, Feb. 17, 2007

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WASHINGTON -- Whenever a tip comes in about Osama bin Laden's location, the CIA, NSA, and military spring into action. So does the NGA.

The NGA?

While most people have never heard of it, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) analyzes and interprets images created by satellites and spy planes.

For years, the NSA (National Security Agency) was known as the "No Such Agency" because it was so secretive. But now that NSA intercepts have become front-page news, the most secret agency is the NGA.

The NGA is a descendant of the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), which determined that the Soviets were providing Cuba with missiles in 1962, precipitating what was known as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The NPIC was part of the CIA, but in 1996, it became part of the National Imagery and Mapping Agency within the Defense Department. In 2003, it was renamed NGA. For unknown reasons, its founders wanted the agency to have an acronym with three letters like the FBI, CIA, and NSA, so they hyphenated "Geospatial" and "Intelligence." While articles about NGA activities appear regularly in trade publications, the mainstream media rarely mention the super-secret agency.

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The NGA includes the former Defense Mapping Agency and is located in that agency's original building in Bethesda, Md. The large complex of red brick government buildings seems out of place in the middle of a leafy suburban neighborhood. Instead of a three-car garage, this neighbor has a guardhouse with military guards armed with assault weapons.

Because the NGA's building was originally used for printing maps, it is built like a factory. The low-ceilinged hallways of stucco and tile are deadly dull, the offices anonymous. With the tensile strength to support printing presses, the wide pillars that hold up the building have to be accommodated when planning office space.

Whenever a tip comes in about bin Laden's whereabouts, NGA analysts examine satellite images of his purported location for clues.

While satellites cannot peer into caves even with infrared imaging, they can pinpoint movement in the area. NGA analysts look for tire tracks and campfire smoke. They compare current images with images from the agency's archives. A change might indicate human activity.

Once NGA checks things out, the CIA may send an agent in to try to pick up information. If a military assault is planned, the NGA might remotely analyze the soil and terrain to determine where helicopters could land and trucks could move in.

"It's not that we hope that bin Laden looks up one day, and we get a picture of him," says Dave Burpee, an NGA officer who gave NewsMax a partial tour of the complex.

In fact, satellites cannot make out human faces. But they can read a license plate, if it is turned upward, intelligence sources say.

Instead, Burpee says, "There are going to be human reports; there are going to be signals reports; there are going to be all these inputs saying, ‘We think he's here. We think there's something going on.' Maybe there's a lot of cell phone activity. All right, we're getting a lot of cell phone activity from this location on the earth. What's that look like? And oh, by the way, if we think it's a place on the face of the earth where bin Laden might be, how do we attack it? How do we get a special forces team in there?"

For pilots, NGA creates images in three dimensions to show what it will look like to fly into a particular mountainous area.

"We have to be ready to be able to do what we do in hours if not minutes — not weeks and days like we had when it was the monolithic Soviet Union," Burpee says.

Beyond the hunt for bin Laden, NGA analyzes possible nuclear weapons facilities in Iran and North Korea; gives the FBI digital maps to help with security at events like the Winter Olympics; helps the Homeland Security Department by surveying damage from hurricanes, and works with the military when it plans an attack. For example, the NGA showed the Defense Department how to move Patriot missile batteries across the sands in Iraq without hitting soft or wet areas.

Three weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) pinpointed Iraqi troop movement. The center's photo-interpreters pointed out that Iraqi troops had months of supplies of fuel — far more than would be taken on a training exercise.

As part of its analysis, the NGA uses most wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum. That allows analysts to see if an airplane is in a hangar, for example. It means they can detect chemicals in smokestack emissions or soil and can identify solid materials, such as crops and camouflage.

The NGA may not be a household name, but it plays a vital role in the war on terror.

Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of NewsMax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you FREE via e-mail. Go Here Now.

© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.

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