Boston Globe
A window on Osama's world
What satellites can - and can't - do in the hunt for America's most wanted man
By Gareth Cook, Globe Staff , 9/25/2001
If Operation Infinite Justice were a movie thriller, a swarm of satellites would be gathering over Osama bin Laden's suspected lairs. The moment he stepped out of one of his caves, a camera would zoom in, capturing a fuzzy image of his turban, beard, and dark, distinctive eyes. The alert would go out - ''target identified!'' - and the commandos would come.
But in the real-life effort to capture a man in a country cut off from our intelligence, military analysts say US spy satellites, powerful weapons hidden by a veil of official secrecy, will not play the role the public might expect. Imaging satellites are able to provide stunning detail about the world that bin Laden lives in - helping pilots to train for missions in realistic flight simulators - but they do not have the resolution to identify an individual, and they move too fast to follow someone on the ground.
''Everything you learned about spy satellites from `Enemy of the State' is wrong,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a national security consulting firm. He was referring to the 1998 film in which federal agents use satellites to track minute details of star Will Smith's life.
In the war that President Bush described last week, aimed at eradicating shadowy global movements, information replaces sheer troop strength as the new high ground, and high technology is a vital weapon in seizing it. Analysts say spy satellites, one of the proudest accomplishments of the US intelligence agencies, illustrate the kind of advantages, and frustrations, the country can hope for on this new battlefield.
''They are very, very good,'' said William E. Burrows, a contributing editor of Air & Space magazine and author of ''By Any Means Necessary,'' a new book about intelligence missions. ''But they can't read a man's mind.''
At the dawn of the space reconnaissance age, the dream of engineers was to develop spying technology so good that it could read Pravda over someone's shoulder. Above all, designers wanted ''spatial resolution,'' the ability to make out smaller and smaller features. Poring over these images, the military could then estimate the capabilities of a new Soviet tank, submarine, or nuclear-tipped missile.
In concept, an imaging satellite is simple: It's just a space-based telescope that points at the Earth instead of the stars. The satellites the United States built to do this, still shrouded in secrecy, are among the great unsung technical achievements of the Cold War.
But an explosion of civilian imaging satellites in recent years is providing some hints of both the promise and the daunting challenges of spying from space.
Two years ago this month, a consortium of private investors, including Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, launched the world's most accurate commercial imaging satellite, giving members of the public the ability to see objects as small as about 3 feet across any place on the planet.
Space Imaging, the company that controls the Ikonos satellite, has been eager to show what it can do. Last month, it provided aerial views of CBS's secret Survivor camp in Africa, right down to its Masai-style thatched huts, from 423 miles above the planet's surface. Ikonos also provided many images of the World Trade Center used by the media in the days after the attack.
Ikonos and other imaging satellites are extremely delicate machines. The most important optical element is a large, curved mirror that takes in the light and precisely focuses it. Even a small imperfection in the mirror would send the light astray, ruining the images. If the mirror in Ikonos, the commercial craft, were 100 miles in diameter, the largest bump would be no larger than 1/800 of an inch, according to Space Imaging.
Military craft, referred to as Keyholes, are thought to have a resolution several times better than the Ikonos - on the order of several inches rather than several feet. This means that the mirror must be built and polished to even more demanding specifications.
To target a tank from hundreds of miles up also takes finely tuned navigating and extraordinary sensitivity in what is called ''attitude control,'' the direction the craft is pointing. Using Global Position Systems, the Ikonos is able to calculate its position in the sky to within about 10 feet, according to Space Imaging.
Impressive as it sounds, the wars in Iraq and Kosovo revealed weaknesses in the obsession with resolution. In the Gulf War in 1991, Keyholes and radar imaging ''Lacrosse'' satellites gave the United States an unprecedented ability to accurately locate targets on the ground for destruction. But the satellites were not as good at giving a broad picture of a battlefield - they were designed more to examine one tank than to survey a large number of tanks on a plain.
And commanders complained about the time it took to get new images once a raid had been staged, Pike said, making it hard to plan the next attack.
The systems on the ground that interpret the satellite images were designed for painstaking analysis of a new Soviet factory, not speedy information about a changing battlefield. The technology it used came before the revolution in cheap data storage and movement.
''During the Carter administration, if you wanted to move a gigabyte file, it was easier to use couriers,'' said Pike.
The Kosovo conflict revealed other weaknesses. The Serbs made extensive use of painted plywood decoys, drawing satellite-guided attacks on useless targets. The intelligence services also failed to catch evidence of genocide - mass graves, clearly visible in satellite images - because they were not looking.
From these hard lessons have come changes. An imaging satellite launched in May 1999, was put into a higher orbit than previous ones, indicating that the government is willing to sacrifice some resolution in favor of wider field views, said Ted Molczan, an amateur astronomer who tracks satellites.
The government has also put more resources into improving the way satellite information is processed and interpreted, Pike and other intelligence analysts said.
And while previous spy satellites have generated black and white images, the next generation will probably create color images, which would sacrifice some resolution but make it possible to discover what kind of material - plywood versus steel for example - a target is made out of.
The government has taken a great interest in the color images created by commercial satellites. The government is purchasing color images from the Ikonos craft, and they will be used in Operation Infinite Justice, according to Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C.
More commercial imaging satellites are planned, including one, called OrbView-4, scheduled to be launched on Friday. It will have the ability to distinguish many more colors of light. These images are of great value to all kinds of customers - from farmers who can use them to gauge the health of their crops to civil engineers who need accurate surveys of land.
And they also have military value.
''Without going into specifics, we do have a strong interest in the use of commercial imagery,'' said David H. Burpee, director of public affairs for the National Imaging and Mapping Agency, an agency charged with gathering, processing, and disseminating spy satellite images for the government.
He said the commercial images were especially useful for taking pictures of lower priority sites and for their color images.
''I'd imagine they will be giving contracts to produce a picture of these sites [in Afghanistan] every time they are overhead,'' said Richelson, who is not privy to intelligence gathering plans but is the author of a book about the CIA's technical research and is considered one of the nation's top specialists on spy satellites.
If the United States chooses a conventional attack on the Taliban, the Afghan city of Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold in the south, would likely be one of the top targets. As was done in Desert Storm, satellites would be used to locate airstrips. communications towers, and other vital infrastructure. With little industrial base after many years of war, however, the city is not what analysts call ''target rich.''
In this elusive environment, imaging satellites have another weakness dictated by simple physics. They are put into relatively low orbits, so that they are close to the Earth, but this brings two military limitations: They are easy to see at night, when they look like a moving star, and they go by quickly. Because the orbits are well known, anyone with access to the Internet can calculate when a satellite will be overhead and hide anything they don't want to show up, said Molczan.
That is how India is thought to have hidden its preparations for an underground nuclear test in 1998.
Afghanistan poses special problems because of its rugged terrain. Tall mountains cast long shadows, and anything in shadow will not show up in an optical image - only in radar, which is less accurate.
And no matter how good a satellite is, it is of no use finding someone who is hiding in a system of caves and tunnels, as some believe bin Laden is doing.
Ultimately, technology can help the cause of terrorists by making communications easier and giving them more powerful weapons, but Ann Florini, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment in Washington, D.C., predicts that spy satellites and other technology can do more to help defeat them by making the world more ''transparent.''
Their money can be tracked. Their communications can be intercepted. Their training camps can be discovered. If nations can cooperate, she said, there will be fewer shadows in which to hide.
This story ran on page C1 of the Boston Globe on 9/25/2001.
© 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.
