GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Terror hunt from space

By Mike Toner

When two American embassies in Africa were bombed in 1998, it was an intercepted call from the terrorists to Osama bin Laden's satellite telephone that allowed U.S. authorities to link the Saudi exile to the attack.

When Iraq's Republican Guard was routed in 1991, it was an armada of orbiting satellites tracking enemy movements and evesdropping on their communications that was a key to the allied victory _ so successful that some military leaders suggested that it was the world's first "space war."

Today, U.S. intelligence-gathering technology is even better _ and more vital for military operations. But intelligence analysts say the country's sophisticated eyes and ears in space may be of limited value in finding, and apprehending, the masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The big difference in the current situation is the targets," says Jeffrey T. Richelson, senior fellow at the National Security Archive, an expert on satellite imagery and author of "The Wizards of Langley: Inside the CIA Directorate of Science and Technology." "Terrorists are going to be much harder to apply this technology to.

"Satellites are good at detecting the large-scale movement of troops, but terrorists are scattered all over the place," says Richelson. "Satellites can see buildings, but they can't see inside them. They can see activity around them. But if the goal is to distinguish between bin Laden and his third lieutenant, satellites aren't going to be much help."

The problem is exemplified by the retaliatory cruise missile attacks the United States launched at what they claimed was one of bin Laden's training camps in Afghanistan after the African embassy bombings. A few buildings were destroyed, but many of the casualties were reportedly civilians. Bin Laden's network remained intact.

"From space, terrorists look a lot like any other bunch of guys sitting around a hooch," says John Pike, a space intelligence analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org in Alexandria, Va. "In the 10 years since the Gulf War, we have seen a radical improvement in our satellite technology, but that has been offset by the ever diminishing visibility of the enemy."

Bid Laden's followers seem to have learned that lesson well. Intelligence officials have reported that most of the training camps used by his al-Qaida network in Afghanistan were evacuated quickly after the attacks on New York and Washington _ making the task of finding any operatives even harder.

Analysts say Hollywood-style versions of satellite surveillance, like that portrayed in "Enemy of the State," where vehicles were tracked as easily as if they were being followed by a helicopter, exaggerate the capabilities of satellite imagery. Although orbits can be adjusted, satellites can't hover like helicopters.

The number of spy satellites operated by the National Reconnaissance Office, an operation whose very existence was classified until 1992, is still a secret _ but it is no secret that number has been growing. The NRO, which has the largest budget of all U.S. intelligence agencies, launches three to five new satellites a year. The latest went up from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on Sept. 8.

Today's imaging satellites definitely have sharper eyes than they did a decade ago. From 150 miles in space, the current generation of KH-11 satellites can distinquish objects as small as three inches across _ about 10 times better than what was possible a decade ago. Richelson says that's good enough to see a license plate lying in the middle of a road, but not good enough to read the numbers.

All KH-11 satellites also have heat-sensing infrared capabilities, which allows them to see targets on the ground at night. And since 1997, a new generation of radar imagery satellites, called VEGA, also makes it possible to obtain high-resolution imagery of the ground even when there is heavy cloud cover.

As U.S. abilities to see from space have grown, so have its abilities to hear. Eight to 12 evesdropping satellites named Vortex, Magnum, Mercury and Orion _ which collectively provide what is known as SIGINT, or signals intelligence _ are in orbit at all times. From 22,000 miles in space, they can intercept and relay millions of low-powered radio and mobile phone signals.

The task of evesdropping, however, is getting harder. Since U.S. intelligence officials boasted that they had taped a conversation bin Laden had over his $80,000 satellite phone with his mother, he and his followers are thought to be relying more heavily on couriers and personal contact for their critical communications. The growth of the wireless world has made the task harder too. Ten years ago, cellular telephones were a relative rarity in most countries. Today, in many Third World countries, more people use wireless phones than the central wired system _ spawning millions of conversations, which, even if intercepted, require time and staff to analyze.

"There is still a huge requirement for human beings at the end of the day to figure out what's important," says James Bamford, the author of "Body of Secrets," an anatomy of the National Security Agency.

That task falls to the 38,000 employees of the NSA, what was known as "No Such Agency," which has the largest staff of linguists, mathematicians and code breakers in the world. From NSA's headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., intelligence analysts use massive computing power, speech recognition systems and other sophisticated software to sift through the avalanche of voice recordings, faxes, e-mail and other communications that are intercepted. Even so, no one can tell how many calls made from random pay phones using pre-paid credit cards, and couched in innocuous sounding codes about family and travel, may slip by unnoticed every day.

No matter how sophisticated the technology, in fact, intelligence experts say there probably is no reliable way to dismantle terrorists or their network without the addition of the third, and oldest, component of any spy network _ HUMINT, human intelligence. For the last two decades, however, through legislation and by executive decisions, the United States has steadily restricted the Central Intelligence Agency's abilities to use unsavory "wet" techniques like assassination or to employ the services of known criminals to gather information.

"Technology is great for seeing something after it happens," Pike says. "But it isn't very good about telling you what someone is going to do. It's the same reason that the cops don't usually catch bank robbers until after they rob a bank. "When it comes to catching bin Laden, the job is going to be complicated. The use of human intelligence basically requires a traitor. And in the highly compact and dispersed cells that bin Laden operates, that is going to be very difficult to get."