CNN Sunday Morning October 7, 2001
Target Terrorism
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: What satellite pictures are telling the U.S. military about Afghanistan? We'll take a look from high above next. Then up close and personal, an exclusive look inside a UNICEF aid caravan making its way into Afghanistan. Stay tuned to CNN.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: Since September 11, U.S. Intelligence agencies have been working overtime tracking Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and one of their primary resources is literally out of this world. Miles O'Brien joins us now from Atlanta to explain. Hi Miles.
MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Thanks, Kyra. You know the U.S. Intelligence community is unsurpassed in its capability of being able to take pictures from space using satellites, military and intelligent satellites. Let me give you a basic sense of what can be seen from orbit, the orbit of earth, as we take a look at some animation. Hopefully, that will get up here in the board here -- there we go. Let's take a look. It's very straightforward, I guess, if you think about it.
Put a powerful camera in space, send down -- point its lens toward earth, as earth passes beneath you can get some incredibly detailed pictures. Now, just to give you a sense of what's in the public domain here. Lets take a look at Afghanistan.
There's Kabul and everything you're going to see here is in the unclassified world of course. Take you in into Kabul. This comes from a company called Space Imaging. They use a satellite called Icons. And we're going to zoom in on Kabul. If you look up here in the corner, that's the airfield in Kabul, right beneath that "LIVE" banner there.
As we get a little bit closer, you can get more and more detail. These are so called one-meter resolution images. That basically means it can pick up anything that is three feet and larger. Now, take a look here you can see some of these airplanes on the tarmac and even get in a little bit more closely. Now, the U.S. intelligence community can do a lot of better than that.
As we take a look at a neighboring region Peshawar, which is in Pakistan. Let's zoom in on that and give you a sense of this area in the Peshawar valley. As we go down we can get a very close image and see things that -- in incredible detail and as we say this is stuff that's in the public domain. Multiply the power by about three and that'll give you a sense of what the military and the Intelligence community has at it's disposal.
Let's talk a bit more about this. Let's turn it over to John Pike, who is with a group called Global Security and he makes it his expertise, this particular.
Mr. Pike, good to see you again, sir.
JOHN PIKE, GLOBAL SECURITY ORG.: Glad to be here.
O'BRIEN: All right, give us a sense in this case. We've been talking an awful lot as time has gone on since the September 11 attacks on the value of human intelligence, particularly in this case. How much of a role does the space borne assets play in this case?
PIKE: The satellite imagery is going to be extraordinarily important in guiding human intelligence because any one collection discipline is really limited unless it's working with others. The imagery and the human intelligence working together in this case would consist of the satellites tracking some of these dispersing Taliban formations out in the countryside.
Then special operations units would be swooping down in helicopters capturing some of them for interrogation to give you additional information as to where the spy satellites are to be pinpointing later on and going back and forth along with the sort of information that presumably U.S. Intelligence will be getting from Pakistani Intelligence and from other Intelligence agencies in the region.
O'BRIEN: All right. But implicit in that discussion, when you start talking about special operations, quick lightning type attacks, is the speed with which this information gets to the people on the ground and -- in the past that has been a real problem. The folks in Langley, Virginia -- the CIA may know what's going on, but the actual troops flying those helicopters may not. What capabilities does the U.S. force have right now to do that?
PIKE: Well that dissemination problem was a big challenge back in Desert Storm, a decade ago. But as everyone knows, in the meantime the Internet came along, high-speed connectivity, digital cameras, and so today, the information that's going to be available to the troops in the field, they're going to be getting that as fast as the people in Washington are getting it and of course they're also going to have the benefit of Predator, unmanned air vehicles with T.V. cameras. So you'd use the satellites to do mission planning to go into a particular camp, have the Predator monitoring it as they're flying in and the helicopters capture some people at the camp, interrogate them and do it all over again.
O'BRIEN: Well let's go and look at some more of these images, these commercially available images, the so-called one- meter images. What does a Predator do for you? Does it increase the resolution capability or does it just give you more flexibility in identifying targets or both?
PIKE: The Predator is doing two things. First the resolution is a lot better, in the satellite imagery you can barely detect people. Whereas with the predator imagery, you can tell the difference between adults and children. Important for wanting to make sure you're going after commandos not refugees. The other thing that it gives you is full motion imagery.
You can see people moving around and it gives you continuous surveillance, so that in the hour and a half the helicopters would take to get to an area they're going to raid, you would be able to know where all of the people were by the time the helicopters got there.
O'BRIEN: To what extent though would a special operations force loose some element of surprise if a Predator was circling overhead in advance of their mission?
PIKE: Normally, the Predator is going to be standing off at such a distance that they wouldn't necessarily know that it was coming, and with a lot of those Predators flying around they wouldn't necessarily know that they were the ones who were being circled in on. And of course, the Predator is going to say, if they hunt her down or if they bolt it and that information would be able to go in real time to the troops coming in.
O'BRIEN: John Pike is an expert on the use of satellite imagery in intelligence gathering and in military operations. He is with a group called Global Security, thanks for being with us out of Washington today John.
PIKE: Thank you.
O'BRIEN: All right, we'll send it back to Kyra in New York -- Kyra.
copyright 2001 Cable News Network
