Florida Today May 04, 2011
Cape Canaveral AFS a crucial player in bin Laden takedown
By Todd Halvorson
CAPE CANAVERAL — Helicopters flying U.S. commandos to Osama bin Laden's compound were guided through Pakistani airspace by Navstar GPS satellites launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
Top-secret spacecraft flown from the cape intercepted cell phone calls made by a trusted courier who inadvertently led U.S. intelligence agents to bin Laden's high-security safe haven.
Also launched from the Cape: advanced communications satellites that enabled President Barack Obama and his national security team to follow the raid from the White House Situation Room.
"We were able to monitor in a real-time basis the progress of the operation," John Brennan, assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, told reporters Monday.
Since Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s, the nation's fleet of military spacecraft has played an increasingly important role in fighting wars in theaters that stretch around the globe. Helping to get those satellites into space have been hundreds of Space Coast residents.
"It would be real hard to do it without them," John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a group that specializes in background information in the fields of defense, space, intelligence and homeland security, among others, said of the satellites.
Almost all of those satellites have been launched from Florida's Space Coast or from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
United Launch Alliance, a joint venture partnership of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, merged the Delta and Atlas rocket families back in 2006 and now launches military and civilian government satellites from both coasts.
The company employs about 3,900 people around the country, including about 650 at Cape Canaveral.
"They give us an edge," said Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor of national security at the Naval War College and former director of the Center for Space Policy and Law at the University of Central Florida. "Those guys in Florida, the engineers, the technical people, everybody behind that, made it possible."
The Air Force on Valentine's Day 1989 began building a constellation of 24 military navigation satellites that would guide troops, fighter jets, bombers, ships and submarines on missions around the world.
The precision of the Navstar Global Positioning System satellites was unprecedented, and the spacecraft were used to guide troops through the featureless deserts of the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield and Operation Desert Storm.
GPS devices now seem ubiquitous -- they guide cars, trucks and vans as well as civilian aircraft and boats. Hikers and adventure vacationers use GPS receivers.
On Sunday, the helicopters that dropped members of Navy SEALs Team Six into bin Laden's compound undoubtedly were guided by signals from GPS satellites.
"Everything always uses GPS. Nobody has any idea where they are, or where they are going, without GPS," Pike said. "And since there was a lot of precision flying going on, they would have been using GPS all over the place."
Photo and radar reconnaissance satellites gathered imagery of the compound over a period of months. In recent years, many have been nudged toward orbits that provide better coverage of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Typically they will fly over targets two times a day. More "persistent intelligence" is gathered by stealthy airborne drones.
Obama and his national security advisers delayed the raid a day as a result of meteorological data beamed back by military and civilian weather satellites.
And any array of heritage and new-generation military communications satellites were used to keep all the people involved -- including those in the White House -- in constant contact.
"Surely just about any (military) communications satellite you can think of was roped in to do something at some point," Pike said.
Pike expressed doubt about the official line that signals intelligence satellites -- like one launched here late last year on a Delta IV rocket -- intercepted cell phone calls between bin Laden's trusted messenger and the courier's family.
Bin Laden discovered in 1998 that U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring his cell phone calls and his e-mail. So he and other al-Qaida members supposedly ditched their phones and shut down their computers.
The Abbottabad compound was not equipped with telephone lines or Internet access.
"The notion that one of bin Laden's most trusted people would use a cell phone and say anything that would be incriminating -- I'm skeptical of that," Pike said.
"They must have screwed up somehow. But I could easily imagine that (the Obama administration) would want to put out a cell phone intercept story to hide (another vulnerability) and how he really screwed up."
© Copyright 2011, Gannett Co., Inc.
