Message from the Director

Intelligence based upon the Earth’s physical and 

man-made attributes—and the art and science of 

interpreting that information—began to change 

well before the tragedy of September 11, 2001. 

By combining America’s most advanced imagery 

and geospatial assets within the National Imagery 

and Mapping Agency (NIMA) in 1996, our nation 

created a much-needed critical mass of skills and 

technologies under a single mission umbrella. 

As a result, the intelligence community was able 

to take its geospatial products to a new level. 

With the creation of NGA in 2003, this area of 

intelligence took another leap forward, allowing 

us to integrate multiple sources of information, 

intelligence and tradecrafts to produce an innovative and sophisticated 

new discipline that then NGA director James Clapper formally christened as 

geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT.

The change of name from NIMA to NGA had little to do with semantics 

and much to do with achieving greater insight into GEOINT. Using this new 

paradigm, intelligence professionals were better able to exploit and analyze 

imagery and geospatial information to describe, assess and visually depict 

physical features and human activity on the Earth. Today, NGA continues to 

deliver these vital intelligence products in responding to, and anticipating, 

our nation’s most critical national security challenges. GEOINT enables our 

nation’s leaders to make the best policy decisions possible. It also supports 

our military partners’ tactical and operational missions abroad. More than 

ever, this agency works hard to put GEOINT in the hands of our customers—

when, where and how they need it.

From the discovery of atrocities in Kosovo, to support for the cities hosting 

the Olympics, through the response to Hurricane Katrina, and our work 

in Haiti and Japan, NGA has provided critical GEOINT support when our 

nation needed it most. In the White House report reviewing the response to 

Hurricane Katrina, NGA was specifically commended for our timely response 

during the crisis. GEOINT offered an early version of the same total picture 

for responders that the administration later recommended for the entire 

nation as its plan to address major disasters in the years ahead. 

With this modest analysis of its past, NGA uses history to better understand 

i
its present and its future. While firmly rooted in a legacy that extends back to 

surveyors like the young George Washington and explorers like Meriwether Lewis 

and William Clark, GEOINT combines extraordinary modern technologies and 

diverse personal skills to solve today’s most difficult and complicated intelligence 

problems. In fact, NGA helped track down al Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin and 

shared insights with the special operations team that successfully stormed his 

compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 1, 2011.

Challenges continue to face our nation. In September 2011, we complete the 

consolidation of most of our East Coast activity to a new state-of-the-art campus, 

which, combined with our facilities in St. Louis, will help further unify and focus 

our efforts on behalf of America’s warfighters and policy makers. NGA will 

continue to learn from our past GEOINT successes, and we will continue to find 

innovative ways to better prepare for the challenges that our nation will face in 

the future. 

 

Letitia A. Long 

Director

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

ii
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Part One: The Genesis of GEOINT. 

Introduction: Something Happened in Dayton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Part Two: The New from the Old . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 

The New Product, Old Roots.

Emerging Technology.

World War II.

The Cold War Era.

Vietnam War.

Cuban Missile Crisis. .

Technologies and Services. .

The End of the Cold War. .

Lessons Drawn from the First Gulf War. .

Part Three: NIMA and NGA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

To Support the Warfighter: NIMA. .

Elements. .

The Early Challenges. .

Politics and Money. .

Significant Accomplishments: Turn of the Century. .

Shuttle Radar Topography Mission. .

International Cooperation. .

Support to Military Operations. .

September 11, 2001. .

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. .

New Tools and New Regions. .

Contents
v

Operation Enduring Freedom. .

Operation Iraqi Freedom. .

Development of NGA Support Teams: NSTs. .

Humanitarian Efforts. .

NGA’s Hurricane Assistance. .

Now and the Future  .

Conclusion: Beyond a Name. .

Glossary of Terms and Acronyms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45

Suggested Readings and Sources. 
President Clinton speaking to the troops in Bosnia 

Photo provided by DoD 
Introduction: Something Happened in Dayton

On November 1, 1995, President William Jefferson 

Clinton called on the warring factions in Bosnia to 

end the conflict that had cost over three hundred 

thousand Serb, Croat, and Muslim lives since 1991. 

He invited their representatives to come to WrightPatterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio to negotiate 

an end to the ethnic discord. 

In Dayton the U.S. delegation relied on a technical 

team led by the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) 

and the U.S. Army Topographic Engineering Center. 

These agencies drew together a support team 

of over fifty individuals who digitally mapped the 

disputed Balkans areas in near-real-time to assist 

the diplomats in their deliberations. The digital 

renderings included up-to-date terrain visualization 

with cultural and economic data relating to potential 

boundaries. 

Using automated cartography, computer-assisted map 

tailoring, and spatial statistical analysis, the team 

regularly furnished fresh maps reflecting territorial 

dispositions that had been negotiated less than thirty 

minutes earlier. The digital technique guaranteed 

accuracy, consistency, and reliability. 

1

PART ONE

The Genesis of GEOINT

The power and flexibility of the technology and the 

technicians gave the political decision makers the 

confidence needed to reach agreement. Threedimensional visual imagery of the disputed areas 

permitted cartographers to walk negotiators through 

disputed terrain, giving them a vivid and virtual 

experience of the space. In at least one instance, 

this three-dimensional experience proved crucial in 

persuading Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic 

to compromise on a disputed area. 

These hard-working cartographers and analysts 

collectively contributed to the Dayton Peace 

Accords, leading to a temporary, but significant, 

suspension of regional violence. In this case, 

the professional lesson did not go unlearned. 

Combining people and talent from eight agencies 

and offices the following year into the National 

Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) certainly 

reflected initiatives underway and also spoke to 

the wisdom of asking those involved in defense 

imagery and mapping to emulate the Dayton 

success on a more permanent basis. 

Of course the agency’s enabling legislation 

simply brought people together and initially could 
do nothing more. For many months after 

the creation of NIMA, imagery analysis and 

geospatial information services within the 

agency remained in separate and culturally 

distinct worlds. Seeing the potential in 

integration, a number of senior leaders 

recommended strongly that the agency actively 

integrate the talents assembled under the 

NIMA umbrella. Strong cultural identities on all 

sides at times made the idea of cartographers 

and other geospatial specialists regularly 

emulating the Dayton experience a very difficult 

and almost unlikely prospect. 

Recognizing possibilities in the combination, 

a number of people stepped forward to 

bridge the gap. In one case, a DMA veteran 

and senior cartographer felt that she might 

be able to help. Having worked for a time in 

private industry on one of the first automobile 

navigation system studies, she thought the 

need to integrate skills and personnel to 

achieve a goal seemed natural. Working with 

the NIMA Production Cell at the Washington 

Navy Yard, she gained approval for a plan to 

blend the analytical skills applied to imagery 

with those of the geospatial arts and sciences. 

In 1999 she began to hire cartographers, 

geographers, and other geospatial 

professionals for placement in some of NIMA’s 

imagery analysis offices. 

In the process, all concerned began to 

appreciate more fully the cultural divide 

between the world of maps and imagery. 

Speaking with some old hands at the imagery 

effort, this former DMA veteran received 

responses to her plan that ranged from “What 

am I going to do with one of them?” to “We 

would not recruit from that university.” In 

an exchange with one imagery analyst, she 

asked, “Where do you get your requirements 

from?” To that point in time cartographers 

lived by the routine of a production schedule, 

discreet well-defined projects each with a neat 

beginning, middle, and end. Instead of an 

answer characteristic of her professional world, 

she learned that the imagery people just knew 

what to do. In short, they owned their areas of 

specialty, their tasks, their analysis, and the 

process of reporting. They thought out loud, 

collaborated regularly, and directed their own 

work to serve the mission at hand. The DMA 

veteran recalled recently, “I was immediately 

jealous.” She wanted that same ownership, the 

freedom and responsibility it offered, and the 

same flexibility for people in her own field in 

collaboration with the imagery world. 

The bloody conflict in Chechnya presented 

the perfect opportunity. Driven for a time by 

this civil war, NIMA’s Eurasia division turned 

potential into practice. Welcomed by a group 

willing to experiment, in 2000 those leading 

the integration initiative asked a Bethesdabased cartographer to join the Eurasia group 

to merge his talent with their imagery analysis. 

The newcomer to the Eurasia division had only 

recently joined NIMA after working at a private 

industry mapping company, and his colleagues 

felt that he had “a sense for cartography. He 

had a sense for displaying information in a 

thematic context and wove it into a story.” 

Once augmented by a geospatial professional, 

the Eurasia group managed to set cultural 

barriers aside, listened, shared, and proceeded 

to issue intelligence products that had 

their customers immediately clamoring for 

more, frequently describing the output as 

“phenomenal.” As one senior NIMA manager 

remembered it, Eurasia’s new cartographer 

“was a rock star:” He provided the magic 

ingredient that brought the effort and the 

2
3

Geospatial intelligence is the exploitation 

and analysis of imagery and geospatial 

information to describe, assess, and 

visually depict physical features and 

geographically referenced activities on 

the Earth.

NSG GEOINT Basic Doctrine 1-0.

output to another level. Intellectual insight 

into a crisis situation expressed in a tight, 

complementary symphony of image and idea 

quickly set a new standard for professional 

achievement. This pioneering group, one 

among many, arrayed their early products 

on a display surface at the Washington Navy 

Yard that quickly became known as the 

“Wall of Fame.” In a visit to NIMA during this 

period, CIA director George Tenet lingered 

for a considerable time over the all-source 

intelligence on the Wall of Fame, with the 

distinct feeling that the future lay before him. 

Starting with eight embedded geospatial 

specialists, within six months those leading the 

integration initiative had little trouble placing 

eighteen more in various imagery offices in 

NIMA.

The success of the Washington Navy Yard 

Eurasia division eroded cultural barriers and 

promoted professional integration. Coming 

together as NIMA created the critical mass of 

talent and insight, but people willing to trust, 

to collaborate, and to experiment provided the 

catalyst. NIMA’s customers understood the 

crisis in Chechnya as never before, through 

a new lens called geospatial intelligence, or 

GEOINT. Intelligence had entered a new era.
Photography from the 

NGA Historical Research Center
The New from the Old

New Product, Old Roots

NIMA and its predecessor agencies reflected the 

historic need of American military and civilian 

leaders for an appreciation of the physical 

environment surrounding them. When General 

George Washington required information on 

the roads, rivers and fields of the New Jersey, 

Pennsylvania, and New York countryside, he turned 

to Robert Erskine an engineer, surveyor and inventor. 

Erskine was commissioned as Geographer and 

Surveyor General to the Continental Army on July 27, 

1777. He completed over two hundred maps and 

surveys for General Washington. 

In June 1803, President Thomas Jefferson 

commissioned Captain Meriwether Lewis to explore 

the new territory gained by the Louisiana Purchase 

and to record what he saw. After traveling west from 

St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean, Lewis and his partner, 

Captain William Clark, brought back maps and 

information about the activities of American Indian 

tribes and potential rival European powers—an early 

combination of mapping and intelligence reporting to 

meet the needs of the new nation’s leaders. 

PART TWO

Emerging Technology

The French brothers Jacques Etienne and Joseph 

Michel Montgolfier successfully launched the first 

balloon on June 5, 1783, in southern France using 

three animals as passengers. The first manned 

flight followed in October. Both British and French 

military leaders immediately saw the value of being 

able to view a battlefield beyond their maps into the 

third dimension. 

The United States began exploiting this new 

opportunity during the Civil War. Thaddeus Lowe 

and at least six other civilian balloon operators 

offered their services to the Union Army. First 

in civilian balloons and later in sturdier military 

balloons, Lowe repeatedly confirmed the value 

of this observation technique, providing a 

demonstration for President Abraham Lincoln 

himself on June 18, 1861. With an accompanying 

military telegrapher, Lowe also sent the president 

an electronic transmission proving the possibility of 

near-instantaneous reporting. The Army put Lowe 

to work the following week observing and reporting 

on Confederate forces operating in northern 

Virginia.
Seeking a more professional eye for 

reconnaissance than the occasional civilian 

balloonist, the Army started sending officers 

aloft. One was General George Armstrong 

Custer, who soon recommended night 

flights in order to better observe enemy 

encampments. Nighttime campfires made it 

easier to see the Confederate forces through 

the trees. As morning mess fires were lit, 

they clearly signaled the enemy’s possible 

strength and distribution. Frequently, balloon 

reconnaissance efforts failed for want of 

the proper technology, inadequate ground 

support, or the open opposition of many 

officers, blue and grey. Technological limits, 

military skepticism, and bureaucracy managed 

to interrupt the Union Army’s use of balloons 

in June 1863.

After the Civil War the new U.S. Army Signal 

Corps incorporated a balloonist in its weather 

forecasting program. The Signal Corps 

purchased a new balloon and established a 

balloon detachment at Fort Logan, Colorado. 

In possession of the Army’s sole balloon when 

the Spanish American War began in April 

1898, the Signal Corps deployed to Cuba 

during the American invasion. The balloonist 

soon detected a route to bring U.S. forces 

more rapidly into the battle of San Juan Hill. 

However, inexperience led 

the Signal Corps to position the balloon 

too far forward, where it soon betrayed 

American positions to the Spanish artillery. 

Consequently, it made only three ascensions. 

These experiences and the potential of the 

technology led to a continued Signal Corps 

interest in balloons after the war concluded 

in August, with several officers giving serious 

study to aerial observation. This included the 

use of kites that carried small instruments aloft 

for military uses and gathering meteorological 

data. In 1895, an American researcher, William 

A. Eddy, took the first aerial photographs from 

a kite in the United States. Two years later, 

in 1897, Eddy approached the Navy about 

a system that used kites to see beyond the 

horizon. Kites remained in use until gradually 

replaced by an alternative perfected by the 

Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk.

As armies realized the advantages of aerial 

observation, they welcomed any means of 

obtaining this valuable information. One 

possibility emerged with the familiar homing 

pigeon. In 1903 the Germans developed a 

seventy-gram pigeon camera that took thirtyeight-millimeter negatives automatically every 

thirty seconds. When the United States entered 

the Great War in 1917, the army followed suit 

with a pigeon system that took pictures of the 

enemy lines. 

The new opportunity to combine the airplane 

with the still image camera gave the armed 

forces the ability to move, see, and record 

the Earth in a more systematic manner. The 

reliability, regularity, and responsiveness of the 

airplane, as opposed to the pigeon, permitted 

the data gathered to become reliable and 

timely intelligence. 

Photographer Edward Steichen made the 

transition from front-line balloon observation 

to aircraft. He eventually commanded a 

reconnaissance unit on the Western Front 

consisting of fifty-five officers and 1,111 

enlisted soldiers daily providing General Billy 

Mitchell’s staff with imagery intelligence. 

Steichen, one of the traditional artists who 

raised photography to a widely recognized art 

form just before the war, advised the army on 

the best way to use the large, aircraft-mounted 

cameras and significantly improved the results 

presented to the U.S. Army senior leadership. 

During the interwar period, Steichen worked for 

Condé Nast publications and virtually defined 

fashion photography. After Pearl Harbor, 

6
7

The demands of World War II

made photo intelligence even

more essential.
Steichen placed his camera in the service of 

the U.S. Navy. At the end of his career, this 

imagery intelligence pioneer became head of 

the photography department at the Museum of 

Modern Art in New York City.

Aerial photographs not only enhanced 

cartographic services but also offered more 

reliable battle damage assessments based 

upon images captured before and after 

bombing runs. Military leaders standardized 

many techniques, including the use of multiple 

images to produce three-dimensional effects, 

enhancing detection further. 

The period between the world wars saw 

great improvements in both aviation and 

photography. Highly technical equipment 

was developed to extract maximum value 

from photographs for mapping purposes. 

Stereoplotters designed to reconcile 

differences in scale among photographs and 

maps became essential to cartographers.

World War II 

The demands of World War II made photo 

intelligence even more essential. Long-range 

reconnaissance and widespread stereo photo 

coverage became necessary for the success of 

strategic planning and combat operations.

Aerial reconnaissance photos provided the 

Allies with early intelligence on the German 

wonder weapons, giving the scientific 

community and strategic planners basic 

insight into the next generation of airborne 

firepower. In helping to reveal the nature of 

German work on the wartime V-1 and V-2 

missiles, aerial photography and imagery 

analysis demonstrated impressive potential 

for supplying information from denied areas. 

In this case, imagery intelligence provided an 

essential part of the total picture for those 

concerned with national security.

As aerial photography grew in importance with 

the war effort, three fundamental changes in 

U.S. military mapping and photo analysis 

occurred. Necessity spawned a close alliance 

with our allies. In 1941, American analysts 

deployed overseas, first to the British Central 

Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, England, 

and later throughout the Allied theaters of 

operation. To accelerate map production, the 

Army Map Service adopted a division of labor 

according to geographical feature to accelerate 

production at its new facility at Brookmont, 

Maryland. During this period and for the first 

time, due to wartime shortages, women and 

African-Americans entered the intelligence 

workforce as professionals in intelligence 

career fields. 

The Cold War Era

Although World War II ended in victory for the 

United States and the Allies, anxiety rather than 

true peace followed. The struggle between 

communist ideology and the largely democratic 

and capitalist west now included the deadly 

threat of nuclear weapons and a constant 

struggle over the general character of the 

postwar world, with dangerous flashpoints 

in Germany, Korea, Greece, and Turkey. As 

the Soviet Union progressively suppressed 

democracy in Eastern Europe, British Prime 

Minister Winston Churchill popularized the 

image of an iron curtain running from the 

Baltic Sea in the north to Trieste in the south to 

symbolize the East-West conflict. 

In reaction, President Harry S. Truman sought 

to contain the Soviet threat with military might, 

the authority of the atomic bomb, and support 

to vulnerable regions of the world through the 

Marshall Plan. The Truman containment policy 

placed a high premium on intelligence that 

might betray Soviet intentions. As the Soviets 

closed Eastern Europe to the west, the 

8
9

potential of information-gathering techniques 

that had been developed and used successfully 

during World War II became increasingly 

important. 

In the summer of 1949 the Soviet Union 

exploded its first atomic bomb, ending the 

short-lived American monopoly on atomic 

weapons. A few months after the Soviet atomic 

bomb test, the Chinese Communist Party won 

the country’s civil war and took control of 

the mainland. In this unsettling geopolitical 

context, North Korea invaded South Korea in 

June 1950, immediately drawing the Defense 

Department’s maritime charting, aerial 

reconnaissance, and mapping organizations 

into the war effort. While the shooting in Korea 

stopped in 1953, a new Soviet long-range 

bomber and hydrogen bomb increased cold war 

anxiety, as did the barely controlled hostility 

daily on display in a divided Berlin. In this 

environment, the United States and its allies 

turned to technology to help them understand 

events in those areas denied by the Soviet 

presence. New reconnaissance aircraft and 

satellites became a principal means for 

developing insight into the plans and actions of 

the communist world.

Analysis of aerial imagery increased in 

importance as a resource for the intelligence 

community. In 1947 the newly created Central 

Intelligence Agency (CIA) organized a team 

to study and interpret aerial photography of 

Eastern Europe captured during World War 

II from the archives of the German geodetic 

service. These captured German materials 

proved invaluable since maps of the area 

possessed by the western powers were 

inexact or nonexistent, and the communist 

governments denied western observers access.

In the mid-1950s, with the support of 

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the CIA 

inaugurated a program to design and build a 

high-altitude aircraft equipped with cameras 

for detailed photographic surveillance. To 

exploit and interpret aerial photos from the 

new U-2 aircraft, the CIA formed a separate 

photographic interpretation division with 

analysts from the Army, Air Force, and 

Navy. The new organization, the National 

Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC), 

used data gathered by flights over Communist 

territory to give the most senior policymakers 

and strategists authoritative knowledge about 

Russian capability, giving the lie to the bomber 

and missile gaps commonly appearing in the 

media during the 1950s.

Vietnam War

Long before the United States formally became 

militarily engaged in the Vietnam conflict in 

Southeast Asia, the AMS, the Air Force’s St. Louis 

Aeronautical Chart and Information Center (ACIC), 

NPIC, and the Navy HydrographicOffice collected 

data and prepared aeronautical and maritime 

charts, maps, and analyses for that region.

Photography from the

NGA Historical Research Center
During a tense summer in 1954, for a moment 

the United States seriously considered 

intervention to help the French after their 

defeat at the hands of the Communist Viet 

Minh at Dien Bien Phu. AMS provided analyses 

of the terrain around the cities of Hanoi and 

Saigon to provide American policymakers 

with critical intelligence on the challenges of 

intervention.

Division of the country followed the French 

defeat in 1954. However, in the late 1950s and 

into the 1960s, contractors and survey parties 

provided the AMS with aerial photographs 

permitting the first complete and accurate 

maps of Vietnam.

In 1959 President Dwight D. Eisenhower 

requested U-2 missions over Vietnam and 

the surrounding region and tasked NPIC with 

an evaluation of the results. NPIC analysts 

also visited the region to evaluate the needs 

generated by the growing conflict between 

North and South Vietnam. By 1962, NPIC 

analysts had already conducted bomb-damage 

assessments, identified possible targets and 

produced valuable intelligence products.

As demands for targeting information grew, 

along with American involvement on the side of 

South Vietnam, ACIC deployed a new database 

targeting system that enabled attacking 

American and allied pilots to evade Communist 

air defenses more effectively and to place their 

ordnance on target more accurately. Exploiting 

SR-71 Blackbird aircraft photography, analysts 

could identify the exact coordinates of newly 

found targets and send that information back 

to allied forces for action. 

The AMS adapted the land-based, lowfrequency Long Range Navigation (LORAN) 

system to record the location of sensors being 

dropped from the air to help allied forces 

interdict North Vietnamese supply and troop 

movements into South Vietnam. At the same 

time, AMS provided its traditional mapping 

support to the Army.

With the beginning of American ground combat 

in Vietnam, experiences during 1965 and 1966 

quickly demonstrated the inadequacy of coastal 

charts based largely upon World War II data. 

In particular, the Army’s understanding of the 

river deltas fell far short. Consequently, over the 

next three years the Naval Oceanographic Office 

completed comprehensive geodetic, coastal, and 

harbor surveys of that complex coastline using 

a series of survey vessels. In addition, during 

December 1966 the Naval Oceanographic Office 

established a branch office in Saigon to provide 

updated maritime charts and publications for 

use by local fleet and Marine Corps units in 

their blockade, interdiction, and naval air 

support actions.

Increasing American military involvement 

required accurate information about the names 

of natural and cultural features in Vietnam and 

adjoining countries for application to maps 

and charts and for operational purposes. 

The U.S. Board on Geographic Names, part 

of the Department of the Interior, provided 

guidelines for standardizing the names. The 

AMS survey parties collected names data in 

the field for topographic maps of Vietnam 

and other countries, and similar staffs at the 

Naval Oceanographic Office and ACIC provided 

names for maritime and aeronautical charts, 

respectively.

10
11

The U-2

Designed by Clarence “Kelly” Johnson in the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works, 

from the beginning of its operational life on 1 August 1955 this aircraft satisfied 

a variety of critical requirements set down by the intelligence community. Able to 

fly at altitudes approaching 70,000 feet, the U-2 employed optics and a camera 

developed by the Polaroid Corporation that initially provided an image resolution 

of 2.5 feet from 60,000 feet above a target.

This aircraft first captured international attention when the Soviets shot down 

pilot Francis Gary Power as he overflew the territory of the Soviet Union on 1 May 

1960. The U-2’s utility, however, never came into doubt. On 14 October 1962, a 

U-2 from the U.S. Air Force 4080th Strategic Reconnaissance Wing photographed 

Soviet missiles armed with nuclear warheads in Cuba, providing critical evidence 

for the world community during the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

The U-2 still serves on the front line of intelligence gathering in 2011.
Photography from the

NGA Historical Research Center
13

Cuban Missile Crisis

In late August 1962, NPIC, using data from 

U-2 flights, identified the installation of 

Soviet missile sites in Cuba. On October 15, 

President John F. Kennedy and his civilian and 

military advisors learned that photos taken 

the day before revealed the presence of six 

long, canvas-covered objects initially called 

“unidentified military equipment.” Further 

analysis branded the objects as Soviet mediumrange ballistic missiles. Photographs also 

revealed missile installations in a significant 

state of readiness with supporting transporters, 

command and control quarters, cables, and 

launch erectors. In the seven weeks since late 

August, when NPIC analysts made the first 

photo identification of the surface-to-air missile 

sites in Cuba, just ninety miles off the coast of 

Florida, the Soviets had managed to ship and 

assemble an arsenal of offensive weapons with 

nuclear capability.

Using irrefutable photographic evidence, and 

with confidence in the analysis, President 

Kennedy and his closest advisors developed a 

strategy that gave the United States the moral 

high ground and incomparable situational 

awareness in the ensuing public confrontation 

with the Soviet Union. In a nationally televised 

address, the president revealed publicly the 

existence of Soviet offensive weapons capable 

of striking deep into the United States. He 

called for their immediate removal, and he 

declared a “strict quarantine” on all shipments 

by air or sea to Cuba. Intense diplomatic 

exchanges followed, in both official and 

unofficial channels. 

Tensions mounted as Soviet ships steamed 

toward Cuba in the days immediately after the 

speech. On October 24, half of the twenty-five 

Soviet vessels en route to Cuba either turned 

back or altered course to avoid the U.S. Navy’s 

positions around the island. Meanwhile, 

President Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita 

Khrushchev exchanged diplomatic notes 

that resolved the conflict. On October 28, 

Premier Khrushchev announced that the 

Soviet Union would withdraw all missiles and 

related equipment from Cuba in exchange 

for a pledge from the United States not to 

invade the island. Only in the 1990s, with 

the opening of documents related to Soviet 

policy, did the world learn that the Soviet 

military in Cuba actually did have nuclear 

warheads at their disposal on the island and 

that the commanders in the area had the 

authority to use them. Not publicized at the 

time was President Kennedy’s agreement to 

remove similar missiles from Turkey, situated 

geographically as close to the Soviet Union as 

Cuba is to the United States. 

Aerial surveillance photography had not only 

revealed the initial buildup of Soviet missiles 

in Cuba; it also revealed the missiles’ state 

of readiness and, during the quarantine, 

the nature of cargo carried by Soviet ships. 

Photographic interpreters clearly established 

the critical value of their craft.

Complementing the aerial intelligence, below 

the surface of the Atlantic Ocean, the newly 

installed east coast arrays of the Navy’s 

sound surveillance system, or SOSUS, not only 

tracked the surface vessels, but also detected 

four Soviet diesel, Foxtrot class submarines on 

their way to establish a submarine base at the 

northern Cuban port of Mariel. The quarantine 

forces drove all four boats away from their 

intended destination, forcing three of them to 

the surface. 
14

Technologies and Services

After the confrontation over Cuba, many 

existing agencies and a few newly created 

began to depend significantly on imagery 

to provide an essential part of the overall 

intelligence picture. In 1961, the newly created 

National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) began 

to develop reconnaissance satellite programs. 

The critical nature of its work kept its existence 

secret and unacknowledged until 1992. Also 

in 1961, the Secretary of Defense established 

the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), 

consolidating many of the uniformed services’ 

intelligence activities.

ACIC began incorporating data collected by 

U-2 flights into its aeronautical charts. With 

the development of tactical and long-range 

missiles, ACIC became responsible for missile 

targeting data. 

To improve the capabilities of its personnel, 

in the late 1950s ACIC began to send 

its employees to graduate programs in 

geodesy, mathematics, photogrammetry, and 

astrophysics. This ACIC program and others like 

it prepared the military’s mapping, charting, 

and geodesy community for its work in the 

new space programs and in accurate missile 

targeting.

Paralleling these developments, satellite 

imagery began to augment the now-traditional 

aerial variety. Beginning in early August 1960, 

the CORONA program provided photographs 

taken from space. CORONA imagery, especially 

of the Soviet Union, retrieved from space once 

a month, satisfied many of the program’s 

customers, such as the precise cartographers 

at ACIC and the AMS. 

As good as CORONA was, the nation’s leaders 

needed timely intelligence, even more 

efficiently collected and delivered. In response, 

imagery analysts at NPIC, inundated by an 

avalanche of new satellite imagery, accelerated 

reporting on select priority areas. However, 

the multiplicity of agency administrative 

structures produced overlapping mandates 

and responsibilities, regularly creating conflict 

and inefficiency. Both the intelligence and 

mapping communities independently used 

satellite images, developing techniques and 

missions that frequently led to duplication 

of work, conflicting priorities, and possibly 

complementary products generated in 

isolation. Technical incompatibilities in their 

respective processing systems also made 

coordination of work awkward and difficult.

Analysts in the intelligence community wanted 

imagery that covered a broad sweep of terrain, 

and they were prepared to use unconventional 

sensors to get it. For them, speed in processing 

and analysis took precedence in gathering 

actionable intelligence. In contrast, AMS 

personnel, who used imagery data to create 

maps for the military, required carefully 

calibrated 

mapping cameras that recorded snapshots 

in which geodetically fixed points appeared 

as references for exact measurement. 

Map makers required cameras that could 

compensate for image motion, deviation from 

the vertical, and optical irregularities present in 

any photographic lens. They prized dimensional 

stability and absolute accuracy. Both the 

intelligence community and the mapping 

community used images of the Earth taken 

from satellites, but processed the information 

through a series of very different priorities and 

cultural assumptions. 

As the Vietnam War drew to a close for the 

United States, Congress looked for ways 

to consolidate military and intelligence 

organizations. The Defense Mapping Agency 

(DMA) emerged in the Department of 

Defense in 1972 to increase efficiencies and 

14
15

economies by bringing into one organization 

the mapping, charting, and geodesy activities of 

all three major services. This new organization 

absorbed the Air Force’s ACIC operations, the 

oceanographic and charting services of the U.S. 

Naval Hydrographic Office, and the AMS. 

The new agency faced several challenges, not 

the least of which was the rapidly growing power 

of the computer. In the early years of DMA, 

information in digital form began to supplant 

analog data. DMA led a major effort in the 

1980s to convert its map making to digital 

format, adapting a variety of new geographic 

products, procedures, and modernization 

programs. By the mid-1990s DMA had created 

a new system for generating maps, the Digital 

Production System.

The power of the computer vastly expanded both 

memory capacity and the ability to manipulate 

data. This ever-increasing capability allowed 

the smoother consolidation of the analysis and 

generation of products by a single agency.

The End of the Cold War

In November 1989, the Berlin wall, that premier 

symbol of the cold war, came crumbling down, 

and within months, communism collapsed in 

Eastern Europe, taking the Warsaw Pact and 

many American defense assumptions with it. 

A change in the threat would certainly mean 

changes in priorities, national investment, and 

a need for an even more flexible intelligence 

community. 

With the reduction of the Soviet military threat, 

pressure mounted in the United States for a 

“peace dividend.” Analysts began to reassess 

governmental operations in all fields, intent 

on streamlining structures and cutting costs. 

In 1990 the Senate Select Committee on 

Intelligence and the Senate Armed Services 

Committee instructed the Secretary of Defense 

to examine all intelligence activities supervised 

by the Defense Department and “to the 

maximum degree possible, consolidate or begin 

consolidating all disparate or redundant functions, 

programs, and entities.” Within a year, the 

Assistant Secretary of Defense proposed a plan 

for restructuring defense intelligence, directing 

the military services to “consolidate all existing 

intelligence commands, agencies, and elements 

into a single intelligence command within each 

Service.” This consolidation of the defense and 

intelligence communities led to substantial 

reduction in the number of both civilian and 

military personnel. 

Lessons Drawn from the First Gulf War

On August 2, 1990, President Saddam Hussein 

of Iraq sent his army into neighboring Kuwait. 

International attention shifted to the Near East. 

The United States responded by dispatching 

military forces to the area in Operation Desert 

Shield to protect Saudi Arabia from Iraqi attack. 

On January 17, 1991, after several months 

of diplomatic pressure failed to bring an Iraqi 

withdrawal, an international coalition of military 

forces led by the United States launched 

Operation Desert Storm to free Kuwait. 

Desert Storm: Troops in protective gear against 

Chemical weapons. 

Photo provided by DoD
President Dwight Eisenhower examines one of the first 

CORONA film buckets retrieved from space. A ceremony 

was held to mark the event in the White House 

Conference Room, 15 August 1960. (Eisenhower 

Presidential Library; 

www.eisenhower.archives.gov/avwebsite)

This cross section diagram reveals the major components of the 

CORONA J-3 System. (NGA Historical Research Center)

Wing Commander Douglas Kenall, head of the Technical Control 

Office of the ACIU through WWII (Center seated) on his left is Col Elliot 

Roosevelt and Dr. (Wing Commander) Hugh Hamshaw – Thomas. they 

are joined by personel working at ACIU at the time. C.1943. (Courtesy 

Medmenham Collection).
17 A U.S. Air Force C-119 is shown recovering a CORONA capsule in 

mid-air after its re-entry from space.

(www.nro.gov/corona/imagery)

One of the CORONA camera systems in 

open cross–section.

(www.nro.gov/corona)

The variety of CORONA cameras: Specific cameras 

addressed specialized missions.

For example: ARGON—developed for mapping 

missions (KH-5); LANYARD—developed for 

spotting missions (KH-6). 

(NGA Historical Research Center)

y 

y 

Royal Air Force — Medmenham c.1945

(Coutesy Medmenham Collection) .
18

DMA provided the military forces in the field with 

precise positioning and targeting information. 

It also provided maps to military commanders, 

producing over 110 million copies as the battle 

progressed. In addition, NPIC, the Defense 

Dissemination Program Office, and the DIA all 

provided imagery or intelligence based upon 

imagery.

Combat exposed shortcomings in the system as 

a whole. DMA’s mapping and production systems 

still reflected cold war needs, emphasizing Eastern 

Europe rather than the Middle East. To meet the 

immediate military requirements, DMA turned 

to images of the terrain available commercially 

through the Landsat program operated by 

the U.S. Geological Survey and the National 

Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). 

The Landsat image maps became an integral part 

of the materiel supplied to theater commanders. 

Other imagery assisted with precision targeting, 

intelligence gathering, and many other needs, 

much of it coming from NPIC. 

In spite of such adaptations, the war in the Persian 

Gulf revealed that the application of imagery data 

to military needs clearly needed improvement. In 

the Pentagon and out in the field, DMA products 

supported the operations staff, whereas NPIC 

products supported the intelligence staff. The two 

agencies used similar resources and technologies, 

but their customers lived in separate cultural 

worlds. 

This cultural separation now seemed 

counterproductive. Although several agencies 

collected and analyzed imagery, they used 

incompatible dissemination systems and had 

different release restrictions. These differences 

impeded the timely transfer of imagery-based data 

to the theater of operations. Military commanders 

commented that in the heat of battle they often 

did not receive necessary information when they 

needed it. In the end, this would not do. The threat 

had changed along with the probable nature of 

future war. Those generating imagery analysis and 

geospatial information would have to change 

as well. 

Photography from the 

NGA Historical Research Center

Building a map. 

18
19
In the early morning: a USA M109 A6 Howitzer (Paladin) at a fire base near Ad Dhuloiya, Iraq

DoD photo by SGT JACK MORSE, USA
21

NIMA and NGA

To Support the Warfighter: NIMA

On the imagery issue, DIA, the service intelligence 

chiefs, and the joint command staff intelligence 

officers of the unified commands had one overriding 

concern. Any new imagery– and cartography–based 

organization had to support the warfighter. Any 

approach to Congress for authorization to unify 

these services while making them more responsive 

would have to adopt this position and confirm 

absolutely the new entity’s commitment to national 

intelligence needs. 

On November 27, 1995, Secretary of Defense 

William Perry, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) 

John Deutch, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs 

of Staff General John Shalikashvili came forward 

as principal sponsors and wrote a joint letter to 

Congress, affirming their mutual commitment to 

create a new “single agency within the Department 

of Defense,” designated as the National Imagery 

and Mapping Agency (NIMA). NIMA would “improve 

the overall effectiveness and efficiency of imagery 

and mapping support to both national and military 

customers” [emphasis in the original].

PART THREE

The next day Deutch appointed Rear Adm. Joseph 

Dantone to implement the plan and named him 

director designate. To include the new agency in 

the fiscal 1997 budget, the implementation team 

had to assemble all the material necessary to 

support authorizing legislation and present it to the 

key congressional committees by April 15, 1996. 

Dantone’s team included representatives of the 

potential constituent agencies: Leo Hazlewood, 

former director of NPIC; Dr. Annette Krygiel, 

director of the Central Imagery Office; W. Douglas 

Smith, deputy director of DMA, which would bring 

the largest contingent of employees into the new 

imagery agency; and Edward Obloy, DMA’s General 

Counsel. 

NIMA’s funding would come from three different 

appropriations. It relied on funds for Tactical 

Intelligence and Related Activities (TIARA) that 

support military commands, dispensed by the 

Secretary of Defense, and funds for the National 

Foreign Intelligence Program (NFIP) used by the DCI 

to support policy planners in the White House, the 

Department of State, the National Security Council, 

and similar national agencies. A third funding line, 
created in 1994, came from Joint Military 

Intelligence Programs that support intelligence 

assets across service boundaries. 

The legislative process for establishing NIMA 

involved primarily the House Permanent 

Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) and 

the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 

(SSCI). Actual appropriation of funds, as 

opposed to fund authorization, would fall to the 

Armed Services Committees of the two houses 

of Congress. 

The merging of funding lines became an issue 

in obtaining final approval for the proposed 

agency. Putting NIMA under both TIARA and 

NFIP funding raised questions about who 

controlled the agency. Providing answers would 

require working with thirteen congressional 

committees.

To navigate this tangle of interests, the 

implementation team developed a strategy 

for winning support both on Capitol Hill and 

among the stakeholders and users of imagery 

and mapping products. At its offices in Reston, 

Virginia, the team conducted a series of NIMA 

Days in January and February 1996, in which 

team members offered presentations on “Why 

NIMA and Why Now?” for committee staffers and 

Department of Defense representatives. After 

additional, substantial discussions to ensure 

this new structure would meet both national and 

military needs, Congress agreed and approved 

the establishment of NIMA. The authorization 

to create NIMA emerged in the Department of 

Defense authorization bill for fiscal 1997, and on 

September 23, 1996, President Clinton signed 

the legislation establishing the new agency. 

On October 1, Acting Director Joseph Dantone 

raised the flag that bore the NIMA seal, and 

a formal establishment ceremony took place 

on October 29 on the River Parade Field at 

the Pentagon. Deputy Secretary of Defense 

John White hosted the event, with Deutch, 

Shalikashvili, Dantone, and two hundred guests 

attending. 

With the ceremonial activities completed, the 

leaders of the new organization faced the 

formidable task of forging a unified operation 

from the pieces of the various imagery, 

mapping, and intelligence agencies that 

comprised it. 

Elements

NIMA emerged from the legislative process as 

an amalgam of personnel and missions from 

eight separate organizations, each of which 

had its own history and corporate culture. 

NIMA absorbed four of those organizations 

entirely: NPIC, DMA, the Defense Dissemination 

Program Office, and the Central Imagery Office. 

The oldest of these, NPIC, began in 1953 as 

an expansion of the CIA’s photo-interpretation 

organization. President Dwight D. Eisenhower 

officially designated the organization as the 

National Photographic Interpretation Center 

in January 1961. For the next 35 years, 

NPIC furnished the Department of State, 

the Department of Defense, the military 

commands, and civil agencies with photo 

analysis. 

The largest organization fully absorbed by 

NIMA, DMA was itself a 1972 merger of Army, 

Navy, and Air Force mapping, charting, and 

geodesy organizations. DMA in turn provided 

those services to the nation’s leaders and to 

the armed forces. It also supported the Drug 

Enforcement Agency in counter-drug operations 

in the western hemisphere and provided 

cartographic support for humanitarian relief in 

Africa, the Caribbean, and other crisis points 

around the globe. In 1990-1991 it supported 

the troops in Operation Desert Shield and 

Operation Desert Storm. 

22
23

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To Manage Imagery

1967

Committee on Imagery 

Requirements and 

Exploitation

1992

Central Imagery Office

For Electronic Dissemination 

of Imagery

1974

Defense Dissemination Program Office

To Interpret Imagery

1952

Photographic Interpretation Division

1958

Photographic Interpretation Center

1961

National Photographic Interpretation Center

To Prepare the Military’s Maps

Navy 1854

U.S. Naval Observatory and 

Hydrographic Office

Army 1917

Engineer Reproduction Plant

Army Air Corps 1928

Map Unit

Army Map Service 1942

Army Air Force 1943

Aeronautical Chart Plant

St. Louis

Air Force 1947

Aeronautical Chart and 

Information Center 

Defense Mapping Agency 1972
Through the 1970s and 1980s, DMA expanded 

its retrieval of geospatial data to include 

digital imagery. By the early 1990s, DMA had 

converted its production system to the digital 

environment. 

The Defense Dissemination Program Office, 

formed in 1974, was the main source of 

time-critical imagery for warfighters, national 

intelligence agencies, the scientific community, 

and the civil sector. Its products supported 

analysis for intelligence, precision targeting, 

and other activities that monitored indications 

and warnings. It provided critical support to 

Operation Just Cause in Panama in December 

1989, Operation Desert Shield and Operation 

Desert Storm in 1990-1991, and peacekeeping 

operations in Bosnia in the 1990s.

The Central Imagery Office was the smallest 

and the most recently formed of the four 

entities entirely merged into NIMA. Created in 

1992 as the focal point of imagery within the 

Department of Defense, it enhanced image 

collection, analysis, exploitation, production, 

and dissemination by developing training 

standards and a broad architecture for imagery. 

It also helped formulate guidelines for policy 

discussions, classification and compartment 

issues, and imagery sharing. 

Four other governmental agencies contributed 

elements of their operations specializing in 

image exploitation. From its first days in 1947, 

the CIA had employed photographic analysis in 

its intelligence operations. In addition to NPIC, 

the CIA also surrendered to NIMA management 

of its foreign imagery-sharing arrangements 

and an element from its research and 

development section, part of the agency’s 

Directorate of Science and Technology. 

The DIA, created in 1961, provided combat 

support to the Department of Defense, 

coordinated and evaluated the intelligence 

operations of all of the armed services, and 

supplied timely, objective, and cogent military 

intelligence to warfighters and policymakers. 

DIA delivered imagery-derived products to 

the Secretary of Defense, the combatant 

commands, subordinate organizations, and 

other customers. NIMA assumed DIA’s imagery 

analysis element, which exploited multi-sensor 

imagery from a range of collection platforms. 

The NRO, also dating from 1961, managed 

the U.S. reconnaissance satellite programs 

and developed technology and space-borne 

assets that gather intelligence worldwide. It 

directed research, development, acquisition, 

and operations for the satellite systems. From 

the NRO’s inception, the U.S. Air Force played a 

strong role in the agency, in which the CIA also 

participated. NRO transferred to NIMA twenty 

imagery-related projects and the personnel 

working on them. 

Finally, the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance 

Office, created in 1993 as an office of the 

Department of Defense, addressed all joint 

military and DoD requirements for intelligence. 

It developed, acquired, and managed a 

system of manned and unmanned aerial 

reconnaissance aircraft, sensors, data links, 

data relays, and ground stations. With the 

formation of NIMA, it transferred two areas of 

responsibility: the development of technology 

to enhance imagery analysis as well as the 

exploitation and dissemination elements of 

the Common Imagery Ground/Surface System 

(CIGSS).

24
25
The Early Challenges

Creating a functioning operation from eight 

constituent organizations, six of which had 

over twenty years of independent operation, 

presented a host of problems. The legacy 

agencies brought with them different 

personnel systems, electronic office systems, 

procurement practices, and systems for 

creating and distributing products 

to customers. 

NIMA’s initial organizational structure 

consisted of three directorates, each headed 

by a deputy director selected from Dantone’s 

implementation team: Leo A. Hazlewood for 

Operations, Dr. Annette Krygiel for Systems 

and Technology, and W. Douglas Smith for 

Corporate Affairs. 

Politics and Money

The fiscal situation compounded the difficulties 

of achieving synergy in NIMA’s early days. When 

the idea of a consolidated agency for imagery 

and mapping took life during the confirmation 

hearings before Congress in 1995, DCI 

nominee John Deutch asserted that the move 

would save money. Deutch’s emphasis on 

economy fit the current political imperative 

to trim defense spending. Before NIMA’s 

formation, personnel reductions descended 

upon several of the legacy agencies, and it 

fell to NIMA to execute them. The prospect 

of reductions in force intensified the stress 

of physically relocating some personnel and 

merging disparate practices and cultures. 

NIMA’s leaders had a directive to hold spending 

in tight check, and the budget for fiscal 1998 

involved cuts. NIMA’s deputy director, Leo 

Hazlewood, acutely felt the adjustments, which 

significantly affected customer services. The 

budget reductions accelerated the reductions 

already mandated in NIMA’s civilian workforce 

and involved even deeper downsizing. NIMA had 

to consolidate its production facilities and slow 

plans to modernize its production systems. 

The austerity of its situation did not prevent 

NIMA from setting goals. A master plan developed 

during the agency’s first eighteen months 

focused on transformation from production of 

paper maps to the use of detailed geospatial 

databases. It proposed planning for an Internetlike architecture with digitized geospatial 

information as its foundation. One of the six 

working cells established to realize this goal 

sought to integrate the work of imagery analysts 

and cartographers to facilitate cooperation and 

encourage integrated production.

We’ve got hundreds of cartographers looking at 

imagery every day. If just twenty percent of those 

cartographers 

find just one item of intelligence interest every 

year, imagine how much better off NIMA will be. 

(Video Interview with Jim MacLeay, spring 1997, 

NGA Historical Research Center.)

NIMA planned to build its new database using 

commercial off-the-shelf products rather than 

proprietary software. Off-the-shelf products, 

flourishing in the new technology environment, 

offered greater potential for rapid development 

and interoperability. NIMA also created 

partnerships with six university-based advanced 

research projects in imagery, imagery intelligence, 

and geospatial information. The agency saw 

long-term, advanced exploration free of specific 

requirements as an opportunity to revolutionize 

the way business was done and to move forward 

to an all-digital environment. 

In July 1999, Assistant Secretary of Defense John 

J. Hamre thanked the NIMA workforce for what 

had been accomplished during the first three 

years of NIMA. Specifically, Hamre mentioned the 

agency’s support to military forces conducting 

operations in Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, 

26
27

Kosovo, and Serbia, while at the same time 

maintaining a global intelligence watch. 

It couldn’t have happened without you ... NIMA is 

at the very core of our ability to fight the kind of 

wars we have to fight today, with precision and care 

and great compassion for the people who are the 

innocents involved in the conflict. 

The Assistant Secretary’s remarks were a defining 

moment; his audience had struggled 

for three long years to make NIMA work as 

one agency. 

As NIMA continued to evolve, a unique technical 

threat arose. Computer systems might crash as the 

new century dawned. Y2K, as it became known, 

placed the agency’s work in jeopardy. Programs 

written with only two digits to designate the year 

were unable to distinguish between the years 

1900 and 2000. The solution involved replacing or 

reprogramming every computer system used by 

the government. 

NIMA’s legacy elements operated with widely 

differing computer networks that followed 

different operating and security protocols. As deputy 

director for operations, Hazlewood launched a 

campaign to build a common, integrated structure 

for the agency’s information technology systems. In 

addition to enhanced efficiency, Hazlewood saw full 

connectivity as a means of lowering operating costs. 

The effort toward connectivity overlapped with the 

task of preparing for the end of the millennium. 

Under the direction of Tom Earley, as Special 

Assistant to the Director for this issue, a Y2K 

Task Force looked at the more than two hundred 

separate systems within the agency that depended 

upon computer operations. In all, nineteen 

needed modifications. Earley’s team knew it had 

succeeded when, from midnight to morning on 

January 1, 2000, nothing happened to interrupt 

normal operations.

Significant Accomplishments: Turn of the 

Century

In spite of early challenges, NIMA managed 

numerous accomplishments in its formative 

years. Included among them were:

•The creation of GEOINT.

•The Shuttle Radar Topography Mission 

(SRTM), a joint project with NASA that closed 

gaps in worldwide mapping elevation data; 

•International cooperative efforts that 

arbitrated and ended several country

border disputes;

•Joint military exercises that both tested and 

improved interoperability among the military 

services and NIMA; 

•Support following the terrorist attacks on 

September 11, 2001, which spurred the 

recognition of GEOINT as an independent 

intelligence entity; and

•Improved support to the warfighter, including 

implementation of new tools and venues, such

as the Mobile Integrated Geospatial-Intelligence System (MIGS) and the birth of NGA 

support teams (NSTs) that took GEOINT to the 

warfighter in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and other 

locations both overseas and at home.

Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the 

United States did not have current detailed 

mapping of the Arabian Peninsula and the Fertile 

Crescent. DMA’s digital terrain elevation data 

(DTED®), its most accurate mapping information, 

measured elevations only at roughly threehundred-foot intervals. Large areas of critical 

terrain remained uncharted. 
Operation Desert Shield and Operation 

Desert Storm succeeded militarily, but they 

demonstrated to senior U.S. military leaders 

the need for more detailed mapping data 

worldwide. The Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed 

this view and set the year 2000 as the target 

date for acquiring the enhanced data. DMA was 

asked to undertake the project. 

The most critical data set, in their opinion at 

that point in time, was Digital Terrain Elevation 

Data worldwide, and not the Digital Terrain 

Elevation Data of the quality that we had been 

producing for the previous ten to fifteen years, 

but a quality that was more dense in terms of 

the number of posts per square kilometer. 

(Oral history with Thomas A. Hennig, SRTM 

Program Manager, June 5, 2003, NGA 

Historical Research Center.)

DMA scientists reviewed several potential 

methodologies to obtain better measurements 

of the Earth’s surface, including taking 

measurements from a satellite orbiting the Earth. 

They settled on an approach using methods of 

radar interferometry developed by scientists at 

the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, 

California. Interferometry uses two images of 

the same area taken simultaneously from two 

different vantage points. The slight differences 

between any pair of images allow scientists to 

determine surface elevation and relief. 

JPL proposed that a NASA space shuttle orbit the 

Earth carrying a device that would take 

radar readings during repeated, overlapping 

passes. Radar signals, not dependent upon 

daylight, can penetrate cloud cover, offering 

distinct advantages over photography. The passes 

would allow imaging of the globe between sixty 

degrees north latitude and about fifty-six degrees 

south latitude, covering about eighty percent of 

the Earth’s surface and ninety-five percent of its 

populated areas. 

In August 1996, work began on the SRTM, 

collaboration between DMA, NASA, the German 

Aerospace Center, and the Italian Space Agency 

that began just before the creation of NIMA. 

The JPL provided project management, and the 

U.S. Geological Survey worked on the use and 

subsequent storage of the data collected. Nine 

private sector companies, U.S. and foreign, 

provided hardware or services during the 

development and execution of the mission. 

Project scientists designed a mast that would 

deploy in space and extend about two hundred 

feet outside the shuttle bay. A main antenna 

inside the shuttle bay transmitted and received 

radar signals, while a second antenna at the far 

end of the mast simultaneously received the 

same signals as they bounced back from the 

Earth. All of the transmissions were recorded 

on high-density tapes.

Originally scheduled for September 1999 on 

the space shuttle Atlantis, the mission was 

postponed by NASA because of bad weather 

and rescheduled for the shuttle Endeavour in 

early 2000. Launched from the Kennedy Space 

Center at 12:44 p.m. EST on February 11, 

Endeavour spent eleven days in flight, returning 

on February 22. The crew responsible for the 

operation of the SRTM spent 222.4 hours, 

almost nine days and eight hours, recording 

topographic data during repeated orbits 145 

miles above the Earth. 

After the mission, NASA duplicated the data 

tapes for the JPL, which processed and 

released them to NIMA one continent at a 

time. Over the next two years, the staff at NIMA 

refined the data, identifying and resolving 

anomalies and making the information 

compatible with the agency’s standard DTED® 

protocols. With the completion of all related 

tasks in 2004, this highly successful mission 

achieved its goals with 

28
29

a budget that would have permitted, without 

SRTM, only about 7.7 percent of the desired 

results. Furthermore, gathering comparable 

data by traditional means would have taken 

at least twenty years. As program manager 

Thomas Hennig indicated, 

From a cost perspective, it’s a fourteen-to-one 

ratio. From a time perspective, it’s a four- or 

five-to-one ratio. From an accuracy perspective, 

it’s at least twice as accurate as the DTED® 

Level 1. From the density perspective, it’s at 

least nine times more data per cell—they’re 

phenomenal numbers that make it easy to 

talk about a project like that. (Oral history with 

Thomas A. Hennig, SRTM Program Manager, 5 

June 2003, NGA Historical Research Center.) 

The project’s managers donated the shuttle 

arm, itself a marvel of technical sophistication, 

to the Smithsonian Institution. It currently 

resides in the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center 

of the National Air and Space Museum near 

Washington Dulles International Airport in 

Virginia. 

After the better part of a decade, SRTM data 

continues to yield data for a variety of 

scientific applications in geology and 

geophysics, including earthquake research, 

volcano monitoring, and hydrological modeling. 

Civilian applications include enhanced 

approach and ground safety systems for 

aircraft, better land use planning, and 

better location of cell phone towers. Military 

applications include improved flight simulators, 

missile and weapons guidance systems, 

battlefield management, and logistical planning.

International Cooperation

To assist in treaty monitoring and resolving 

national long-standing border disputes, NIMA 

provided detailed geospatial information 

and imagery analysis of Latin America and 

the Near East and continued to monitor 

conditions in Bosnia and Serbia following the 

1995 Dayton Peace Accords. The accords 

demonstrated convincingly the value of digital 

map compilation and revision, as well as the 

utility in diplomatic negotiation of the threedimensional moving terrain simulations known 

as “fly-throughs.” During the late 1990s, NIMA 

brought these new capabilities to other regions 

of global concern, including the decades-old 

border dispute between Peru and Ecuador. 

The new agency supplied the products used 

in negotiations between Peruvian President 

Albert K. Fujimori and Ecuadorian President 

Jamil Mauad. That half-century-old conflict 

came to a conclusion on May 14, 1999, with 

the ceremonial laying of a boundary stone in a 

disputed area of the Amazon jungle.

In Bosnia-Herzegovina, NIMA’s support of 

peacekeeping efforts was more effective, 

although the agency’s contribution involved 

the revelation of atrocities. The Dayton Peace 

Accords placed a Zone of Separation between 

the warring factions patrolled and regulated by 

an international force, allowing limited traffic 

through a number of checkpoints. In practice, 

the partitioning did little to help the plight of 

Muslims in Bosnia and Albanians in Kosovo, 

both part of a disintegrating Yugoslav state. 

In fact, the partitioning of Bosnia-Herzegovina 

mandated by the accords forcibly displaced 

more than a million civilians. 

On November 25, 1998, the North Atlantic 

Treaty Organization (NATO) ordered Yugoslav 

President Slobodan Milosevic, who had 

rejected earlier calls for international action 

in Kosovo, to stop his ethnic persecution of 

Albanians in Kosovo or face NATO air strikes. 

To prepare pilots for these missions, should 

Milosevic not comply, NIMA produced virtual 

fly-throughs of the terrain to provide experience 

with the terrain and local conditions. 
Intelligence from NIMA also revealed evdence

of ethnic cleansing in the region. In May 

1999 the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal 

indicted Milosevic and four of his associates 

for crimes against humanity. The indictment 

produced a change in the political agenda of 

the Serbian government. Serb troops began to 

withdraw from Kosovo, and the following month 

NATO suspended its bombing missions.

During the late 1990s, NIMA also assisted 

the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency and 

its international partners in stemming the 

production and international transport of 

illegal drugs, and produced reports monitoring 

suspected international drug trafficking in 

both hemispheres. In the same timeframe, 

NIMA supported humanitarian relief efforts 

in Rwanda and Uganda with quickly produced 

Landsat image maps used by U.N. relief 

workers to deliver aid shipments to the 

refugee camps.

Support to Military Operations

Prior to the action in Kosovo, NATO’s internal 

command relationships had not been used 

to plan and conduct sustained combat 

operations. A lessons learned report presented 

by Secretary of Defense William Cohen and 

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General 

Henry Hugh Shelton to the Senate Armed 

Services Committee on October 14, 1999, 

stated that mechanisms developed by NATO 

for delegating target approval authority to 

military commanders proved flexible in meeting 

the military requirements of the campaign 

while preserving the necessary level of 

political oversight. 

NIMA’s participation in an annual exercise 

hosted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 

Staff known as the Joint Warrior Interoperability 

Demonstration (JWID) greatly enhanced 

these NATO mechanisms. JWID, now known 

as the Coalition Warrior Interoperability 

Demonstration, enables U.S. combatant 

commands and the international community 

to investigate new and emerging technologies 

that can be moved into operational use. 

The demonstration builds a temporary 

global network over which communications 

technologies interact to support a scripted 

scenario. Technologies are evaluated for utility, 

interoperability, and security. JWID ’97, for 

example, involved forty-five sites and tested 

communications interoperability among the 

U.S. military services and its worldwide allies, 

Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United 

Kingdom, and elements of NATO, during a 

wartime exercise scenario.

September 11, 2001

On September 11, radical Islamic terrorists 

hijacked four commercial airliners and flew one 

of them into the Pentagon and two others into 

the twin towers of the World Trade Center 

in lower Manhattan. The fourth crashed in 

Pennsylvania when the passengers resisted 

and fought against their highjackers. In all some 

three thousand innocent individuals lost their 

lives. President George W. Bush declared a 

global war on terrorism. 

Two days later, NIMA welcomed retired Air Force 

Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. as its second, 

and first civilian, director, succeeding Army Lt. 

Gen. and GEOINT pioneer James C. King. Soon 

after his arrival, the new director began to 

promote products that emerged from initiatives 

like NIMA’s work on Chechnya. This ambitious 

synthesis of source and image emerged during 

General King’s tenure and became known 

simply as geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT. 

Among Clapper’s newly created list of offices 

was the Office of Geospatial-Intelligence 

Management, whose mission was to provide 

the director, in his role as the GEOINT 

functional manager, with the plans and policies 

30
31

to manage GEOINT resources and a new 

system to be known as the National System 

for Geospatial Intelligence (NSG). The first task 

of the new office was to develop and publish 

a series of formal communications that would 

comprise the doctrine of GEOINT. The first of 

these, Geospatial Intelligence Basic Doctrine, 

appeared in July 2004.

The global war on terrorism and the events 

of September 11 dramatically changed the 

nature of NIMA’s priorities and products. 

Recognizing that new threats could occur at 

any time or place, Clapper determined both to 

make regional analytic overviews more robust 

and to embed NIMA analysts throughout the 

combat support and intelligence community 

networks. His concept of a unifying discipline 

and doctrine evolved into a new agency name: 

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). 

The new name represented the maturation of a 

new discipline and the increased unification of 

NIMA’s parts.

The report by the House-Senate Intelligence 

Committee investigating the September 11, 

2001 attacks recommended creating a new 

Director of National Intelligence as the principal 

intelligence adviser to the president and the 

statutory intelligence advisor to the National 

Security Council. This cabinet-level official 

would coordinate all fifteen components of the 

intelligence community, a task that previously 

fell to the director of the CIA. On February 17, 

2005, President George W. Bush named John 

Negroponte, former U.N. Ambassador and 

U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, to the post. By April, 

Congress confirmed the Director of National 

Intelligence, and within months a new National 

Intelligence Strategy drove NGA operations.

The National Geospatial-Intelligence 

Agency

NIMA officially became NGA with the November 

24, 2003, signing of the fiscal 2004 Defense 

Authorization Bill. The passage of the Homeland 

Security Act a year earlier clarified the agency’s 

role in supporting its national customers and 

helped strengthen NIMA’s relationship with 

other domestic agencies. After September 

11, 2001, the agency quickly began to utilize 

tactics, techniques, procedures, and solutions 

it had long used overseas, only now applying 

them to domestic situations with congressional 

approval. Some of these new tasks included 

surveying the World Trade Center site as an 

aid to reconstruction efforts and supporting 

the counterterrorism activities of the CIA. NGA 

played a significant role in site examination 

and response planning for major national and 

international events, working with domestic and 

overseas authorities to provide security 

for the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City (2002) 

and Turin (2006) and the summer games in 

Athens (2004), providing maps and geospatial 

intelligence for training and security. The 

same period saw more involvement in newly 

intensified efforts to protect the president of the 

United States, the vice president, and 

other high-ranking officials, and to provide 

better security for U.S. military and other 

government facilities.

NGA brought to the table the same capabilities 

for scene visualization, situation analysis, 

intelligence data fusion, and contingency 

planning that it provided military customers. 

The same technology that enabled flight 

simulation allowed walk-through or drivethrough animations. Analysts brought together 

information from divergent sources, just as they 

did in GEOINT support to military customers. 

One notable example was the discovery in 

utility-company records of a tunnel running 
DoD photo by Master Sgt. Cecilio Ricardo, U.S. Air Force

directly under the site of the World Trade 

Center Memorial dedication. On the basis of 

that discovery, New York City police were able 

to secure the tunnel and eliminate a potential 

risk of attack. In deployments to support 

security planners at the national political 

conventions, NGA added a new imagery 

source, commercially available terrain data 

from a radar source, avoiding the limitations 

of cloud cover. Such high-resolution data has 

become the standard for other major, nonintelligence activities.

Overseas, the Near East continued as the locus 

of most terrorist activity, but as the new century 

approached, many areas in Central and South 

Asia, the Balkans, and Transcaucasia became 

even more significant. In 1993, eighteen U.S. 

soldiers were killed in Mogadishu, Somalia, 

during an attack that some analysts attributed 

to Islamic terrorists. Five years later terrorists 

struck in the region again, bombing American 

embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es 

Salaam, Tanzania, killing over two hundred 

people and injuring more than four thousand. 

In October 2000, terrorists struck the USS Cole

in Yemen, just off the horn of Africa, taking 

the lives of seventeen U.S. sailors. All of this 

took place even before the terrible events of 

September 11 brought the violence of the 

Near East to the American homeland. The 

comforting, if macabre, equation known as 

mutually assured destruction, which restrained 

the superpowers during the cold war, no 

longer applied. 

New Tools and New Regions 

Along with the challenges and changes that 

transformed NIMA into NGA came new tools 

and practices that better defined and applied 

GEOINT. During Operation Allied Force in 

Kosovo, NGA recognized the need for a 

deployable system that could withstand harsh 

environmental conditions and move with the 

troops in order to bring more timely, actionable 

32
33

intelligence directly to the customer. The 

MIGS became the solution: a mobile, fully 

self-sustaining suite of communications, life 

support, and transportation equipment. 

MIGS utilizes the High Mobility Multipurpose 

Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV or Humvee) and 

includes a mounted satellite link, integrated 

power and server control, and internal backup 

power. As demonstrated during the military 

operations in the Near East and during 

cleanup operations after Hurricane Katrina in 

New Orleans in 2005, it permitted remotely 

accessible GEOINT exploitation and the ability 

to reach back to other NGA facilities 

for support. 

Support personnel worked for their 

operational and tactical customers and built 

tailored products in support of fluid military 

operations. These analysts also served as 

liaisons to incorporate the latest national-level 

information, continually updating the database. 

NGA analysts had advantageous, real-time 

access to the latest tactical information coming 

from the maneuver units and could provide this 

knowledge to NGA.

Shortly after September 11, the agency 

developed systematic ways of using the 

emerging technology for real-time airborne 

tracking and targeting. Just prior to the 

launch of the military action in Afghanistan, 

NIMA set up new centers at three of its main 

offices for viewing and exploiting airborne 

imagery from unmanned aerial vehicles like 

the Predator and for establishing the precise 

targeting information these vehicles needed to 

make accurate strikes. In August 2002, NIMA 

leadership established the Airborne Analysis 

Cell in Washington, recognizing airborne 

imaging platforms as an untapped source of 

raw intelligence. The cell, constructed in less 

than four months and completed in December 

2002, improved support to U.S. combat forces. 

St. Louis became the site of the Targeting 

Fusion Center, placing geospatial and imagery 

analysts together in the same 

spaces, creating a synergy that provided even 

more complete and accurate answers to forces 

in the field. 

Operation Enduring Freedom

The swift military response to the September 

2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and 

Washington, D.C., christened Operation 

Enduring Freedom (OEF), began on October 

7, and NIMA’s new product, GEOINT, followed 

American forces. OEF’s objectives, as 

articulated by President George W. Bush, 

included the destruction of terrorist training 

camps and infrastructure within Afghanistan, 

the capture of al Qaeda leaders, and the 

cessation of in-country terrorist activities. In 

addition to American participation, the coalition 

included more than sixty-eight nations, with 

twenty-seven nations having representatives at 

the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command 

in Tampa, Florida.
As OEF began, the Taliban controlled 

more than 80 percent of Afghanistan and 

seemed poised to overwhelm their domestic 

opponents. By October 20, U.S. and coalition 

forces had destroyed virtually all Taliban 

air defenses, and U.S. Army Special Forces 

detachments joined with anti-Taliban leaders 

and coordinated operations on multiple fronts. 

By mid-December, U.S. Marines had secured 

Kandahar Airport, and the Taliban capital was 

in the hands of anti-Taliban forces. Within 

weeks, the combined international effort 

reduced the Taliban and al Qaeda to isolated 

pockets of fighters. Seventy-eight days after the 

beginning of combat operations on December 

22, Army General Tommy Franks arrived in 

Kabul to attend the inauguration of the Afghan 

interim government. By mid-March 2002, the 

coalition removed the Taliban from power 

in Afghanistan. Assisted by special maps, 

aeronautical navigation data, and GEOINT 

products supplied by NIMA, U.S. Transportation 

Command addressed all force positioning and 

most logistical needs in theater by air.

With a combination of overwhelming 

firepower, delivery systems, and ever-more 

accurate targeting information from NIMA, 

the ratio of sorties to successful strikes 

shrank dramatically, from ten aircraft per 

target during Operation Desert Storm to 

two targets per aircraft during OEF. U.S. 

airmen and aircraft, some operating from 

western Missouri and assisted by both NIMA 

navigational aids and on-site support, flew 

the longest combat fighter missions in U.S. 

history, taking more than fifteen hours, and 

broke another duration record for surveillance 

missions at twenty-six hours. The agency also 

supported extensive use of unmanned aerial 

vehicles, which permitted around-the-clock 

surveillance of critical sites, facilities, and troop 

concentrations.

34

Directed from Tampa by U.S. Central Command, 

which provided real-time connectivity to all 

manner of forces operating seven thousand 

miles away, the OEF effort drew support from 

267 bases. The coalition operated from thirty 

locations in fifteen countries and regularly overflew forty-six nations. In every case, the ability 

to see the battlefield literally and virtually at 

each location provided unprecedented insight 

into each mission. 

Operation Iraqi Freedom

On March 19, 2003, United States, United 

Kingdom, and other coalition forces began 

conducting military operations designed to 

depose Saddam Hussein and deprive the state 

of Iraq of any weapons of mass destruction it 

might possess. 

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, imagery from 

reliable commercial satellites supplemented 

NGA’s own assets to supply the necessary imagery 

in support of diplomatic initiatives, humanitarian 

relief, and reconstruction efforts. Commercial 

imagery aided in defining deployment locations for 

Patriot missile and air defense batteries, assisted 

in mission planning for the seizure of Kirkuk in 

northern Iraq, and helped locate and characterize 

minefields along the border between Iraq and 

Iran. It demonstrated that coalition forces did not 

ignite the Baghdad oil fires and provided context 

for decisions to strike or pass on select Iraqi 

industrial targets.

The military and humanitarian efforts in 

Afghanistan and Iraq occasioned the largest 

overseas deployment of NGA and NIMA 

personnel in the history of the agency. To facilitate 

arrangements for their overseas tours and ensure 

efficiency, NIMA established the Office of Global 

Support, initially called the Office of Deployed and 

Externally Assigned Personnel, in August 2003.

34
Development of NGA Support Teams: NSTs

Emulating practices employed by other 

agencies and defense consulting firms, 

NGA asked some analysts to join deployed 

customers. The NGA deployments formed part 

of a concerted effort to extend the NSG into 

each command headquarters and national 

government agency. By providing support 

team experts at each customer site to help 

interpret and manipulate GEOINT products 

and services, NGA gave warfighters and the 

intelligence community a worldwide, first-hand 

intelligence baseline for their own analytical 

and operational needs. 

Thus, rather than reaching back for expertise 

from NGA, the operating forces found the 

GEOINT community projected forward, at their 

side and available. 

Most NST members deployed for ninety-day 

rotations and received warm testimonials from 

the field commanders and warfighters whom 

they served in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other 

locations. In case after case, their talents 

helped save lives and resources by supplying 

vital information in a timely manner.

During Operation Iraqi Freedom, NGA 

downloaded a major portion of its Iraqi GEOINT 

database to more than two hundred computer 

hard drives and delivered them, through the 

NSTs in theater, to forces throughout the area 

of operation. An Army warrant officer pointed 

out that it would have taken him a year to 

download what NGA provided!

35

A UH-60 Blackhawk from the 101st Airborne Division (Air 

Assault), 9th Aviation Battalion, A Company flies over Al 

Hamdania, Iraq, during Operation Iraqi Freedom June 16, 

2003.

U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Michael Bracken
© 2004 Digital Globe

Banda Aceh, Indonesia (before tsunami)

36

Humanitarian Efforts

The Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from 

Florida on January 16, 2003 for a sixteen day 

mission to work in the physical, life, and space 

sciences. It conducted approximately eighty 

separate experiments. On February 1, during 

re-entry, it disintegrated over Texas, killing all 

seven astronauts on board. NIMA analysts, 

working with NASA and Federal Emergency 

Management Agency (FEMA) personnel, 

precisely mapped the likely trajectory of 

shuttle debris to focus search efforts more 

precisely, and then refined the model with 

data from actual recoveries. A team of Remote 

Replication System personnel from NIMA in St. 

Louis provided replication and graphic output 

services for the massive numbers of maps 

requested by the various debris search teams. 

The NIMA team aided the recovery of human 

remains and most of the debris that had not 

disappeared in space. 

36
© 2004 Digital Globe

Banda Aceh, Indonesia (after tsunami)

37

Following the December 26, 2004, undersea 

earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean, 

NGA provided imagery products of the 

affected areas daily to all agencies supporting 

humanitarian relief activities. These included 

the U.S. Agency for International Development’s 

Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) 

and the U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), 

in whose region the tsunami occurred. With 

these geospatial products, OFDA and PACOM 

determined priorities for emergency relief 

efforts and the deployment of life-supporting 

supplies and personnel. The products showed 

the scope of the damage caused by the 

earthquake and resulting tsunami. NGA also 

assessed the impact on infrastructure, including 

damage to roads, bridges, ports, and airfields 

and how that damage affected access to the 

damaged areas. This assessment assisted 

the U.S. Transportation Command and others 

providing assistance. 
38

NGA’s Hurricane Assistance 

In the fall of 2005, NGA rose to the occasion 

in providing support for relief efforts during the 

most destructive hurricane season on record. 

The agency’s director, James R. Clapper, told 

the Associated Press on May 13, 2006, that 

the work the agency did after hurricanes 

Katrina and Rita was the best he had seen 

from an intelligence agency in his forty-two 

years in the intelligence business. 

This was kind of a direct payback to the 

taxpayers for the investment made in this 

agency over the years, even though in its 

original design it was intended for foreign 

intelligence purposes.

NGA’s assistance to Hurricane Katrina relief 

efforts began before the first waves hit the 

Louisiana shore on August 29, 2005. For first 

responders from those Gulf Coast counties 

in the hurricane’s path, the agency provided 

scores of graphics for relief agencies and 

depicting the locations of major airports, 

hospitals, police and fire stations, emergency 

operations centers, hazardous materials, 

highways, and schools. FEMA and other 

government agencies welcomed information 

from NGA that was based on imagery from 

commercial and U.S. government satellites as 

well as American military airborne platforms. 

A White House report issued in March 2006, 

The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: 

Lessons Learned, documented widespread 

deficiencies in the federal government’s 

planning and management response to 

Katrina. Among its 125 recommendations, the 

report called for creating a national operations 

center and establishing a national information 

and knowledge management system to 

provide a common operating picture for federal 

incident managers. 

During Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane 

Rita, which struck the Gulf Coast near Houston 

about a month later, NGA forward-deployed 

more than two dozen analysts and two MIGS 

to the affected areas to provide timely, 

on-site support. 

Katrina, 2005

U.S. Navy photo by Larry W. Kachelhofer

38
39
40

Now and the Future

The diversity of tradecrafts and the increased 

technical capability of NGA have enabled this 

community of practitioners to expand the mix 

of services and support they can provide to our 

nation and to those in need around the world. This 

mix naturally includes direct warfighter support 

and assistance to valued allies, as well as regular 

involvement in global humanitarian efforts.

 On the humanitarian side, NGA quickly became 

a valued component in the response to the oil 

spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 and to 

the terrible flooding in Pakistan during that same 

year. Agency focus cells also played a role in the 

response to the dreadful earthquake in Haiti and 

the tragic combination of earthquake and tsunami 

that assaulted Japan in 2011. 

However, the warfighter always represents NGA’s 

primary concern. The current drawdown in Iraq, the 

safe withdrawal of our troops, and the nature of 

future American support to the Iraqi government 

regularly draw on NGA assets and talent. The ongoing 

fight for stability and peace in Afghanistan preoccupies 

NGA personnel, from those involved in research and 

development to thwart the production of home-made 

explosives, to the provision of essential intelligence 

details about the field of battle, to the significant 

geospatial and cultural aspects of a land ravaged by 

war. The power of GEOINT products surged into public 

view in May 2011 when NGA played a critical role in 

locating Usamah–bin–Laden and eliminating him as a 

threat to world peace. 

As the functional manager for GEOINT within the 

intelligence community, NGA has begun to play 

an ever-increasing role in the way the United States 

relates to the rest of the world. The new Fort Belvoir 

home of NGA will house nearly all of the agency’s 

East Coast personnel and the facilities that support 

them. For the first time in its history, NGA will have 

an eastern workforce concentrated in a single facility, 

able to generate an even more effective professional 

synergy in creating GEOINT, advancing the tradecraft, 

and satisfying those who depend upon geospatial 

knowledge. 

40

President Obama and his staff watch as 

US Navy SEALs close in on Usamah–bin–Ladin 

1 May 2011 White House photo by Peter Souza
Beyond a Name 

41

Well before the tragedy of 11 September 2001, 

intelligence that depended upon the Earth’s 

physical attributes, as well as the art and science 

of interpreting that information, changed quietly 

but fundamentally. Combining most of the nation’s 

capable imagery and geospatial intelligence assets 

within NIMA in 1996 went beyond simply addressing 

problems of efficiency and economy. Rather, NIMA 

suddenly provided a critical mass of skills and 

technologies under a single mission umbrella that 

soon enabled the intelligence community to realize 

a significant step in the evolution of its craft and 

product. Creating NGA acknowledged, in name and 

in practice, the confluence of every possible sort 

of imagery with geospatial, human, signals, and 

open source intelligence. This confluence created 

the innovative, sophisticated, and powerful product 

General Clapper formally christened GEOINT. The 

change of name from NIMA to NGA had little to do 

with semantics. As one experienced analyst put it 

barely one year before the agency became NGA,

CONCLUSION

Bringing geospatial information fully into imagery 

intelligence added a new dimension in terms of 

analytical content and the visualization of the 

information. Thus practitoners and policymakers 

collaborated to bring the discipline to a new 

stage in its evolution, moving from just imagery 

intelligence to broader geospatial intelligence.

GEOINT demonstrated its unique ability to 

illuminate critical situations in ways that 

permit both intelligent policy decisions and 

timely action. GEOINT confirmed ethnic cleansing 

atrocities in Kosovo through the latest in 

imaging and geospatial technology enhanced 

by an incomparable knowledge of culture and 

context. From the cities hosting the Olympics 

to the disaster in New Orleans, NGA provided 

timely GEOINT products that allowed American 

authorities at every level to improve the quality 

and the timing of their security and emergency 

response. 
42

Even the 2006 White House report, in 

reviewing the Katrina disaster response and 

offering recommendations for improvement, 

applauded NGA timeliness during the crisis. 

GEOINT offered a preliminary version of the 

same total picture for responders that the 

administration proceeded to recommend for 

the entire nation as a part of a standard plan 

to address major disasters. 

While firmly rooted in a past that extends back 

to surveyors like the young George Washington 

and President Thomas Jefferson’s explorers 

Lewis and Clark, GEOINT has only recently 

emerged as a new synthesis of extraordinary 

technologies and valuable personal skills. NGA 

has the dual responsibility to learn daily from 

past GEOINT achievements and to practice for 

the greater good the powerful combination of 

technology and art it has created. 

42

Photo by Robert Cox

photo of NCE 
43
Photography from the

NGA Historical Research Center

Photography from the

NGA Historical Research Center
ACIC

Aeronautical Chart and Information Center

AMS

U.S. Army Map Service

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

CIGSS

Common Imagery Ground/Surface System

DCI

Director of Central Intelligence

DIA

Defense Intelligence Agency

DMA

Defense Mapping Agency

DTED®

Digital Terrain Elevation Data

FEMA

Federal Emergency Management Agency

GLOSSARY

45
46

GEOINT

geospatial intelligence

HPSCI

House Permanent Select Committee on 

Intelligence

JPL

Jet Propulsion Laboratory

JWID

Joint Warrior Interoperability Demonstration

LORAN

Long Range Navigation

MIGS

Mobile Integrated Geospatial Intelligence 

System

NASA

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

NATO

North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NFIP

National Foreign Intelligence Program

NGA

National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency

NIMA

National Imagery and Mapping Agency

NPIC

National Photographic Interpretation Center

NRO

National Reconnaissance Office

NSG

National System for Geospatial Intelligence

NST

NGA Support Team

OEF

Operation Enduring Freedom

OFDA

Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance

SOSUS

The Navy’s sound surveillance system

SRTM

Shuttle Radar Topography Mission

SSCI

Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

TIARA

Tactical Intelligence and Related Activities 

U.N.

United Nations

USPACOM

U.S. Pacific Command

Y2K

The year 2000, associated with the problem of 

computers’ ability to roll over to the year 2000, 

given that 00 could be interpreted as 1900.

46
47

Suggested Readings and Sources

Books and Monographs:

Allyn, Bruce J., James G. Blight, and David A. Welch, eds. Back to the Brink: Proceedings of the Moscow 

 Conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis, January 27–28, 1989. Cambridge, MA: Center for Science and 

 International Affairs, Harvard University; Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1991.

Babington-Smith, Constance. Air Spy: The Story of Photo Intelligence in World War II. New York: Harper, 1957.

 Reprint, Falls Church, Virginia: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1985. 

Brugioni, Dino. Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis. New York: Random House,1991.

 . From Balloons to Blackbirds: Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Imagery Intelligence—How It 

 Evolved. Intelligence Profession Series, no. 9. McLean, V.A.: Association of Former Intelligence Officers, 1993.

Buisseret, David, ed. From Sea Charts to Satellite Images: Interpreting North American History through Maps.

 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Crouch, Tom D. The Eagle Aloft: Two Centuries of the Balloon in America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian 

 Institution Press, 1983.

Finnegan, Terrence J. Shooting the Front: Allied Aerial Reconnaissance and Photographic Interpretation on the 

 Western Front—World War I. Washington, D.C.: National Defense Intelligence College, 2006.

Fischer, Irene K. Geodesy? What’s That?: My Personal Involvement in the Age-Old Quest for the Size and Shape 

 of the Earth. New York: iUniverse, 2005.

Goss, John. The Mapmakers Art: A History of Cartography. London: Studio Editions, 1993.

Haydon, Frederick Stansbury. Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War. Baltimore, M.D.: John Hopkins 

 University Press, 2000.

Kahn, David. The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. New York: MacMillan Publishing Company, Inc., 

 1967.

Keegan, John. Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the enemy from Napoleon to Al-Qaeda. New York: Random 

 House, 2003.

Maury, Matthew Fontaine. Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology, ed. John Leighly. Cambridge: 

 Harvard University Press, 1963.

McAuliffe, Mary S., ed. CIA Documents on the Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962. Washington, D.C.: History Staff, 

 Central Intelligence Agency, 1992.

McDonald, Robert A. Corona—Between the Earth and the Sun: The First NRO Reconnaissance Eye in Space.

 Bethesda, MD: American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, 1997.

Pedlow, Gregory W. and Donald E. Welzenbach. The CIA and the U-2 Program, 1954–1974. Washington, D.C.: 

 Central Intelligence Agency, 1998. [https://www.cia.gov/csi/books/U2/]

Pinsel, Marc I. 150 Years of Service on the Seas: A Pictorial History of the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office from 

 1830 to 1980. Vol. 1, 1830–1946. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1982.
Richelson, Jeffrey T. America’s Secret Eyes in Space: The U.S. Keyhole Spy Satellite Program. New York: 

 Harper Collins, 1990.

Robarge, David. Intelligence in the War for Independence. Washington, D.C.: Center for the Study of 

 Intelligence, 1997.

Ruffner, Kevin C., ed. CORONA: America’s First Satellite Program. Washington, D.C.: Central Intelligence 

 Agency, 1995.

Stanton, William. The Great United States Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842. Berkeley: University of 

 California Press, 1975.

Weber, Gustavus A. The Hydrographic Office: Its History, Activities, and Organization. Baltimore: Johns 

 Hopkins Press, 1926. Reprint, Washington, D.C.: AMS Press, 1974. 

Wilford, John Noble. The Mapmakers: The Story of the Great Pioneers in Cartography—from Antiquity to the 

 Space Age, 2d ed. New York: Knopf, 2000.

Periodicals:

Brugioni, Dino. “Aerial Photography: Reading the Past, Revealing the Future.” Smithsonian 14, no. 12 

 (December 1984): 150–161.

Brugioni, Dino, and Robert Poirier. “The Holocaust Revisited: A Retrospective Analysis of the Auschwitz-

 Birkenau Extermination Complex.” Studies in Intelligence 22, no. 4 (Winter 1978): 11–29. 

Doll, John G. “Cloth Maps of World War II.” Western Association of Map Libraries 20, no. 1 (November 

 1988): 24–35.

Hall, R. Cargile. “From Concept to National Policy: Strategic Reconnaissance in the Cold War.” Prologue

 28, no. 2 (Summer 1996): 113.

 . “Origins and Development of the Vanguard and Explorer Satellite Programs.” Air Power 

 Historian 9 (October 1964): 102–108.

Hall, R. Cargile, and Donald E. Hillman. “Overflight: Strategic Reconnaissance of the USSR.” Air Power 

 Historian 43, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 28–39.

Hudson, Alice, and Mary McMichael Ritzlin. “Introduction to the Preliminary Checklist of Pre-Twentieth-

 Century Women in Cartography.” Cartographica 37, no. 3 (Fall 2000).

Luvaas, Jay. “The Role of Intelligence in the Chancellorsville Campaign, April–May 1963.” Intelligence 

 and National Security 5, no. 2 (April 1990): 99-115.

Richelson, Jeffrey T. “The Keyhole Satellite Program.” Journal of Strategic Studies 7, no. 2 (1984): 

 121–153.

Sayle, Edward F. “George Washington, Manager of Intelligence.” Studies in Intelligence 27, no. 4 

 (Winter 1983): 1–10.

Schultz, Mark E. “The Power of Geospatial Intelligence.” Defense Intelligence Journal 14, no. 1 (2005): 

 79–87.

Tyner, Judith. “The Hidden Cartographers: Women in Mapmaking,” Mercator’s World 2, no. 6 

 (November– December 1997): 46–51.

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The History of the NGA Community

Using geospatial methods, seasoned intelligence 

professionals exploit and analyze imagery and 

geospatial information to describe, assess, and visually 

depict physical features and human activity on the 

Earth. 

Therefore the history of geospatial intelligence includes 

the history of geography, cartography, aircraft and 

satellite reconnaissance, physical oceanography, digital 

imaging, geodesy, weather forecasting, and the analysis 

of products generated by these arts and sciences as 

they pertain to the national defense. 

Collection

The history program at NGA supplements the records 

permanently retained by law with additional historical 

sources rendered in text, imagery, and oral history. 

These records and artifacts permit historical analysis 

and the transmission of our heritage.

Analysis

How did we get here? Historical analysis rendered 

in publications, presentations, and exhibits asks 

questions of our sources to explain how and why the 

NGA community works as it does and the significance of 

GEOINT. 

Education and Outreach

History is an incomparable teacher. Through 

sponsorship, partnerships, and museum activity, the 

history program seeks to inform teachers and involve 

students of all ages in the effort to understand NGA’s 

history and its significance to the American experience. 

History History

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Services

Historical Services

Reference

Records Retention and Recall

Archives

Historical Analysis

Curatorial Consultation

Oral History

Exhibits

Teacher Training

Education Programs

Internships

Guest Speakers

Contact Information

NGA Historian

571-557-8306

Historical Research Center

571-557-6414

571-577-5723

Museum

NGA-West, St. Louis

314-676-3246 

Services

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51

LiDAR shot of the Presidential Palace in Haiti.

LiDAR Image NGA Historical Research Center.