Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [99]
The U.S. government also maintains what’s known as “shutter control” over American satellite imaging companies. This means that at any time, for national security reasons, the feds can declare any part of the world off-limits for U.S. commercial satellites. This provision was written into federal law in the mid-1990s when defense experts began to worry about the implications of having such sophisticated spy technology available in the private sector. They were thinking of General Norman Schwartzkopf’s famous “left hook” maneuver in the Gulf War, in which American armored units swept hundreds of kilometers to the west of the location where Iraqi forces were expecting them. Surprise meant everything in such a situation. What if Saddam Hussein’s forces could simply have downloaded satellite images of the American positions from the Internet? That would have been a disaster for Schwartzkopf’s troops.
In the real world, though, such concerns have been swept aside by the astonishing pace of technology. Since shutter control was implemented, the United States has fought two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
In 2001, as the Pentagon was drawing up plans for the battle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, planners wrestled with the issue of what to do about commercial satellites. If they used shutter control to block the Afghanistan region, they might face lawsuits from American media over freedom of information. Instead of hashing out the issues in court, the Pentagon decided to buy up the entire inventory of commercial satellite imagery of Afghanistan.* For GeoEye, that meant the entire inventory of IKONOS images of the region for three months.10
The military didn’t need the IKONOS pictures—it has plenty of satellites of its own of far higher quality. It just wanted to keep the images out of private hands: otherwise, anyone with a few hundred dollars to spend might have been able to spy on preparations for the ground war against the Taliban. During the invasion, no images of Afghanistan were available to the public. But after the three-month period, many pictures taken at that time entered the public archive, and they can now be purchased commercially.
Just a year and a half later, when the United States laid its war plans for Iraq in early 2003, the government made a different decision. Figuring that by then there were so many satellite images available from foreign companies, the U.S. military didn’t restrict American commercial satellite imagery at all. The genie was now out of the bottle. From that point on, any military force invading any location in the world would have to assume that cheap and accurate satellite images would be available to its enemies. Today, anyone with a computer can do a Google Maps search, pull up a picture of downtown Baghdad’s Green Zone, and admire the swimming pools and Blackhawk helicopters of the U.S. occupying force there.*
During the long coming-out period of commercial satellite imagery, private-sector companies recruited veterans of the U.S. military and intelligence agencies—these were the biggest pipeline of experienced satellite jockeys. So it is not surprising that GeoEye is linked to the CIA: the company’s board of directors includes James M. Simon, Jr., a veteran of the CIA who served as the senior intelligence official for homeland security. Simon established and chaired the Homeland Security Intelligence Council after 9/11. Earlier in his career at the CIA, he was responsible for acquiring technology, overseeing budgets, and setting policy for the fourteen agencies that make up the intelligence community. He started his own intelligence consulting firm outside government in 2003.
SUCH CLOSE AFFILIATION with U.S. intelligence can scare away global customers, who fear that their own use of satellite imagery companies based