The CIA has made its share of mistakes, but it does have the best spy technology in the world. Its “brain” at Langley is a computer-disc farm in a room the size of a football field, plus seven giant silos (nicknamed “the seven dwarfs”), each containing 6,000 magnetic computer tapes that robots load. Before going on a mission, a spy can rehearse his or her route by sitting before a glowing video monitor. Tens of thousands of satellite photos are fed into the disc farm’s Cray 4-MP supercomputers, which play back an animated cartoon of the alleys and bazaars the CIA operative would actually see on the street. The agency is finding new uses for the high-tech hardware. Spy planes that once watched the Red Army now peer down at drug dealers and terrorists. Sophisticated sensor satellites that once sniffed krypton-85 gases in the air to measure plutonium production in the former Soviet Union now hunt for secret nuclear programs in countries like North Korea. “It’s hard to get a spy in place, and his field of view is pretty narrow,” says William F. Lackman Jr., who coordinates the Pentagon’s photosatellite coverage. “If all you want to do is see things, doing it with technology is better.”
Satellites could broaden the spooks’ mandate to include the economy and the environment. The Pentagon used satellite photos to help relief workers quickly survey damage last year from hurricanes Andrew in Florida and Iniki in Hawaii. In exchange for favors to Washington, foreign countries have secretly received CIA satellite intelligence to locate valuable oil and gas reserves. Congress has smelled porkbarrel uses for the spies in the sky. When he was vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, Frank Murkowski of Alaska pressured the CIA to have satellites photograph waters off his home state to catch Japanese fishing boats poaching salmon. But high tech can’t do everything. From 500 miles high, the Japanese boats looked just like the Alaskan ones.
