Navy Capt. Chris Koury arrived at the Tampa, Fla., headquarters of U.S. Central Command in August of 1998, assigned to pull together a unit of intelligence and Arabic specialists.He was honored with a plaque for his work. It hangs in his father’s Weaver home.
Soon, Central Command’s director of intelligence, Army Brig. Gen. Keith Alexander, gave him another assignment. Koury was to assess the strength and distribution of the reserves in the Intelligence Directorate and recommend changes according to the needs of the active-duty forces. The assignment opened the secrets of the command to him.
Koury says what he found was troubling.
The imagery branch of CentCom analyzes changes in satellite pictures to track activities at thousands of sites in the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Koury says he learned that CentCom’s analysts couldn’t keep pace with the unrelenting volume of images dumped by remote feed into their computers.
The imagery shop was staffed at about 50 percent below the required levels, Koury says. Its logs showed it wasn’t meeting standing requirements on how often sites had to be checked.
Places in Central Command’s territory, a 25-country region larger than the continental United States, weren’t being monitored "for days, weeks, sometimes months," Koury says.
Coordinated efforts
Every site of some importance in the Middle East is prioritized and assigned a basic encyclopedic number that tells an imagery analyst how frequently to check it, intelligence officers say.
Sites considered critical to the national interest, such as munitions factories or nuclear power plants, might get examined every time a satellite passes over, almost on the hour. With satellites training cameras and overlapping orbits, this provides nearly continual coverage, these officers say.
Safer-seeming places, such as a remote harbor or the pyramids of Egypt, might get looked at every few months or once a year — just often enough to make sure a missile silo isn’t being built nearby.
But, because Central Command’s imagery branch was short-staffed, the analysts during the late-1990s often were forced in times of crisis to concentrate only on global hotspots such as Iraq and Afghanistan, neglecting the photographs from many of the other 23 countries in their region, Koury and senior intelligence officers say.
Many of these countries are riddled with terrorists.
The command’s targeting and bomb-damage-assessment people, who also use satellite imagery, were staffed at about 50 percent as well, Koury and others say.
These shortages, they claim, did not match what command leaders had been reporting to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Congress. In its Joint Monthly Readiness Report, Central Command’s senior leadership had been reporting that imagery, targeting and bomb-damage shops were operating at a readiness level of "R-2," which meant they were almost completely prepared for war, Koury says.
"The reality, R-3, not ready, or R-4, absolutely not ready," Koury says.
When he addressed this discrepancy in a meeting, the officers in charge told him they could not broadcast that Central Command was less ready than the other unified commands. The leadership feared that would make it look bad, Koury and others claim.
A newly minted base commander isn’t going to make waves asking for more personnel, the officers say. If the previous commanders could do the job under similar conditions, the prevailing mentality goes, then why can’t he?
Weight of the past
This culture of silence has a history.
Until Communism’s fall in the early 1990s, U.S. military and intelligence agencies had been concentrating on Europe and the Eastern bloc. That gave the U.S. spy the advantage of ethnic and cultural similarities.
As long as the Middle East was giving the United States oil, we let Israel serve as our primary means of checks and balances in the region, Koury and senior intelligence officers say. Now, U.S. military and intelligence agencies are years behind in that region, they claim.
It takes as many as 10 years for an intelligence agency, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency, to train a secret agent. In the Middle East, the process takes longer; the language and cultural barriers are harder to overcome.
In the race to catch up, technological information-gathering, such as signals and imagery intelligence, has been a fast, cheap alternative to training agents, the intelligence officers say. Satellite imagery in particular has the virtue of being a "pure" form of intelligence that is hard to fake or refute. Both the U.S. military and its intelligence agencies use it.
But all the satellite technology in the world is useless if analysts don’t study the images.
At Central Command, which was established in 1983, there haven’t been enough people, say numerous officers critical of the shortcomings. CentCom became a major player among the U.S. commands faster than it could grow.
Missing weapons
Doraine Dorman, a former Army sergeant first class who worked both in intelligence and security at Central Command, agreed with Koury and the others’ assessment of the imagery problems there.
She was supposed to work in imagery a few years ago, she says. Then a friend showed her the imagery shop, and she saw a bunch of empty seats. She never took the job.
"(In wartime) there’s not enough people over there to take care of the problems," she warned in a phone interview before the most recent war in Iraq.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. Larry Baxley, who also worked at Central Command while Koury and the others were there, said the failure of the senior leaders to report the personnel shortfalls to Congress was asking for problems.
"They should want to report the numbers that are reflective of reality," Baxley said. "If for some reason there is an issue getting reservists in the command, they (Congress) can see what the numbers are to bump those numbers up. Or if there is a lack of skill, like imagery analysis or electronic surveillance, they can put money to schools, or whatever."
Central Command did not respond to The Anniston Star’s requests for information on personnel shortages, nor did it reply to the majority of The Star’s 13 Freedom of Information Act requests filed last fall for this story. The command’s public affairs office would say only that the military has suffered general personnel decreases in all branches of service, but it would not provide specifics.
Commands and subcommands
According to a former military imagery analyst who worked at Central Command in recent years, the shortage in the imagery branch was a continual problem in the period leading up to the recent war with Iraq.
Organized as a headquarters, Central Command typically has about 400 active-duty personnel, backed by 400 reserves who fill in for them in Tampa during military engagements overseas.
These personnel can be thought of as the management team for subordinate commands of the four military services, located elsewhere, that do much of the fighting overseas: an Air Force command at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C.; a Marine Corps command at Camp Smith, Hawaii; a Navy command in Manama, Bahrain; and an Army command at Fort McPherson, Ga.
The analyst, whose name The Star has withheld, said the headquarters’ Intelligence Directorate in the late-1990s typically had only about 60 imagery analysts poring over the thousands of satellite images coming from the Middle East, which the subordinate commands of the four services relied on for much of their intelligence.
Other, less-active unified commands had about twice as many imagery people, the analyst says.
The United States has nine unified commands, which combine two or more branches of military service and have a broad, continuing mission. Several of the unified commands are organized into geographical regions called "areas of responsibility."
Pacific Command, the headquarters for U.S. forces in Asia and the South Pacific, had more than 100 imagery analysts, the source says. European Command, which oversees forces in the European and African continents, had about 110-120. Strategic Command, which coordinates national defense against missile and long-range conventional attack, had about 130-150. The Star could not confirm these numbers independently.
"Obviously, when you’re asking 60 people to do a job and you have (25) countries in your area of responsibility, and you’re asked to provide imagery analysis for all the components (services), and all the war fighters, and everyone and their brothers, you’re not going to be able to do it," the analyst said.
What to watch
Besides regularly tracking sites throughout the Middle East, the analysts provided intelligence during battles, which included helping the dozen or so targeting and bomb-damage assessment analysts in another branch. At those times, meeting the standing requirements on checking sites in other, less-volatile countries was a low priority, the analyst said.
The pressures often forced analysts to send pictures out to those requesting them after only a superficial examination, the analyst said. "Sometimes the only thing that’s being done is a quick look, and we’re not doing everything that’s required."
It had a detrimental effect on both regular intelligence-gathering and wartime efforts, the analyst said.
When an imagery analyst examines a photograph, he or she has to be able to distinguish among the "order of battle," power lines, radar stations, ships, armored vehicles, and aircraft of all the different countries in the Middle East — not to mention government buildings and military installations. It is a difficult task, requiring a high level of training and expertise.
A simple target, such as a grounded airplane, sometimes takes 30 minutes to get an image, annotate it and send it to the soldiers, the analyst said. A photo of many airplanes often takes much longer. With some targets, it takes up to four hours.
"But in battle, you don’t have four hours for a target," the analyst said.
As CentCom conducted operations in the Middle East, not only were photos being skimmed, but the analysts, who worked in round-the-clock shifts, often for 12-14 hours a day, were growing exhausted and error-prone, the analyst says. In battle, a mistake could get a plane shot down or a ship sunk. "It’s a job that I wouldn’t wish on anybody."
Weight of the past
Several intelligence officers described the manning situation at Central Command and other unified commands as "a shell game" in which no new positions ever get created militarywide. Positions often are filled in time of crisis by pulling people from other commands and other bases. After a conflict has ended, the "new" personnel usually return to their old places of work.
But not always.
To create Northern Command, the nation’s new Homeland Defense headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., the eight other unified commands had to take a 15 percent cut in staff, said a former Central Command intelligence officer.
"We joke about it, doing more with less," the officer said. "But, quite honestly, it’s a zero-sum game."
Security concerns
The deficiencies at Central Command aren’t limited to its imagery shop, say a dozen intelligence officers interviewed by The Star.
Warnings have been there for years, but they have begun only recently to register on the public radar, they said.
Last August, as the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan raged, the news broke that two laptop computers, one probably containing top-secret information, had disappeared from a supposedly secure room at Central Command’s Intelligence Directorate. It was a severe security breach. The computers were recovered days later in the home of a sergeant who was convicted of the theft.
That summer, versions of alleged U.S. plans for war with Iraq leaked into several U.S. newspapers. Then, last winter, the news leaked that Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the now-retired head of Central Command, was under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general’s office.
The investigation reportedly was for several allegations, including that he may have allowed his wife, Cathy, to be present during discussions of highly classified material. Sources at Central Command said the investigation ultimately was dropped.
Several intelligence officers, some of whom asked not to be named, said it was only a matter of time before such incidents bubbled out into the open.
"Was I surprised when I read that two computers were missing from a CentCom SCIF (Secure Compartmented Information Facility)? No, to be quite honest, I was not surprised," said Navy Cmdr. Rita Szymanski, a former CentCom intelligence officer who is now at Strategic Command. She was using the military term for an ultra-sensitive, locked and alarmed security room intended to safeguard the military’s deepest secrets in the war on terror. "If you’re not at the top of your game in security, you’re going to have spaces in security. If you’re not enforcing it, you’re going to have lapses."
Some also said it wasn’t the first time computers had disappeared from command’s area of responsibility.
Standing guards
Dorman, who spent more than 15 years at Central Command, said there were too few security guards for the directorate’s 65,000 square feet of space. Guards would search people’s bags maybe once a month, she said. When they did, they would set up a table near the door, and everyone going in and out would know beforehand what they were doing.
"I used to say it all the time," Dorman said. "These people are walking in and out of the buildings every day, and no one gets searched. I thought, this is so stupid … And that’s why those laptops walked out of here."
However, those determined to walk out with classified information wouldn’t have to take a laptop, several sources said. A would-be spy could just download the information onto a disk. The guards never patted anyone down, the sources said, and there were no metal detectors at the building exits.
"They can walk out with disks all day long," Dorman said.
After the stolen laptops made national news, command tightened security, providing more guards and bag searches at entryways, said a source close to security whose name The Star has withheld. But the guards don’t scan people with wands or metal detectors — anything that could fit under a uniform still could slip in or out.
Central Command’s public affairs office refused to comment on the security measures that are being taken on base.
Physical security
The source close to security says that for years, the headquarters assigned an average of just three officers to physical security, which is responsible for ensuring the integrity of all the classified areas in the unified command. All told, that meant making sure unauthorized materials didn’t go in or out of any of the top-secret facilities at home or overseas, a total of 345,000 square feet of floor space, the source said.
"It was like trying to hold sand in your fist and just watching it slip through your fingers," the source said. "A lot of rules were broken in the name of ‘the mission.’ It was really frustrating."
Another source close to security said higher-ups often brushed off security protocols, and that people were allowed to go in and out without proper clearance.
It was best not to make too much noise about the infractions, the source said. People who spoke out were told to move on. "As soon as an issue comes up around here, people are shipped out or sent home to cover it all up."
