Remember back at the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, the Defense Department bought up all of the photographs taken by private surveillance satellites? Ever wonder what happened to them?
For nearly a month after the bombing campaign began, pilots had to make do with old Russian maps of Afghanistan, because the American intelligence community was slow to figure out how to process and distribute satellite photographs from a private contractor, the officials say.
Once Air Force officers discovered that thousands of the fresh, high-resolution satellite pictures were sitting on CD-ROM’s in storage at a military base here, they skirted the bureaucracy and began ferrying the photographs themselves directly to a forward air base in Saudi Arabia. But the episode underscores the way American intelligence’s management of spy satellite technology has encountered problems in trying to integrate information from the private sector.