Enviro-Intelligence: the CIA Goes Green
Agency now tracks forests, water, smog
The great forests of Alaska and Siberia are on the move, like Birnam wood marching against Macbeth. And the CIA has pictures to prove it.
The spy agency is set to trade data from its cold war reconnaissance photos of Siberian forests for Russian intelligence on Alaskan woodlands. Scientists consider these boreal forests--vast stretches of pine and birch named for the Greek god of the north wind--a laboratory for the study of global warming.
The trade is one more sign that the CIA itself is turning green. Last year, the agency established an environmental center to monitor and forecast crises--from fires in Indonesia to water shortages in the Mideast--that could affect America's economic and security interests.
The spy photos of the boreal forests, which Vice President Al Gore will discuss this week with visiting Russian Prime Minister Victor Chernomyrdin, will allow scientists to track the advance of Arctic forests as global warming allows trees to grow farther north. For decades, U-2 spy planes and satellites photographed Soviet military sites in the Yegoryevsk Forest near Moscow, the Biryusa River basin near Krasnoyarsk, and elsewhere in Siberia. The Soviets spied on the Brooks Range and other parts of Alaska. This sequence of pictures now serves as a time machine for viewing environmental change. And because the CIA is forbidden by law to photograph U.S. territory, it needs data from Moscow to study America's forests.
Civilian satellites can distinguish features on Earth about 30 feet across. But the resolution of spy satellites is so fine--measured in inches rather than feet--that scientists expect to learn about the migration of insects by studying leaves on infested trees.
Since operational details of the reconnaissance systems remain secret, the United States and Russia will not exchange raw photos. In America, the MEDEA (Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis) project--created in 1992 at the instigation of then Senator Gore--grants member scientists security clearances to review data from satellites, aircraft, and submarines. In the case of the boreal forests, U.S. and Russian experts will trade detailed diagrams derived from spy imagery.
Fear of betraying secrets has stalled one project: joint submarine cruises to sample water and ice in the Arctic Ocean. After years of undersea jousting, both the U.S. and Russian navies balk at revealing submarine capabilities and tactics.
But two other projects are going forward. Russia intends to provide data from spy photos of Florida Bay so that U.S. scientists can study its dying sea grasses and dwindling mangroves. And Russia will use American imagery to map flood plains and marshes, helping to plan new oil pipelines and minimize the impact of spills.
The scientific exchanges are coordinated by Gore and Chernomyrdin. The CIA's new center, on the other hand, will focus on environmental challenges that affect American interests:
Treaty negotiations. The CIA already monitors compliance with international environmental treaties. A priority this year will be to discover and analyze the negotiating positions of other nations as last year's Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gases is refined. "Our negotiators need to understand what is really driving their counterparts," says Norm Kahn, a senior analyst at the environmental center.
Imminent crises. The ingredients for disaster in Indonesia, for example, were evident last year: Farmers were setting fires to clear land just as the El Nino storm system was producing a drought. Kahn believes that if the CIA's environmental center had been operating, it could have warned about the impending catastrophic smog. The agency will continue to watch Indonesia this year because of the interplay of smog, economic turmoil, rioting, and political change.
Long-term trouble. Water shortages in Gaza could fuel unrest among young Arabs. Egypt is building a canal to divert water from the Nile, which may cause problems with its neighbors. China's Three Gorges Dam project is considered environmentally unsound and politically risky: A reservoir will displace 1.2 million people, and landslides could crush whole villages.
"Singling out the environment as one way to look at international tensions gives us a way to anticipate things," says George Demko, a political geographer at Dartmouth who has worked with the environmental center. CIA officials are confident that they can foresee many environmental problems years down the road. But they are less sure that policy makers, lurching from crisis to crisis, will pay attention.
This story appears in the March 16, 1998 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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