A thirty minute special report.

Sixteen agencies make up the intelligence community, but one is at the center of almost every move.

Arriving on campus, you're immediately impressed by two things. The guard with a large shotgun cradled in the crease of his elbow outside the visitor center is the first thing.

The second comes inside when you realize what they do.

"Knowing everything about every hill, every valley, the ocean bottom," says David Burpee, chief of Public Affairs.

And if you're wondering just how important NGA is to the intelligence community, Burpee says think of it like this: "You can't put a puzzle together by starting in the middle, what you do is you start at the edges and corners and you lay a foundation."

That's what NGA does with photography, video, multimedia and other imaging capabilities. Their goal, says Burpee, is "to show a combatant commander or politician or somebody else how to move from point A-B or to solve a problem.

Case in Point

How do those unmanned predator drones blast Hellfire missiles through the window of a terrorist home from many miles away? It's called the National Geospatial-Intelligence agency.

"We're embedded deeply into the intelligence community," says Burpee and backed up by military credentials for tight spots. "If you stick a gun to our head we're DOD."

They know everything on the face of the earth, and through their next-generation imaging techniques, military and intelligence attack assets can achieve some pretty incredible feats. This allows "small bombs to be dropped on precise targets with limited collateral damage."

Fifteen-thousand employees around world are constantly taking pictures, video, and acquiring other images from satellites and sensors and aircraft. They're processing and piping them out to the military and the other 15 intelligence agencies.

Digitally Vital

In the digital age in which we live, the world, according to NGA public affairs officer David Burpee, no longer exists on a paper map. "One of the things you can do when you've moved away from paper is the world exists in servers."

And those servers, which store the images that NGA captures, not only make it possible to share the images instantly anywhere in the world, but with computers, NGA can enhance them and make interactive 3-D images.

One reason for that is to give the military's combat pilots a chance to virtually fly a difficult mission before they actually do it. For instance, in the dangerous peaks and valleys of Afghanistan, says Burpee, "we can create a virtual valley that they can fly their planes and helicopters down through and practice and see as many times.

Out of Office

The U.S. is engaged in several military conflicts right now. Troop levels are lower than almost anytime in history. So how can it be effective in engaging the enemy?

The NGA is part of the answer. It has 15,000 employees, many of whom are collecting, processing, and disseminating still and moving images.

Burpee says NGA "can use a lot of sources to collect (those images.) Classified satellites, civilian satellites, Predator Global Hawk."

And they aren't just collecting intelligence. They are actually on the ground showing the military what is available to them case by case.

"We have trained and put people forward so that they're at the vision level, and some times lower... sitting in the tents, sharing the trials and tribulations of our customer, because they don't know what they don't know."

In other words NGA can help them see things they didn't know they could.

How vital is NGA to the military?

"No U.S. Navy ship at sea moves without information from our Maritime Safety - Navigation."

The same is true of military aircraft. They go nowhere without "charts and navigational information provided by this agency."

Critical Concerns

Homeland Security officials are constantly looking for ways to keep the U.S safe.

The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency plays a big role in that by helping to protect critical infrastructure.

John Goolgasian, deputy director for the Office of the Americas says critical infrastructure pretty much includes anything that would be of importance to FEMA. "Critical infrastructure is made of things we can portray spatially on the ground. Things like transportation routes communications nodes. It's also derived from the Nunn, Lugar, Domenici Act where they identified 120 key cities in the U.S. that could be potential targets for terrorists. They eventually expanded that to 133 cities to include all the state capitals."

Not only do they have images on file of large cities but critical infrastructure in small towns. So who decides what infrastructure is critical?

"It's actually a consortium of federal agencies and state and local jurisdictions that agree upon a list."

Security at Home

The NGA provides the military and intelligence communities with international intel, but they also have a big homeland security mission.

"We work very frequently, for example, with FEMA. Right in Hurricane Katrina, as quickly as they'd request information from us, as soon as a satellite would pass, we could get them answers."

NGA spokesman David Burpee gave us a snapshot, but John Goolgasian, Deputy Director of their office of the Americas gave us a broader picture of their mission.

"We've taken the knowledge we've gained from overseas in Geoint and applied it to a domestic mission. So we're really here to supply critical information for domestic threats. From foreign terrorism to natural disasters. We support special events such as the Superbowl and inaugurations."

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On the Web:

The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency: http://www.nga.mil/

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