Annette was Army intelligence herself at the time, in active duty and serving just west of her husband in Kabul. Eight-year-old Stephanie had been home in Pittsburgh with Annette’s mother, and it had been doubly hard on her that her own mother was not home at the time she heard about her father’s death.
Yes, Stephanie’s awful teenage-years behavior had an explanation, but Annette didn’t let her use it as an excuse.
After the trials of her daily morning ordeal getting her daughter up and out the door to school, Annette actually enjoyed the short drive down to Springfield to work. She was no longer in the Army, but shortly before eight a.m., she pulled through the gates of Fort Belvoir. A few winding roads took her to her destination: the third-largest government building in the Washington area behind the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
NGA is one of America’s sixteen intelligence agencies under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and certainly one of the least well known. Formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, NGA is dual-hatted as a combat support agency for the Department of Defense as well as being a member of the U.S. intelligence community. The agency was only a few years old, but tremendous resources had been poured into this facility and another massive building in St. Louis.
The organization received $5 billion a year in federal funds, and employed thousands of personnel, both military and civilian.
After showing her badge to a guard and then running it over a scanner she put her purse on a table for inspection and went through a metal detector. A long walk down a hallway with other employees — about a third of whom wore military uniforms — took her to a down escalator, above which ran the motto of the organization written out high on the walclass="underline"
KNOW THE EARTH… SHOW THE WAY… UNDERSTAND THE WORLD.
She passed into the massive atrium of the building — she’d read somewhere you could lay the Statue of Liberty on its side in here — and she scanned her badge at a reader in front of one of a half-dozen glass doorways in the center of the room that led to a bank of elevators. She took a ride to the fourth floor, then crossed the suspended hall over the atrium, made her way down another corridor, and scanned her badge a fourth time to get into her small office.
Annette was an imagery specialist for the NGA; she spent her days looking over all types of pictures using imagery manipulation and enhancement software, as well as compiling and analyzing other bits of data. Then she wrote interpretative reports of what she found, and these were delivered to the NGA’s mission partners: policy makers, war fighters, and first responders.
Although she recognized her work wasn’t going to change the world, she found it interesting nonetheless, and she took solace in the fact she was damn good at it. Annette had spent her entire adult life focused on intelligence. After a full career in Army intel she had gotten hired here as a civilian analyst. She loved her work and her colleagues and the mission itself.
As fractured and stressful as her home life was — she was, after all, a widow with a teenage daughter with issues — Brawley took comfort in the fact she could come here every day, devote herself totally to the imagery and data points of a faraway place she would never visit personally, and build a coherent picture about what was going on there that just might help her country in some small way.
Her office was in the East Asia Department and her focus was North Korea, and while most of the others in her office spent their time on the “sexy stuff,” fixated on either the opaque and mysterious government there or the nuclear and missile programs, Annette Brawley was in the economic section, and she concentrated almost exclusively on the DPRK’s mining industry.
She’d become an expert on mining not out of any love for digging up rocks, but for the simple fact that she was tasked to North Korea’s economic sector and that was their principal industry.
NGA geospatial technology was much more than looking at pictures and maps. The agency used all manner of data: spaceborne, airborne, seaborne, and landborne intelligence platforms at their disposal, as well as pulling the activity on cell-phone towers and even social media.
But much of that didn’t apply in North Korea. NGA had little to no visibility on cell-phone data inside the Hermit Kingdom, and social media there was banned. But there were other geospatial analysis tools at her disposal — satellite photos and videos ferried out of the country by smugglers and defectors; even government propaganda information could be gleaned to find hidden nuggets of information.
This morning she decided she’d take a look at some new images from one of the National Reconnaissance Office’s KH-12 satellites. She pulled up the files on one of the three twenty-seven-inch monitors in front of her, and oriented herself with the global positioning information on the data screen next to it.
She spent a few minutes looking at a road project to a tungsten mine just outside Pyongyang, saw that nothing much had changed since she’d last looked in on the location a month earlier, and she noted it in her log.
Then she typed in the coordinates to the Chongju rare earth mineral mine.
A year earlier she had spent virtually all her time watching activities at the Chongju mineral mine. But that was when the Chinese were there, when there was real development going on. America’s policy makers were interested back then, because rumors out of China said the deposit in the mountain there could have amounted to trillions of dollars for North Korea. This was something that worried the U.S. government, so Annette had worked long hours tracking the progress on the site. She’d discovered small amounts of ore, just a few rail cars, traveling north from the open-pit mine to the Chinese border, presumably for processing at one of China’s rare earth refineries. When the Chinese were thrown out — Annette had received an intel briefing from the CIA that suggested they left because North Korean leader Choi invalidated their mining contract — interest in the mine quickly waned. Everyone concluded that the North Koreans wouldn’t be able to do much more than continue to dig a small amount of ore out of the rocks and then ship it up to China for processing. Through her own work she determined the mine would reach only about four percent of its yearly production output capability without help from the Chinese.
When Chongju went on “life support,” she refocused her attention on other mines in other parts of the DPRK, but she circled back every month or so to peek in on the sat images over Chongju. Each time she had done this over the past year she saw that the North Koreans were still trying to get something out of the site, but it was a shell of the operation it had been when they were partnered with those who knew what the hell they were doing.
Looking over the newest digital images from the KH-12 satellite, Brawley was happy to see there were no clouds over the site. The KH-12 sat had radar imagery capability, as well, but this wasn’t the same as looking directly at the site through an optical lens.
She scanned the images the way she always did, slowly and methodically. First she ignored the buildings around the mine and focused directly on the open pit gouged out of the mountainside. The resolution of the KH-12 satellite cameras was fantastic. She could make out bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment; she even saw individual men, their shadows a further indication of what a clear day it was.