CATHERINE HERRIDGE REPORTS: Exactly three years ago, Hellfire Missiles killed the Al Qaeda Leader at His Hideout In Kabul, Afghanistan, Ending a 21-year manhunt. DoD’s secretive imagery agency, @NGA_GEOINT, is now acknowledging their involvement publicly for the first time. Director Frank Whitworth Everything you see here is accurate …we will not be approximate when we’re talking about something of this gravity.”

CATHERINE HERRIDGE: With exclusive access to a highly secretive intelligence agency that supports combat operations, we met Director Frank Whitworth, whose team is at the forefront of artificial intelligence. He revealed for the first time his agency’s role in the takedown of a top al-Qaeda leader, as well as a task force supporting security at the southern border. Director Whitworth, many Americans are not familiar with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and its mission. What should they know? VICE ADMIRAL FRANK WHITWORTH, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL GEOSPATIAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Thanks. This is so important to answer this question right up front. This is an intelligence agency. It is also a combat support agency, so we are a DOD, Department of Defense agency, and we concentrate on taking all those images that are taken every day by satellites, and we make sense of it, provide understanding in three ways, targeting, warning, and the safety of navigation. And I’m sure we’ll have a chance to break those open, but it’s really about data, maps, and images. This is the place in the intelligence community where we take responsibility for providing understanding through those media. HERRIDGE: What are your top priorities? WHITWORTH: So this is something we normally don’t talk about, intelligence priorities, but we’re going to at least probably not surprise you or your viewers in saying that the southern border is one, certainly. China is one, certainly. The Middle East, Russia, Ukraine, counterterrorism. I could go on, and I don’t think that’s a surprise, but it’s important that we go ahead and acknowledge that. HERRIDGE: Is that one of the first times, or is this the first time that you’ve acknowledged these priorities? WHITWORTH: Me personally, it is. HERRIDGE: It is, right, publicly. Thank you. Walk us through the intelligence you’re reviewing in the mornings. WHITWORTH: So it could be anything, and that’s part of the relationship that we drive from a leadership perspective with all these analysts and collections professionals is we have a conversation at 8.45 every morning, and we talk about the intelligence that comes in overnight. And it’s a very, I would say, a soft Socratic method where it’s a lot of give and take, some questions. We could have several thousand people in this meeting where the only rule of engagement is, hey, if you know the answer, chime in. And if you have the correct answer, and we are on the wrong path towards building understanding, please chime in. HERRIDGE: So it sounds very collaborative. WHITWORTH: Very collaborative with each other, and then we encourage anybody from the interagency also to participate. HERRIDGE: The fallout of the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, I understand, is highly classified, and we can’t discuss today. But perhaps you can give our viewers a sense of what you’re seeing with Russia and China. WHITWORTH: Let’s start with Russia and Ukraine. Our task has been to enable the ability of Ukraine to defend themselves, and that’s been steadfast. And I’m really proud of the ability. There’s something that we take very seriously in providing understanding through also commercial imagery. When you think about the satellites that are over the world, a lot of times people go to that exquisite capability that is provided by a group called the NRO, and that’s great. But there are also commercial satellites that can provide unclassified images, and we do that in droves. We go into what’s called and establish a portal, a place where many different users, to include Ukrainians who are vetted, about 400,000 people go into this portal and they can have immediate access to commercial images. HERRIDGE: So you’re talking about real-time information and intelligence that can really drive their decisions on the battlefield. WHITWORTH: That’s right, and it helps them defend themselves. HERRIDGE: And what about Russia? WHITWORTH: So with Russia, obviously, we need to better understand the status of what we call that forward line of troops. We need to ensure that the President, the Secretary of Defense have all the information they need to render decisions. I think some of our readership would also include the State Department from a diplomatic perspective. It’s a very important relationship that we have, again, as the interagents. HERRIDGE: And China. WHITWORTH: So with China, this is a very important challenge. We need to ensure that we’re going to prevent surprise, understanding what we call the PLA, effectively their military, the steps that they’re making towards their own readiness. This gets into the warning piece. I said that we do targeting, warning, and the safety of navigation. We need to ensure that we have a baseline of their activity, their equipment, where we know if something’s anomalous, out of place, and worrisome. And that allows us then to be predictive. HERRIDGE: Vis-a-vis Taiwan. WHITWORTH: That is certainly one of the problem sets. That’s correct. HERRIDGE: You also have a mission helping to protect the homeland. What is the Southern Border Task Force? WHITWORTH: So as soon as that emergency was declared by the Commander-in-Chief, we snapped right into action. We established our own border task force to ensure that we had leadership who were task organizing our people, our collection, our exploitation, and our support to then the North Comm. Commander and ultimately also the South Comm. Commander to ensure that they had all of the images and the understanding, exploitation that they could have. HERRIDGE: What intelligence are you collecting? WHITWORTH: The nice thing about this particular problem set is that it wasn’t necessarily new for us. We were building understanding on the flow of narcotics and at least the pieces of the puzzle of the counter-narcotic problem. Some of the contributing factors that go into making narcotics, we were actually on top of that for years before. Some of the indicators you get on a mass migration issue way south, far away from the border. Those were things that we already were well-practiced on. So we just started refining a lot of that, concentration on the cartels, some of the human geography that is very important for decision-makers to understand. I call it thumb-tackable information, where you want to have a picture of the human geography that is part of that landmass in between, where it might begin, where a problem might begin, and then ultimately the border. But never crossing over the border. We pay very close attention to our left and right limits as to we don’t… HERRIDGE: Is that, I was just going to ask you, is that the red line that you’re collecting on the approach to the southern border? WHITWORTH: That’s correct. That’s right. And then don’t forget, we also have troops down there. And so from a force protection perspective, we need to make sure that they’re not surprised. HERRIDGE: Since January in the new administration, have you identified changes in the pattern of behavior or the traffic? WHITWORTH: I would like to say it’s been a very steady problem set. I don’t think anyone who especially dedicates their life to counter narcotics ever feels completely satisfied. And so I’m not going to say that we’ve cracked the code on that, but it’s not for a lack of trying. We are really integrated very well on the Border Task Force in Tucson, Arizona, with the Border Intelligence Task Force established by the U.S. NORTHCOM commander. And we’re just going to keep on plugging to try to make this less and less a problem. HERRIDGE: Is the Southern Border Task Force expanding under the Trump administration? WHITWORTH: I can’t speak for the Trump administration relative to expansion. I just know for us, we have hit a point of a very good relationship from an interagency perspective with the U.S. NORTHCOM commander, with DHS, with Customs and Border Patrol, etc. We have a lot of readership who depend on our building understanding through some of those mechanisms I talked about. HERRIDGE: I understand you’ve been able to get some information cleared about a specific operation. What can you share? WHITWORTH: A great example would be in the maritime domain. A lot of people don’t concentrate as much on that. They focus on the land. And there’s a lot that happens in the maritime domain that’s a problem. For instance, a lot of different small boats out there that have some patterns of behavior that are worrisome and deserve to be boarded. And so how do you break that out, especially when you’re taking risk at night if you’re the Coast Guard? We have some automated approaches that do help us help the Border Guard as well as the Coast Guard with like, where do you start? What’s worthy of an interdiction? HERRIDGE: So essentially, you’re helping them, I would think, with artificial intelligence to find the needles in the haystack. WHITWORTH: So we haven’t talked about NGA MAVEN, but MAVEN, which is our hallmark AI program that is AI enabled, what we call Mission Command, does a lot of the study and helps establish the scale and the patterns that ultimately lead to some of that understanding, just like in this example. So MAVEN was employed to help the Coast Guard understand, okay, this is a pattern of behavior that you need to pay attention to. This might merit some sort of a boarding or an interdiction. HERRIDGE: So it’s not only narcotics, would it be right to conclude that it’s also human trafficking? WHITWORTH: So certainly that is one of the problem sets also, that if we see something that fits into that pattern, then that needs to be brought to the attention of those interdictors. HERRIDGE: Let’s move on to artificial intelligence. In your intelligence world, what is next? WHITWORTH: So artificial intelligence, it’s interesting that we always say AIML in that particular order. It’s really machine learning and then artificial intelligence. One of the things that we have here is a growing amount of data. So when we talk about all those satellites that take pictures, that constellation is growing by leaps and bounds. That’s a good problem to have. That means a lot more data, a lot more images are coming in, and we’re going to ensure that we don’t become unbridled in the growth of the number of people, but we have the right people. They have 20, 30, 40 years in some cases of experience. So who better than those people to teach what we call models, to detect equipment that’s out of place or worrisome, to help us with the predictive ability in this business. So the people actually do what’s called data labeling that helps us then establish what’s called detections. That entire process is called inference. This is part of computer vision. It is a form of artificial intelligence. We’ve dabbled in this in the past. HERRIDGE: We’re in a big way right now, especially through NGA-MAVE. For people listening to this conversation, I think one of the central questions is, what skills, what jobs survive artificial intelligence? WHITWORTH: When we’re talking about our people, they are a greatest resource. And it’s also true in terms of AI and ML, because who better to ensure that the models learn correctly? I look at this as a kind of an audacity, humility issue. We have the audacity to try to map the Apollo series. We have the audacity to render more positive identification calls than any other agency on earth. And that’s because of these people. So they deserve at least that mention. But we also have the humility to admit we’re going to need some automated help and some AI help with the amount of data coming in as it grows. So that’s a form of humility that I really respect our workforce. They’re not worried about their jobs. They just want the additional help. But then there’s another type of humility, and that’s AI humility. And so anyone who suggests that we can forego the human in this process and simply have the models, I think that they may need to pay attention to the clever abilities of some of our adversaries, some of our enemies, before rendering that judgment. I submit they’re going to make it hard. And right now, the human processing unit, known as the brain, is pretty good at recognizing when it’s being duped. HERRIDGE: So you don’t see a scenario where humans are taken out of critical decision making, such as launching lethal attacks. WHITWORTH: So decision making is a very human process. On the defensive side, we’re already quite automated. And there are many, many either sailors or soldiers out there who are defended every day by automated procedures that have a human that is established part of the loop, but is kind of separated because it’s defensive. We’ve got to keep people alive. You need the immediacy. For a human and the offensive decision making, we’re still right now with a human on the loop. So there may be a human that is witting to a lot of automation going on, but is going to insert him or herself on behalf of the president and the secretary of defense. If that changes, that will be the president’s call or the secretary’s call. So I do not right now see a situation where a human will be taken out of the loop for offensive, what we call fires or targeting against an unwitting enemy. But that could happen and that’ll be the prerogative of the president and the secretary. HERRIDGE: Does artificial intelligence, machine learning have the potential to know what an adversary is going to do before it even crosses their mind? WHITWORTH: This body of evidence that we have called imagery and what we keep in storage really becomes very important for predicting the future because sometimes you just have to have some of the past and some of the way that either equipment or behaviors have presented themselves in the past to understand what you should expect. So we’re always looking for something that’s predictive. So when we talk about needing additional compute, I very quickly will say as well as storage. So we move more ones and zeros and data than just about anybody because a file of imagery is so dense that we have to always have a place to put it. Data loss is very, very bad for this exact reason. We need to be able to be predictive and sometimes those eurekas happen by going back years and years into old data, old images. HERRIDGE: So is it fair to assess that you’re saying that AI, machine learning does have that capability, that it can predict what the bad guys are going to do before they even do it? WHITWORTH: I think that it certainly gives us a head start. There will always be an assessment based on some other ints. GeoINT is excellent, but it also is better in terms of confidence when you bring in some other ints. Now we’re talking about multimodal AI and NGA Maven, our flagship, is starting to bring in some aspects where you bring in multiple modes. So maybe a little human, maybe a little electronic intelligence, a little bit of signal intelligence coupled with our mainstay which is imagery intelligence, GeoINT. That helps your confidence and confidence does count in this business. And for somebody who’s tasked to make a decision, they just want to know how confident you are when you render a prediction or in this case normally an identity. HERRIDGE: Is China closing the gap? WHITWORTH: We all have to be impressed by the coverage that the Chinese have demonstrated over the last, I’d say five to ten years. However, in this business, Fusion taking a lot of data, when you have a lot of data and a lot of coverage, Fusion also has to be met with process and has to be met with honesty. In our system, we move bad news, something that may not be very popular, but we move it with great speed and we’re engineered to do so. I don’t know, this is a gap for me and for a lot of people in this business, whether the Chinese choose to move bad news very quickly to the top. That’s a very interesting net assessment question. HERRIDGE: Well, you need to know what’s failing and what’s not working in order to move forward. WHITWORTH: That’s exactly right. We have a watch center here, just like every other intelligence agency that’s dedicated to moving troublesome bad news within minutes, frankly within seconds. HERRIDGE: What happens if the United States loses the AI race? WHITWORTH: I don’t even think in those terms, because right now it’s still so formative and we have such a capable IT sector. At this juncture, as one of the beneficiaries of more data, we just want to make sure that we keep up with that and are able to turn all of that data into a real advantage. I don’t think about losing that race. HERRIDGE: Earlier, you mentioned Maven. You’ve recently had a successful test of something called Gambler, which is designed to support the warfighter in the field. What is Gambler and how does that work? How is it different? WHITWORTH: It’s an AI program, but it’s meant for those troops that are out there in the field. It’s meant to ensure that a model can be applied to very tactical collection. Instead of a satellite that might be national in scope, now we’re talking about maybe a drone or something that is very local to that commander. We can apply models there and they might even be able to adjust their models. One thing that we’re finding in this business is that human ingenuity, creativity, you don’t want to stop that just because someone might be lower ranking or they’re out farther away from the quote-unquote flagpole. Gambler seizes on that philosophy. It allows those warfighters to actually have a little more control over the models and to apply them to more localized collection. HERRIDGE: Is it a small device? WHITWORTH: It’s software. HERRIDGE: That’s right. WHITWORTH: It’s software that’s applied to smaller devices and smaller collections. HERRIDGE: Let’s move to space. The U.S. has dominance in space right now. What’s it going take to maintain that dominance? WHITWORTH: I think the vigilance that we’re already well on top of. The fact of having a Space Force, people who make their living every single day as part of their career to understand that domain and to keep that edge, I think was certainly part and parcel of the nation’s decision to be competitive and to win in space. HERRIDGE: It says that space is the next battlefield. WHITWORTH: I think that as far as the next battlefield, the integration is starting to become part and parcel of every battlefield. There are going to be some that might be more localized, but for the United States, we’re not going to take anything for granted and we’re going to always respect the possibility that space is involved. HERRIDGE: I want to talk to you about GPS. One of your responsibilities here at the NGA is being a guardian of GPS. How does that work? WHITWORTH: This gets to the safety of navigation mission that I mentioned. At some point, on behalf of all of those warfighters and people who travel in our Navy ships and people who are in our Air Forces and Navy’s planes, Marines, etc., Army, you got to understand what the datum is that makes all those maps accurate. We established that datum in 1984 and it’s called the World Geodetic System 1984. It has been the start point for accuracy for everything that’s been navigationally related to our Armed Forces. Now, in order to understand and have a good GPS system, you have to actually have a good datum on the Earth. And so that becomes very important in the triangulation of position of GPS. GPS is effectively just that, understanding where the satellite is that triangulates a place on the Earth. That might sound really complex, but ultimately, you always have to have that datum and we’re responsible for that. HERRIDGE: Is China developing a credible competitor to GPS? WHITWORTH: They are. I think that right now, I like where we stand in this regard, but it’s going to take work and it’s going to be, frankly, work between academia and the Armed Forces because we, from a, you know, this is the study of the Earth, especially the way the Earth is measured and spin rate and distances of the Earth. This is a very specialized field called geodesy. HERRIDGE: That’s not a term you hear every day, by the way. WHITWORTH: There aren’t many geodesists and we have only had in higher learning, whether it’s a master’s or a PhD, you could probably count up to about 20. HERRIDGE: Less than two dozen in the United States. WHITWORTH: There are very few. That’s right. And I’m very proud of the ones that we have at NGA, but we have to continue this because right now we’re seeing more geodesists created within Chinese academic systems than in ours. And this is very important. We do not want them to gain an advantage when it comes to navigation because all navigation ultimately yields competitiveness and enabling wealth, frankly, and all the other things that go with where are you on the Earth relative to, for us, GPS and for them it may be something like Beidou. HERRIDGE: Other systems rely on GPS, right? I mean, financial systems. WHITWORTH: Correct. HERRIDGE: Obviously your phone, you’re trying to get somewhere. What happens if the United States no longer is the dominant force in GPS? WHITWORTH: Yeah, that’s one that I don’t ponder because I don’t want to. I think at this juncture we want to keep that advantage. There is so much billing and this is very interesting. I asked an economist once which agency creates or enables the most wealth. It was a very interesting question. This aspect, I think you could make the argument that the geodesists of NGA enable a lot of wealth by keeping that datum ready for GPS, all billing, all communications, everything. We have so much reliance on GPS. So I don’t think about losing that competitive edge, but it is important that we have this conversation about academia and the need for more to study geodesy and by extension STEM. HERRIDGE: Three years ago, the United States took down a top Al-Qaeda leader at a safe house in Kabul, Afghanistan. Ayman al-Zawahiri was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks that killed American citizens and he’d been a top deputy to Osama bin Laden. The successful U.S. drone strike ended a 21-year manhunt. Is this the first time you’re publicly acknowledging your agency’s role? WHITWORTH: It is. It was a very, I think, important step as somebody who, for the better part of two decades, was dedicated to this manhunt, not only for him, but just for anyone who meant harm in that organization, who meant harm to the United States and to our people. This was an important memory. And so we did have some real relevance here. We have model makers who actually bring to life a situation, how it presents itself. And that’s very helpful. Some people are very visual and very physical in the way that they memorize or make decisions. And so to have a three-dimensional product that showed what we anticipate as a situation, that was very powerful. HERRIDGE: Then-Director Whitworth showed us the model up close without the protective case. He emphasized the importance of scale and precision. WHITWORTH: It’s very effective at showing the three-dimensionality, basically, of building understanding. In this case, the president, he was going to be briefed by his national security team. He needed to have a better understanding of how does this present? How will this opportunity present itself? And so everything you see here is accurate, from the trees to the little guardhouse to the barbed wire to some of these little fortifications that were meant to obscure, right? HERRIDGE: Why is precision and scale so important? WHITWORTH: Well, I think it’s important operationally, of course, because we will not be approximate when we’re talking about something of this gravity. I think it’s important also, and I would defer to decision makers, but I think it’s important to those decision makers that we’re not approximating here. Everything you see, Mr. President or Mr. Secretary, is exactly to scale, okay? This is important enough that we’re going to do this right. HERRIDGE: I look at the model. One of the things that stands out is it almost looks like there’s a canvas or sort of makeshift walls around the balconies, which to me are an indicator that maybe there’s someone important inside. WHITWORTH: So maybe we need to hire you, Catherine. So I take your point, and I would tell you that you know, this is the very terminal phase of building understanding. You have to understand, though, that an interagency effort, many different entities got us here to this point to understand that this building is where this particular person was being located and will be located. So the predictive piece and what we should actually see and expect. So you’re right. That’s sort of the target development phase of this. Now we’re talking about building understanding of that last kinetic phase. HERRIDGE: It’s very unusual to see one of these models without any of the glass or sort of protective covers. WHITWORTH: That’s right. It’s the first time I’ve seen it without the glass. HERRIDGE: Oh, really? Yourself too? Yeah. WHITWORTH: Yeah. So I also like the sneakiness of it. You know, we’ve got this wooden base here, and you can tell that we’ve got a wooden top that goes over top that somebody could just simply take in almost like a briefcase so that it stays a secret. Obviously, these things need to be protected. The OPSEC has been operational security is very tight. And so we are pretty good at building our casings as well. HERRIDGE: Yeah. The other model that is very famous is the model for the hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan for Osama bin Laden. WHITWORTH: We made that one too. That’s right. For that one, because you had humans who were involved in that process of doing that particular assault, that took on an additional importance where they actually then need to be very familiar with the kind of the physical arrangement and the presentation of that place on the earth. HERRIDGE: It’s helping the warfighter avoid surprises once they’re on target. WHITWORTH: That’s exactly right. Yeah. We don’t like surprise in this business, and we definitely don’t like surprise when our warfighters are directly involved. HERRIDGE: You joined the Navy back in 1989. WHITWORTH: That’s right. HERRIDGE: What is it meant to serve this country for nearly four decades? WHITWORTH: I, it’s flown by, and I will just tell you, I am still very proud to be part of the U.S. Navy, and it would be part of the joint force. My career has moved in a very joint way, and I love it. I love it every day getting into this uniform. It’s something about putting on the Jersey of the United States that I find very inspiring. I’m actually one of the few in uniform. We barely have 4% of our population is military here. That corporate knowledge of our civilians is also very, very important. I give out these certificates of appreciation to people in some cases who have been serving here for 45 years. They are national assets. HERRIDGE: You’ve taken some steps to try and open up the agency. What have you done and why? WHITWORTH: So this is a quiet group of people. It’s a quiet agency. We have a beautiful, you know, beautiful headquarters here, and we take really good care of our people, but they don’t necessarily have that tail. You know, we don’t have a special series on TV. We don’t have really a movie dedicated to what we do. These people and their story, it deserves to be told, and I really appreciate your taking the time to do that. We trust you with this story, and there are a lot of Americans who use this medium, and so this is the right thing to do. HERRIDGE: Have you taken steps to bring some of the families into the building? You had mentioned to me that if someone passes, you maybe try and bring the family members in because most people will never see inside this building. WHITWORTH: It’s true, and thank you for raising this because we don’t talk much about it, and it’s frankly taking a page out of military custom that we tried once early, as soon as I got here, in fact, to have a memorial where we honor someone who has passed who is part of our government workforce, and we could tell immediately what an impact it had on our people and on their families. This is a place that is kept secret. We keep secrets here, and a lot of our people take that so seriously that they don’t talk much about where they work with their families, but at that dark hour where there’s grief, it’s really important for the closure of our own people and the closure of that family to meet each other and to frankly to grieve together and work on some of that closure together. We provide a few comments. We certainly, if they are so inclined, I want to give them a flag, you know, on behalf of the President of the United States, the Secretary of Defense, the intelligence community, and the DNI, and then the teammates here at NGA. It is always a bit heavy, but none of us would trade that experience, especially the family member, and I just think from a sense of purpose perspective and a esprit de corps perspective, it’s one of the best things that we’ve done, and we’re not stopping, and I will always make time for that process to occur. HERRIDGE: Director Whitworth, this is your first far-reaching, far-ranging interview inside the agency. You really, frankly, could have given it to any intelligence reporter or any big corporate outlet. Why choose independent media? WHITWORTH: Well, it goes to what we talked about on how to tell the story, and it is clear to us that the social media mechanism is where a lot of our people, especially some of our younger people, but it really doesn’t matter what their age, if people are going to your mechanism, and you’re a trusted entity within that media, that’s the right thing to do. I just file it in the right thing to do category, and I really appreciate the fact that we can trust you to tell this story.RealClearPolitics Videos