Robert Cardillo NGA Director
NGA HEADQUARTERS: If you want further proof of the damage that Edward Snowden has wrought on American intelligence capabilities, look at the relative ease with which the Paris terrorists planned, traveled and killed in Europe.
“The adversary has gone and is going to school against our capabilities,” NGA Director Robert Cardillo told reporters here today. They are operating in “ways that stay under our ability to detect,” he admitted, calling the fact of the attacks “a failure” of the Intelligence Community, which exists to protect the public.
Terrorists killed 132 people in Paris on Friday evening, massacring unarmed people as they dined, danced, watched soccer and enjoyed their lives in a free country.
Salah Abdeslam, terror suspect
Cardillo, who met with his French counterpart two weeks ago, described NGA’s efforts to provide intelligence to France simply: “Everything we can do for our French counterparts we are doing.”
About the same time that Cardillo spoke to us, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook released a statement that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and Defense Secretary Ash Carter had instructed “U.S. military personnel to more easily share operational planning information and intelligence with our French counterparts on a range of shared challenges to the fullest extent allowed by existing law and policy.”
In other news, Cardillo told a US Geospatial Intelligence Foundation conference on small satellites that the NGA budget would be larger in fiscal 2017, though he wouldn’t reveal a figure. The president’s budget request is typically formalized in early February — after which it must then be approved by Congress — but most of the decisions inside the administration have already been made.
During a presentation this morning at the USGIF conference, the head of space policy at the National Security Council, Chirag Parikh. announced that he would be leaving “soon” to take up a job at NGA in the Source Strategies Office. While I couldn’t confirm it, this may well be the job he’s taking.
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Tehran has been increasingly public about its air defense capabilities, including showing off models of systems at a recent international defense expo.
