Frank V Pabian

Sleuthing with Images in Google Earth
 

I grew up on Long Island, New York, in a typical middle class neighborhood (not far from a friend and neighbor named Billy Joel). My formative years were spent flying with my father, a Captain for American Airlines. My Dad would take me flying in an antique aircraft that he had rebuilt, and he would always assign me two jobs: 1) look out for other planes and 2) be the navigator. I spent a lot of time looking at the ground from the air, comparing the view with maps, and thinking in 3 dimensions. I also gained a unique appreciation of clouds from that lofty perspective and how they form, as well as the effects weather processes can have on aircraft operations. I built my own weather instruments (anemometer and wind vane) and monitored and recorded the daily changes with them. I spent one high school summer working in the tower at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) as a student meteorologist. When flying, I became fascinated by the landforms that I could see from the air, including the glacial deposits that created Long Island where I lived. I developed a life-long curiosity about the Earth, its history, and the physical processes that have transformed it, both natural and technological. I decided I wanted the ability to monitor those changes through remote sensing means, particularly from space.
 
So I went to college at the University of California-Berkeley and studied Physical Geology and Geomorphology, with a minor in Remote Sensing. One of my professors, Dr. Robert Colwell, opened my eyes to a whole new world of the art and science of deriving valuable information from overhead imagery. Although I was accepted to graduate school in geology at UC, I decided to take a different tack in life. I applied to the Office of Imagery Analysis, where I began my career. This was at the height of the “Cold War,” and the role of satellite reconnaissance was then very highly classified. It was a perfect fit for me. After learning all about the nuclear fuel cycle, I began to work on the task of tracking foreign nuclear fuel cycle activities. For six years, I was looking for everything from evidence of mining and concentrating uranium to nuclear weapons development, testing, and production.
 
But I missed California, and when the opportunity to do similar work at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory became available, I jumped at it. For the next 18 years, I tracked nuclear activities in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. I received a gold medal from the Director of the CIA for helping the U.S. Government and the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) with its safeguards inspections and verification. I served as a nuclear Chief Inspector for the IAEA during inspections in Iraq from 1996-1998 and again in 2002. I moved to Los Alamos ten years ago, and have been active in promoting the use of commercial satellite imagery for briefings on foreign clandestine nuclear facilities to the International Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG), the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and various Foreign Ministries around the globe on behalf of the National Nuclear Security Administration and the U.S. State Department.
 
Science is about solving puzzles and mysteries and answering the questions: what, where, when, how, and why? With the new geospatial tools like Google Earth, it is now possible for anyone to arrive at some of those answers as they apply to international security in ways that were previously only possible within the cloaked depths of the U.S. intelligence community.