Sue Gordon’s mission to help forge the future of The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) is no small task. Consider that she leads a team of some fourteen thousand cartographers, geographers and others as they deliver a comprehensive understanding of time and space to decision makers in the military and intelligence communities. The Bin Laden raid? NGA provided the SEALs with details of the raid site that allowed for a mock compound to be built and months of training that helped them prepare.
But the Bin Laden raid was more than four years ago, a lifetime when you’re leading an agency charged with understanding earth and beyond better than anyone else. In today’s world, the intelligence agency that most effectively harnesses innovation wins, so it probably makes sense that the Deputy Director’s career at the apex of science and intelligence spans three and a half decades. She started as a CIA analyst in the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research within the Directorate responsible for technical analysis of foreign space and missile systems. That was 35 years ago.
“The Cipher Brief has become the most popular outlet for former intelligence officers; no media outlet is even a close second to The Cipher Brief in terms of the number of articles published by formers.” —Sept. 2018, Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 62
Access all of The Cipher Brief‘s national security-focused expert insight by becoming a Cipher Brief Subscriber+Member.
