The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has officially declassified an image first tweeted by President Trump in 2019.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
hide title
change the subtitles
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
The National Geospatial Intelligence Agency has officially declassified an image first tweeted by President Trump in 2019.
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
Three years ago, Donald Trump tweeted an image that stunned intelligence experts.
The photo was of a missile that had exploded on a launch pad deep inside Iran. It was so fresh that some initially thought it might not have been picked up by a satellite.
“This picture is so fine and you see so much detail,” says Jeffrey Lewis, who studies satellite imagery at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey. “At first I thought it must have been taken by a drone or something.”
But aerospace experts quickly determined it was photographed using one of America’s most prized intelligence assets: a classified spacecraft called USA 224 that is widely believed to be the multibillion-dollar KH-11 reconnaissance satellite.
Now, three years after Trump’s tweet, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA) has officially declassified the original image. The declassification, which came as a result of a Freedom of Information Act request by NPR, followed an exhaustive Pentagon-wide review to determine whether the image could be shared with the public.
Many details on the original image remain redacted — a clear sign that Trump was sharing some of the US government’s most prized spy images on social media, says Steven Aftergood, secrecy and classification specialist at the Federation of American Scientists.
“He was literally getting a bird’s-eye view of some of the most sensitive American intelligence on Iran,” he says. “And the first thing he seemed to want to do was show it on Twitter.”
The revelation comes just days after Trump announced his bid to run for president in 2024. It also follows the FBI’s seizure in August of 33 boxes filled with over a hundred classified records stored at the Mar-a-Lago resort of Trump in Florida. According to the Washington Post, some of those documents were reportedly related to Iran.
The NGA, which produced the image Trump used in his 2019 tweet, is the government’s clearinghouse for much of its intelligence. The agency collects images from drones, spy planes and satellites and turns them into information that can be used by decision makers.
It’s not unusual for those people to want to declassify what they see, says Robert Cardillo, who served as director of the NGA from 2014 to 2019. Often, he says, he would suggest the government release a high-resolution image lower than an ad. satellite in place. “This has been done time and time again as a way to protect that resource, but then also to get the information out,” says Cardillo.
He says he cannot recall seeing the authorized release of an image such as the one tweeted by President Trump.
According to reports, Trump first saw the image as part of a daily intelligence briefing the morning after the Iranian launch failed. In the fuller account of what happened next, published last year by Yahoo! News, President Trump requested to keep a copy of the photo, which was from a KH-11 series satellite. An hour later, he sent it to more than 60 million Twitter followers.
NPR has not independently verified that reporting, but what is clear is that the image in the tweet was a photograph of a physical sheet of paper, Lewis says. Visible in the center of Trump’s tweet is the glow of overhead lights or a flash, and a shadow, possibly of Trump or an aide, snapping the image with a camera.
The image tweeted by President Trump shows a bright light in the center, most likely an overhead light or the flash of a cell phone camera used to photograph the original slide.
AP
hide title
change the subtitles
AP
The image tweeted by President Trump shows a bright light in the center, most likely an overhead light or the flash of a cell phone camera used to photograph the original slide.
AP
Part of the text tweeted by the president also used the exact wording of the then-classified caption for the image, indicating that his tweet was based on the NGA briefing document released to NPR.
After tweeting the image, Trump said he did nothing wrong. “We had a picture and I published it, which I have the absolute right to do,” he told reporters at the time. The president has ultimate authority over that classified material, and Aftergood says he was probably within his legal rights to release the image.
Cardillo, who now works as a senior executive for the commercial satellite company Planet, says the images are no longer as secret as they once were. The proliferation of commercial imaging satellites means the public now has regular access to overhead imagery that is comparable, if not as good, as US government satellites. During his career, he saw the classification levels for spy satellite imagery loosen.
“Because there’s so much commercial imagery out there, I feel like there’s less empathy,” he says.
But that image was still classified, and Lewis says seeing it released probably stung for the intelligence agencies involved.
“The entire American intelligence community is extremely loathe to release this information,” Lewis says. “The idea that the president would just yell ‘YOLO!’, take a picture of it and tweet it — that’s really hard to take.
Cardillo says he’s sure other countries have used the tweeted image to learn more about what US spy satellites can do. If, for example, Putin had posted a photo from a Russian satellite, he says the US would have assembled a task force to learn everything they could from the image.
In the case of Trump’s tweet: “My guess is that Russia would have done the same thing and Iran would have done the same thing,” he says.
Aftergood says the latest release “confirms a kind of inconsistency on the part of former President Trump and also a lack of respect for the quite astonishing intelligence that he was receiving.”
For Lewis, the incident is indicative of Trump’s ability to handle classified documents as he heads into the 2024 presidential race.
“I wasn’t going to tell this man any information that I wanted to keep private,” Lewis says. “The idea that he could again have access to classified information is troubling.”
