Changes at the top for NGA

Deputy Director of National Intelligence Robert Cardillo will head the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency starting in October, the Defense Department announced June 2. Outgoing NGA Director Letitia Long will retire later this year.

Cardillo has been deputy DNI for intelligence integration since September 2010, when the position was established. He has also held top posts in the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Since Long took over at NGA in August 2010, the agency moved from “providing static products, such as maps,” to offering geospatial intelligence in varied formats to “users on all security domains,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

The Map of the World, a visual mix of intelligence from top-secret, classified and unclassified networks, is perhaps the agency’s prime geospatial tool. Capabilities like that make NGA the intelligence agency best suited to turn big data into actionable intelligence, Long told FCW in April.

“Tish Long and Robert Cardillo both have led the transformation of intelligence to address the complex global strategic challenges we face as a nation,” Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers said in a statement. Long once held Vickers’s job, and has also served as deputy director of DIA and of Naval Intelligence, and as executive director of what is now the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

In a message to NGA staff, Long called Cardillo “a truly distinguished intelligence professional who knows the intelligence community, NGA and many of our employees well," according to a DOD statement.