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Center wants to put still-classified Soviet spy secrets to peaceful use

high over the Soviet Union and United States, snapping millions of detailed images of each other's military installations, cities and infrastructure.

Although the Soviets didn't realize it at the time, their practice of placing army soccer fields near sensitive sites gave the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency an invaluable tool for measuring the size of military installations, according to information released recently by the American armed forces.

Most of the details of the Soviet spy campaigns remain locked away under secrecy laws dating back to the Cold War era.

At least one group in Ukraine is looking to change that. The Ukrainian Land and Resource Management Center, a Ukrainian-American environmental organization that officially set up shop on March 19, is determined to coax the government into releasing military imaging data and put that information to peaceful use.

The center is a non-profit joint project between the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan and the Ukrainian Environmental and Resources Research Institute.

Funded by a $5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the center has opened offices in Kyiv; Washington, D.C.; and Ann Arbor, Michigan.

The center is encouraging the development and use of remote-sensing, digital-mapping and satellite-imaging technologies for commercial and governmental purposes in Ukraine.

'Our mission is to produce and provide geo-space information to improve life in Ukraine and regions,' said Laura Cinat, the center's chief financial officer, at a press conference dedicated to the opening of the center.

According to Cinat, data collated by the center will be used to develop the agriculture sector, track oil spills in the Black Sea, provide surveying data for transport-infrastructure building and help prevent environmental disasters. In the future, satellite data from the center could be used to combat the lingering effects of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

The center brings the best of U.S. satellite-imaging and interpretation technologies together with Ukrainian expertise. It employs more than 30 Ukrainian scientists and imaging experts, and will make use of satellite data from U.S. and Ukrainian satellites, as well as aerial photography from the center's own An-28 aircraft.

'Ukraine has a huge number of highly qualified specialists, but financial problems are hindering their work. The key issue is technology,' center director Oleksandr Kolodyazhny said.

The center's organizers are aware that the use of high-resolution satellite imagery could conflict with existing Ukrainian secrecy laws, and they plan to lobby for the declassification of such data in Ukraine, as was recently done in the United States.

'We will share the American experience to encourage the free and open exchange of data, and facilitate the consensus between the scientific, political and commercial communities in Ukraine,' said Albert Fuerst, the center's president.

At the press conference, the center presented U.S. satellite imagery that, with the help of Vice President Al Gore, was declassified in 1999.

A limited amount of data and imagery produced by the center is already commercially available, some of which has been shared with the Ukrainian government.

'Even when the center was only being formed, it was able to respond to the [flood] disaster in Transcarpathia,' Fuerst said.

The risk-assessment systems that were used to pinpoint the flood- and avalanche-prone areas of Transcarpathia were jointly created at the center, and the Ukrainian government's Emergency Situations Ministry benefited from the center's snowmelt and runoff predictions.

By May 15, the center's high-resolution picture-receiving station, which will be able to receive data from several types of satellites, will be fully operational.

'If we had the station now, we could already use it to monitor the situation in Transcarpathia,' said Fuerst. The station will also provide infrared data on snow lines and crop health.

The center is promoting Geographic Information Systems technology, whereby survey information is referenced to global coordinates and stored in computer databases.

The nation's agriculture sector could stand to benefit the most from such resources. In the United States, large farms use GIS technology to generate farm reports on soil erosion and crop placement.

To illustrate the advantages of GIS, the center is launching an agricultural demonstration project in Lviv oblast. The $275,000 project will collect data on crop health and yields, then make the information available to the public.

Later on, the center will provide data to individual farms to support advanced farming techniques – a prospect eagerly welcomed by agricultural businessmen.

'This is the most progressive technology, used by the most advanced businesses. If we want to compete on world markets, we have to use the same technology, and now that seems possible,' said investment officer Michael Wagner of the Western NIS Enterprise Fund, an investment company that works with two major agricultural-sector clients in Ukraine.