Geographer, students had Osama bin Laden in their sights

They didn’t get his address quite right, but five UCLA undergraduates and a geography professor came fairly close to pinpointing the whereabouts of the world’s most wanted terrorist — and they did it more than two years before Osama bin Laden was actually found.

 

So the world, based on all the media hounding the study's lead author for interviews over the last three days, now wants to know how they did it.

 

Cleverly, they did it using theories typically used by biogeographers to determine the likely location of endangered birds or plants, high-resolution satellite imagery, remote sensing data and an analysis of life history characteristics. Put simply, if bin Laden were an endangered California condor, what would his habitat look like?

 

In a prescient paper that was published in MIT International Review on Feb. 17, 2009, geography students taking the class "Remote sensing in the environment" taught by Professor Thomas Gillespie came up with a probability model that pointed to a city in northwest Pakistan, Parachinar, as bin Laden’s most likely hideout. Although that location turned out to be 230 miles from Abbottabad, where he was found and killed Sunday, the UCLA researchers’ model turned out to be on track. Based on concentric circles identifying probability over large areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the model predicts that there would be an 88.6 percent chance that bin Laden would be found in the area where Abbottabad is located.

 

Even more to the point, based on bin Laden’s life history characteristics, the researchers also hypothesized that the mastermind of 9-11 was living near or in a large town — not in a primitive cave in the rugged, isolated Tora Bora mountains where he was last located in 2001. And they predicted correctly that he was living in a tall building to accommodate a man who stood 6-foot-4 in height, protected by walls over three meters high with access to electricity, based on a rumor of his dependence on a dialysis machine.

 

The building would have to have more than three rooms to accommodate a small number of bodyguards, they hypothesized, and there would very likely to be space between structures to allow him personal privacy. Plus, there would be trees to protect him from aerial surveillance.

 

"It was quite a surprise," said Gillespie of his reaction to news about where bin Laden was actually living. "I had never heard of Abbottabad until three days ago. But the way the model predicted it on a geospatial scale, given the probability for a large section of Earth, Abbottabad fell into that probability."

 

When Gillespie finally saw photos of the battered compound where the al-Qaeda leader was living, he went back through the checklist of characteristics described in the paper. To his delight, "It pretty much matched right on. … It does appear that he ended up living in a big town. There was a tree, a tall building, tall walls, and it appears to have electricity. And he clearly had protected structures with more than three rooms."

 

Gillespie and his students began the study back in 2007, with the goal of devising a standard and repeatable model or method of predicting Bin Laden’s whereabouts. Working from his last known location in the Tora Bora Mountains, they examined three-D spectral and elevation images from satellites to figure out his possible escape route from there.

 

"We spent a lot of time finding that one spot (his last known location) because that’s where everything began," Gillespie recalled.

 

Of all the theories they applied that geographers generally use to explain the distribution of life and extinction, the one that turned out to be most reliable was the island biogeographic theory that holds that large and closer islands have higher immigration rates and can support more species with lower extinction rates than smaller, more isolated islands.

 

The theory predicted that bin Laden was on a larger "island" or in a sizable town rather than a smaller, more isolated town where the "extinction rate" would be higher. Once a probable location was found — Parachinar, which has a long history of housing mujahedeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan — the team then used high-resolution analyses to identify individual buildings that matched up with bin Laden’s life history characteristics. They identified three structures that looked to be the best fortified as possible residences.

 

Gillespie, who’s more likely to be found in a rain forest in Hawaii searching for the best place to plant endangered trees than out hunting terrorists, said that the bin Laden exercise was challenging, but just one of many such class assignments students master. His students have looked at agriculture in the California Central Valley as well as drone bombing in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan and mining damage in Papua New Guinea.

 

"For this one — because it was going to be so hard to do — I told them, ‘If you take it seriously, I’ll take it seriously.’ And they did such a good job."

 

Although the research paper itself has only been cited twice in the scientific literature, it’s been the subject of countless TV, newspaper and social media news accounts. Since bin Laden was found, Gillespie has heard from some of his former students. Several are graduate students. They are currently enrolled at Oxford University, at a special graduate school for CIA trainees in Monterey and at UC Berkeley studying urban planning. One former student is working on drawing redistricting lines in California.

 

While there’s actually a lot of overlap between what geographers do and what the intelligence community does in terms of using geospatial technology to solve problems, Gillespie said he takes no credit for helping in the hunt for bin Laden.

 

He would rather be remembered, the geography professor said, for "planting a whole bunch of trees in Hawaii to get them off the federal endangered species list."