time on this little [segment of a boundary], and
then it winds up two weeks later that little tiny
place—who would’ve thought—being very rel-
evant or extremely important,” Linthicum says.
“Even if it isn’t important in terms of military or
intelligence, it’s important to somebody ... and
getting their village, their house, or their fields in
the wrong country is something that I definitely
try to work at every day to avoid.”
Unfortunately for Hodgson, the set of geopoliti-
cal and boundary issues that came across his desk
in the form of Airgram A-1245 represented one of
the most intractable to be found anywhere on the
globe—a “cartographic nightmare,” in the words
of one geographer—the dispute over Kashmir.AFTER WORLD WAR II, when the British relin-
quished control of the Indian subcontinent,
they hastily decided to divide the region into
two states based on the two dominant religions,
India for Hindus and Pakistan for Muslims.
Commissions appointed by the British vice-
roy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and made up of
representatives from the two most influential
political parties, the Indian National Congress
and Muslim League, were convened to decide
the new boundaries—an impossible task given
that millennia of overlapping cultures and
empires had left South Asia with intermingled
populations of Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs.
At the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947,
India and Pakistan gained their independence.
Violence erupted as millions of frightened people
tried to make their way across the new borders
to join people of their religion. The conflict was
bloodiest in the Punjab—the subcontinent’s
agricultural heartland. Overall, as many as two
million people were killed in the chaos.
Under the terms of Mountbatten’s plan, a
mountain kingdom north of Punjab known offi-
cially as the Princely State of Jammu and Kash-
mir faced its own special dilemma. Although
the population was overwhelmingly Muslim,
Kashmir was ruled by a Hindu maharaja and was
granted the option to determine which country
it would join. But weeks after independence,
militias of Pashtun tribesmen, with supportpolitical borders as far as the official U.S. policy
was concerned and, in turn, helped shape the way
other nations viewed them. It also meant that,
among the approximately 325 country-to-country
land boundaries the U.S. recognized, the thorn-
iest cartographic questions fell to Hodgson and
his fellow geographers. Addressing these conun-
drums demanded a surveyor’s sense of precision
and a scholar’s approach to research.
The term for this is “recovering boundaries,”
explains Dave Linthicum, an ebullient, bearded
man who recently retired after more than 30
years as a cartographer for the CIA and the Office
of the Geographer. “We’re not drawing lines out
of [whole] cloth. We’re recovering the boundaries
where they were placed in 1870 or 1910 or you
name it with these old maps, old treaties.”
Today Linthicum and his contemporar-
ies spend a good part of their job poring over
high-definition satellite imagery. By comparison,
Hodgson, a former marine who’d been wounded
fighting on Okinawa, began his career “map shag-
ging” for the State Department while stationed
in Germany from 1951 to 1957. Map shagging
entailed driving around to local magistrates,
pawing through archives of musty paper maps,
and physically verifying the location of towns
and geographic landmarks across the land. In
the early days of the Cold War, a cartographic
mistake could have cataclysmic consequences:
In the event of a conflict, U.S. planes could be
sent to bomb the wrong town, or possibly the
wrong country, if a map was off by a few miles,
or a slightly different spelling of a place-name
was used.
Linthicum understands all too well how easy it
is to make a mistake. A decade ago he was tasked
with drawing the border between Nicaragua and
Costa Rica as it follows the San Juan River to the
Caribbean Sea. He drew the boundary as follow-
ing an old watercourse rather than the river’s cur-
rent course, erroneously assigning a few square
miles of an island to Nicaragua. Google Maps
adopted Linthicum’s line, and soon Nicaragua
sent a platoon of 50 soldiers to occupy the island.
“Sometimes at work with my colleagues, it’ll
be, you know, why are you spending that muchTO GUARD UNINHABITED WILDERNESS.
A LINE IN THE MOUNTAINS 103