[3][4][5] Brugioni flew in the 66th Bomb Squadron and a number of reconnaissance missions in World War II over North Africa, Italy, Germany, Yugoslavia and France.

In 1955, he was selected as a member of the cadre of the newly formed Photographic Intelligence Division that would interpret U-2, SR-71 and satellite photography.

The founding analysts included Dino Brugioni and small team of World War II photo interpreters, under the direction of Art Lundahl.

Analysis was also conducted on U-2 photography taken during the Suez, Lebanon, Chinese Off-Shore Islands, Middle East and Tibetan crises.

[7] He then was intimately involved in the Cuban Missile Crisis (see below) U-2 photographs taken on[8] October 14, 1962, by some of the first U-2 aircraft piloted by US Air Force members rather than CIA personnel, brought back photographs, in which the NPIC analysts found visual evidence of the placement of Soviet SS-4 medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBM), capable of hitting targets, in the continental United States, with nuclear warheads.

Brugioni's book, although a general history, deals extensively with the role of imagery intelligence in the Cuban Missile Crisis.

A selection of the actual photographs, as well as supporting data such as the chart of CIA photo are at the George Washington University National Security Archive.

In a video interview by Doug Horne (actually a digest of excerpts from nine interviews by Peter Janney and Doug Horne), Dino Brugioni said that he and his team examined the 8mm Zapruder film of the John F. Kennedy assassination the evening of Saturday November 23, 1963, and into the morning of Sunday November 24, 1963, when he was the weekend duty officer at the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center.

Dino and his team projected the film for two members of the Secret Service several times, and they indicated which frames they wanted prints made from, which in turn should be included on the briefing boards.

After creating the required duplicate negatives from the desired frames, the film was returned the two members of the Secret Service, and that at approximately 3 AM they left the NPIC facility.

When the work was complete, Dino Brugioni reviewed the briefing boards and notes with his superior, Arthur Lundahl, whom he had called and requested come to the facility.

Apparently the team that worked on the second examination was given 16mm film and made up another, and possibly larger, series of frame prints, and that another set of briefing boards was also created.

[11][14] As more and more intelligence photographs are declassified, essentially all from World War II and a great many from the CORONA, ARGON, LANYARD and GAMBIT satellites, Brugioni became active in guiding historians to use these collections in historical research.

[16] Brugioni explains why Allied intelligence knew little about the targets, even after the President asked that the camps be bombed.