Calling themselves the Harvard Chess Club, the group of young, high-tech secret agents Clooney helped organize granted The Daily the first behind-the-scenes look at how they use satellites to maintain surveillance on foreign lands.

Housed in an off-campus Harvard building, the little-known Satellite Sentinel Project has a $2 million budget to spy on enemies over 6,000 miles away. Their goal? To thwart attacks on civilians by Sudanese dictator Omar Bashir.

“We log every event that could affect the human security situation in Sudan,” data analyst Brittany Card, 23, told The Daily.

Now in its first year, the clandestine group has used satellite imagery to observe tanks and troop movements that could spell danger for people living in and around the newly created state of South Sudan. Charged with genocide by the International Criminal Court for atrocities committed in Darfur, Bashir continues to wage war against civilian populations.

Clooney’s spooks are funded in part by Not on Our Watch, a nonprofit he started with Matt Damon and Brad Pitt. But much of the money comes from Clooney himself, who has donated entire speaking fees (which can be upward of $500,000) directly to the group.

“Clooney is out front when it counts, and we are the engine under the hood,” said Nathaniel Raymond, 34, who leads the Harvard Chess Club. “But he is a hood ornament who also drives and hits the gas pedal.”

A typical day for the group begins with a detailed review of reports from Sudan.

The findings are communicated to DigitalGlobe, a top satellite imagery company based in Colorado, which donates very expensive satellite time to the group. Clooney described this process in a recent interview on CBS. (Clooney did not respond to The Daily’s request for an interview. And Raymond said Clooney has not yet popped in for a personal visit at the Chess Club.)

“I’m renting out a satellite, basically, and I keep a camera on the border where the north lines up troops,” the actor said. “Every day, we take pictures to keep them from just saying it’s rebel infighting; when it’s tanks and helicopters and planes, it’s not rebel infighting.

“One of the foreign ministers said, ‘How would you like it, Mr. Clooney, if a camera was watching your house all the time?’ ” he said. “I want war criminals to be awarded the same celebrity status as me.”

DigitalGlobe staffers train their orbital lenses on the requested African areas, uploading the images back to Cambridge. Once they arrive, Issac Baker, 32, goes to work, poring over 75-mile-long swaths of the hot zone. He can detect tanks, runways under construction, troop formations, stray cows on the road and, on the worst days, suspected sites of mass graves.

“We know when it’s market day in certain towns and we know when there’s a traffic jam,” said Raymond. “We have then seen some of those same towns wiped off the face of the Earth.”

The results are published in reports such as one titled “State of Emergency.” In it, Clooney’s spies issued a warning to civilians about an impending advance by the Sudanese army that could result in heavy violence, including “the intentional deployment of heavy armor against civilian targets.”

Within 30 minutes of the Chess Club issuing such a report, Bashir was condemning it from Sudan. For Clooney’s spies, it was proof they were rattling the right cage.

Since then Sudanese forces have attempted to hide themselves from eyes in the sky, even covering tanks with branches.

“It’s now very clear that this is a very real chess game,” said Raymond. “They make a move and we make a move … Bad guys are not going to stop being bad guys, they are going to adapt.”

The group has remained largely under the radar because they are concerned about computer virus attacks and other forms of retribution. (They declined to say whether there have been any such attacks.)

While Sudan is the proving ground, this Harvard spy squad could easily deploy their intelligence gathering to any hot zone in the world. The team hopes to make this the future of the fight against genocide, remembering that millions of victims throughout history could never call on satellites for salvation.