Surveillance is normally performed by humans, since it requires visual intelligence. However, this can be dull and dangerous, especially for military operations. Therefore, unmanned autonomous visual-intelligence systems are desired. In this paper, we present a novel system that can recognize human actions, which are relevant to detect operationally significant activity. Central to the system is a break-down of high-level perceptual concepts (verbs) in simpler observable events. The system is trained on 3482 videos and evaluated on 2589 videos from the DARPA Mind's Eye program, with for each video human annotations indicating the presence or absence of 48 different actions. The results show that our system reaches good performance approaching the human average response.