Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (3 page)

McChrystal meanwhile appointed a senior officer who was also an old friend, army Major General Timothy McHale, to lead an investigation to determine exactly what had happened and why. McHale’s first act was to fly to the remote hospital where the wounded were being treated and meet the victims, among them a six-year-old boy, the same age as his own son, Riley, whose leg had just been amputated. “That really shook me up,” he told me later.

McHale, a logistics specialist appointed to command the entire supply effort for the U.S. expeditionary force, had only been in Afghanistan a matter of weeks., Now he quickly recruited a small but well-connected team of officers to help him explore the strange and, to him, unknown worlds of ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) and DCGS (distributed common ground systems), not to mention Special Operations. Untrammeled by institutional connections to these organizations, he was unafraid to ask hard questions, an attitude that clearly upset some of the interviewees. The Predator squadron commander at Creech, for example, objected to McHale’s apparent impression that his crew “were out to employ weapons no matter what.” McHale tartly responded that according to the transcript of their chatter, the crew had stated exactly that intention “about fourteen times.” Furthermore, he pointed out, “You have a sensor operator whose response to a call out of children is ‘bullshit.’ Do you think he is likely to be focusing on potential for children or is he only looking for weapons or trying to confirm that this is a target?”

Within six weeks McHale and his staff had interviewed over fifty witnesses in Afghanistan, Nevada, and Florida, creating in the process a hand-drawn time line of the events that ultimately stretched for sixty-six feet around the four walls of the hangar he had commandeered for his office. He delivered a withering report that described the Special Operations headquarters responsible for Operation Noble Justice as “ineffective,” while reserving his deepest scorn for the Predator crew, characterizing them as “almost juvenile in their desire to engage the targets,” and recommended that the air force conduct its own investigation of the crew’s “unprofessional conduct.”

The investigation’s interviews, transcribed and included in the report, track McHale’s exploration of the tangled links in the kill chain, much of which came as a revelation to the general, despite a lifetime in the service. Thus he was astonished to learn from the Florida team in their $750 million station that they had no means of communicating with the men on the ground in Afghanistan, relying on the mission intelligence coordinator in Nevada to pass on their information. “We cannot hear what he is saying,” one of the Florida staff told McHale, “so we hope that he is providing the best information possible.” The chief screener, an intelligence professional who supposedly had been trained to make lethal judgments on the basis of her observations, provided insight into her training in cultural awareness when she recalled how the vehicles had “stopped and a large group of MAMs began to get water, wash, and pray. To us that is very suspicious because we are taught that they do this before an attack.” Several hundred million non-Taliban Muslims also wash and pray every morning, but the little party’s ablutions had fed into the pattern already established by the flashing headlights and anonymous radio summons to the “Mujaheddin.”

The general eagerness in Nevada to “go kinetic” had done the rest. A safety officer, present to advise the Predator crew when the attack seemed imminent, summed up the prevailing attitude at Creech in a candid admission: “Well, to be honest sir, everyone around here, it’s like ‘Top Gun’: everyone has the desire to do our job, employ weapons against the enemy.”

McHale’s voyage of discovery as chronicled in the interviews, transcripts, and conclusions of his 2010 report not only retraced what he saw as a saga of bloody-minded incompetence and confusion but also revealed something more profound. The technological architecture in which the assorted participants operated was a tribute to the notion that if it is possible to see everything, it is possible to know everything and therefore automate the process of empirical deduction. Technology had supposedly made it possible to see down through the dark from almost three miles up and count the passengers inside a moving vehicle as well as any weapons they might be carrying. Technology enabled these images to move around the world for multiple viewers to assess and draw their own conclusions. Finally, it could be taken for granted that each target required only a single shot. In sequence, it was a very efficient kill chain.

But however miraculous the technology, the information it delivered was inevitably ambiguous (“Was that a fucking rifle?”) partly because, contrary to popular belief, the imagery delivered by ISR (the overworked acronym for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) pictures tends to be fuzzy. Quizzing one Special Forces major as to why he had been slow to report the casualties despite the pictures coming from the drone, McHale remarked, “Your ISR knows there are civilians there…” To which the officer responded exasperatedly: “The ISR? Literally, look at this rug right here sir, that’s what an ISR looks like.”

Inevitably, everyone involved tried to clarify the ambiguity by shaping the information to fit a predetermined pattern, in this case that of hostile Taliban. Figures gathered on a riverbank at dawn to pray? “That’s what [the Taliban] do,” ergo they’re going to do something nefarious. For what other reason would three cars be driving away from the friendly force? Given the pervasive concentration throughout the U.S. war effort on the importance of HVI (high-value individuals), the ground force commander was quick to assume that this was an “exfill”—an assisted escape—of a high-ranking Taliban commander. Subsequently he accepted the alternative explanation of the “flanking maneuver,” equally well fit to the cast-iron assumption that the little convoy fitted the pattern of a threat. The complexity of this system, especially given its widely dispersed components (Nevada, Florida, Afghanistan), made it even harder for the people involved to adapt to changing reality. Instead, reality was adjusted to fit the predetermined pattern. This, in other words, was a “signature strike” in which the victims were targeted solely on the basis of their behavior.

Nor did it help that the system came with its own language—MAM (military-age male) for
man
, PID (positive identification) for
see
, TIC (troops in contact) for
coming under fire
—imposing its own framework. A military-age male, after all, is almost self-evidently a legitimate target, whereas a man might well be an innocent civilian. Officially fostered as a means of succinct, precise communication, the language adapted and divided, with different meanings for different people. So PID, for example, had a different definition depending on whether someone was in Florida, Nevada, or Afghanistan. Everyone had different notions of what
adolescent
meant and whether it was OK to kill one.

As recommended by McHale, the air force did indeed hold an investigation. Conducted by a major general, it concluded that the Predator crew had perhaps “clouded the picture on adolescents” but laid much of the blame on the special operations command for failing to supervise the operation. Neither of the reports highlighted the statement of a Special Forces sergeant from the ground force, a veteran of seven tours in Afghanistan, including three in Uruzgan, who lodged a protest against the system of complex technology embodied in the kill chain:

Looking at the video afterwards, someone was saying when the vehicles stopped, the (passengers) were praying. Someone said there might be people pulling security. When I looked at the video they could also have been taking a piss. Whoever was viewing the video real-time, maybe they needed a little more tactical experience. It needs to be someone that knows the culture of the people. If I can say anything, they just need to be familiar with what they are looking at.

But the system had not been built to work that way, not in a long time.

2

WIRING THE JUNGLE

Twenty years after the last bombs had fallen, the So Tri, an indigenous group who had lived in the remote wilderness of southeastern Laos for centuries, still didn’t know who had bombed them. For nine years, high explosives of all shapes and sizes had rained down out of the sky, killing men, women, and children and obliterating their homes and much of the old forest. The survivors had retreated deep into the mountains, hiding in underground shelters to stay alive. When the bombing finally stopped they came back and rebuilt their villages along the muddy trail they called the war road. Cluster-bomb casings dug from under the bushy bamboo that had replaced the forest were ideal as stilts to support their houses. The yellow bomblets could be turned into oil lamps, though some of them would still occasionally explode. Asked by a visitor in 1994 who it was that had bombed them over and over for all those years, the Tri laughed and shrugged: “The enemy.” Asked who the enemy was, they laughed louder and replied, “We don’t know.” When told that the bombs had come from the United States, they expressed thanks for the information, grateful to have the mystery solved at last.

It would have been harder to explain that at its heart the enemy had been a machine. A massive computer hundreds of miles away, prompted by devices hidden in the forest that were designed to detect the sound, movement, and even smell of humans and their vehicles, had directed when and where the bombs should land. Unwittingly, the So Tri had hosted the world’s first automated battlefield. Grounded on an unswerving faith that the vagaries of conflict can be overcome by technology, this half-forgotten project was the precursor of the drone wars that America would fight in the twenty-first century.

The scheme had been conceived far away on the east coast of the United States, in a leafy suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Here, in 1966, Dana Hall, a prep school for girls, had been selected as the venue for the annual summer get-together of an elite and very secret group. Known as the Jasons, they were eminent scientists and scholars, most of whom were graduates of the Manhattan Project that designed and built the first atomic bomb. These men were accustomed to deploying their intellects to assist the U.S.government with the most fundamental and secret issues of national security, especially with regard to nuclear warfare. George Kistiakowski, an acerbic Russian-born physicist, had helped develop the atom bomb and gone on to be President Eisenhower’s science adviser. Carl Kaysen, who had helped plan bombing targets in World War II, held high rank in the Kennedy White House and at one point had urged a preemptive nuclear attack on the Soviets, providing precise calculations on likely casualties. The hyperactive Richard Garwin had worked on the design of the very first hydrogen bomb, tested in 1952, and now enjoyed a lofty position as senior scientist with the IBM Corporation. Many among the group were or would become Nobel Prize winners, and their ideas were assured of respectful attention at the highest levels.

Given their background in nuclear weapons, it was natural that the initial topics to which the Jasons were asked to address their intellects would involve nuclear warfare, specifically the problems of defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles as they came over the North Pole from the Soviet Union. It was assumed that with the right radars, enough computing power, and suitable interceptors, it would be possible to track and shoot down the missiles before they reached the United States. Possible solutions—the Jasons at one point suggested interceptor lasers—could never be realistically tested, so the problem remained pleasingly abstract, a rich field for abstruse technological speculation and, not least, a lucrative source of contracts for corporations such as IBM.

However, in 1966, the group was asked to turn its attention to a real and ongoing war. The principal topic of discussion at Dana Hall that June was “technical possibilities relating to our military operations in Vietnam.” The war was going badly; although the Johnson administration had been pouring troops into South Vietnam, the North Vietnamese had apparently matched this escalation, sending ever more troops and supplies down the jungle routes through Laos known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail. “Rolling Thunder,” a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam’s infrastructure, appeared to have had little effect on these supplies while drawing worldwide condemnation. It was a problem that had plagued the air force throughout its history. Deep in the service’s DNA was the traumatic memory of its early life as the “army air corps,” a mere branch of the army no different in status and with a budget lower than that of the artillery. In those days the air corps had nurtured dreams and schemes of revolt and independence that were based on a dogma that strategic bombing of an enemy heartland can win a war without any need for armies or navies. In-house theoreticians took as their gospel the writings of an Italian artillery officer, Giulio Douhet, who argued in the aftermath of World War I that since modern technology favored the defense on land and at sea, airpower alone could bring an enemy to his knees.