Predator (11 page)

Inexpensive as the investment was, the wisdom of making it was debatable at the time, considering how indifferent the military was to drones. Karem had offered an ingenious new technology that was revolutionary, but politics and personality had trumped performance, and what little interest the armed services had in other such machines was fading as fast as the Soviet Union. In 1989, with the Cold War over, the Democrats controlling Congress had demanded a “peace dividend,” and newly elected President George H. W. Bush had agreed to cut sixty-four billion dollars in defense spending within five years. Prized programs such as the Navy's F-14 Tomcat fighter plane, the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey tiltrotor transport, and the Air Force's F-15 Eagle fighter were on the chopping block, and the Army was shrinking significantly.

In 1990 the market for drones was nearly nonexistent. Neal Blue, though, had faith in his golden rule of investing: always buy straw hats in winter.

 

4

PREDATOR REBORN

One Monday in March 1993, Abe Karem was sitting at his desk at the Adelanto, California, offices of work-starved General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., a company Neal and Linden Blue had created after buying Leading Systems. Just before noon, someone came by and said, “Get in the car. We're going to El Mirage.”

A twenty-minute drive away, El Mirage was the Mojave Desert airfield Karem had bought for Leading Systems as a place to fly Ambers and Gnats within Federal Aviation Administration rules for drones. Karem had lost the property as part of his company's bankruptcy, but General Atomics now leased a hangar from the airfield's new owner and kept ten Gnat 750s there. In 1992, Turkey had finally agreed to buy six of those drones and a ground control station for about fourteen million dollars, a deal whose seeds Karem had sown back when he was trying to save Leading Systems. So far, however, that was the only drone sale General Atomics had made, though a couple of smaller deals for demonstrations and studies had provided work enough to keep Tom Cassidy's aeronautics enterprise going.

On the drive to El Mirage that March Monday, Karem learned that another Gnat 750 sale was in the works. The Central Intelligence Agency had sent some senior officers to see the Gnat 750 fly, discuss buying a couple for a secret operation, and at all events get a photo of Karem at the airfield. The new CIA director, Jim Woolsey, was about to initiate an operation whose scope was modest but whose effect on the future of drones would be momentous, and if the agency was going to buy Gnats, Woolsey wanted to know that his friend Abe Karem was involved.

*   *   *

At age fifty-one, bald, bespectacled R. James Woolsey Jr. was an old Washington hand. A native of Oklahoma, Woolsey had arrived in the nation's capital in the latter part of 1968 as a young Army officer who also happened to be a Phi Beta Kappa alumnus of Stanford University, a Rhodes scholar, and a Yale Law School graduate. At Yale earlier that year, Woolsey had led a student campaign to secure the Democratic presidential nomination for Vietnam War opponent Eugene McCarthy, who lost the prize to U.S. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota. After the campaign, Woolsey reported for active duty in the Army to fulfill a Reserve Officer Training Corps obligation from his years at Stanford, where joining ROTC had gotten him an exemption from the draft. Assigned to staff jobs at the Pentagon and the National Security Council, Woolsey finished his Army service, spent three years as general counsel of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then served as undersecretary of the Navy under President Jimmy Carter. In 1981 the Reagan administration named him to a high-level commission studying how to base MX nuclear missiles.

The so-called Townes Commission's challenge was to figure out how a sufficient number of MX missiles could be based so as to ensure their survival in a theoretical Soviet first strike, and thus deter such an attack in the first place. Among the ideas considered was a design for a low-flying, long-soaring unmanned aircraft able to carry one ninety-plus-ton MX and stay aloft nearly seven days. The aircraft's designer was Abe Karem, who had come up with the idea after discussing the MX survival challenge at length with science consultant Ira Kuhn. Karem completed his drawings in a week, working at his customary frenzied pace when seized with an idea, and Kuhn dubbed it “Big Bird.”

Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and President Reagan were both interested, and Karem's concept got front-page coverage in the
Washington Post
. Air Force opposition, however, killed it. But Woolsey thought Big Bird brilliant—he liked unconventional thinking—and became a lifelong Abe Karem advocate. In the late 1980s, Woolsey even tried to intercede at top levels of the Pentagon to prevent the Navy-run JPO from killing Karem's revolutionary Amber—a favor that backfired badly when word of the intrusion filtered down to the JPO.

Two years after Karem's bankruptcy, President Bill Clinton nominated Woolsey to head the CIA. The director-designate was a lifelong Democrat but often described as a neoconservative, a label he found every bit as annoying as the media found it handy. The term generally described someone liberal on domestic and social issues but who also favored muscular military and foreign policies and was reliably pro-Israel. Clinton's nomination of Woolsey was widely seen as payback to neoconservatives for their election support of his candidacy, and Woolsey was quickly confirmed by the Senate. He was sworn in on February 5; the next day he called relevant CIA officials to his office to talk about one of his new boss's top intelligence priorities: Bosnia.

Bosnia-Herzegovina was a multiethnic republic of the former Yugoslavia, whose post–Cold War breakup in 1992 unleashed decades of repressed hostility among Croats, Muslims, Serbs, and smaller ethnic groups. The result was a civil war that marked the worst conflict in Europe since 1945 and led to demands for intervention to stop it. Western triumphalism was in the air—political scientist Francis Fukuyama had just published his book
The End of History
, predicting the rise of global liberal democracy—and most of America's leaders felt inclined or even obliged to use U.S. military power for world peace, especially now that the Soviet Union's history really
had
ended and Moscow wasn't going to interfere. Seven months before Clinton's election, his predecessor, President George H. W. Bush, had joined the European Union in recognizing the independence of the Yugoslav provinces of Croatia, Slovenia, and Bosnia.

The leaders of once-dominant Yugoslav province Serbia responded with violence. In league with ethnic Serb insurgents eager to carve their own republic out of Bosnian territory, Serbia's military laid siege to Bosnia's capital in 1992; by early 1993 they had been shelling Sarajevo's citizenry with all manner of weaponry for months. The siege led the United Nations to send peacekeeping troops to the Sarajevo airport, declare a “no-fly zone” over Bosnia, and begin airlifting aid to the beleaguered population. Undeterred, the Serbs began firing on UN troops as well.

Clinton wanted to break the Serb blockade, and he was both shocked and chagrined to find out how little his military and intelligence agencies could tell him about what was actually happening on the ground around Sarajevo. Chronic cloud cover over Bosnia, a territory as large and mountainous as West Virginia, was making it impossible to track Serb artillery. Spy satellites and manned U-2 reconnaissance jets were proving inadequate to the task. Their still-photo cameras were unable to penetrate the clouds, U-2 flights were limited—in part to reduce the risk of their pilots being shot down—and orbiting satellites overflew the region only a few minutes a day. Serbs, moreover, knew when the satellites were going to pass overhead. They hid their weapons in barns and wooded valleys before the satellites arrived, brought them out and fired when no satellite was scheduled, and moved their big guns at night. Clearly, what the military and the CIA needed was a way to get cameras or other sensors below the clouds and conduct surveillance for long periods. The White House wanted ideas on how to do that—in a hurry.

What about UAVs?
was Woolsey's first thought. He posed that question at the February 6 meeting in his CIA headquarters office; a couple of weeks later, he got answers from agency experts, including a woman he and others would later refer to only by the alias Jane. Described in a CIA-approved magazine article as a “young, talented, multiengine-rated pilot and engineer,” Jane, along with a team of experts, had been experimenting even before Woolsey's arrival with flying drones at extended ranges by relaying their remote-control and sensor signals through a manned aircraft. As Jane briefed Woolsey on their work, the director saw a photo of a Gnat 750 and recognized it immediately. “Hey, that's Abe's design,” Woolsey said. Then he wondered, “Where
is
Abe these days?”

To find out, Woolsey called their mutual friend Ira Kuhn, who explained that Abe now worked at General Atomics for Neal and Linden Blue. By happenstance, Woolsey also knew Linden Blue. They had met years earlier, at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank where Linden was a board member and Woolsey a frequent conference participant. Woolsey's next call was to Linden, who told him, “Jim, we'll give you whatever you need. We'll make it happen.”

*   *   *

Waiting for Karem when he arrived at the sun-bleached El Mirage airfield in March 1993 was Thomas A. Twetten, CIA deputy director for operations, chief of the spy agency's clandestine branch. With Twetten was the chief of the air branch of the agency's Special Activities Division—the covert action arm of Twetten's directorate—and a couple of subordinates. By the time Karem arrived, the CIA party had already watched a Gnat 750 fly. Shielding his eyes against the desert sun as the drone passed by at what he guessed was two thousand feet in altitude, Twetten was shocked at how noisy the aircraft was. The Gnat's engine buzzed like a lawn mower, and one in need of a tune-up at that.

“This is a non-starter unless you can put a silencer on it,” Twetten told Karem. “I mean, that thing's got to be really quiet.”

Karem assured him that noise would be no problem because “this is just a temporary, developmental engine.”

“Can this thing loiter for twenty-four hours?” Twetten asked.

Karem assured him it could. On a full load of fuel, the Gnat 750 could stay in the air for as long as forty hours—depending on altitude, wind conditions, and weather—while carrying about 130 pounds of cameras, radars, or other sensors. The drone's greatest intrinsic limitation was range, for the Gnat 750's remote controls operated on the “C-band” radio frequency, whose characteristics required that the antennas of both the drone and its ground control station stay within “line of sight” of each other. A Gnat 750 could fly as far as 130 or even 150 miles from its ground station, but their antennas had to communicate on a direct path—no mountains or tall buildings in between, no flying over the horizon. The Gnat 750's range might be improved, however, by relaying its signals through a manned aircraft to provide a line of sight to the drone at higher altitudes—exactly the concept that Jane and the CIA's covert air operations branch already had been studying.

As the two men finished their discussion, someone with a camera snapped a photo of Karem and Twetten in front of the General Atomics hangar, their faces turned toward the bright sun. Twetten, in slacks and a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows of his crossed arms, is hatless and white-haired in the picture. Wearing sunglasses and smiling broadly, he looks down at the shorter Karem. Standing to Twetten's left, Karem wears blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. A pair of sunglasses dangles from his left hand, and he squints directly at the camera. He smiles a bit wanly, perhaps because of the large, stiff baseball cap on his head. The cap bears the logo of General Atomics and seems a poor fit.

*   *   *

General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was as eager as Woolsey to provide President Clinton with better information about Serb artillery and other military movements in Bosnia. Returning to the Pentagon from a White House meeting on the subject in early 1993, the nation's top military officer summoned the director for intelligence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Rear Admiral Michael W. Cramer, and briefed him on the meeting. Powell gave Cramer two orders. First, go find a system of some kind that will “get us ground truth.” Second, go see Jim Woolsey and discuss why the United States needs better technology to track mobile weapons, whether in Bosnia or elsewhere. The same challenge had marred the military's otherwise sterling performance two years earlier, during Operation Desert Storm, the six-week shooting war in which U.S. and allied troops evicted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein's invading army from Kuwait. The Iraqis were able to hide most of their Scud ballistic missiles from U.S. forces—despite concerted Air Force attempts to locate and strike them—by moving the tractor-trailer-size weapons under highway overpasses and into desert wadis or by camouflaging them. In all, the Iraqis fired eighty-eight Scuds into Israel, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, killing and wounding civilians and, in one single dumb-luck hit, dozens of U.S. troops.

Cramer left Powell's office, returned to his own, and called in Navy Commander Steve Jayjock, an intelligence officer the admiral knew had worked on classified UAV programs at DARPA in the 1980s. Cramer told Jayjock what Powell wanted and directed him to research what was possible. A week or two later, the two were standing at a whiteboard in Cramer's office, jotting down ideas about the capabilities a drone would need in order to produce the intelligence Clinton wanted. How high and far must it fly? How long must it loiter? What sensors must it carry? How much could it cost without stirring up fatal resistance from the armed services or Congress, especially at a time of post–Cold War “peace dividend” cuts in defense spending? Above all, how could they quickly get the drone they needed from an acquisition bureaucracy that generally needed a dozen years or more to design, develop, test, and field any new type of airplane?