Predator (15 page)

Werner quickly became fascinated with the new UAV. He saw its video as the perfect reconnaissance medium for military officers of the CNN Generation, as he called them, who he thought tended to feel more informed by live-motion imagery than by still photos. But as the Predator began its twenty-four-month demonstration period, Werner realized that getting intelligence officers and an imagery interpretation bureaucracy accustomed to still photos to even
look
at the drone's video would be the first major hurdle. Video imagery was streamed back to the controllers by the Navy's Vietnam-era drone helicopter and the service's little Pioneer UAV in tactical operations. Werner knew, though, that a common conceit among imagery analysts was that only still photos could be parsed sufficiently to reveal things an enemy was trying to hide. In fact, most imagery analysts preferred to work with black-and-white instead of color photos. They were used to poring over snapshots, not watching events unfold in real time, when they could be harder to interpret. Many intelligence analysts dismissed color video as a toy.

Given this cultural attitude, no infrastructure for distributing reconnaissance video to those who might use it even existed. At the time, the only way anyone could see the Predator's video was to be inside the ground control station as the aircraft flew, or to watch a videotape after the fact. The drone's bulbous nose held a satellite dish, but the first dish installed was merely a placeholder, a UHF (ultra-high-frequency) antenna with too little bandwidth to handle the amount of data required both to control the aircraft and to stream video. The UHF antenna was soon to be replaced with one still being developed that would offer far greater bandwidth and data flow by operating on what is called the Ku-band radio frequency. For now, though, the Predator could send streaming video to the GCS only through the drone's C-band radio antenna. This was the same line-of-sight device whose limits had led the CIA to relay signals to and from the Gnat 750 through another aircraft as it flew over Bosnia the previous year, an inconvenient and unsatisfactory fix.

Rutherford, eager to generate military interest in his project, had contracted with a private firm to turn raw tapes of Predator video into packaged presentations and deliver them every few weeks, beginning in September 1994, to military leaders, civilian Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and congressional aides. Set to music ranging from operatic classical to instrumental rock and roll, the tapes were essentially commercials for the Predator, and they proved to be an effective way of keeping those who would help decide the drone's future apprised of its progress. But Werner, Rutherford's imagery adviser, had a more ambitious goal: he wanted to make it possible for leaders in the Pentagon to see Predator video
live
. Only then, he believed, could they grasp the drone's revolutionary potential.

Rutherford was all for a live video feed, and Werner was sure he could figure out technically how to get the Predator's streaming images into the Pentagon. But Werner also knew that getting Defense Department bureaucrats to approve such a thing would require far more clout than either he or Rutherford had. Then, in late 1994, Werner learned that the new J-2, Major General Hughes, had been forced to cancel a planned visit to Fort Huachuca to watch Predator video live in the GCS. Suddenly he saw an opportunity to get the Predator's video into the Pentagon.
If the general can't go to the video,
Werner thought,
the video must come to him
. Werner figured that all he needed was for the general to lend his authority to such a scheme, and in December Hughes did.

Armed with a letter signed by Hughes explaining that the bearer was on a special mission for the two-star general and should be granted any cooperation he needed, Werner spent several days at the Pentagon that month talking to people who knew how video and other communications media were brought into the Building, as insiders call the nation's military headquarters. In short order, he had a plan.

*   *   *

Werner's first step was to persuade an electronics vendor to lend him a thirty-six-thousand-dollar digital video compressor, a machine made by Compression Labs Inc. and known as a Rembrandt codec, short for “coder/decoder.” Assured that the loan could result in substantial sales of such machines to the military, the supplier was happy to provide the Rembrandt, a light gray box resembling a large window air conditioner. In the first week of January, Werner had the eighty-seven-pound Rembrandt shipped to Fort Huachuca.

Next Werner implemented step two of his plan, which required adding an ad hoc feature to the Predator's ground control station. Under the initial design, the Predator's video was never meant to leave the GCS. When it arrived from the drone, the video was seen live by the pilot, the sensor operator, and a couple of intelligence analysts sitting a few feet behind them at two computer work stations. The analysts would record the imagery on eight-millimeter videotape as it came in and select individual frames or sequences of frames—shot by the Predator's camera at thirty frames a second—for closer examination. After copying the selected frames into a computer as individual screen grabs, the analysts would “exploit” the images, meaning study them for militarily relevant information, annotating and highlighting what they found. Important objects in the image would be circled. Arrows and lines that directed the eye would be superimposed. Little text boxes would be added.

The annotated screen grabs would then be saved as separate computer files—one image per file—and transmitted to a U.S. military data storage center at Royal Air Force Station Molesworth, in the east of England, an airfield used by American planes in World War II. Since 1991 the base also housed Joint Analysis Center Molesworth, an intelligence facility abbreviated JAC Molesworth and called Jack Molesworth, or simply, the Jack. Big computer servers at the Jack stored intelligence imagery at different levels of classification, which users with the appropriate clearances could call up remotely. This was the system long used to store satellite images, and out of custom and habit the Predator was being treated like a low-flying satellite. In fact, the equipment at the Jack couldn't even handle video.

Predator screen grabs had yet to be sent anywhere, but by the end of 1994 the capability for transmitting them was in place. Parked near the drone's GCS in Arizona was the Trojan Spirit II, a mobile satellite system housed in two large, green Army transport trucks. One of the trucks in the system carried a satellite earth terminal with a dish 5.5 meters in diameter; the other truck carried an earth terminal whose dish measured 2.4 meters across. The larger antenna was intended to receive signals from the Predator once the Ku-band satellite dish being developed was installed in the drone's bulbous nose. The smaller mobile earth terminal was meant to send screen grabs to a Trojan Spirit hub at Fort Belvoir, a base in northern Virginia, for relay to JAC Molesworth. At Fort Huachuca, though, both satellite trucks were sitting unused.

When Werner arrived at Fort Huachuca in early January 1995, he had with him a fanny-pack-size, jungle-green camouflage tool bag filled with electrical, computer, and video connectors of various types and sizes. He got some Mibli soldiers to put the Rembrandt video compressor on a table in a tent between the Predator ground control station and the satellite dish with the 2.4-meter antenna. He used a coaxial cable to feed the Predator's analog video signal into the Rembrandt, which could digitize and compress the video for satellite transmission, then ran a data cable from the Rembrandt to the satellite terminal. Satisfied with this setup, Werner flew back to Washington.

Again carrying the letter from Major General Hughes in his pocket, Werner then drove half an hour south to Fort Belvoir. At Belvoir, he took a borrowed technician with him into a long, air-conditioned room filled with rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling metal racks stacked with electronic equipment. One rack contained a patch panel—a switchboard, essentially—that was used to route signals to and from mobile Trojan Spirit satellite terminals around the world. As Werner had recently learned, the other side of the same room held equipment used to connect participants in military video teleconferences, wherever they might be. Werner had the technician run a cable under the room's raised floor from the Trojan Spirit hub patch panel to the video teleconferencing system switch. Now Predator video could flow via satellite from the Trojan Spirit at Fort Huachuca to Fort Belvoir, then into the video teleconferencing hub, then into the ultra-secure National Military Command Center. No one had explicitly authorized Werner to make this connection, but he was confident it would work.

On January 11, Werner was back at Fort Huachuca, up at three in the morning and in the ground control station. The two-way video feed worked perfectly: Werner watched Hughes and his officers at the V-shaped table in the Pentagon war room, while the officers watched the Predator video streaming live from Arizona. Werner savored the moment. Allan Rutherford thought it magic.

*   *   *

Eight days later, the Predator set a new UAV endurance record, flying at Fort Huachuca for forty hours and seventeen minutes—nearly two hours more than the 1988 record set by its ancestor the Amber. Over the next few months, Rutherford staged many more video demonstrations in the Pentagon war room. For many who saw them, the demos were mesmerizing. Rutherford marveled at how generals unused to video reconnaissance would stare at the screen as if in a trance while the Predator flew at a crawl over barren desert, beaming back meaningless shots of sand and Joshua trees. Meanwhile, Rutherford's small team and the Mibli took the new drone on the road. During February and March 1995, some of the six Predator drones built by General Atomics were used in a counterdrug exercise along the southwest border with Mexico. In April and May, the Mibli flew Predators from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the U.S. military's largest annual air and missile defense exercise, Roving Sands.

Roving Sands '95 would be the Predator's military debut, and a major step toward acceptance. That year, more than seventeen thousand troops from all four armed services and those of several U.S. allies conducted maneuvers that sprawled across New Mexico and into Arizona. The Predator provided reconnaissance for troops and used its cameras to search out mock Scud missiles (plywood replicas on five-ton Army trucks) hidden amid cacti, beneath trees, or under highway culverts. In only eighteen missions, the Predator logged 173 hours in the air and found 50 percent of all plywood Scuds “killed” in the exercise.

The success at Roving Sands led the Joint Special Operations Command to invite the Mibli to fly the Predator in June with special operations forces conducting a classified exercise in the Everglades of Florida, an event that brought the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Pentagon war room for a live video demonstration. The show for Admiral William A. Owens that day didn't go as Rutherford hoped it might. As the nation's second-ranking military officer ate lunch and listened to Rutherford's briefing, live Predator video appeared on the screen, but it was impossible to recognize what the imagery was showing. After a considerable silence as those in the room waited in vain for the image to come into focus, Rutherford quipped, “Admiral, as you can see, we're very closely monitoring the green blob that's eating the Everglades.” To Rutherford's relief, Owens laughed. As it turned out, the problem was just a loose cable. After it was fixed, the admiral declared that he liked what he saw.

Encouraged, Rutherford flew to Stuttgart to brief officers of the U.S. European Command on the Predator, hoping to get permission to test the drone in actual military operations. He quickly won approval to operate it over Bosnia, the former Yugoslav republic whose ethnic war had been a catalyst for developing the drone in the first place. Things were reaching a boiling point in the Balkans, where UN peacekeeping troops had been deployed since 1992. NATO warplanes had been enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia since 1993, and tensions had escalated considerably over the following two years. When Rutherford came calling, commanders in Germany were happy to try tracking Serb weapons and activities with an unmanned drone. They were happier still to have the unmanned Predator after June 2, when a Serb missile shot down U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Scott O'Grady's F-16C during a patrol over Bosnia. O'Grady parachuted safely, but U.S. forces took five days to find him and send a Marine Corps helicopter into Bosnia to get him out.

Rutherford was ecstatic. Less than a year after its first flight, the Predator would get a chance to prove itself in combat.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1995 Tom Cassidy flew to the Balkans to see how his company's new Predator was doing in its first combat deployment. The former fighter pilot and Navy rear admiral arrived with great expectations: he believed he would find the military taking full advantage of the revolutionary new form of reconnaissance his company had given them—full-motion video, as it was known—and hungering for more. He also assumed the good news about the Predator would be spreading quickly; since the system wasn't classified, its video could be shared with just about anyone in uniform. Instead, Cassidy found intelligence analysts sitting at work stations in a covered truck trailer that was parked behind a barbed-wire barrier and a sign reading “Restricted Area.” Inside, the analysts were turning the Predator's video into still photos. Cassidy couldn't believe it. They weren't
watching
the video—they were turning it into
still photos
.

“Why?” an astonished Cassidy asked one of the Army people.

“We're used to having eight-by-ten glossies, so that's what we want,” the analyst replied.

Recalling his trip to Bosnia years later, Cassidy felt exasperated all over again. “They would take the video stream, which is eighteen hundred frames per minute, and freeze-frame every single one of them—you can imagine on a thirty-hour mission how many frames you have—and
print
them! Then they had this Army three-star running around the Pentagon telling everybody, ‘Predator video's no good. Look at these out-of-focus freeze frames!'”