Predator (19 page)

Big Safari was small. In the 1990s, the unit had only twenty-one people at its Wright-Patterson headquarters and a few dozen more in small detachments and “operating locations” housed at contractor facilities in California and Texas, where most of the hands-on work was done. Wherever they were and whatever the project, Big Safari operators prided themselves on being creative, sly, and largely anonymous. Until the Internet came along, the organization itself was so deep in the shadows that even four-star generals who became chief of staff were often taken by surprise to learn that Big Safari existed—a fact usually conveyed in a few whispered words. Big Safari operated in the “black world” because its innovations often needed to remain secret to succeed. Beginning with Pie Face, the organization cloaked its work in opaque code names such as Lulu Belle, Hot Pepper, Purple Passion, Speed Light, Cobra Eye, and a series of projects whose sobriquets began with “Rivet.”

By law, Big Safari had “rapid acquisition authority,” which allowed it to bypass much of the bureaucratic molasses that bogs down most military procurement. By dispensing with what its leaders disdained as “administrivia,” and by working hand-in-glove with defense contractors and the operators of its aircraft, Big Safari could get innovative new gear into action within months, weeks, and sometimes even days, rather than the years it routinely takes to develop and field most military technology. Big Safari's philosophy was expressed in mottoes, catchphrases, and admonitions such as “Minimum but adequate,” “Off-the-shelf,” “Need to know,” “Modify, don't develop,” and “Provide the necessary, not the nice to have.”

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When General Ron Fogleman decided in 1997 that it would be nice for the Air Force to have total control of the Predator, Big Safari's director was William D. W. Grimes, who had run the semisecret technology shop for the past eleven years. A Baptist minister's son raised in Danvers, Massachusetts, Bill Grimes found his vocation in the Air Force. He entered the service upon receiving his bachelor's degree in experimental psychology from Brown University, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship. Grimes graduated in 1959—or, as he liked to put it, before the Ivy League school “got wacky” by making course grades optional and banning ROTC from its Providence, Rhode Island, campus.

In the Air Force, Grimes was trained as a navigator, then became an electronic warfare officer with the 348th Bombardment Squadron at Westover Air Force Base, in south central Massachusetts. His unit's mission was straight out of
Dr. Strangelove
, Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire of Cold War logic. Under the Strategic Air Command's massive retaliation strategy, Grimes and his fellow B-52 Stratofortress long-range nuclear bomber crew members remained on twenty-four-hour alert for a week at a time. Their aircraft, fueled and ready, sat on a nearby runway, while they lived underground in a shelter nicknamed the Mole Hole, ready to fly off and nuke the Soviet Union at a moment's notice if so ordered. Now and then they scrambled into the air for practice.

Grimes found such exercises exciting. But in 1966 he got involved in an actual contest with the Soviets—aerial cat and mouse—by requesting and receiving a “green door assignment,” as highly classified intelligence postings were called. For the next seven years, stationed at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, he used his electronic warfare skills aboard a sensor-packed Big Safari aircraft code-named Wanda Belle. Technically an RC-135S, Wanda Belle's mission was to sit on strip alert on Shemya Island, all but the last western link in the Aleutians chain, and rush into the sky to track and record data on Soviet missile tests when a launch was detected. Flying in those northern reaches was hazardous. Wanda Belle's sister ship, code-named Rivet Amber, disappeared over the Bering Sea without a trace on June 5, 1969, just six months after Wanda Belle hydroplaned off the runway during a landing at Shemya and was wrecked. Grimes wasn't aboard that day, and unlike the Rivet Amber's crew his Wanda Belle mates were lucky and suffered only minor injuries. Transferred to Texas to help equip a replacement aircraft, Grimes himself was invited to join Big Safari in 1973. Thirteen years later he became its commander, then stayed on as its civilian director upon retiring from the Air Force as a colonel in 1990.

As a career airborne reconnaissance practitioner, Grimes was intimately familiar with UAVs, as was Big Safari. In the 1960s, Big Safari converted the first Q-2C jet target drones into Firefly reconnaissance UAVs, flight-tested the various configurations used in Vietnam, and trained the crews who flew them. During the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, Big Safari added GPS navigation and special metal spheres to forty target drones and turned them into decoys that Iraqi radars saw as F-15 and F-16 fighter planes. Of forty U.S. aircraft the Iraqis claimed to have shot down in the opening hours of the war, thirty-seven were Big Safari decoys. Around the same time, Big Safari studied Abe Karem's Amber, the Predator's genealogical forebear, when U.S. Southern Command was looking for a better way than manned aircraft to sniff out illicit drug laboratories in the jungles of Latin America.

More recently, UAVs had been a significant drain on Big Safari's budget. Defense Department officials had taken badly needed RC-135 re-engining money to help fund Advanced Concept Technology Demonstrations of two high-altitude drones, the so-called Tier II Plus Global Hawk and the Tier III Minus DarkStar. No one at Big Safari liked this shift in focus, especially after the DarkStar crashed and was destroyed during its second flight on April 22, 1996. But Grimes had been impressed with the Predator, and he thought its ability to fly into far more dangerous airspace and stay there far longer than a manned plane could offer enormous potential for the military. He was also sure Big Safari could exploit the Predator's possibilities—and he didn't think the regular Air Force would appreciate, much less fully develop, the drone's potential.

Neither did Mike Meermans, a retired chief master sergeant who joined the staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1995 after a twenty-two-year career in Air Force intelligence. Meermans had come to know Big Safari's work well during his tenure in the Air Force, and he was a big fan of Bill Grimes, whom he deemed a “national treasure.” Meermans had flown during his Air Force career as a crew member on Big Safari aircraft from Rivet Joint to Compass Call, a communications-jamming version of the C-130. He later became an Air Force Compass Call program officer, then finished his career as chief of airborne reconnaissance operations at Air Force headquarters in the Pentagon from 1990 to 1995. When Meermans went to work for the House Intelligence Committee, its vice chairman was Representative Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who was emerging as the nascent Predator's chief promoter in Congress. In June 1996, Lewis sent Meermans to observe an exercise at Key West, Florida, that included the Predator. Meermans came back infatuated.

“Mr. Lewis, this little guy is going to be a winner!” Meermans assured his boss.

Lewis and his aide Letitia White, who had worked closely with Tom Cassidy of General Atomics and Navy Captain Allan Rutherford to get the Predator off the ground, feared the Air Force didn't share Meermans's view of the Predator. Rutherford's rough reception at Air Combat Command the previous year had made clear what most Air Force pilots thought about the slow little drone, and there was little reason to think the service's acquisition arm would feel differently. The Air Force's top priority was the fantastically capable but also fantastically costly F-22 Raptor, a supersonic stealth fighter plane then expected to cost an average $166 million per aircraft. Pentagon officials and defense experts in Congress, meanwhile, were arguing over reconnaissance aircraft far more exotic and expensive than the Predator, from the manned SR-71—cancelled for cost by the Air Force in 1989 but revived by Congress in 1994—to the DarkStar and Global Hawk high-altitude drone projects. When Lewis asked Meermans what he thought they could do to help the far less sexy Predator not just survive but thrive, Meermans knew right away. In the course of his intelligence committee job, Meermans talked regularly with his old friend Bill Grimes, and he knew the Big Safari director was itching to take the Predator under his wing.

In the spring of 1997, Meermans brought Grimes to one of the most secure locations in Washington, the House Intelligence Committee hearing room, a curved, wood-paneled chamber tucked into the dome of the Capitol that was both soundproof and regularly swept for listening devices. Soon Meermans and Grimes were joined by Congressman Lewis, Letitia White, and recently elected Representative James A. Gibbons, a Nevada Republican who was both a new intelligence committee member and an old Air Force RF-4C pilot. Neither Grimes nor Meermans had let the Air Force legislative liaison office know that the Big Safari director was in town to meet Lewis—a breach of protocol that might provoke a flap if discovered. If they were found out, Meermans told Grimes, they could just explain that he had asked Grimes to educate Lewis and Gibbons about Big Safari. But everyone present knew the real agenda.

After introductions, the members and aides took seats on the bottom row of the room's two-tiered, twenty-seat dais and Grimes launched into what he called the “dollar version” of his Big Safari 101 briefing: What is Big Safari? How does it function? What programs come under it? The briefing was illustrated with viewgraphs—PowerPoint wasn't yet ubiquitous in 1997—shown with a projector Grimes set up on the faux-leather surface of the room's six-foot-long wooden witness table. There was nothing in the briefing about the Predator. But after the briefing ended, Grimes gladly answered questions posed by the congressmen and their aides about what he saw as the drone's potential and how Big Safari would develop the Predator if given the chance.

As Meermans had anticipated, Lewis and Gibbons were impressed, and a few weeks later Lewis sent the Air Force a message the way members of Congress frequently do. The House Intelligence Committee's report on its annual intelligence authorization act noted that the underlying bill would transfer to the Air Force all authority over the Predator still held by the Navy, as also directed by that year's defense authorization bill. But the committee's report added that the panel “has been keenly interested in the rapid, flexible, and innovative acquisition approaches that hallmark Big Safari, and it strongly urges” the Air Force to let Big Safari manage further development of the Predator.

On October 1, 1997, the Air Force assumed full control of the Predator, as required by the defense bill. As required by good political sense, the Air Force made Big Safari the Predator's System Program Office, thus assigning it to work with General Atomics and other contractors to improve the Predator and increase its capabilities. One of the first things Grimes did was give a consulting contract to Werner, the imagery scientist who first figured out how to pipe the Predator's video into the Pentagon, then how to get it from Albania to command posts around Europe. Grimes, too, wanted to turn this interesting technology into something important.

Eight months later, the Air Force version of Q Branch would start doing exactly that.

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Air Force Captain Scott Swanson had thought that by 1998 he would be piloting the V-22 Osprey, a futuristic aircraft the Marine Corps and his service were developing that could take off and land like a helicopter but fly with the speed of a fixed-wing airplane. As an Air Force Special Operations Command helicopter pilot with a Gulf War combat tour and two years of dicey search-and-rescue missions over the stormy North Atlantic under his belt, Swanson was ready for a new challenge. The Osprey was supposed to be a revolution in aviation, and the Air Force was going to use it for special operations. But the Osprey wasn't ready when Swanson was. By 1998, the V-22 was a decade late; a poster child for what was ailing Pentagon procurement, the new tiltrotor wasn't slated to go into service until 2001. So as Swanson's tour at the 56th Rescue Squadron in Iceland neared its end, he started looking for an assignment to tide him over until the Air Force needed Osprey pilots.

One day Swanson was perusing potential billets on an Air Force electronic bulletin board when an odd one caught his eye. The 11th Reconnaissance Squadron, a three-year-old unit at Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field near Las Vegas, was looking for pilots willing to fly a UAV called the Predator, though in this case “fly” wouldn't mean actually leaving the ground. Not a seductive thought for most Air Force aviators, who generally sign up to experience the thrill of defying the law of gravity. In fact, the 11th RS announcement made it clear that the Air Force was having trouble filling the squadron's pilot billets; the offer promised that after a two-year Predator tour volunteers would be guaranteed the assignment of their choice.

Ordinarily, flying UAVs wouldn't have interested Swanson. The red-haired, freckle-faced Minnesota native suffered from none of the preening egotism common among fighter pilots, but even as a kid in the Minneapolis suburb of Minnetonka, Scott Swanson knew that when he grew up he wanted to join the Air Force and fly. A subscriber to
Aviation Week
&
Space Technology
magazine at age thirteen, he got his private pilot's license the same week the aptly named Lindbergh High School gave him his diploma. Swanson went to the University of Minnesota on an Air Force ROTC scholarship and left in 1986 with a degree in aviation management. For him, being a pilot was a calling, and he was good at it. His aerospace studies professor at U Minn was so impressed with Swanson's skills that he planned to recommend him for the prestigious Euro-NATO Joint Jet Pilot Training program, which turns out fighter pilots for the United States and its European allies. The professor was stunned when Swanson said thanks but no thanks; he only wanted to fly search-and-rescue helicopters, an idea he had been fixated on since he was a boy.