Predator (2 page)

This is the story of the first armed drone ever to be flown by intercontinental remote control and used to kill human beings on the other side of the globe. The military has long had an interest in unmanned aircraft, but before the Predator, drones were at best a niche technology. The Predator itself was widely ignored at first, until a series of iconoclastic visionaries began transforming it from a simple eye in the sky into an exotic new weapon. Once the Predator became capable of firing laser-guided missiles at enemies half a world away, military and industry attitudes toward such unmanned aerial vehicles changed nearly overnight. The drone revolution began.

How and why that happened is a tale previously told only in dribs and drabs, and often inaccurately. This account is based on five years of reporting and hundreds of interviews with the insiders who made the Predator what it became—an invention that not only changed the military, the CIA, and warfare itself, but also led the way into a new technological age. Drones of all kinds are now poised to transform civilian aviation, law enforcement, agriculture, and dozens of other human endeavors.

This is the drone revolution's book of genesis, and like another creation story it opens near the confluence of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It begins with a boy in Baghdad.

 

1

THE GENIUS OF THE GENESIS

He was a born engineer. From the time Abraham Karem was a toddler, he was always drawing things and making things and taking things apart to see how they worked. At age two he pulled the back off a large standing radio, the sort owned by every middle-class Jewish family in Baghdad in 1939, and pulled out the big glass vacuum tubes one by one, looking for the talking man inside. Abe cried when a technician came and put the tubes back. Not long afterward, he became intrigued by the magic of electrical switches—
click
, the light went on;
click,
the light went off! One day he climbed on his uncle Ezra's bed, found a round, brown light switch on a cord beneath the pillow, and took it apart, getting a 220-volt sting he seemed to regard as more interesting than painful.

When not engaged in this sort of basic research, little Abe was usually building a toy of his own design out of cardboard, or drawing something with a pencil or crayon on a piece of paper. His parents proudly encouraged their little prodigy. When Abe was eight, they gave him and his oldest brother, Isaac, each a set of Meccano, a British construction kit much like the Erector sets popular in America. Meccano provided perforated strips and plates of sheet metal; miniature girders of different sizes; wheels, pulleys, gears, axles, nuts, bolts; and instructions for using the parts and pieces to make models of all sorts. You could put together little buildings—or ships, bridges, cars, and trucks—or you could design and construct your own creations. In 1937, the year Abe was born, Meccano offered eleven different sets, numbered 0 through 10, according to rising levels of difficulty. Their parents got Abe a No. 2 and Isaac, who was seven years older, a No. 7, but Isaac quickly grew frustrated and abandoned his kit. Before long, Abe appropriated the No. 7 and combined it with his No. 2 to create toys as complex as those in Meccano No. 10.

By the time he got the Meccano kit, Abe was sure he was going to be a mechanical engineer. But as a teenager, he acquired a new ambition. His family had immigrated to Israel in 1951 as part of an exodus of roughly 120,000 Jews from Iraq, which, with other Arab League nations, had tried three years earlier to wipe the newly declared Jewish state off the map before it could take root. Abe's father, a prosperous textile merchant named Moshe Kiflawi, already owned land in Israel. He had taken his wife, Flora, and their boys to Jerusalem during World War II, when the British still governed what was then Palestine, seeking a safe haven for his family after a June 1941 pogrom in Iraq that left 130 Jews dead and hundreds injured. Forced by the British to return to Iraq at war's end, the family was relieved to get out again, even at the cost of forfeiting all their Iraqi property to the regime in Baghdad.

Once back in Jerusalem, Abe—who as an adult would change his surname from Kiflawi to the Hebrew for “vineyard,” to make it sound Israeli—was eager to fit in. Already fluent in Hebrew, he found schoolwork easy and had plenty of time for the nonprofit youth clubs that abounded in newborn Israel, which was heavily influenced by socialist attitudes of collectivism. Diminutive, intellectual, and cursed with flat feet that made it painful to run, Abe initially joined a chess club and an “electrotechnical” club. Then he discovered the Aero Club of Israel, where a young adult counselor was teaching members to make model gliders that could fly. When Abe built his first glider and saw it rise into the air, his heart soared with it. Within a year, he was flying models in competitions. Within two, he was the instructor for his Aero Club chapter. He also now knew what he was
truly
going to do with his life. Mechanical engineering wasn't it after all. He was going to be an aeronautical engineer. He was going to spend his life designing aircraft.

*   *   *

On October 26, 1973, a Friday, Abe Karem was clearing his desk for the weekend when an unexpected visitor burst into his office at Israel Aircraft Industries, whose manufacturing and modification facilities lay on the north side of Lod International Airport, near Tel Aviv. Colonel Ezra “Beban” Dotan didn't need to introduce himself, and not because he was a famous fighter pilot. He and Abe had known each other for years, first as Aero Club members, then working together as young majors in the Israeli Air Force. They had a lot in common, and they were entirely different.

Now a small, pale, baby-faced thirty-six-year-old, Karem had made his mark in the Air Force by leading teams of engineers in quick-reaction fighter plane modifications that three times won the Israel Defense Prize, the military's highest honor for technical achievement. Joining the Air Force in 1961 after earning his aeronautical engineering degree at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology at Haifa, Karem served until 1969. He rose quickly to the rank of major and was so respected as an engineer he could get the Air Force commander in chief on the phone—a privilege that may have spoiled the young genius, who later in life, preferring to deal with those at the top, developed a hazardous habit of going over other people's heads.

At government-owned Israel Aircraft Industries, the most important aerospace company in the country, Karem was director of preliminary design—IAI's director of innovation, in effect. He was known as a brilliant engineer, but he was also known for
knowing
he was a brilliant engineer—and for being impatient with those who weren't also above average. Precocious subordinates often became acolytes. Those who weren't, or who just weren't team players, often found themselves quickly out the door. Abe Karem simply refused to work with anyone he didn't respect. He also didn't mind telling subordinates exactly what he thought of them, and he could let them go with as little apparent regret as Beban Dotan downing an enemy in a dogfight.

Physically, Dotan dwarfed Karem. He was big, muscular, tanned, and known not only as an audacious fighter pilot but also, within the Air Force, as a congenial commander. Nicknamed Mr. Skyhawk, from the moniker of the U.S.-made Douglas A-4 fighter planes he flew, Dotan was celebrated for downing five Syrian MiGs—including two in a single May 12, 1970, air battle in which he killed one MiG-17 by the unorthodox means of firing an antitank version of the unguided Zuni rocket. He was also a fan of Karem's, for Dotan appreciated his friend Abe's brilliance as an engineer; indeed, that was why he had come to see him this Sabbath eve.

Dotan dispensed with pleasantries.

“Abe, why don't you give me a Zuni rocket with a dihedral wing?” he demanded without even sitting down.

“Ezra,” Karem softly scolded, motioning to a chair in front of his desk, “don't tell me what I need to give you. Tell me how you'll use it.”

“I want to fire it from my aircraft so they'll turn the radars on and shoot missiles at it,” Dotan said.

He didn't need to explain further why he wanted to add a wing that was dihedral, a common shape on airplanes, to a Zuni, a tubelike munition just five inches in diameter. Nor did he need to explain why he was in a hurry to get it. For the past twenty days, and for the third time since the creation of the Jewish state twenty-five years earlier, Israel had been at war with its neighbors Egypt and Syria, but with a frightening difference. Israel's Air Force, which six years earlier had dominated the skies and been a key to victory in the so-called Six-Day War, had been rendered nearly impotent this time by surprising new enemy air defenses.

The Egyptians and Syrians had invaded from two sides on October 6, choosing the most important holiday in Judaism, Yom Kippur, to launch their surprise attack. Egyptian tanks and troops flooded across the Suez Canal. Syrian forces joined by Iraqi and Jordanian troops pushed Israeli forces back to the edge of the Golan Heights, which Israel had captured from Syria in the Six-Day War. After initial setbacks, the ground troops of the Israel Defense Forces repelled the invaders, establishing a bridgehead on the Egyptian side of the Suez and holding the Golan Heights. Under pressure from their respective superpower allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, Israel and its foes had signed cease-fire agreements two days before Dotan came to Karem. Whether or not those bargains held, though, the Israeli Air Force was going to need a way to counter those Arab air defenses in the future.

In the four short weeks of what history would dub the Yom Kippur War, Israeli air losses had been devastating. Mobile batteries of Soviet-built SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles, or SAMs—supplied to Egypt and Syria by Moscow, operated with the help of Soviet advisers, and supplemented by thousands of advanced antiaircraft guns—had cost Israel not just one hundred warplanes but also its far more precious pilots. The SAMs had also inflicted untold Israeli casualties on the ground by making it difficult for the Air Force to provide Israeli ground troops effective close air support with attacks on enemy land forces. Using the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact's tactics and equipment, the Arabs had erected a five-layered air defense umbrella consisting of long-range radars and missiles, short-range radars and missiles, and fighter aircraft. The long-range radars, positioned beyond Israel's reach, would “paint” an Israeli fighter as it approached Arab forces and transmit the aircraft's position to a short-range SAM battery lying in ambush. The short-range battery would then turn its radar on just long enough to target the Israeli plane and fire a SAM. Within seconds, a missile traveling nearly three times the speed of sound would be homing in on the Israeli aircraft from a short and deadly range. As its missile flew, the SAM battery would douse its radar and scurry away to avoid being targeted by Israeli planes armed with missiles that homed in on radiation.

Dotan had just spent days flying risky observation missions over the battle lines in a desperate search for ideas on countering the enemy tactics, which was why he was in Karem's office that evening. What Israel needed, Dotan told Karem, was a decoy to fool those SAM radars, and the radar image of a Zuni rocket with a dihedral wing ought to look enough like an airplane to do the trick. As an Israeli fighter jet neared the enemy air defense umbrella, its pilot could launch a winged Zuni. The enemy's long-range radar would see the rocket as a manned aircraft and signal a short-range SAM battery to attack it. When the SAM battery turned its radar on to target the Zuni, Israeli planes with antiradar missiles would detect the SAM radar and fire at the enemy missile battery while the SAM battery pointlessly fired on the decoy.

Karem silently pondered Dotan's idea for a moment, the roar and whine of jets on the runways outside the only noise in the room. Then he waved his friend off.

“You don't need a rocket and you can't afford the dihedral,” Karem said. “You do need a decoy, but it can't be a Zuni.” Karem knew the Zuni's radar signature was too small to mimic that of a fighter plane. “Invite me for lunch tomorrow,” he told Dotan. By then, Karem promised, he'd have a solution.

After Dotan left, Karem called his wife, Dina, to tell her he wouldn't be home for dinner that evening after all, news she was used to after seven years of marriage. Karem stayed at the office through the night, feverishly working the engineering challenge Dotan had given him. The next day, promptly at noon, he was on the doorstep of Dotan's home in a suburb north of Tel Aviv. Under his arm was a set of drawings produced during his all-nighter: a design for a winged decoy about the size of a small target drone, but with special radar-reflecting spheres on its sides to make it look big to SAM radars. Light enough to hang under a manned jet's wing, Karem's decoy would be unpowered but aerodynamically shaped so that when released at thirty thousand feet it would glide at a plausible fighter plane speed of Mach 0.85—about 575 miles an hour at that altitude—into the enemy air-defense umbrella.

The next morning, Dotan took Karem's glide decoy idea to the commander in chief of the Israeli Air Force, Major General Benjamin “Benny” Peled. By midday, IAI had Air Force approval to build some prototypes as a quick-reaction project. The ranks of IAI's engineers had been thinned by the war, as many were reservists called up by the military, but Karem assembled a small team from those available and started work immediately, pushing his group to keep at it nearly around the clock.

A week into the project, someone came back from a trip abroad with a copy of a magazine article describing a new U.S. Air Force radar decoy with folding wings that had just been flight-tested successfully. Karem urged the Israeli Air Force to consider trying to get the U.S. decoy instead of having IAI produce his, but he was instructed to carry on with his work. Four weeks later, his decoy made its first test flight. Over three more weeks, seven further tests were flown. Not all were successful, but the prototypes flew well enough that Karem's preliminary design work was largely done, which allowed him to turn his attention to other things.