Predator (22 page)

The room roared with laughter.

The accident delayed the project eight days, but on May 13 the team flew a different Predator with a new Forty-Four ball under its nose on a second test at Nellis, this time lasing targets for actual bomb drops by F-15Es. Three of four bombs hit their targets. The fourth missed because of a weapon malfunction.

Ten days later, a massive C-17 Globemaster transport plane landed at Tuzla Air Base carrying three Predators, three Forty-Four balls, a ground control station modified to control the laser designator, four crews of operators trained to use it, including three General Atomics pilots, and a handful of Air Force maintainers. The C-17, put under Colonel Snake Clark's direction for this special mission, had flown the more than six thousand miles from Nellis to Tuzla nonstop, refueling in midair to get the modified Predators into the war in Bosnia quickly. They were met at Tuzla by Clark, who scoffed when Lieutenant Colonel Dana Richards, the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron commander and one of those on board the C-17, told him they needed to fly to Rhein-Main Air Base at Frankfurt, Germany, before unloading their cargo. Regulations required anyone reporting for duty at Tuzla to get personal weapons, chemical warfare gear, and mandatory training in spotting land mines and other hazards in Bosnia before assuming their duties, Richards pointed out.

“We don't need any of that crap,” Clark said, and loudly ordered Richards off the plane. “If it comes down to these seventeen Predator guys with nine millimeter sidearms holding off the Serbian hordes at the gate, I think the party's over.”

Earlier, the Air National Guard colonel in charge of the base had argued the same point with Clark. “They'll get their training, they'll get their weapons, but these guys are here at the direction of the chief of staff of the Air Force,” Clark had assured his nominal peer. Then the master Pentagon Poker player pulled out his cell phone and asked if the colonel wanted to discuss it with the chief of staff. “I could arrange that phone call,” Clark said.

The base commander folded.

The arrival of the new team fit neatly under a rubric for the laser designator project thought up by Big Safari's first, and at that point only, Predator sensor operator, a crusty master sergeant from Maine named Jeff A. Guay. “Gunny” Guay, thirty-nine, had spent most of his twenty-two years in the Air Force as an imagery analyst, plying his trade in part on Big Safari aircraft. He was just the kind of guy Grimes loved: a renegade who was innovative, resourceful, and not afraid to stir things up. By the time the Big Safari team got to Tuzla, Guay had dubbed their mission Project WILD Predator.

WILD, Guay explained, stood for “Wartime Integrated Laser Designator.” He liked the acronym. It described the ride they were on.

*   *   *

In late April, Werner arrived in Tuzla and installed his exploitation support data mapping system in a ground control station being used by the 11th RS. That allowed controllers at the CAOC to see precisely where the Predator's camera was looking in real time and thus give pilots better directions, though it could still be hard to talk them onto targets. Snake Clark used his pull at Air Force headquarters to make sure ACC declared Werner's invention a standard element of the Predator system.

Using the WILD Predators was less simple. Mechanical and other “haste makes waste” problems kept the Big Safari team from flying a CAOC-directed operational mission with the WILD Predators for the first ten days they were at Tuzla. Instead, they tested the laser designator in a couple of training flights by using it to point out mock targets to planes, which allowed the fighter pilots to confirm that their laser gear could see the Forty-Four ball's laser spot.

Only on June 2 were Swanson and Guay directed to buddy-lase a target in Kosovo for an A-10 Warthog attack plane controlled by the CAOC in Vicenza, a mission that would be reported as operational but was in fact more a test than an act of war. Swanson circled the Predator while Guay put the crosshairs of the laser designator on a derelict shed they were told was the target. When the A-10 arrived, Guay shone the Forty-Four ball's laser beam on the shed so the A-10's laser tracker, called a Pave Penny, could pick it up. Swanson and Guay listened through their green headsets as the CAOC and the pilot talked. The only noise in the ground control station was the hum of its air-conditioning and the whirring of the many fans keeping computers and other electronic equipment cool.

“What's your code?” the pilot asked the controller, referring to a four-digit number needed to connect the Pave Penny to the Predator's laser beam. The answer came back, and the pilot punched the code into a keyboard in the cockpit. “I've got your spot,” the pilot said, then released a laser-guided five-hundred-pound bomb. Swanson, Guay, and the others in the ground control station kept their eyes on the shed. Something suddenly streaked across the screen, and the building disappeared in a blinding burst of white.

“Woo hoo!” Guay shouted as the screen momentarily whited out. Then he traded high fives with Swanson and some other officers who had been watching over their shoulders in the ground control station.

The WILD Predator never got closer to combat—by coincidence, Serbia agreed to peace terms the day after the successful test. By July 2 the three Predators and their Forty-Four balls were on their way back to El Mirage. On October 1, Captain Brian Raduenz was promoted to major. In a ceremony at General Atomics, Bill Grimes donned his old colonel's uniform and ceremoniously pinned a major's golden oak leaves onto his protégé's collar. In photos of the event, Grimes beams like a proud father.

In truth, the laser designator experiment was more educational than effective, though the team's rapid work would garner medals for some. The WILD Predator unit's daily maintenance report for June, however, said that “all sorties with the AN/AAS-44 installed experienced high occurrences of Ku lost link failures.” Electromagnetic interference between the laser ball and the Ku-band satellite dish in the Predator's nose was suspected. Shortly after Operation Allied Force ended, Big Safari was directed by Air Combat Command headquarters to take the Forty-Four balls off the three WILD Predators, put the laser balls in a warehouse, and reinstall standard Wescam balls. The laser designator had been a wartime expedient, the directive noted, not a modification approved through normal channels.

Though short-lived and unwelcome in some quarters, the WILD Predator opened eyes. To those paying attention, it was now clear that this drone could do more than carry sensors and watch a war. Properly equipped, the Predator might become lethal.

 

7

THE SUMMER PROJECT

After forty years at the CIA, Charles E. Allen was already a legend when he became assistant director of central intelligence for collection on June 2, 1998. Allen had survived a bit part in the 1986–87 Iran-Contra Affair; he had also famously predicted Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Now Allen was in charge of coordinating all secret intelligence gathering by the CIA and by more than a dozen other agencies of the U.S. government.

Sixty-six days after he took on that sweeping responsibility, the big, bearish, bullheaded workaholic acquired an obsession. On August 7, Al Qaeda terrorists smashed suicide truck bombs into the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, killing 213 people and wounding more than 4,500. Among the dead were a dozen Americans, including two CIA employees. Seven months earlier, Osama bin Laden had declared war on the United States in the name of Islam for the second time since 1996. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda had long been on the CIA's threat list, but from the day of the embassy bombings on, Charlie Allen's chief goal in life was to destroy Al Qaeda—and see as many of its leaders as possible captured or killed, beginning with the elusive Osama bin Laden.

Success was equally elusive. After the embassy bombings, Allen held a daily meeting on bin Laden in the soundproof conference room of his sixth-floor office at CIA headquarters, where representatives of various intelligence agencies and other offices discussed how to anticipate or discover Al Qaeda's plans and find the terrorist group's leaders. Officers from the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, known as the CTC, participated, as did the agency's special bin Laden desk, designated Alec Station after the son of the unit's first director. Also taking part were members of the CIA's Directorate of Operations—the agency's cloak-and-dagger arm—and officials and experts from the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military's Joint Staff, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. Allen found the sessions a useful way to prep for more exclusive daily meetings with the CIA's executive director on the same topic, and for “deep dive” meetings on Al Qaeda convened by Director George Tenet once or twice a week.

Despite all this deliberation, concrete information and good ideas were hard to come by, and President Bill Clinton's initial response to the embassy bombings disappointed Allen and many others. On August 20, Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes in retaliation. Thirteen missiles were aimed at a pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, suspected of being used to produce the nerve gas VX for Al Qaeda. Sixty-six cruise missiles hit an Al Qaeda training camp near Khost, Afghanistan, where intelligence indicated bin Laden might be that day. Both targets were destroyed—and both strikes proved an embarrassment to the United States. No evidence of chemical weapons was found at the plant in Khartoum, whose destruction put about three hundred people out of work, killed a night watchman, and obliterated the source of more than half of Sudan's legitimate drugs. The strikes in Afghanistan killed twenty to thirty people, according to CIA estimates, but neither bin Laden nor any other Al Qaeda leader was among them.

That same month, Clinton signed a Memorandum of Notification authorizing the CIA to use tribal proxy forces to capture bin Laden or his associates. The Navy, meanwhile, was ordered to keep submarines able to fire cruise missiles within range of Afghanistan, ready to attack if bin Laden was spotted. Five days before Christmas, the Agency learned that bin Laden was to spend the night at the governor's house in Kandahar, the spiritual home of his Taliban allies. But after the military argued that a cruise missile blast might kill too many innocent people in the urban setting, those running a major White House meeting on what to do decided against a strike.

In February and again in May 1999, HUMINT (for “human intelligence,” meaning spies or other people) reported bin Laden's presence at locations that cruise missiles might strike without risk of “collateral damage.” The CIA and the military, however, were unable to verify that the Al Qaeda leader was there. Satellites could take photos of locations and buildings where bin Laden might be, but the images came in hours later, providing no certainty of success if used as the basis for a missile strike. Clinton administration officials were wary of launching another strike that might backfire, especially after faulty intelligence led U.S. forces to mistakenly bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, in May of that year during the air campaign in Kosovo.

By early 2000, eighteen months after the embassy bombings in Africa, the CIA's Afghan agents and allies had reported several sightings of bin Laden and claimed to have made unsuccessful attempts of their own to assassinate him, leaving Allen and others increasingly frustrated. In early April, the National Security Council's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, wrote a strongly worded memo to his old friend Charlie Allen requesting a detailed report on everything being done to find bin Laden and demanding suggestions for new initiatives. As far back as 1996, Clarke had argued that the CIA should be authorized to kill terrorists who wanted to kill Americans—a view regarded as radical in those days—and he thought the CIA now had that authority under Clinton's August 1998 Memorandum of Notification. Clarke also urged Allen to meet with Vice Admiral Scott Fry, director of operations for the military's Joint Staff, who had complained to the NSC that keeping a submarine “in the basket,” as the Navy called it, in the hope of attacking bin Laden was a waste of expensive resources.

Not long afterward, Allen met with Fry at the three-star admiral's office in the Pentagon. “I think we might have a game changer,” Fry said, explaining that he wanted to tell Allen about it “because no one else seems interested.” Then they walked down the hall to see one of Fry's subordinates, Air Force Brigadier General Scott Gration, the Joint Staff's deputy director for operations. Earlier that year, Gration had asked Fry to let him come up with innovative ways to pinpoint bin Laden's whereabouts and produce the “actionable intelligence” President Clinton wanted before he would order a strike against the Al Qaeda leader.

The military, Gration told Allen, had an extraordinarily powerful telescope able to beam images back to a control station by satellite. If the CIA could sneak the device into Afghanistan and set it up on a mountaintop, providing a wide-angle view of a place bin Laden or his senior lieutenants were known to frequent, it might be possible to spot him. Once the telescope found him, the Air Force could fly a Predator overhead to keep the terrorist leader in sight long enough for action of some sort to be taken, whether that meant a snatch operation or a cruise missile attack. Whatever was done, using the Predator to keep him in sight would dramatically increase the chances of success. The aircraft might take a few hours to get to the area from its launch point, but it would be able to loiter overhead for twenty-four hours or more, keeping bin Laden in view, or even following him if he departed. With the “persistent dwell” provided by its endurance, the Predator just might make the difference in what so far had been an exasperating exercise.

Allen agreed. The idea was damned exciting, he told Gration.

Allen already knew more than a little about drones. In one of his previous assignments, Allen had worked a bit with General Atomics when the company sold the CIA the Gnat 750s the Agency flew over Bosnia from Albania in 1994. Until the spring of 2000, though, Allen hadn't thought of using a UAV to help solve the problem that had vexed him for almost two years: how to take out bin Laden and learn enough about Al Qaeda to disrupt and if possible defeat the terrorist network.