Predator (25 page)

*   *   *

The CIA's Charlie Allen saw the Predator video of the tall man presumed to be bin Laden only on tape, not live, partly because noon in Afghanistan was 4:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time in Washington. Someone called Allen at home a couple of hours after the sighting and said, “We found him—we think.” Later, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency analysts brought to the Predator team by Allen analyzed the drone's video freeze-frame by freeze-frame and confirmed that the tall man was indeed bin Laden. Studying the video from the previous six Summer Project missions more closely, the analysts determined that the Predator's camera had actually captured bin Laden for the first time during the second mission flown, nearly a month earlier.

After the imagery analysts concluded that the man in white was indeed bin Laden, a CTC officer came to Allen's office with a tape and played it for the person who had pushed harder than anyone at the CIA for using the Predator.

“It's bin Laden! It's bin Laden!” Allen said excitedly. “And there are his lieutenants!”

Unlike the Summer Project team at Ramstein, Allen and others at the CIA knew that no cruise missiles would be launched. Before the idea of using the Predator to find bin Laden ever arose, Hank Crumpton, a clandestine operations officer and one of CTC director Cofer Black's three deputies, had advocated sending military and CIA commando teams to “work with our Afghan partners to target (bin Laden) with lethal force.” Black told Crumpton there was “insufficient political will.”

Back in August, after the committee of senior officials known as the Small Group had approved the Predator operation, Richard Clarke's deputy at the NSC, Roger Cressey, had sent National Security Adviser Sandy Berger a memo on how the intelligence the Afghan Eyes project gathered might be used. If the Predator found bin Laden, Cressey reasoned, emergency meetings of the NSC's Counterterrorism Security Group and the cabinet-level Principals Committee might be needed to decide what to do. Berger made it clear a mere sighting wasn't going to be enough to persuade President Clinton to authorize an attempt to kill bin Laden. Several hours would be needed for cruise missiles launched from the Indian Ocean to be programmed and to cover the distance to the target, and if the target moved after those missiles were fired, they couldn't be called back. Burned by the reaction to his 1998 cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda, Clinton was wary of trying that option again. “I will want
more
than verified location: we will need, at least, data on
pattern
of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place,” Berger wrote in the margin of Cressey's memo, underlining
more
and
pattern
himself.

Clarke argued that a cruise missile shot would be worth a try even if bin Laden escaped; he saw no downside in blowing up the terrorist leader's house. Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, however, thought a miss would be a political victory for Al Qaeda.

Allen understood from the first that the Predator missions over Afghanistan were regarded as an experiment. Still, he felt vindicated when he showed what quickly became known as the “Tall Man in White” video to CIA chief Tenet and a handful of others in the director's conference room the morning after the Predator's camera shot it. Tenet was astonished by the clarity of the video, Allen could see.

“Whatever doubts he had about the Predator vanished,” Allen later recalled.

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Although the Summer Project team was elated to learn that they had indeed spotted Osama bin Laden, some were disillusioned when nothing happened as a result. Their orders were to acquire actionable intelligence, and after September 27 those at Ramstein figured they had accomplished that goal. Yet no action had been taken, nor did any seem to be in the cards.

Over the next several weeks, the team flew the Predator over other intelligence targets in Afghanistan, documenting Al Qaeda's presence and mapping Taliban military assets. Guided by intelligence from the CIA, the missions produced hours and hours of videotape revealing useful information. They even captured on video terrorist training being conducted at a camp at Garmabak Ghar. Those in the ops cell at Ramstein were amazed to see black-garbed young men firing weapons and scrambling through obstacle courses. Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey sometimes drove the eight miles from the White House to Langley around midnight to watch the drone's video live in the CTC flight operations center. Clarke was utterly fascinated by this technological magic trick—the ability to surreptitiously watch your enemies on the other side of the globe live and in color. “This sort of intelligence capability was something we had seen only in Hollywood movies,” Clarke later wrote.

In the weeks following the bin Laden sighting, increasingly bad weather over Afghanistan rendered the Predator missions less productive. Icing conditions and high winds were annoyances, but the main problem was cloud cover, which often made it impossible to fly the drone low enough to loiter without being seen. Some days the team couldn't even consider flying.

Just as boredom began to set in at Ramstein, Al Qaeda struck again. On October 12, at 11:15 a.m. local time, a fiberglass fishing boat slowly pulled up alongside the USS
Cole
, an American destroyer at anchor in the Arabian Peninsula port of Aden, Yemen. The boat stopped in the water next to the warship. Two men in the little vessel rose, smiled, waved, and stood at attention—then vanished in the fireball of an explosion. The blast ripped a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the port side of the
Cole
's steel hull, killing seventeen U.S. sailors, wounding thirty-seven, and nearly sinking the ship.

Bin Laden—who three months later was videotaped reading a poem that included a tribute to the
Cole
bombing—was so certain the United States would strike back that he sent his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Kabul and ordered Al Qaeda military commander Mohammed Atef to a different location in Kandahar so the expected attack couldn't kill them all simultaneously. But Richard Clarke and others who favored a retaliatory strike in Afghanistan were unable to persuade military or civilian leaders to launch one, because neither the CIA nor the FBI could confirm that Al Qaeda was responsible for the
Cole
bombing. President Clinton later wrote that he came close to ordering a cruise missile strike at bin Laden after the
Cole
bombing but “the CIA recommended that we call it off at the last minute, believing that the evidence of his presence was insufficiently reliable.”

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After the
Cole
bombing, no one on the Summer Project team lacked motivation; they were all livid. But soon Clarke and other Predator advocates reluctantly agreed that the drone's flights over Afghanistan should cease, at least for the winter. The difficulty of flying in bad weather, not to mention the risk of a crash that might expose the covert flights, left little choice. The Summer Project officially ended on November 8.

Around the same time, Clarke, his deputy Cressey, and their ally Charlie Allen learned of an intriguing new development, an Air Force project that had been stalled for weeks but just might offer a radical new option for dealing with bin Laden. Seven months earlier, General John P. Jumper, an innovative former fighter pilot who had taken over Air Combat Command early in 2000, had ordered Big Safari and General Atomics to give the Predator a new capability. As Clarke later noted in a strategy paper about Al Qaeda, “This new capability would permit a ‘see it/shoot it' option.”

Prior to taking over ACC, Jumper had commanded U.S. Air Forces Europe for two years and two months, a period that included the air war in Kosovo. Like other commanders, he had been frustrated with how hard it was for allied pilots to find and hit mobile targets such as Serb armored vehicles and antiaircraft missile batteries during that campaign. The Predator had shown in Kosovo that it could find targets with its cameras and even carry a laser designator to pinpoint them so manned aircraft could attack. But Jumper wanted the Predator to do more, and a “see it/shoot it” option was exactly what he had in mind. He decided to arm the drone.

The effect of putting weapons on the Predator would be nothing short of revolutionary. Soon the drone would be much more than just a persistent eye in the sky. Armed, it would be a remote-control killing machine.

Jumper called it “the next logical step.”

 

8

THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP

By the spring of 2000, General John Jumper had been in uniform thirty-four years and in the Air Force all his life. An Air Force brat, he was the son of fighter pilot Jimmy Jumper, who in the early 1970s was a two-star general on his way to three stars, until lung cancer cut him down. By then, Jimmy's son Johnny was a “shit hot” pilot in his own right, with two tours in Vietnam under his belt and forty flights as a “fast forward air controller,” or Fast FAC. That meant zigzagging his beefy F-4D Phantom over hostile territory at high speed and low altitude, often dodging bright red streams of tracer fire, to find targets for other planes to attack. It was the same death-defying tactic pioneered in the 1960s by the Misty Fast FACs, whose number included Ronald Fogleman, the pilot who later became Air Force chief of staff and decided his service was the Predator's rightful home.

Five foot ten and barrel-chested, Johnny Jumper had a full head of thin brown hair, lively eyes, and exceptionally long arms. In a photo snapped in 1970 after he climbed out of his cockpit at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, Jumper's hands are draped over the shoulders of two squadron mates and dangle so far from his body that at first glance they appear fake. Wearing flight suits, parachutes, and insouciant grins as they celebrate a comrade's last combat mission, Jumper and his 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron buddies look fearless and fun-loving, and Jumper certainly was. A “good stick” in the cockpit, on the ground he was a practical joker. He once poured a pool of oil under the engine of a fellow pilot's expensive new sports car so he could cackle at the proud owner's reaction. As a contributor to a magazine published by the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, where young Captain Jumper was a star instructor in the mid-1970s, he faked a cover showing Air Force pilots strafing a parachuting Soviet flier who had ejected from his plane. Then Jumper talked the wing commander—a colonel, three ranks above him—into slamming the sham cover down on the desk of Jumper's boss and telling the shaken lieutenant colonel that he could hit the street as soon as the outrageous cover on the magazine's three thousand copies did.

Stationed in England, Jumper flew unscheduled mock dogfights against Royal Air Force pilots, using air-to-air maneuvers he later admitted were “so dangerous it wasn't even fun. It was plain stupid.” But he was serious about his profession, and a knack for devising novel tactics set the 1966 Virginia Military Institute graduate apart throughout his Air Force career. As a captain, he figured out how to extend the range of the “dive toss” method of bombing to reduce the risk to pilots. He also devised a way for two-ship fighter formations to fly at low levels without using radio calls, an innovation adopted by U.S. pilots around the world. Educated as an electrical engineer, Jumper was also unusually eager to adopt or adapt technology.

During the last of his two tours in Vietnam, he became a big fan of laser-guided weapons. One February day in 1970, Captain Jumper and his backseater, Lieutenant Dick Anderegg, were flying their F-4D on a Fast FAC mission over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Communist supply line that ran through Laos and Cambodia. Anderegg, later Air Force chief historian, described their introduction to the wonder of laser-guided weapons in his 2001 book,
Sierra Hotel: Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam
. The Fast FAC tactic was to search at low altitude for enemy trucks, troops, or supply caches, climb to rendezvous with fighters carrying bombs, lead them to the targets and fire white phosphorous rockets to mark where they should strike, then get out of the way. It was hazardous duty: two months earlier, Jumper and Anderegg's squadron mate Lieutenant Richard Honey had bled to death in the cockpit after a .50-caliber bullet hit him in the chest as his F-4's pilot jinked over the same dirt road they were searching that day in Laos.

After a couple of hours in the danger zone, Jumper took their Phantom roaring to safer altitudes while Anderegg tuned to the radio frequency used by a flight of F-4s who were waiting to pounce and using the call sign “Buick.” When the Buick flight leader asked if Jumper and Anderegg had any targets for his planes to hit, Jumper suggested an enemy storage area they had found. Surprisingly, the Buick leader said that wouldn't be a good target for the ordnance they were carrying. He wanted “a small, pinpoint target.” Jumper suggested a single thirty-seven-millimeter gun “that's been shooting at us pretty good,” to which Buick replied, “That's perfect.”

Jumper and Anderegg led the other fighters to the target, dove to mark it with a white phosphorous rocket, and climbed out of the way. They were then puzzled to watch the Buick flight leader circle in a lazy left-hand turn while his wingman rolled in from well above normal bombing altitude. The wingman was so high that Jumper and Anderegg were sure his bomb would miss. “Bomb gone,” they heard him say over the radio—then they watched in amazement as the attack scored a direct hit. They later learned that the circling F-4 had been shining a laser designator's beam on the target for the other Phantom's new laser-guided bomb.

The phenomenal accuracy of bombs able to home in on the sparkle created by a pulsing laser beam would soon save time, money, and the lives of both American air crews and innocent civilians near their targets. On April 27, 1972, for example, F-4s used laser-guided bombs to drop one end of the Thanh Hoa Bridge, a strategic link in the Ho Chi Minh Trail that U.S. aircraft had tried to cut 871 times since 1965 without success, and at painful cost. By some calculations, 104 American pilots were lost in unsuccessful missions against the Dragon's Jaw, as the structure was known.