Predator (29 page)

Certain the test would be covered by CNN, Hawes told his parents back in Minnesota to watch for him. The first Hellfire launch from a Predator in flight would indeed be historic, and the test was no secret. The Air Force and General Atomics would issue news releases about it, prompting
Inside the Air Force
and the Las Vegas
Review-Journal
to write articles about the project. As it turned out, however, the event was of far less interest to CNN than to the CIA and the NSC.

Charlie Allen of the CIA and Richard Clarke of the NSC had been wowed by the Predator video of bin Laden produced by the Summer Project. Motivated by both the USS
Cole
bombing and intelligence indicating that Al Qaeda was planning further attacks on U.S. interests, they were also keenly interested in the Air Force project to arm the Predator. Clarke had already recommended sending armed Predators to Afghanistan, in a paper titled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida: Status and Prospects,” which he had finished on December 29, just over a week after Big Safari got word the INF Treaty roadblock had been lifted. On January 25, two days after the test ground launch of a Hellfire from Predator 3034 and five days after President George W. Bush was inaugurated, Clarke sent the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, another memo with his Al Qaeda strategy paper attached. In this memo, Clarke told Rice, “We
urgently
need … a Principals level review on the al Qida network.” By that, the NSC counterterrorism chief meant that key players at the highest levels of government—including the new president—needed to have a discussion of what Clarke saw as the increasing threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Islamic terrorist group, he noted, was trying “to drive the US out of the Muslim world” and “replace moderate, modern, Western regime [
sic
] in Muslim countries with theocracies modeled along the lines of the Taliban.”

As Clarke soon learned, getting the Bush administration to focus on Al Qaeda, much less
do
something about it, would be no easy task. But Clarke; his deputy, Roger Cressey; the CIA's Allen; and other senior officials were watching closely as the Air Force began conducting airborne test launches of Hellfires from Predator 3034 that February.

*   *   *

Curt Hawes and most others on the test team were oblivious to the interest in what they were doing at the NSC and the CIA. Big Safari's Hellfire test director Spoon Mattoon, however, knew who the armed Predator's first customer was likely to be once the team he was leading proved it ready for operations. The day after the new test detachment was established, the Summer Project team, including Big Safari's designated Predator crew, Scott Swanson and Gunny Guay, had gathered in a large, windowless conference room on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a “hot wash”—a detailed review—of the previous fall's Predator flights over Afghanistan. For three full days, the Air Force team and their CIA Counterterrorist Center partners discussed and debated the pros and cons, accomplishments and failures, lessons learned and ideas generated by the fifteen missions they had conducted. Besides spotting bin Laden as many as three times, they had gotten video of terrorist training in progress, discovered training sites previously unknown, mapped Taliban air defenses, and charted other military assets. The intelligence gathered was impressive.

On the second day of the hot wash, CIA Director George Tenet and CTC Director Cofer Black came by to congratulate and thank the participants. Black gave each a “challenge coin,” a medallion the size of a silver dollar, as a token of appreciation. On one side, the coins bore the initials CTC on a red, white, and blue background. “DCI Counterterrorist Center” and “Central Intelligence Agency” in brass-colored lettering trimmed the coin's border on that side. The flip side displayed the CIA seal: an American bald eagle's head, a compass with sixteen radiating spokes, and a white shield, bordered by “Central Intelligence Agency” and “United States of America” in gold.

The coins were nice, but many in the Air Force contingent were frustrated, and they found their CIA colleagues divided. Some at the hot wash agreed with Clarke and Allen that Predator reconnaissance flights alone were valuable enough to resume. Others, including Summer Project operations director Major Mark Cooter, wanted to wait and send the Predator back only when it was armed rather than risk discovery with more unarmed flights. On the CIA side, some opposed using an armed Predator against bin Laden or his lieutenants even if the Air Force perfected it. Revelations in the 1970s of CIA assassination plots against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders had led to searing Senate hearings that stained the agency's reputation. In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning any U.S. employee from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, “political assassination,” an order President Jimmy Carter renewed and President Ronald Reagan broadened by removing the word
political
. After the African embassy bombings in 1998, President Clinton signed a secret order giving the CIA authority to kill bin Laden in certain circumstances, but sending an armed drone to stalk the terrorist leader hadn't been contemplated then. For many at the CIA, there was ample reason to think twice before agreeing to such an operation, which could go badly wrong in many ways and would be controversial even if it succeeded. With the technology still being tested, the Bush administration still getting under way, the Al Qaeda threat still seemingly distant, and major legal and political issues still unresolved, the way forward was murky at best.

Soon these uncertainties would vanish. But as 2001 began, those pondering whether to send Hellfire-armed Predators on a big safari for Osama bin Laden and his top disciples were not so different from Captain Curt Hawes when his wife walked into their bedroom on that February evening. They were groping in the dark, anxious about pulling the trigger.

*   *   *

Curt Hawes made it on time to his 4:30 a.m. briefing on February 16, which was held in the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron's auditorium at Indian Springs. At the briefing, Big Safari's Mattoon went through the plan for the first test shot of a Hellfire from a Predator in flight. The Air Force contingent wore green flight suits or camouflage fatigues; the rest of the twenty-two-member team, all civilians, were dressed in work pants or jeans, and most wore sweaters and jackets against the early morning desert chill. Everyone in the auditorium was tired but excited: since February 5, when General Atomics trucked Predator 3034 from El Mirage to Indian Springs, the team had worked almost nonstop to prepare for the test.

As the briefing ended, Hawes stood up and faced the motley crew. “We have come too far and all worked too hard for this to be anything but successful,” he declared. “Let's go out and kick some ass!”

A few minutes later, a contractor crew using a ground control station at Indian Springs launched 3034 and flew the Predator northeast into Nellis Air Force Base's vast test and exercise ranges. After the drone was beyond some hills that made C-band line-of-sight control impossible, Hawes and sensor operator Leo Glovka took control of 3034 from a second ground control station parked on the Nellis test range, also using a C-band antenna. Under the crawl-walk-run philosophy of testing, the first Hellfires would be launched with the Predator under line-of-sight control, thus avoiding the risk of losing link to the drone when flying via satellite.

With 3034 carrying an inert, instrumented Hellfire (a missile fitted with sensors to gather and transmit data in flight), Hawes did some dry runs toward the target, an old tank parked in the desert. Glovka would go through the motions of a launch, putting the crosshairs of the Forty-Four ball's heat-detecting infrared sensor on the tank. To reduce the chances of a miss, though, a ground-based laser designator team would shine the beam used to guide the Hellfire to its target.

Finally satisfied they were ready, Hawes used the nose camera to line the Predator up on the tank at an altitude of two thousand feet, then flew toward a predetermined “engagement zone.” Once 3034 entered the zone, Hawes depressed and held the black launch button on the throttle with his left thumb, then squeezed the trigger on the front of the joystick with his right forefinger. With a flash of heat and light that momentarily turned Glovka's infrared screen a milky white, the Hellfire rocketed off the drone's left wing and instantly disappeared.

The unarmed missile traveled three miles downrange and struck the tank about six inches to the right of dead center. As Major Ray Pry of Big Safari put it in an Air Force news release, the Hellfire “made a big, gray dent in the turret—just beautiful.” Best of all, as instruments aboard the drone showed, the Predator barely shook.

After the test was finished, Hawes was struck by how anticlimactic the experience was. From the earthbound cockpit he was using to fly the Predator, he heard and felt nothing as the Hellfire left the wing and completed its flight in less than thirty seconds. The shot Hawes had anticipated for weeks seemed to be over almost before it began.

Five days later, the team repeated the performance twice. This time, though, Glovka used Predator 3034's Forty-Four ball to lase the target tank, and the second of the Hellfires they shot was live. Hawes launched the first shot while flying via C-band link, and the second while flying via Ku-band satellite control. Some on the team were nervous about the second shot, which they knew was being streamed live into the Pentagon so that several generals, including Jumper, could watch. To help ensure that Glovka could find the cold tank with the Forty-Four ball's heat-sensing infrared sensor—the Forty-Four lacked a daylight camera—some of the Army members of the team, Hellfire experts from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, poured bags of Kingsford charcoal into the defunct tank's empty ammunition box, doused it with lighter fluid, and put a match to it. Because the desert sun had warmed the earth, they also drove a Chevy Suburban onto the sand in front of the tank and carved some donuts to churn up cooler soil, striving to provide even more contrast for the infrared camera.

Both Hellfire shots hit the target. That afternoon, Hawes and Glovka posed for a triumphant photo next to the tank they had hit, each still in his green flight suit, each standing with one dusty boot on a broken wheel their live missile had blasted loose. Hawes had found these Hellfire shots far more exciting; he kept expecting a CNN crew to show up and ask to talk to the man who had fired the “shot heard around the world,” though he later chastised himself for possibly being prideful. But technological revolutions often arrive quietly, and for the moment at least, Hawes and Glovka had to settle for a few high fives and pats on the back from their teammates.

*   *   *

A couple of weeks after the Hellfire test shots in Nevada, Snake Clark brought a small group of top managers and engineers from the Army Hellfire program office at Redstone Arsenal to CIA headquarters. Jumper and his fellow generals had been far from the only ones interested when Curt Hawes and Leo Glovka hit that tank in the desert with a live Hellfire. When Richard Clarke, Charlie Allen, and others at the NSC and CIA learned that arming the Predator was proving feasible, they began pressing to get this new weapon operational—ready to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top Al Qaeda lieutenants. Others within the “black world” of intelligence operations were also becoming far more interested in Jumper's project to arm the Predator. Before they could decide whether to try using it against Al Qaeda, though, a number of difficult issues needed to be resolved. Snake Clark had brought the Army Hellfire experts to the CIA to help sort through some of the remaining technical challenges.

Greeted by Counterterrorist Center and Directorate of Operations representatives, the Army experts, civilians all, were given a tour of the sixth-floor CTC operations center created to command the unarmed Predator flights over Afghanistan the previous September. Their CIA hosts then took them to a conference room and showed the visitors something that made their eyes bulge: the “Tall Man in White” footage of Osama bin Laden crossing a courtyard at Tarnak Farms, his disciples orbiting their hero like planets about a sun. The CTC officials also showed the Army experts color video of other Al Qaeda figures captured by the Predator's camera before the operation was suspended.

Then the CIA officials told their visitors something even more surprising: the CIA wanted to kill the people in those videos. They wanted to kill them with Hellfire missiles launched from Predators, and they wanted the Army experts to help make sure this experimental weapon could get the job done. The Air Force, General Atomics, Forty-Four ball maker Raytheon Corporation, and the Army Hellfire office had fired a couple of missiles off a Predator from two thousand feet above the ground and hit a big tank parked in the desert. The CIA wanted to know whether a Hellfire shot from a Predator flying at ten thousand or fifteen thousand feet could accurately strike a man walking in the open, or riding on a horse, or seated in a vehicle, or sheltering in a mud-brick building.

Terry McLean, a defense contractor engineer working for the Hellfire office, saw his Army colleagues blanch as the CIA men unabashedly used the word
kill
. During a discussion that lasted a good two hours, they seemed to sprinkle it into every sentence. It was jarring, to say the least; in those days, most members of the military-industrial complex would do verbal backflips to avoid the word
kill
, preferring euphemisms such as
kinetic action
. The Hellfire was an antitank missile, a weapon built to destroy machines. People might be inside those machines, but nobody ever talked about that.

The Hellfire was a “tank killer”—could it kill people who weren't inside tanks, where the missile's explosion was contained and intensified? Probably, the Army experts told the CIA officials, but not with the C-model Hellfire launched in the Nevada tests, a variant designed to be fired from helicopters flying two thousand feet or less above the ground. Nor could the Hellfire do what the CIA wanted with the Forty-Four ball's laser designator, whose range was far less than the five miles or more needed to lase a target from the altitudes where the Predator loitered. Engineering fixes for those problems could probably be found, the experts allowed. A newer K-model Hellfire, whose digital guidance was better than the C model's analog mechanism, might work. But the antitank Hellfire's lethality against “soft targets,” as the engineers preferred to put it, would have to be tested. The missile was designed to penetrate armor with a jet of molten molybdenum formed by a precursor explosion on impact. The molten molybdenum would burn a hole through steel, providing entry for a high-explosive warhead weighing less than twenty pounds but whose detonation, contained by the metal walls of a tank, would incinerate anything inside. If fired at a soft target, the missile might go right through it and explode in the ground.