Predator (33 page)

Werner promised to get back to Gration with an answer as soon as possible.

The next day, after a discussion with a vice president of L-3 Communications, a Salt Lake City company that had been providing communications technology for the Predator since the drone's birth, Werner told Gration they could meet the September 25 target date.

At the time, even Werner failed to grasp the technological revolution that would follow if he found a way to make remote split operations of the Hellfire Predator work. For the first time in history, it would be possible to target and kill an enemy much the way a sniper does—from ambush, and with precision—but from the other side of the world. Science fiction would become science fact.

*   *   *

CIA headquarters covers 258 acres carved out of verdant woods on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, eight miles and eighteen minutes northwest of the White House by car, in an unincorporated area known as Langley. The well-marked main entrance is on the south end of the property, just off Dolley Madison Boulevard. Leafy woods shield the rest of the grounds from public view, and even most visitors allowed to travel past the front gate see little of the CIA compound. Once they and their vehicles pass inspection by an armed guard, they motor nearly half a mile down a curving, tree-lined drive along the easternmost edge of the property, then park in front of the 1960s-vintage Old Headquarters Building. The east front of that seven-story structure faces the Potomac, and the capital beyond; the west side connects to two six-story office towers completed in 1991. Behind those towers, parking lots fan out in several directions and service roads snake into the tree-covered southern end of the compound. This part of the campus is home to an ad hoc scattering of storage sheds, utility buildings, power generators, and a large, white water tank tucked into some thick woods not far from the CIA day care center.

In the summer of 2001, the trees directly south of that water tank had been cleared for a couple of dozen yards to either side, creating a secluded glade where a construction crew was storing equipment and supplies. One unusually pleasant morning—the Washington region is normally insufferably muggy in August—this glade was the first of several planned stops on a tour of the CIA campus being conducted for Cofer Black, the no-nonsense director of the intelligence agency's Counterterrorist Center. Major Mark Cooter and Black's deputy Alec B. had set out that morning to show Black and about twenty other officials and experts various spots on the CIA campus that might make suitable locations for a Predator ground control station and a mobile home that an Air Force team could use as an operations cell, if President Bush and his National Security Council ultimately decided to send the armed drone in search of Osama bin Laden.

“Major,” Black barked as the group stood in the glade.

“Yes, sir,” replied Cooter, the only military officer in the group.

“Where do
you
think we should put the equipment?”

“Right here, sir.”

“I agree,” Black said, then turned and started walking back to the CIA headquarters building. Tour over.

Colonel Ed Boyle, who as intelligence director for U.S. Air Forces Europe had been the Summer Project's commander at Ramstein and would reprise his role if new Predator flights over Afghanistan were ordered, had wanted to put the ground control station at another Langley this time: Langley Air Force Base, near Hampton Roads, Virginia. The latter Langley was home to Air Combat Command, where Boyle had transferred in April, requested by General Jumper to be ACC's director of intelligence, a prestigious assignment. The CIA, however, wanted tighter control over the operation than an Air Force base could provide, especially now that the Predator could fire missiles. Higher-ups had decided to put the drone's operators at the CIA's Langley.

With that decision, Boyle thought of embedding the Air Force contingent in the Global Response Center on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. No one liked working in a cramped, chilly, and often smelly Predator GCS, and members of the Air Force team assigned to the operations cell tent next to the GCS at Ramstein during the so-called Summer Project had complained of the damp and cold of Germany's autumn, which featured much rain and not a little snow. The tent was so poorly heated that they often had to work in gloves and field jackets to stay warm, and when it rained the tent leaked. Captain Ginger Wallace, the only woman officer on the Summer Project, especially disliked having to share a porta-potty with a football team's worth of men during the Ramstein operation.

Boyle thought his people would be happier indoors, but the CIA rejected that idea and insisted that the Predator team set up its operation away from the main building. The agency wanted as few Air Force people as possible working in its headquarters; besides, with roughly three hundred employees, the twenty-four-hour CTC operations center was crowded already. Their CIA hosts also wanted to keep the Predator operation as inconspicuous as possible, so Air Force participants were instructed to wear civilian clothes only, and the unit's little base in the glade near the water tower would be made to look as much as possible like a construction site. The CIA campus at Langley was a favorite photographic subject for foreign spy satellites—and, for that matter, users of Google Earth.

“You've got to be kidding me, right?” Wallace blurted out when Cooter called her at Ramstein to tell her about the move to Langley. She and Captain Paul Welch, a communications officer at Ramstein, had worked for the past six months to get ready for more Predator flights over Afghanistan conducted from Germany. They already had a semipermanent building on the spot at Ramstein where the ops tent and the huge satellite earth terminal required for split operations of the Predator were located. The building was only a two-story metal shelter akin to one GCS stacked atop another, but it had tile floors, windows with glass in them, reliable heat, good lighting, and comfortable work spaces. It also had an indoor toilet.

Cooter assured Wallace that things wouldn't be so bad at Langley. There would be no building like the one she and Welch had set up at Ramstein, but there would also be no tent. The ops cell would be in a double-wide mobile home, which the CIA rented and parked in the glade not long after the site was chosen.

“Okay, I don't care what our setup is, but we
will
have a bathroom in that trailer,” Wallace told Cooter. “I will
not
spend ninety more days going to the bathroom in a porta-potty.”

*   *   *

On July 11, the day Stephen Hadley told the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff to get ready to deploy armed Predators in September and the Air Force told Congress it would fund the completion of the Hellfire project, Big Safari gave General Atomics a new contract. It directed the company to modify two more existing Predators to carry MTS balls and Hellfires, to make software changes so all three Hellfire Predators could “engage moving targets,” and to “conduct live fire flight demonstrations” at China Lake. General Atomics was also to paint Predator 3034 and the two other Hellfire Predators “air superiority gray,” the color used on Air Force warplanes to make them hard for enemies to see. Cooter had insisted on the color scheme. Remembering the Taliban MiGs that had come looking for the Summer Project's unarmed Predators the year before, he wanted to take every step possible to preserve the element of surprise as they stalked Osama bin Laden.

Air Force policy nominally stipulated four Predator air vehicles per ground control station, but aside from the one MTS ball on Predator 3034, only two other prototypes existed. For that matter, there weren't that many Predators around, even seven years after the drone's birth. At the beginning of 2001, the entire fleet numbered just sixteen, for despite all the sudden interest in the Hellfire Predator, drones were still extremely low on the Air Force's list of priorities. The service was buying so few, in fact, that in August of that year, General Atomics' Frank Pace told Tom Cassidy they might have to lay off about ten employees.

As General Atomics prepared the two additional Hellfire Predators, the Big Safari team began working out how to use them most effectively against Al Qaeda. Cooter pushed Major Spoon Mattoon of Big Safari, the project's test director, to conduct more flight tests. Cooter wanted to see if the Hellfires and their electronic components worked as well after twenty hours of flying in the cold air of high altitude as they did within an hour or so of taking off from the warm desert floor. By August 22, Scott Swanson and Jeff Guay of Big Safari, with two General Atomics pilots, were flying practice missions lasting hours at China Lake, devising and testing flight patterns they might use to find Osama bin Laden with the MTS ball, follow him without being detected, and possibly launch Hellfires at him. To make the exercises more productive, and help the team pass the time, Cooter and Mattoon devised some scenarios requiring members of the Hellfire Predator team to play the roles of “terrorists” and “civilians” by moving around a China Lake range at night in trucks and SUVs. The Predator crew had to find them in the desert using the MTS ball's sensors, and then decide whether they were targets worth following.

Werner arrived at China Lake on August 23, still working on aspects of his remote split operations scheme. When he heard about the nighttime exercises in the desert, he couldn't resist getting involved. Werner was once commissioned by an intelligence agency other than the CIA to write a scenario for an exercise focused on defending against a possible attack on the U.S. communications infrastructure; his scenario was so realistic and worrisome that the agency immediately classified his work. Intrigued by what the Big Safari team was doing at China Lake, Werner sat down and wrote a couple of scenarios more elaborate than Cooter and Mattoon's—six-hour plays, in effect, in which almost all the nearly two dozen members of the Hellfire Predator team had roles to play.

In one scenario, a dozen or more of the team members were divided into small squads and sent out into the black desert night in various directions and in multiple vehicles. At certain times and places, staggered for the different squads taking part, they were to stop, get out of their vehicles, and post guards. One of the men in one of the vehicles was “Dr. Zhukov,” a nefarious character whose purpose was to meet up with a vehicle carrying people who would hand him a suitcase containing a small nuclear bomb—fictional, of course. Another character was a “Western intelligence agency plant”—a spy. The Predator crew's assignment was to use their drone to find the various squads and, by observing their behavior, discern which man was Dr. Zhukov and which was the Western spy. The Western spy would be distinguished by the way he walked around outside his squad's vehicle during stops while posing as a guard. While the others would meander in circles during stops to ease the burden of being on their feet, as guards usually do, the Western spy would occasionally walk in a short, straight line, then turn at a sharp right angle and walk in a longer straight line, describing a capital
L
.

For Hellfire engineer Terry McLean and Raytheon engineers Bill Casey and Willie Norman, acting out roles in Werner's scenarios—or playing “Rescue Rangers,” as they called it—made them feel a little silly, but the games gave them a way to have a bit of fun and blow off some steam after a summer of difficult work in the blazing desert. It also led to some comical experiences.

On their first night of playacting, McLean was cast as the spy and Casey and Norman as terrorists traveling with him. After a couple of stops in the desert, his companions were to discover McLean walking his
L
, then shoot him down. The Predator crew's assignment was to catch the drama on video. Having done that scene, McLean, Casey, and Norman had some time to kill in the desert before the next act, so they pulled some cheap folding chairs they had bought for that purpose out of their SUV and sat down to relax. Sitting in the pitch black of the desert, their eyes were naturally drawn up to the glorious sight of the Milky Way, made all the more mesmerizing by the absence of any nearby manmade light. After they had been staring at the stars for a while, they heard a coyote howl in the distance, just like in a Hollywood Western.

“Oh, that's pretty cool,” McLean said. Then another coyote howled, but this time from much closer. Turning on a flashlight and pointing it in the direction of the second howl, McLean saw red eyes glowing back at him from only about fifty feet away. Swinging their flashlights around in a circle, the three engineers got a surprise that sent chills up their spines. Perhaps thirty sets of red eyes peered at them: they were surrounded by an entire pack of coyotes. “You've never seen three middle-aged men jump in an SUV as fast,” McLean recalled. “We left the chairs and hauled ass.”

The next night, Casey realized at a certain point during Werner's second scenario that they were getting a little giddy from the long hours. This time, to show the Predator crew that they had spotted the drone overhead, Casey, McLean, and Norman offered the MTS ball's sensors an ad hoc rendition, in song and arm signals, of the Village People disco classic “Y.M.C.A.” That's when Werner, watching from the GCS, knew they were having entirely too much fun.

*   *   *

Werner came up with another scenario that was played out that month, but this one was for real. After telling Gration of the Joint Staff that he could make remote split operations work in time to have Predators controlled from Langley over Afghanistan by September 25, Werner discovered they would need a new satellite earth terminal at Ramstein to do that. They could still use the eleven-meter TMET—the “Big Ass Dish”—to receive signals from the Predator, but the Dutch communications satellite used during the Summer Project for transmitting the drone's signals was no longer available, for its capacity had been leased to another customer. Werner found an alternative: a Russian-built, French-operated satellite known as SESAT (an acronym derived from “Siberia-Europe satellite”), but its only unleased capacity would require transmitting GCS data from the earth terminal to the SESAT at a lower frequency than the TMET could provide.