Predator (34 page)

With a bit of research, Werner found a company in Catania, Sicily, that was offering for lease a satellite earth terminal with a four-meter antenna that could transmit in the 13.75- to 14-gigahertz range the SESAT required. The company seemed a bit desperate for business, and after negotiating a price Werner thought a bargain, he added an unusual condition. For operational security, he insisted that the Sicilian company deliver the satellite terminal to a location in Germany he would disclose to them at a time of his choosing and hand it over without being told where the equipment was going. The Sicilians agreed, and Werner choreographed a clandestine exchange that unfolded one night a few miles east of the Rhine River.

As instructed, the Italian company transported their terminal to Germany on a flatbed trailer, with the representative who negotiated the deal with Werner following in a passenger car. Exactly one hour after Werner called the Sicilian's cell phone and told him where to take the terminal, the Italians pulled into a rest stop on the A5 Autobahn near Offenburg, a city about two hours south of Ramstein Air Base by car. Three Air Force contractors sent by Werner met the Italians there and carefully inspected the flatbed and the satellite terminal. They even scanned both the truck and the terminal with a “radio frequency sniffer” to check for hidden transmitters. The handoff made, the Sicilians left the rest stop in their passenger car, leaving the flatbed and satellite terminal to the Americans.

As the team Werner sent to meet the Italians drove north in the flatbed with the terminal, a pair of cars driven by two other Air Force contractors assigned to the operation fell in behind the satellite dish. Continually varying their distances to disguise their purpose, they watched for other cars that might be following the satellite terminal to its destination. Yet another car, driven by an American contractor, followed the Italians to make sure they didn't double back. Werner's team detected nothing suspicious, and when the flatbed reached Ramstein a couple of hours later, it was met and set up by the engineers permanently assigned to the air base to take care of the TMET.

A few days later, the rest of the equipment needed for remote split operation of the Predator was in place at CIA headquarters. Now all Werner had to do was find out whether his jury-rigged system would work.

*   *   *

As the three Hellfire Predators and the remote split operations scheme for using them to go after Osama bin Laden neared readiness, Scott Swanson and Jeff Guay were assigned to test yet another bit of technology. Designed by Big Safari and installed in a GCS at China Lake, the new device was a little red toggle switch under a clear plastic cover. The switch assembly, fastened to a short wooden plank, was connected by a long black cable to the Predator flight control console. The function of this tethered remote switch was to supplant the joystick trigger a Predator pilot had to pull to launch a Hellfire. Lifting the plastic cover and flipping the red switch attached to the board would potentially become the final step in the launch sequence. Its purpose was to let someone other than a military pilot fire the missile—presumably someone from the CIA—and thus take legal responsibility for the act. Chronically cynical Gunny Guay immediately dubbed it the Monkey Switch. Even a monkey could work it, Guay told Swanson, so that must be what the bosses had in mind.

Guay was just being Guay, but he was right about the origins of the Monkey Switch. It was a product of the indecision and anguish gripping top CIA officials and military leaders as they approached the prospect of using an armed drone to stalk and kill a man. The NSC Deputies Committee had decided at its August 1 meeting that the CIA could legally use the Hellfire Predator to kill bin Laden or one of his deputies without violating Executive Order 12333, the long-standing ban on assassination. That order, signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981, and carrying the force of law, was a detailed codification of intelligence community authorities and limits, but one section, “Prohibition on Assassination,” was unadorned. Section 2.11 stated simply, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Section 2.12, “Indirect Participation,” added, “No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”

Beyond those two statements, Executive Order 12333 offered no specifics on how to define
assassination
or how to interpret or apply the ban on U.S. employees engaging in it. The Deputies Committee decided drone strikes against Al Qaeda leaders would be acts of self-defense, not assassinations, but the deputies could only offer their opinion on such a complex legal issue. The NSC Principals Committee would have to decide whether they were right. The principals would also have to decide who would authorize any drone strikes conducted, who would foot the bill for the Hellfire Predators, and whether an officer of the military or of the CIA would actually pull the trigger.

John McLaughlin, a career intelligence analyst who became CIA deputy director exactly a week after the USS
Cole
bombing, agreed with the decision at the August 1 meeting but still harbored reservations. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the idea of using the Predator to go after bin Laden, who between the African embassy bombings and the
Cole
had a lot of American blood on his hands. The Predator's persistence—its ability to keep its eye on a location for more than twenty-four hours—and the fact that Al Qaeda would have no way of anticipating such a weapon made the happenstance of the Air Force project to arm the drone manna from heaven in McLaughlin's view. But he and other longtime Langley veterans were still traumatized by scandals over CIA assassination schemes that had been revealed in the mid-1970s and had led to curbs on the Agency's activities. McLaughlin told the meeting that the Agency needed to be sure that all those involved would be willing to share the responsibility if the Predator were used to kill bin Laden.

McLaughlin worried about how the public and politicians might react to newspaper headlines about the CIA assassinating a terrorist in Afghanistan. McLaughlin's fear, a common one at Langley, was that the politicians were likely to run for cover and let the CIA take the blame if an attempt to kill bin Laden with the Predator went awry, especially if there was collateral damage. Among the items discussed at Langley was how to avoid killing or wounding innocent civilians. Predator video from the Summer Project included imagery of women and children near the homes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, bin Laden, and the Al Qaeda leader's deputies in Afghanistan. If a drone strike ended up killing children, it wasn't hard to imagine Washington politicians lining up to get in front of TV cameras to do their best imitations of Captain Louis Renault, the cynical French police inspector in the film
Casablanca
who declares that he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” just as a croupier hands him money he's won in the casino he's shutting down.

Charlie Allen was one of the few CIA old-timers ready from the first to hunt bin Laden with the armed version of the Predator; at one of that year's meetings, he had appalled Director George Tenet by declaring that he was even willing to pull the trigger himself. Tenet remained wary even after the Deputies Committee decided the CIA could legally kill a terrorist who had openly declared war on America and whose organization had killed Americans. The CIA director was also still skeptical that an intelligence agency could legally fire a military weapon. The head of the CIA's clandestine activities branch, meanwhile, Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt, was even more opposed to using the Hellfire Predator than he had been to deploying the unarmed version. The lives of his operatives around the world would be at risk if the Agency used such a weapon and the fact got out, Pavitt argued. CIA people would become targets themselves.

But the military was equally opposed to having
its
people pull the trigger—hence the Monkey Switch. “There was concern that you couldn't have a military officer actually pulling the trigger in a situation that wasn't declared war, was part of a covert action,” the CIA's liaison to the military at the time, Lieutenant General Soup Campbell, explained years later. “So the idea was that maybe we would actually put a trigger or switch in there and a CIA guy who was covered under the [presidential] finding would push it.”

To prepare for that possibility, the CIA sent a couple of its officers to China Lake that summer so Swanson and Guay could train them in using the Monkey Switch. Mark Cooter came out to China Lake to supervise, and on the day of the training Cooter had Swanson stop at a grocery store on his way to work. After each of the CIA officers had, as instructed, stood to the side of the flight control console, held the wooden plank in both hands, and toggled the switch a time or two, Cooter asked Swanson, “Well, are they good?”

“Yes,” Swanson replied in his cheery Minnesota lilt. “They can do it!”

Reaching up into the dimly lit top of the flight control console, Cooter plucked two bananas off the bunch Swanson had bought that morning as instructed and handed the CIA men one each. Then they all laughed.

The Monkey Switch was never used again.

*   *   *

When the question of who would pull the trigger finally reached the people with the power to decide such issues, they punted. On September 4, 2001, the NSC Principals Committee held its first meeting on Al Qaeda since President Bush's election—a meeting Richard Clarke had been begging for since four days after Bush's inauguration. Among those gathered in the White House Situation Room that day were NSC principals President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (sitting in for Secretary Donald Rumsfeld), and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, with statutory advisers Tenet and Joint Chiefs vice chairman Richard Myers, who was a few days away from succeeding Army General Hugh Shelton as Joint Chiefs chairman. After a brief discussion, the committee approved the expanded authorities for a broad campaign against Al Qaeda as outlined in a classified memo that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had asked the CIA to draw up earlier in the year. The memo laid out a more aggressive new U.S. policy whose goal would be to eliminate Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda both, in part by having the CIA funnel money and military equipment and supplies to Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, the main insurgent force trying to overthrow bin Laden's hosts, the ruling Taliban.

Next, those at the NSC meeting discussed the armed Predator. Neither the CIA nor the military wanted to take responsibility for pulling the trigger, and neither wanted to pay for the program—issues that led to heated discussion. Rice's deputy, Stephen Hadley, told the leaders that the Predator might be useful in the effort to gather more intelligence on Al Qaeda. But he offered a far more conservative view than Big Safari's of how ready the armed version of the drone was to deploy, saying the Hellfire Predator might not be suitable for immediate use. Rice suggested the spring of 2002 might a better time to deploy it. Powell, a former Army general who had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when President Bush's father was president, was in favor of using the armed Predator but doubted that bin Laden would be easy to target.

Tenet, who had been briefed in detail on the Hellfire test shots conducted between May 22 and June 7, knew that although the missile was highly accurate, the reliability and thus the lethality of the weapon was iffy. He contended that the probability of taking bin Laden out with a Hellfire was low, and Rice concurred. Tenet also said it would be a terrible mistake for the CIA director to decide when to fire a weapon like this. Others assured Tenet that the decision to fire would be the president's to make. As for who would actually pull the trigger, the military or the CIA, that question was left unresolved, though Myers said that if a strike were launched covertly the CIA would have to do it.

In the end, the principals decided against trying to kill bin Laden with the Predator, at least for the time being, but agreed the military should consider it among other options. They left it to Tenet to decide whether the CIA would use the Predator for more unarmed reconnaissance missions but agreed it was a good idea. Tenet later directed the CIA to go ahead with the plan under way to deploy the Hellfire Predators to Uzbekistan in late September, but he told them to prepare to fly the drones, controlled from the Langley campus, for intelligence gathering only.

Richard Clarke left the meeting feeling more frustrated than ever. Before the session, Clarke had sent Rice a personal note urging her to press the “real question” the principals should focus on—“are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat?”—rather than leaving it to the lower-level Counterterrorism Security Group he chaired. In his note, he added a passionate, and prescient, prediction:

“Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US. What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

*   *   *

Even as the National Security Council principals hesitated to use the new Hellfire Predator, the Air Force team was making final preparations to give them the option. On August 26 and 27, the Big Safari and General Atomics flight crews flew Predator 3034 in a twenty-four-hour test culminating in a Hellfire launch at a China Lake target. Then they ferried 3034 back to El Mirage to get its air superiority gray paint job. On August 30 they began testing Predator 3037 and Predator 3038, the two other drones modified to carry the prototype MTS ball and Hellfire missiles under the July 11 contract Big Safari had given General Atomics. Those tests, which included missile shots, would continue at China Lake through the Labor Day weekend.