Predator (41 page)

In early October 2001, Rumsfeld and other officials were saying little in public about the Predator. But in the October 22 issue of
The New Yorker
magazine, journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA was controlling an armed version of the drone that had tracked Mullah Omar the first night of the war and had been refused permission to fire on him by Franks. Tom Ricks of the
Washington Post
quickly followed up with a front-page article calling the armed Predator “a revolutionary step in the conduct of warfare.” Even so, months would pass before many others began to grasp just how revolutionary a step the Predator was.

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On the drone revolution's ramparts—in the ground control station or the double-wide trailer on the CIA campus—the initial cadre of revolutionaries knew they were players in a real-life drama. In bull sessions, the Wildfire team joked about which Hollywood actors should play them in the movie about their operation. But as the initial adrenaline rush of waging war by remote control ebbed, some began to feel they had entered the Twilight Zone, where a twelve-hour shift might consist of either mind-numbing tedium or nerve-wracking tension. Improvisation and on-the-job training were essential to their success. At first, Big Safari's Swanson, the only Air Force pilot on the team who had fired any Hellfires before the war, was the only Air Force pilot to launch missiles over Afghanistan. Contractor Big had fired them in tests, too. Later, other operators began taking shots but, in their case, without ever firing a missile at a practice target. With only two Predators modified to carry Hellfires in those early days of the war, there was no way for the pilots and sensor operators to fully rehearse their lethal act before going onstage, although taking a couple of dry runs at a real target before firing was useful and usual.

The more they fired, the more they noticed peculiar things about using this new weapon. Unlike pilots or other crew in strike aircraft or big bombers, the Predator's operators could watch their targets for hours, see their missiles strike, and continue to watch the aftermath long after the smoke had cleared. Often—but not always, for some of their targets were inside vehicles or buildings—they could see the people they were about to attack, although never well enough to discern their faces, just enough to distinguish them from others. They also saw bodies flip, or disappear, or lie lifeless on the ground; sometimes, severely wounded, the men they had targeted would try to crawl away. Operating the Predator was less like flying an attack aircraft than like being a sniper lying in ambush, which for some made the act of killing somehow seem more personal.

Yet the Predator crews, communicating over their headsets with the mission commander seated toward the back of the ground control station, or with intelligence analysts in the double-wide, rarely had any idea whom they were stalking and killing. This was true even in the case of so-called high-value targets. Rather than keeping a scorecard, operations director Mark Cooter and mission commander Darran Jergensen concentrated on making sure their crews could deliver what their CIA controllers wanted the Predator to do. Ed Boyle and Air Force liaison officers who routinely spent time in the CIA Global Response Center might know more about individual targets, but there was no reason to pass such information on to the flight crews. Picking targets was the CIA's business. Besides, CIA culture focused to the point of obsession on “compartmentalizing” information—keeping it secret from all but those with a clear need to know. The Counterterrorist Center mission managers on Langley's sixth floor seemed particularly wary of sharing information that might reveal sources and methods of identifying Al Qaeda or Taliban members the CIA wanted to target.

“Generally, we would have some kind of target or area to look at, and that was based on some other type of cross intel,” one crew member recalled. “If there was something there that caught the attention of the guys up in the CTC, we might linger for hours or days. At some point, they would go, ‘Hey, this is a valid target.' Our mission commander, the guy sitting in the back of the GCS, would be in [computer] chat and perhaps on a direct phone line to the guys upstairs, passing that information back and forth, and eventually it would come down, ‘Yes, put a round on target. I want you to put a round through the building; take out those people; take out that car.'” For the Predator crews, the names of those in the crosshairs were unknown and unimportant, just as a fighter or bomber pilot, or a soldier in combat on the ground, almost never knows anything personal about the enemy. All the Wildfire crews knew was that they were killing “bad guys.”

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One name the Predator crews did know was Lucky. He was the dog who regularly wandered into the picture on the Predator screen just as they were about to launch a missile, a glowing, four-legged apparition who continually tempted fate. There were often dogs in the mud-brick compounds common to Afghanistan, which usually contained a house or two behind a tall outer wall and heavy iron gates. The wall provided security and privacy for extended families, allowing women to go unveiled and children, chickens, and goats to wander freely. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters sometimes took refuge in such compounds, and when the Predator crews launched Hellfires at them, any dogs in proximity invariably bolted several seconds before the missile hit, alerted by their keen sense of hearing, the Wildfire team supposed. Humans never ran. A human might hear a shrill shriek during the final subsonic portion of the Hellfire's flight, but the shriek lasted only a split second, and by then it was too late. Early on in the war, someone at the Trailer Park—inveterate cut-up Guay, most likely—started calling every canine that appeared just as a strike was being launched Lucky, and the joke caught on. “There goes Lucky,” someone would say as a dog fled an incoming Hellfire.

Guay was a reliable source of humor, and perhaps because of the Predator team's somewhat strange circumstances, his sarcastic outlook became contagious. By late October or early November, the crews had spent weeks working in the chilly GCS or the drafty double-wide for twelve hours on, twelve hours off, seven days a week, with infrequent trips to the Big House for food, and most toilet breaks taken in a thin-walled bathroom in one corner of the trailer or in one of three porta-potties outdoors. At smoke breaks in the glade, over beers at the Tysons Corner Marriott or Mr. Smith's, a favorite bar nearby, gripes were nursed about spending days and nights hidden away in the woods. They would joke that they were so close to the edge of the CIA campus they might as well be in West Virginia, which was actually fifty miles or so away.

Then one of the CIA people made a crack about the Predator crews being “trailer trash”—just about the time, as it happened, that Ginger Wallace and other women on the team were complaining to Boyle about a broken toilet in the double-wide. No one at the Big House seemed to care about getting the toilet repaired, so Guay and some of the others decided to send the CIA a message. “We're trailer trash, so we might as well look that way,” one declared. They took the malfunctioning toilet out of the double-wide, plopped it on the ground outside, and stuck a pot of flowers in its bowl. “All we need now is a sofa out front, a broken-down truck on cement blocks, and pink flamingos,” someone said, and though they couldn't manage the sofa and truck, someone came up with four plastic pink flamingos, which they stuck in the ground around their “redneck flower pot.”

CIA officials came out to the Trailer Park from time to time for various reasons, and one or two who saw the pink flamingos and toilet bowl on their grounds suffered shock and awe. Some told Boyle he had to get rid of that junk, if not for operational security then for aesthetic reasons. When CIA Director Tenet saw the hillbilly tableau, he chuckled, then chuckled some more. He also promised to get the toilet fixed, and did. But the flamingos stayed.

Tenet, gregarious by nature, occasionally made the fifteen-minute trip from his office to the double-wide on his way home at night to let the Air Force team know how much he appreciated what they were doing. Some weekends, he would come out to the Trailer Park in blue jeans, plop down in a chair with an unlit Cohiba cigar in his mouth, and shoot the breeze for twenty or thirty minutes with whoever happened to be there. Tenet also lingered in the Global Response Center on the sixth floor and watched operations unfold when the Predator was on an important target; sometimes he himself issued the approval to launch the Hellfires. Before 9/11, he had been skeptical and cautious about the CIA using the armed Predator, but after Al Qaeda's attacks on America, and after seeing what the drone could do in the first days of the war, Tenet became a “disciple,” as one official close to him put it.

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One of those employing this new technology was a remarkable young woman—remarkable even before she made history by becoming the first of her sex to launch a lethal drone strike. Among the first female fighter pilots in U.S. history, she was an F-15E Strike Eagle flier who logged combat hours over Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo before becoming a Predator operator. Even out of the cockpit, she stood out. Tall, blond, athletic, and bold, she was a self-described tomboy—the only sister of four brothers—whose sole observable fear was being taken less seriously because she was female. She liked to drink, and when she drank too much, she tended to get into fights—wrestling bouts, really, and always with men. She and her husband had first gotten acquainted when they started wrestling and rolling on the floor at a Christmas party where there was alcohol to drink and cake to shove in each other's faces.

Her tough-girl tendencies also inspired her radio call sign “Ghengis” (which she spelled that way). Her first F-15E squadron chose her call sign, and while stationed overseas later, she lived up to the moniker during a crowded apartment party. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the front of a sofa and a drink in her hand when a weapon systems officer (a “backseater,” in military slang) slid onto the seat behind her. When he rested his legs on her shoulders, let out a sigh, and loudly declared, “Now that's what women are good for,” Ghengis knocked him over the back of the sofa. He got up with a bloody lip.

Ghengis—at her stipulation, the only way she will be identified in this account—was an Air Force brat. Her father was an officer, and one of her brothers was a fighter pilot. Yet she chose her career on a whim. One day at the start of her sophomore year at a junior college, she was driving down the road with her arm out the window, letting her hand play in the wind like an airplane wing. As she put it years later, “Just out of the blue, I decided I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.” She also wanted to fly fighters, and was lucky in her timing. About the time she got her Air Force commission, the Clinton administration decided women should be allowed to pilot combat planes.

Another male weapon systems officer—a job also known as a Wizzo, after the abbreviation WSO—learned in a different way not to mess with Ghengis. Her greatest difficulty piloting F-15Es over Iraq wasn't the occasional antiaircraft missile she had to dodge but the duration of the missions, which could last ten hours—a long time to go without emptying your bladder. Males could urinate in flight into a piddle pack, a small vinyl bag lined with compressed sponges. But at the time, no such device existed for female fighter pilots. Ghengis griped about this aloud, and one day, while flying over Iraq, the male WSO in her F-15E's backseat began gleefully reporting each time he used his piddle pack. About the third time she heard him say, “Ahhh, yeahhh, peein' now,” she jerked back on the control stick, throwing the plane into a sharp vertical climb that caused the WSO to wizz all over himself. No WSO ever teased Ghengis about the piddle pack problem again.

Months later, it was Ghengis's turn to fume. Her squadron commander told her that the instructor pilot billet she had requested as her next assignment wasn't available; instead, the Air Force was sending her to Indian Springs, Nevada, to fly the Predator. This wasn't punishment, he assured her, just dues she had to pay for the great three-year assignment she was finishing up.

Her shoulders fell. “Predator?” Ghengis asked in disbelief. “Seriously?”

No fighter pilot volunteered for life at “One G,” as two F-16 jockeys assigned to the Predator called it in a rap video lament that found its way onto the Internet. Even by the summer of 2000, Indian Springs was still known as “the Land of Misfit Toys,” among other unflattering nicknames. “What did you screw up to get here?” asked a fellow fighter pilot who reported for Predator training with Ghengis after damaging his back in a hard landing. Fourteen months later, in October 2001, Ghengis found herself flying combat missions again, only this time from the ground control station at the Trailer Park at the CIA. On October 24, three weeks into the war in Afghanistan, she became the first woman ever to fire a missile from a drone in combat.

Over the previous five weeks, Ghengis had flown Predators 3034 and 3037 over Afghanistan more than sixty-two hours, recording her flight time in a small diary she kept. She also noted specifics of her workouts at a local gym—“weights, sit-ups, X-trainer 30 min”—how far she jogged, and visits to Washington by her parents and friends. Unlike Swanson, who had flown many of the Hellfire tests at China Lake before the war, Ghengis launched her first missile at a target with people inside. She had no idea who they were. The mission commander simply told her to “take out that truck.” She and a sensor operator did, with a K-model Hellfire. Now her little diary entries recorded acts of war as well. On October 24 she wrote, “Notify Gold's Gym if here past 25 Nov (or if leaving)—7.5 miles—FLY 3.5—1 x K truck.”

As time went on, the former fighter-bomber pilot found it a strange form of combat. Dropping bombs in Kosovo, she'd known she might be killing people, but it was rare to spot people on the ground or see what happened after the bombs hit. Her view of the strikes she made from her F-15E came from brief glimpses of infrared video, but then she'd quickly fly away. Flying the Predator, Ghengis watched people for long periods of time—hours in some cases—and after firing missiles at them or directing other aircraft to attack them, she usually kept the drone loitering and saw the aftermath. She would have preferred to forget some of the scenes she witnessed. “I'd say it was more difficult in Predator,” she mused years later.