Predator (46 page)

But not all drones were being built for military purposes. If wars and antiterrorist operations had fomented the drone revolution, by a decade after the armed Predator's debut something far larger was happening. Enabled by ever more accessible and affordable component technologies, a new generation of mini-drones quickly began gaining popularity. And just as it transformed the military and the CIA, the drone revolution also promises to reshape society, from the way our laws are enforced and how much privacy we enjoy, to the way our food is grown, our news is gathered, and our goods and services are bought, sold, and delivered. Law enforcement, wildfire management, precision agriculture, news and entertainment media, search and rescue, environmental research, disaster response—the list of potential uses for drones providing a bird's-eye view of the world is nearly inexhaustible, the possibilities as boundless as the human imagination. For the moment, Federal Aviation Administration regulations limit the use of unmanned aircraft to hobbyists and government and academic entities granted a special certificate of authorization by the FAA. Commercial use of drones is banned. But in time those rules will surely change: a revolution in the civilian use of drones seems inevitable.

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As with many revolutions, technological as well as political, the history of this one was written partly in blood, and targeted killings using drone strikes raised a set of profound moral, legal, political, and practical questions. About a year after such strikes began, the world beyond the military began waking up to the existence of the armed Predator and its capabilities. During the early months of the war in Afghanistan, Predator strikes went largely unnoticed, but when similar attacks were launched outside the war zone, the response changed. On November 3, 2002, a Hellfire strike on an SUV in Yemen made major news. Killed, along with five others, was Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, an Al Qaeda leader partly responsible for the bombing of the USS
Cole
. Over the years that followed, the CIA's use of drones to kill people identified as terrorists would become one of the Agency's least secret covert programs ever.

The CIA itself refused to acknowledge the practice publicly, so exact numbers are impossible to come by, but the frequency of such strikes clearly grew after Al Qaeda leaders chased out of Afghanistan took refuge in lawless areas of Pakistan and Yemen. The New America Foundation, a think tank that began using open media and what it called “U.S. sources” to track drone strikes beginning in 2004, estimated that the CIA conducted about 50 strikes in Yemen and Pakistan under President George W. Bush and more than 400 during President Barack Obama's first term, launching 122 in 2010 alone. As many as thirty-three hundred Al Qaeda, Taliban, and other militants were killed as a result, the foundation estimated, including more than fifty senior terrorist leaders.

Initially, the CIA drone strikes raised little controversy in the United States, and public opinion polls showed that most Americans supported them. The reaction overseas was very different. Critics contended that drone strikes often killed innocent civilians, an allegation that U.S. officials denied. After a decade of tracking, the New America Foundation reported that unintended casualties from drone strikes had steadily declined over the years, but reliable numbers were unavailable. Pakistanis and Yemenis were angered by what they viewed as a violation of their national sovereignty, though their governments had agreed to many if not all the strikes, and had even requested some. The thought that unseen machines in the sky might rain down death at any moment clearly made many people in those countries anxious. Some argued that outrage over drone strikes was a source of recruitment for Al Qaeda.

The Obama administration defended targeted killings as necessary to prevent further attacks by Al Qaeda and its allies. “Very frankly, it's the only game in town in terms of confronting or trying to disrupt the Al Qaeda leadership,” CIA Director Leon Panetta said in May 2009. But over the next couple of years, the debate over the legality and morality of drone strikes heated up and came home.

In 2010 the UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary Executions denounced U.S. drone strikes and the secrecy surrounding their conduct as an “ill-defined license to kill without accountability.” More Americans expressed misgivings the following year after a drone strike in Yemen killed U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamic militant said to have aided and abetted Al Qaeda operations, including attempts to explode bombs in airliners in flight. Critics questioned whether it was legal to kill a U.S. citizen in places such as Yemen, which was not at war with the United States, and without affording the person his or her constitutional rights.

When President Obama finally addressed the issue publicly, in a speech at the National Defense University, in Washington, D.C., on May 23, 2013, he acknowledged the legitimacy of the debate, saying, “This new technology raises profound questions—about who is targeted, and why; about civilian casualties, and the risk of creating new enemies; about the legality of such strikes under U.S. and international law; about accountability and morality.” But he also defended the tactic, saying drone strikes were legal under America's “legitimate claim of self-defense” against Al Qaeda and other terrorists and were being conducted under “clear guidelines, oversight and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance that I signed yesterday.” The new guidance on “Use of Force in Counterterrorism Operations” stipulated, among other things, that “lethal force” (drones strikes) would be used only when there was no alternative means of preventing a terrorist posing a “continuing, imminent threat” to “U.S. persons” and when there was a “near certainty” that no “non-combatants” would be injured or killed. The process used to reach those conclusions, however, remains cloaked in government secrecy.

In the same speech, Obama declared that lethal force was necessary against terrorists because capturing them was often impractical, risked casualties among U.S. forces, and posed a greater risk to innocent bystanders than drone strikes did. “Conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and are likely to cause more civilian casualties and more local outrage,” he noted. “By narrowly targeting our action against those who want to kill us and not the people they hide among, we are choosing the course of action least likely to result in the loss of innocent life.”

The debate is far from settled, but even CIA veterans are worried that the practice of conducting drone strikes to kill terrorists has helped transform the Agency from an intelligence service into a paramilitary organization—a concern that echoes former director George Tenet's reluctance before 9/11 to use a military weapon such as the armed Predator. There is also growing sentiment in favor of returning all authority to “pull the trigger” back to where Tenet originally felt it belonged: at the Pentagon. The state of emergency that followed 9/11, after all, is over. Whether the CIA will return to its original purpose in the age of global terrorism, though, is another open question.

Just over a decade into the drone revolution, many questions remain. One is how much this new technology will really change things in the end. Will armed drones play important roles in future wars, or were the Predator and Reaper so prominent in Afghanistan and Iraq because they were used against enemies who lacked air defenses? Clearly the answer will depend on the nature of the war, the strength of the opponent, and the capabilities of future drones.

Will civilian drones someday crowd the skies, becoming reliable enough not just to deliver goods but also to carry passengers? Perhaps, though the limits of line-of-sight remote control and the expense of satellite data links seem to argue against the prospect of pizza and book delivery by quadcopter. Meanwhile, the fallibility of technology argues against the prospect of passengers entrusting their fate to an aircraft with no pilot on board.

Only two things about the drone revolution seem certain. First, the new UAV technology is here to stay. Second, society needs to figure out how to cope with its implications. When automobiles replaced horses, traffic laws and stoplights and roads were needed. When powered flight was invented, new laws and rules and airports and agencies to govern aviation had to be created. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a technology developed for military purposes began proliferating rapidly, and its implications are still being recognized. Drone technology has already changed the way people die; one day it may change the way people live.

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Purely by coincidence, the Air Force created its third Predator unit four days after the firefight at Roberts Ridge, and on May 29, 2002, a detachment from the new 17th Reconnaissance Squadron took over at the Trailer Park on the CIA campus. The Air Combat Command Expeditionary Air Intelligence Squadron, which since its creation the previous fall had been led by Colonel Ed Boyle and Major Mark Cooter, was deactivated. With the armed Predator's utility proven, the regular Air Force, under General John Jumper, was preparing to expand its use of the UAV that so many had once disdained.

That June, Cooter was transferred to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, where he would put his special Predator experience to work. The Air Force had decided to establish new facilities at Nellis from which regular crews could fly armed Predators almost anywhere in the world, whether on military or CIA missions. They would do so using the remote split operations satellite communications architecture designed by Big Safari consultant Werner less than a year earlier.

Within three more years, the Air Force would also implement Werner's once-rejected grander vision of flying Predators overseas from brick-and-mortar buildings rather than faux freight containers. In 2005, global Predator operations moved to just such a facility at Indian Springs Auxiliary Airfield, which was renamed Creech Air Force Base. And the structure at Creech was only the first Predator ground control station with indoor plumbing: within half a dozen more years, variations on that facility were being used to fly Predators and Reapers overseas from nearly a dozen other bases in the United States as well. Now Predator and Reaper operators could wage war by day or night and go home to their families after their shift was done, an even stranger way to wage war than the Trailer Park imposed on the Wildfire team.

Colonel Ed Boyle left the Trailer Park before the 17th RS detachment took over there. On April 1, 2002, Boyle put in his retirement papers and moved back to Langley Air Force Base, Virginia, to serve out the last months of his twenty-eight-year career. By the time he left the CIA operation, one entire wall of the double-wide was filled with freeze-frames of Predator Hellfire shots. Between the first strike on Mullah Omar's security detail on the opening night of the war in Afghanistan and the time Boyle departed, the team had fired fifty-four Hellfires. Boyle could remember only two missiles that missed their targets, both for mechanical reasons.

One retired general acknowledged years later that mistakes were made in choosing the Predator's targets, but responsibility for those mistakes and for issuing orders to fire rested with CIA officials and senior military officers elsewhere, not with the Wildfire team. “Any tall guy in a white jacket became a high probability of being Osama bin Laden, and we clearly struck a bunch of vehicles and groups of people that we thought could be and turned out not to be,” this former general said. “When you're really searching for something desperately, you can believe—you begin to build a case for what you think you have. The sophistication of our intelligence analysis today is way better than it was in 2001, but even today we've seen Predator strikes that probably didn't get who we thought we were getting. You can get captured by the eye candy and lose track of [the fact that] the real mission is to have a very high degree of certainty that what you're about to kill is a valid target and the real person you're trying to get.”

The Wildfire team never earned the right to drink the bottle of Scotch placed on the shelf in the double-wide by CIA Director George Tenet for the day the Predator finally “got him.” By the time Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 2, 2011, the Trailer Park had been dismantled and the Scotch had disappeared, perhaps lost in the move to Nevada. But from time to time, beginning shortly after bin Laden's death, members of the Wildfire team and those in the Air Force, the CIA, or private companies who commanded or worked with the Hellfire Predator's initial operators got together for reunions, and someone nearly always brought along a bottle of Scotch to pass around. For many, the Predator missions were the highlight of their careers. The missiles they launched were not targeted killings; they were military operations undertaken on the orders of their commander in chief and in response to heinous acts of terrorism that killed nearly three thousand innocent Americans.

A number of the initial cadre who armed and used the Predator continued to work on or with the drone and its derivatives, whether as part of their continuing Air Force careers or after retiring from the service. By 2014, for example, nearly two decades after the Air Force chief of staff sent him to look into Predator operations in Hungary, Snake Clark was still the drone's promoter and protector in the Pentagon.

Others had moved on. Bill Grimes retired in December 2002, and when he wasn't fishing or hunting he wrote a history of Big Safari that was published in 2013.

Mark Cooter finished his Air Force career in 2013 as a colonel, a rank Ginger Wallace also achieved. Besides her role in the Summer Project and Trailer Park operations, Wallace made a bit of military history about a decade later. After the Obama administration's repeal in 2011 of the military's controversial Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy on homosexuality, she came out as a lesbian. Wallace had her partner pin on her silver eagles when Wallace became a colonel that December, and in January 2012 she sat in First Lady Michelle Obama's box at the president's State of the Union address to Congress, chosen to represent all gay and lesbian service members and veterans.