Predator

by Richard Whittle

  By 1958, Neal and Linden, ages twenty-three and twenty-two respectively, had graduated from Yale and become the principal owners of a three-thousand-acre cacao and banana plantation carved out of the jungle along Nicaragua’s northeast coast. The Somoza family owned 17 percent of the venture, which was financed by the Nicaraguan Development Bank. Before long, the plantation had five hundred employees, its own airstrip, and a house designed by Neal that the Blue brothers shared. They often flew a plane across the country to Managua, where they rented another house, this one up in the cool hills outside the capital, and socialized with Tachito and, more often, his brother Luis. The Blues also had a standing invitation to the presidential palace, and though seeing Luis could require waiting for hours in an ornate anteroom, over the next couple of years they found many reasons to stay in close touch with both the Somoza brothers.

  * * *

  On March 24, 1961, Neal passed some anxious hours waiting in the tower of Managua’s airport, trying to get word over air traffic control radio of Linden, who was overdue on a return trip from the United States. To save a stop for fuel and a day’s transit time, Linden had planned to fly in the brothers’ Beechcraft Twin Bonanza from Key West to Nicaragua via Cuba, using an international airway over the island nation’s capital, Havana. Tensions between the United States and Cuba were running high: two years earlier, Cuba’s pro-U.S. dictator had been overthrown in a revolution led by belligerent, blustery Fidel Castro, and the country had immediately become a close ally of the Soviet Union. As Castro suspected, the CIA was now trying to help Cuban exiles overthrow his Communist regime; years later, it would be revealed that the CIA was also plotting to assassinate the island nation’s new leader.

  Linden was well aware that he’d chosen a touchy moment to be flying through Cuba’s air space. “There were some clouds I didn’t want to get into,” he recalled years later. “I was talking to air traffic control Havana. As I approached the coast, I asked them for a change in altitude. They said, ‘Stand by,’ and then when they came back on, they said, ‘Your flight over the international airway has been cancelled. You’re to land in Havana.’ And I said, ‘Well, I don’t really want to do that. I think I’ll return to Key West.’ And they said, ‘No, you’re going into Havana, and we have two jets being vectored on you to make sure that you do.’”

  As Linden dutifully descended, he assured a passenger he had with him, Gerber baby food executive Don Swenson, that the Cubans would probably search the plane for contraband and, finding none, let them go. All they had aboard was a banana puree machine the Blues had bought as part of a proposal to sell pureed bananas to Gerber for baby food. Swenson had been on his way to Mexico City when Linden persuaded him to fly to Nicaragua with him for the weekend to see the brothers’ plantation and show workers there how to use the puree machine.

  When their plane came to a stop on the tarmac in Havana, Linden instantly saw that he had been naïve to assume their stay would be brief. Bearded men carrying submachine guns rushed to surround the plane, and Linden and Swenson were whisked to the government’s intelligence headquarters for an interrogation that lasted until eleven o’clock that night. The interrogator had them watch as he signed a transcript, adding beneath his signature with a flourish, “Death to the invaders!” Then the two men were taken down a hallway; as a door opened, they felt a blast of heat on their faces before they were shoved into a cramped, smelly room containing nearly forty sweat-soaked prisoners. All were Cubans.

  For the next twelve days, the two Americans were held by the government and given no opportunity to communicate with anyone. Every time the door opened, Linden tensed, waiting for his name to be called and wondering if hearing it would mean he was on his way to freedom or to execution. He also wondered if anyone at home knew where he was.

  They did—and his parents were working feverishly to get him and Don Swenson freed. Their friend U.S. Senator Gordon Allott, a Colorado Republican, made calls to the State Department and elsewhere on their behalf, trying to work behind the scenes. Another friend, Peter Dominick, a Republican serving his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives that year, counseled them to make Linden’s captivity public and speak about it as loudly as possible so the Cubans couldn’t deny they were holding him. After several days of intense negotiations, Cuba finally released the two Americans. A photograph accompanying an April 6 New York Times story about tensions with Cuba showed Swenson and Linden after their arrival in Miami on a Pan Am flight, both looking gaunt and a bit in shock. Linden also looked a little angry, and for good reason: as he and Swenson were being marched under guard to the airliner in Havana, Linden had seen his Beechcraft across the ramp. When he protested that he wanted to fly his own plane home, he felt the business end of a submachine gun in his ribs. “¡Camine!” was the reply. “Walk!”

  Thirteen days after Linden and Swenson were released, CIA-backed exiles invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, staging their operation from the northeast coast of Nicaragua. For reasons that included President John F. Kennedy cancelling a key air strike the exiles had planned to mount on Castro’s air force using old World War II B-26 bombers provided by the CIA, the invaders were repulsed, and nearly all 1,511 of them killed. Linden was convinced he and Swenson had narrowly escaped death themselves, for as he later learned most of their fellow prisoners were taken out and shot after the invasion. Had he and Swenson been held only a little longer, their captors might well have assumed that the two Americans they had captured flying over Cuba two weeks before the invasion were complicit and executed them, too.

  The abrupt and frightening confinement by Cuban authorities was a formative experience for Linden. Suddenly, through no misdeed of his own, he had lost his freedom to the whim of a regime with the absolute power to decide whether he lived or died, a regime that might have killed him just on the suspicion—false, he insisted years later—that he was in league with the CIA and Castro’s enemies. Linden and Neal Blue had always been anticommunists; now they were anticommunists with a grievance.

  The Blues left Nicaragua the next year. The brothers had joined Air Force ROTC while in college, and now the Air Force was demanding that they serve the three years they had signed up for. Commissioned second lieutenants upon graduation from Yale, they had managed to delay their service by enrolling at an agricultural university in Managua and thereby receiving graduate student deferments. By 1962, though, they could put off their obligation no longer. Besides, it was clear by now that they weren’t going to get rich growing cacao and bananas. Before returning to the United States, they left the plantation to the Nicaraguan Development Bank and the Somozas.

  Linden reported for duty first; Neal followed six months later. Though they were avid fliers—Neal had once aimed to fly fighter planes—neither signed up to become an Air Force pilot. That would have meant extending their service beyond three years, which wasn’t part of their plan. They were going to be entrepreneurs.

  In 1963, the year after the Blues left Nicaragua, a leftist rebel movement funded by Cuba and the Soviet Union began working to overthrow the Somozas. Taking their name from 1920s rebel leader Augusto César Sandino, the insurgents called themselves the Sandinista National Liberation Front, or more simply Sandinistas. As the years went on, the Blue brothers watched the rise of the Sandinistas with much interest and concern—and they never forgot their friends in Nicaragua.

  * * *

  Two decades after leaving Nicaragua, Neal and Linden Blue were the owners of Cordillera Corporation, a private Denver company whose substantial holdings included local commercial real estate, construction businesses and ranches, oil and gas interests in Canada, aviation facilities, and 880 acres of the valley at Telluride, the Colorado ski resort—land they bought in 1983, to much local consternation, for a mere six million dollars. Neal Blue, the driving force in their investment company, had a reputation for bare-knuckle bargaining and hard-nosed tactics that would result in more than one lawsuit against the Blues and their companies o
ver the years. Linden, widely regarded as the kinder and gentler of the two, was his older brother’s partner but had also served a term on the Denver city council in the early 1970s, attended Harvard Business School, and held top jobs at Gates Learjet Corporation and Beech Aircraft Corporation, where in 1982 he became president and chief executive officer. Along the way, Linden became an expert in, and ardent advocate of, using advanced composite materials such as carbon epoxy—a new technology in those days—to build aircraft.

  Politically, the Blue brothers were dedicated to helping President Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, which in the early 1980s appeared increasingly likely to get hot. The Soviet Union and its chief allies in Latin America, Castro and the Sandinistas, had been growing bellicose in recent years, a factor that in 1980 helped Republican Reagan make Democrat Jimmy Carter a one-term president. The year before, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, Castro had celebrated his twentieth year in power, and the Sandinistas had forced Neal and Linden Blue’s former business partner—and more recently dictator in his own right—Anastasio Somoza Debayle to flee Nicaragua. Somoza’s overthrow was hastened by international outrage over human rights violations by his National Guard, whose atrocities were brought into clear focus when one of its soldiers was filmed murdering American TV newsman Bill Stewart in cold blood on June 20, 1979. President Carter refused to let Somoza settle in the United States; just over a year later, the exiled caudillo was assassinated in spectacular fashion in Asunción, Paraguay. Somoza died in a hail of bazooka and machine-gun fire that shredded him and his yellow Mercedes as it drove by a house that hid his ambushers.

  Three years after Somoza’s assassination, the CIA began supporting Nicaraguan rebels whose goal was to overthrow the Sandinistas, who had established a dictatorship of their own, leftist brand. The CIA-backed insurgents, mostly ex–National Guardsmen, became known as the Contras, from counterrevolutionaries. On September 1, 1983, the same year the Contras were organized, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a South Korean airliner over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew on board. An outraged President Reagan went on national television to denounce the Soviets for the plane’s downing and to announce stiff sanctions against Moscow. A couple of weeks later, the White House further announced that, to help pilots avoid Soviet airspace, the president would allow all nations free use of a revolutionary new constellation of navigation satellites the U.S. military was launching.

  The still-incomplete array would consist of twenty-four satellites circling the earth every twelve hours in six orbital planes while emitting continuous radio signals. Read by the right kind of receiver, these radio signals would tell users their location, velocity, and the time of day with unprecedented precision. For the first time in history, humans or machines would be able to know where they were within a few yards, how fast they were traveling down to fractions of a mile per hour, and what time it was within a millionth of a second. Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System was the name of this new technology; initially referred to by the acronym NAVSTAR, it later became known as GPS.

  Interested in technology since he was a youngster, and familiar since his Blue Bird days with the difficulties of aerial navigation, Neal Blue found his imagination fired by the coming availability of GPS. He began following the system’s development avidly, and when he heard of a Silicon Valley company named Trimble Navigation Ltd. that was already making products based on GPS applications, he flew to California to meet the firm’s founder. He came back with a new idea: theoretically, an unmanned aircraft equipped with a GPS receiver connected to an autopilot could be flown with great accuracy to any point on the globe that its aerodynamics and fuel capacity would enable it to reach. If such a drone also had a couple of hundred pounds of TNT in its nose, and was built cheaply enough, it could be a poor man’s cruise missile.

  Neal had been following the turmoil in Nicaragua closely, and now it occurred to him that the Contras—or a covert ally of theirs, perhaps—might use a weaponized drone to destroy Managua’s military aviation fuel supplies and thereby ground a fleet of attack helicopters the Soviets had given the Sandinistas in 1984. The heavily armed Soviet choppers had been chewing up the CIA-backed Contras. Well aware of the domestic and international pressure to stop supporting the Contras, Neal reasoned that the GPS-guided flying bombs might be just the covert weapon the Reagan administration needed. “You could launch them from behind the line of sight, so you would have total deniability,” Neal explained some years later.

  Neal also believed that if the GPS-guided drones were inexpensive enough, the U.S. military could use them to stop the swarms of Soviet tanks that analysts expected to pour through the Fulda Gap, lowlands on the border between West and East Germany, if Moscow decided to invade Western Europe. The risk of a Soviet invasion of West Germany had preoccupied Neal for a long time, partly because his wife was an East German by birth. Anne Prause’s father had smuggled his family out of the Communist German Democratic Republic before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. For Neal, meeting Anne was one of the highlights of the Yale Daily News Asian Expedition—she had been a stewardess on his Pan Am flight to Europe—and they married in 1962. Over the years, they had talked a lot about the need to stop the Communists, and about the horrors of indiscriminate Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, which Anne and her family had witnessed. The precision of GPS-guided drones, Neal reasoned, could prevent such tragedies.

  By the early 1980s, then, Neal Blue felt certain he had perceived the need for a unique new weapon. Brash as ever, he concluded that he and his brother, Linden, should look for the right opportunity to add the development of an armed, inexpensive, GPS-guided drone to their eclectic business portfolio.

  * * *

  One day in the summer of 1985, Neal read a report in the Wall Street Journal that Chevron Corporation, which the previous year had bought Gulf Oil for $13.3 billion in a deal financed largely by borrowing, was “circulating an informational packet among prospective buyers ‘identifying assets that might be for sale.’” Among the former Gulf properties Chevron wanted to spin off was GA Technologies Inc., a nuclear energy and defense research company in La Jolla, California, a palmy suburb of San Diego where Neal happened to own a house already. Neal and Linden’s company, Cordillera Corporation, had just finished its annual planning meeting, and afterward Neal had decided that Cordillera should shift 50 percent of its business portfolio into high-technology products and companies. When Neal heard about GA Technologies, he thought, My God, this fits perfectly.

  Founded in 1955, GA Technologies was originally General Atomic, a division of nuclear submarine builder General Dynamics Corporation formed to explore peaceful uses of atomic energy. Renamed after it was acquired by Gulf, GA Technologies now had a staff of fifteen hundred—many of them scientists and engineers—and revenue of $170 million in fiscal year 1984. The company’s businesses included building nuclear research reactors, experimenting with nuclear fusion, and doing research under Pentagon contracts for President Reagan’s new Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” program to create exotic ground- and space-based weapons able to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. Neal had been interested in nuclear power since 1947, when experts first began saying that atomic energy would one day provide a clean form of power too cheap to measure, and GA Technologies was just the sort of high-tech enterprise he wanted to own.

  In August 1986, the Wall Street Journal reported that Denver businessmen Neal and Linden Blue were buying GA Technologies for “more than $50 million.” (The price was closer to $55 million, Neal revealed years later, with more than $20 million in cash from their Canadian oil and gas holdings going into the purchase; the rest was borrowed.) GA Technologies had expanded into defense work earlier in the 1980s, when its president was Harold Agnew, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Now Neal Blue decided to expand the company’s defense work into an entirely different undertaking: unmanned aircraft.<
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  * * *

  As his new employees pondered how to get into the drone business, Blue found someone to lead the way, an aviator who knew a lot not only about airplanes but also about the military, the Pentagon, and Congress. He also happened to be looking for a job.

  Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., fifty-four years old when a banker friend introduced him to Neal, was a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who had been one of that service’s hottest fighter pilots for three decades. Born and raised in the Bronx, big in every dimension, Cassidy was brassy and gruff, and he could cuss like the sailor he had been his entire adult life. He could also employ Irish altar boy charm when it suited him. He loved to fly, and he liked to say he enjoyed it because it was complicated, which made it satisfying, and you could do it sitting down. A “good stick” in the cockpit, Cassidy left college after two years to become a naval aviation cadet, winning his wings in 1953 and finishing his academic degree later.

  Cassidy started out in propeller-driven World War II F6F Hellcats and went on to pilot every type of jet fighter the Navy possessed and several Air Force planes to boot, flying all over the world. During the Vietnam War, when better-turning Russian-built MiG fighters were besting American pilots in aerial duels, Cassidy was selected to fly MiG-17s and MiG-21s, acquired through third-party nations, in secret mock dogfights conducted to develop new U.S. tactics. He later commanded Miramar Naval Air Station, home of the famous Navy Fighter Weapons School just outside San Diego known as “Top Gun.” When Hollywood director Tony Scott came to Miramar to film the eponymous 1986 hit movie starring Tom Cruise, Cassidy not only played himself in a cameo as base commander, but also flew an F-5 Tiger the script called the “black MiG-28.”