Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Clinton wanted to break the Serb blockade, and he was both shocked and chagrined to find out how little his military and intelligence agencies could tell him about what was actually happening on the ground around Sarajevo. Chronic cloud cover over Bosnia, a territory as large and mountainous as West Virginia, was making it impossible to track Serb artillery. Spy satellites and manned U-2 reconnaissance jets were proving inadequate to the task. Their still-photo cameras were unable to penetrate the clouds, U-2 flights were limited—in part to reduce the risk of their pilots being shot down—and orbiting satellites overflew the region only a few minutes a day. Serbs, moreover, knew when the satellites were going to pass overhead. They hid their weapons in barns and wooded valleys before the satellites arrived, brought them out and fired when no satellite was scheduled, and moved their big guns at night. Clearly, what the military and the CIA needed was a way to get cameras or other sensors below the clouds and conduct surveillance for long periods. The White House wanted ideas on how to do that—in a hurry.

  What about UAVs? was Woolsey’s first thought. He posed that question at the February 6 meeting in his CIA headquarters office; a couple of weeks later, he got answers from agency experts, including a woman he and others would later refer to only by the alias Jane. Described in a CIA-approved magazine article as a “young, talented, multiengine-rated pilot and engineer,” Jane, along with a team of experts, had been experimenting even before Woolsey’s arrival with flying drones at extended ranges by relaying their remote-control and sensor signals through a manned aircraft. As Jane briefed Woolsey on their work, the director saw a photo of a Gnat 750 and recognized it immediately. “Hey, that’s Abe’s design,” Woolsey said. Then he wondered, “Where is Abe these days?”

  To find out, Woolsey called their mutual friend Ira Kuhn, who explained that Abe now worked at General Atomics for Neal and Linden Blue. By happenstance, Woolsey also knew Linden Blue. They had met years earlier, at the Hudson Institute, a conservative Washington think tank where Linden was a board member and Woolsey a frequent conference participant. Woolsey’s next call was to Linden, who told him, “Jim, we’ll give you whatever you need. We’ll make it happen.”

  * * *

  Waiting for Karem when he arrived at the sun-bleached El Mirage airfield in March 1993 was Thomas A. Twetten, CIA deputy director for operations, chief of the spy agency’s clandestine branch. With Twetten was the chief of the air branch of the agency’s Special Activities Division—the covert action arm of Twetten’s directorate—and a couple of subordinates. By the time Karem arrived, the CIA party had already watched a Gnat 750 fly. Shielding his eyes against the desert sun as the drone passed by at what he guessed was two thousand feet in altitude, Twetten was shocked at how noisy the aircraft was. The Gnat’s engine buzzed like a lawn mower, and one in need of a tune-up at that.

  “This is a non-starter unless you can put a silencer on it,” Twetten told Karem. “I mean, that thing’s got to be really quiet.”

  Karem assured him that noise would be no problem because “this is just a temporary, developmental engine.”

  “Can this thing loiter for twenty-four hours?” Twetten asked.

  Karem assured him it could. On a full load of fuel, the Gnat 750 could stay in the air for as long as forty hours—depending on altitude, wind conditions, and weather—while carrying about 130 pounds of cameras, radars, or other sensors. The drone’s greatest intrinsic limitation was range, for the Gnat 750’s remote controls operated on the “C-band” radio frequency, whose characteristics required that the antennas of both the drone and its ground control station stay within “line of sight” of each other. A Gnat 750 could fly as far as 130 or even 150 miles from its ground station, but their antennas had to communicate on a direct path—no mountains or tall buildings in between, no flying over the horizon. The Gnat 750’s range might be improved, however, by relaying its signals through a manned aircraft to provide a line of sight to the drone at higher altitudes—exactly the concept that Jane and the CIA’s covert air operations branch already had been studying.

  As the two men finished their discussion, someone with a camera snapped a photo of Karem and Twetten in front of the General Atomics hangar, their faces turned toward the bright sun. Twetten, in slacks and a dress shirt, sleeves rolled up to the elbows of his crossed arms, is hatless and white-haired in the picture. Wearing sunglasses and smiling broadly, he looks down at the shorter Karem. Standing to Twetten’s left, Karem wears blue jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. A pair of sunglasses dangles from his left hand, and he squints directly at the camera. He smiles a bit wanly, perhaps because of the large, stiff baseball cap on his head. The cap bears the logo of General Atomics and seems a poor fit.

  * * *

  General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was as eager as Woolsey to provide President Clinton with better information about Serb artillery and other military movements in Bosnia. Returning to the Pentagon from a White House meeting on the subject in early 1993, the nation’s top military officer summoned the director for intelligence of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Rear Admiral Michael W. Cramer, and briefed him on the meeting. Powell gave Cramer two orders. First, go find a system of some kind that will “get us ground truth.” Second, go see Jim Woolsey and discuss why the United States needs better technology to track mobile weapons, whether in Bosnia or elsewhere. The same challenge had marred the military’s otherwise sterling performance two years earlier, during Operation Desert Storm, the six-week shooting war in which U.S. and allied troops evicted Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s invading army from Kuwait. The Iraqis were able to hide most of their Scud ballistic missiles from U.S. forces—despite concerted Air Force attempts to locate and strike them—by moving the tractor-trailer-size weapons under highway overpasses and into desert wadis or by camouflaging them. In all, the Iraqis fired eighty-eight Scuds into Israel, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, killing and wounding civilians and, in one single dumb-luck hit, dozens of U.S. troops.

  Cramer left Powell’s office, returned to his own, and called in Navy Commander Steve Jayjock, an intelligence officer the admiral knew had worked on classified UAV programs at DARPA in the 1980s. Cramer told Jayjock what Powell wanted and directed him to research what was possible. A week or two later, the two were standing at a whiteboard in Cramer’s office, jotting down ideas about the capabilities a drone would need in order to produce the intelligence Clinton wanted. How high and far must it fly? How long must it loiter? What sensors must it carry? How much could it cost without stirring up fatal resistance from the armed services or Congress, especially at a time of post–Cold War “peace dividend” cuts in defense spending? Above all, how could they quickly get the drone they needed from an acquisition bureaucracy that generally needed a dozen years or more to design, develop, test, and field any new type of airplane?

  The first thing Cramer and Jayjock agreed was that whatever they proposed had to be COTS, a government acronym (pronounced the way it looks) meaning “commercial, off-the-shelf.” In other words, the drone couldn’t just be a concept; it had to exist already, at least in basic form. Then they decided that, to preclude objections about the cost of losing such a drone to air defenses or accidents, the price per aircraft should be no more than $2.5 million—precisely the cost of each of the forty-two cruise missiles the Navy had fired a month earlier at a nuclear fabrication facility in Iraq after UN inspectors looking for weapons of mass destruction were obstructed by Iraqis.

  The next requirement Cramer and Jayjock scribbled on the whiteboard was that the drone must carry sensors that could detect what was happening on the ground—at night, through clouds, no matter the weather. In addition to a daylight camera, its payloads should include a temperature-sensitive infrared camera and a “synthetic aperture radar,” a computerized radar whose software uses the motion of the vehicle it rides on to electronically produce returns equivalent to that which would be transmitted by an antenna hundreds of yards in diameter.

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bsp; The wish list grew still longer. The two men decided that everything on the drone should be unclassified, thus allowing the imagery gathered to be shared widely within the military. This requirement would also prevent enemies from gaining secret knowledge if they recovered a UAV that crashed or was shot down. They also wanted the drone to be able to fly over a target that was as many as five hundred miles from the UAV’s ground control station and stay there for at least twenty-four hours. This meant it not only would have to remain airborne far longer than a day to get to the target and back, but also would have to be able to communicate with its ground station “beyond line-of-sight,” or over the horizon. To do that, both the craft and its ground station would have to be equipped with satellite communications antennas.

  When the brainstorming session finally ended, Cramer directed Jayjock to conduct an industry survey and find out what the half dozen or so companies that had built drones could offer to match their initial list of requirements. He told him to report back within six weeks.

  * * *

  The day Clinton named Woolsey to lead the CIA, Navy Captain Allan Rutherford was in his native California, visiting the San Diego offices of General Atomics during a “get-acquainted tour” of companies that made drones. Rutherford, an electrical engineer, had spent much of his twenty-two years in the Navy at sea and loved navigation, but of late his career had led him into shore billet jobs that involved buying weapons and equipment. By 1993 there was more electrical engineer than sailor in Rutherford’s appearance. He had an office worker’s tan, wavy black hair, and a trim black mustache, and he wore reading glasses. As a newly promoted four-striper, he now worked in the Defense Department’s UAV Joint Program Office, and it was his job to make sure Pentagon drones used as many common parts and systems as possible. Rutherford needed to know potential suppliers, which was what had brought him to General Atomics, where he met Tom Cassidy and Frank Pace. That day, in a loose-leaf calendar Rutherford used as a work diary, he noted only that General Atomics owned software that Leading Systems had created for the Amber.

  Three weeks after his drop-by at General Atomics, Rutherford got a call from Admiral Cramer, who had been advised by a retired Navy man to get Rutherford’s help on the UAV project. Soon Rutherford found himself meeting with Cramer and Jayjock in the admiral’s Pentagon office to talk about the drone that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs wanted. Cramer ticked through the wish list he and Jayjock had created, and then told Rutherford that he wanted him to manage the drone project. Cramer also gave him an ambitious target to hit: he wanted the new UAV fielded within two years. Given the usual pace of new product development at the Defense Department, this would require something akin to a miracle. At the very least, a lot of stars would have to align.

  * * *

  Another star presently did. On April 7 the Pentagon acquired a new undersecretary of defense for acquisitions and technology—a new “procurement czar,” in media argot. John M. Deutch—longtime professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, former senior Energy Department official, defense technology expert—had a résumé larded with degrees and honors and service on federal commissions. He also had a reputation for being imperious, and his new job gave him great, if not total, power to decide what the military would buy and how the purchases would be made.

  Among other convictions, Deutch believed that the armed forces needed far more drones. Given the miniaturization of computers and the proliferation of digital technologies, from cameras to satellite communication, Deutch thought the military was woefully behind the curve in developing and using unmanned aircraft. In his view, drones were a potentially lifesaving reconnaissance technology that would have been operational by now if the armed services weren’t so myopic or the acquisition system such a mire. A drone able to fly high, for example, could replace manned U-2 flights along North Korea’s border, doing the job at far less cost and at no risk of losing a pilot. Deutch realized that this notion was heresy in the Air Force, which loved its U-2s and their daring pilots, but he wasn’t about to let that stop him.

  As soon as he took office, Deutch began talking regularly with Jim Woolsey, whom he had known for years from his work in defense circles. When Woolsey discovered that Deutch shared his interest in UAVs, the CIA director enthusiastically described his initiative to have the spy agency buy Gnat 750s from General Atomics.

  That spring, Deutch called CIA operations director Twetten and invited him to his office for a chat. When Twetten arrived, he was surprised to find Deutch’s conference table ringed with three-star officers from each armed service. After discoursing on why UAVs were a “thing of the future,” Deutch declared that the military needed to think more about which service or office should be responsible for UAVs once they became numerous, as they inevitably would. Then he turned to Twetten, who was wondering why he was there, and said, “Tell these fellows what you’re up to in the drone program.”

  Perhaps out of habit, career clandestine officer Twetten kept his remarks brief and vague. “We’re working on a small drone that we think might be operational within a year or so,” Twetten told the officers. “At this point it looks like it’ll be primarily available for imagery, and if one of you has the need for it—well, it’s pretty low-tech, understand. We’re not talking about flying it over a sophisticated antiaircraft environment.” After uttering “low-tech,” Twetten could see the military men’s eyes glaze over. For the military, Twetten knew, “high-tech” was sexy, “low-tech” a yawner.

  Deutch was equally unsurprised by their reaction. He had hoped to stimulate their competitive juices by letting the officers know that the CIA was buying a new drone. But the new procurement czar knew he would have to push hard to change military attitudes about UAVs, for most aviators in the Air Force and Navy seemed to regard drones as a threat, the Marine Corps lacked enough money to develop them on its own, and most Army leaders viewed the technology warily after the billion-dollar snake bite the Aquila had inflicted on their service. But if there seemed to be no natural home for drones in the military, Deutch was determined to find one or create one. Somehow, he would find a way to shoehorn UAVs into the system.

  * * *

  Not long after Twetten’s visit to his office, Deutch invited the principal owner of General Atomics to pay him a visit. Neal Blue arrived assuming the new undersecretary of defense, being a former Energy Department official, might want to talk about a special nuclear reactor General Atomics had developed. Instead, Blue found half a dozen senior military officers in the room and Deutch wanting to discuss UAVs. Noting that the CIA was buying Gnat 750s from Blue’s company, Deutch talked a bit about why UAVs were a potentially “enabling technology” that the military needed as well. “You’ve got a capability of doing this,” Deutch said to Blue. “How soon can you deliver something?”

  “Six months” was what came out of Blue’s mouth. What went through his mind was Manna from heaven. Buying straw hats in winter was about to pay off once again.

  Soon Tom Cassidy was calling Steve Jayjock so often that Jayjock got a second phone installed on his Pentagon desk so he wouldn’t miss other calls. In the wake of Deutch’s conversations with Woolsey, Jayjock had been assigned to work with the CIA on its drone project and keep those in the Pentagon informed. The CIA and Pentagon drone initiatives weren’t being merged, but they were being coordinated.

  In April, Jayjock accompanied a CIA officer to Israel to see that country’s “Scout,” a mini-RPV in use since the early 1980s that was a possible alternative to the Gnat 750. Jayjock viewed the trip as a waste of time. Having become familiar with the predecessor Amber when he was assigned to DARPA years earlier, Jayjock was sure the CIA was right to buy the Gnat 750, and he thought the Pentagon should just give General Atomics a sole-source contract to provide the UAV that the Joint Chiefs wanted, too. General Atomics owned the software Karem had developed for his Amber, which had flown more hours without crashing than any drone ever built; in Jayjock’s view, Karem
’s software was the key to success. But Jayjock understood that for several reasons—including pressure from other companies and the Israelis to give them a chance at the contract—the Pentagon was going to have to hold a competition to choose its new drone.

  On May 17, Allan Rutherford outlined in his work diary what had been settled in the six weeks since Deutch’s arrival at the Pentagon. The CIA would take five million dollars from other agency programs to buy two Gnat 750s from General Atomics and fly them over Bosnia as an “operational demonstration.” What the CIA learned would be shared with Rutherford’s office, which would put together a separate program to get the military a similar but better drone, one more rugged than the Gnat 750, equipped to operate “beyond line-of-sight” via satellite, and able to meet the other basic requirements Cramer, Jayjock, and Rutherford had come up with. The CIA would deploy the Gnat 750s first because Woolsey had more discretion to shift money within his budget than the military did. Money for the Pentagon’s drone would have to be obtained through regular channels: by creating a “program of record” and getting Congress to authorize and appropriate funds for it.

  Things were moving quickly. Rutherford didn’t yet have a drone ready for Bosnia, but stars were aligning.

  * * *

  The Pentagon project gained yet more momentum on July 12, 1993, when Deutch signed a two-page memo that Rutherford had drafted weeks earlier titled “Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Program.” The first page directed Rutherford’s office to “expeditiously contract for an endurance UAV” to provide “urgently needed, critical, worldwide, releasable near real time intelligence information on mobile targets.” The second page listed the drone’s technical requirements, and they were nearly identical to those Cramer and Jayjock had sketched out on a whiteboard earlier in the year. Deutch’s memo also imposed a tough deadline: the drone must make its first flight within six months of a contract being awarded.