Yet he couldn’t bring himself to retire. Ten years after the Frontier Systems sale, Karem was still at it, working in a small industrial building in Lake Forest, California, where he and the thirteen employees of Karem Aircraft Inc. were attempting to make his newest dream a reality. This time Karem wanted to build a manned aircraft he called the Aerotrain. A tiltrotor, the craft would swivel the rotors on its wings upward to take off like a helicopter, and forward to fly like an airplane. The Aerotrain would be the size of a Boeing 737 jetliner and use Karem’s patented optimum-speed rotor design. By eliminating the 737’s need for runways, Karem was sure his tiltrotor would revolutionize both regional air travel and military operations. Just like the pioneers of the early twentieth century who led the way into the air—people such as Glenn Curtiss, Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop, and Igor Sikorsky—the boy from Baghdad still wanted to change the world.
* * *
On August 31, 1994, two months after the Predator’s first flight, and after the prototype had been flown enough to prove itself airworthy, General Atomics staged an official rollout at El Mirage.
“General Atomics said its new Predator unmanned aerial vehicle had a successful 45-minute demonstration flight yesterday at the company’s El Mirage test facility,” the San Diego Union-Tribune reported the following morning. “The craft, one of 10 on order from the Pentagon, performed various maneuvers and collected reconnaissance photos for an audience of about 200 people, the company said.”
The audience of two hundred consisted of General Atomics employees, government officials, and invited guests, including spouses and children. Seated in rows of folding chairs under a large white canopy to shield them from the piercing desert sun, they watched the Predator perform flawlessly. Then they heard speeches by Tom Cassidy, Allan Rutherford, and Congressman Jerry Lewis, who praised the new drone as a sensible use of scarce defense dollars. Cassidy and Rutherford were pleased to see Lewis there. Given the rocky history of UAVs, both knew they would need all the help they could get to sell the military on the Predator.
After the successful rollout at El Mirage, Rutherford started selling. He carefully cultivated reporters he felt he could trust—primarily at Aviation Week but also elsewhere—to generate stories about the Predator. Others were also encouraging favorable coverage of the program, and that fall the campaign to sell the Predator enjoyed its biggest payoff so far. Tom Brokaw, host of NBC’s Nightly News, aired a report on what the anchorman described as a new “high-tech spy plane.” In his introduction to a piece about the Predator by reporter Ed Rabel, Brokaw said, “It looks like a toy but is being called a breakthrough.”
One day soon, that description would be proven accurate beyond any doubt.
5
PREDATOR’S PROGRESS
The shiny wood table was V-shaped, long on both sides, and situated so that the person seated at its apex faced a large screen on the opposite wall. Designed for video teleconferences, the theater-size room was part of what is purportedly one of the most secure facilities in the world: a war room complex in the bowels of the Pentagon called the National Military Command Center. Early on the morning of January 11, 1995, military officers of junior rank, mostly lieutenants and captains, began filtering in, some stifling yawns, some with coffee cups in hand, and took seats at the wide end of the massive table. Soon they were joined by majors, lieutenant colonels, and on up the ranks, until the seat at the head of the table was the only one unoccupied. Then that seat was taken by Army Major General Patrick M. Hughes, who six months earlier had replaced Rear Admiral Michael W. Cramer as director of intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, or, in military parlance, the J-2.
Moments after Hughes took his seat, the screen on the opposite wall came alive, silently showing a five-ton Army truck from above, in living color, as it slowly rolled down a paved road cut through the prickly scrub brush and parched sand of Fort Huachuca, a dusty, desolate Army base located in the southeast corner of Arizona. Headquarters of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, Fort Huachuca was fifteen miles north of the Mexican border, in Cochise County, named for the Apache war chief and home to Tombstone, where the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral played out between the Earps and the Clantons and their allies in 1881. Fort Huachuca was also the location chosen for initial testing of the Predator, partly because drones could be flown in restricted military airspace without Federal Aviation Administration permission.
Military test drives were the next stage of the Predator’s development, and the test driving was being done by a small detachment of troops from the Army’s Military Intelligence Battalion (Low Intensity), the MI BN LI, as the Army abbreviated the unit’s name. The commander of the MI BN LI—insiders dropped the N and called it the Mibli, pronounced “MIB-lee”—had jumped at the chance to help Navy Captain Allan Rutherford’s office with the Predator. Based in Orlando, Florida, the Mibli had been formed in the 1980s to provide reconnaissance over Central America by flying small propeller planes equipped with sensors in sometimes dangerous low-level missions. With the Cold War over and democracy breaking out in Central America, the battalion was shrinking—whole companies were disbanding as their planes grew obsolete—and its commanders were eager for new missions to help the unit survive. Some Mibli pilots turned up their noses at the idea of flying a UAV, but volunteers were learning to operate the Predator from the safety of its ground control station, where small teams of soldiers flew the drone, manipulated its cameras, and sat at work stations equipped with computers and other equipment needed to record and analyze the UAV’s video.
On this January morning, Mibli soldiers were also driving the truck the Predator’s camera was following, for the benefit of Major General Hughes and the rest of the Pentagon audience. Mibli troops would also play roles as “enemy” troops in scenarios performed to demonstrate for the new J-2 what the drone could do. Four years earlier, during the 1991 Gulf War, so-called gun camera videotape, which showed precision strikes on Iraqi tanks, bridges, and other targets by manned aircraft dropping laser-guided bombs, had been a staple of military news briefings, helping sell the allied campaign to astonished television viewers. More recently, the captivating power of aerial video shown live had been demonstrated on June 17, 1994, two weeks before the Predator’s first flight, when a fleet of TV news helicopters equipped with cameras followed a white Ford Bronco around Los Angeles for five hours. Former pro football star and accused double murderer O. J. Simpson was a passenger in the Bronco, whose driver led authorities on a low-speed chase while Simpson decided between surrender and suicide, mesmerizing a national TV audience. Between Gulf War gun cameras and Simpson’s dramatic ride, CNN and other networks were now hooked on aerial video. For the military, though, using live aerial video was something exotic and entirely new—especially live aerial video shot from a drone. General Hughes wanted to experience it.
As the Predator’s camera tailed the green Army truck around Fort Huachuca, Predator manager Rutherford stood up in the Pentagon war room and welcomed the J-2, taking care not to get cute. By nature, Rutherford was an ebullient sort, but he knew that Hughes had a reputation for being a no-nonsense, “show-me” intelligence officer who was not fond of irony, sarcasm, or cynicism in a briefing. After crisply explaining how the Predator had come about, why this was the first Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration, and what that meant, Rutherford introduced his deputy, civilian Jay Stratakes, a career Naval Air Systems Command aeronautical engineer. As the video rolled on, Stratakes called up on a separate screen the first of a dozen or so slides to go with a detailed briefing on what the Pentagon called the Medium Altitude Endurance UAV Predator. His title slide bore a logo that Stratakes had devised and drawn himself, an emblem (later discarded for fear of copyright violation) depicting the insect-faced, human-hunting alien title character in the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger thriller Predator.
As Stratakes narrated slides showing the new Predator drone’s development schedule and describing its sensors, ground co
ntrol station, and other equipment in detail, the video from Fort Huachuca rolled on. During the presentation, some in the war room couldn’t resist commenting on the video feed, especially after one officer wondered aloud, “What was that vehicle? I wish we could see that again,” at which point the drone’s camera slewed back and zoomed in for a closer look. “It’s like they’re reading our minds,” someone muttered. Only then did Rutherford explain, a bit sheepishly, that the operators in the GCS in Arizona could hear what those in the war room audience were saying, and even see them sitting at the V-shaped table—not by design, but because the Predator’s video was being piped into the room through the National Military Command Center’s video teleconferencing system. No one working in the GCS intended to eavesdrop; the two-way sound and video was simply a by-product of the jury-rigged method by which the Predator’s imagery was entering the Pentagon.
However the moving pictures were reaching them, the officers in the war room seemed astounded by what they were watching. For decades, photo reconnaissance had consisted solely of black-and-white still shots taken by manned aircraft—usually flying fast and at either low or high altitude to avoid getting shot down—or by satellites orbiting the earth and thus able to make only brief passes over target areas. In either case, the still photos had to be developed on the ground, then examined and analyzed by trained imagery analysts to produce so-called actionable intelligence. Previously that work required at least several hours; often it took days. Now, all of a sudden, a general at the Pentagon was watching live video of things happening on the ground in Arizona, more than two thousand miles away; if he wanted to, he could even talk to the crew flying the plane shooting the imagery. The Gnat 750’s video from Bosnia had appeared live on a tiny screen at CIA headquarters in 1994, arriving by transatlantic fiber-optic cable. But in 1995, piping video from a drone into a Pentagon conference room was a challenge far more complex than simply bouncing a signal off a satellite, as TV networks had done for years. Streaming video would soon be routine throughout the military, but for the moment it was unheard of—a veritable magic trick.
* * *
The magician who prepared the Predator program’s prestidigitation that day was a man of extraordinary intellect. An expert on nuclear weapons, computer networks, and satellites, he was fluent in both the electromagnetic spectrum and multiple European languages. He held a multiengine-rated commercial aircraft pilot’s license, was a skilled mariner, and could quickly use, repair, or quite often improve nearly any new machine or technology put before him. This remarkable technoscientist, who had joined the Pentagon’s Predator project when it began in 1993, would be responsible for a long string of innovations in the imagery and communications systems of the new endurance UAV, devising improvements that—combined with the aeronautical genius of Abe Karem’s legacy airframe design—would transform the nature of drones much as the mouse, the Internet, and wireless digital communication transformed the personal computer. His ideas and work would turn what was at first merely an interesting technology into a pivotal one. Werner, an alias, is how he must be identified in this account—not because he is a covert operative, for he never was, but because he prefers to remain anonymous.
Nicknamed the Man with Two Brains by one Pentagon official and the Thousand-Pound Head by a military officer who worked with him, Werner came to Rutherford’s team while under contract as an “imagery scientist” for the National Exploitation Laboratory of the National Photographic Interpretation Center, which no longer exists by that name but at the time was a component of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology. The mission of the National Exploitation Laboratory (known as the Nell, from its acronym, NEL) was to figure out how best to get the most out of imagery gathered by collection devices and sensors of all types, which might include enhancing the images artificially. When the team responsible for the fledgling Predator program needed help improving what were at first grainy video feeds from its cameras, the Nell sent Werner to Rutherford.
Werner quickly became fascinated with the new UAV. He saw its video as the perfect reconnaissance medium for military officers of the CNN Generation, as he called them, who he thought tended to feel more informed by live-motion imagery than by still photos. But as the Predator began its twenty-four-month demonstration period, Werner realized that getting intelligence officers and an imagery interpretation bureaucracy accustomed to still photos to even look at the drone’s video would be the first major hurdle. Video imagery was streamed back to the controllers by the Navy’s Vietnam-era drone helicopter and the service’s little Pioneer UAV in tactical operations. Werner knew, though, that a common conceit among imagery analysts was that only still photos could be parsed sufficiently to reveal things an enemy was trying to hide. In fact, most imagery analysts preferred to work with black-and-white instead of color photos. They were used to poring over snapshots, not watching events unfold in real time, when they could be harder to interpret. Many intelligence analysts dismissed color video as a toy.
Given this cultural attitude, no infrastructure for distributing reconnaissance video to those who might use it even existed. At the time, the only way anyone could see the Predator’s video was to be inside the ground control station as the aircraft flew, or to watch a videotape after the fact. The drone’s bulbous nose held a satellite dish, but the first dish installed was merely a placeholder, a UHF (ultra-high-frequency) antenna with too little bandwidth to handle the amount of data required both to control the aircraft and to stream video. The UHF antenna was soon to be replaced with one still being developed that would offer far greater bandwidth and data flow by operating on what is called the Ku-band radio frequency. For now, though, the Predator could send streaming video to the GCS only through the drone’s C-band radio antenna. This was the same line-of-sight device whose limits had led the CIA to relay signals to and from the Gnat 750 through another aircraft as it flew over Bosnia the previous year, an inconvenient and unsatisfactory fix.
Rutherford, eager to generate military interest in his project, had contracted with a private firm to turn raw tapes of Predator video into packaged presentations and deliver them every few weeks, beginning in September 1994, to military leaders, civilian Pentagon officials, members of Congress, and congressional aides. Set to music ranging from operatic classical to instrumental rock and roll, the tapes were essentially commercials for the Predator, and they proved to be an effective way of keeping those who would help decide the drone’s future apprised of its progress. But Werner, Rutherford’s imagery adviser, had a more ambitious goal: he wanted to make it possible for leaders in the Pentagon to see Predator video live. Only then, he believed, could they grasp the drone’s revolutionary potential.
Rutherford was all for a live video feed, and Werner was sure he could figure out technically how to get the Predator’s streaming images into the Pentagon. But Werner also knew that getting Defense Department bureaucrats to approve such a thing would require far more clout than either he or Rutherford had. Then, in late 1994, Werner learned that the new J-2, Major General Hughes, had been forced to cancel a planned visit to Fort Huachuca to watch Predator video live in the GCS. Suddenly he saw an opportunity to get the Predator’s video into the Pentagon. If the general can’t go to the video, Werner thought, the video must come to him. Werner figured that all he needed was for the general to lend his authority to such a scheme, and in December Hughes did.
Armed with a letter signed by Hughes explaining that the bearer was on a special mission for the two-star general and should be granted any cooperation he needed, Werner spent several days at the Pentagon that month talking to people who knew how video and other communications media were brought into the Building, as insiders call the nation’s military headquarters. In short order, he had a plan.
* * *
Werner’s first step was to persuade an electronics vendor to lend him a thirty-six-thousand-dollar digital video compressor, a machine made by Compression Labs Inc. and known as a Remb
randt codec, short for “coder/decoder.” Assured that the loan could result in substantial sales of such machines to the military, the supplier was happy to provide the Rembrandt, a light gray box resembling a large window air conditioner. In the first week of January, Werner had the eighty-seven-pound Rembrandt shipped to Fort Huachuca.
Next Werner implemented step two of his plan, which required adding an ad hoc feature to the Predator’s ground control station. Under the initial design, the Predator’s video was never meant to leave the GCS. When it arrived from the drone, the video was seen live by the pilot, the sensor operator, and a couple of intelligence analysts sitting a few feet behind them at two computer work stations. The analysts would record the imagery on eight-millimeter videotape as it came in and select individual frames or sequences of frames—shot by the Predator’s camera at thirty frames a second—for closer examination. After copying the selected frames into a computer as individual screen grabs, the analysts would “exploit” the images, meaning study them for militarily relevant information, annotating and highlighting what they found. Important objects in the image would be circled. Arrows and lines that directed the eye would be superimposed. Little text boxes would be added.
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