Predator

by Richard Whittle

  The annotated screen grabs would then be saved as separate computer files—one image per file—and transmitted to a U.S. military data storage center at Royal Air Force Station Molesworth, in the east of England, an airfield used by American planes in World War II. Since 1991 the base also housed Joint Analysis Center Molesworth, an intelligence facility abbreviated JAC Molesworth and called Jack Molesworth, or simply, the Jack. Big computer servers at the Jack stored intelligence imagery at different levels of classification, which users with the appropriate clearances could call up remotely. This was the system long used to store satellite images, and out of custom and habit the Predator was being treated like a low-flying satellite. In fact, the equipment at the Jack couldn’t even handle video.

  Predator screen grabs had yet to be sent anywhere, but by the end of 1994 the capability for transmitting them was in place. Parked near the drone’s GCS in Arizona was the Trojan Spirit II, a mobile satellite system housed in two large, green Army transport trucks. One of the trucks in the system carried a satellite earth terminal with a dish 5.5 meters in diameter; the other truck carried an earth terminal whose dish measured 2.4 meters across. The larger antenna was intended to receive signals from the Predator once the Ku-band satellite dish being developed was installed in the drone’s bulbous nose. The smaller mobile earth terminal was meant to send screen grabs to a Trojan Spirit hub at Fort Belvoir, a base in northern Virginia, for relay to JAC Molesworth. At Fort Huachuca, though, both satellite trucks were sitting unused.

  When Werner arrived at Fort Huachuca in early January 1995, he had with him a fanny-pack-size, jungle-green camouflage tool bag filled with electrical, computer, and video connectors of various types and sizes. He got some Mibli soldiers to put the Rembrandt video compressor on a table in a tent between the Predator ground control station and the satellite dish with the 2.4-meter antenna. He used a coaxial cable to feed the Predator’s analog video signal into the Rembrandt, which could digitize and compress the video for satellite transmission, then ran a data cable from the Rembrandt to the satellite terminal. Satisfied with this setup, Werner flew back to Washington.

  Again carrying the letter from Major General Hughes in his pocket, Werner then drove half an hour south to Fort Belvoir. At Belvoir, he took a borrowed technician with him into a long, air-conditioned room filled with rows and rows of floor-to-ceiling metal racks stacked with electronic equipment. One rack contained a patch panel—a switchboard, essentially—that was used to route signals to and from mobile Trojan Spirit satellite terminals around the world. As Werner had recently learned, the other side of the same room held equipment used to connect participants in military video teleconferences, wherever they might be. Werner had the technician run a cable under the room’s raised floor from the Trojan Spirit hub patch panel to the video teleconferencing system switch. Now Predator video could flow via satellite from the Trojan Spirit at Fort Huachuca to Fort Belvoir, then into the video teleconferencing hub, then into the ultra-secure National Military Command Center. No one had explicitly authorized Werner to make this connection, but he was confident it would work.

  On January 11, Werner was back at Fort Huachuca, up at three in the morning and in the ground control station. The two-way video feed worked perfectly: Werner watched Hughes and his officers at the V-shaped table in the Pentagon war room, while the officers watched the Predator video streaming live from Arizona. Werner savored the moment. Allan Rutherford thought it magic.

  * * *

  Eight days later, the Predator set a new UAV endurance record, flying at Fort Huachuca for forty hours and seventeen minutes—nearly two hours more than the 1988 record set by its ancestor the Amber. Over the next few months, Rutherford staged many more video demonstrations in the Pentagon war room. For many who saw them, the demos were mesmerizing. Rutherford marveled at how generals unused to video reconnaissance would stare at the screen as if in a trance while the Predator flew at a crawl over barren desert, beaming back meaningless shots of sand and Joshua trees. Meanwhile, Rutherford’s small team and the Mibli took the new drone on the road. During February and March 1995, some of the six Predator drones built by General Atomics were used in a counterdrug exercise along the southwest border with Mexico. In April and May, the Mibli flew Predators from Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in the U.S. military’s largest annual air and missile defense exercise, Roving Sands.

  Roving Sands ’95 would be the Predator’s military debut, and a major step toward acceptance. That year, more than seventeen thousand troops from all four armed services and those of several U.S. allies conducted maneuvers that sprawled across New Mexico and into Arizona. The Predator provided reconnaissance for troops and used its cameras to search out mock Scud missiles (plywood replicas on five-ton Army trucks) hidden amid cacti, beneath trees, or under highway culverts. In only eighteen missions, the Predator logged 173 hours in the air and found 50 percent of all plywood Scuds “killed” in the exercise.

  The success at Roving Sands led the Joint Special Operations Command to invite the Mibli to fly the Predator in June with special operations forces conducting a classified exercise in the Everglades of Florida, an event that brought the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Pentagon war room for a live video demonstration. The show for Admiral William A. Owens that day didn’t go as Rutherford hoped it might. As the nation’s second-ranking military officer ate lunch and listened to Rutherford’s briefing, live Predator video appeared on the screen, but it was impossible to recognize what the imagery was showing. After a considerable silence as those in the room waited in vain for the image to come into focus, Rutherford quipped, “Admiral, as you can see, we’re very closely monitoring the green blob that’s eating the Everglades.” To Rutherford’s relief, Owens laughed. As it turned out, the problem was just a loose cable. After it was fixed, the admiral declared that he liked what he saw.

  Encouraged, Rutherford flew to Stuttgart to brief officers of the U.S. European Command on the Predator, hoping to get permission to test the drone in actual military operations. He quickly won approval to operate it over Bosnia, the former Yugoslav republic whose ethnic war had been a catalyst for developing the drone in the first place. Things were reaching a boiling point in the Balkans, where UN peacekeeping troops had been deployed since 1992. NATO warplanes had been enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia since 1993, and tensions had escalated considerably over the following two years. When Rutherford came calling, commanders in Germany were happy to try tracking Serb weapons and activities with an unmanned drone. They were happier still to have the unmanned Predator after June 2, when a Serb missile shot down U.S. Air Force pilot Captain Scott O’Grady’s F-16C during a patrol over Bosnia. O’Grady parachuted safely, but U.S. forces took five days to find him and send a Marine Corps helicopter into Bosnia to get him out.

  Rutherford was ecstatic. Less than a year after its first flight, the Predator would get a chance to prove itself in combat.

  * * *

  In the summer of 1995 Tom Cassidy flew to the Balkans to see how his company’s new Predator was doing in its first combat deployment. The former fighter pilot and Navy rear admiral arrived with great expectations: he believed he would find the military taking full advantage of the revolutionary new form of reconnaissance his company had given them—full-motion video, as it was known—and hungering for more. He also assumed the good news about the Predator would be spreading quickly; since the system wasn’t classified, its video could be shared with just about anyone in uniform. Instead, Cassidy found intelligence analysts sitting at work stations in a covered truck trailer that was parked behind a barbed-wire barrier and a sign reading “Restricted Area.” Inside, the analysts were turning the Predator’s video into still photos. Cassidy couldn’t believe it. They weren’t watching the video—they were turning it into still photos.

  “Why?” an astonished Cassidy asked one of the Army people.

  “We’re used to having eight-by-ten glossies, so that’s what we wan
t,” the analyst replied.

  Recalling his trip to Bosnia years later, Cassidy felt exasperated all over again. “They would take the video stream, which is eighteen hundred frames per minute, and freeze-frame every single one of them—you can imagine on a thirty-hour mission how many frames you have—and print them! Then they had this Army three-star running around the Pentagon telling everybody, ‘Predator video’s no good. Look at these out-of-focus freeze frames!’”

  The reality wasn’t quite that bad. Cassidy didn’t realize that the imagery analysts weren’t freezing every video frame, just those that seemed to show something of interest, usually no more than a dozen or so at a time. But the point was the same: they weren’t watching the video for its own sake.

  The Predator’s first combat deployment also got off to a slow start in other respects. It began on July 8, when a half dozen chunky C-130 cargo aircraft touched down at the same airfield in Albania the CIA had used to fly the Gnat 750 over Bosnia in 1994. Inside the holds of the C-130s were three disassembled Predators in tan polyester-plastic crates. The C-130s also brought a ground control station, two small Trojan Spirit II satellite earth terminals with 2.4-meter dish antennas, a UHF satellite antenna, and roughly fifty-five military and civilian personnel. Only five were military pilots—three Army, one Navy, one Marine Corps—but General Atomics had sent its chief pilot, Tim Just, to help out. The Air Force had sent no pilots, but some of its civil engineers had arrived in advance to set up a tent city.

  After decades of Albania’s peculiar brand of isolationist communism, followed by widespread looting after the system’s collapse, Gjader air base was largely just a concrete runway with concrete aprons. The base’s most interesting feature was a tunnel dug into a nearby mountain to the southwest; reached by a very long taxiway, the tunnel still served as a bomb-proof hangar for some old MiG fighter jets. At the base itself, there was no electricity, no running water, no toilets, and not a single building the Americans could use. The Air Force engineers had set up a portable clamshell hangar for the three Predators, and an array of tents to shelter, feed, and provide other needs for the multiservice detachment sent to fly the drones. Next to the ground control station, they set up an improvised work station consisting of two big “expando vans”—five-ton trucks with boxlike shelters on their trailers—parked with their rear ends facing each other and connected by wooden steps and a platform. One truck was the Predator unit’s operations center, the other a “Rapid Exploitation and Dissemination Cell.” This RED Cell—the scene of Cassidy’s rude awakening—had been added so that more intelligence analysts could be present to exploit the Predator’s video, print screen grabs, annotate the resulting still photos, and transmit them to JAC Molesworth in England.

  Before the deployment, imagery scientist Werner had been asked to figure out how the unit could stream the Predator’s video almost five hundred miles up the coast of the Balkan Peninsula and across the Adriatic Sea to the Combined Air Operations Center at Vicenza, Italy, a NATO command center known by the acronym CAOC. The CAOC (pronounced “KAY-ock”) was a collection of trailers where U.S. and allied commanders ran and monitored air operations over the Balkans. For the Predator’s first deployment to succeed, the CAOC’s planners would have to see the value of the intelligence the UAV produced and get accustomed to including the drone in their plans. Werner and the Predator’s other advocates also wanted to transmit the UAV’s video to the CAOC to spread the word about this new reconnaissance tool to as many commanders as possible.

  Getting the ground control station connected to the CAOC took some creative thinking, since the Predator’s satellite uplink was the Trojan Spirit, whose mobile terminals could transmit only to their hub at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. After consulting with the CAOC, Werner devised a double bank shot. First he set up one of the two Trojan Spirit earth terminals at Gjader to send the Predator’s video by satellite to Fort Belvoir; then he arranged to have the video signal brought back across the Atlantic to NATO’s southern headquarters in Naples and to the CAOC in Vicenza through an existing Defense Department fiber-optic cable laid across the ocean floor. The signal would travel roughly 54,000 miles—25,000 up to the satellite, 25,000 down to Fort Belvoir, and about 4,000 from Belvoir to Italy—to cover the 476 miles from Gjader to the CAOC. Still, since radio waves travel at the speed of light, the video would arrive at the CAOC with less than a second’s delay.

  Tom Cassidy did his part to make sure people watched Predator TV, though the military’s lack of video dissemination technology limited that opportunity. After visiting the Predator base in Albania, Cassidy went to Naples to see Admiral Leighton W. “Snuffy” Smith Jr., commander in chief of U.S. and NATO forces in the Balkans, and told him that the intelligence analysts at Gjader were converting video into printed freeze frames. “I said, ‘We built this thing so you could watch the war on television. You’ve got to get with it and do that,’” Cassidy recalled. “Fortunately I knew the guy, so he agreed.”

  At first, however, there was no Predator video to watch, and except for an accident of geography there might have been none at all. The Predators sent to Albania that July were equipped only with the placeholder UHF satellite antenna. The broader-bandwidth satellite antenna, which would transmit and receive frequencies in the Ku band, was still being manufactured. From Gjader, pilots could fly the Predator up the Adriatic coast and turn east over Croatia to reach Bosnia using the line-of-sight C-band antenna, which offered bandwidth enough to both control the plane and stream its video back to the GCS. But once the Predator flew behind a range of mountains between Bosnia and Gjader, the C-band signal was blocked and the flight crew had to rely on the beyond-line-of-sight UHF satellite antenna to communicate with the drone.

  Crews hated this patchwork solution, for the UHF antenna offered so little bandwidth that streaming video with it was impossible. The UHF antenna sent video at about 19 kilobits per second, which meant the video came back at a rate of one frame per minute instead of thirty frames a second. Worse, the single frames that came in were random and intermittent. The flood of data captured by the Predator completely overwhelmed the UHF antenna; in effect, all the Predator could do via UHF was take a useless still photo every one to five minutes. The Predator detachment could only hope that the Ku-band system would arrive before their deployment ended. Otherwise, the impression the drone made on commanders elsewhere might be embarrassing, if not disastrous.

  One night, however, someone realized that the valley in which Gjader lay was oriented at a northwest angle pointing directly toward Sarajevo, scene of most of Bosnia’s fighting. Better still, there was a gap in the mountains between Gjader and the Bosnian capital. Sarajevo was 157 miles away, far too distant for those at Gjader actually to see the Predator, even with binoculars. But for radio waves, Sarajevo was in Gjader’s line of sight. The Predator’s C-band antenna was guaranteed to operate at distances only up to 115 miles, but when Werner was told about the quirk in the geography between Gjader and Sarajevo, he advised the young commander of the operation, Army Captain Scott Sanborn, to try flying over Sarajevo within a certain altitude and zone. If his calculations were correct, Werner explained, the GCS antenna would find the Predator’s C-band antenna if the drone loitered in that spot.

  At the end of a regular mission, and with every bit of transmit-and-receive hardware in the system torqued to highest capacity, a crew flew the Predator to Sarajevo. To no one’s surprise, Werner was right. As the drone reached the city at the altitude he had suggested, crisp color video of the Bosnian capital began pouring into the GCS; more important, the same images began appearing on Predator screens at NATO’s regional headquarters in Naples and at the CAOC in Vicenza. Soon the phone in the Predator operations center was ringing constantly, as officers in Naples and Vicenza called with requests from commanders, who had long lists of “targets” they wanted the Predator to fly over, locations where the Serbs might be hiding tanks, artillery, or surface-to-air missile batteries.

&nbs
p; Suddenly the Predator wasn’t just a trifle anymore. Seventeen years after Abe Karem first began designing drones in his Los Angeles garage, the latest version of his invention was much in demand.

  * * *

  By August, the Mibli was flying missions so regularly the Serbs began to realize that when they heard something like a loud mosquito buzzing overhead they were being watched. Soon they began gunning for the Predator. While its small size and white composite skin made the drone hard to spot with the naked eye, and its slow speed was below velocities usually targeted by military radars looking for combat planes, Serb troops finally bagged one on August 11, 1995.

  Chief Warrant Officer 3 Greg Foscue, a Mibli pilot, was in the ground control station at Gjader that overcast Friday, taking turns with Tim Just of General Atomics in flying the first mission using a Predator with a Ku-band satellite dish. They were tracking a convoy of Serb military vehicles traveling west on a highway out of Brčko, a town in northern Bosnia, as Air Force Brigadier General–select Glen W. “Wally” Moorhead III, chief of staff for the NATO task force, monitored the mission from Naples. Army Captain Sanborn, the commander at Gjader, was nervous about the mission. Sanborn had asked for a three-day “stand-down” of flights so his crews could train with the new Ku-band aircraft, which had arrived only a couple of days earlier. He had been granted a stand-down lasting a single day. Keeping tabs on whether the Serbs were moving heavy weapons in violation of UN resolutions was a top priority, he was told, and his commanders were relying on the Predator to help them accomplish that for their civilian bosses.

  Moorhead himself was relaying instructions to the Predator unit through Captain Greg Gordy, an Air Force intelligence officer, as they sat at either end of a long wooden table in a secure conference room at NATO headquarters in Naples. They were watching the Predator’s video on a twenty-seven-inch cathode ray tube TV usually used for video teleconferencing. Gordy was communicating live with Sanborn, who was in the RED Cell in Albania, through a secure computer chat room when Moorhead said he wanted the Predator to fly lower over the convoy so they could see what the Serb trucks were carrying. Sanborn balked. The Predator crew was already flying the drone only about seven thousand feet above the ground because its sensor operators had so little practice focusing the camera over the Ku-band satellite link, which created a lag of approximately half a second between the GCS and the aircraft. Sanborn feared that the Predator was already within earshot, eyesight, and antiaircraft gun range of the Serbs below.