Predator

by Richard Whittle

  “Why would we want to do this?” Pavitt demanded.

  The cost would be minimal, and the payoff potentially large, Allen replied. Allen then explained the high-powered telescope’s role in the operation. His staff had thought through where to put it and how to get it there. One good spot might be a mountain near Darunta, where one of bin Laden’s associates, Abu Khabab, was said by Afghan sources to be holed up in a camp known to the CIA, experimenting with chemical and maybe biological weapons by killing dogs and videotaping their death throes. Maybe some followers of Northern Alliance leader and U.S. ally Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Taliban’s chief indigenous foe, would help a CIA paramilitary team carry the telescope over the mountains from Pakistan and set it up overlooking the area.

  Pavitt dismissed that scheme. “We’re not going to risk our people humping all this equipment over all these mountains and putting it up,” he declared.

  “The biggest thing, of course, is to fly the Predator, which has both infrared and electro-optical capabilities,” Allen continued. With the Predator, the CIA could look for bin Laden night and day, and increase its knowledge of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the bargain.

  The debate lasted three hours, from about 10:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m., with neither Allen nor Pavitt giving ground, but both frequently raising their voices. Allen sensed that Gordon, wearing blue jeans and clearly still hoping to make it to his Baltimore picnic, was only getting angrier as the discussion wore on. It was a “very ugly scene,” Allen recalled years later. “I still smart over it.” It also ended in a stalemate.

  The next day, CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on the Memorial Day meeting. When he and Allen discussed the matter, Tenet asked, “Why do I care whether I have an image of a guy, whether he’s six feet four or six feet?”

  “Because we need to find and identify this individual,” Allen said. “We need to be able to locate him, know where he is, track him, geolocate him, and take whatever action’s required.”

  Four weeks later, on June 25, Richard Clarke sent Tenet a memo saying that other agencies in the Counterterrorism Security Group “are unanimous that the Predator project is our highest near-term priority and that funding should be shifted to it.” The CIA had been resisting the idea partly because the project was expected to cost three to four million dollars, a relative pittance by Pentagon standards but serious money for the CIA. Four days after Tenet received Clarke’s memo, the so-called Small Group, a special interagency committee of top officials cleared to see the most sensitive information concerning bin Laden, approved Clarke’s Afghan Eyes plan. Under an arrangement imposed by the White House, the Defense Department and CIA would share the costs.

  As part of this compromise, the operation would be considered a mere test of the idea that a Predator could find Osama bin Laden. The CIA and the Air Force would try using the drone to hunt the terrorist leader. What came next would depend on how well the experiment worked.

  * * *

  Several days after the Afghan Eyes decision, Snake Clark phoned Captain Scott Swanson at Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field in Nevada. Scraped out of the desert forty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, by the summer of 2000 the onetime Army Air Forces gunnery training field was home to the Air Force’s 11th and 15th Reconnaissance Squadrons, the Air Combat Command units that flew Predators. For Swanson, however, Indian Springs was only a temporary home.

  That spring, encouraged by Major Brian Raduenz and others who worked with Swanson during the WILD Predator experiment in the Balkans the year before, Big Safari Director Bill Grimes had asked the former special operations helicopter pilot if he’d like a green door assignment as the technology shop’s chief Predator operator. The job would mean transferring from the 11th RS in Nevada to Big Safari’s operating location at the General Atomics plant in Rancho Bernardo, California, just north of San Diego. Single guy, San Diego, doing more of this neat stuff? Swanson had asked himself. Sure. Swanson was still at Indian Springs only because his official orders to move to California had yet to take effect, which was why Snake Clark was calling from the Pentagon.

  Clark wanted to know if Swanson could put together—without attracting attention—a briefing on the Predator and a flight demonstration for “a bunch of people in suits” who would be visiting Indian Springs in a few days. Bill Grimes would be among them, as would senior people from the CIA, the NSC, and other intelligence and military agencies. Clark and Grimes wanted Swanson to show the visitors what the Predator could do if used for a special mission in what Clark said was “a rugged part of the world.” Clark was vague about what kind of mission, but Swanson read intelligence briefings. He could guess.

  The dozen or so “high political rollers,” as Swanson viewed them, spent a couple of hours at Indian Springs on the afternoon of July 12. Swanson briefed his visitors on the Predator’s capabilities, showed them how it operated, and gave them a tour of the GCS. Then he answered their questions, some of which seemed to confirm his suspicions. By the time the members of the traveling party climbed back into their air-conditioned bus and drove away, Swanson was pretty sure he knew what kind of special mission the government officials had in mind.

  A few days later, Swanson learned that Grimes and the rest of the delegation must have liked his briefing. The Predator was going to Afghanistan to hunt Osama bin Laden, and Scott Swanson would be the operation’s chief pilot. Swanson thought that was neat stuff indeed.

  * * *

  Those planning the operation needed to solve a number of tricky problems. First, where could the Air Force put the ground control station? This was a major issue, for although the Predator was flown largely through the Ku-band satellite dish in its nose, taking off or landing via satellite link wasn’t recommended. To be relayed through a satellite in geostationary orbit, signals from the GCS to the Predator, and vice versa, had to travel about 25,000 miles into space and 25,000 miles back to Earth. The signals also had to be processed on each end by equipment that added milliseconds to their trip. Even with the signals traveling at 186,000 miles per second, there was enough delay between a pilot’s commands and the aircraft’s response, and the pilot’s reaction to that response, and the pilot’s next move, to make takeoffs and landings risky. Once in flight, the Predator flew largely on autopilot, so the roughly one-second signal latency caused by the satellite connection was less problematic. But for takeoffs and landings, crews always used the line-of-sight C-band link; they switched to Ku-band once the drone was airborne to extend the Predator’s range over the horizon and switched back to land. This was why the Predator couldn’t fly much farther than four hundred or five hundred miles from its landing point if it was going to loiter over a target area for the optimum seventeen to twenty-two hours.

  Which posed a problem. Draw a circle with a five-hundred-mile radius on a map of Afghanistan and the center of the circle located at Tarnak Farms—a rundown agricultural complex near Kandahar where the Taliban had settled bin Laden and his wives and children in 1997—and the circumference will run through Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Even if any of the friendly countries on that list granted the United States permission to base Predators on its soil, there was no way to bring in all the equipment and personnel needed and still keep the operation covert. Besides a GCS, the operators would need a satellite earth terminal with a large antenna, a shelter where the aircraft could be kept and serviced, accommodation for several dozen people—you might as well put up a billboard.

  Which raised a question. How remote from the Predator could the drone’s controls be located? Could the three key elements of the system—the aircraft, the GCS, and the satellite earth terminal—be split up? What if the drone were launched somewhere near Afghanistan by a crew using the usual line-of-sight C-band link, then switched to the usual Ku-band satellite link, but then simultaneously taken over by a different crew in a full-up GCS that was far distant but somewhere within satellite range? The
crew flying the Ku-band segment could perform the mission, then hand the Predator back to the first crew, who could land it using the C-band link. If the drone’s flight were split up this way, the GCS and satellite terminal needn’t be located with the Predator near Afghanistan; instead, they could be located someplace unobtrusive—at a U.S. air base in Europe, say, where security would be good and no one would pay much attention to a freight container or one more satellite dish.

  Was something like that possible? That was the question Bill Grimes put to Werner that spring, as the Afghan Eyes proposal was being debated at higher reaches of the U.S. government’s national security apparatus. Others within the Air Force and the intelligence community had tried to answer the same question but had come away stumped. Werner, however, reported back after a quick review of technical issues that “split operations,” as he suggested they call the concept, could be done—just not easily.

  Providing a stripped-down pilot console that could be located with a small maintenance facility at a base in Central Asia and used to take off and land the drone via C-band link wouldn’t be particularly difficult. But finding a satellite that covered much of Afghanistan would be a challenge, since the typical satellite beam creates a footprint—usually amoeba-shaped—only five hundred to a thousand miles in diameter. It would be an even greater challenge to find a satellite that not only covered Afghanistan but also had an antenna able to communicate with the Predator. The Predator’s Ku-band transmitter was so weak that it “whispered” to a satellite, as Werner put it, and the drone’s Ku-band dish was so small it could barely “hear” what a satellite transmitted back. Beyond those problems, there weren’t a lot of satellites in geostationary orbit whose footprint covered Afghanistan—because, as Werner observed, “satellite operators realized that not many goat herders and mountain dwellers were equipped with satellite receivers.” The only candidate he could find, in fact, was a Dutch satellite aimed at India whose roughly circular footprint offered marginal coverage of Afghanistan.

  Given those limitations, Werner later mused that “no satellite engineer in his right mind” would try to operate the Predator over Afghanistan using this method. Even so, he saw a way to make it work. The Air Force could fly the drone using New Skies Satellites’ NSS-703. But the service would also need to put an earth terminal with an enormous dish antenna—an ear big enough to pick up the Predator’s whispers—somewhere in Europe. Werner researched that, too, and found that the Air Force had only three terminals that were both large enough to do the job and sufficiently mobile to be packed into cargo aircraft and flown to Europe. Two were untouchable. The third was a terminal with an antenna dish eleven meters (more than thirty-six feet) in diameter called the Transportable Medium Earth Terminal, or TMET (pronounced “TEE-met”). The TMET was located in southern Virginia, at Langley Air Force Base. It belonged to Air Combat Command.

  When Bill Grimes heard it was ACC’s, he couldn’t help but grin.

  One day in early August, a crew of about twenty contractors showed up at Langley Air Force Base with a couple of big trucks, a heavy crane, a satellite earth terminal with a 6.2-meter dish, and a set of special, classified orders. After unloading the terminal they’d brought along, they dismantled ACC’s TMET and its 11-meter dish, packed it on pallets, and set up the smaller 6.2-meter dish in its place. Then they loaded their trucks and drove away with the TMET.

  The next morning, Werner got a call from the same ACC chief master sergeant who had ordered the laser designators taken off the WILD Predators the previous year. He was irate. Where was his satellite terminal? he demanded.

  Werner looked at his watch. “Right now, it’s at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware,” he said, adding that the TMET was waiting to be picked up by a huge C-5 Galaxy cargo plane. The C-5 was going to take the terminal to a location he wasn’t at liberty to divulge, but Big Safari had brought ACC a replacement satellite terminal with a 6.2-meter dish, Werner pointed out.

  “After explaining that none of his satellite services were being interrupted or even diminished,” Werner recalled years later, “I seemed to unclaw him from the ceiling just a bit.”

  * * *

  A couple of weeks after the July 12 Predator demonstration at Indian Springs, Captain Scott Swanson threw most of his clothes in the backseat of his gold 1995 Lexus ES 300. Then he headed southwest on I-15 for his new assignment to Big Safari’s office in the General Atomics Predator plant near San Diego. Along the way, Swanson took a side trip to the General Atomics flight control center at El Mirage to see a test of Werner’s new split operations concept. Now refined, the plan was for a pilot assigned to a small “launch-and-recovery element” to put the Predator into the air using its C-band antenna, then hand the drone off to a crew in a ground control station elsewhere to fly the actual mission via the Ku-band satellite link. At mission’s end, the GCS crew would fly the Predator by satellite to within the C-band antenna’s roughly hundred-mile range, where the launch-and-recovery crew would once again take control and land the drone.

  Before leaving for California, Swanson had been fully briefed about what Richard Clarke called Afghan Eyes and Big Safari was calling the Summer Project: the plan to hunt Osama bin Laden using the Predator. A CIA-led launch-and-recovery element employing just two contractor pilots and a couple of mechanics would take off, land, and service the Predators in Uzbekistan, one of three former Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan on the north. Uzbek President Islam Karimov, an authoritarian strongman and Taliban opponent, had agreed to let the drones fly from a small, rugged military airfield on his nation’s soil. But since both the host country and the U.S. government wanted the American presence kept small enough to escape public notice, members of the CIA team would work in a heavy-duty cloth hangar and live in a tent.

  Swanson and others flying the actual missions via Ku-band satellite would have it easier. Eight days after he moved into his new apartment in San Diego, Swanson was on his way to Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. Air Force facility in southwestern Germany. Ramstein was the headquarters of U.S. Air Forces Europe, a command known by the acronym USAFE (pronounced “you-SAY-fee”). Shortly before Swanson’s arrival, the Air Force had created an ad hoc unit to conduct the Summer Project. To preserve secrecy, the 32nd Expeditionary Air Intelligence Squadron was formed by verbal rather than written orders, which were issued retroactively five months later. The unit’s handpicked members would include Swanson, Big Safari sensor operator Master Sergeant Jeff Guay, and Major Brian Raduenz of the Big Safari detachment at General Atomics. A pilot and sensor operator borrowed from one of ACC’s Predator squadrons, plus a dozen officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians from USAFE intelligence and communications squadrons, would work the CIA missions as well.

  USAFE’s director of intelligence, Colonel Edward J. Boyle, a Long Island native who had joined the Air Force in 1974 and worked with Big Safari often during his twenty-six years in uniform, was the ad hoc squadron’s commander.

  “If anything goes wrong, you’re going to be kicked out of Germany,” USAFE’s commander, General Gregory S. “Speedy” Martin, told Boyle with a laugh. “But don’t worry about it, you’ll get a good job.”

  To plan and execute the Predator missions, Boyle recruited Major Mark A. Cooter, an intelligence officer recently transferred to the Pentagon from the Predator-flying 11th Reconnaissance Squadron. A thirty-six-year-old Tennessean popular with subordinates and superiors alike, Cooter had worked on Predator operations from the time his service took over the drone program from the Army in 1997. He had deployed to Taszár, Hungary, then Tuzla, Bosnia; he had also served as operations director at 11th RS headquarters in Nevada.

  Boyle also brought Captain Ginger Wallace and a couple of other USAFE intelligence officers into the squadron. When Boyle told Wallace that she was going to help Big Safari and the CIA try to find terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and even Osama bin Laden himself using Predator drones launched in Uzbekistan but flown via satellite from Germany,
Wallace thought her jaw would hit the floor.

  “We’re going to do what?” the cheery 1990 Air Force Academy graduate blurted in her Kentucky accent. “Really? We can do that?”

  “We can,” Boyle said. “And we’re going to.”

  By the time Swanson arrived at Ramstein, the squadron’s equipment was already in place. At one end of a runway, positioned next to another large satellite antenna, sat what members of the team quickly dubbed the Big Ass Dish—the TMET satellite earth terminal that Big Safari had commandeered from ACC. Nearby, on a fenced-off concrete pad nestled next to some pine trees, sat a Predator ground control station painted green-and-black camouflage. Ten feet from the GCS was a green-and-black camouflage tent roughly thirty feet square; outside the tent stood a couple of porta-potties. The tent would serve as an operations center, or “ops cell.” Inside, tables and desks were crammed with computers and big display screens so those working in the ops cell could easily see what the Predator’s sensors were seeing.

  The Air Force communications crew, advised by Werner, had set up a data link via a fiber-optic cable that ran beneath the Atlantic to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. The data link would stream video shot by the Predator from the GCS at Ramstein roughly four thousand miles, to a new flight operations center on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters, just down the hall from Charlie Allen’s office. Computer terminals lined the walls and filled an island in the middle of the CIA’s operations center; wide video screens were mounted high on the walls. Here, CTC analysts and others would be able to see what the Predator saw with a delay of less than a second.

  Among those watching around the clock, in shifts, would be thirty-one imagery analysts Allen had borrowed from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which specialized in analyzing photo reconnaissance. Intelligence officers in the ops cell tent at Ramstein would relay information and orders from the CTC at Langley to the Predator crew in the GCS. The ops cell had secure computer chat rooms and phones that allowed the Air Force team at Ramstein to talk directly to CIA headquarters. Those in the ops cell could also communicate with the drone operators in the GCS via a separate chat room or over an intercom piped into the crew’s headsets.