Predator

by Richard Whittle

  On January 2, Predator 3034 got its wings back in the General Atomics hangar at El Mirage. The company’s Hellfire project manager, Christopher Dusseault, thirty-three, a former Air Force engineer with three master’s degrees to his credit, happily supervised as the brand-new beefed-up wings were fastened into their fuselage slots and all the right wires were connected. Each wing held a single gray launch rail, and each rail angled downward five degrees from its wing’s leading edge. With the wings in place, a small group of engineers and technicians fitted 3034 with a Forty-Four ball, the same laser designator turret used on the WILD Predators flown over Kosovo in 1999. Then, after three weeks of ground and flight tests of various kinds, the team trucked 3034, a ground control station, and other equipment ninety miles north to the test range at China Lake to start shooting missiles.

  Chained to its test pad four hundred feet above sea level, 3034 sat with its nose pointed northwest and upward nine degrees. Behind the drone and its Hellfires was a second hill forty feet higher, with two big antennas on its summit, one to stream the Predator’s video, one to communicate with a ground-based laser designator sitting beside a control van a couple of miles downrange. A crew manning this second laser designator would shine a laser beam to guide the inert Hellfire to a mock target, a dusty, defunct green tank sitting in the desert three miles straight ahead of the Predator.

  Shielded from the test pad by the hill holding the antennas was a concrete bunker full of test gear and engineers, including General Atomics project manager Dusseault and Major Spoon Mattoon, a weapons testing expert and Big Safari’s project manager. Behind the bunker sat the Predator’s ground control station, looming up from the desert floor like a lost freight container, its big, black tires powdered with desert sand, its dull metal skin painted black, tan, and beige desert camouflage.

  At 10:39 a.m., with the Predator’s engine running and its small pusher propeller gently turning, Mattoon decided it was time to launch a missile.

  “Four … three … two … one … fire!” a China Lake test director ordered over an intercom piped into the GCS and other locations. After a split-second pause, a jet of flame as long as the missile spurted from the rear of the Hellfire under the Predator’s right wing. As recorded by a high-speed camera sitting off to the side of 3034, the mock weapon’s rocket plume reflected yellow on the underside of the white wing but vanished in milliseconds.

  “Item away, item away,” the test director intoned as the missile zoomed off in a low parabola toward a distant mountain. A forward-facing camera recorded the Hellfire and its rocket plume disappearing from view.

  “Plus five … plus ten … plus fifteen … plus twenty,” the test director reported as the missile flew. Reaching Mach 1.3 in the flight’s first two and a half seconds—around a thousand miles an hour at this altitude and temperature—and slowing to about four hundred miles per hour as it traveled, the Hellfire slammed into the side of the target tank’s turret, right where a nearby camera able to detect laser light showed the beam’s sparkle flickering. The aluminum test missile burst into ragged black chunks.

  “We have impact,” the test director reported unemotionally. “End of test.”

  Mattoon, Dusseault, and their team reacted like the NASA engineers in Houston when astronaut Neil Armstrong set mankind’s first foot on the moon: giving high fives all around, jumping up and down, patting one another on the back.

  The Predator team spent the rest of the day analyzing video of the Hellfire launch and the missile smashing into the right side of the tank, studying the test from every angle at actual speed, in slow motion, and in super slow motion. They analyzed the data from thermal gauges on the wing and tail, the flapping of the tape strips attached to the drone, the flutter of the wings. Then they adjourned to a restaurant in nearby Ridgecrest, California, and after a nice dinner enjoyed a proud and rowdy night at the bar. Now the question was whether the Predator could repeat its new trick in flight.

  * * *

  Chona Hawes feared her husband might be having a seizure. She came upstairs at dusk one evening at their north Las Vegas house to find Air Force Captain Curt Hawes flat on his back in bed. The lights were off, the curtains closed, and her husband was clad only in underwear and a tee-shirt. Eyes shut, knees bent, his bare feet moved up and down in a dance with no rhythm. Hands flitting back and forth in the air, his index fingers poked and pressed while his thumbs turned and twitched.

  “Curt?”

  No answer.

  “Curt!” his wife demanded, turning on a light. Curt stopped gyrating and sat up with a start. He looked at Chona wide-eyed, then reached to his ears with both hands and removed yellow foam plugs.

  “What’s happening?” she asked worriedly.

  Sorry, Curt replied with a sheepish smile, but it was hard to get to sleep this early, even wearing earplugs, when you knew you had to get to the park-and-ride by 3:45 a.m. to catch the bus to Indian Springs airfield for a 4:30 a.m. briefing. As a Predator pilot, the possibility of missing or arriving late for a preflight briefing was one of Curt’s worst fears, and the briefing he would help conduct the morning of Friday, February 16, 2001, was one of the most exciting and important in his twenty-year career. That day, Hawes, thirty-eight, a Minnesota farm boy who dreamt of being a military pilot but missed the minimum five-foot-four height requirement by a quarter inch, was to make aviation history. He would become the first person ever to launch a Hellfire missile from a Predator in flight, a privilege Hawes felt blessed by God to have been granted.

  By regulation, a pilot was supposed to get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep before reporting for a flight. Whatever the rules, Hawes wanted to be rested and ready to make history, so he had plugged his ears to help get to sleep. Then, worried the plugs might make him miss his wakeup alarm, he set three clocks to go off simultaneously. Still too nervous to sleep, he began visualizing and practicing the moves he would make at the console in the ground control station when he flew the Predator the next day. His feet were moving the rudder pedals; his hands were manipulating the keyboard, the mouse, the throttle, and joystick on the Predator control console. Military pilots often do a “chair fly” before a mission; Curt just happened to be doing a “bed fly” when Chona interrupted him.

  Hawes wanted to do everything precisely right the next day, especially the most important move he would make. At the end of a countdown, with a ground-based laser designator shining its beam at a target tank on a test range at nearby Nellis Air Force Base, Hawes would depress and hold down a black thumb button on his throttle, activating the trigger on his joystick, then squeeze the trigger to launch an inert Hellfire at that tank from an altitude of two thousand feet. Whatever he did, Hawes had to make sure he put his left thumb on the correct button. The missile launch button on the throttle, whose original purpose was to deploy an emergency parachute, was positioned on the joystick just a quarter inch from another button that, if pressed and held, would kill the Predator’s engine, yet another emergency mechanism.

  There were other reasons to be cautious, for the Predator’s controls—its human-machine interface, in the language of engineers—were complex and at times confusing. The previous September, another pilot at Indian Springs who thought he had the complicated drop-down menus of the ground control station computer memorized got into the wrong menu, commanded the equivalent of a system shutdown, and crashed Predator 3023 at Nellis. The purpose of that flight was to test the laser designator carried in one of the three remaining Forty-Four balls; as a result of the crash, the Air Force now had only two Forty-Four balls left.

  Hawes wasn’t likely to make that kind of mistake. He had learned to fly the Predator in 1996 as a Naval Reserve officer on loan to the Air Force, and had flown multiple missions over Bosnia and Iraq. During a break in his military service, he’d flown the Predator for General Atomics. Now, having severed his Navy ties and joined the Air Force, Hawes was an Air Combat Command UAV test pilot, a “plank holder” in a new unit of the 53rd Tes
t and Evaluation Group that was less than a month old. ACC commander Jumper, intent on standardizing how the Air Force handled the Predator, had ordered the test unit created. Thus far, the detachment was just three men strong. Hawes was its pilot; Major Kenneth “2K” Kilmurray, the detachment commander, and Master Sergeant Leo Glovka, a veteran of Predator operations since 1995, were the unit’s sensor operators. Test-launching the Hellfire from Predator 3034 was the detachment’s first major assignment.

  Certain the test would be covered by CNN, Hawes told his parents back in Minnesota to watch for him. The first Hellfire launch from a Predator in flight would indeed be historic, and the test was no secret. The Air Force and General Atomics would issue news releases about it, prompting Inside the Air Force and the Las Vegas Review-Journal to write articles about the project. As it turned out, however, the event was of far less interest to CNN than to the CIA and the NSC.

  Charlie Allen of the CIA and Richard Clarke of the NSC had been wowed by the Predator video of bin Laden produced by the Summer Project. Motivated by both the USS Cole bombing and intelligence indicating that Al Qaeda was planning further attacks on U.S. interests, they were also keenly interested in the Air Force project to arm the Predator. Clarke had already recommended sending armed Predators to Afghanistan, in a paper titled “Strategy for Eliminating the Threat from the Jihadist Networks of al Qida: Status and Prospects,” which he had finished on December 29, just over a week after Big Safari got word the INF Treaty roadblock had been lifted. On January 25, two days after the test ground launch of a Hellfire from Predator 3034 and five days after President George W. Bush was inaugurated, Clarke sent the new national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, another memo with his Al Qaeda strategy paper attached. In this memo, Clarke told Rice, “We urgently need … a Principals level review on the al Qida network.” By that, the NSC counterterrorism chief meant that key players at the highest levels of government—including the new president—needed to have a discussion of what Clarke saw as the increasing threat posed by Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Islamic terrorist group, he noted, was trying “to drive the US out of the Muslim world” and “replace moderate, modern, Western regime [sic] in Muslim countries with theocracies modeled along the lines of the Taliban.”

  As Clarke soon learned, getting the Bush administration to focus on Al Qaeda, much less do something about it, would be no easy task. But Clarke; his deputy, Roger Cressey; the CIA’s Allen; and other senior officials were watching closely as the Air Force began conducting airborne test launches of Hellfires from Predator 3034 that February.

  * * *

  Curt Hawes and most others on the test team were oblivious to the interest in what they were doing at the NSC and the CIA. Big Safari’s Hellfire test director Spoon Mattoon, however, knew who the armed Predator’s first customer was likely to be once the team he was leading proved it ready for operations. The day after the new test detachment was established, the Summer Project team, including Big Safari’s designated Predator crew, Scott Swanson and Gunny Guay, had gathered in a large, windowless conference room on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, for a “hot wash”—a detailed review—of the previous fall’s Predator flights over Afghanistan. For three full days, the Air Force team and their CIA Counterterrorist Center partners discussed and debated the pros and cons, accomplishments and failures, lessons learned and ideas generated by the fifteen missions they had conducted. Besides spotting bin Laden as many as three times, they had gotten video of terrorist training in progress, discovered training sites previously unknown, mapped Taliban air defenses, and charted other military assets. The intelligence gathered was impressive.

  On the second day of the hot wash, CIA Director George Tenet and CTC Director Cofer Black came by to congratulate and thank the participants. Black gave each a “challenge coin,” a medallion the size of a silver dollar, as a token of appreciation. On one side, the coins bore the initials CTC on a red, white, and blue background. “DCI Counterterrorist Center” and “Central Intelligence Agency” in brass-colored lettering trimmed the coin’s border on that side. The flip side displayed the CIA seal: an American bald eagle’s head, a compass with sixteen radiating spokes, and a white shield, bordered by “Central Intelligence Agency” and “United States of America” in gold.

  The coins were nice, but many in the Air Force contingent were frustrated, and they found their CIA colleagues divided. Some at the hot wash agreed with Clarke and Allen that Predator reconnaissance flights alone were valuable enough to resume. Others, including Summer Project operations director Major Mark Cooter, wanted to wait and send the Predator back only when it was armed rather than risk discovery with more unarmed flights. On the CIA side, some opposed using an armed Predator against bin Laden or his lieutenants even if the Air Force perfected it. Revelations in the 1970s of CIA assassination plots against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders had led to searing Senate hearings that stained the agency’s reputation. In 1976, President Gerald Ford signed an executive order banning any U.S. employee from engaging in, or conspiring to engage in, “political assassination,” an order President Jimmy Carter renewed and President Ronald Reagan broadened by removing the word political. After the African embassy bombings in 1998, President Clinton signed a secret order giving the CIA authority to kill bin Laden in certain circumstances, but sending an armed drone to stalk the terrorist leader hadn’t been contemplated then. For many at the CIA, there was ample reason to think twice before agreeing to such an operation, which could go badly wrong in many ways and would be controversial even if it succeeded. With the technology still being tested, the Bush administration still getting under way, the Al Qaeda threat still seemingly distant, and major legal and political issues still unresolved, the way forward was murky at best.

  Soon these uncertainties would vanish. But as 2001 began, those pondering whether to send Hellfire-armed Predators on a big safari for Osama bin Laden and his top disciples were not so different from Captain Curt Hawes when his wife walked into their bedroom on that February evening. They were groping in the dark, anxious about pulling the trigger.

  * * *

  Curt Hawes made it on time to his 4:30 a.m. briefing on February 16, which was held in the 15th Reconnaissance Squadron’s auditorium at Indian Springs. At the briefing, Big Safari’s Mattoon went through the plan for the first test shot of a Hellfire from a Predator in flight. The Air Force contingent wore green flight suits or camouflage fatigues; the rest of the twenty-two-member team, all civilians, were dressed in work pants or jeans, and most wore sweaters and jackets against the early morning desert chill. Everyone in the auditorium was tired but excited: since February 5, when General Atomics trucked Predator 3034 from El Mirage to Indian Springs, the team had worked almost nonstop to prepare for the test.

  As the briefing ended, Hawes stood up and faced the motley crew. “We have come too far and all worked too hard for this to be anything but successful,” he declared. “Let’s go out and kick some ass!”

  A few minutes later, a contractor crew using a ground control station at Indian Springs launched 3034 and flew the Predator northeast into Nellis Air Force Base’s vast test and exercise ranges. After the drone was beyond some hills that made C-band line-of-sight control impossible, Hawes and sensor operator Leo Glovka took control of 3034 from a second ground control station parked on the Nellis test range, also using a C-band antenna. Under the crawl-walk-run philosophy of testing, the first Hellfires would be launched with the Predator under line-of-sight control, thus avoiding the risk of losing link to the drone when flying via satellite.

  With 3034 carrying an inert, instrumented Hellfire (a missile fitted with sensors to gather and transmit data in flight), Hawes did some dry runs toward the target, an old tank parked in the desert. Glovka would go through the motions of a launch, putting the crosshairs of the Forty-Four ball’s heat-detecting infrared sensor on the tank. To reduce the chances of a miss, though, a ground-based
laser designator team would shine the beam used to guide the Hellfire to its target.

  Finally satisfied they were ready, Hawes used the nose camera to line the Predator up on the tank at an altitude of two thousand feet, then flew toward a predetermined “engagement zone.” Once 3034 entered the zone, Hawes depressed and held the black launch button on the throttle with his left thumb, then squeezed the trigger on the front of the joystick with his right forefinger. With a flash of heat and light that momentarily turned Glovka’s infrared screen a milky white, the Hellfire rocketed off the drone’s left wing and instantly disappeared.

  The unarmed missile traveled three miles downrange and struck the tank about six inches to the right of dead center. As Major Ray Pry of Big Safari put it in an Air Force news release, the Hellfire “made a big, gray dent in the turret—just beautiful.” Best of all, as instruments aboard the drone showed, the Predator barely shook.

  After the test was finished, Hawes was struck by how anticlimactic the experience was. From the earthbound cockpit he was using to fly the Predator, he heard and felt nothing as the Hellfire left the wing and completed its flight in less than thirty seconds. The shot Hawes had anticipated for weeks seemed to be over almost before it began.

  Five days later, the team repeated the performance twice. This time, though, Glovka used Predator 3034’s Forty-Four ball to lase the target tank, and the second of the Hellfires they shot was live. Hawes launched the first shot while flying via C-band link, and the second while flying via Ku-band satellite control. Some on the team were nervous about the second shot, which they knew was being streamed live into the Pentagon so that several generals, including Jumper, could watch. To help ensure that Glovka could find the cold tank with the Forty-Four ball’s heat-sensing infrared sensor—the Forty-Four lacked a daylight camera—some of the Army members of the team, Hellfire experts from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, poured bags of Kingsford charcoal into the defunct tank’s empty ammunition box, doused it with lighter fluid, and put a match to it. Because the desert sun had warmed the earth, they also drove a Chevy Suburban onto the sand in front of the tank and carved some donuts to churn up cooler soil, striving to provide even more contrast for the infrared camera.