Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Both Hellfire shots hit the target. That afternoon, Hawes and Glovka posed for a triumphant photo next to the tank they had hit, each still in his green flight suit, each standing with one dusty boot on a broken wheel their live missile had blasted loose. Hawes had found these Hellfire shots far more exciting; he kept expecting a CNN crew to show up and ask to talk to the man who had fired the “shot heard around the world,” though he later chastised himself for possibly being prideful. But technological revolutions often arrive quietly, and for the moment at least, Hawes and Glovka had to settle for a few high fives and pats on the back from their teammates.

  * * *

  A couple of weeks after the Hellfire test shots in Nevada, Snake Clark brought a small group of top managers and engineers from the Army Hellfire program office at Redstone Arsenal to CIA headquarters. Jumper and his fellow generals had been far from the only ones interested when Curt Hawes and Leo Glovka hit that tank in the desert with a live Hellfire. When Richard Clarke, Charlie Allen, and others at the NSC and CIA learned that arming the Predator was proving feasible, they began pressing to get this new weapon operational—ready to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top Al Qaeda lieutenants. Others within the “black world” of intelligence operations were also becoming far more interested in Jumper’s project to arm the Predator. Before they could decide whether to try using it against Al Qaeda, though, a number of difficult issues needed to be resolved. Snake Clark had brought the Army Hellfire experts to the CIA to help sort through some of the remaining technical challenges.

  Greeted by Counterterrorist Center and Directorate of Operations representatives, the Army experts, civilians all, were given a tour of the sixth-floor CTC operations center created to command the unarmed Predator flights over Afghanistan the previous September. Their CIA hosts then took them to a conference room and showed the visitors something that made their eyes bulge: the “Tall Man in White” footage of Osama bin Laden crossing a courtyard at Tarnak Farms, his disciples orbiting their hero like planets about a sun. The CTC officials also showed the Army experts color video of other Al Qaeda figures captured by the Predator’s camera before the operation was suspended.

  Then the CIA officials told their visitors something even more surprising: the CIA wanted to kill the people in those videos. They wanted to kill them with Hellfire missiles launched from Predators, and they wanted the Army experts to help make sure this experimental weapon could get the job done. The Air Force, General Atomics, Forty-Four ball maker Raytheon Corporation, and the Army Hellfire office had fired a couple of missiles off a Predator from two thousand feet above the ground and hit a big tank parked in the desert. The CIA wanted to know whether a Hellfire shot from a Predator flying at ten thousand or fifteen thousand feet could accurately strike a man walking in the open, or riding on a horse, or seated in a vehicle, or sheltering in a mud-brick building.

  Terry McLean, a defense contractor engineer working for the Hellfire office, saw his Army colleagues blanch as the CIA men unabashedly used the word kill. During a discussion that lasted a good two hours, they seemed to sprinkle it into every sentence. It was jarring, to say the least; in those days, most members of the military-industrial complex would do verbal backflips to avoid the word kill, preferring euphemisms such as kinetic action. The Hellfire was an antitank missile, a weapon built to destroy machines. People might be inside those machines, but nobody ever talked about that.

  The Hellfire was a “tank killer”—could it kill people who weren’t inside tanks, where the missile’s explosion was contained and intensified? Probably, the Army experts told the CIA officials, but not with the C-model Hellfire launched in the Nevada tests, a variant designed to be fired from helicopters flying two thousand feet or less above the ground. Nor could the Hellfire do what the CIA wanted with the Forty-Four ball’s laser designator, whose range was far less than the five miles or more needed to lase a target from the altitudes where the Predator loitered. Engineering fixes for those problems could probably be found, the experts allowed. A newer K-model Hellfire, whose digital guidance was better than the C model’s analog mechanism, might work. But the antitank Hellfire’s lethality against “soft targets,” as the engineers preferred to put it, would have to be tested. The missile was designed to penetrate armor with a jet of molten molybdenum formed by a precursor explosion on impact. The molten molybdenum would burn a hole through steel, providing entry for a high-explosive warhead weighing less than twenty pounds but whose detonation, contained by the metal walls of a tank, would incinerate anything inside. If fired at a soft target, the missile might go right through it and explode in the ground.

  That was appalling, one of the Army experts gasped as the group drove away from the CIA. A long-standing executive order made it illegal for federal government employees to take part in assassinations, he reminded his colleagues. Just helping the CIA devise a weapon to use this way might get them all in trouble. In any event, this was no job for the Hellfire program office. The Army Hellfire program existed to provide combat weapons for the military, not the CIA.

  Soon Terry McLean, an Auburn University engineering graduate and Huntsville native—his engineer father had worked on the space program—found himself in a strange situation. The Army program office unofficially left it to McLean, a contractor, to lead a half dozen Army engineers assigned to help Big Safari and the CIA adapt the helicopter-launched, antitank Hellfire to be fired from the Predator in targeted killings.

  About the time McLean and his colleagues visited Langley, and at the urging of Richard Clarke, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice asked the CIA to draft an order for President Bush to sign authorizing covert operations in Afghanistan that might include lethal action. On March 14, General Jumper convened a meeting about the Predator at Air Combat Command, and then issued a series of orders governing Air Force use of the drone. One of his orders directed Big Safari to get a new laser ball on the Predator and modify the Hellfire to work from altitude. And he wanted it done ASAP.

  * * *

  They were packed into the ground control station like sardines, roughly twenty of them, mostly engineers, all but one male, making enough involuntary skin contact to feed phobias. But as they squeezed into the crowded confines of this eight-by-eight-by-twenty-four-foot metal box crammed with computer work stations and humming electronics, no one was griping. On April 4, 2001, everyone on the team developing the Hellfire Predator, as insiders had begun calling it, wanted to be in the GCS at El Mirage to see how a new sensor turret would perform in its first test flight aboard the Predator. Especially eager was William M. Casey, forty-seven, chief engineer for Raytheon Corporation’s new Multi-Spectral Targeting System, known to the Hellfire Predator team as the MTS ball.

  A derivative of Raytheon’s Forty-Four ball, the battleship gray MTS looked much the same on the outside. The first MTS, in fact, was partially fabricated from salvaged remains of the Forty-Four ball crushed in the first Wartime Integrated Laser Designator Predator test at Indian Springs, on May 4, 1999, when the drone’s composite nose gear collapsed on landing and the aircraft slid to a stop on its sensor turret. Like the Forty-Four ball, the MTS was nineteen inches tall, but the glass apertures in the MTS ball’s aluminum skin were different sizes and shapes. The MTS’s camera aperture was squarish instead of round, with a lens window that angled down and in at its top, slanting toward the small, round laser designator aperture on the other side of the turret’s face. The effect (viewed with imagination) was a mechanical squint, lending the MTS the look of a robot taking aim. With a circumference of 17.8 inches, the MTS was only an inch or so fatter than the Forty-Four ball, but at 124 pounds, it was more than ten pounds heavier. In addition to an infrared sensor and a laser designator with nearly twice the range of the one in the Forty-Four ball, the MTS held a daylight video camera. Carrying the MTS, the Predator would be able to beam back not just black-and-white infrared images but also color video of what it saw. The new ball’s laser designator could also paint a
target from five miles or more away.

  Big Safari, viewing the WILD Predator as a successful experiment despite its limited use, had advocated development of the MTS in late 1999, after Kosovo. General Jumper had kick-started it in early 2000, after taking over Air Combat Command and learning that ACC had taken the Forty-Four balls off the three WILD Predators sent to Kosovo. Raytheon’s Casey persuaded the Air Force and Navy to make the MTS a joint project, and they pooled their money with the company’s to design, develop, and fabricate three prototypes incorporating major improvements over the Forty-Four ball. Thanks to newly available semiconductors, the MTS would carry one of the first-ever “staring” infrared sensors, a device able to detect heat within its field of view the way a camera senses light, rather than producing an image by the less advanced scanning method used in the Forty-Four ball. The more advanced MTS infrared sensor also provided a far sharper black-and-white image at far greater distances.

  Originally, Big Safari was to get one MTS prototype for Jumper’s project to arm the Predator, and the Navy was to get two for testing. In late March 2001, however, after the cadre of officials eager to use the Predator to hunt bin Laden got excited by the missile tests at Nellis, and after Jumper ordered the project sped up, all three MTS prototypes went to the Hellfire project. Now, on April 4, the engineers were jammed into a ground control station at El Mirage to see how the MTS worked.

  Years later, General Atomics project manager Chris Dusseault offered a dry assessment of the results: “Many issues were discovered during the testing.” Two General Atomics pilots who were at the controls in the GCS for the initial test flight described their response much more vividly.

  “Man, this color sucks,” Raytheon’s Casey heard one of them say early on, complaining about the color balance in the daylight TV camera.

  “What did he say?” someone at the back of the GCS asked.

  “Color sucks!” someone replied.

  As one of the General Atomics crew tried to use an autotracker feature to lock on a target with the laser designator, Casey heard him say, “The tracker sucks.”

  “What?” someone in back asked.

  “Tracker sucks!” someone replied.

  Then Casey heard another comment: “Focus sucks.”

  “What?”

  “Focus sucks!”

  The MTS ball’s black-and-white infrared imagery was about the only feature of the new sensor turret spared complaints. As the test flight went on, snorts were heard and sharp glances exchanged in the increasingly claustrophobic GCS.

  Casey and two Raytheon engineers with him weren’t surprised by the performance of the MTS, which they knew was immature. They were a bit dispirited, though, to realize how much work needed to be done before the technology would be ready for operational use. Casey figured they needed to do something to dispel that cloud.

  At the project team’s daily briefing the next morning, Casey stood in the El Mirage hangar and told the group the GCS had been so crowded the day before that it was “hard to hear the evaluations at the back.” So in order to “enhance and facilitate communications,” and to ensure that “everybody has access to the information,” he and Raytheon engineer Willie Norman had fabricated some communication aids for use in the GCS during the next test. Made from six-by-six-inch squares of poster board glued to wooden tongue depressors, the aids were signs bearing messages Casey and Norman had written out by hand with felt markers. Some were intended for use by the Predator flight crew, Casey explained, and he and Norman would use a couple of others. Then Casey held them up so everyone could see what they said:

  “Color sucks.”

  “Tracker sucks.”

  “Focus sucks.”

  As laughter echoed through the hangar, Casey held up a message that he and Norman might use:

  “Bite me.”

  The tension from the previous day’s failures evaporated.

  Many changes would have to be made before this new sensor ball could be used either for reconnaissance or for guiding a Hellfire from a Predator to a target, and both tasks would prove challenging. All through April, the team flew the MTS on Predator 3034, first at El Mirage, then at nearby Edwards Air Force Base, where on isolated test ranges they could shine the invisible but potentially blinding laser beam.

  Among many other problems, the Predator team discovered that it was difficult to keep the invisible laser designator beam “bore-sighted”—precisely linked to the aim point visible in graphic overlays on the monitors of the daylight and infrared cameras of the MTS. With the laser beam accurately bore-sighted, the sensor operator could guide a Hellfire to a precise aim point by keeping the crosshairs of either camera, daylight or infrared, on the exact spot the missile was meant to hit. But as the April flights continued, it proved impossible to keep the laser beam bore-sighted after the Predator was airborne. While using the drone’s cameras to aim the laser beam at the center of a black-and-white grid on a sixteen-by-sixteen-foot plywood “target board” and viewing its sparkle through a special camera on the ground, the team observed consistent aim point variances of several feet between the MTS’s designator and its cameras. A variance of that size would mean nothing if the weapon following the laser were a five-hundred-pound bomb, but with the Hellfire’s tiny twenty-pound warhead, and against targets as small as a man, a miss of a few feet would be as good as a mile. Unless the Predator team could correct it, the inability to bore-sight accurately was a potentially showstopping flaw.

  Given that and lesser problems, Bill Casey reluctantly sent the MTS back to Raytheon’s factory in McKinney, Texas, where they could take it apart, diagnose the sources of its problems, and perform major surgery. Casey and his team then spent the last week of April and the first week of May rehabilitating the MTS. They replaced the ball’s laser transmitter, upgraded its software, and made other fixes. On May 10 they sent the ball back to El Mirage.

  During the two-week pause, Raytheon’s engineers also came up with a solution for the bore-sighting problem. After puzzling over its cause for some time, Casey concluded that after the Predator left the hot desert floor and climbed into the below-freezing temperatures at fifteen thousand feet or more, some piece of metal in the MTS must be contracting more than other pieces and skewing the laser beam. But isolating that piece of metal might prove impossible, so Casey and his engineers came up with a different bore-sighting method. From now on, the Predator’s operators would launch the drone and climb to the median altitude planned for its mission, then aim the camera crosshairs at the center of the target board on the ground and shine the laser beam. Someone looking at the target board through the special camera able to see laser light would check the divergence between the MTS laser designator and its camera aim points and then tell the sensor operator, say, “You’re six feet left and four feet high.” The sensor operator would type that information into the keyboard on the flight control console in the GCS and transmit it to the MTS ball, whose internal steering mechanisms would adjust the laser beam and cameras accordingly.

  The Predator team got mixed results in more Hellfire tests on the China Lake range from May 22 through May 31. Flying 3034 at various altitudes and shooting a number of missiles at target tanks, they found that although the latest fixes helped, this jury-rigged weapon performed awkwardly at best. The hybrid system—a featherweight drone originally designed to carry sensors but not weapons; a missile originally designed to attack tanks from low altitude, not people from several miles up and away; a prototype sensor ball drafted into service before its creators deemed it ready—was very much a work in progress.

  The team also discovered a new problem. Terry McLean and his engineers had been correct in saying that the antitank K model of the Hellfire could be launched from far greater altitudes than its standard two-thousand-foot ceiling, but to do that they had to overcome the missile’s inherent “pitch bias.” The standard Hellfire was programmed to climb when fired so a helicopter could launch it from behind a tree or hilltop. McL
ean had General Atomics alter electronic signals sent to the missile from the Predator before launch, essentially tricking the Hellfire’s autopilot into thinking it was being launched nose up so it would veer downward as severely as possible. That fix helped, but even so, four out of nine shots they took at China Lake tanks over the last nine days of May missed. Once, the Ku-band satellite link was lost just as the missile was launched. Once, the missile malfunctioned. Once, the electronic signal used to fool the missile’s autopilot was too weak and the missile went off at the wrong angle. Another time, the bright, hot plume from the Hellfire’s rocket blinded the laser designator and the device lost the target.

  Getting the Hellfire Predator ready to hunt Osama bin Laden was taking a lot longer, and proving much more difficult, than those who wanted to use it that way had expected.

  * * *

  So was getting a decision on whether to use it. Six days after the MTS ball went back to Raytheon, Richard Clarke finally got a semblance of what he had been urging since President Bush took office: high-level attention to the Al Qaeda threat. On April 30, the NSC’s Deputies Committee met to review terrorism policy for the first time under Bush. By then, Clarke was increasingly frustrated with the new administration’s approach to what, in his judgment, was the most serious and immediate threat facing the United States.

  Earlier that spring, Condoleezza Rice, the new national security adviser, had decided to downgrade Clarke’s position. She cut him out of meetings he had formerly attended of the Principals Committee, meaning the NSC’s five statutory members (the president, the vice president, and the secretaries of state, defense, and treasury) and other legally designated advisers. She also decided that Clarke’s interagency Counterterrorism Security Group would no longer report to the Principals Committee directly, as it had done under Clinton. Rice asked Clarke to stay on at the NSC, but she and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, wanted a new, more comprehensive approach to combatting terrorism, as opposed to what she regarded as “tit-for-tat” responses exemplified by President Clinton’s cruise missile strikes on targets in Afghanistan and Sudan after Al Qaeda’s bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998.