Predator

by Richard Whittle

  After the group had worked through the two scenarios, Campbell led a discussion of other issues. What rules should be adopted to avoid collateral damage, especially that which killed or hurt women and children? And how would the CIA and the rest of the government deal with the aftermath of a drone strike that killed bin Laden? “Okay, we’re going to shoot,” he posited. “What comes next? What do we do the next day?”

  Campbell and his Army officer briefer later held a smaller tabletop for more senior CIA officials and encountered much greater division. Despite the existence of secret presidential orders, findings, and other directives relating to bin Laden and Al Qaeda, Director Tenet was sure his agency lacked the legal authority to kill someone by firing a missile from a drone, a worry others shared. Some in the smaller meeting also expressed concern about what might happen if the CIA’s hand in a drone strike became known.

  Other meetings about the Predator were held that summer at both the CIA and the White House. In one, Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Pentagon, raised an issue that set the Hellfire Predator project back weeks. Under a Status of Forces Agreement between the United States and Germany (a pact delineating what U.S. troops and forces could legally do on German soil), the United States might risk major legal and diplomatic problems, Shiffrin warned, if a crew in a ground control station at Ramstein Air Base, where the GCS had been located during the Summer Project, fired missiles from a Predator. Charlie Allen thought Shiffrin’s argument specious—the missile would be fired in Afghanistan, not Germany—but the Pentagon lawyer was adamant. Either the German government would have to officially agree to the presence on its soil of a crew controlling the Predator and launching the drone’s Hellfires, in which case the Americans could surely forget keeping the operation covert for very long, or the GCS would have to be located somewhere else.

  But where? Even with the system blinking red, even with the Hellfire Predator working well enough to deploy, there seemed many reasons to hesitate.

  10

  READY OR NOT

  “What if I could figure out a way to operate the Predators from a location in the United States?”

  That question, posed with unusual trepidation for him, was asked by Werner, the technoscientist on contract to Big Safari. In 1995, Werner had streamed Predator video into the Pentagon for the first time ever. In 1999 he had created a way to cue fighter pilots over Kosovo to what the Predator’s cameras were seeing. In 2000 he had devised a unique satellite setup that allowed the Air Force to fly the unarmed version of the Predator over Afghanistan for the CIA from a ground control station in Germany. Now, during a meeting in the latter part of July 2001 at the CIA that included more than a hundred military and intelligence experts, Werner gingerly raised his hand to suggest he could solve a problem that had stumped everyone else in the room. Until he spoke up, the group seemed about ready to abandon the idea of sending an armed Predator to hunt Osama bin Laden.

  The room fell silent, though Werner could hear some quiet chuckles and, from the corner of his eye, glimpse some shaking heads.

  “Do you really think you can do this?” asked the leader of the meeting, Counterterrorist Center Deputy Director Alec B., his voice betraying a mixture of incredulity and hope. (Alec B. has never been willing to allow his full name to be published.)

  All through June, reports that Al Qaeda was planning major attacks continued to flow in from various sources to the CIA, the FBI, and other arms of government. During the first week of July, Richard Clarke convened the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group and asked the various federal agency members to go on “full alert” against terrorist attacks. On July 11 the deputy national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, hoping to hurry along the Hellfire Predator project, sent a memo to CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and Air Force General Richard Myers, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, telling them that by September 1 the White House wanted to deploy Predators “capable of being armed.” The same day, the Air Force legislative liaison office sent ten key members of Congress letters that Snake Clark’s staff had prepared reporting that $2.275 million was being transferred from other programs “to complete the Hellfire demonstration.” The money would be used, the letters said, “to modify two more Predator aircraft to develop useable tactics, techniques and procedures for weapons delivery from UAVs.”

  By this point, senior officials had concluded that firing missiles off a drone controlled from German soil was legally and politically impossible unless they asked Berlin’s permission, and no one wanted to risk that. Attempts to find another country in Europe where the GCS could be based had failed. Werner and Air Force Major Mark Cooter, who had served as operations director for the Summer Project flights of the Predator over Afghanistan and would reprise that role if such flights resumed, had studied twelve different alternatives to Ramstein, from putting the ground control station on a ship to placing it in Scotland. For various technical and political reasons, none of the satellite and communications experts in the meeting at the CIA could identify a suitable new location anywhere abroad, and no one except Werner thought it possible to effectively control a Predator and fire its missiles from the United States. The curvature of the earth made it impossible to communicate from U.S. soil to a Predator over Afghanistan through a single satellite relay, and every expert but Werner believed that any other setup would introduce too much latency—delay in the signal due to travel time—to allow a sensor operator to reliably hold the laser designator’s beam on a target, especially in the case of a moving target. Even when the GCS was located in Germany there had been nearly a full second of latency for the pilot controlling the Predator over Afghanistan, and slightly more than a full second’s delay in the video from Afghanistan reaching Washington via Ramstein. But Werner had been studying the idea of operating Predators from the United States for quite a while, and he thought he saw a way to overcome the extra latency. He would do it by adding a new wrinkle to split operations, the scheme he had devised for the Summer Project.

  Under split operations, a flight crew in Uzbekistan equipped with a C-band line-of-sight data link and minimal controls had launched and recovered the Predator while a flight crew in a GCS at Ramstein used the Ku-band satellite link to fly the drone on its missions over Afghanistan. Since then, Werner had studied the idea of moving the mission crew to Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field, where the two Air Force Predator squadrons were based. He had even mused about the possibility of having Predator operators fly missions from a permanent building with pilot and sensor operator consoles built into comfortable, soundproofed rooms like those of a television station, instead of in a freestanding equivalent of a freight container. The pilots could fly their missions during the day, then go home to their families for dinner in the evening and sleep in their own beds. Some found the idea nothing short of absurd: a couple of years earlier, Werner had proposed this notion during an Air Combat Command meeting at Indian Springs, and those present told him he was dreaming. “We will never operate that way,” he was assured. So Werner filed the idea away in the back of his mind—until the July 2001 meeting of experts at CIA headquarters.

  Based on his extensive knowledge of the satellite system and unofficial technical inquiries he had made of experts at satellite manufacturers and elsewhere, Werner declared that flying the Predator from U.S. soil “should be possible.” It could be done, he thought, by deconstructing a black box in the Predator system’s satellite earth terminal, which contained both a multiplexer—a device that combined the various data signals from the GCS into a single digital stream—and a modem, which converted the digital stream from the multiplexer into an analog radio signal for uplink to the satellite. The modem performed the opposite function when the Predator’s data signal came back from the satellite, converting that analog radio signal into a digital signal for return to the GCS.

  Werner’s idea was to put several thousand miles in between the
multiplexer and the modem by locating them on either side of an existing fiber-optic network that crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He would move the multiplexer with the ground control station to the United States and leave the modem with the satellite earth terminal in Germany. If the Defense Department fiber-optic network were chosen carefully, Werner calculated that he could hold the round-trip latency on the fiber network between Ramstein and the United States to less than two-tenths of a second. This would make the round-trip latency between the GCS at Langley and the Predator over Afghanistan—the amount of time that would elapse between a pilot sending the drone a control input and receiving return signals showing the results—less than 1.3 seconds in all.

  After describing his idea to those attending the CIA meeting, Werner added that “I should hasten to point out that this has never actually been done before, so there may be a part of the architecture somewhere that might preclude it.”

  Hearing this caution, Alec B. asked how much confidence Werner had in his scheme.

  “I would give it an eighty percent chance of succeeding,” the Big Safari scientist replied. Then he added a final word: “Although these odds significantly favor success, they’re not the odds I would want to go into heart surgery with. It all depends on how desperate you are to do the operation.”

  “How about we let you know tomorrow?” Alec B. responded.

  The next afternoon, Alec B. phoned to ask how long Werner thought it would take to create and test the system he envisioned. With enough money and people, Werner told him, maybe three months.

  “We have six weeks,” replied the CIA man. Given how early winter weather set in over Afghanistan, he noted, they had to start flying sometime in September, even if they couldn’t be ready by September 1, as the NSC had wanted. Alec B. said he would call Big Safari Director Bill Grimes to make sure Werner got what he needed.

  Over the next few days, Werner did deeper research on what it would take to put in place what he was now thinking of as remote split operations, in which the satellite earth terminal and GCS would be separated by an ocean. On August 1, Werner met at the Pentagon with Brigadier General Scott Gration, the Joint Staff’s deputy director for operations, who more than a year earlier had first suggested the CIA use the Predator to search for Osama bin Laden. The Deputies Committee of the National Security Council was meeting that same day to discuss, for a second time, Richard Clarke’s proposal to kill Osama bin Laden with the armed Predator. Now deeply involved in the Hellfire Predator project, Gration told Werner that Clarke hoped by August 7 to get the Principals Committee of the NSC to agree to use the armed Predator in Afghanistan. Clarke wanted the CIA and Air Force to be ready to start flying no later than September 25. Could Werner get his remote split operations scheme working in time to make that happen?

  Werner promised to get back to Gration with an answer as soon as possible.

  The next day, after a discussion with a vice president of L-3 Communications, a Salt Lake City company that had been providing communications technology for the Predator since the drone’s birth, Werner told Gration they could meet the September 25 target date.

  At the time, even Werner failed to grasp the technological revolution that would follow if he found a way to make remote split operations of the Hellfire Predator work. For the first time in history, it would be possible to target and kill an enemy much the way a sniper does—from ambush, and with precision—but from the other side of the world. Science fiction would become science fact.

  * * *

  CIA headquarters covers 258 acres carved out of verdant woods on the Virginia side of the Potomac River, eight miles and eighteen minutes northwest of the White House by car, in an unincorporated area known as Langley. The well-marked main entrance is on the south end of the property, just off Dolley Madison Boulevard. Leafy woods shield the rest of the grounds from public view, and even most visitors allowed to travel past the front gate see little of the CIA compound. Once they and their vehicles pass inspection by an armed guard, they motor nearly half a mile down a curving, tree-lined drive along the easternmost edge of the property, then park in front of the 1960s-vintage Old Headquarters Building. The east front of that seven-story structure faces the Potomac, and the capital beyond; the west side connects to two six-story office towers completed in 1991. Behind those towers, parking lots fan out in several directions and service roads snake into the tree-covered southern end of the compound. This part of the campus is home to an ad hoc scattering of storage sheds, utility buildings, power generators, and a large, white water tank tucked into some thick woods not far from the CIA day care center.

  In the summer of 2001, the trees directly south of that water tank had been cleared for a couple of dozen yards to either side, creating a secluded glade where a construction crew was storing equipment and supplies. One unusually pleasant morning—the Washington region is normally insufferably muggy in August—this glade was the first of several planned stops on a tour of the CIA campus being conducted for Cofer Black, the no-nonsense director of the intelligence agency’s Counterterrorist Center. Major Mark Cooter and Black’s deputy Alec B. had set out that morning to show Black and about twenty other officials and experts various spots on the CIA campus that might make suitable locations for a Predator ground control station and a mobile home that an Air Force team could use as an operations cell, if President Bush and his National Security Council ultimately decided to send the armed drone in search of Osama bin Laden.

  “Major,” Black barked as the group stood in the glade.

  “Yes, sir,” replied Cooter, the only military officer in the group.

  “Where do you think we should put the equipment?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  “I agree,” Black said, then turned and started walking back to the CIA headquarters building. Tour over.

  Colonel Ed Boyle, who as intelligence director for U.S. Air Forces Europe had been the Summer Project’s commander at Ramstein and would reprise his role if new Predator flights over Afghanistan were ordered, had wanted to put the ground control station at another Langley this time: Langley Air Force Base, near Hampton Roads, Virginia. The latter Langley was home to Air Combat Command, where Boyle had transferred in April, requested by General Jumper to be ACC’s director of intelligence, a prestigious assignment. The CIA, however, wanted tighter control over the operation than an Air Force base could provide, especially now that the Predator could fire missiles. Higher-ups had decided to put the drone’s operators at the CIA’s Langley.

  With that decision, Boyle thought of embedding the Air Force contingent in the Global Response Center on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters. No one liked working in a cramped, chilly, and often smelly Predator GCS, and members of the Air Force team assigned to the operations cell tent next to the GCS at Ramstein during the so-called Summer Project had complained of the damp and cold of Germany’s autumn, which featured much rain and not a little snow. The tent was so poorly heated that they often had to work in gloves and field jackets to stay warm, and when it rained the tent leaked. Captain Ginger Wallace, the only woman officer on the Summer Project, especially disliked having to share a porta-potty with a football team’s worth of men during the Ramstein operation.

  Boyle thought his people would be happier indoors, but the CIA rejected that idea and insisted that the Predator team set up its operation away from the main building. The agency wanted as few Air Force people as possible working in its headquarters; besides, with roughly three hundred employees, the twenty-four-hour CTC operations center was crowded already. Their CIA hosts also wanted to keep the Predator operation as inconspicuous as possible, so Air Force participants were instructed to wear civilian clothes only, and the unit’s little base in the glade near the water tower would be made to look as much as possible like a construction site. The CIA campus at Langley was a favorite photographic subject for foreign spy satellites—and, for that matter, users of Google Earth.

  “You’ve got to be kidding
me, right?” Wallace blurted out when Cooter called her at Ramstein to tell her about the move to Langley. She and Captain Paul Welch, a communications officer at Ramstein, had worked for the past six months to get ready for more Predator flights over Afghanistan conducted from Germany. They already had a semipermanent building on the spot at Ramstein where the ops tent and the huge satellite earth terminal required for split operations of the Predator were located. The building was only a two-story metal shelter akin to one GCS stacked atop another, but it had tile floors, windows with glass in them, reliable heat, good lighting, and comfortable work spaces. It also had an indoor toilet.

  Cooter assured Wallace that things wouldn’t be so bad at Langley. There would be no building like the one she and Welch had set up at Ramstein, but there would also be no tent. The ops cell would be in a double-wide mobile home, which the CIA rented and parked in the glade not long after the site was chosen.

  “Okay, I don’t care what our setup is, but we will have a bathroom in that trailer,” Wallace told Cooter. “I will not spend ninety more days going to the bathroom in a porta-potty.”

  * * *

  On July 11, the day Stephen Hadley told the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff to get ready to deploy armed Predators in September and the Air Force told Congress it would fund the completion of the Hellfire project, Big Safari gave General Atomics a new contract. It directed the company to modify two more existing Predators to carry MTS balls and Hellfires, to make software changes so all three Hellfire Predators could “engage moving targets,” and to “conduct live fire flight demonstrations” at China Lake. General Atomics was also to paint Predator 3034 and the two other Hellfire Predators “air superiority gray,” the color used on Air Force warplanes to make them hard for enemies to see. Cooter had insisted on the color scheme. Remembering the Taliban MiGs that had come looking for the Summer Project’s unarmed Predators the year before, he wanted to take every step possible to preserve the element of surprise as they stalked Osama bin Laden.