Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Air Force policy nominally stipulated four Predator air vehicles per ground control station, but aside from the one MTS ball on Predator 3034, only two other prototypes existed. For that matter, there weren’t that many Predators around, even seven years after the drone’s birth. At the beginning of 2001, the entire fleet numbered just sixteen, for despite all the sudden interest in the Hellfire Predator, drones were still extremely low on the Air Force’s list of priorities. The service was buying so few, in fact, that in August of that year, General Atomics’ Frank Pace told Tom Cassidy they might have to lay off about ten employees.

  As General Atomics prepared the two additional Hellfire Predators, the Big Safari team began working out how to use them most effectively against Al Qaeda. Cooter pushed Major Spoon Mattoon of Big Safari, the project’s test director, to conduct more flight tests. Cooter wanted to see if the Hellfires and their electronic components worked as well after twenty hours of flying in the cold air of high altitude as they did within an hour or so of taking off from the warm desert floor. By August 22, Scott Swanson and Jeff Guay of Big Safari, with two General Atomics pilots, were flying practice missions lasting hours at China Lake, devising and testing flight patterns they might use to find Osama bin Laden with the MTS ball, follow him without being detected, and possibly launch Hellfires at him. To make the exercises more productive, and help the team pass the time, Cooter and Mattoon devised some scenarios requiring members of the Hellfire Predator team to play the roles of “terrorists” and “civilians” by moving around a China Lake range at night in trucks and SUVs. The Predator crew had to find them in the desert using the MTS ball’s sensors, and then decide whether they were targets worth following.

  Werner arrived at China Lake on August 23, still working on aspects of his remote split operations scheme. When he heard about the nighttime exercises in the desert, he couldn’t resist getting involved. Werner was once commissioned by an intelligence agency other than the CIA to write a scenario for an exercise focused on defending against a possible attack on the U.S. communications infrastructure; his scenario was so realistic and worrisome that the agency immediately classified his work. Intrigued by what the Big Safari team was doing at China Lake, Werner sat down and wrote a couple of scenarios more elaborate than Cooter and Mattoon’s—six-hour plays, in effect, in which almost all the nearly two dozen members of the Hellfire Predator team had roles to play.

  In one scenario, a dozen or more of the team members were divided into small squads and sent out into the black desert night in various directions and in multiple vehicles. At certain times and places, staggered for the different squads taking part, they were to stop, get out of their vehicles, and post guards. One of the men in one of the vehicles was “Dr. Zhukov,” a nefarious character whose purpose was to meet up with a vehicle carrying people who would hand him a suitcase containing a small nuclear bomb—fictional, of course. Another character was a “Western intelligence agency plant”—a spy. The Predator crew’s assignment was to use their drone to find the various squads and, by observing their behavior, discern which man was Dr. Zhukov and which was the Western spy. The Western spy would be distinguished by the way he walked around outside his squad’s vehicle during stops while posing as a guard. While the others would meander in circles during stops to ease the burden of being on their feet, as guards usually do, the Western spy would occasionally walk in a short, straight line, then turn at a sharp right angle and walk in a longer straight line, describing a capital L.

  For Hellfire engineer Terry McLean and Raytheon engineers Bill Casey and Willie Norman, acting out roles in Werner’s scenarios—or playing “Rescue Rangers,” as they called it—made them feel a little silly, but the games gave them a way to have a bit of fun and blow off some steam after a summer of difficult work in the blazing desert. It also led to some comical experiences.

  On their first night of playacting, McLean was cast as the spy and Casey and Norman as terrorists traveling with him. After a couple of stops in the desert, his companions were to discover McLean walking his L, then shoot him down. The Predator crew’s assignment was to catch the drama on video. Having done that scene, McLean, Casey, and Norman had some time to kill in the desert before the next act, so they pulled some cheap folding chairs they had bought for that purpose out of their SUV and sat down to relax. Sitting in the pitch black of the desert, their eyes were naturally drawn up to the glorious sight of the Milky Way, made all the more mesmerizing by the absence of any nearby manmade light. After they had been staring at the stars for a while, they heard a coyote howl in the distance, just like in a Hollywood Western.

  “Oh, that’s pretty cool,” McLean said. Then another coyote howled, but this time from much closer. Turning on a flashlight and pointing it in the direction of the second howl, McLean saw red eyes glowing back at him from only about fifty feet away. Swinging their flashlights around in a circle, the three engineers got a surprise that sent chills up their spines. Perhaps thirty sets of red eyes peered at them: they were surrounded by an entire pack of coyotes. “You’ve never seen three middle-aged men jump in an SUV as fast,” McLean recalled. “We left the chairs and hauled ass.”

  The next night, Casey realized at a certain point during Werner’s second scenario that they were getting a little giddy from the long hours. This time, to show the Predator crew that they had spotted the drone overhead, Casey, McLean, and Norman offered the MTS ball’s sensors an ad hoc rendition, in song and arm signals, of the Village People disco classic “Y.M.C.A.” That’s when Werner, watching from the GCS, knew they were having entirely too much fun.

  * * *

  Werner came up with another scenario that was played out that month, but this one was for real. After telling Gration of the Joint Staff that he could make remote split operations work in time to have Predators controlled from Langley over Afghanistan by September 25, Werner discovered they would need a new satellite earth terminal at Ramstein to do that. They could still use the eleven-meter TMET—the “Big Ass Dish”—to receive signals from the Predator, but the Dutch communications satellite used during the Summer Project for transmitting the drone’s signals was no longer available, for its capacity had been leased to another customer. Werner found an alternative: a Russian-built, French-operated satellite known as SESAT (an acronym derived from “Siberia-Europe satellite”), but its only unleased capacity would require transmitting GCS data from the earth terminal to the SESAT at a lower frequency than the TMET could provide.

  With a bit of research, Werner found a company in Catania, Sicily, that was offering for lease a satellite earth terminal with a four-meter antenna that could transmit in the 13.75- to 14-gigahertz range the SESAT required. The company seemed a bit desperate for business, and after negotiating a price Werner thought a bargain, he added an unusual condition. For operational security, he insisted that the Sicilian company deliver the satellite terminal to a location in Germany he would disclose to them at a time of his choosing and hand it over without being told where the equipment was going. The Sicilians agreed, and Werner choreographed a clandestine exchange that unfolded one night a few miles east of the Rhine River.

  As instructed, the Italian company transported their terminal to Germany on a flatbed trailer, with the representative who negotiated the deal with Werner following in a passenger car. Exactly one hour after Werner called the Sicilian’s cell phone and told him where to take the terminal, the Italians pulled into a rest stop on the A5 Autobahn near Offenburg, a city about two hours south of Ramstein Air Base by car. Three Air Force contractors sent by Werner met the Italians there and carefully inspected the flatbed and the satellite terminal. They even scanned both the truck and the terminal with a “radio frequency sniffer” to check for hidden transmitters. The handoff made, the Sicilians left the rest stop in their passenger car, leaving the flatbed and satellite terminal to the Americans.

  As the team Werner sent to meet the Italians drove north in the flatbed with the terminal, a
pair of cars driven by two other Air Force contractors assigned to the operation fell in behind the satellite dish. Continually varying their distances to disguise their purpose, they watched for other cars that might be following the satellite terminal to its destination. Yet another car, driven by an American contractor, followed the Italians to make sure they didn’t double back. Werner’s team detected nothing suspicious, and when the flatbed reached Ramstein a couple of hours later, it was met and set up by the engineers permanently assigned to the air base to take care of the TMET.

  A few days later, the rest of the equipment needed for remote split operation of the Predator was in place at CIA headquarters. Now all Werner had to do was find out whether his jury-rigged system would work.

  * * *

  As the three Hellfire Predators and the remote split operations scheme for using them to go after Osama bin Laden neared readiness, Scott Swanson and Jeff Guay were assigned to test yet another bit of technology. Designed by Big Safari and installed in a GCS at China Lake, the new device was a little red toggle switch under a clear plastic cover. The switch assembly, fastened to a short wooden plank, was connected by a long black cable to the Predator flight control console. The function of this tethered remote switch was to supplant the joystick trigger a Predator pilot had to pull to launch a Hellfire. Lifting the plastic cover and flipping the red switch attached to the board would potentially become the final step in the launch sequence. Its purpose was to let someone other than a military pilot fire the missile—presumably someone from the CIA—and thus take legal responsibility for the act. Chronically cynical Gunny Guay immediately dubbed it the Monkey Switch. Even a monkey could work it, Guay told Swanson, so that must be what the bosses had in mind.

  Guay was just being Guay, but he was right about the origins of the Monkey Switch. It was a product of the indecision and anguish gripping top CIA officials and military leaders as they approached the prospect of using an armed drone to stalk and kill a man. The NSC Deputies Committee had decided at its August 1 meeting that the CIA could legally use the Hellfire Predator to kill bin Laden or one of his deputies without violating Executive Order 12333, the long-standing ban on assassination. That order, signed by President Ronald Reagan on December 4, 1981, and carrying the force of law, was a detailed codification of intelligence community authorities and limits, but one section, “Prohibition on Assassination,” was unadorned. Section 2.11 stated simply, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.” Section 2.12, “Indirect Participation,” added, “No agency of the Intelligence Community shall participate in or request any person to undertake activities forbidden by this Order.”

  Beyond those two statements, Executive Order 12333 offered no specifics on how to define assassination or how to interpret or apply the ban on U.S. employees engaging in it. The Deputies Committee decided drone strikes against Al Qaeda leaders would be acts of self-defense, not assassinations, but the deputies could only offer their opinion on such a complex legal issue. The NSC Principals Committee would have to decide whether they were right. The principals would also have to decide who would authorize any drone strikes conducted, who would foot the bill for the Hellfire Predators, and whether an officer of the military or of the CIA would actually pull the trigger.

  John McLaughlin, a career intelligence analyst who became CIA deputy director exactly a week after the USS Cole bombing, agreed with the decision at the August 1 meeting but still harbored reservations. McLaughlin was enthusiastic about the idea of using the Predator to go after bin Laden, who between the African embassy bombings and the Cole had a lot of American blood on his hands. The Predator’s persistence—its ability to keep its eye on a location for more than twenty-four hours—and the fact that Al Qaeda would have no way of anticipating such a weapon made the happenstance of the Air Force project to arm the drone manna from heaven in McLaughlin’s view. But he and other longtime Langley veterans were still traumatized by scandals over CIA assassination schemes that had been revealed in the mid-1970s and had led to curbs on the Agency’s activities. McLaughlin told the meeting that the Agency needed to be sure that all those involved would be willing to share the responsibility if the Predator were used to kill bin Laden.

  McLaughlin worried about how the public and politicians might react to newspaper headlines about the CIA assassinating a terrorist in Afghanistan. McLaughlin’s fear, a common one at Langley, was that the politicians were likely to run for cover and let the CIA take the blame if an attempt to kill bin Laden with the Predator went awry, especially if there was collateral damage. Among the items discussed at Langley was how to avoid killing or wounding innocent civilians. Predator video from the Summer Project included imagery of women and children near the homes of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, bin Laden, and the Al Qaeda leader’s deputies in Afghanistan. If a drone strike ended up killing children, it wasn’t hard to imagine Washington politicians lining up to get in front of TV cameras to do their best imitations of Captain Louis Renault, the cynical French police inspector in the film Casablanca who declares that he is “shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here” just as a croupier hands him money he’s won in the casino he’s shutting down.

  Charlie Allen was one of the few CIA old-timers ready from the first to hunt bin Laden with the armed version of the Predator; at one of that year’s meetings, he had appalled Director George Tenet by declaring that he was even willing to pull the trigger himself. Tenet remained wary even after the Deputies Committee decided the CIA could legally kill a terrorist who had openly declared war on America and whose organization had killed Americans. The CIA director was also still skeptical that an intelligence agency could legally fire a military weapon. The head of the CIA’s clandestine activities branch, meanwhile, Deputy Director for Operations James Pavitt, was even more opposed to using the Hellfire Predator than he had been to deploying the unarmed version. The lives of his operatives around the world would be at risk if the Agency used such a weapon and the fact got out, Pavitt argued. CIA people would become targets themselves.

  But the military was equally opposed to having its people pull the trigger—hence the Monkey Switch. “There was concern that you couldn’t have a military officer actually pulling the trigger in a situation that wasn’t declared war, was part of a covert action,” the CIA’s liaison to the military at the time, Lieutenant General Soup Campbell, explained years later. “So the idea was that maybe we would actually put a trigger or switch in there and a CIA guy who was covered under the [presidential] finding would push it.”

  To prepare for that possibility, the CIA sent a couple of its officers to China Lake that summer so Swanson and Guay could train them in using the Monkey Switch. Mark Cooter came out to China Lake to supervise, and on the day of the training Cooter had Swanson stop at a grocery store on his way to work. After each of the CIA officers had, as instructed, stood to the side of the flight control console, held the wooden plank in both hands, and toggled the switch a time or two, Cooter asked Swanson, “Well, are they good?”

  “Yes,” Swanson replied in his cheery Minnesota lilt. “They can do it!”

  Reaching up into the dimly lit top of the flight control console, Cooter plucked two bananas off the bunch Swanson had bought that morning as instructed and handed the CIA men one each. Then they all laughed.

  The Monkey Switch was never used again.

  * * *

  When the question of who would pull the trigger finally reached the people with the power to decide such issues, they punted. On September 4, 2001, the NSC Principals Committee held its first meeting on Al Qaeda since President Bush’s election—a meeting Richard Clarke had been begging for since four days after Bush’s inauguration. Among those gathered in the White House Situation Room that day were NSC principals President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (sitting in for Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld), and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, with statutory advisers Tenet and Joint Chiefs vice chairman Richard Myers, who was a few days away from succeeding Army General Hugh Shelton as Joint Chiefs chairman. After a brief discussion, the committee approved the expanded authorities for a broad campaign against Al Qaeda as outlined in a classified memo that National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice had asked the CIA to draw up earlier in the year. The memo laid out a more aggressive new U.S. policy whose goal would be to eliminate Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda both, in part by having the CIA funnel money and military equipment and supplies to Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance, the main insurgent force trying to overthrow bin Laden’s hosts, the ruling Taliban.

  Next, those at the NSC meeting discussed the armed Predator. Neither the CIA nor the military wanted to take responsibility for pulling the trigger, and neither wanted to pay for the program—issues that led to heated discussion. Rice’s deputy, Stephen Hadley, told the leaders that the Predator might be useful in the effort to gather more intelligence on Al Qaeda. But he offered a far more conservative view than Big Safari’s of how ready the armed version of the drone was to deploy, saying the Hellfire Predator might not be suitable for immediate use. Rice suggested the spring of 2002 might a better time to deploy it. Powell, a former Army general who had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff when President Bush’s father was president, was in favor of using the armed Predator but doubted that bin Laden would be easy to target.

  Tenet, who had been briefed in detail on the Hellfire test shots conducted between May 22 and June 7, knew that although the missile was highly accurate, the reliability and thus the lethality of the weapon was iffy. He contended that the probability of taking bin Laden out with a Hellfire was low, and Rice concurred. Tenet also said it would be a terrible mistake for the CIA director to decide when to fire a weapon like this. Others assured Tenet that the decision to fire would be the president’s to make. As for who would actually pull the trigger, the military or the CIA, that question was left unresolved, though Myers said that if a strike were launched covertly the CIA would have to do it.