Predator

by Richard Whittle

  In the end, the principals decided against trying to kill bin Laden with the Predator, at least for the time being, but agreed the military should consider it among other options. They left it to Tenet to decide whether the CIA would use the Predator for more unarmed reconnaissance missions but agreed it was a good idea. Tenet later directed the CIA to go ahead with the plan under way to deploy the Hellfire Predators to Uzbekistan in late September, but he told them to prepare to fly the drones, controlled from the Langley campus, for intelligence gathering only.

  Richard Clarke left the meeting feeling more frustrated than ever. Before the session, Clarke had sent Rice a personal note urging her to press the “real question” the principals should focus on—“are we serious about dealing with the al Qida threat?”—rather than leaving it to the lower-level Counterterrorism Security Group he chaired. In his note, he added a passionate, and prescient, prediction:

  “Decision makers should imagine themselves on a future day when the CSG has not succeeded in stopping al Qida attacks and hundreds of Americans lay dead in several countries, including the US. What would those decision makers wish that they had done earlier? That future day could happen at any time.”

  * * *

  Even as the National Security Council principals hesitated to use the new Hellfire Predator, the Air Force team was making final preparations to give them the option. On August 26 and 27, the Big Safari and General Atomics flight crews flew Predator 3034 in a twenty-four-hour test culminating in a Hellfire launch at a China Lake target. Then they ferried 3034 back to El Mirage to get its air superiority gray paint job. On August 30 they began testing Predator 3037 and Predator 3038, the two other drones modified to carry the prototype MTS ball and Hellfire missiles under the July 11 contract Big Safari had given General Atomics. Those tests, which included missile shots, would continue at China Lake through the Labor Day weekend.

  Mark Cooter and his CIA Counterterrorist Center opposite number Alec B., meanwhile, spent Labor Day weekend performing an unusual task. On Friday night, the Predator ground control station the Summer Project team had used in Germany arrived from Ramstein Air Base, where it had been in storage all year. Cooter and a Big Safari communications technician, Master Sergeant Cliff Gross, met and inspected the GCS at Andrews Air Force Base. When Cooter turned the GCS’s meat-locker-style door handle and walked inside, he was surprised, and pleased, to find the white Stetson and cavalry spurs the Summer Project crew had given him for his birthday the previous October. They were still hanging from the equipment rack at the back of the GCS, where he had sworn to leave them until they were allowed to take some action against Al Qaeda.

  The GCS was trucked to a warehouse on a CIA property in northern Virginia that night; the next day, Cooter, Gross, and Alec B., along with a CIA security officer and a logistics expert from the Counterterrorist Center, met at the warehouse wearing jeans and T-shirts. The logistician brought along two Wagner Power Painters, a collection of paintbrushes, rollers, and trays, and a couple of hundred gallons of flat white industrial paint he had purchased at the Home Depot.

  The five men set to work, and though they ran the power painters so hard the machines broke, forcing them to finish the job with rollers on extension poles, by nightfall they were done. The CIA wanted the ground control station that would be parked on its campus to look like any old freight container, perhaps one used for storage by the construction crew that had been using the space that way earlier that year, but the GCS had arrived from Ramstein with its metal skin painted black, brown, and green camouflage. Now its exterior was a scruffy white. “The requirement isn’t that it’s pretty,” Cooter reminded the others as they stood back to admire their work and wipe their paint-smeared brows. “The requirement is that it’s not camouflage.” Nothing about the white metal box suggested the technological revolution it would unleash.

  * * *

  That August, Ginger Wallace was transferred to Colonel Ed Boyle’s ACC intelligence staff at Langley Air Force Base. She also received orders to report for ninety days of temporary duty at the other Langley, CIA headquarters, commencing the Monday after Labor Day. Though she’d been irritated when Cooter called to tell her they would be operating out of a double-wide trailer at CIA headquarters instead of the base she and Paul Welch had prepared at Ramstein, Wallace was eager to get started. Cooter had also asked for Welch; he wanted him at CIA headquarters that summer to make sure Werner’s scheme for remote split operations was correctly set up. Cooter also knew Welch could get the Air Force team connected to all the military intelligence sources and resources needed to guarantee success once they started flying again.

  Wallace and Welch were due to meet Cooter at CIA headquarters on Monday, September 10, to prepare for the planned arrival on Tuesday of a full team of Air Force intelligence analysts. Everyone would need to get an ID badge, find their way to the double-wide, and begin to prepare to operate Predators over Afghanistan again. A CIA-led launch-and-recovery team was in Uzbekistan already, preparing a hangar for the drones.

  On Sunday, September 9, Werner flew from his East Coast home to Palmdale, California, where Big Safari had a detachment at the Skunk Works, the famed Lockheed Martin Corporation facility where secret and exotic aircraft such as the Mach 3 SR-71 spy plane were built. Monday, September 10, would be the first of three planned days of flight tests of remote split operations, which L-3 Communications and Air Force engineers had put together during August according to Werner’s specifications.

  That same Sunday, Colonel Ed Boyle was preparing to fly to Arizona. He planned to take a few days off to see Army Brigadier General James A. “Spider” Marks, an old friend, take command of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Fort Huachuca—by coincidence, the base where the Predator had flown its first operational tests just six and a half years earlier. The change-of-command ceremony was scheduled for Tuesday; Boyle would attend with another friend, Air Force Colonel Rich Gibaldi, then fly back home to Langley Air Force Base. When he got back, Boyle planned to put in his retirement papers. His mentor, General John Jumper, who on Thursday had taken over as Air Force chief of staff, had phoned Boyle that Sunday with some mortifying news. Jumper had just found out that, for reasons he couldn’t explain, a promotions board choosing new brigadier generals had just passed over Boyle.

  “We’ll work on fixing this next year,” Jumper promised.

  Boyle believed him. At the moment, though, he was just too angry and hurt to care.

  * * *

  Eleven months after Al Qaeda suicide bombers blew a hole in the side of his ship and killed seventeen of his sailors, the captain of the USS Cole paid his first visit ever to CIA headquarters. At 6:30 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, Commander Kirk S. Lippold arrived at Langley and spent a few minutes waiting in the lobby for his escort. While he waited, Lippold admired the big inlaid granite CIA seal in the shiny floor. He also pondered rows of gold stars embedded in the lobby’s north wall to commemorate, anonymously, CIA men and women killed in the line of duty.

  Earlier in his Navy career, Lippold had served on the guided-missile cruiser USS Shiloh, as executive officer. The vessel’s skipper, Captain John Russack, had since retired from the Navy and gone to work at the CIA as Charlie Allen’s deputy. Lippold himself was now working at the Pentagon, in the Strategic Plans and Policy Division of the Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Allen had told Russack to ask Lippold to visit them at Langley. Allen wanted to tell Lippold some of what the CIA knew about Osama bin Laden and how Al Qaeda had carried out the bombing of the Cole. The CIA veteran felt terrible about the bombing, about the intelligence community’s failure to detect the plot in advance, and about the government’s failure—under both President Bill Clinton and President George W. Bush—to retaliate after the attack was tied to Al Qaeda.

  Russack soon arrived in the lobby and took Lippold to Allen’s sixth-floor office, where at 7:00 a.m. sharp Allen invited them in for bagels, coffee, and orange juice. For the next
hour and a half, Allen told Lippold the story of the largely secret war with Al Qaeda; he also explained how and why he had been obsessed with Osama bin Laden ever since the African embassy bombings of 1998. Given Lippold’s lack of certain clearances, there was much that Allen couldn’t tell him, but Lippold was grateful nonetheless. As the conversation ended, the naval officer shook the older man’s hand and thanked him.

  “It means an awful lot for me to understand what our country is doing to catch this guy,” Lippold said. “But I don’t think America understands. I believe it is going to take a seminal event, probably in this country, where hundreds, if not thousands, are going to have to die before Americans realize that we’re at war with this guy.”

  Lippold thought Allen seemed surprised. “Well, hopefully that’ll never happen,” Allen said. “I hope we’ll be able to head that off before it does.”

  Russack and Lippold then left Allen. Russack wanted to take his former shipmate and subordinate to meet some other people at the agency and see some satellite imagery of Al Qaeda’s training camps.

  About ten minutes before nine, as they were walking through an office in another part of the building from Allen’s, a news bulletin on a television there caught their attention. Black smoke and fire were pouring from a hole near the top of the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York; the broadcast anchor was casting doubt on an earlier report that a small plane had hit the tower. Russack and Lippold continued their tour, making their way to the office of Cofer Black, the Counterterrorist Center director. As they waited for Black to finish a phone call, they watched the drama in New York play out on TV—and at 9:03 a.m. saw an airliner fly straight into the World Trade Center’s South Tower.

  “In that instant, it was clear the United States was under attack,” Lippold recalled in his memoir, Front Burner: Al Qaeda’s Attack on the USS Cole. “The office became a ferocious beehive of activity, with people running in and out of Black’s office. We slipped in, were quickly introduced, and just as quickly slipped out.”

  As Russack and Lippold were leaving, an office assistant with a phone to her ear told them that Allen wanted to see the two of them in his office immediately. When they arrived, Allen came out from behind his desk and put his arm around Lippold’s shoulders.

  “Kirk, I can’t believe you said what you did this morning,” Allen said. “I think the seminal event has just happened.”

  11

  WILDFIRE

  When Al Qaeda hijackers slammed an American Airlines plane into the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, Colonel Ed Boyle, director of intelligence for Air Combat Command, was in Arizona, driving south on State Highway 90 in a rented Mercury Grand Marquis sedan. Boyle had spent part of the summer of 2001 organizing an expanded “expeditionary intelligence squadron” to fly Predators for the CIA over Afghanistan. Those missions were set to begin on September 25, but for the moment Boyle had time for some other business. He and Colonel Rich Gibaldi, another senior intelligence officer at Langley Air Force Base, flew to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, near Tucson, and spent Monday, September 10, in meetings with the commander of 12th Air Force and his staff. On Tuesday, Boyle and Gibaldi, native New Yorkers who had been friends since high school, were driving the roughly hour and a half south from Tucson to Fort Huachuca, home of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center. An Army intelligence officer friend, Brigadier General James “Spider” Marks, was scheduled to take command of the base that day, in a ceremony that promised to be inspiring, followed by a reception that promised to be a good time.

  Boyle and Gibaldi had been on the road less than an hour when Fox News Radio reported that the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York had been hit by what was thought to be a small airplane. Boyle was immediately suspicious. “No planes are allowed on that side of Manhattan,” he remarked. Imperfect eyesight had prevented Boyle from becoming a pilot in the Air Force, but when he was a youth a family friend taught him to fly on Long Island, and he knew New York’s air traffic rules.

  “Yeah, it must be really bad weather,” Gibaldi said. But then a radio reporter described the brilliantly blue skies over Manhattan on that crisp, late summer morning, and soon the men heard that a second plane had hit the trade center’s South Tower.

  Boyle and Gibaldi gave each other a look. “We’ve got a problem,” Boyle said. Gibaldi stepped on the gas.

  Within half an hour, they were at the Fort Huachuca gate. They were still reaching for their military IDs to show the guards when Boyle’s cell phone rang.

  “Where are you?” asked the acting commander of Air Combat Command, Lieutenant General Donald Cook, calling from ACC headquarters at Langley Air Force Base, Virginia. Boyle explained that he and Gibaldi were about to see General Marks take command at Fort Huachuca. Cook told Boyle to get back to Langley Air Force Base as soon as possible—but first, the general ordered, “Call me from a secure phone.”

  By the time Boyle and Gibaldi found Spider Marks, a third hijacked plane had hit the Pentagon and people at Fort Huachuca were too busy for a change-of-command ceremony. Marks offered to let Boyle use the secure phone in his new residence, but when they got there, they realized the phone needed a new “seed key” to activate it, which incoming commander Marks had yet to receive. The friends shook hands, and Boyle and Gibaldi headed back to Davis-Monthan.

  As they drove, Boyle called Cook to explain why it would take a while before he could call back from a secure phone.

  “You need to get your butt back here,” Cook told him. “Jumper wants to know when you can be operational and flying.”

  There was no need to be more specific.

  * * *

  When the attacks began, General Jumper was in the Air Force Operations Center in the basement of the Pentagon, presiding over his first staff meeting since being confirmed by the Senate the previous Thursday as the seventeenth chief of staff of the Air Force. Seated at a curved table in the ops center briefing room, with senior officers to either side and subordinates occupying a couple of rows of tiered theater seating behind them, Jumper was listening to a daily intelligence briefing. The briefing officer was using imagery and other displays on a large screen facing the audience.

  Just before 9:00 a.m., another officer entered and spoke quietly to the briefer, who then announced they were switching the screen to live coverage from CNN because a plane had crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers in Manhattan. As the broadcast came up, the CNN anchor was reporting speculation that the plane had strayed off course from LaGuardia Airport, whose runways were just over eight miles from the towers. With bright blue sky behind the black smoke pouring from the North Tower, Jumper and every other pilot in the room knew there was no way bad navigation was at fault. Then they watched, dumbstruck, as United Airlines Flight 175 banked into the trade center’s South Tower. Now they knew this was a terrorist attack.

  Within minutes, a report came in that air traffic controllers at Dulles International Airport, to the west of Washington, had spotted a plane with its transponder shut off headed in the general direction of the Pentagon. Officers of all ranks rushed upstairs to get people out of the E Ring, the five-sided Pentagon’s exterior set of office buildings. The E Ring, with its windows on the outside world, is reserved for the most senior officers and officials of the Defense Department and their staffs.

  After hearing the report, Jumper wanted to get Air Force Secretary James Roche out of his fourth-floor E Ring office and down to the safer operations center. He found Roche, and as they headed to the operations center together, people began running down the halls, some screaming. American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757 with sixty-four passengers and crew and five Al Qaeda hijackers aboard, had flown into the west side of the Pentagon even as Jumper was on his way to fetch Roche. In the world’s largest office building, whose interior courtyard covers five acres, the distance from where the plane hit to the Air Force secretary’s suite was so great that neither Jumper nor Roche had realized t
he building was struck—until they saw people running from the smoke and smelled the stench of aviation fuel now seeping through the corridors.

  * * *

  Big Safari Director Bill Grimes was at his desk in Building 557 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, in Dayton, Ohio, that morning when someone stuck their head in his door and said, “Hey, an airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center.” Grimes joined others around the television in the conference room next door. He remembered that a B-25 bomber had hit the Empire State Building by accident in 1945, so the initial reports that something similar had happened at the North Tower didn’t seem implausible. But then the second plane hit the South Tower.

  Within a few minutes, Grimes was called back to his office to take a phone call. Snake Clark’s deputy, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Johns, was calling from Air Force headquarters. He wanted to know what needed to be done to get the three Hellfire Predators and whatever else was needed to fly them in the airspace over Afghanistan ready to go. They had just started discussing the matter when Johns said he’d have to call back: the Pentagon was being evacuated. Grimes promised to have answers when they talked again.

  His first call was to Major Spoon Mattoon, the Big Safari officer who had been running the Hellfire Predator testing at China Lake.

  * * *

  Captain Ginger Wallace, wearing jeans and a light sweater, was watching television in the Counterterrorist Center at CIA headquarters when the planes hit the World Trade Center. She and Captain Paul Welch had met Major Mark Cooter there early that morning to start organizing the planned new round of Predator reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan. Wallace was a specialist in intelligence collection; Welch, the son of a former Air Force chief of staff, was a communications specialist who had worked on the Summer Project at Ramstein. Welch had also helped Big Safari scientist Werner set up the communications structure for the new Predator operations base in the glade near the CIA’s day care center. As with the Summer Project, Cooter was to serve as Air Force operations director for the Predator team, working with his counterpart Alec B. of the Counterterrorist Center in running the CIA reconnaissance missions. Cooter, Wallace, and Welch had expected to spend September 11 preparing for the arrival of the Air Force intelligence analysts selected to work in the double-wide trailer when Predator flights resumed. Now, with the World Trade Center in flames, Wallace wasn’t sure what the Predator team would be told to do.