Predator

by Richard Whittle

  A year earlier, the Summer Project had suffered a crash as well, losing Predator 3050 on the runway in Uzbekistan because of a malfunction of some sort. That accident caused a lengthy argument between the CIA and the Air Force over who would pay the roughly $1.5 million needed to replace the aircraft. When Predator 3038 crashed, no one was arguing over money anymore. As a satellite reconnaissance photo later confirmed, 3038 went down near Mazar-i-Sharif, an area held by the U.S.-allied Northern Alliance, so the Taliban, as far as U.S. officials knew, remained ignorant of the armed version of the Predator. But the crash left the Wildfire team with only two armed Predators, just at the moment when the Bush administration’s former qualms about using such a weapon evaporated.

  The day before the Predator team’s hunt for bin Laden began, President Bush visited the Pentagon for a briefing on special operations and was asked by a reporter, “Do you want bin Laden dead?”

  Bush replied, “There’s an old poster out West that I recall that said, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.’” Later that day, Monday, September 17, he signed a CIA Memorandum of Notification modifying the ban on assassinations in Executive Order 12333 and authorizing lethal covert action to disrupt Al Qaeda. The memorandum specifically empowered the CIA to use the armed Predator for that purpose.

  Also on September 17, Colonel Ed Boyle officially assumed command of the Air Combat Command Expeditionary Air Intelligence Squadron—the unit that would be hunting bin Laden from the “Trailer Park,” as insiders quickly took to calling the double-wide and GCS on the CIA campus. As he did, Boyle was told by Air Force lawyers that he would be the officer authorized to issue the actual order to launch a Hellfire from the Predator, empowered to do so by the laws of war and Title 10 of the U.S. Code. First, however, CIA Director George Tenet or his designee would have to authorize Boyle or his designee to order the trigger pulled.

  Soon, the question of who should decide when to launch the Predator’s missiles would prove much more complex than that, and the way that question was answered would mark a new chapter in the history of the CIA.

  * * *

  On September 28, President Bush chaired a National Security Council meeting at the White House to set rules of engagement for attacking Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ten days earlier, the president had signed a bill titled “Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists,” which had been approved by Congress on September 14; Bush now had the legal right to wage war in Afghanistan. The United States and its allies expected the conflict to be mainly an air war, with small units of CIA paramilitaries and special operations troops on the ground to direct bomb and missile strikes. But Bush was particularly worried about collateral damage, especially damage to mosques. At the NSC meeting, he and the other principals agreed that Army General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command and commander in chief for the coming conflict, would have to obtain the president’s approval to attack targets where “moderate or high collateral damage” was a risk. If the Air Force unit flying armed Predators for the CIA could find bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders, however, Bush’s okay would not be necessary: Tenet or his designee could authorize a Hellfire shot. But the CIA was to coordinate with Franks before launching Hellfires in situations where other U.S. and allied military forces were involved.

  The Predator cadre at the Trailer Park was already working hard to give Tenet a chance to approve a shot. Three pilots per shift, with one or two sensor operators available at all times, were flying two twelve-hour shifts a day, changing shifts at 1:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. None would stay “in the seat” more than a couple of hours at a time, for flying and manipulating sensors by remote control was often a mind-numbing job that required keen concentration. At first, Big Safari’s Swanson and Guay—the only Air Force pilot and sensor operator taking part in the operation who had ever launched a Hellfire from a Predator—were scheduled to overlap with the other crews during the meat of each mission, in case a chance to take a shot arose. One of the two General Atomics pilots, who had far more time flying the Predator than even Swanson, would sit or stand behind the military pilots, coaching them through any tricky situations. The General Atomics pilots and the other Air Force crews would fly the Predator on the roughly six-hour “ferry flights” necessary to get the drone to and from its base in Uzbekistan to the skies above the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and other areas of interest in southern Afghanistan.

  Summer Project veteran Cooter and Major Darran Jergensen, meanwhile, were swapping out each twelve-hour shift as mission commander, spending much of their time in the ground control station or the double-wide at the Trailer Park. From there, they would talk on a headset with the Counterterrorist Center in the “Big House,” as the Air Force contingent had begun calling the CIA headquarters building. As operations director for the Air Force cadre, Cooter also spent a lot of time in the CIA Global Response Center working with his counterpart there, Alec B.

  Finding and killing Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders was the Predator team’s primary goal, but keeping track of the Taliban’s leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was also among the cadre’s assignments. Omar, a former mujahedeen insurgent and reputed sharpshooter with rocket-propelled grenades, had by 1996 become “Head of the Supreme Council and Commander of the Faithful” within the Taliban, and thus de facto ruler of Afghanistan. Fanatically fundamentalist in his Muslim beliefs, Omar became Osama bin Laden’s chief ally, providing the wealthy Saudi extremist a haven and training camps for Al Qaeda. Omar claimed Allah had appeared to him in a dream as an ordinary man and called him to lead the faithful, yet he was described as a “political hermit” whose lack of ambition was one reason the Taliban revered him. He was said never to have ventured much farther from Kandahar than Kabul, the official capital of Afghanistan, yet his goal was to impose his strict brand of Islam on the world.

  During the last two weeks of September and the first week of October 2001, a Predator occasionally circled Omar’s modest town house in downtown Kandahar and a walled hundred-acre compound northwest of the city that included a palatial residence bin Laden had built for Omar after a truck bomb exploded near the Taliban leader’s home in 1999. Two hundred yards from that compound, Omar added a T-shaped bunker forty feet beneath the ground that had electricity and running water. By the time Bush decided irrevocably for war, bin Laden’s whereabouts remained a mystery, but the CIA knew where to look for his ally and protector Mullah Mohammed Omar.

  * * *

  On Sunday, October 7, at 1:00 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time (9:30 p.m. in Afghanistan), President Bush addressed the nation and the world from the Treaty Room of the White House. “On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” the president declared. The initial strikes had begun a half hour before Bush spoke, with fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from ships and submarines in the North Arabian Sea and attacks by Air Force bombers against preplanned, fixed targets, mainly Taliban air defenses and military headquarters. The purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom, Bush said in his speech, would be “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”

  Bush’s address, delivered on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Washington, lasted just six minutes and thirty seconds. By then, on a clear, starry night in Afghanistan, Predator 3034, call sign Wildfire 34, carrying two K-model Hellfires, was flying past Kabul en route to Kandahar, and by midnight was circling within camera range of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s compound northwest of the city. Forty minutes later, the drone’s cameras saw a bright flash above the Taliban leader’s nearby bunker—perhaps a gunshot, perhaps an explosion, but in any event, nothing dropped or launched by U.S. forces. U.S. planners had decided against bombing Omar’s compound for fear of killing innocents.

  An hour and fifteen minutes after the flash at the compound was recorded, a convoy of thre
e vehicles departed, heading southeast toward Kandahar. The Predator followed, for those in command were sure one of those vehicles had the Taliban leader inside. Swanson and Guay were in the pilot and sensor operator seats in the GCS, controlling Predator 3034 from the CIA campus, seven thousand miles away from what their cameras were showing. Four F/A-18 fighter-bombers were also loitering in the vicinity of Kandahar, with a KC-10 aerial refueling tanker nearby to keep them from running out of gas. The fighter-bombers were waiting for the Predator to follow the Taliban leader to a spot where they could bomb and kill him.

  Memories are fallible, especially memories formed in the infamous fog of war. Absent public release of whatever documentation still exists of what at the time was a highly classified operation, however, the memories of those participants willing to talk (including one who kept contemporaneous notes) provide the best evidence available to describe the drama that unfolded that night in Afghanistan. What can be said with certainty is that at the highest levels of the military, keen attention was being paid to the pursuit of Mullah Omar as seen in infrared Predator video.

  Predator 3034’s video was being viewed by General Tommy Franks on a screen at U.S. Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida; with him were several subordinates, including his chief legal officer: his judge advocate general, or JAG. In Washington, the CIA Predator’s video was being watched in a basement office of the Pentagon by General John Jumper, with Snake Clark and the Air Force intelligence director, Major General Glen Shaffer, by his side, and with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dick Myers, joining them from time to time. The drone’s video was also being fed to Prince Sultan Air Base, a lonely batch of beige buildings in the desert about seventy miles southwest of Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh. Prince Sultan was home to the headquarters of the allied air war, the Combined Air Operations Center. From the main CAOC building—a big, hangar-shaped structure furnished with dozens of desks, phones, computers, and four theater-size screens to project imagery on two large walls—Air Force Lieutenant General Charles F. “Chuck” Wald was to run the air war.

  Wald, a former North Dakota State University wide receiver selected by the Atlanta Falcons in the National Football League draft of 1970, was the Combined Forces Air Component Commander. While directing the air war, Wald would be joined in the main building by Major General David Deptula, the director of the CAOC; Colonel James Poss, Wald’s intelligence director; and Major Peter Gersten, Wald’s aide-de-camp. The four men would be sitting on an elevated platform known as the Crow’s Nest, a cockpit formed by three modular office tables littered with computers, telephones, radios, and coffeepots and cups; here they could see all the imagery on the CAOC screens, which would help them command and control air operations. As the war began, however, no one in the main CAOC building—not even Wald or any of the other men in the Crow’s Nest—could see the video from the CIA’s armed Predator. The operation at Langley was regarded as so secret and sensitive that the screen receiving the Predator’s feed was installed in a smaller building next door, the better to prevent French and Saudi officers at desks a few feet in front of the Crow’s Nest from finding out about America’s new weapon.

  Swanson and Guay were still at the controls of Wildfire 34 as Omar’s convoy entered Kandahar at 1:10 a.m., local time, on October 8. The small convoy consisted of an SUV (a Toyota Land Cruiser or similar model) followed by a white dual-cab and another pickup truck with armed men crammed into its cargo bed. “Vehicles joined by motorcycles at Kandahar,” an officer sitting near Wald and keeping notes at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia wrote forty-five minutes later. “Get the fighters up there ASAP.”

  A few minutes later, the vehicles stopped in front of a compound in downtown Kandahar and some of the occupants went inside. At 2:12 a.m., Kandahar time, General Deptula told subordinates to get a direct line from the Crow’s Nest to Colonel Ed Boyle at the CIA. A new set of F/A-18 fighter-bombers, recorded the officer taking notes, would arrive over this “time sensitive target” at about 3:10 a.m., Afghan time. As the planes flew, Deptula was amazed to hear that Franks planned to decide himself whether they should bomb the building they believed Omar was inside, or whether the risk of collateral damage was too high. Deptula thought such tactical decisions rightly belonged not to the strategic commander, the officer highest in the chain of command, but to the air commander and his staff.

  Air commander Wald, however, was not surprised. He knew Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had made clear to Franks before the war that they regarded collateral damage in Afghanistan as a strategic issue. Their view was that killing civilians or damaging mosques could make it appear that the United States and its allies were waging war on the Afghan people and Muslims in general, as Al Qaeda and the Taliban were saying, and thus turn potential friends into enemies.

  Franks would later write that, with his JAG telling him that the convoy now parked at the compound in Kandahar was a “valid target for Hellfire,” he directed Langley to have the Predator launch a missile, then waited as the drone lined up for the shot. For reasons unexplained in his book, neither Franks nor anyone else at U.S. Central Command—or the CIA, apparently—told those in the CAOC in Saudi Arabia that Franks had told the CIA to launch a Hellfire.

  Unable to see the Predator’s video, Wald, Deptula, and the two other officers in the Crow’s Nest were also unable to see the convoy or the compound in Kandahar. Nor could they talk directly to the Predator’s operators at the CIA. Communications about what Predator 3034 was doing were instead being relayed to the Crow’s Nest by a CIA liaison officer in the building next door, who was fielding phone calls and reading computer chat room messages from Langley aloud into a Crow’s Nest phone that Major Gersten had set to “speaker.” Wald, meanwhile, was talking and listening the same way to an AWACS communications and surveillance plane as it relayed his instructions to the leader of the Navy F/A-18s by radio. Suddenly, from one of the Crow’s Nest phones on speaker, a disembodied voice no one recognized said blandly, “Cleared to fire.”

  “Where’d that come from?” Wald demanded as he and the others in the Crow’s Nest swiveled their heads in confusion. “Stop!” he ordered the AWACS, assuming the clearance to fire was being given by someone in the surveillance plane to the fighter-bombers. “Knock it off!” Wald ordered. “You’re not cleared to fire! Don’t do anything!”

  After a flurry of phone calls, Wald was incensed to learn that the order to fire was a command to the Predator from someone elsewhere, not the AWACS. When he realized that fact, Wald decided it was time for Operation Enduring Freedom’s air commander to get direct access to the CIA Predator’s screen, too. “Get it here now,” Wald ordered a senior officer in charge of CAOC communications.

  “Sir, we can’t,” the officer said. “It’s a classified system on a classified net.” The Predator screen was supposed to remain in the smaller building next door, which housed the CAOC’s Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secured room with controlled access known as a “skiff” for its initials, SCIF.

  “I don’t give shit. Do it,” Wald said. “I need the system on the deck so I can make operational decisions. Bring it in.”

  By 2:32 a.m., Afghan time, a boxy white TV monitor with a filter screen on its front sat on the table at Gersten’s position toward the back of the Crow’s Nest. A thin, black cable ran through a hole in the table, down the Crow’s Nest steps, across the rear of the CAOC, under a door leading out into the Saudi sun, and across the sand to the SCIF in the building next door, where the Predator feed arrived from Langley. Wald and his key subordinates were asked to sign letters acknowledging that the air commander had ordered the CIA Predator screen be brought out of the SCIF. Although a computer showing chat rooms that those at Langley were using had to remain in the smaller building, Wald and his crew could now watch the silent infrared video the Predator was producing.

  The vehicles in Mullah Omar’s convoy had begun moving before the Pr
edator was in a position to take the shot Franks wanted in Kandahar, Franks wrote in a memoir published three years later. By the time the Predator screen was set up in the Crow’s Nest at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, the three vehicles had arrived at another destination after a journey of about thirty minutes.

  Kandahar’s winding streets made it tough for Guay to keep the infrared camera on the SUV and the two trucks as they made their way through the urban maze. But Guay managed, and as the convoy reached the countryside the Predator followed. Uncertain they could hit a moving vehicle with a Hellfire launched from the Predator, which had been tested so far only against stationary targets, Cooter told Swanson and Guay simply to follow Omar and his men, who finally pulled into a mud-walled compound about southwest of Kandahar. This compound featured two fairly large, one-story rectangular buildings oriented north–south; though situated parallel to each other, they were separated by a courtyard perhaps as big as a soccer field. On the north end of the compound was another, smaller building whose purpose, as with the other structures, was hard to discern in an infrared image shot at night.

  Omar’s convoy pulled into the compound from the west, crossing a small bridge over a creek or gully. One truck stopped just beyond the bridge, and a couple of armed men got out and began pacing. The other two vehicles turned south, drove around the first building, and parked in the courtyard on the other side. There, several men got out of the vehicles and stood next to the big building on the west side of the courtyard, fuzzy white figures on the Predator video screen. The infrared image, created by detecting and displaying contrasts in heat, provided no way to discern the features of the men below or guess which one, if any, might be Omar. But having followed the three-vehicle convoy from Omar’s compound to this one, those secretly watching from thousands of miles away were all but certain that the Predator had the Taliban leader and his inner circle in its sights.