“I’ve got the shot,” Predator mission commander Cooter told the CIA Global Response Center, certain Swanson and Guay could put a Hellfire into the men as they stood there next to their vehicles.
Cooter was told to sit tight for a while. Someone at Central Command believed the small building at the north end of the compound might be a mosque. Talking over a speaker phone in the GCS, Cooter conversed with his counterparts on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters and described precisely how he would direct his crew to fly the Predator so that even if the Hellfire’s twenty-pound warhead missed the Taliban leaders, there would be no risk of hitting the small building. As the higher-ups debated what to do, though, the potential targets entered the large rectangular building, disappearing from view. Cooter was furious.
Adrenaline was flowing at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, too, where Wald, Deptula, and Gersten had clustered their chairs at one end of the Crow’s Nest to watch the silent infrared drama playing out on the TV monitor now feeding them the Predator’s video. Wald was distracted, still seething that someone had been ready to launch a missile at a building in Kandahar without even giving the air commander a heads-up. Deptula and Gersten had their blood up. Only hours into the war, the Predator had handed the air commander and his team an opportunity to take out the Taliban’s leader and perhaps his most senior subordinates—a strategic blow of incalculable proportions. Knocking out the Taliban leadership would leave the enemy in disarray, strip bin Laden of his protectors, and possibly lead others to turn on the Al Qaeda leader and serve him up to the United States.
While awaiting a decision from Central Command, Deptula instructed two Navy F-14C Tomcats carrying thousand-pound bombs to go into a holding pattern twenty miles south of Omar’s latest stop. The Predator, with its tiny engine and pusher propeller, could circle above the Taliban’s heads unnoticed, but a loitering F-14’s roar might be heard for miles. Deptula wanted the two fighter planes far enough away to keep anyone in the compound below from hearing them, but ready to strike as soon as Franks gave the okay.
At CIA headquarters, Boyle walked outside and hurried to the GCS. If a shot was taken, he was required to order it. Swanson and Guay, with contractor pilot Big standing behind them, kept the Predator circling with its infrared camera on the compound as they waited to hear from Cooter what they were to do. A Hellfire’s relatively small warhead would be useless against the large building Omar, or the man they presumed to be Omar, had entered, but now the Taliban leader was in a place that could be obliterated with ease by warplanes. The excitement in the GCS was palpable. The war was on. The Predator team had in their sights a target they knew was important. Fighter-bombers were on hand, just waiting for the Predator crew to lead them to the target.
Thirty minutes passed. Swanson kept Predator 3034 circling. Guay kept its infrared camera on the building they were sure Omar had entered. The others in the GCS kept watching. A half hour stretched into an hour. One hour stretched toward two. The men outside the truck parked near the bridge at the entrance of the compound in Afghanistan split up, came back together, and meandered in circles. The F-14s were long gone, thirsty for fuel, but two new F/A-18s had been summoned and were close enough to kill the Taliban’s leader. Yet from the sixth floor of the CIA, from the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, no orders came down.
“What are they waiting on?” Guay grumbled.
12
CLEARED TO FIRE
General John Jumper, watching the pursuit of Mullah Omar unfold live but silently on a Predator screen in the Pentagon, was asking the same question as Master Sergeant Jeff Guay: What are they waiting on? As Air Force chief of staff, Jumper was both the most senior officer in his service and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His job, however, was to work with the secretary of the Air Force to manage the service—to “recruit, organize, supply, equip, train, service, mobilize, demobilize, administer and maintain”—not command units in combat. Jumper was free to offer his advice on military matters, including combat operations, to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, who as principal military adviser to the president could share that advice with the commander in chief. But when it came to operations, the members of the Joint Chiefs were legally outside the chain of command, which ran from the president to the secretary of defense to the combatant commander—in this case, Army General Tommy Franks. Which was why Jumper—watching the war with Snake Clark and several others outside the chain of command—was increasingly puzzled by the failure to strike first at the Taliban leader’s convoy and later at the buildings Omar was thought to be inside.
“We’d gone to all this trouble to set this up and get this architecture,” Jumper recalled years later, “and I thought we were exactly where we needed to be to make the right decision.”
Omar’s convoy (or, more correctly, the convoy believed to contain the Taliban chief) was the very definition of a “fleeting target,” the elusive sort that had led Jumper to decide to arm the Predator less than a year and a half earlier. Jumper had watched with anticipation as the little convoy went from Omar’s house in Kandahar to the walled compound in the countryside. When the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Air Force General Dick Myers, walked into the SCIF in the Pentagon where Jumper was watching the Predator video, Jumper told Myers he had thought the drone was going to launch a Hellfire at Omar’s convoy.
“We didn’t shoot, and I don’t know why,” Jumper said.
More than an hour later, the Predator was still circling the compound southwest of Kandahar while Franks, his legal officer, and others at U.S. Central Command in Tampa argued with the CIA about whether one of the buildings in the compound—either the larger one they thought Omar was in or the smaller one to the north—was a mosque. Neither structure had a minaret, but not all mosques do. The CIA and the leaders of the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia wanted fighters to drop bombs on the building they believed Omar had entered, the large one on the west side of the courtyard. CIA experts were sure that that building was just a meeting hall and the smaller one perhaps a kitchen.
“As I watched, I remembered my final conversation with President Bush,” Franks wrote in a memoir three years later. “The President had reminded me that the enemy was al Qaeda and the Taliban, not the Afghan people. ‘And this is not about religion,’ he’d said. ‘If you see bin Laden go into a mosque, wait until he comes out to kill him.’ Wait till they come out, I thought.”
At the CAOC, Lieutenant General Chuck Wald, air commander for Operation Enduring Freedom, was talking to Franks by phone from time to time and sharing what he heard with those in the Crow’s Nest with him: Major General David Deptula, Colonel James Poss, and Major Peter Gersten. Deptula was confident that, whatever the smaller building might be, it was distant enough from the one they wanted to bomb to rule out any significant risk of collateral damage. “CINC not hitting building because of collateral damage,” a CAOC officer keeping notes wrote, using the acronym for commander in chief to mean Franks. “Amazing. We could get Omar but the CINC’s worried about collateral damage.”
At the Trailer Park tucked into the glade on the CIA campus, Predator pilot Captain Scott Swanson, sensor operator Guay, and others in the ground control station and the operations cell kept asking, or wondering, why nothing was happening. “They’re not going to drop because they think it’s too close to a mosque,” Major Mark Cooter, the mission commander in the GCS, finally told them after getting the explanation from an Air Force liaison officer in the CIA Global Response Center.
* * *
Then, suddenly, the situation changed. Cooter was told by the liaison officer that higher-ups wanted the Predator operators to launch a Hellfire into a vehicle parked at the bridge leading into the compound, where dismounted armed guards kept gathering. Swanson thought the “guys upstairs” at the CIA had finally lost their patience with the hesitation at Centcom, as U.S. Central Command was known. But according to Franks’s memoir, that wasn’t the case at all. After
being told the Predator had only enough fuel to stay above the compound less than an hour more, Franks wrote, he decided to have the drone’s operators put a Hellfire into one of the vehicles “parked near the wall,” an apparent reference to the truck parked near the bridge at the gate to the walled compound. That gate was on the west side of the larger building, which Franks believed was a mosque. “Maybe that will persuade the people to leave the mosque and give us a shot at the principals,” Franks recalled saying.
Some thought the order simply dumb, given the odds against figuring out who the principals might be in a fuzzy infrared video. But the idea of taking a shot to flush Omar out had been discussed between Centcom and the CAOC in Saudi Arabia earlier, judging by the notes one officer took at the time. “The CINC is directing Predator to shoot two Hellfire with 30-pound warheads when we have F-18s with GBU-12s on station,” the officer wrote at 3:15 a.m., Afghan time, erring ten pounds on the high side in describing the Hellfire warhead. “Hellfires will bounce off the building,” the officer added in a bit of hyperbole, misunderstanding which target Franks had picked. The note taker added that Deptula had asked Wald to “call the CINC and tell him.” The notes added Centcom’s logic: “Perhaps”—with “perhaps” double underlined—“use Hellfires to scare them out to go to another hold site and then hit them.”
Swanson needed a few minutes to get the Predator in position to fire. Based on the Hellfire’s projected flight path, he would have to pull the trigger when the Predator was within a “sweet spot” of half a kilometer or less to make sure the missile hit where Guay was aiming the crosshairs of the laser designator. Precision flying was required, and then a countdown to the moment to fire, to be sure Guay had the beam on target when Swanson pulled the trigger.
As the time to begin the launch sequence approached, contractor pilot Big looked back at Cooter and nodded toward the white cowboy hat hanging on a metal rack above Cooter’s head. When the Summer Project crew gave him the hat for his birthday a year earlier, Cooter swore never to wear it until they were taking action against Al Qaeda. Now he looked up at the hat, looked back at Big and gave him a grin, then reached up and grabbed the white Stetson and put it on his head. This was the moment Cooter had been itching for ever since he and Swanson saw the caskets of USS Cole sailors being unloaded in Germany. “Okay,” Cooter told Swanson and Guay. “Cleared to fire.”
“Ten, nine, eight,” Swanson announced, pacing his count with the Predator’s closure rate while pressing and holding the “arm” button on the throttle with his left thumb. As he finished—“two, one, launch”—he pulled the trigger on his joystick. A second later, the GCS video screens went wavy for a moment as the bright light of the Hellfire’s rocket plume disrupted the infrared sensor. Then the missile vanished. “Weapon away,” Swanson said calmly.
For the next twenty seconds, sensor operator Guay took center stage. For the missile to hit its target, Guay had to lock the laser designator crosshairs on the truck near the bridge no matter how the air might buffet the Predator. Swanson focused on keeping the aircraft steady as the missile streaked unseen toward the men below. Then a bloom of bright light silently flashed on their video screens, and a glowing object of some kind somersaulted into the air and fell to the ground.
“We’ve got a flip-pah,” Guay declared in a mock thick Maine accent as the object spun in the air and disappeared in the infrared glow from the now-flaming truck. The “flipper” was one of the guards who had been standing next to the vehicle the Hellfire hit.
As the bright blossom of the initial explosion cleared, Swanson could see a couple of glowing bodies on the ground. Luminous figures poured out of the buildings in the compound and began running in all directions, many clearly carrying weapons and searching for the source of the munition that had hit the truck. None of them seemed to be looking up. Swanson thought the men below reacted as if they had been mortared or hit from across the road with a rocket-propelled grenade. He and Guay traded high fives with each other and with contractor pilot Big behind them. Cheers from the double-wide trailer echoed in their headsets.
The moment was historic. The Hellfire Predator was no longer just a concept. A new way of waging war had been inaugurated, a new way of killing enemies proven. Remote-control war and remote-control killing were no longer remote ideas: they were realities. One of the intelligence analysts in the double-wide printed a freeze frame of Predator 3034’s video at the moment the truck hit by the Hellfire exploded; annotated the photo with the date, location, and other data; and taped it to a wall in the trailer, a record of the world’s first intercontinental drone strike. Soon there would be more such pictures on the double-wide’s walls—many more.
* * *
Those at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia reacted far differently from the high-fiving crew in the GCS at Langley. Wald and Deptula, seated side by side, had turned their chairs to watch the Predator screen now sitting on the table at the back of the Crow’s Nest. Wald had been leaning back in his chair, occasionally putting a Styrofoam coffee cup to his lips to catch the shells of sunflower seeds he was chewing. When the silent infrared picture suddenly flared in the familiar white blossom of an explosion, the three-star general sat bolt upright.
“Who the fuck did that?” Wald and Deptula blurted in unison, staring at each other in wide-eyed shock as men poured out of the building they had wanted to bomb and dashed around the courtyard of the compound in Afghanistan.
“It’s like an anthill down there,” Deptula muttered.
Wald and Deptula watched as dozens of men filled the courtyard; there were too many to count. Some jumped in vehicles and drove away. The Predator’s infrared camera followed one vehicle that had been part of Omar’s convoy.
Wald phoned Franks and then told the others what the CINC had told him.
“Predator fired one Hellfire at the vehicles,” the officer taking notes recorded. “CINC did not know—we did not know: Who issued the fire order?” Franks, according to this officer’s contemporaneous notes, told Wald he didn’t know who had ordered the Hellfire shot—contrary to what Franks later wrote in his memoir.
“Looks like we gave up—forfeited—an opportunity to take out the entire Taliban leadership because CIA or Intel controlling Predator,” the officer at the CAOC taking notes wrote. “We were not notified Hellfire would be shot. CINC did not know, either. Who gave the fire order? Wald on the phone to CINC ten minutes after fire of Hellfire. Did not know.”
Wald’s next phone call was to Lieutenant General Soup Campbell, the CIA’s military liaison and a fellow Air Force fighter pilot. They had known each other for years.
“What the fuck, over?” Wald began.
Campbell was chagrined. He thought Franks and the CINC’s intelligence director at Centcom were in direct touch with Colonel Ed Boyle at the CIA and Wald both. In any event, Campbell told Wald, he thought Boyle had issued the specific order to fire.
Fourteen minutes after his call to Campbell, Wald called the Centcom operations director, Major General Gene Renuart, another fellow Air Force officer Wald knew well. “If you were me, what do you think I’d want to know?” Wald said. Then he answered the question himself: “Who the fuck is running what?”
Next Wald called Boyle, another officer he had known for nearly twenty years. Wald reached Boyle in the double-wide trailer at the CIA.
“Eddie, first of all, I’m going to kill you, and then I’m going to have you go to jail for this,” Wald loudly threatened, apparently with no humor intended. Wald knew Boyle was one of John Jumper’s favorites. He also knew Jumper was unhappy that the armed Predator hadn’t been used earlier during the Omar chase. Myers, the Joint Chiefs chairman, had called Wald and said so. But Jumper was outside the chain of command.
“You’re working for Johnny Jumper,” Wald accused.
Boyle denied the accusation.
“You’re lying through your teeth,” Wald said.
Boyle nearly exploded. “Hey, boss, to be all honest with you, go
fuck yourself!” he snarled. Those nearby whipped their heads around. Boyle was pale and trembling. “I don’t give a shit what you try to do to me tonight,” he loudly added.
For the next few minutes, Boyle and Wald argued about how the Hellfire shot had come about. Their heated conversation ended only after Boyle assured Wald, as the CIA’s military liaison Campbell had done earlier, that Wald or his staff would be told in advance before the Predator took any other Hellfire shots.
Twenty minutes later, Deptula telephoned Boyle. “Hey, Ed, calm down,” urged the CAOC director, who had worked with Boyle off and on since the 1991 Gulf War.
“Dave, in all honesty, the boss called me a fuckin’ liar,” Boyle fumed. “Franks and his staff didn’t have the courtesy to read Wald in, and you’re blaming me?”
“You’ll get over it,” Deptula soothed.
* * *
The officer taking notes wrote later that night that the “actual fire order” for the first Hellfire launch by a Predator in combat was issued by Franks to the Centcom director of intelligence, Army Brigadier General Jeff Kimmons, who relayed it to an Army lieutenant colonel serving as Centcom’s liaison in the CIA Global Response Center, who relayed it to a CIA official, who relayed it to Boyle, who then gave the order to fire to the crew in the ground control station.
By now—5:17 a.m. on Monday, October 8, in Afghanistan—the Predator was circling a building half a mile south of the compound where the Hellfire shot had been taken. The drone’s cameras had followed some people who fled there in one of the vehicles from Mullah Omar’s former convoy. Now officers at Centcom and analysts from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency were debating whether that building was a mosque, with the intelligence analysts sure that it was. “Picture up,” the officer at the CAOC taking notes wrote. “Boyle watching mosque area. Centcom guys have no idea what’s going on. Argument between Centcom and NIMA over mosque. No coordination at all.”
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