Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Reeve and an Afghan colleague returned early the next morning to BBC House to start covering the unfolding takeover of Kabul by the Northern Alliance. When he arrived, Reeve saw a huge gap in the street perhaps seventy-five yards from BBC House. Until the night before, the home of Taliban police chief Abdul Razak and two other houses had stood there. Reeve also soon learned that Al Jazeera’s villa, several blocks away, had been destroyed later the same evening. Al Jazeera and other news organizations were reporting that the network’s employees had left the villa shortly beforehand.

  Two days after the strikes in Wazir Akbar Khan, Al Jazeera broadcast a telephone interview with its correspondent Allouni; the network said he had been missing for more than a day and was now reporting from Gardez, a city close to eighty miles south of Kabul. Allouni said that while fleeing the capital just before midnight on November 12 he had been beaten—he refused to say by whom—and had witnessed “scenes that, I’m sorry, I couldn’t describe to anybody.” Allouni added that he was in “deep psychological shock,” and Al Jazeera reported that he was leaving Afghanistan for medical treatment.

  The day before Allouni resurfaced, reports emerged that the Al Jazeera bureau in Kabul had been struck by bombs or missiles. Responding to a question about those reports, a Pentagon spokesman told journalists at the State Department Foreign Press Center in Washington that “some weapons have failed and some human errors have been made, resulting in targets being struck that we did not intend to strike.” Rear Admiral Craig Quigley added that if Al Jazeera’s bureau had been hit in error, the Defense Department would “stand up and say so. We’re not to that point yet. But if that would be the case, that is what you will hear from us.”

  Al Jazeera Washington bureau chief Hafez Al-Mirazi, meanwhile, wrote a letter to the Pentagon demanding an explanation. Victoria Clarke, assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, replied on December 6, writing that “the building we struck was a known al-Qaeda facility in central Kabul.” She added that “there were no indications that this or any nearby facility was used by Al-Jazeera.” A subsequent letter to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld from the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Ann Cooper, elicited a similar reply from Air Force General Dick Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  “Please be assured any decision to strike a target is made carefully,” Myers wrote to Cooper. “As Assistant Secretary of Defense Clarke noted in her letter to Mr. Al-Mirazi-Osman, the building we struck was a known al-Qaeda facility in central Kabul.”

  Myers, like Clarke, offered no evidence to support the description of the house as an Al Qaeda facility, nor did he acknowledge that it was Al Jazeera’s bureau—which it was, as BBC reporter Reeve confirmed years later. It was also the house visited by the convoy that was tracked by the Predator on the night of November 12, a fact confirmed by geographic coordinates and a review of videos of the bomb strike by the F-15Es flying under the radio call sign Crockett.

  And there was more. Several days after the F-15Es leveled the Al Jazeera villa and the Predator launched a Hellfire at the survivors who fled, the fighter-bomber crews were told that higher-ups believed the strike on that house, the one they were called back to Kabul to conduct, had killed Mohammed Atef. But no one explained how that was known.

  Others concede the possibility that Atef died (if indeed he was killed that night) when the Predator’s Hellfire hit the smaller house shortly after the villa was bombed. Unless a credible witness or more evidence comes forward, the absolute truth simply cannot be known. But retired four-star general Renuart, who was Centcom operations director at the time, said years later that he believed Atef was killed in the bomb strike on what turned out to be Al Jazeera’s villa—a fact unknown at the time to those who conducted the bombing.

  “The reality is we’ll never know for certain,” Renuart acknowledged. But Atef died around the time of the strike, and as Renuart said, “I think everybody felt pretty confident, listening to what we listened to on the radios subsequent to that, that that was a successful strike, and that was the one that got him.”

  * * *

  Sometime after the news of Atef’s death reached Langley, CIA military liaison Soup Campbell went to Director Tenet’s office and suggested they visit the Trailer Park to congratulate the Predator team. As he waited for Tenet, Campbell asked the director’s secretary for the key to the executive dining room liquor cabinet. Campbell took out a bottle of Scotch and handed the whisky to Tenet as they headed to the Trailer Park. Why not offer the Predator team a drink to celebrate? Campbell suggested.

  When they arrived at the double-wide, everyone who could be spared from the two GCSs was waiting, crowded around a center island of tables laden with computers, video screens, phones, and other gear. Tenet shook people’s hands, and then spoke. No one took down the director’s words, but he offered congratulations on the great work they had been doing. He ended by holding up the Scotch and announcing: “This is for the team when we get him.” Then he turned and placed the unopened bottle on a shelf that ran along one of the double-wide’s walls, a trophy in waiting for the day they bagged the biggest high-value target of all, Osama bin Laden.

  A week after the Taliban confirmed Atef’s death, the New York Times revealed the important role the Predator was playing in the war in an article headlined, “Ugly Duckling Turns Out to Be Formidable in the Air.” Among other things, the article revealed that the Predator “was used to coordinate the surgical strike” that killed Al Qaeda military commander Atef. It also reported that after the escape of Mullah Omar, the CIA had been given “authority to strike beyond a narrow range of counterterrorism targets.”

  At the Trailer Park, the Wildfire team decided to create a souvenir to commemorate the revolutionary role they and their unorthodox weapon had carved out in a scant two months of operations and six weeks of war. They designed a “challenge coin”—a popular form of military memento—and had a batch minted. Paid for from their squadron snack fund, the coin they created was designed by the team, just as everything they had done was as a team.

  On one side of the coin, against a brass background, the words “United States of America” and “Operation Enduring Freedom” encircled a relief of the World Trade Center towers against an American flag in the shape of the Pentagon, with the numerals 9 and 11 on either side. The coin’s flip side was more distinctive, and unique. At its top was a representation of a double-wide mobile home constructed around a Predator, with the drone’s nose, wings, and inverted-V tail protruding from the trailer’s sides. Under the wings were Hellfire missiles. Below the Predator were head-on reliefs of an AC-130 gunship, B-1B and B-2 bombers, and F/A-18 and A-10 attack aircraft. Between the fighters, one front paw raised in the classic pose, was a hunting dog, pointing. Everyone knew the dog was the Hellfire-dodging Lucky, but no name was on the coin. The only writing on that side was a motto the team had adopted as their CIA controllers grew more and more willing to pull the Predator’s trigger without Centcom agreement. Embossed in capital letters at the top and bottom of the coin, the motto declared, “Never Mind … We’ll Do It Ourselves.”

  * * *

  Sometime that November, President Bush took his “Most Wanted Terrorists” scorecard out of his desk drawer in the Oval Office and drew a large X through the photo of Mohammed Atef. On December 11, about a month after Atef’s death, Bush traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to speak at the Citadel, the state military academy, where he told the corps of cadets that a new age in warfare was dawning, an age in which “innovative doctrine in high-tech weaponry” was the key to defeating “shadowy, entrenched enemies.” Bush didn’t mention the killing of Atef, but he told his audience that “Afghanistan has been a proving ground” for what defense professionals called “military transformation,” a policy relying on high technology rather than manpower to fight and win wars. “The Predator is a good example,” Bush said. “This unmanned aerial vehicle is able to circle over enemy forces, gather intelli
gence, transmit information instantly back to commanders, then fire on targets with extreme accuracy. Before the war, the Predator had skeptics because it did not fit the old ways. Now it is clear: The military does not have enough unmanned vehicles.”

  Major decisions are often made, and millions are often spent or invested, based on far weaker presidential endorsements of a program or a product. Those few sentences sent a powerful signal to the military-industrial complex and the traditional defense establishment, which for decades had largely ignored not just the Predator but any unmanned aircraft. Lots of different drones had been built, and several had occasionally been used in combat, but remote-control aircraft had remained a niche technology. Now all that would change, and the old ways would soon start to disappear. A new era in aviation had begun.

  The day after Bush spoke, U.S. Central Command issued a Combat Mission Needs Statement requesting that all Air Force Predators be fitted with laser designators and Hellfire missiles. The new armed Predators would be designated MQ-1 rather than RQ-1, as the unarmed version was designated—R standing for reconnaissance, M for multimission, and Q for drone. Even before the Atef operation, the Air Force, under inveterate innovator John Jumper and like-minded Secretary James Roche, had decided to double the number of Predators it would buy in the coming year to about two a month. They had also decided to spend ten million dollars for two prototypes of a larger “Predator B,” which had recently been produced by General Atomics. Tom Cassidy, ever an aggressive salesman for the company and its products, had been pushing the bigger, more capable aircraft on the Air Force for months. Not long before Bush spoke at the Citadel, Jumper had told those gathered at a Capitol Hill breakfast that the original Predator was his service’s “workhorse” unmanned aerial vehicle, but that the bigger, turboprop Predator B would offer “a little bit longer endurance and greater carrying capacity.” Left unmentioned by Jumper was the fact that the Predator B would carry bombs as well as Hellfire missiles.

  The Predator’s missiles, the wide distribution of its live streaming video, and the remarkable ability to fly the drone by remote control on the other side of the planet were the gee-whiz features that caught the world’s attention. Yet the novel feature that made the Predator a dramatic departure from the drones of the past was its phenomenal flight endurance, and that capability was what made it uniquely valuable to the military. Mark Cooter liked to say that the Predator’s Hellfires, with their puny twenty-pound warheads, were just “two silver bullets” that might be expended during ten minutes of a mission lasting a total of twenty hours. Over that mission’s duration, though, the unblinking, unseen Predator could lurk in the sky, find enemy targets for manned fighters and bombers, allow them to, as Cooter put it, “rain down lots of iron on bad guys,” and then keep loitering to help manned aircraft do the same thing again and again.

  Necessity being the mother of invention, and war being the mother of necessity, Big Safari would soon be working to improve the Predator and make its video much more widely available. For now, though, the drone revolution was only dawning, and many had yet to see the light. Two weeks before the death of Mohammed Atef, the Pentagon’s director of operational test and evaluation, Thomas Christie, issued a report declaring that the Predator was “not operationally effective or suitable” for combat.

  Cooter printed a one-page summary of the report and posted it in the original GCS at the Trailer Park. He figured others on the Predator team could also use a laugh.

  EPILOGUE

  When Scott Swanson and Jeff Guay used Predator 3034 to kill some of Mullah Omar’s security detail on the opening night of the war in Afghanistan, a new way of waging war was born. When the Predator tracked and led attacks by other aircraft on U.S. enemies such as Mohammed Atef, this new kind of killer scout opened eyes and gained many more advocates among military commanders and senior intelligence agency officials. When President George W. Bush declared in December 2001 that the Predator had proven that more unmanned aerial vehicles were needed, the military-industrial complex got busy providing them. But the drone revolution truly began, members of the Wildfire team believe, on March 4, 2002, when a couple of dozen U.S. troops endured a nightmare of a day atop a snowcapped peak in the mountains of Afghanistan called Takur Ghar, later known as Roberts Ridge.

  For those at the Trailer Park, the drama began on the evening of March 3, when Ghengis and a sensor operator named Andy, flying Predator 3037 from the original GCS, spotted a flash in the dark Afghan sky roughly twenty miles away from their aircraft. A few moments later, the Predator’s camera recorded the crash of a big tandem-rotor helicopter on Takur Ghar. It was 6:10 a.m. on Monday, March 4, in Afghanistan; what the Wildfire team knew was that U.S. forces were conducting Operation Anaconda, a campaign to kill or capture Al Qaeda forces who had taken refuge in the mountains. What the team didn’t know was that this was in fact the third Chinook to be riddled with gunfire that day by Al Qaeda fighters dug in on the peak where the helicopter had crashed.

  Three hours and twenty minutes earlier, a Navy SEAL, Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts, had fallen from the back ramp of a Chinook that was attempting to drop off a seven-man SEAL reconnaissance team on Takur Ghar. Al Qaeda fighters, hidden in a trench and log-lined bunkers, put a rocket-propelled grenade into the Chinook as it was trying to land; Roberts was lost as the pilot lifted back up to escape the enemy fire. The wounded Chinook lurched over the side of the mountain and plunged through the air toward a valley below, but the pilot somehow avoided a fatal crash.

  As would later emerge, Roberts was soon dead, slain by an Al Qaeda bullet to the head. But a little more than two hours after he fell from the helicopter, the six others in his SEAL team returned in another MH-47 to try to rescue him. Though this Chinook, too, came under fire as it descended, it successfully dropped the SEALs on the ridge before flying away with serious damage. The SEAL team immediately got into a firefight with the Al Qaeda fighters; outnumbered and outgunned, the SEALs were soon forced to retreat down the side of the mountain with one of their number killed and three wounded.

  Just over an hour later, a third Chinook—the helicopter that had caught the eye of the Predator team at Langley—descended toward the ridge in a second attempt to retrieve Roberts. Manned by a crew of seven, this Army MH-47E had flown Captain Nate Self, eight other Army Rangers, four Air Force Special Tactics men, and an Army medic to the mountain on the rescue mission. But because of command, control, and communications failures, Self and his Ranger-led quick reaction force were also ambushed the moment they arrived; under heavy enemy fire, their Chinook crashed, injuring some of Self’s team when it hit the ground. Then, as its crippled rotors whined to a stop, the aircraft was perforated by small arms and RPG fire from multiple directions. Four men were dead before Self and other survivors could get out of the helicopter and fight back.

  At the Trailer Park, contractor pilot Big saw the Chinook crash from the second ground control station, which had a video feed from the original GCS. Big, piloting a second Predator, was just handing over his own drone to the launch-and-recovery element in Central Asia to land. Already due to relieve Ghengis after that handoff, Big immediately walked over to the original GCS. There, Ghengis told him she had radioed an AWACS that was controlling the airspace to ask permission to take up station above the mountain where the Chinook was down and see if the Predator could help. She had been denied permission because a third Predator—this one unarmed—was there already, but she was trying to make the AWACS controllers understand that her Predator was armed. Finally, minutes after Big relieved Ghengis and took the controls of Predator 3037, the AWACS cleared him to put the drone into an orbit above Takur Ghar. The AWACS also gave him the Ranger team’s radio call sign, Slick Zero One, which was being used by Air Force Staff Sergeant Gabe Brown, an enlisted tactical air controller, to call in close air support for the Rangers.

  Over the rest of that Monday, the Wildfire team put all the Predator’s powers to work for the troops battl
ing for their lives on Takur Ghar. The Predator’s video, fed to the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command on Masirah Island, near Oman, and a tactical operations center at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan, provided a live view of the battle, which for some commanders was a revelation. In the end, though, Predator 3037’s Hellfire missiles played an even more important role as the firefight raged near the fallen Chinook.

  After the Rangers scuttled away from their disabled helicopter, they took cover behind some rocks a few feet to one side of the aircraft. Their redoubt was only about seventy-five yards from an enemy bunker under what Self and Brown quickly dubbed the “bonsai” tree; the Rangers were taking fire from both the bunker and Al Qaeda positions farther up the ridge. Soon after the Rangers asked the AWACS for air support, two F-15E Strike Eagles and two F-16C Fighting Falcons streaked over the mountain several times firing 20-millimeter cannons, but the fighter planes’ strafing runs failed to take out the Al Qaeda positions. The Rangers tried to assault the hilltop themselves, even though only five of the men who had landed on the Chinook were still able to pull a trigger. Self ordered a retreat when he realized the enemy had a heavy machine gun in a bunker shielded by thick logs.

  When the Rangers got back down the ridge and behind the rocks again, they came under mortar fire. Self had Brown call on an F-16C to try to hit the enemy position under the bonsai tree with a five-hundred-pound bomb; the target was so close to Self’s men that the pilot asked Brown for Self’s initials so he could later prove that Self had approved the strike. Three bombs missed, and the last rained gravel on his men, leading Self to decide that the risk was too great. Then, shortly after calling off the bombing, the Ranger captain heard Brown talking to the Predator. Worried about enemy movement, Brown was asking Big to tell him what the Predator’s camera was seeing to the east.