Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare

by William M. Arkin

  But PowerPoint and background papers flew, focusing everyone more on the question of feasibility and choreography than on legality or wisdom. The circle of decision-makers, already quite small, got smaller and even tighter, everyone in that circle being there precisely because they accepted the validity and exceptionality of their mission. So it came down to killing.10

  The “debate” about using so-called “lethal force” against Osama bin Laden devolved into a bureaucratic exercise to ensure that the presidential finding authorizing the action was worded properly to protect everyone involved, including the president himself: capture would be preferable to killing, and killing would be judged acceptable only if capture was not feasible; the Afghan partners—euphemistically labeled “the tribals” to suggest some circle of indigenous wagons defending against outside marauders—would be paid only if bin Laden was captured. Bin Laden was declared an imminent threat to the United States. The right of self-defense was invoked, granting permissions and immunities. Before the 9/11 Commission three years later, CIA director George Tenet portrayed the covert action agency as the protector of the laws and status quo—rather than the president’s law-breaking arm, which is in fact what it is—claiming that “CIA leadership… felt it important that there was a full understanding by the President and the National Security Council” of another attack or an assassination.11 Yet when the president’s authorization allowing the agency to kill the Saudi man was finally granted, only four decision-making officials outside the White House (or the CIA) were even allowed to read it; and none were allowed to keep a copy or discuss it with their staffs.12

  By then this small circle of secret warriors in the White House had discovered Predator. The “Predator project is our highest near-term priority,” wrote the head of the Small Group, the formal interagency chamber beyond top secret, in April 2000. The CIA would fly the air force drone over Afghanistan to gather real-time information on the whereabouts of the al Qaeda head, so as to provide the intelligence needed to make that next attack a successful assassination. The still-developing capability was taken out of any normal chain of command and career path to become part of a high-priority White House program now labeled Afghan Eyes.13

  Again there was considerable opposition. James Pavitt, the head of the Agency’s clandestine service, even argued that if Predator fired a missile at bin Laden and responsibility for the use of lethal force was laid at the Agency’s doorstep, it would endanger the lives of CIA operatives around the world.14 But the response of the Predator’s supporters was ruthless, a machine now being placed in harm’s way, dissenters turned into weak and visionless bureaucrats. “You know,” White House blusterer Richard Clarke is quoted as saying, “if the Predator gets shot down, the pilot goes home and fucks his wife. It’s OK. There’s no POW issue here.”15 No loss of American life, or so it seemed, meant there was no issue of any kind.

  By mid-August 2000, the White House approved deployment of Predator to Uzbekistan. The CIA wouldn’t fly the Predator. Air force pilots on loan would man the controls, together with the technical specialists who were still working out the kinks of the communications and imagery network. And there would be civilian contractors from General Atomics as well.16 It would be an extremely complex operation: two combined teams—from the CIA, the air force, the technologists’ secret cauldron called Big Safari, and the manufacturer General Atomics—would be needed, together with security, housing, feeding, etc. One team would operate in Uzbekistan to launch and recover the Predator drones and maintain them before and after each mission. The other team deployed with the ground control station to a secret base—in Germany, the secret being that the German government wouldn’t be told.17 It was the first attempt at what the air force called split operations, with forward takeoff handed off to active mission control over a thousand miles away once the drone was at stable altitude.18

  On September 7, the first Predator mission was conducted from Uzbekistan: the drone was launched and made the three-hour flight to Kandahar in southern Afghanistan.19 In a memo to national security advisor Sandy Berger, one of the White House staffers suggested that an emergency committee be established to act on any video that might come in if the reconnaissance drone locked in on bin Laden’s location. Much discussion ensued about how Afghan tribals would be rushed closer, about how US special operators might swoop in, about how more Tomahawk cruise missiles might be spun up and sent off to get him this time, even how a manned air attack might be undertaken; the only “implications” of the now-accumulated capability that were raised were whether surveillance could determine whether bin Laden actually remained in place or moved.20

  About two weeks later, they thought they had found their quarry.21 Loitering over Tarnak Farms, a walled compound and old Soviet agricultural commune east of the city and one of bin Laden’s residences, the Predator sensor operators saw “a security detail around a tall man in a white robe.” It was probably bin Laden, those read in at the CIA assessed; it was bin Laden, the staff at the White House concluded.22 The video was labeled “truly astonishing,” the whole enterprise taking on the merriment of total victory. After a second bin Laden sighting was supposedly made,23 staffer Richard Clarke wrote to Berger that “it might be a little gloomy sitting around the fire with the al Qida [sic] leadership these days.”24 A stylized video show of the two missions was prepared for President Clinton, who was personally walked through the 15,000-foot sightings.25

  The second sighting of bin Laden came a week to the day after Congress authorized approval for the air force to arm the Predator, releasing funds from the public treasury to do so. The program had been initiated by General Jumper upon his return to the United States, and development of a Hellfire missile capability on the Predator was moving along.26 But since the missile was considered a “new start” under the law, air force attorneys forbade any “touch labor” by government employees until approval was received. There was also a legal issue as to whether an armed Predator violated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with the Soviet Union. That 1987 treaty banned ground-launched cruise missiles, and the question was whether the drone was being given characteristics that would classify it as a cruise missile, albeit a reusable one.27 While awaiting resolution on the treaty issue, lawyers counseled that no missile could actually be attached to a complete Predator airframe. A wing was removed from a Predator and propped up on sawhorses; the engineers ran wires from the launcher to a flight control computer in the disassembled Predator’s fuselage to check whether the systems would work.28

  Sounds ridiculous, no? Momentum was building to kill bin Laden and change history and a bunch of bureaucrats, lawyers, and green-eyeshade penny pinchers were being punctilious? That was certainly the way conventional wisdom would frame the conversations after 9/11 as to why Predator didn’t just go on and do its thing against bin Laden right then and there.29 The participants told tales of bin Laden being caught on tape during the first flight, and even convinced the 9/11 Commission that that was what happened.30 But the truth of Predator’s capabilities is that the drones were far less advanced than advertised, and there was no particular culprit, except maybe secrecy, for the failure to eliminate bin Laden. Richard Whittle, in his book Predator, demonstrates how tentative the capability was. The former chief lawyer of the CIA agreed, later writing that “drone technology was still a work in progress; it was not yet certain that it would be lethally effective.”31

  In fact, no one delayed needlessly. Any hesitation or caution about whether a mission over remote Afghanistan could be successful was legitimate. By mid-2000, almost a quarter of the five dozen Predators that had been delivered to the air force had been lost in operations.32 During two deployments to the Balkans, three exercises in the United States, and one demonstration at the United States’ southern border, weather caused the cancellation of 17 percent of planned missions, and there was an early return to base in 19 percent of the others that got off the ground.33 Over the former Yugoslavia, from 1996
through the end of 1999, only about half of Predator missions were completed. Enemy action was one cause, but operator error equaled weather as another.34 The official operational test and evaluation, completed in October 2000, said that Predator was “not without limitations and difficulties,” in part because “reliability and maintainability problems persist.”35 Flying over Afghanistan at that point also had a very real, tight time constraint, as bad weather over the northern Hindu Kush mountain range would start to creep in in October (as was seen exactly a year later when US special operations helicopters flying from Uzbekistan had a hard time making it to the Panjshir Valley after 9/11).

  The Taliban also detected the high-flying drone on radar, and early on launched a MiG fighter to attempt an interception.36 Though air analysts went to work at the Pentagon to determine whether the ancient Soviet jets could indeed shoot down a drone, it was now clear that the Taliban (and al Qaeda) knew that the reconnaissance missions were being flown. A glimmer of triumph might have flickered with those in the know, but the mission was also made exponentially more difficult because the other side knew: the tall man in white robes was never seen again.37

  This is sometimes the disremembered reverberation of covert action, which is always sought when the president and his advisors can’t change the facts. And then, as the covert action itself unfolds in a secret chamber, for all the covertness, changes in the direction of the winds or ripples in the sands also act to provoke countering actions on the part of those who are being hunted. In “normal” channels, even in the development of revolutionary technologies that are highly secret (such as, for instance, stealth in the 1970s), a part of the process is to create equal and parallel countermeasures programs to ensure that a high level of classification doesn’t inadvertently result in a lack of independent review and outside criticism regarding what an adversary might be doing to counter the goal.38 But this was not the case with the Clinton administration’s growing “war” with al Qaeda.

  Gilgamesh the black box, then, is not the only manifestation of a secret world that lies beyond. A black box can also be thought of as policy. There is all of what happens in the open—Congressional appropriations, foreign policy, boots on the ground, bombing, navies showing the flag here and there—and then there are the supplements and appendages that make up special operations and covert action and psychological warfare and the newest member of the black family: cyber. Although throughout this chapter I have used the terms “air force” and “CIA” and “White House” to suggest some coherent council, in fact it was not the CIA but simply the counterterrorism-dedicated elite within the CIA, and to apply even that term before 9/11 is an erroneous characterization. They were hardly elite, which means they had to operate black box style in order to out-elite the other elites, often against the prevailing views of the CIA’s own leadership. In the black box world, the result is incredible secrecy and an alliance with people more powerful than those in delegated positions of power. Which brings us to the who of the more powerful people. It wasn’t the White House, the public place, or the government on record, but the black box operators who were members of the staff of the National Security Council, which in those days meant people who were desktop warriors—memo-writers and meeting-goers who know how to guide decisions without making them, and who would never claim to be operators of anything, because they also need to avoid the stain of Oliver North and the legacy of White House operators mucking about in the business of open government. And they are mere staffers when diffidence matters, especially when there is a need to foist off disasters or unsuccessful projects on their bosses. But paper tigers they are through and through, because they don’t have any authority to order anything or spend any money, not without the okay of some department or agency that actually has a budget. So their only avenue of do, derring-do or just plain do, and certainly the easiest, is the black box, which always means “segregated” and sometimes means “in a vacuum and cut off from what is going on outside closed worlds.” Those working in the open world are also unaware of what goes on in the black box, or the when and the why of the rules being suspended. This is the genesis of warrantless surveillance or enhanced interrogation techniques (torture), each a black box pursuit and off the books. And the public consequence is not only to make drone attacks seem out of the blue and out of context, but also for the compartment to fail to enlist the greatest minds in thinking through the overall problem and the proper response.

  At this point, merely telling the Predator story in isolation is, well, a bit isolated—because a week after the second (and last) sighting of the tall man in the white robes and just a month after the secret start of Predator flights over Afghanistan, a small dinghy carrying two men and a load of explosives rammed into the middle of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden harbor in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors and injuring thirty-nine others.

  The immediate impulse for the residents of the secret chambers—for those in Washington who had been living and breathing Afghan Eyes, snatch and grab, Predator, and the man in the white robes—was to attempt another retaliatory strike: a faster one, a better one, a bigger one. They agitated for it and then lamented not getting it, blaming sticklers and lawmen and those too weak to have vision, who were still standing in the way.39

  “We were shocked to learn that the Navy was even making port calls in Yemen,” counterterrorism staffer Richard Clarke later wrote,40 revealing what a vacuum the bin Laden quest existed in. General Anthony Zinni, the overall commander for the Middle East region, was labeled “culpable” by two others working in the White House circle.41 Michael Sheehan “was particularly outraged” that neither Zinni nor anyone else in the US military pressed for implementation of existing terrorist retaliation plans, that is, for an immediate attack.42 The government, even most of the intelligence community, was criminally stuck on a peacetime footing, the residents of the black box fumed. It was all the military’s fault for taking al Qaeda too lightly, they said. The dots weren’t connected even before America knew there were dots.43

  For America, the attack on the USS Cole came out of the blue, sending people running for their atlases to check where Yemen was, and scratching their heads to fathom how the US military could have been making such an ill-prepared and unprotected port visit in such an obviously dangerous part of the world. And just a month away, America had a presidential election—a hotly contested one.

  Volumes would later be written as to whether terror is a crime or an act of war, about the namby-pamby pre-9/11 reactions, about the failures of intelligence and government that led to the 2001 attacks, and then about the turnaround and all the supposed correctives that followed. But there is no denying in hindsight that by conferring warrior status upon al Qaeda, the United States also conferred the age-old mantle of the military on a bunch of criminals, even if they were archcriminals. Like the goddess Ishtar throwing a tantrum that resulted in Enkidu’s death, the black box reared its mighty pencil and took on the role of judge and jury—and more, claimed the essential authority and power of the gods. None of it would have happened without unmanned systems—first the long-range Tomahawk cruise missiles that could be fired from the Indian Ocean deep into Afghanistan, and then Predator, which now proved that it could range anywhere, and also could soon do so with its own weapon.

  I hate to say that regardless of the outcome of the 2000 elections, al Qaeda had gained advantage and the embassy bombings and the attack on the Cole were huge victories for bin Laden. As Lawrence Wright says in The Looming Tower, “al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan filled with new recruits, and contributors from the Gulf States arrived carrying Samsonite suitcases filled with petrodollars, as in the glory days of the Afghan jihad.”44

  It was all just part of a continuum, the focus on the best way to “fix” and “finish” the enemy, from Iraqi Scuds in 1991 to those Serb tanks in Kosovo in 1999, but soon enough, the focus was on taking out one leader at a time, and then even one terrorist or insurgent at a time. As some have suggest
ed, it was not just an overreliance on technology and a descent into an all-consuming black box that blinded the government to broader threats, but also an automaticity that suggested that public servants and even the president had no choice in the matter, that indeed our entire system of national security was in its way becoming autonomous and unmanned.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Inherit the Wind

  [I will] curse you with a mighty curse,

  my curse shall afflict you now and forthwith!

  A household to delight in [you shall not] acquire,

  [never to] reside in the [midst] of a family!

  TABLET VII, EPIC OF GILGAMESH

  In his first regular meeting with the Bush White House after the inauguration, CIA director George Tenet raised the question of who would be in command of Predators flying over Afghanistan, particularly since they would soon be armed.1 He got no answer. Less than a week later, he raised the same issue in his first private meeting with Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.2 Tenet asserted that the experiences of the previous year hunting for bin Laden demonstrated that, in the case of another sighting, the US government wasn’t ready.3 Rumsfeld, who was ultimately in command of the air force’s Predator, was noncommittal and fails to even mention any pre-9/11 deliberations in his own autobiography.

  On February 16, 2001, less than two weeks after Tenet delivered his talking points at the Pentagon, a Predator flying over the Nevada desert launched a five-foot-long Hellfire laser-guided missile against a stationary tank target. Under the most carefully chosen conditions of clear skies and calm weather, the ninety-eight-pound Hellfire left its position under the wing and found the laser spot “painted” on the turret of the stationary hull. Seventeen seconds after ignition, the missile struck the tank turret about six inches to the right of dead center, spinning it around about thirty degrees. The unarmed Hellfire “made a big, gray dent in the turret—just beautiful,” the test director said.4