CHAPTER SIX Another Plane
1. Michael Scheur, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam and the Future of America (Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, 2006, revised edition), pp. 124–125; Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (New York: Knopf, 2006), pp. 158, 195, 210, 247; CNN broadcast, interview of Bin Ladin [sic] by Peter Arnett on March 20, 1997.
2. Looming Tower, p. 188.
3. On August 23, 1996, bin Laden issued an 11,500-word “fatwa” authorizing attacks against Western military targets in the Arabian Peninsula. See Usama Bin Ladin [sic], “Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” August 23, 1996; Looming Tower, pp. 232ff. According to Through Our Enemies’ Eyes, p. xvi, the declaration of war on the United States is actually published on September 2, 1996, in the Movement for Islamic Reform in Arabia’s al-Islah newsletter.
4. An al Qaeda videotape appeared on Al Jazeera on June 21, 2011, presenting recorded statements of Osama bin Laden. “With small capabilities, and with our faith, we can defeat the greatest military power of modern times. America is much weaker than it appears,” bin Laden says. He reassures potential martyrs: “You will not die needlessly. Your lives are in the hands of God,” and encourages the killing of Israelis and Americans: “We will see again Saladin carrying his sword, with the blood of unbelievers dripping from it.”
5. CIA director George Tenet, in a top secret memo after the embassy bombings, even declared “war” against al Qaeda. DCI memo to deputies at the CIA, December 4, 1998: “We are at war… I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community… We must now enter a new phase in our effort against Bin Ladin [sic]… we all acknowledge that retaliation is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced.…”
Tenet additionally writes: “I want Charlie Allen [Deputy Director] to immediately chair a meeting with NSA, NIMA [now NGA], CITO [our clandestine information technology organization] and others to ensure we are doing everything we can to meet CTC’s [counterterrorist center] requirements.” See George Tenet with Bill Harlow, At the Center of the Storm (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 119.
6. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 203.
7. Looming Tower, pp. 265–266.
8. John Rizzo, Company Man: Thirty Years of Controversy and Crisis in the CIA (New York: Scribner, 2014), p. 165.
9. 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 6, Footnote 112, p. 506.
10. At the Center of the Storm, p. 112; 9/11 Commission Report, p. 112.
11. Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
12. 9/11 Commission Report, pp. 131–132. The four were Secretary of State Albright, Secretary of Defense Cohen, Attorney General Reno, and chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Shelton.
13. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 189.
14. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002), p. 344.
15. Mark Mazzetti, The Way of the Knife (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), p. 92.
16. Age of Sacred Terror, p. 321; Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 19.
17. Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 154.
18. Saudi Arabia is merely the author’s best guess as to the location of the second base. In Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 21, he says “another country that was located within the beam footprint of a [communications] satellite in orbit over Southwest Asia.” George Tenet later testified before the 9/11 Commission that: “indications were that the host country would be unlikely to tolerate extensive operations, especially after the Taliban became aware, as it surely would, of that country’s assistance to the United States.” See Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
19. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 189.
20. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 189.
21. Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 157.
22. 9/11 Commission Report, p. 190; At the Center of the Storm, p. 127; Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 220; The Way of the Knife, p. 93.
23. Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
After a second sighting of the “man in white” at the compound on September 28, intelligence community analysts determined that he was probably Bin Laden; 9/11 Commission Report, p. 190. The footnote reads: “The CIA’s Ben Bonk told us he could not guarantee from analysis of the video feed that the man in the white robe was in fact Bin Ladin, but he thinks Bin Ladin is the ‘highest probability person.’ (Bin Ladin is unusually tall.)” Ben Bonk briefing (March 11, 2004). Intelligence analysts seem to have determined that this might have been Bin Ladin very soon after the September 28 sighting; two days later, Clarke wrote to Berger that there was a “very high probability” Bin Ladin had been located. NSC note, Clarke to Berger, “Procedures for Protecting Predator,” September 30, 2000.
Tenet later testified: “During two missions the Predator may have observed Usama bin Ladin. In one case this was an after-the-fact judgment. In the other, sources indicated that Bin Ladin would likely be at his Tarnak Farms facility, and, so cued, the Predator flew over the facility the next day. It imaged a tall man dressed in white robes with a physical and operational signature fitting Bin Ladin. A group of 10 people gathered around him were apparently paying their respects for a minute or two.” Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
24. 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 6, Footnote 120, p. 507.
25. Age of Sacred Terror, p. 322.
26. On May 1, 2000, General Jumper, then commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), sent a message to Headquarters Air Force, the office of Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters, AFMC, and other relevant commands. “Chief, ACC has internalized the Predator lessons learned from Operation Allied Force and is changing the direction for the Predator program,” the May 1 message began. “The original construct of the Predator as just a reconnaissance surveillance target acquisition asset no longer applies. ACC will employ Predator as a FAC-like resource, with look-out, target identification, and target acquisition roles using the inherent and proposed EO/IR/laser targeting/designation capabilities and upgrades. Also, ACC, AFMC, and the Air Armament Center (Eglin) are moving out on the next logical step for USAF UAVs using Predator—weaponizing UAVs.” See Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, pp. 17–18.
In the spring of 2000, a weaponization working group was formed including air force and army representatives. Big Safari assumed stewardship of the weaponization effort in late summer and a CONOPS for the multirole Predator was drafted, finalized in August 2001. See Briefing, Colonel Larry L. Felder, Commander, UAVB; Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Battlelab, 5 January 2005 (FOUO); obtained by the author.
27. Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 19; 9/11 Commission Report, p. 189.
28. Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, pp. 21–22. On December 21, 2000, the Office of the Secretary of Defense signed the armed Predator’s “Compliance Certification,” resolving the treaty issues.
29. See, e.g., Against all Enemies, p. 220; Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
30. See Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 157, for the story of the sighting on the seventh and not the first flight. Then see also 9/11
Commission Report, p. 190; At the Center of the Storm, p. 127; Against all Enemies, p. 220; and The Way of the Knife, p. 93.
“In the Predator’s very first trial run… we observed a tall man in flowing white robes walking around surrounded by a security detail”; At the Center of the Storm, p. 127.
Even Whittle in his initial Predator study accepted the first flight/fight sighting tale: “Big Safari began flying Afghan Eyes missions over Afghanistan on Sept. 7, 2000. On its first flight over Bin Laden’s Tarnak Farms compound outside Kandahar, the Predator’s camera spotted a man intelligence analysts believed to be the Al Qaeda leader himself.” See Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 21.
Later CIA analysts concluded that the camera had captured bin Laden in the second mission flown but only after analysis later; Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 160.
31. Company Man, p. 178.
32. By September 2001, nineteen of the sixty-eight Predators that had been delivered had been lost in operations, as many because of operator error as due to weather; the Pentagon operational evaluation office criticized the drone for its vulnerability to “visible moisture such as rain, snow, ice, frost or fog.” Bill Yenne, Attack of the Drones: A History of Unmanned Aerial Combat, pp. 64–65.
33. Major Christopher A. Jones, USAF; Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS): An Assessment of Historical Operations and Future Possibilities; A Research Paper Presented to the Research Department, Air Command and Staff College, AU/ACSC/0230D/97-03, March 1997, p. 33.
34. Major Houston R. Cantwell, USAF; Beyond Butterflies: Predator and the Evolution of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in Air Force Culture; School of Advanced Air and Space Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, June 2007, p. 24.
From March 1996 through April 1997, out of the 315 Predator missions tasked, weather and system cancellations kept nearly two-thirds (60 percent) on the ground. Of the remaining missions that were launched, slightly under one-half were subsequently aborted. These aborts were due to system (29 percent), weather (65 percent), and operational issues (6 percent) that included airspace conflicts, operator errors, and crew duty limitations.
Data indicates that 38 missions (12 percent) were scrubbed due to system failures, and that there were an additional 18 system aborts (6 percent) that did not result in mission cancellation (due to launch of another aircraft or weather hold), as well as other issues that kept the Predator on the ground 6 times (2 percent). See DOD, UAS Roadmap 2005, Appendix H—Reliability, pp. H-5 and H-6.
Of 128 Predator sorties scheduled during Operation Allied Force over Kosovo in 1999, 84 were launched, 30 had to return to base (20 due to weather, 4 for maintenance problems, 6 for communications). And of the remaining 54, a total of 41 missions were shortened or canceled due to weather, 4 for maintenance. See Air Force PowerPoint Briefing, Weaponized UAV Demonstration, Brigadier General Kevin Sullivan, AAC Vice Commander, 16 March 2000; obtained by the author.
35. The DOD Director of Operational Test & Evaluation went further in his 2001 annual report, declaring, “The Predator UAV system is not operationally effective or suitable as tested during IOT&E.” DOT&E Annual Report FY2001, February 2002, p. V-100 and V-101; www.dote.osd.mil/pub/reports/FY2001/.
36. Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
On September 30, 2000, “the Taliban issued press statement on unknown aircraft seen over Kandahar allegedly looking for UBL. NSC note, Clarke to Berger, “Procedures for Protecting Predator,” September 30, 2000. Clarke pointed to a silver lining: “The fact that its existence has become at least partially known, may for a while change the al Qida movement patterns,” he wrote, but “it may also serve as a healthy reminder to al Qida and the Taliban that they are not out of our thoughts or sight.” See 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter 6, Footnote 119, p. 507.
37. The 9/11 Commission report later said that after the October attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, just weeks later: “Bin Laden anticipated U.S. military retaliation. He ordered the evacuation of al Qaeda’s Kandahar airport compound and fled—first to the desert area near Kabul, then to Khowst and Jalalabad, and eventually back to Kandahar. In Kandahar, he rotated between five to six residences, spending one night at each residence. In addition, he sent his senior advisor, Mohammed Atef, to a different part of Kandahar and his deputy, Ayman al Zawahiri, to Kabul so that all three could not be killed in one attack.” 9/11 Commission Report, p. 191.
38. Stealth Combat Aircraft—Michael J. Lippitz and Richard H. Van Atta; in IDA, Transformation and Transition: DARPA’s Role in Fostering an Emerging Revolution in Military Affairs, Volume 2—Detailed Assessments, p. I-7.
39. George Tenet writes: “neither our intelligence nor the FBI’s criminal investigation could conclusively prove that Usama bin Ladin and his leadership had had authority, direction, and control over the attack. This is a high threshold to cross…. What’s important from our perspective at CIA is that the FBI investigation had taken primacy in getting to the bottom of the matter.” At the Center of the Storm, p. 128.
40. Against all Enemies, p. 223.
41. Age of Sacred Terror, pp. 323–324.
42. Against all Enemies, p. 224.
43. John Miller and Michael Stone with Chris Mitchell, The Cell (New York: Hyperion, 2002), p. 225; Bill Gertz, Breakdown (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2002), p. 51.
44. Looming Tower, p. 331.
CHAPTER SEVEN Inherit the Wind
1. At the Center of the Storm, p. 143.
2. 9/11 Commission Report, Chapter Six, Footnote 190, p. 511.
3. Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004.
4. Air Force PowerPoint Briefing, Requirements Pull: Predator-Hellfire, n.d. (2001); obtained by the author; Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 23. See also Sue Baker, Aeronautical Systems Center Public Affairs, “Predator Hellfire Missile tests ‘totally successful,’” March 1, 2001; Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 191.
5. Randy Roughton, “Rise of the Drones—UAVs After 9/11: 9/11 and war on terror sparked an explosion in unmanned aerial vehicle technology,” Airman magazine, September 2011.
6. Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 18.
7. Jumper issued that order on June 21, 2000; Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 7. See also Houston R. Cantwell, Major, USAF, RADM Thomas J. Cassidy’s MQ-1 Predator: The USAF’s First UAV Success Story, Air Command and Staff College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, April 2006, p. 23.
At an Air and Space Conference in 2002, Jumper talked about the problems he had in getting service officials to agree to a proposal for arming Predator with Hellfire. “People blanked out and fainted” about the proposal, Jumper said, noting that opponents said that it would cost “tens of millions of dollars.” Instead, it cost $3 million, he said. Those attached to the intelligence field in the service thought a Hellfire capability would make Predator unflyable, but Jumper said that putting air force technicians familiar with close air support on the problem solved such issues quickly. See Marc Strass, “Air Force Stands Up First Armed Predator UAV Squadron,” Defense Daily, March 11, 2002.
8. Mark Mazetti says that with this test, “The age of armed, remote-controlled conflict had begun,” but this is an exaggeration; The Way of the Knife, p. 97.
9. Richard M. Clark, Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles: Airpower by the People, for the People, but Not with the People; A Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the School of Advanced Airpower Studies, for Completion of Graduation Requirements, School of Advanced Airpower Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, June 1999, p. 2; Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitch
ell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 18.
10. Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, p. 23; Walter J. Boyne, How the Predator Grew Teeth, Air Force Magazine, July 2009 (Vol. 92, No. 7).
11. Written Statement for the Record of the Director of Central Intelligence, Before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, March 24, 2004. See also 9/11 Commission, p. 211; referring to NSC memo, Hadley to McLaughlin, Wolfowitz, and Myers, “Re: Predator,” July 11, 2001; At the Center of the Storm, p. 158.
12. Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 202.
13. Whittle, Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution (2014), p. 199; Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, pp. 22–23.
14. Richard Whittle, Predator’s Big Safari, Mitchell Papers 7, August 2011, pp. 23–24.
15. The CIA was also flying its Gnat-750 drones, which it had operated from fourteen sites worldwide, but clearly it was on a path to adopting the Predator as its standard as well.
16. After OAF, the 11th Reconnaissance Squadron remained at Tuzla for several months, and they returned for periodic deployments in 2000 and early 2001. See Bill Yenne, Attack of the Drones: A History of Unmanned Aerial Combat, p. 64.
17. Thomas P. Ehrhard, Air Force UAVs: The Secret History, p. 52.
18. Global Hawk stems from the Long-Endurance Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition (RSTA) Capability mission need statement (MNS) endorsed by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) in January 1990; Rand, Global Hawk and DarkStar in the HAE UAV ACTD, p. 7.
19. The ACC CONOPS states: “The Global Hawk system’s long dwell capabilities increases the likelihood of detecting, identifying, and locating with precision (less than 20 meters CEP), high value ground targets of a time-critical nature. Typical targets in this class are tactical missile launchers, mobile air defense elements, supply convoys, and mobile command and control centers. It is critical that such time-critical targets be targeted before they move again. The combination of SAR/EO/IR with GMTI carried by Global Hawk provides the tools to facilitate immediate attack by air or ground elements, provided the target data (not necessarily an image) can be delivered immediately to the appropriate tactical forces.” Air Combat Command (ACC) Concept of Operations for Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), August 2000, Version 2.0, p. ix; DOD, UAS ROADMAP 2005, p. 3-10.
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