Predators

by Williams, Brian Glyn

  The Pakistanis were of course furious, and the military and ISI felt they were being used by the Americans. At this time Pakistani officers who had been traveling to U.S. military academies ceased coming to America for training. A new generation of Pakistani military officers would come of age in the 1990s distrusting the Americans and believing in Islamist causes such as the jihad against the Indians in the contested province of Kashmir. These same officers would later be asked to join with the Americans in waging war against the Taliban and al Qaeda after 9/11. One Pakistani officer summed up this generation’s views of America when he said, “You used us, and then you dumped us. Pakistanis are convinced you are going to do it again.”4 There was bound to be mistrust between the two allies who had parted ways during the 1990s under a cloud of mutual suspicion.

  There were deeper differences between the two nations as well. Pakistan had become an increasingly fundamentalist place under President Zia-ul-Haq, who died in 1989. Zia-ul-Haq had built thousands of madrassas (religious seminaries) to increase Islamic fervor in his country and unite its various peoples under the umbrella of Islamism. Many of these Saudi-funded madrassas were built in the FATA and served as orphanages for young Afghan refugee boys. The students known as Taliban (Taliban is the plural of the Pashto and Persian word for “student”—talib) who studied in the madrassas in the late 1980s and 1990s were even more conservative than the already conservative Pashtuns.

  AFGHANISTAN, 1988–2001

  By the early 1990s United States had come to see its former mujahideen proxies as a terrorist threat as well. During the first Gulf War with Iraq, the former CIA-backed Afghan mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar supported Saddam Hussein in his fight against the Americans.5 Then, in 1993, a Pakistani named Ramzi Yousef, who had trained in an Afghan mujahideen camp, tried to blow up the World Trade Center. At this time the United States threatened to designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism. Additional sanctions were imposed on Pakistan when it bought banned missile technology from Communist China.

  In the meantime, post-Soviet Afghanistan had descended into an all-out civil war between the various mujahideen factions. The worst offender in the war was the Pakistanis’ candidate to rule in Kabul, Hekmatyar. He mercilessly shelled the Afghan capital, killing thousands of civilians in his effort to take the city. The siege led to a collapse of authority and to chaos in the Pashtun south. There the ex-mujahideen attacked civilians, set up checkpoints to prey on the common people, and raped women. The southern province of Kandahar in particular was consumed by violence as predatory Pashtun mujahideen bandits made it all but impossible to travel.

  The violence in the Afghan south disturbed many Afghan Pashtuns, none more so than a former mujahideen leader–turned–mullah (cleric) named Omar. In 1994 Mullah Omar led a group of religious students in attacking a local mujahideen warlord who had recently attacked a traveling family, killed its men, and turned its women into sex slaves. Mullah Omar’s Taliban overran the warlord’s checkpoint and famously hung him from the barrel of a tank.

  When word of Omar’s success spread, his Taliban movement began to snowball. Although there had always been Taliban in the Pashtun tribal areas, the name began to take on a new meaning. It came to mean black-turbaned vigilantes who were fighting to end the chaos and violence of the ex-mujahideen. One by one the Pashtun mujahideen of the south were either killed, disarmed, or grew their beards long and joined the Taliban movement.

  By 1995 the Taliban had begun to spread from beyond Kandahar into the western lands of the ethnic Tajiks and into the lands of the northeastern Pashtuns known as the Ghilzais. The most powerful Ghilzai Pashtun mujahideen leader in this area was the previously mentioned Jalaludin Haqqani. Haqqani made the decision to join the Taliban and brought his troops over with him. As a mark of respect, Haqqani was then made Taliban governor of Paktia Province and minister of tribes and frontiers.

  By this time the Pakistani ISI had begun to fully bet on the Taliban in their quest to conquer all Afghanistan. There were many reasons for this realpolitik decision. On the one hand, Taliban members were first and foremost Islamists. They did not organize officially on the basis of their Pashtun ethnic identity. This was a huge relief to the Pakistanis who had long feared what would happen if the Pashtuns living in Pakistan and those living in Afghanistan united in an effort to create a larger “Pashtunistan.” This Pashtun state could be created only by slicing land from Pakistan’s northwest and adding it to Afghanistan. The Pakistanis, who had already lost East Pakistan (i.e., Bangladesh), were not going to lose the Pashtuns who made up 15 percent of their state to Afghanistan.6

  For this reason, the Pakistanis actively supported the Afghan Taliban in their battle for supremacy with a coalition of Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara ethnic opponents known as the Northern Alliance. While much of this support for the Taliban was ad hoc and consisted of thousands of Pakistani madrassa students (mainly Pashtuns) who came to fight for the Taliban in the summer, the Pakistani government also directly supported the Taliban with volunteer soldiers.

  It did not bother the Pakistanis that on many levels the people of Afghanistan had begun to suffer terribly under the Taliban. The Taliban members had originally been greeted as Robin Hood–style heroes when they conquered the Pashtun mujahideen warlords of the south, but they had become more and more puritanical as they spread out into the Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara lands. Among other things, they horribly oppressed half the population of Afghanistan, the women, by denying them the right to work. The Taliban also arrested women caught outside without a male relative, cut the fingers off women who wore nail polish, and enforced the Pashtun burqa in areas like cosmopolitan Kabul and the Hazara lands where it had not previously been enforced.

  The men also suffered under Taliban rule. They had to grow full-length beards and appear in mosque at prayer time. The Taliban closed movie theaters; destroyed TVs, which were deemed “satanic devices”; executed homosexuals, elopers, and adulterers; closed girls’ schools; and banned almost all forms of recreation (for example, music, dancing, kite flying, and singing). Under the Taliban, Afghanistan was essentially converted into a grim religious prison camp dominated by Pashtun zealots.

  Such issues did not originally bother Washington policymakers (although the Americans played no role whatsoever in the creation and rise to power of the Taliban as some have suggested). For all their distaste of the Taliban’s social policies, the distant Americans were content to see them consolidate power and create stability in this war-torn land.

  But Washington eventually grew hostile to Afghanistan’s new Taliban masters when they began to play host to an international terrorist organization known as al Qaeda. Although the Taliban leader Mullah Omar tried to control his Arab terrorist guest, Osama bin Laden, and put an end to his angry calls for total jihad against the American “Far Enemy,” bin Laden proved to be uncontrollable. In August 1998 bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorists blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing hundreds of Africans and a few Americans. President Bill Clinton showed America’s resolve to kill the terrorists responsible for the slaughter by launching a wave of cruise missiles against bin Laden’s bases, found primarily in the territory of his old friend from the 1980s Afghan jihad, Jalaludin Haqqani (incidentally, the distrusted Pakistanis were warned only at the last minute that a wave of cruise missiles would be crossing their territory to hit bin Laden’s terrorist camps in eastern Afghanistan).

  But the strikes failed to kill their intended target. Far from killing bin Laden, the strikes only infuriated Mullah Omar, who vowed to protect his own people and Arab terrorist guests from the American “infidels.”

  President Bill Clinton’s lawyers at the time concluded that the United States could legitimately kill bin Laden and his lieutenants, despite a previous presidential ban on assassinations. The lawyers concluded that attempts to kill bin Laden were defensible as “acts of war” or as “national self-defense” under both American and international law.7 Clint
on subsequently signed a presidential finding and issued secret orders allowing the CIA to assassinate bin Laden.8 These findings, and a later one by President George W. Bush, would give the CIA the authority to carry out the drone assassination campaign on al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11.

  Although it was not discussed much at the time, Clinton’s presidential finding was a groundbreaking development. The ban on government-sponsored assassinations went all the way back to President Gerald Ford. During his tenure in the White House, Ford had discovered that under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the CIA had tried to murder a grand total of eight foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro of Cuba. In 1976 President Ford authorized Executive Order 12333, forbidding anyone in the U.S. government from engaging in such assassinations.9

  In the years following the failure of the assassination attempt on bin Laden, the United States scrambled to develop new means for carrying out more precise airborne raids on enemy targets. By the time Bush took over from Clinton as president of the United States, that mission was well on its way. As bin Laden prepared for his greatest terrorist outrage, the so-called Holy Tuesday attacks of 9/11, the ultrasecret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was busy working on a new advanced weapon that would give the CIA the ability to kill enemies with unparalleled precision. This was to lead to one of the most important developments in air warfare since the first pilots brought guns and bombs into their aircraft during World War I.

  3

  Enter the Predator

  Every so often in the history of war, a new weapon comes along that fundamentally rewrites the rules of battle.

  —Lara Logan, discussing the advent of drones on 60 Minutes

  The August 2008 Predator missile strike that killed Pakistan’s most wanted man, Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, did not come about overnight. The story of the development of the CIA’s top-secret Predator-Reaper program is one of the murkiest chapters in the war on terrorism. The story of how a clumsy, propeller-pushed, remote-control plane went from the drawing boards to becoming the most effective, high-tech assassination tool in history has been shrouded in mystery.

  VIETNAM, THE BALKANS, AND IRAQ, 1970–2000

  The origins of the program actually lay in the Vietnam War era. This was the time of the CIA’s infamous Phoenix Program, which saw the agency’s antiterrorism teams assassinate thousands of communist infiltrators and terrorists. During the Vietnam War the United States began using remote-controlled drones known as Lightning Bugs to fight the enemy. The CIA and Air Force used the jet-propelled Lightning Bugs to carry out high-altitude photo reconnaissance missions against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese.1

  The real predecessors to the Predator, however, were the UAVs known as the Gnat and Amber. The Amber drone was first built by a U.S.-based company owned by a former Israeli air force designer, Abraham Karem, called Leading Systems. It was developed in the late 1980s and then reconstituted as the Gnat, a drone that was similar to the modern Predator in shape and configuration. The Predator drone used in Pakistan with such deadly effect after 2004 was developed from the Gnat and made its debut flight in June 1994. This initial Predator, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego, was a spy/surveillance aircraft and was not armed.

  The timing of the Predator’s development was most serendipitous for the CIA because the U.S. military had recently become involved in a war in the Balkans. The United States desperately needed a new reconnaissance aircraft to spy on the enemy in this complex civil war. Interestingly enough, the Predators (four initially) were deployed in July 1995 to spy on the Christian Serbs who had slaughtered thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the worst case of genocide in Europe since the Nazis.2 The United States intervened to fight on behalf of the Muslims to prevent further genocide and began an aerial campaign against Republika Srbska Serbian troops known as Operation Deliberate Force. To help U.S. attack aircraft spot Serbian targets, the CIA Predators, which were based in Gjader, Albania, made recon flights over Bosnia in an operation known as Nomad Vigil.3 The actual pilots for the aircraft were based in trailers in Indian Springs Air Force Base, Nevada (renamed Creech Air Force Base in 2005) and belonged to the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron. The CIA’s dream of using remote-control planes to collect data and intelligence from the skies had finally come true.4 Author and journalist Steve Coll describes the revolutionary development as follows: “In the first flights over Bosnia the CIA linked its Langley headquarters to the pilots’ van. Woolsey [the CIA head] emailed a pilot as he watched video images relayed to [CIA Headquarters] Virginia. ‘I’d say What direction for Mostar? … Is that the river? …’ Woolsey recalled. ‘And he’d say Yeah. Do you want to look at the bridge? … Let’s zoom further, it looks like he has a big funny hat on.’”5

  These early surveillance drones were a huge improvement on the existing surveillance option: orbiting satellites. Unlike spy satellites whose views were blocked by clouds, the drones could fly under the cloud cover to monitor their targets. Once they found their target, they could follow it for hours at a time, unlike satellites, which flew over their designated targets only when their preexisting orbits took them there. And satellites, while useful in filming static targets, were less capable of filming small moving targets, such as vehicles or humans.

  Drones were also far superior to “fire and forget” cruise missiles, which were usually launched from offshore vessels and took considerably more time to reach their destination. The situation in the targeted area could change dramatically while the less accurate cruise missiles made their way to their preprogrammed target. When finally armed, drones by contrast could fire in live time based on their pilots’ reaction to current information gained from tracking fluid targets.

  For all their revolutionary advances, however, these experimental Predators were not yet equipped with radar systems that would allow them to see through cloud cover. They were finally fitted with radars that could allow them to see through fog and clouds in 1997, demonstrating that the Air Force was still perfecting the early drones.

  In January 1999 Predators were flown to the Persian Gulf and used to spy on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as part of Operation Southern Watch.6 In the spring of that year Predators were also used against Serbian Christian forces that were once again engaged in genocidal assaults on Muslims, this time the Kosovar Albanians. By all accounts, the Predator “eye in the sky” gave the Americans unprecedented access to Serbian troop movements and facilitated the accuracy of U.S. bomb strikes.

  At this time the Predators made another technical leap when laser designators and range finders were added to the censor balls on their “chins.” This meant that the Predator could lase a target and a loitering manned fighter jet could then use a laser-designated bomb to precisely destroy it.7 The ball under the Predator’s chin was one of its most expensive features and also came to contain two television cameras, including an infrared camera for seeing targets on the ground at night and the previously mentioned radar, which could see through clouds and dust. Pilots watching the screens back in bases outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, reported that this allowed them to see a license plate from more than two miles away in the air.8 This was a capability the Predator would need for its next mission in Central Asia.

  AFGHANISTAN, 2000–2001

  By 2000 America’s focus had transferred from the war-torn Balkans to the Taliban-controlled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was here that Arab terrorists belonging to bin Laden’s al Qaeda were plotting further terrorist attacks on the United States. In 2000 bin Laden’s agents set off a bomb next to the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors. The same year an al Qaeda agent named Ahmed Ressam attempted to infiltrate America to set off a bomb at Los Angeles’s LAX airport.

  While many Americans, who lived far from al Qaeda’s targets in eastern Africa and Arabia, remained blissfully unaware of the danger posed by this terrorist group, many in the CIA saw the organization as the greatest threat to the c
ontinental United States. The United States had by this time established a Bin Laden Unit at the CIA; in fact, some CIA personnel called this unit the “Manson Family” for its members’ obsession with the little-known terrorist bin Laden.

  In the spring of 2000 the United States gained permission from the dictator of Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov, to fly Predator surveillance drones out of his country over southeastern Afghanistan to try tracking bin Laden. As mentioned previously, the Clinton administration had already overridden President Ford’s earlier directive against carrying out assassinations. It was hoped that the Air Force–piloted Predator could help the CIA track down bin Laden, who was known to live in a series of compounds in the Pashtun lands of southern and eastern Afghanistan. The drones, it was theorized, might then be able to direct a cruise missile strike against bin Laden from a submarine or cruiser operating in the Indian Ocean. This joint Pentagon-CIA surveillance operation was to be known as “Afghan Eyes” and was headed up by White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black, and Charles Allen, head of the CIA’s intelligence-gathering operations.9 Clarke in particular was worried about al Qaeda’s ability to hit the U.S. mainland in the months and years before 9/11 and was interested in any tool that might help him prevent such an event.

  In the fall of 2000 a drone monitoring a known bin Laden compound in the Afghan south near Kandahar at a place called Tarnak Farms sent back live video feed to a screen at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in northern Virginia. The extraordinary video was of a tall man (bin Laden was six foot six), “with a physical and operational signature fitting Bin Laden,” wearing white robes and talking to ten figures who were paying him respect. Those watching the screen in America were stunned and later said, “It was probably Bin Laden himself.”10 In fact the drone may have spotted bin Laden on as many as three separate occasions.