Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Fogleman wasn’t sure what to believe. “I want someone who’s going to tell me the truth,” the chief told Clark.

  Despite Clark’s nickname, Fogleman implicitly trusted him—relied on him, in fact, to do things even the chief of staff couldn’t get done through regular channels. Fogleman would give Snake Clark a task or money or just an idea, say, “Go do it,” and then provide top cover for him when others protested. Irreverent, sassy, and unafraid to step on toes, Clark was an acquired taste. He spoke in a preening patter—its flavor was slightly acidic and reminiscent of W. C. Fields—but his wise guy bite was tempered by hints of self-deprecation. He was a disciple of Colonel Richard “Moody” Suter, a charismatic and revered Air Force figure. As a major in the 1970s, Suter stepped on a lot of toes, too, but he maneuvered the service into creating an innovative annual fighter pilot exercise called Red Flag. Based on lessons learned in Vietnam and credited with helping U.S. forces own the air in every conflict since, Red Flag taught American and allied fighter pilots how to win by pitting them against mock enemy air and ground forces in simulated but realistic battles.

  Clark, who had been a pallbearer at Suter’s funeral the previous January, enjoyed working on special projects for Fogleman, and he loved playing what he called Pentagon Poker—“I’ll see your three-star and raise you a four-star”—when someone got in his way. He made the most of his nickname; Clark figured being known as Snake helped deter bureaucratic foes. But the nickname actually predated his service in the Air Force. Sigma Pi Delta fraternity brothers at Catholic University in Washington, impressed with the way Clark sweet-talked a coed into revealing the location of a statue stolen as a sorority prank, dubbed him Snake in 1970. Clark had Irish charm as well as Irish blood—the New Jersey native wore a black armband every St. Patrick’s Day—and those who relied on his special talents or reported to him often found him charismatic. Even the two wives who divorced Clark before he married a third time remained friends with him. Not surprisingly, many of those he trumped at Pentagon Poker resented him, but Clark worried little about them. He did worry about his bosses, though, and shortly after Fogleman’s call Snake Clark began arranging a trip to Taszár.

  * * *

  Fogleman was getting complaints about the Predator partly because senior military leaders were becoming addicted to its video. For the deployment to Taszár, the U.S. European Command had created a new video dissemination system that sent the drone’s imagery via satellite not only to NATO headquarters in Naples and the CAOC in Vicenza, but also to Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, in Mons, Belgium; to other military commands around Europe; to the Pentagon; and to various points in Washington—forty locations in all. Werner liked to say the system was created after he “infected” the military with a craving for video by piping it into the Pentagon.

  The Predator’s video was usually screened on office televisions; compared to the imagery seen in the ground control station, the video was grainy, for it arrived after being digitized, compressed, decompressed, and converted back to analog format. Even so, many viewers were captivated by their newfound ability to watch images live and in color as the drone’s cameras found Serb checkpoints, searched for mass graves, or monitored cantonments where the warring parties had agreed to store military vehicles. Commanders all around Europe and Washington took to phoning the Predator ground control station in Hungary to ask questions about what they were seeing or to make special requests. What was that vehicle? Which road is that? Can you go back and take another look behind that barn? Predator crew members, all relatively low in rank, were at first startled to get direct calls from generals and admirals, some of them with four stars on their shoulders. But soon such calls became so routine that the crews started joking about “Predator crack” and “Predator porn” addicts. When the Air Force took over and the Predator video channel largely went blank, the addicts grew agitated.

  A shortage of pilots was one problem. Standard practice required that two pilots be at the controls when the Predator took off and landed; Air Force pilots were also supposed to get twelve hours of rest between flights. With only three pilots assigned to it, the 11th RS detachment at Taszár could fly only one twelve-hour mission a day throughout October and November 1996. In early December, four new pilots arrived, as well as one from General Atomics, but the previous three Air Force pilots went home, and the weather over the Balkans, which was often cloudy, rainy, or snowy, became a hindrance. Under a rule adopted after another near crash that fall, believed to have been caused by icing, the 11th RS didn’t fly its Predators in wet weather, or even through clouds.

  The second Air Force detachment sent to fly the Predator arrived at Taszár on December 4, led by Major Jon Box, a former aerial refueling tanker pilot from Texas who was two months shy of his fortieth birthday. Box and the three other 11th RS pilots who came with him flew the drone only six days that December, logging nine flights in all. But only four were reconnaissance missions—the rest were tests and check flights—and two of the missions over Bosnia had to be aborted because of weather. From December 28, 1996, to January 26, 1997, the four pilots didn’t fly their Predators at all; they were prevented from doing so by the Air Force weather rules, which banned them from taking off when there was any “visible moisture” or if visibility was below minimums.

  Every day, a launch crew of two pilots and three or four sensor operators would show up on time, get briefed on the day’s planned mission over Bosnia, go through preflight checks of the GCS and the aircraft, and then sit and wait for permission to take off. Every day, the base weather forecaster would tell Box he saw visible moisture near the airfield, or that visibility was too poor for the drone to fly. Box would put the crew on hold for hours, sometimes all day, waiting for the weather to lift, but then the CAOC would cancel the mission. Every night, Box and his pilots and sensor operators would gather in their tent, shove the same videotape into a VCR, and watch the same movie for the umpteenth time. The movie perfectly reflected their situation: it was Groundhog Day, the 1993 comedy starring Bill Murray, in which a TV weatherman covering a Groundhog Day celebration in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, gets caught in a time loop that makes him relive the same day again and again.

  After the movie, at precisely ten o’clock each night, one of Box’s pilots, Major Ray Miller, would go outside, face the side of the sprawling, muddy tent city at Taszár where two thousand Army troops lived, and scream at the top of his lungs, “I … LOVE … IT … HERE!” Box played dumb when the Army “mayor” at Taszár demanded to know who was screaming every night.

  Nearly every night, Box, Miller, and others in their group would go outside and sing a little song Box and Miller had made up based on the 11th RS’s official nickname, the Black Owls, a moniker represented on shoulder patches depicting a black owl diving with talons bared. Soulfully sung to the tune of the chorus of the venerable “Whiffenpoof Song”—“We’re little black sheep who have gone astray. Baa, baa, baa”—the Black Owls song reflected the Predator pilots’ view of the way the Air Force felt about them: “We are the black owls who’ve lost our way. Hoo … hoo … hoo.…”

  Toward the end of January, Box and some of his Predator team finally studied tapes of the near crash the previous fall and decided that it hadn’t been caused by icing but by the pilot taking the Predator’s nose up too high at takeoff, creating an aerodynamic stall. As a result of their study, the restrictions on taking off with visible moisture in the air were loosened and the detachment flew nearly every day in February.

  On February 24, ACC commander General Hawley arrived with six colonels to inspect the Black Owl squadron’s Predator operation. He left without telling Box what he thought. Three days later, Box learned that Snake Clark would be arriving in mid-March on behalf of the chief of staff, accompanied by another colonel who was ACC’s operations director, plus two lieutenant colonels and a major; their assignment was to investigate the squadron’s operation.

  On March 17, Clark and his party
flew into Taszár after official stops in Germany and Italy. The delegation stayed two days. On the third day of Clark’s visit, Box was told to report to the office of the Air Force colonel in charge of the Taszár airfield. The colonel was a reservist Major Box had clashed with after Box had set up an unauthorized tent so field representatives from General Atomics could live more comfortably. Box had also irritated the colonel by handing out parking passes for the Air Force side of the field to transportation and other personnel whose help he needed.

  When Box entered the room, Clark was sitting at the colonel’s desk and the colonel was standing up—crying. Clark asked the colonel whether it was true that he had reprimanded Box for setting up the tent and giving out the parking passes. The colonel acknowledged that he had. As Box watched, wide-eyed, Clark chewed out his fellow Air Force colonel some more.

  “Don’t you realize that you’re the senior Air Force officer here and you’re supposed to be protecting those guys and doing whatever they need to go do their mission?” Clark demanded. “And you’ve been fighting him. This is what I heard you said about Jon Box at an Army staff meeting. You got up on the stage and you said, ‘I’m really proud of how the Army and the Air Force have been working together—except for one pompous ass major.’”

  Things got better for Box and the Black Owls after that.

  After visiting Taszár, Clark decided that while the Predator was still technologically a work in progress, the biggest flaw in the program was interservice rivalry. “Clearly Predator’s biggest problem is political,” Clark wrote in a report to Fogleman. “The Army is still mad that they lost the program after the ACTD. Their possible agenda is to prove that the USAF cannot properly support their ground commanders and to regain control of the Predator program or restore funding to their Hunter program.” Army officers, Clark wrote, were keeping a “daily detailed record” of when the Predators flew or didn’t, and sending it to higher headquarters. “The USAF has no control over it’s [sic] own destiny with Predator as long as the Navy is in charge of the program office running the JPO,” Clark argued. “There needs to be a single USAF office to run the entire program.”

  After he read Clark’s memo, Fogleman started quietly campaigning to get the Air Force total, not just operational, control over the Predator.

  “After my report was done,” Clark wrote years later, “I was convinced that the Predator and I would go our own separate ways.”

  He was wrong.

  6

  WILD PREDATOR

  Visitors to the 645th Aeronautical Systems Group at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, must find their way to Building 557, the second of three modern, parallelogram-shaped office structures on Loop Road West. Once there, they must register at a reception window in the lobby. Photo ID must be shown. Cameras are not allowed. Cell phones or other electronic devices must be deposited in a bank of lockboxes built into a nearby wall. Proceeding past the lobby requires an escort, who must punch a code into a keypad to enter the first-floor hallway. After walking a ways down the hall, the escort will turn left, then punch another code into another keypad to open another door on the right. Upon closing that door, the escort will cross a ten-foot vestibule to a sturdy vault door, where a square black button that rings a buzzer must be pressed to gain entry.

  Hung on the vestibule’s left wall are signed 1980s-vintage photographs of President Ronald Reagan, President George H. W. Bush, and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, each bearing a handwritten note of thanks for unspecified achievements by the unit headquartered behind the vault door. Hung on the vestibule’s right wall is a color photo—taken by the gun camera of a Soviet MiG-17 fighter jet—showing a C-130AII aircraft in flames and plunging toward earth during the hottest days of the Cold War. Seventeen crew members, including eleven Russian linguists and intelligence analysts, died in that special reconnaissance aircraft, which four MiGs attacked without warning on September 2, 1958, after it inadvertently flew from a base in Turkey into denied airspace over Armenia. The vaulted door framed by these photographs bears a sign embossed on metal and mounted on walnut that declares, “Those who say it cannot be done should not get in the way of those doing it.” Above the sign is a striking emblem that depicts an African shield with two crossed spears. This insignia speaks to the fact that, no matter which of several official names the 645th Aeronautical Systems Group has borne during its six-decade history, this obscure Air Force unit has always been known to the few who are aware that it exists as Big Safari.

  Created during the Cold War to help the Air Force, the CIA, and other agencies keep an eye on the Soviet Union and its Cold War allies, Big Safari quickly evolved into a real-world echo—though far less zany—of Q Branch, the fictional British Secret Service technology shop in the James Bond movies. Big Safari didn’t rig attaché cases to spew tear gas or fit snazzy sports cars with machine guns and ejection seats but, like 007’s Q Branch, Big Safari was staffed with clever engineers and technicians whose mission was to devise and field often exotic gear quickly. Big Safari was just more specialized: beginning with its first assignment in December 1952—installing the largest aerial camera ever on a huge C-97 Stratofreighter cargo plane, a project code-named Pie Face—Big Safari’s game was tricking out “special purpose aircraft,” often with aerial reconnaissance devices, usually in a hurry, and expressly for special missions. Big Safari and its contractor partners also serviced and tweaked their products to keep them useful.

  Big Safari was small. In the 1990s, the unit had only twenty-one people at its Wright-Patterson headquarters and a few dozen more in small detachments and “operating locations” housed at contractor facilities in California and Texas, where most of the hands-on work was done. Wherever they were and whatever the project, Big Safari operators prided themselves on being creative, sly, and largely anonymous. Until the Internet came along, the organization itself was so deep in the shadows that even four-star generals who became chief of staff were often taken by surprise to learn that Big Safari existed—a fact usually conveyed in a few whispered words. Big Safari operated in the “black world” because its innovations often needed to remain secret to succeed. Beginning with Pie Face, the organization cloaked its work in opaque code names such as Lulu Belle, Hot Pepper, Purple Passion, Speed Light, Cobra Eye, and a series of projects whose sobriquets began with “Rivet.”

  By law, Big Safari had “rapid acquisition authority,” which allowed it to bypass much of the bureaucratic molasses that bogs down most military procurement. By dispensing with what its leaders disdained as “administrivia,” and by working hand-in-glove with defense contractors and the operators of its aircraft, Big Safari could get innovative new gear into action within months, weeks, and sometimes even days, rather than the years it routinely takes to develop and field most military technology. Big Safari’s philosophy was expressed in mottoes, catchphrases, and admonitions such as “Minimum but adequate,” “Off-the-shelf,” “Need to know,” “Modify, don’t develop,” and “Provide the necessary, not the nice to have.”

  * * *

  When General Ron Fogleman decided in 1997 that it would be nice for the Air Force to have total control of the Predator, Big Safari’s director was William D. W. Grimes, who had run the semisecret technology shop for the past eleven years. A Baptist minister’s son raised in Danvers, Massachusetts, Bill Grimes found his vocation in the Air Force. He entered the service upon receiving his bachelor’s degree in experimental psychology from Brown University, which he attended on an ROTC scholarship. Grimes graduated in 1959—or, as he liked to put it, before the Ivy League school “got wacky” by making course grades optional and banning ROTC from its Providence, Rhode Island, campus.

  In the Air Force, Grimes was trained as a navigator, then became an electronic warfare officer with the 348th Bombardment Squadron at Westover Air Force Base, in south central Massachusetts. His unit’s mission was straight out of Dr. Strangelove, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire of Cold War logic. Unde
r the Strategic Air Command’s massive retaliation strategy, Grimes and his fellow B-52 Stratofortress long-range nuclear bomber crew members remained on twenty-four-hour alert for a week at a time. Their aircraft, fueled and ready, sat on a nearby runway, while they lived underground in a shelter nicknamed the Mole Hole, ready to fly off and nuke the Soviet Union at a moment’s notice if so ordered. Now and then they scrambled into the air for practice.

  Grimes found such exercises exciting. But in 1966 he got involved in an actual contest with the Soviets—aerial cat and mouse—by requesting and receiving a “green door assignment,” as highly classified intelligence postings were called. For the next seven years, stationed at Eielson Air Force Base, Alaska, he used his electronic warfare skills aboard a sensor-packed Big Safari aircraft code-named Wanda Belle. Technically an RC-135S, Wanda Belle’s mission was to sit on strip alert on Shemya Island, all but the last western link in the Aleutians chain, and rush into the sky to track and record data on Soviet missile tests when a launch was detected. Flying in those northern reaches was hazardous. Wanda Belle’s sister ship, code-named Rivet Amber, disappeared over the Bering Sea without a trace on June 5, 1969, just six months after Wanda Belle hydroplaned off the runway during a landing at Shemya and was wrecked. Grimes wasn’t aboard that day, and unlike the Rivet Amber’s crew his Wanda Belle mates were lucky and suffered only minor injuries. Transferred to Texas to help equip a replacement aircraft, Grimes himself was invited to join Big Safari in 1973. Thirteen years later he became its commander, then stayed on as its civilian director upon retiring from the Air Force as a colonel in 1990.

  As a career airborne reconnaissance practitioner, Grimes was intimately familiar with UAVs, as was Big Safari. In the 1960s, Big Safari converted the first Q-2C jet target drones into Firefly reconnaissance UAVs, flight-tested the various configurations used in Vietnam, and trained the crews who flew them. During the run-up to the 1991 Gulf War, Big Safari added GPS navigation and special metal spheres to forty target drones and turned them into decoys that Iraqi radars saw as F-15 and F-16 fighter planes. Of forty U.S. aircraft the Iraqis claimed to have shot down in the opening hours of the war, thirty-seven were Big Safari decoys. Around the same time, Big Safari studied Abe Karem’s Amber, the Predator’s genealogical forebear, when U.S. Southern Command was looking for a better way than manned aircraft to sniff out illicit drug laboratories in the jungles of Latin America.