Predator

by Richard Whittle

  Members of the Air Force team at Ramstein were ordered to keep their mouths shut about their mission. To stress the importance of secrecy, USAFE commander Martin called a meeting with the unit’s leaders: Boyle, Cooter, Wallace, communications specialist Captain Paul Welch, and Raduenz of Big Safari, who was there to help with logistics and personnel. Martin told them he was going to have the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations test the special Predator unit’s operational security, or, in military parlance, its OPSEC (pronounced “OPP-seck”).

  “I’m not going to tell them what you’re doing, but I am going to give them access to your phones, your garbage cans, where you’re located, and I’m going to have them try to find out what you’re doing,” the general said. “And if they do, I’m going to kill all of you. So if you think you can gibber about this at the snack bar or you can talk on the phone about anything, I’m telling you, your phones are tapped. And if I catch anybody leaking any of this stuff, you’re dead.”

  The extraordinary security was mainly to keep Al Qaeda from finding out what was being done at Ramstein, but also to keep the mission secret from the German government. Someone well above the Summer Project team’s pay grade had decided that although Germany was a NATO ally and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was friendly with President Clinton, it might be better to ask forgiveness rather than permission for using German soil to hunt a major terrorist. Why risk getting nein for an answer?

  * * *

  They found their quarry on live video a month into the operation—on Wednesday, September 27, 2000—during their seventh flight. Swanson was at the controls, and Big Safari sensor operator Jeff Guay was aiming the Predator’s camera as the drone circled near Tarnak Farms, following instructions from the ops cell in the tent outside their GCS at Ramstein.

  By now, Swanson and others on the Summer Project team were pretty familiar with the former agricultural complex the Taliban had provided bin Laden for his family and followers. The Predator had loitered over it several times during the previous six flights. To Swanson, the place looked like a typical Afghan village. Mud-brick buildings of various sizes sat behind walls so numerous that from fifteen thousand or more feet up they looked like a maze. The CIA had provided a written description of the compound and annotated satellite photos showing a building thought to be bin Laden’s primary residence, a couple of other houses for his wives, and a meetinghouse of some sort used for prayer, though it didn’t appear to be a mosque. The CIA also had a schedule of prayer times at Tarnak Farms, and on September 27 Swanson was directed to circle the Predator where Guay could keep both bin Laden’s house and the meetinghouse in view around the time the Muslims might convene for prayers.

  Just before noon, a tall man in white robes came out of the house believed to be bin Laden’s and was met by a group of smaller figures in dark garb who had gathered in a courtyard. Nearby, the Predator team could see three vehicles, an SUV and a couple of trucks, which suggested a security detail. As the tall man in white emerged from the building, the group of shorter men rushed to him. As he began walking, they orbited the taller man as if to protect him, some bowing in an apparent show of obeisance. Having been briefed that bin Laden was six foot five, Swanson thought there was no question they had found their target.

  “Yeah, that’s definitely the dude,” he told Guay.

  Mission commander Cooter, watching on a screen in the ops cell tent, agreed.

  Swanson kept the Predator circling, awaiting further orders and wondering how long it might take for the submarine or ship he and the others at Ramstein assumed was in range to get the word, spool up some Tomahawk cruise missiles, and take out this enemy who had declared war on America twice and begun waging it in earnest two years earlier. But as they continued to fly their unseen drone several miles above and away from what their cameras were pointed at below, Swanson realized that although their “customers” back at Langley seemed very excited, judging by what he was hearing over his headset, nothing was being said to suggest that cruise missiles would soon be on their way.

  “Okay, guys, are they going to be inbound?” Swanson muttered under his breath.

  Shortly after the tall man in white and his entourage went indoors, Cooter got word from a different intelligence source that an Afghan air force unit at Kandahar airport, just three and a quarter miles northeast of Tarnak Farms, had spotted something strange in the air and was preparing to investigate. Talking to his CIA counterpart through an Air Force liaison officer at Langley, Cooter said he was going to have Guay slew the Predator’s camera toward the Kandahar airport to see what was happening. He met resistance: the CIA wanted to keep the Predator’s camera on Tarnak Farms. Cooter could be a bull when certain he was right, and now, unable to get the CIA to agree with him, he decided that at the moment it was more important to preserve the Predator than to keep watching Tarnak Farms. As Swanson got up to take a break, giving the left-hand seat at the flight control console to a pilot from General Atomics, Cooter told Guay to point the Predator’s camera toward the airport.

  “Oops, guess they spotted us,” Guay said, zooming in on a ground crew preparing a Russian-made MiG-21 fighter for takeoff. Minutes later, the Predator team watched the jet—one of five MiG-21s the Taliban’s air force was still flying in those days—rise into the sky. Joined by Ed Boyle, who had arrived from his Ramstein office to see what was happening, the Summer Project team watched the jet make a climbing turn and head straight toward the Predator.

  Everyone in the GCS and ops cell watched, transfixed, as the MiG silently flew toward them on the Predator’s video screen. With Guay keeping the camera on the MiG, the General Atomics pilot—in his stocking feet, others would later recall—maneuvered the Predator to make the drone as difficult as possible for the Afghan pilot to spot. The MiG headed straight toward them, growing larger and larger, then simply zoomed past the Predator’s lens. The MiG pilot launched no missile, fired no gun. Man, that was close, Swanson thought. Flying at several hundred miles an hour, the MiG pilot must have failed to see the tiny, slow-moving Predator, Swanson and others agreed.

  The Predator team wondered how the Taliban had spotted the drone, which was circling several miles from the airport and roughly four miles high. They were sure the Predator was too high to be heard, too small to be seen flying at twenty thousand feet, and at less than a hundred knots too slow for Afghan radar operators to identify. The most likely possibility, the team decided, was that an alert hilltop lookout had seen sun glint off the Predator’s wings. To ward off ice at Afghanistan’s high altitudes, the wings had been modified to pump glycol de-icing fluid out of hundreds of tiny laser-drilled holes along their leading edges. The drone’s “weeping wings” could keep ice from forming and adding so much weight the plane would crash, but the fluid coating gave the Predator’s composite skin a brushed-aluminum look, which reflected sunlight.

  * * *

  The CIA’s Charlie Allen saw the Predator video of the tall man presumed to be bin Laden only on tape, not live, partly because noon in Afghanistan was 4:30 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time in Washington. Someone called Allen at home a couple of hours after the sighting and said, “We found him—we think.” Later, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency analysts brought to the Predator team by Allen analyzed the drone’s video freeze-frame by freeze-frame and confirmed that the tall man was indeed bin Laden. Studying the video from the previous six Summer Project missions more closely, the analysts determined that the Predator’s camera had actually captured bin Laden for the first time during the second mission flown, nearly a month earlier.

  After the imagery analysts concluded that the man in white was indeed bin Laden, a CTC officer came to Allen’s office with a tape and played it for the person who had pushed harder than anyone at the CIA for using the Predator.

  “It’s bin Laden! It’s bin Laden!” Allen said excitedly. “And there are his lieutenants!”

  Unlike the Summer Project team at Ramstein, Allen and others at the CIA
knew that no cruise missiles would be launched. Before the idea of using the Predator to find bin Laden ever arose, Hank Crumpton, a clandestine operations officer and one of CTC director Cofer Black’s three deputies, had advocated sending military and CIA commando teams to “work with our Afghan partners to target (bin Laden) with lethal force.” Black told Crumpton there was “insufficient political will.”

  Back in August, after the committee of senior officials known as the Small Group had approved the Predator operation, Richard Clarke’s deputy at the NSC, Roger Cressey, had sent National Security Adviser Sandy Berger a memo on how the intelligence the Afghan Eyes project gathered might be used. If the Predator found bin Laden, Cressey reasoned, emergency meetings of the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group and the cabinet-level Principals Committee might be needed to decide what to do. Berger made it clear a mere sighting wasn’t going to be enough to persuade President Clinton to authorize an attempt to kill bin Laden. Several hours would be needed for cruise missiles launched from the Indian Ocean to be programmed and to cover the distance to the target, and if the target moved after those missiles were fired, they couldn’t be called back. Burned by the reaction to his 1998 cruise missile strikes against Al Qaeda, Clinton was wary of trying that option again. “I will want more than verified location: we will need, at least, data on pattern of movements to provide some assurance he will remain in place,” Berger wrote in the margin of Cressey’s memo, underlining more and pattern himself.

  Clarke argued that a cruise missile shot would be worth a try even if bin Laden escaped; he saw no downside in blowing up the terrorist leader’s house. Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, however, thought a miss would be a political victory for Al Qaeda.

  Allen understood from the first that the Predator missions over Afghanistan were regarded as an experiment. Still, he felt vindicated when he showed what quickly became known as the “Tall Man in White” video to CIA chief Tenet and a handful of others in the director’s conference room the morning after the Predator’s camera shot it. Tenet was astonished by the clarity of the video, Allen could see.

  “Whatever doubts he had about the Predator vanished,” Allen later recalled.

  * * *

  Although the Summer Project team was elated to learn that they had indeed spotted Osama bin Laden, some were disillusioned when nothing happened as a result. Their orders were to acquire actionable intelligence, and after September 27 those at Ramstein figured they had accomplished that goal. Yet no action had been taken, nor did any seem to be in the cards.

  Over the next several weeks, the team flew the Predator over other intelligence targets in Afghanistan, documenting Al Qaeda’s presence and mapping Taliban military assets. Guided by intelligence from the CIA, the missions produced hours and hours of videotape revealing useful information. They even captured on video terrorist training being conducted at a camp at Garmabak Ghar. Those in the ops cell at Ramstein were amazed to see black-garbed young men firing weapons and scrambling through obstacle courses. Richard Clarke and Roger Cressey sometimes drove the eight miles from the White House to Langley around midnight to watch the drone’s video live in the CTC flight operations center. Clarke was utterly fascinated by this technological magic trick—the ability to surreptitiously watch your enemies on the other side of the globe live and in color. “This sort of intelligence capability was something we had seen only in Hollywood movies,” Clarke later wrote.

  In the weeks following the bin Laden sighting, increasingly bad weather over Afghanistan rendered the Predator missions less productive. Icing conditions and high winds were annoyances, but the main problem was cloud cover, which often made it impossible to fly the drone low enough to loiter without being seen. Some days the team couldn’t even consider flying.

  Just as boredom began to set in at Ramstein, Al Qaeda struck again. On October 12, at 11:15 a.m. local time, a fiberglass fishing boat slowly pulled up alongside the USS Cole, an American destroyer at anchor in the Arabian Peninsula port of Aden, Yemen. The boat stopped in the water next to the warship. Two men in the little vessel rose, smiled, waved, and stood at attention—then vanished in the fireball of an explosion. The blast ripped a forty-by-forty-foot hole in the port side of the Cole’s steel hull, killing seventeen U.S. sailors, wounding thirty-seven, and nearly sinking the ship.

  Bin Laden—who three months later was videotaped reading a poem that included a tribute to the Cole bombing—was so certain the United States would strike back that he sent his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Kabul and ordered Al Qaeda military commander Mohammed Atef to a different location in Kandahar so the expected attack couldn’t kill them all simultaneously. But Richard Clarke and others who favored a retaliatory strike in Afghanistan were unable to persuade military or civilian leaders to launch one, because neither the CIA nor the FBI could confirm that Al Qaeda was responsible for the Cole bombing. President Clinton later wrote that he came close to ordering a cruise missile strike at bin Laden after the Cole bombing but “the CIA recommended that we call it off at the last minute, believing that the evidence of his presence was insufficiently reliable.”

  * * *

  After the Cole bombing, no one on the Summer Project team lacked motivation; they were all livid. But soon Clarke and other Predator advocates reluctantly agreed that the drone’s flights over Afghanistan should cease, at least for the winter. The difficulty of flying in bad weather, not to mention the risk of a crash that might expose the covert flights, left little choice. The Summer Project officially ended on November 8.

  Around the same time, Clarke, his deputy Cressey, and their ally Charlie Allen learned of an intriguing new development, an Air Force project that had been stalled for weeks but just might offer a radical new option for dealing with bin Laden. Seven months earlier, General John P. Jumper, an innovative former fighter pilot who had taken over Air Combat Command early in 2000, had ordered Big Safari and General Atomics to give the Predator a new capability. As Clarke later noted in a strategy paper about Al Qaeda, “This new capability would permit a ‘see it/shoot it’ option.”

  Prior to taking over ACC, Jumper had commanded U.S. Air Forces Europe for two years and two months, a period that included the air war in Kosovo. Like other commanders, he had been frustrated with how hard it was for allied pilots to find and hit mobile targets such as Serb armored vehicles and antiaircraft missile batteries during that campaign. The Predator had shown in Kosovo that it could find targets with its cameras and even carry a laser designator to pinpoint them so manned aircraft could attack. But Jumper wanted the Predator to do more, and a “see it/shoot it” option was exactly what he had in mind. He decided to arm the drone.

  The effect of putting weapons on the Predator would be nothing short of revolutionary. Soon the drone would be much more than just a persistent eye in the sky. Armed, it would be a remote-control killing machine.

  Jumper called it “the next logical step.”

  8

  THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP

  By the spring of 2000, General John Jumper had been in uniform thirty-four years and in the Air Force all his life. An Air Force brat, he was the son of fighter pilot Jimmy Jumper, who in the early 1970s was a two-star general on his way to three stars, until lung cancer cut him down. By then, Jimmy’s son Johnny was a “shit hot” pilot in his own right, with two tours in Vietnam under his belt and forty flights as a “fast forward air controller,” or Fast FAC. That meant zigzagging his beefy F-4D Phantom over hostile territory at high speed and low altitude, often dodging bright red streams of tracer fire, to find targets for other planes to attack. It was the same death-defying tactic pioneered in the 1960s by the Misty Fast FACs, whose number included Ronald Fogleman, the pilot who later became Air Force chief of staff and decided his service was the Predator’s rightful home.

  Five foot ten and barrel-chested, Johnny Jumper had a full head of thin brown hair, lively eyes, and exceptionally long arms. In a photo snapped in 1970 after he clim
bed out of his cockpit at Udorn Royal Thai Air Force Base, Thailand, Jumper’s hands are draped over the shoulders of two squadron mates and dangle so far from his body that at first glance they appear fake. Wearing flight suits, parachutes, and insouciant grins as they celebrate a comrade’s last combat mission, Jumper and his 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron buddies look fearless and fun-loving, and Jumper certainly was. A “good stick” in the cockpit, on the ground he was a practical joker. He once poured a pool of oil under the engine of a fellow pilot’s expensive new sports car so he could cackle at the proud owner’s reaction. As a contributor to a magazine published by the Fighter Weapons School at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, where young Captain Jumper was a star instructor in the mid-1970s, he faked a cover showing Air Force pilots strafing a parachuting Soviet flier who had ejected from his plane. Then Jumper talked the wing commander—a colonel, three ranks above him—into slamming the sham cover down on the desk of Jumper’s boss and telling the shaken lieutenant colonel that he could hit the street as soon as the outrageous cover on the magazine’s three thousand copies did.

  Stationed in England, Jumper flew unscheduled mock dogfights against Royal Air Force pilots, using air-to-air maneuvers he later admitted were “so dangerous it wasn’t even fun. It was plain stupid.” But he was serious about his profession, and a knack for devising novel tactics set the 1966 Virginia Military Institute graduate apart throughout his Air Force career. As a captain, he figured out how to extend the range of the “dive toss” method of bombing to reduce the risk to pilots. He also devised a way for two-ship fighter formations to fly at low levels without using radio calls, an innovation adopted by U.S. pilots around the world. Educated as an electrical engineer, Jumper was also unusually eager to adopt or adapt technology.