Predator

by Richard Whittle

  After the Pentagon was hit, Wallace and Welch left Cooter at the CTC and went out to the double-wide to watch news coverage on a television there and make preparations for the others who would work there. The picture quality on the TV in the trailer was poor, but at 9:59 they watched in rapt horror as the South Tower collapsed, and then, twenty-nine minutes later, the North Tower fell. They also saw reports that a fourth hijacked plane was in the air.

  After a couple of hours in the trailer, Wallace and Welch walked back to the headquarters building and found it nearly empty. CIA Director George Tenet had ordered the headquarters complex evacuated in case it, too, was on Al Qaeda’s target list. Nonessential personnel were sent home, while critical staff went to the CIA printing plant, a small building with a basement elsewhere on the campus. At Director Cofer Black’s insistence, the CTC was still occupied and at work, and Cooter was among those there, talking almost constantly on a secure phone. Several of his calls were with Ed Boyle, who by midmorning Arizona time had made it back to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base and found a secure phone.

  Boyle’s first call was to ACC commander Cook. The White House, Cook told him, wanted to know how soon the Air Force could get those three Hellfire Predators over Afghanistan—with missiles under their wings.

  * * *

  The telephone in his San Diego apartment woke Scott Swanson that morning just before 6:30 a.m., Pacific time. “They just hit the World Trade Center,” said Jeff Guay, the other half of Big Safari’s sole Predator crew. “Turn on your TV.”

  Swanson jumped out of bed and started watching the news. Like others on the Hellfire Predator team, he assumed that the burning towers were the work of Al Qaeda. Rubbing shoulders with CIA officers during the Hellfire Predator tests that summer, Swanson had gotten a sense of why the project seemed so urgent, at least to some at high levels. But like most people paying attention to Al Qaeda, Swanson had figured that if the terrorist group struck again, the target would be somewhere overseas.

  The previous Friday night, Swanson had spent two hours in a ground control station at China Lake with a General Atomics crew assigned to the anticipated CIA missions. They put Predator 3038 into the air, bore-sighted its MTS ball, and launched Hellfires at target tanks. On Saturday, all the team members were sent home to get rested and ready to deploy. Some would be moving to the ad hoc base at Langley, some to Central Asia to man the launch-and-recovery element, which would take off and land the Predators from a scruffy little airfield in Uzbekistan. Some members of the LRE had flown to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on August 28, and then traveled to the airfield to erect a portable hangar.

  After driving home to San Diego from China Lake, Swanson spent Sunday relaxing, the first real break he’d had in weeks. On Monday, he had taken his car to a garage for minor repairs and left it while the shop got in some parts. Now, after Guay’s wakeup call and the horrific reports on TV, he decided he’d better stay near the phone. Swanson had known he would soon be heading to the white GCS and the double-wide trailer on the western edge of the CIA grounds to fly more Predator missions, but he wasn’t due to fly east for a week or so.

  Not long after the third hijacked plane hit the Pentagon, Swanson got another call, this time from Big Safari headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. “Pack your bags,” the caller said, “you’re going to deploy early.”

  * * *

  Werner had arrived in Palmdale, California, on September 9 to conduct flight tests of his new remote split operations scheme from Big Safari’s office in the Lockheed Martin facility there. On September 11 he was shaving in his hotel room with the television on when the second hijacked plane struck the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He happened to see it live.

  A few hours later, Grimes called.

  “How are things going with your new toy out there?” Grimes asked.

  “Well, pretty good so far,” Werner said. “I’ve got two more days of tests scheduled.”

  “Well, you’re done with your testing,” Grimes told him. “As of right now, your system’s been declared operational.”

  “But it’s just a prototype,” Werner protested.

  “We understand that, but we need it,” Grimes replied, telling Werner to get ready to travel because “you’re going to have an airplane picking you up.”

  * * *

  No airplane would be picking up Ed Boyle and Rich Gibaldi, who were now desperate to get back from Arizona to their assignments at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. But the only military aircraft flying after Al Qaeda struck were fighter planes on patrol, tankers in the air to refuel them, and Airborne Warning and Control System—abbreviated AWACS and pronounced “A-wax”—radar and communications planes to detect threats and direct the fighters. Just after the South Tower was hit, the Federal Aviation Administration issued an unprecedented ban on all takeoffs of nonemergency aircraft.

  That afternoon, Boyle and Gibaldi drove about 450 miles to Kirtland Air Force Base, near Albuquerque, New Mexico, hoping to find “space available” seats on a military flight. No transports were flying, so they caught a few hours of sleep in a motel, rose early on Wednesday, and went back to Kirtland to try again. Still no flights were available; after a while, they gave up and started driving east as fast as they could. Nearly two thousand miles of highway separated them from Langley Air Force Base.

  Stopping as little as possible, they made about a thousand miles, then pulled into Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas to try once more to find a flight. Stymied again, they spent the night and then lit out Thursday morning for Virginia. They were making good time—Boyle was doing about ninety miles an hour on Interstate 40—when they passed a tractor trailer truck poking along at seventy or so just east of Forrest City, Arkansas. A white Chevrolet Camaro in front of the truck caught Gibaldi’s eye.

  “You know, Ed, I think that was a state trooper,” Gibaldi said. He was soon proved right by a flashing blue light.

  Boyle and Gibaldi were glad to see the officer’s military-style haircut as he got out of his car and put on his hat. They figured he might be a marine, and sympathetic. They were half right: Trooper Mike Kennedy, twenty-seven at the time, had never served in the armed forces, but he was on the Arkansas State Police Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT) and had military bearing. He was also happy to let the two colonels in uniform off the hook when they told him they were rushing to Virginia to get ready for war with Al Qaeda.

  “I’ve already called you in, so I have to give you this warning ticket,” the trooper said apologetically, quickly filling out a pale green Arkansas State Police Warning of Violation citation and handing it to Boyle. “Sir, go kill the bastards,” Kennedy added. “Between you and me and the border, there’s no more state troopers.”

  Boyle and Gibaldi pulled into Langley Air Force Base just after midnight and went straight to their two-story, redbrick houses there. Boyle’s wife, Bev, met him at the door. She had some bags with fresh clothes already packed for him, in case he needed to leave again right away, but Boyle had to see Lieutenant General Cook in the morning. Then he would get in his car, drive three hours north to the other Langley—CIA headquarters—and take command of the special Air Force cadre now assembling to fly the Hellfire Predator over Afghanistan. This time, Boyle hoped the newly armed drone would let them do exactly what Arkansas State Trooper Mike Kennedy had urged: go kill the bastards.

  * * *

  Not long after Boyle arrived home that night, an Air Force C-17 Globemaster III cargo plane roared out of the dark, empty skies over Washington, D.C., and landed with a screech of its tires at Andrews Air Force Base, roughly a dozen miles southeast of the capital. As the squat gray transport parked on a taxiway and its jet engines whined to a stop, a ground crew swarmed the aircraft. Soon a portly man in slacks and a polo shirt stepped from the shadows and walked to the C-17’s side door.

  Snake Clark, who until May 1 had worn the blue uniform and silver eagles of an Air Force colonel, was now a civilian, though he was still technical d
irector, simulation and integration, Office of the Assistant Vice Chief of Staff, Headquarters U.S. Air Force. He was also still the Predator’s Wizard of Oz in the Pentagon, the man behind the curtain who pulled strings and twisted knobs, or in Clark’s case twisted arms. And once again he had worked his magic: with no civilian and few military planes in the air, and even senior officers unable to hitch a ride on those flying, Clark—with a little help from the CIA—had arranged for this huge Air Force cargo jet to cross the United States on a trip begun barely twenty-four hours after the attacks of 9/11. Now, in the wee hours of Friday, September 14, he wanted to see for himself the C-17’s unusual cargo.

  Strapped to the deck of the transport’s eighty-eight-foot-long hold were three tan, fiberglass-reinforced, polyester-plastic “coffins,” each twenty-seven feet long; four feet, five inches wide; and two feet tall. Each held a disassembled Hellfire Predator, tail numbers 3034, 3037, and 3038. Crates nearby held a stripped-down flight control console and a portable C-band radio antenna, which a small team of experts could use to get the three Hellfire Predators in and out of the air from almost any airfield on earth. Also in the hold was a pallet cradling about a dozen tarp-covered black-and-yellow AGM-114K Hellfire missiles.

  All this equipment, plus the small team of experts needed to handle it, would remain aboard when the C-17 departed. The rest of the C-17’s passengers, though, were getting off at Andrews. Barely more than a dozen in number, they were the initial cadre who would fly the Hellfire Predators from the white GCS parked next to the double-wide trailer on the CIA grounds in Langley, Virginia. They included Spoon Mattoon, Scott Swanson, Jeff Guay, and Werner; three Predator pilots (one a woman) and six sensor operators from the Air Force’s 11th and 15th Reconnaissance Squadrons at Indian Springs; two General Atomics pilots, some avionics experts, and a handful of engineers from their company and L-3 Communications.

  * * *

  Mattoon had boarded the C-17 at China Lake on Wednesday, the day after the twin towers fell, bringing aboard—at the loadmaster’s suggestion—a rented Jeep Cherokee he’d had no time to return. (Clark would cackle about that bit of chutzpah for years to come.) From China Lake, the cargo plane flew to Palmdale, where Werner, Swanson, Guay, the other Air Force drone operators, and the contractors were waiting in the Big Safari office at Lockheed Martin. The Globemaster took off again at 7:00 p.m., almost precisely sunset. Sitting in a cockpit jump seat so he could chat with the crew and get a view as they flew, Swanson found it the eeriest flight of his life. No other aircraft were visible in the sky, and the C-17 provided the only light between the ground and the stars. Their first stop, after a bit more than four hours, was the Army’s Redstone Arsenal, in Huntsville, Alabama. The previous day, only hours after the attacks in New York and Washington, Mattoon had telephoned Hellfire engineer Terry McLean, who had flown home to Huntsville the previous weekend, exhausted after their summer of round-the-clock Predator tests in the desert.

  “We’re making our way down your way,” Mattoon said cryptically. “We want to pick up some jalapeños.” Speaking over an unsecure phone line, he used a nickname for Hellfires they had cooked up while testing the missile against “Taco Bell” at China Lake that summer. McLean knew exactly what Mattoon meant, and told him whom he should call. When the C-17 landed at Huntsville, the pallet of Hellfires was waiting.

  From there, the Globemaster flew to Charleston Air Force Base, in South Carolina, arriving at 4:00 a.m. Thursday. To the surprise and frustration of some of the plane’s passengers, their ride remained on the ground there for the next twenty hours. The C-17’s three-member crew was required to stop flying and rest; beyond that, the airplane needed inspection, maintenance, and fuel, and a new crew had to be found to take the Globemaster on the rest of its long journey to Uzbekistan. The C-17 was wheels up out of Charleston at midnight.

  At Andrews, where they arrived at 1:30 a.m. on Friday, Swanson and the other pilots and sensor operators, plus a couple of contractors assigned to work with them at the CIA, were met by not only Snake Clark, but also Major Darran Jergensen, a Predator pilot most of them knew who had recently transferred to Air Combat Command. Jergensen had a white bus waiting to take them to the Marriott Residence Inn at Tysons Corner, a sprawl of shopping malls and office buildings just off the Washington Beltway in Virginia and a five-minute drive from CIA headquarters. The night of September 11, Ed Boyle had ordered a subordinate at ACC to book almost all of the Marriott’s roughly one hundred rooms indefinitely. In addition to the small Predator flight crew cadre, Boyle figured three daily shifts of as many as thirty Air Force intelligence analysts would be needed to digest the drone’s video and perform other tasks. Though the Predator carried no pilot, it might need fifteen to twenty people at a time in the GCS and the double-wide to monitor and assess the products of its video camera and other sensors during round-the-clock missions.

  Recruited that summer for the Predator missions the CIA was planning, Jergensen had been summoned to the Pentagon on September 11 a few hours after the attacks on New York and Washington. A former special operations navigator, he would share mission commander duties with Mark Cooter, directing the flight crews in the GCS and, when useful, helping them fly their Predators. As Jergensen’s charges boarded the bus, he invited them to take a beer from a case he had brought along; then, after asking the driver to step outside and away from the bus, he briefed the group on what they would be doing after they got oriented at CIA headquarters.

  Jergensen told the group they would use the ground control station there to fly the Hellfire Predators over Afghanistan, picking the drones up via Ku-band satellite link after an LRE in Central Asia got them into the air with their portable C-band antenna. If the CIA’s sources in Afghanistan could tip them to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or his lieutenants, they might launch a Hellfire strike, buddy-lase for warplanes with laser-guided bombs, or simply talk them onto the target. Their first priority, however, would be to use the Predator’s cameras and other sensors to hunt bin Laden and other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders; at the same time, they would scout out targets that regular U.S. and allied military forces could attack if President Bush decided, as seemed increasingly likely, to go to war.

  “Any questions?” Jergensen asked when he finished.

  “Yeah, I have a question,” said a General Atomics pilot. “Who are you?”

  Like everyone else, Jergensen was wearing civilian clothes.

  When Mattoon turned in his rented Jeep Cherokee at Washington National Airport, the car company agent was befuddled. Mattoon had rented the vehicle in California, more than two thousand miles away. But according to the odometer, the Jeep had been driven only two hundred miles. How was that possible?

  Someone must have made a mistake, Mattoon said with a shrug.

  * * *

  The armed Predator’s call sign—the way the cadre would identify themselves to other military units by radio—would be Wildfire. The WILD Predators flown over Kosovo by Big Safari had carried a laser designator; these added Hellfire missiles. Someone did the obvious math: WILD + Hellfire = Wildfire.

  By the weekend of September 15, the handful of technicians and engineers in the CIA-led LRE was fully in place at a secret, isolated airfield in Uzbekistan near the Afghan border. To cloak their presence as much as possible, LRE members were barred from going into the tiny border town nearby and told to avoid contact with locals. Living in a tent, working in an inflatable hangar, their duty would be to maintain, service, and operate the three Hellfire Predators at the start and finish of their missions over Afghanistan using the portable flight control console they had brought with them. After takeoff, the pilot was to fly the Predator to mission altitude, where a technician would bore-sight the MTS ball; next, the pilot would put the Predator into an orbit, at which point the mission crew in the GCS at CIA headquarters would take control using the Ku-band satellite link. The timing was worked out so precisely that no conversation or messaging was necessary.

 
; After a couple of “functional flight checks”—test drives—over their host nation during the weekend of September 15–16, the first armed Predator entered Afghan airspace on Tuesday, September 18. The hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants that Charlie Allen, Richard Clarke, and the other Predator advocates had long been working for was at last under way—a week to the day after Al Qaeda’s devastating attacks on New York and Washington.

  Four days after the operation began, the Predator team suffered a major setback. A contractor pilot, radio call sign “Big,” was flying Predator 3038 over Afghanistan on September 22 when the screens in the GCS showing the video imagery and the airspeed, altitude, and other constantly changing numbers suddenly froze. “Crap,” Big muttered.

  The Ku-band satellite link had been lost. In such a circumstance, Predator 3038 was programmed to return to base, but for these missions, only after loitering at about twenty-five thousand feet for fifteen hours. The long loiter time was meant to make sure the Predator crossed the border after dark; Uzbekistan’s authoritarian leader wanted to do everything possible to prevent the Taliban and restive Islamists on his side of the border from finding out about the Predator operation. Fifteen hours after losing link, Predator 3038 was still missing. The team was soon certain that it had crashed.