Predator

by Richard Whittle

  In his memoir, Franks wrote that he was in the Fusion Cell at Centcom headquarters in Tampa, as the SCIF where his Predator screen was located was called. He saw the building the Predator was watching as a “large, multistory house behind a fortress-like wall” and figured that those inside were Taliban leaders. By his account, some F/A-18s (planes that the officer taking notes in the CAOC recorded as F-14s) were within striking distance. Franks ordered the CAOC to direct the fighters to the scene while he called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to request clearance to bomb the building “as a high collateral damage target.” Rumsfeld said he would call Bush and get back in touch as soon as possible.

  “Within five minutes, President Bush had approved the target for immediate strike,” Franks wrote, but when he got back to the Fusion Cell, an officer calling from CIA headquarters was on the phone with a member of Franks’s staff. “Don’t shoot,” the officer said. “We think this building is a mosque.” According to his memoir, Franks, with his legal officer concurring, called Wald and ordered him to have the fighters drop their bombs anyway.

  In the GCS, contractor pilot Big raised the fighters on the Predator’s unsecured radio and talked them onto the target building. With Wald’s okay, Deptula had a colonel on the CAOC floor pass approval through the AWACS for the planes to drop their bombs. “Two on one building, two on the second building,” the officer taking notes wrote. The target, Franks wrote in his book, “disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke.”

  Soon afterward, Wald was surprised—and annoyed—to get a call from Jumper. The Air Force chief of staff said he realized this was Wald’s turf, but he wanted to be sure Wald knew that the people thought to be Taliban leaders had fled those buildings before the bombs hit. Jumper had seen them go on the Predator’s video.

  “Chief, are you watching this in real time?” Wald demanded, clearly suggesting Jumper shouldn’t be. Who else has got a Predator feed? Wald wondered. Mullah Omar?

  As the buildings fell, the time was 5:48 a.m., Monday, in Afghanistan. The Predator had thirty minutes left before its dwindling fuel would require flying back to its base, a trip of about six hours, given the drone’s slow cruising speed. Contractor pilot Big, who had taken over for Swanson, turned the drone north for home.

  As the Predator poked along, Big was instructed to fly over Kandahar’s airport, which was on the way. U.S. bombers had hit the airfield earlier that night, but three concrete buildings Osama bin Laden was known to have visited in the past were still standing. Boyle got CIA higher-ups to approve putting the Predator’s remaining Hellfire into the middle one of those three buildings. Getting rid of the second missile would reduce the Predator’s aerodynamic drag, making it easier for the drone to get home, and the airfield was a valid target in any event. Guay had given up the sensor operator’s seat to another Air Force enlisted man, who after Big pulled the trigger kept the laser designator on the structure and scored a direct hit. How much damage the strike did, or whether anyone was inside the little building, was impossible to tell, but the Predator’s camera showed debris blowing out of the structure’s back wall.

  A few minutes later, Boyle’s phone rang.

  “What the fuck, over?” Wald demanded. “You’ll get no more fighters from us.”

  Wald then called Franks, told him about Jumper’s call, and complained about the “screwed up command and control of the Predator.” Franks agreed with Wald. The CIA’s armed Predator should be part of the CAOC’s daily Air Tasking Order, a document listing every allied aircraft flying in the theater of operations by radio call sign, aircraft type, and mission. The CIA’s Predator operators should coordinate with the CAOC, not just fly around independently, even if their primary mission was to hunt “high-value targets” such as Osama bin Laden.

  As soon as they were off the phone, Wald called Centcom operations director Renuart again and told him about Jumper’s call. “Who is in control?” Wald fumed. “I’m ready to fold up and come home.”

  In his memoir, Franks also reported getting a call about Jumper’s observations on Omar’s escape. “Within an hour, Dick Myers called on the STU-III,” Franks wrote, referring to a secure telephone. “‘Tom,’ he said, ‘John Jumper has been watching the Predator scene at Air Force ops here in the Pentagon, and he tells me that the principals left the house before the bombs went in. He knows this is your business, says he’s just trying to be helpful.’”

  After calling Rumsfeld to thank him for his and Bush’s quick reaction to his request to bomb what others thought was a mosque, Franks wrote, he called Myers back and complained about what he viewed as Jumper’s meddling. Franks then quotes himself as telling Myers, “I’d appreciate it if you would remove the fucking Predator downlink from the Building.”

  The next day, the Predator video feed into the Pentagon was cut off. A Predator video feed to the White House, though, remained in place, and had an avid viewer: President Bush. As Bob Woodward reported in his book Bush at War, on October 10, 2001, three days after the Afghan campaign began, Bush brought up the Predator during a National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room. “Why can’t we fly more than one Predator at a time?” Bush asked, remarking on how impressed he was with the drone.

  “We’re going to try to get two simultaneously,” offered CIA Director George Tenet, alluding to a plan his agency and the Air Force were working on to add a second ground control station to the Trailer Park and get more Hellfire Predators to the base in Uzbekistan.

  “We ought to have 50 of these things,” Bush said.

  Later that day, Bush attended a news conference at FBI headquarters to announce a new list of the twenty-two “Most Wanted Terrorists.” Led by bin Laden, the list included his top two deputies, Egyptians Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef, the Al Qaeda military commander, whose daughter was married to bin Laden’s son. “Bush took a classified version for himself that had photos, brief biographies and personality sketches of the 22 men,” Woodward reported. “When he returned to his desk in the Oval Office, he slipped the list of names and faces into a drawer, ready at hand, his own personal scorecard for the war.”

  * * *

  In the early days of the war, firing missiles was only a small part of what the Hellfire Predators did over Afghanistan. With 3034 and 3037 the only two remaining Predators modified to carry the missiles, with only a dozen or so Hellfire Ks left at their operating base in Uzbekistan after the first night of the war, with only one Air Force pilot experienced in firing them, and with bin Laden, Omar, and other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders gone to ground, U.S. commanders had as much or greater need of the Predator’s cameras and other sensors as for its weapons.

  The first night of the war, before the botched pursuit of Mullah Omar began, the Wildfire team had flown 3034 undetected near Taliban anti-aircraft missile batteries and helped B-2 stealth bombers flying from Missouri bypass that threat. Rather than go through the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, however, the Wildfire team communicated with the B-2s through a special data distribution system. Following the first night’s confusion over command and control during the Omar chase, Wald and Franks insisted the CIA-controlled Hellfire Predators be part of the CAOC’s daily Air Tasking Order. After that, and for the next four or five days, the Hellfire Predators divided their time between searching for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—with help from CIA paramilitaries, tribal allies, and other agents on the ground—while also helping manned aircraft hit targets selected by the military. If the manned aircraft carried GPS-guided bombs, the Predator crew would provide a target’s geographic coordinates; if it carried laser-guided bombs, the Predator crew would provide a laser spot or talk the attacking planes onto their targets.

  The number of fixed targets U.S. commanders wanted to hit, though, diminished quickly. The first night of the war, U.S. and British warplanes and ships firing cruise missiles hit thirty-one Taliban airfields, air defenses, communications facilities, Al Qaeda terrorist training camps, and related sites. The second da
y, they struck only thirteen such targets. “We’re not running out of targets, Afghanistan is,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld cracked on the third day of the war at his daily Pentagon news briefing with Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers. But targets worth striking were “emerging as we continue,” Rumsfeld noted, meaning Al Qaeda and Taliban forces were being hit whenever they could be found.

  The Hellfire Predator was proving useful in both finding and striking targets. A given Predator mission typically lasted twenty to twenty-four hours, with four to six hours on each end needed for transit time. At the CAOC’s behest, the Wildfire crew would sometimes watch a particular location for evidence of Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters for hours; every couple of hours, pilots and sensor operators in the GCS would shift in and out of the seat. When a bomb strike was ordered, the Predator crew would guide manned aircraft onto the targets. One Predator operator at the Trailer Park, a former F-15E Strike Eagle pilot, had dropped a lot of bombs on Serb targets in Kosovo two years earlier and was especially good as a virtual forward air controller, which required knowing how to conduct a “Nine-line Brief.” In a nine-line, a forward air controller talks a pilot onto a target by providing instructions and descriptions in nine standard steps, starting with “initial point,” meaning where to begin the bomb or missile run, and ending with “egress direction,” meaning which way the attacking pilot should depart the scene of a strike.

  During the first weeks of the war, the Wildfire crews used the Predator’s cameras and laser designator to help F/A-18, F-14, F-15, and F-16 strike aircraft, plus B-1B, B-2, and B-52 bombers find and hit targets ranging from Taliban helicopters found on the ground by the drone to groups of Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters detected by its cameras. With the enemy on the run, the Wildfire team worked frequently with AC-130U “Spooky” and AC-130H “Spectre” gunships—fearsome special operations ground attack aircraft equipped with side-firing 40 millimeter and 105 millimeter cannons and a Gatling gun. The gunships were called in several times after the Predator, lurking high above for hours, tracked men in trucks or SUVs to compounds or buildings clearly under guard by enemy fighters.

  Sometimes, after a bomb strike on such a target, the Predator would help track and attack what the Wildfire crews took to calling “squirters” and those in the CAOC usually called “spitters”—survivors running from the scene of a strike. Sometimes, the Predator crew would be directed to launch a Hellfire at squirters as they climbed into a truck or SUV or some other vehicle to flee, or simply ran for cover. For CAOC commanders, the Predator’s cameras were vital to maintaining the so-called chain of custody—the proof that their targets were indeed people positively identified as enemy fighters—required to attack.

  Despite their initial frustration and Wald’s anger over the CIA and Franks controlling the Hellfire Predator without consulting him, commanders at the CAOC found the drone extremely valuable in corroborating intelligence tips from other sources about activity on the ground. One officer recalled that CIA paramilitaries or other intelligence sources might report, “There’s a meeting at such and such a location at such and such a time. So the Predator would go there and look. And sure enough, there’d be a group of people entering. You’d watch them enter, you’d loiter, you’d wait till the meeting came out. Then you’d watch the vehicles go away and then you’d assign an AC-130 to go take out those vehicles. We did that multiple times. You’ve got bad guys meeting, you don’t take out the building with large-scale weapons because you’ve got potential for collateral damage.”

  Defense Secretary Rumsfeld quickly became a Predator enthusiast. “In those first days of combat in Afghanistan, the Predator and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) conclusively proved their value to our military and intelligence personnel,” Rumsfeld wrote in his memoir Known and Unknown—though the Predator was actually the only UAV in use in Afghanistan during the first month of the war. Rumsfeld added in a note that “with coalition operations underway in Afghanistan, George Tenet and I began to sort out Defense-CIA joint Predator operations. We came to an agreement over who owned and paid for the assets, where they would operate, and who would ‘pull the trigger’ on the very few UAVs that were armed at the time.” Left unmentioned by Rumsfeld was that after the escape of Mullah Omar the first night of the war, the CIA often coordinated with Centcom but never again deferred to Franks before taking a shot at a high-value target.

  In early October 2001, Rumsfeld and other officials were saying little in public about the Predator. But in the October 22 issue of The New Yorker magazine, journalist Seymour Hersh revealed that the CIA was controlling an armed version of the drone that had tracked Mullah Omar the first night of the war and had been refused permission to fire on him by Franks. Tom Ricks of the Washington Post quickly followed up with a front-page article calling the armed Predator “a revolutionary step in the conduct of warfare.” Even so, months would pass before many others began to grasp just how revolutionary a step the Predator was.

  * * *

  On the drone revolution’s ramparts—in the ground control station or the double-wide trailer on the CIA campus—the initial cadre of revolutionaries knew they were players in a real-life drama. In bull sessions, the Wildfire team joked about which Hollywood actors should play them in the movie about their operation. But as the initial adrenaline rush of waging war by remote control ebbed, some began to feel they had entered the Twilight Zone, where a twelve-hour shift might consist of either mind-numbing tedium or nerve-wracking tension. Improvisation and on-the-job training were essential to their success. At first, Big Safari’s Swanson, the only Air Force pilot on the team who had fired any Hellfires before the war, was the only Air Force pilot to launch missiles over Afghanistan. Contractor Big had fired them in tests, too. Later, other operators began taking shots but, in their case, without ever firing a missile at a practice target. With only two Predators modified to carry Hellfires in those early days of the war, there was no way for the pilots and sensor operators to fully rehearse their lethal act before going onstage, although taking a couple of dry runs at a real target before firing was useful and usual.

  The more they fired, the more they noticed peculiar things about using this new weapon. Unlike pilots or other crew in strike aircraft or big bombers, the Predator’s operators could watch their targets for hours, see their missiles strike, and continue to watch the aftermath long after the smoke had cleared. Often—but not always, for some of their targets were inside vehicles or buildings—they could see the people they were about to attack, although never well enough to discern their faces, just enough to distinguish them from others. They also saw bodies flip, or disappear, or lie lifeless on the ground; sometimes, severely wounded, the men they had targeted would try to crawl away. Operating the Predator was less like flying an attack aircraft than like being a sniper lying in ambush, which for some made the act of killing somehow seem more personal.

  Yet the Predator crews, communicating over their headsets with the mission commander seated toward the back of the ground control station, or with intelligence analysts in the double-wide, rarely had any idea whom they were stalking and killing. This was true even in the case of so-called high-value targets. Rather than keeping a scorecard, operations director Mark Cooter and mission commander Darran Jergensen concentrated on making sure their crews could deliver what their CIA controllers wanted the Predator to do. Ed Boyle and Air Force liaison officers who routinely spent time in the CIA Global Response Center might know more about individual targets, but there was no reason to pass such information on to the flight crews. Picking targets was the CIA’s business. Besides, CIA culture focused to the point of obsession on “compartmentalizing” information—keeping it secret from all but those with a clear need to know. The Counterterrorist Center mission managers on Langley’s sixth floor seemed particularly wary of sharing information that might reveal sources and methods of identifying Al Qaeda or Taliban members the CIA wanted to target.

  “Generally, we would have some kin
d of target or area to look at, and that was based on some other type of cross intel,” one crew member recalled. “If there was something there that caught the attention of the guys up in the CTC, we might linger for hours or days. At some point, they would go, ‘Hey, this is a valid target.’ Our mission commander, the guy sitting in the back of the GCS, would be in [computer] chat and perhaps on a direct phone line to the guys upstairs, passing that information back and forth, and eventually it would come down, ‘Yes, put a round on target. I want you to put a round through the building; take out those people; take out that car.’” For the Predator crews, the names of those in the crosshairs were unknown and unimportant, just as a fighter or bomber pilot, or a soldier in combat on the ground, almost never knows anything personal about the enemy. All the Wildfire crews knew was that they were killing “bad guys.”

  * * *

  One name the Predator crews did know was Lucky. He was the dog who regularly wandered into the picture on the Predator screen just as they were about to launch a missile, a glowing, four-legged apparition who continually tempted fate. There were often dogs in the mud-brick compounds common to Afghanistan, which usually contained a house or two behind a tall outer wall and heavy iron gates. The wall provided security and privacy for extended families, allowing women to go unveiled and children, chickens, and goats to wander freely. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters sometimes took refuge in such compounds, and when the Predator crews launched Hellfires at them, any dogs in proximity invariably bolted several seconds before the missile hit, alerted by their keen sense of hearing, the Wildfire team supposed. Humans never ran. A human might hear a shrill shriek during the final subsonic portion of the Hellfire’s flight, but the shriek lasted only a split second, and by then it was too late. Early on in the war, someone at the Trailer Park—inveterate cut-up Guay, most likely—started calling every canine that appeared just as a strike was being launched Lucky, and the joke caught on. “There goes Lucky,” someone would say as a dog fled an incoming Hellfire.