Guay was a reliable source of humor, and perhaps because of the Predator team’s somewhat strange circumstances, his sarcastic outlook became contagious. By late October or early November, the crews had spent weeks working in the chilly GCS or the drafty double-wide for twelve hours on, twelve hours off, seven days a week, with infrequent trips to the Big House for food, and most toilet breaks taken in a thin-walled bathroom in one corner of the trailer or in one of three porta-potties outdoors. At smoke breaks in the glade, over beers at the Tysons Corner Marriott or Mr. Smith’s, a favorite bar nearby, gripes were nursed about spending days and nights hidden away in the woods. They would joke that they were so close to the edge of the CIA campus they might as well be in West Virginia, which was actually fifty miles or so away.
Then one of the CIA people made a crack about the Predator crews being “trailer trash”—just about the time, as it happened, that Ginger Wallace and other women on the team were complaining to Boyle about a broken toilet in the double-wide. No one at the Big House seemed to care about getting the toilet repaired, so Guay and some of the others decided to send the CIA a message. “We’re trailer trash, so we might as well look that way,” one declared. They took the malfunctioning toilet out of the double-wide, plopped it on the ground outside, and stuck a pot of flowers in its bowl. “All we need now is a sofa out front, a broken-down truck on cement blocks, and pink flamingos,” someone said, and though they couldn’t manage the sofa and truck, someone came up with four plastic pink flamingos, which they stuck in the ground around their “redneck flower pot.”
CIA officials came out to the Trailer Park from time to time for various reasons, and one or two who saw the pink flamingos and toilet bowl on their grounds suffered shock and awe. Some told Boyle he had to get rid of that junk, if not for operational security then for aesthetic reasons. When CIA Director Tenet saw the hillbilly tableau, he chuckled, then chuckled some more. He also promised to get the toilet fixed, and did. But the flamingos stayed.
Tenet, gregarious by nature, occasionally made the fifteen-minute trip from his office to the double-wide on his way home at night to let the Air Force team know how much he appreciated what they were doing. Some weekends, he would come out to the Trailer Park in blue jeans, plop down in a chair with an unlit Cohiba cigar in his mouth, and shoot the breeze for twenty or thirty minutes with whoever happened to be there. Tenet also lingered in the Global Response Center on the sixth floor and watched operations unfold when the Predator was on an important target; sometimes he himself issued the approval to launch the Hellfires. Before 9/11, he had been skeptical and cautious about the CIA using the armed Predator, but after Al Qaeda’s attacks on America, and after seeing what the drone could do in the first days of the war, Tenet became a “disciple,” as one official close to him put it.
* * *
One of those employing this new technology was a remarkable young woman—remarkable even before she made history by becoming the first of her sex to launch a lethal drone strike. Among the first female fighter pilots in U.S. history, she was an F-15E Strike Eagle flier who logged combat hours over Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo before becoming a Predator operator. Even out of the cockpit, she stood out. Tall, blond, athletic, and bold, she was a self-described tomboy—the only sister of four brothers—whose sole observable fear was being taken less seriously because she was female. She liked to drink, and when she drank too much, she tended to get into fights—wrestling bouts, really, and always with men. She and her husband had first gotten acquainted when they started wrestling and rolling on the floor at a Christmas party where there was alcohol to drink and cake to shove in each other’s faces.
Her tough-girl tendencies also inspired her radio call sign “Ghengis” (which she spelled that way). Her first F-15E squadron chose her call sign, and while stationed overseas later, she lived up to the moniker during a crowded apartment party. She was sitting on the floor with her back against the front of a sofa and a drink in her hand when a weapon systems officer (a “backseater,” in military slang) slid onto the seat behind her. When he rested his legs on her shoulders, let out a sigh, and loudly declared, “Now that’s what women are good for,” Ghengis knocked him over the back of the sofa. He got up with a bloody lip.
Ghengis—at her stipulation, the only way she will be identified in this account—was an Air Force brat. Her father was an officer, and one of her brothers was a fighter pilot. Yet she chose her career on a whim. One day at the start of her sophomore year at a junior college, she was driving down the road with her arm out the window, letting her hand play in the wind like an airplane wing. As she put it years later, “Just out of the blue, I decided I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.” She also wanted to fly fighters, and was lucky in her timing. About the time she got her Air Force commission, the Clinton administration decided women should be allowed to pilot combat planes.
Another male weapon systems officer—a job also known as a Wizzo, after the abbreviation WSO—learned in a different way not to mess with Ghengis. Her greatest difficulty piloting F-15Es over Iraq wasn’t the occasional antiaircraft missile she had to dodge but the duration of the missions, which could last ten hours—a long time to go without emptying your bladder. Males could urinate in flight into a piddle pack, a small vinyl bag lined with compressed sponges. But at the time, no such device existed for female fighter pilots. Ghengis griped about this aloud, and one day, while flying over Iraq, the male WSO in her F-15E’s backseat began gleefully reporting each time he used his piddle pack. About the third time she heard him say, “Ahhh, yeahhh, peein’ now,” she jerked back on the control stick, throwing the plane into a sharp vertical climb that caused the WSO to wizz all over himself. No WSO ever teased Ghengis about the piddle pack problem again.
Months later, it was Ghengis’s turn to fume. Her squadron commander told her that the instructor pilot billet she had requested as her next assignment wasn’t available; instead, the Air Force was sending her to Indian Springs, Nevada, to fly the Predator. This wasn’t punishment, he assured her, just dues she had to pay for the great three-year assignment she was finishing up.
Her shoulders fell. “Predator?” Ghengis asked in disbelief. “Seriously?”
No fighter pilot volunteered for life at “One G,” as two F-16 jockeys assigned to the Predator called it in a rap video lament that found its way onto the Internet. Even by the summer of 2000, Indian Springs was still known as “the Land of Misfit Toys,” among other unflattering nicknames. “What did you screw up to get here?” asked a fellow fighter pilot who reported for Predator training with Ghengis after damaging his back in a hard landing. Fourteen months later, in October 2001, Ghengis found herself flying combat missions again, only this time from the ground control station at the Trailer Park at the CIA. On October 24, three weeks into the war in Afghanistan, she became the first woman ever to fire a missile from a drone in combat.
Over the previous five weeks, Ghengis had flown Predators 3034 and 3037 over Afghanistan more than sixty-two hours, recording her flight time in a small diary she kept. She also noted specifics of her workouts at a local gym—“weights, sit-ups, X-trainer 30 min”—how far she jogged, and visits to Washington by her parents and friends. Unlike Swanson, who had flown many of the Hellfire tests at China Lake before the war, Ghengis launched her first missile at a target with people inside. She had no idea who they were. The mission commander simply told her to “take out that truck.” She and a sensor operator did, with a K-model Hellfire. Now her little diary entries recorded acts of war as well. On October 24 she wrote, “Notify Gold’s Gym if here past 25 Nov (or if leaving)—7.5 miles—FLY 3.5—1 x K truck.”
As time went on, the former fighter-bomber pilot found it a strange form of combat. Dropping bombs in Kosovo, she’d known she might be killing people, but it was rare to spot people on the ground or see what happened after the bombs hit. Her view of the strikes she made from her F-15E came from brief glimpses of infrared video, but then she’d q
uickly fly away. Flying the Predator, Ghengis watched people for long periods of time—hours in some cases—and after firing missiles at them or directing other aircraft to attack them, she usually kept the drone loitering and saw the aftermath. She would have preferred to forget some of the scenes she witnessed. “I’d say it was more difficult in Predator,” she mused years later.
* * *
A few days before Ghengis launched her first Hellfire, the Wildfire team took on a new type of mission: using the Hellfire Predator’s sensors to help troops on the ground. The first U.S. troops into Afghanistan were two Special Forces teams that infiltrated the country the night of October 19–20, flying in on MH-47E Chinook helicopters. One twelve-man detachment, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, landed in the mountains fifty miles south of Mazar-i-Sharif. The other, ODA 555, deployed in mountains farther northeast, above the Panjshir Valley. One of their missions was to call in air strikes on enemy troops, and on the radio, ODA 555 was “Tiger Zero One.” ODA 595 was “Tiger Zero Two.” Years later, Scott Swanson vividly remembered one radio call he had with a soldier from ODA 595 after the CAOC directed the Predator to help find some Taliban who had the Special Forces unit under fire near a former Soviet airfield at Bagram, just north of Kabul.
“Tiger Zero Two, this is Wildfire three four. Understand you need help,” Swanson said over the radio that day in early November 2001.
“Wildfire, I don’t see you guys on my list. What are you?” the soldier replied.
“Cyclops,” Swanson explained, using radio code for a UAV.
“Oh, okay,” the soldier said. “So if you’re not in the airplane, where are you?”
“The Land of the Big BX,” Swanson said, using a military nickname for the United States—in other words, the “land of the big Base Exchange,” where all the comforts of home can be found.
“Well, have a cold beer on me,” the soldier said, a sip of scorn in his voice.
The soldier’s tone changed dramatically when the Predator’s camera found the Taliban and put a laser spot on the target, allowing the intelligence analysts in the double-wide to pinpoint the enemy’s geographic coordinates and pass them to a B-52 bomber. The B-52 dropped bombs, and the Taliban shooting stopped. There were no apparent survivors.
“I don’t care if you guys are sitting at home drinking beer and playing video games or not,” the soldier told Swanson after the mission ended. “You can support us any day.”
13
NEVER MIND … WE’LL DO IT OURSELVES
He was an extraordinary enemy, perhaps more directly responsible than even Osama bin Laden for the American blood their Islamic fundamentalist followers shed in the final decade of the twentieth century. Born in 1944, according to most sources, Mohammed Atef (also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, among many aliases) was a tall, thin-faced, heavily bearded, quietly imposing Egyptian. Atef went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to wage jihad against the Soviet Union with bin Laden and other Arab volunteers, and as the Soviets began leaving that country in 1988, he was among half a dozen jihadists who, with bin Laden, founded Al Qaeda. In the early 1990s, Atef traveled to Somalia to instigate and train fundamentalists there to fight U.S. troops, and in 1998 he was said to have masterminded the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He preceded those attacks by publicizing, with other Al Qaeda members, a fatwa declaring it the duty of all Muslims to wage holy war on the United States and drive all Americans, military or civilian, out of the Persian Gulf region.
Three months after the embassy bombings, a federal grand jury in New York issued a 319-count indictment charging Atef, along with bin Laden and various others, with felonies that included “conspiracy to murder, bomb, and maim” and “conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against nationals of the United States.” The same day the indictment was made public, November 4, 1998, the State Department offered a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction anywhere in the world of either bin Laden or Atef for their roles in the bombings.
Following the success of his operations in Africa, Atef joined with Al Qaeda’s second-ranking leader, fellow Egyptian and physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, in arguing that they should try to acquire biological and chemical weapons to use against the “enemies of Islam” rather than seeking the nuclear bombs bin Laden favored. In November 1999, Atef joined bin Laden and the later infamous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in picking targets for “the planes operation,” as they called the plot to have suicide teams hijack airliners and crash them into U.S. military and civilian buildings. The next year, Atef publicly took credit for the bombing of the USS Cole, explaining that Al Qaeda had hoped the attack would provoke the United States into invading Afghanistan, where the jihadists could wage holy war against Americans just as they had against the Soviets.
Although Atef was the third most important member of Al Qaeda, he may have ranked higher in bin Laden’s heart. Journalists who interviewed bin Laden in 1998, after the U.S. cruise missile strikes on Al Qaeda training camps, said Atef personally searched them. Two and a half years later, in January 2001, bin Laden and Atef arranged the marriage of Atef’s fourteen-year-old daughter to bin Laden’s seventeen-year-old son. At the videotaped wedding, bin Laden and Atef sat side by side, and bin Laden read a poem celebrating the bombing of the Cole.
With the exception of bin Laden and Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef was the highest of high-value targets for the United States. And with the United States waging war in Afghanistan, he was on the run.
* * *
On Thursday, November 15, after several days of intense U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan, reports that Mohammed Atef had been killed began filtering out of the country. The next day, when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld visited the naval training center at Great Lakes, Illinois, he was asked if he could confirm those reports.
“I have seen those reports,” Rumsfeld said. “Do I know for a fact that that’s the case? I don’t. I suspect—the reports I’ve received seem authoritative.”
Later that Friday, a Defense Department spokesman added a wrinkle. Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem said U.S. forces had hit a “series of targets” in Afghanistan over the past week that were thought to be Taliban or Al Qaeda “command and control.” After one such strike “a couple of days ago,” he said, “intelligence reports picking up discussions” indicated that Atef had been killed, but “we haven’t been able to confirm that.”
On November 17, the day after Stufflebeem’s comments, Taliban spokesman Mullah Najibullah, speaking from a town near Kandahar, told the Associated Press that Atef and seven other Al Qaeda members had been killed in a U.S. air strike three days earlier, though he refused to say where, and there was no guarantee he was telling the truth. Later that Saturday, quoting “U.S. officials,” CNN reported that after a bomb strike “south of Kabul”—no date was specified—the “United States intercepted communications from people sifting through the bombed wreckage who made frantic statements saying Atef had been killed.”
In succeeding days, and over succeeding years, various accounts of how Mohammed Atef died would emerge. The accounts often contradicted one another on fundamental facts, from the exact date of his death, to the precise place he died, to the aircraft and weapon or weapons used to kill him. Some accounts said Atef was killed in Kabul; some said in Gardez. Some said he was found by a Predator and killed by bombs from a fighter plane; some said a Hellfire missile launched by a Predator killed him; some reports included no mention of the Predator at all. The date Atef died has been reported to be anywhere from November 12 to November 16.
The nature and pace of military operations and the number of air strikes U.S. forces conducted in Afghanistan during October and November 2001 likely make it impossible—especially without access to relevant classified information that still exists—to verify any account of Atef’s death beyond the shadow of a doubt. But a number of former senior officers who were in the U.S. military chain of command at the time, and who have never before disclosed t
heir recollections of this event, retain distinct and vivid memories of how they believe Atef died—and all of them agree that the role played by the Predator was central. What they believe about how Atef died, however, cannot be considered proven fact, for as one explained, “We didn’t control the site, we didn’t recover the body or anything. It’s been confirmed by the process of elimination.”
As with the escape of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the recollections of participants or others who witnessed via Predator video the action believed to have eliminated Al Qaeda’s chief planner of terrorist and military operations disagree on some points. Taken together and carefully weighed, though, they shed new light on what at the time was the most important blow U.S. forces had ever dealt Al Qaeda’s leadership, and still ranks as perhaps the second most important, behind only the killing of bin Laden himself. The Predator made it possible—the Predator and a trip to RadioShack.
* * *
By Monday, November 12, 2001, there were two ground control stations in the glade on the CIA campus and, as Director George Tenet had promised President Bush, the Wildfire team was flying two Predators at a time. That afternoon, Washington time, Major Darran Jergensen was in the Trailer Park’s original GCS, commanding Predator 3037; sitting in the pilot’s seat was Ghengis, the former fighter pilot. It was nine and a half hours later in Afghanistan and already dark when the drone’s infrared camera began following three vehicles heading toward Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. CIA paramilitaries on the ground had passed Langley a tip that the little convoy was carrying high-value targets, possibly one or more senior Al Qaeda figures.
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