This is the world of the NSA that we have become so familiar with since Edward Snowden sprang onto the scene. But NSA is also like a character in a favorite television drama: there is a real person behind the character, and the character is also only playing a role, even if he or she perfectly inhabits that role. In the real world of NSA, even going back fifty years or more, history is silent on what the eavesdroppers were specifically listening to at any one time. There are incidents such as the USS Liberty or USS Pueblo or Flight 007 that are dissected (and butchered), but by and large, the most historians learn is that “a signal” or an intercept, or a decryption, provided some breakthrough.
Abdel Bari Atwan, in his Secret History of al Qaeda, claims that Mohammed Atef telephoned the newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi before he was killed,14 but whether that is true or not, what seems clear is that on that day, at that moment, the center of Kabul was a pretty quiet place electronically, and the use of any satellite telephone would have been picked up by the American ear. One air force officer who was in the command center on November 13 said, “We sat there with report after report after report of thousands of vehicles leaving Kabul” on the southwestern road leading east, but airstrikes were restricted because of concerns that “civilians might be mixed in” with the possibly escaping al Qaeda and Taliban.15 So though every possible eye was mobilized, ears proved the most revealing of a potential target in this chaotic environment, providing that “second source” or positive ID that is needed for any sensitive attack. Thus the activation of any signal, including an Al Jazeera signal, might have been, in this final night of Kabul bombing, enough of a tip-off to “flex” to the target, as they say. Especially if it is true that the United States didn’t know that Al Jazeera was at that specific structure, at that moment. Or if the United States knew, but also knew that al Qaeda was borrowing (or commandeering) Al Jazeera satellite circuits to communicate.
Admittedly, that’s a lot of ifs.
Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who was involved in postwar exploitation of al Qaeda material, says definitively that Atef was killed in an airstrike in Kabul on November 13, 2001, unable to evacuate from the city because of his chronic back problems.16 Peter Bergen, bestselling terrorist expert, also says that Atef stayed behind in Kabul because of a back problem, and that a prominent Pakistani surgeon, Dr. Amer Aziz, was summoned to Kabul “in early November 2001” to treat him.17 The 9/11 Commission lets slip in a footnote that various al Qaeda materials were “found in the rubble of Atef’s house near [sic] Kabul following a November 2001 airstrike, together with a martyrdom video of [Ramzi] Binalshibh,” one of the 9/11 key planners.18 Another official source refers to the success of immediate follow-on counterterrorism operations in Malaysia and Singapore based upon the exploitation of material taken from Atef’s house.19 I know that his death was confirmed on the ground and that the house was exploited, and I know from my own sources that it was the exact house I later visited.
The role Predator played that night is exquisitely dissected by Richard Whittle in his Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution. The air force–flown CIA Predator over Kabul that day and night, equipped literally with a Radio Shack black box receiver, picked up radio signals from an evident al Qaeda convoy and tracked it to Wazir Akbar Khan Street, the targets labeled AOM 592 and 597. Air force F-15Es flying in the vicinity were called to attack the target, Whittle writes, based upon his sources, and bombed it twice, contradicting what the paper trail said; but the F-15 mission was later also lauded in a semiofficial air force history, “the longest fighter combat mission in history.”20 The important point, though, is that the Predator didn’t fire on Atef’s house, instead going on to shoot a single Hellfire at another house—AOM 666?—that a group of people escaped to from Atef’s house, watching them as they ran through the streets of Kabul.21
For reasons that probably have mainly to do with the desire for some charmed epic, the legend would become that Predator killed Atef. The New York Times first reported it based on whichever administration or intelligence official heard the rumors and passed on the magic. Even former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dick Myers later says in his autobiography that Atef “had been killed in a CIA Predator strike that had targeted his Kabul home with a Hellfire missile.”22 And Peter Bergen goes even further, saying that Atef’s “death, though initially reported to have come in a U.S. air strike, was later confirmed to have been the result of a drone strike.”23 But manned airstrike it was; of that there’s no doubt.
Though the Afghanistan war fully opened the door for our current drone wars, the lesson of the killing of Atef is once again that it is the target and not the means of attack that is the remarkable part of contemporary warfare. My air force analyst friends and I later marveled at how many unknowns persisted, the how and the why of the Predator rumor, and we speculated over beers whether the “information ops” types at the CIA or some other black box channel didn’t secretly borrow the navy F-18s that night to intentionally bomb the news media, though when asked, a high-level intelligence source countered that it was perfectly justifiable to bomb and cut off one of the last communications paths that might be used to transmit al Qaeda’s latest orders—a justification that might hold up in the court of law and public opinion, the mere bonus being that the bombing of a “command and control” target also served to silence a disagreeable Arab station.24
Though the lessons learned report I helped with was classified and never publicly released, the air force, like the other services, sponsored a variety of official and approved histories of the kind that tell varnished war stories, the ones that fawn over command brilliance and are filled with institutional heroics. One states unambiguously that Atef was killed in a manned strike, and not only that, but by an air force plane.25 Though I generally remain skeptical of the common assumption that the fighter pilot community that dominates the air force works against Predator and the unmanned, drones are second-class citizens, not just because they are not citizens at all but also because they inhabit unfamiliar space between sensor and shooter, a funny military way of describing two human attributes. For the air warriors, it isn’t just their love affair with manned flight that tends to make them opposed to unmanned killing—it is also the universal discomfort with a process of seeing a prospective target during a war without being able to kill it. And of course, there is the unsatisfying legend that comes from the world of the unmanned: that the network killed Atef; that it was fast computer work; that it was merely the physics of triangulating a telephone call; that it could all have been done by machines.
CHAPTER NINE
The Machine Builds
[Wild Cow] Ninsun was clever [and wise, well versed in everything,]
[the mother of] Gilgamesh.…
She smothered the censer and came [down from the roof,]
She summoned Enkidu…
TABLET III, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
The Afghanistan war in its first few weeks just about confounded everyone—after all, there was no industrial military opponent à la Serbia or Iraq, and there were no discernible targets. But the official public utterances were right on. “I want to remind you that while today’s operations are visible, many other operations may not be so visible,” General Myers said at the podium of the Pentagon press room on the first night.1 The next night on the CBS Evening News, Rumsfeld added: “We’re so conditioned as a people to think that a military campaign has to be cruise missiles and television images of airplanes dropping bombs, and that’s just false. This is a totally different war. We need a new vocabulary. We need to get rid of old think and start thinking about this thing the way it really is.”2
Yet despite attempts by Rumsfeld and Myers, the story of war continues to be all about bombs and bullets. In this version of war, friendly versus enemy hardware is stacked up on two sides of a ledger, with divisions of men mobilized and trained and prepared to move to some front line where they engage in battles that look largely unchanged from those tha
t took place thousands of years ago. Rumsfeld and company stressed all of the right points in arguing that this was not going to be our forefathers’ war. But even they could not anticipate how different this war would be, and how the Data Machine—and its vast collection of intelligence—would begin to take over, even as the public narrative of war stayed largely stuck in the industrial age (and on the ground).
This is the essence of the wars the United States now fights. Individual targets—fixed, mobile, and now even individual humans—are identified and validated and located and tracked from the ground or the sky; they are identified through imagery, electronic emissions, communications, or other intelligence. In this kind of war, the strikers are more abundant than good targeting information, and the data itself, like a camouflaged enemy, masks the intelligence. The magic is melding what satellites and high-flying aircraft can see and hear, fusing together audio and video, the visible and invisible electromagnetic spectrums, and then processing and moving all of the information literally around the globe in seconds to make decisions. The key is to have strikers on station above or in close for that moment in time.3
In a place as far away and isolated as Afghanistan, whether cruise missile strikes or manned bombing are involved or not, the data scouts—both human and machine—at the edge of the Machine are almost always there first. These are the intelligence collectors who map enemy air defenses, the spy planes that listen in on radio communications, the photographers who image military installations and enemy concentrations. In 2001, Predators were sent out to do reconnaissance. They first overflew Afghan airspace before anyone else did, with an air force–led crew operating the now-veteran drone from an improvised ground control station in a wooded area on the CIA’s grounds in Langley, Virginia.4 But at that point, the majority of the scouts (if you don’t count reconnaissance satellites) were almost completely manned. America’s “strategic” intelligence collectors, all manned, air force RC-135 and navy EP-3 signals intelligence planes and the high-flying U-2s, began patrols around the periphery of Afghanistan almost immediately after 9/11 to sniff out prospective targets; they would penetrate into Afghan airspace soon thereafter.5 Manned navy P-3C Orion airplanes, meanwhile, normally used for antisubmarine warfare and maritime surveillance (and also equipped with a full-motion video camera similar to the Predator’s), leapfrogged closer to the potential battlespace, where they would join the others overflying the Taliban from forward air bases in Pakistan.6 When the air force squadrons and the aircraft carriers arrived, EA-6B, ES-3, and specialized F-16 planes brought in electronic warfare capabilities and other black boxes. The Royal Air Force brought its own equivalents as well: Nimrod R1 electronic intelligence aircraft, the Canberra PR9 reconnaissance aircraft, and an E-3D AWACS flying radar. The French air force contributed the Mirage IV reconnaissance jet.7
“For the first time in the history of modern warfare,” Ben Lambeth wrote in his semiofficial history of the conflict, a war “was conducted under an overarching intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) umbrella that stared down relentlessly in search of enemy activity.”8 There was a lot of ISR, but “relentlessly” is pure hyperbole, and the initial small contribution of the unmanned goes by without remark. It was the amount of ISR overhead that would become a measure of success; it was the ability of each collecting platform or its black boxes to collect the right data to serve the needs of the specific weapons or the characteristics of the specific targets. And those needs were becoming more and more exacting. Bombing, the visible element of the conventional war model, initially unfolded with the attack on fixed targets associated with the Taliban and then moved to troops in the field. But the satellite-guided JDAM bombs—precise and economical—had taken on a meticulous singularity, each a product of a specific GPS coordinate rendered by some human. You want the bomb where? At that spot on the front lines? On that mortar position? So one bomb was delivered. But government officials were not impressed with one bomb—no matter how precise it was. They wanted more. In fact, the day after bombing commenced, the head of the CIA team inside northern Afghanistan wrote that the “disappointment with the Northern Alliance’s senior ranks to the first night’s bombing was palpable…. News from the NA commanders on the Kabul front reported no bombs falling on the Taliban or Arab positions.” Intercepted radio communications from Taliban positions on the front lines also “indicated a sense of relief among the Taliban forces at the low level and limited impact of the bombing.” 9 Four days later, the CIA station chief in Islamabad further sent a cable labeling the military effort in southern Afghanistan even worse and a “political disappointment.”10
The Northern Alliance probably would have been ecstatic if B-52s and “dumb bombs” had come in instead and carpet-bombed their archenemies into dust, as was the case through the end of the war in Vietnam. But regardless of the emotions of 9/11, something crucial had changed, and practices lacking in a precision result had become antithetical to the airpower creed. Despite all the anger unleashed by the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, despite a Bush administration that beat its breast, bellowing that it would break with the recent past of controlled bombing to introduce “shock and awe,” the same unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles dominated in the first few days, and air attacks remained as controlled as they had been at any time in the Clinton administration. The Bush White House—or at least someone with a political eye to the future—restricted attacks in urban areas and imposed collateral-damage and civilian-casualty restraints not much different than those used in the Balkans.11
Even General Tommy Franks called the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom the “ten days from Hell,”12 demonstrating that his lifelong artilleryman’s viewpoint was even more habituated to imagining blistering bombardment. Rumsfeld was putting constant pressure on Franks, particularly apoplectic that the CIA was getting all the credit because military special operations forces hadn’t yet arrived. It appeared that perhaps a frustrated nation and a wholly changed military would still reach back into the deep past of carpet-bombing to mete out a little more old-fashioned killing.13
For almost a week nothing changed in the design or pace of the war, but then on October 16, manned AC-130 gunships took part in the air campaign for the first time, attacking Taliban frontline positions.14 Gunships operated by the Air Force Special Operations Command would become the most lethal assets available to the CIA and special operations forces working with the Northern Alliance (and later with Karzai’s Pashtun fighters in the south) in the weeks ahead, supporting nearly every major offensive in strafing Taliban troops and pulverizing prepared defenses. With a legacy of nicknames like Puff the Magic Dragon, Angel of Death, Ultimate End, and Equalizer, the gunships delivered old-fashioned bloody vengeance. Each plane was armed with a side-mounted 25mm Gatling gun capable of firing 1,800 rounds a minute, a 40mm cannon—think machine gun firing small artillery shells—and a 105mm howitzer that fired 33-pound shells. These were said to be so accurate and fast that a single airplane could put one round in every square foot of a football field in seven seconds. If anyone argued that bombardment of that sort wasn’t precision, the airpower advocates would counter that these were “special” operations. They hardly had to argue; the missions were secret.
Doctrine was for the gunships to fly a racetrack pattern above the battlefield, but the lumbering aerial battleships, flying slowly and at low altitude (and with a crew of fourteen) were consequently also vulnerable to missiles and gunfire from the ground (one was shot down over Kuwait during Desert Storm). So despite the passions of 9/11, the vulnerability of these manned aircraft restricted their operations. Crews were also having a problem in sparsely populated and mountainous Afghanistan: the sound of their presence traveled great distances at night, when the AC-130s flew for greater protection and safety. During orbits to line up their targets, the crews would often watch enemy fighters scatter in their infrared scopes.15 To give the gunships a leg up in defending themselves and in preparing immediate fir
e, the technologists furiously worked to bring a live feed from a Predator already overflying Taliban defenses that would then prep the planes while they were as far as 100 miles away. The addition of the black box in November had an immediate payoff. Now, rather than the aircraft gunners looking through their own television viewing system and infrared detection sensors to find targets, or making contact with a ground spotter who would literally have to talk the aircraft gunner onto a desired target, those in the plane had their own unmanned scout and could see exactly what the drone saw, arriving ready and blasting away.16
It wasn’t until October 16, the same day AC-130s began flying, that military special operations forces staged in Uzbekistan were also finally given the go-ahead to insert into the Panjshir Valley as well.17 Then on October 19, in the first action by US ground forces, special operators flew in four specially configured MH-47 helicopters from the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk in the Indian Ocean, overflying Pakistan to penetrate deep into Taliban country. Officially it was a mission to “disrupt Taliban leadership and AQ [al Qaeda] communications, gather intelligence and detain select personnel.” AC-130 gunships and heavily armed MH-60 Blackhawk helicopters peppered the objectives with artillery and missiles moments before the assault.
Really, it was a demonstration, an isolated operation to put boots on the ground, one intended to send a signal both to the enemy and to the American people. For General Franks and the other ground force leaders in the US military, and for the Bush administration, the departure from cruise missile strikes and airstrikes represented the important break with the recent past. So on October 19, when the parachutes opened and the helicopters roared, old-fashioned images of real war were finally registered. The assault was directed at two objectives—one Gecko (Mullah Omar’s house west of Kandahar) and the other Rhino, an unused airfield in southern Afghanistan. The special operators spent a total of an hour on the ground at Gecko, some collecting whatever was left to collect, but most just manning security positions to protect everyone until the show was over.18
Unmanned: Drones, Data, and the Illusion of Perfect Warfare Page 11