by Scott Shane
Awlaki had been happy in San Diego, but success was feeding his ambitions. He had forged his own preaching career, in the face of his father’s skepticism, in Fort Collins and Denver. He had proven in San Diego that he could successfully run his own mosque. He was launching an audio publishing venture to reach a larger audience. And though he was not yet thirty, Dar Al-Hijrah was one of the nation’s biggest mosques, and its location in the Virginia suburbs of Washington would give Awlaki a chance to perform on a more prominent stage. The 2000 presidential campaign was well under way, and Anwar told his father that he supported George W. Bush, the Republican nominee, whose conservative social views matched his own. He even mused excitedly about the possibility that his new job as imam might win him an invitation to the White House. He agreed to start at Dar Al-Hijrah in January 2001 and left the San Diego job in June for an extended visit to Yemen.
4
AN EXQUISITE WEAPON
Estimating a man’s height on the basis of video footage shot from fifteen thousand feet was not so easy. And the lanky, bearded Saudi’s appearance was not yet, in early September of 2000, nearly so iconic as it would become a year later. But this guy in the grainy images beamed back from the Predator flying over Afghanistan to Langley, Virginia, was clearly very tall. And the dance of deference—he moved like a shark with a bodyguard of pilot fish, aides approaching to consult him and then scurrying away—marked him as the leader. It was Osama bin Laden, the CIA analysts were sure.
This was videotape shot two weeks earlier and now being reviewed and shared with bosses, part of a rushed project called Afghan Eyes. The goal was to test the notion that the cameras on the Predator, a UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle, reminiscent of a gangly intelligent insect, might be good enough to allow operators to identify the terrorist. But say the Predator had found Bin Laden—what then? Sure, the video analysts could alert the Pentagon of a Bin Laden sighting, and a volley of cruise missiles could be loosed from a ship or submarine toward Tarnak Farms, Al Qaeda’s training camp near Kandahar. But it would take four to six hours for the missiles to reach their target. Where would Osama bin Laden be in six hours? They had no idea. An attack would kill whatever luckless souls had wandered into the target area; if things went really wrong, the missiles would miss Bin Laden and his deputies and kill a bunch of women and children.
So what are we going to do, the analysts muttered, just watch him? This was the guy who in 1996 had declared war on America and whose acolytes in 1998 had blown up the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, operations of staggering crudity that killed far more Africans than Americans. He had vowed to reach “the far enemy,” America, and his rhetoric was drawing a motley mix of followers from all over the world.
In September 2000, as the CIA wrestled with what to do about Bin Laden, Anwar al-Awlaki was visiting his family in Yemen, was applying for a doctoral program, and would soon be preparing for his new job at the Virginia mosque a short drive from CIA headquarters. Barack Obama was an Illinois state senator who, soundly beaten in his race for Congress the previous year, was wondering whether his political career had reached its ignominious end. Terrorism barely ranked on the issues that concerned Americans; in April, 75 percent of those polled told Gallup they were “not too worried” or “not worried at all” about becoming a victim of terror. Just 4 percent were “very worried,” the lowest proportion on record.
But at the CIA, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council, a few officials had become preoccupied with Bin Laden and his grandiose threats. Sometimes to the perplexity of their colleagues, they spent every day worrying about what might be coming. Just days after the Gallup survey, on April 25, 2000, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism adviser, had sent a memo to the Counterterrorism Security Group, an interagency committee that advised President Clinton, then in his final year in office. Clarke proposed that the CIA fly Predators over Afghanistan to look for Bin Laden. The committee gave its consent. The advent of the drone as a counterterrorism tool was under way.
Now, five months later, at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, the Afghan Eyes analysts were polishing their ability to scan hours of video and spot what mattered. They saw the man they believed to be Bin Laden a second time in late September. They kept watching, burning with frustration, and their imaginations inevitably ran to a technological revenge fantasy: What if the Predator toted a missile along with its camera? What if the instant they got confirmation of the tall guy’s identity they could fire at the push of a button? What if, some morning between a boring early staff meeting and a desultory lunch, they could kill Bin Laden, spend the afternoon writing it up, and still get home for dinner with the kids?
The drone revolution in counterterrorism began in moments like those. That fall and winter, in secret tests at China Lake in California and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, Air Force teams showed that it was possible to load a one-hundred-pound Hellfire missile under each of the Predator’s twenty-five-foot wings and fire them without burning up the aircraft or sending it into a tailspin. At a meeting in a sixth-floor conference room at CIA headquarters in the spring of 2001, senior agency and military officials debated whether it was time to launch some armed Predators over Afghanistan and try to take a shot at Bin Laden. The strongest advocate was Charlie Allen, a blunt-spoken CIA veteran, then the agency’s assistant director for intelligence collection, who had pushed the Predator program hard along with a few other officials, including Vice Admiral Scott Fry, director for operations at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and especially Richard Clarke, who had stayed on in the Bush White House as counterterrorism adviser.
“We need to begin now to use the lethal capabilities of this system,” Allen recalled telling the group. Colleagues say he stood and pounded the table in fury as the counterarguments came back at him: The armed Predator was too new, too experimental, to use in so important an operation. Sure, the tall man on the video resembled Bin Laden, but how could they be sure whom they were shooting at? Some CIA leaders worried about the cost that the agency, without the Pentagon’s endless bankroll, might have to bear. Some Air Force generals found it hard to be enthusiastic about airplanes without pilots.
Allen persisted. “We’re going to regret this if we don’t strike as soon as we can,” he recalled telling the group. “My view was: Decapitate the leadership. If you don’t get Bin Laden, and you get his lieutenants, you’re starting to lessen his capabilities.” The skeptics offered more reasons for caution: In some tests, the Hellfire missiles had punched through buildings and buried themselves in the ground, detonating too late. The control system to link operators stateside with the Predators over Afghanistan was an unproven, jury-rigged design involving signals bounced off a communications satellite over Southeast Asia. The meeting ended without a decision to strike. Nor did a countermanding order come from the White House, since Clarke was having trouble persuading the new George W. Bush team to take up the Predator issue—or even to talk seriously about the terrorist threat. He had called for an urgent meeting to discuss the Al Qaeda threat in the first days of the Bush presidency, on January 25, 2001. He finally got his meeting on September 4, 2001.
“I lost that fight,” Charlie Allen said in an interview years later. He didn’t like pondering “hypotheticals,” he said, but he couldn’t help himself. “Bin Laden in September 2000 had his entire leadership there,” Allen said, “and his guards were totally unaware that the UAV was watching.” What if the consensus in early 2001 had gone the other way, and the novice drone operators had gotten lucky and hit Bin Laden or wiped out his deputies? “History would have been very different, sir,” Allen told me. “It would have been tremendously different. The intellectual candlepower, and the fire, and those fanatically obsessed with striking the United States would have been killed.”
After September 11, 2001, the objections to the armed Predators quickly dissolved. The first real-world Predator strike hit the camp of Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, on October 7, 2001, killing tw
o of his bodyguards. A new era in warfare had begun, with unpredictable consequences.
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The Predator would be the first drone to become famous—and infamous—generating newspaper editorials, protest marches, secret legal opinions, and outlandish artworks. What few Americans knew was that it was the descendant of generations of unmanned American aircraft, dating almost to the origins of aviation. Flying, after all, was inherently dangerous for human beings, who were poorly designed to sail through the air. Failure was lethal. If the idea was human transportation, there was no avoiding the danger. But if a flying robot might somehow be controlled from the ground and dispatched on a mission to pose as an enemy plane for target practice, or to take aerial photographs, or eavesdrop, or blow up a strategic target, why not try it?
By 1918, the US Army was experimenting with the Kettering Bug, a pilotless biplane with gyroscope guidance that could carry 180 pounds of explosives for about forty miles before dive-bombing into a target. The Bug was never used in combat, but by World War II, in Operation Aphrodite, daring pilots were assigned to steer bomb-laden “robot” aircraft toward Nazi Germany before bailing out short of the target and turning control over to radio operators on the ground. A young lieutenant named Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., elder brother of the future president, was one of two pilots killed on the first Aphrodite mission when the aircraft’s ten tons of munitions exploded prematurely over Suffolk, England. This line of development, in which the unmanned craft itself became the weapon, would eventually lead to the cruise missile.
Meanwhile, Radioplane, a company founded by Reginald Denny, a British boxing champion, opera singer, actor, and aviation enthusiast, pioneered a different kind of drone, one capable of surviving for reuse. During World War II, the army bought thousands of Radioplane aircraft, eight-foot-long, radio-controlled wooden models, mainly for use in aerial target practice or to draw enemy fire and expose antiaircraft installations. Among Radioplane’s assembly-line employees was eighteen-year-old Norma Jeane Dougherty, who posed smiling and holding a wooden propeller for a US Army public relations program run by a young army captain. Dougherty would soon become better known under her assumed name, Marilyn Monroe; the captain, Ronald Reagan, would also pursue a Hollywood career before turning to other work.
The value of surveillance UAVs was underscored in 1960, when the piloted Lockheed U-2 was shot down first over the Soviet Union, with the arrest and interrogation of the surviving pilot, Francis Gary Powers. Two years later another U-2 was downed over Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis, killing the pilot, Rudolf Anderson. Partly as a result, unmanned spy planes really came into their own with the war in Vietnam, where the United States sent unmanned surveillance aircraft on more than three thousand missions. Among the most prominent craft were the Ryan Aeronautical Company’s models, which were given distinctly nonthreatening nicknames: the Lightning Bug and the Firefly. Usually launched at a high altitude from a piloted aircraft, they carried cameras and sometimes electronic intercept equipment and could be retrieved in midair using a helicopter.
But military planners long pondered the possibility of a reusable drone that could drop bombs or fire missiles. In a project code-named Have Lemon, the Air Force Flight Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California attached a Maverick missile to a Ryan model called BGM-34A and conducted the first live test on December 14, 1971. A weight to balance the missile was hung on the drone’s opposite wing and dropped at the moment the missile was released, to keep the aircraft stable.
By 1981, the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems was a decade old and had the money and clout to draw as keynote speaker the famous Hungarian-born physicist known as the father of the hydrogen bomb, Edward Teller. At a press conference, the seventy-three-year-old Teller declared that “the unmanned vehicle today is a technology akin to the importance of radars and computers in 1935.” That sounded like hyperbole at the time—perhaps Teller was being gracious to his hosts—but his detailed remarks look prescient in retrospect. (Less prescient was his claim, a decade before the Soviet collapse, that “the Soviet Union is ahead in practically every military field” and that “we need to catch up.”) Teller said that in addition to being small, cheap, and expendable, “unmanned vehicles become really useful when they are intelligent”; they could carry “every extra sensory organ that you can dream of”; they could “be used for reconnaissance, for attack or for defense—for anything you please.” He insightfully predicted their value in agriculture, fire fighting, and crime fighting. Even Teller’s diagnosis of the major cause of the Air Force’s dilatory and reluctant approach to drones both before and after 1981 was right on target. “The Air Force is built around fliers—and unmanned vehicles put fliers out of business. And that is a serious problem,” he said.
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Twenty years later, the irresistible force of 9/11 changed all that. Soon, former Top Gun fighter pilots were retraining for what they wryly called the Chair Force, mastering robotic aircraft by remote control. In Afghanistan and Iraq, both the Predator and its bigger, newer cousin, the Reaper, would become an indispensable part of the American combat arsenal. The CIA, recognizing a growth area, began to bulk up what would eventually become, in the tribal area of Pakistan, the biggest paramilitary program in its history. Within a decade, the Air Force would be training more drone pilots than fighter pilots and bomber pilots combined.
A cranky debate about what to call this new class of armed aircraft would go on for years. The Air Force had long called them UAVs, but some objected that this latest generation of aircraft were by no means “unmanned.” In fact, each Predator had a team of more than one hundred people behind it: not just a pair of hands-on operators but intelligence officers to guide its movements, video analysts to assess what it saw, ground mechanics to maintain its engine and other gear, another team to load its weapons and launch it, and a string of satellite communications technicians to make sure the complex controls and video download worked right. Most of these jobs were worked in shifts around the clock, pushing the total manpower much higher. If they were not “unmanned,” could they be drones? Many official military documents had called them “drones” for decades, but historically that name had been technically reserved for only those vehicles used to fill in for enemy aircraft in target practice.
So the Air Force came to prefer the term RPA, for “remotely piloted aircraft,” or RPV, for “remotely piloted vehicle,” and government officials at all levels tried to steel themselves to stick to that technically correct language. But as the media and the broad public became aware of these strange flying machines, and especially as their possibilities beyond surveillance and killing drew attention, a simple, one-word moniker was vastly more attractive than a military abbreviation or a tongue-tangling phrase. For most people, a drone would be a drone, no matter what anybody in authority said.
Though the first Predator strikes in Afghanistan in late 2001 had been controlled from a parking lot outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the Air Force pilots flying the growing fleet of armed drones were soon relocated to a desolate area of Nevada. Creech Air Force Base, as many military veterans noted, oddly resembled some of the landscapes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Yemen that the drones surveyed. “If you could have cut out a hunk of Iraq’s terrain around Baghdad and matched it to anywhere in the United States, that would have been in Nevada,” one Predator pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Matt Martin, wrote about his move there. “Various shades of desert brown crumpled by the fist of a giant stretched to the horizon, broken only by green waterways. Creech was in the middle of nowhere.” An hour’s drive from Las Vegas, near the tiny hamlet of Indian Springs, the base had been built in a hurry after Pearl Harbor but for decades had been a backwater called Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field. But it came back to life in the mid-1990s when the Air Force decided to operate the new surveillance Predators from a hodgepodge of trailers and low-rise buildings there. In 2005, in recognition of its growing impor
tance in the post-9/11 wars, it was given the name of an eminent retired general, Wilbur Creech, and that vaguely menacing motto: Home of the Hunters.
The Predator, made by the San Diego–based General Atomics, had a wingspan of fifty-five feet, nearly twice its length. It weighed, literally, half a ton, not counting the six hundred pounds of fuel. Its bulbous front, which gave it a feeling of barely containable brainpower, housed a satellite antenna. The underside of the nose held the cameras, whose multiple streams could be fused into a single video image beamed back to Creech or the CIA or the military’s Joint Special Operations Command. The propeller, in back, pushed it along at a cruising speed of just eighty miles an hour, pokey by airplane standards. Its strangest feature was the tail, which angled sharply downward on both sides, as if some vandal had climbed up and stood on the flanges until they bent. The drones cost up to $4 million apiece—not big money at the Pentagon, but the total fleet cost, with ground control stations and satellite networks, would eventually run into the billions. With a standard cruising altitude of fifteen thousand feet, three miles up, they were often out of sight and inaudible, but when they were in range and the wind was right the Predators made a jangling buzz that many compared to a lawnmower engine. The sound, and the occasional silver glint of sunlight off the fuselage, heralded a strange, new threat for those living below, whether they were Al Qaeda commanders or children herding goats.
At Creech, each Predator in the country’s growing fleet had a core team of two: the pilot, who used his joystick to fly the plane, and the sensor operator, or SO, who ran the increasingly complex array of gear it carried. There was an optical video camera to view the landscape; an infrared camera that could penetrate light cloud cover and distinguish warm objects such as vehicle engines and human beings; synthetic aperture radar, able to provide high-resolution images of large landscapes, effective even in bad weather; a laser designator that could “sparkle” a vehicle or building, as the operators called it, allowing a missile to follow the laser trail to the target; and, sometimes, sophisticated eavesdropping equipment to pick up cellular calls, walkie-talkie traffic, and other electronic signals. They worked night shifts, when it was daylight in Al Qaeda territory. They sat in the dark before a bewildering array of screens, with distant landscapes unrolling before them. They learned to zoom in on a suspicious compound, circling and circling the aircraft while trying to make sense of the people and vehicles coming and going. It was called “pattern of life,” and it was what you studied for hours, sometimes, before you decided you were watching a legitimate target, got clearance for a kill, took aim, and fired the missiles, hoping for the best.