by Scott Shane
One intelligence veteran who had spent years high up in the chain of command offered to re-create for me the kind of exchanges he had with drone operators in advance of approving a strike.
How long have you had capture of the target?
Two hours.
Give me the history of the compound: When have you seen anyone other than a military-age male in that compound?
I’ll get back to you.
How’s the weather?
Weather’s fine.
How much fuel?
We got three more hours, but we got the next Predator on orbit.
Okay. Call me back in two hours.
So, two hours later:
See any women and children? Where are they?
They’re in the family quarters.
Can you see cooking fires over there?
We see no cooking fires.
Okay, give me a bug splat. [Which is a kill radius. It’s a blob that appears on the operator’s screen, giving the computer’s estimate of the strike zone in three colors—green being safe, red being dead, and yellow in between. It depends on the munition and the angle.] Which way do you want the Hellfires to come in?
It’s going to be easiest to do it from the northwest.
Okay, show me a bug splat from the northwest. Oh, shit, I don’t like that—you’ve got the energy coming in from the northwest, you’re hitting the guest quarters here and the energy’s still going to the family quarters over there. I don’t like that at all. Now show it from the southeast. You gotta come in this way, it hits the guest quarters here, all of the energy goes away from the family compound. What’s the PK, probability of kill, there? Oh, it’s pretty good. Okay, let’s do it from the southeast.
The patient prestrike analysis that drones permitted made believers out of many of the government officials who wanted a weapon that matched the terrorist enemy, whose numbers were small but who often found refuge in lawless territory or hid among civilians. Michael Hayden, who as CIA director had proposed the drastic increase in drone strikes in Pakistan to President Bush in 2008, told me that the armed drone was “an exquisite weapon when you want to be both effective and moral. It gives you a sense of proportionality. It gives you a sense of distinction—legitimate and not-legitimate targets. So for this kind of war, when the target is an individual or a small group of individuals, I just can’t think of any other way of doing it.”
Hayden’s view was representative of the upbeat accounts from high-level American officials of the drone’s capabilities. There was no question that the drone held huge promise of precision by comparison with the alternatives available to kill suspected terrorists: a bomber dropping heavy ordnance, a fighter jet firing missiles as it raced overhead, certainly an invading ground force. But tellingly, as a few drone pilots dared to break the silence and speak up about their own experiences, their accounts were less sanguine. Lieutenant Colonel Matt Martin, for instance, whose book Predator makes clear his support for the program in which he worked as a drone pilot, nonetheless candidly acknowledged the daunting responsibility of firing missiles and the significant chance that a drone operator could hit the wrong people. “If his hand twitched at the last instant, if he breathed wrong, the missile might go astray and take out the house full of people next door or the group of old men smoking and joking down the block,” he wrote. Martin recounted harrowing cases in which he saw innocent civilians killed.
Once, an old man appeared just after Martin had fired a missile, “tottering along” toward the target in Baghdad’s Sadr City; it was unclear whether he was killed or only injured by the blast. Another time, two boys on one bicycle—one ten or eleven years old, the other smaller and balanced on the handlebars—suddenly came into view as the missile shot toward the ground, riding toward a truck with insurgents milling around it. Martin described how in that instant he recalled having pedaled his little sister on his own bike in similar style as a boy in Indiana; he thought, too, of the old man whom he had hit inadvertently, an episode he said “had plagued me ever since.” Senior security officials often emphasized the technical advantages of drone strikes, including an ability to divert a missile after it had been fired in exactly such a situation. But in this case, diverting the missile from the boys on the bike would have endangered other nearby civilians, Martin wrote. “Mesmerized by approaching calamity, we could only stare in abject horror as the silent missile bore down on them out of the sky. It could not be diverted without the risk of even greater carnage.” The boys died, their “bent and broken” bodies visible in the rubble after the smoke cleared, Martin wrote in his admirably honest account.
The debate about war, and how it should be conducted, now expanded to the question of killing by remote control. Opponents of the drone program pictured Americans watching distant, alien people on a screen and using a joystick to fire a weapon at them—and inevitably thought of video games. “Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio-feed, there is a risk of developing a ‘PlayStation’ mentality to killing,” Philip Alston, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on extrajudicial execution, wrote later in a phrase that became a rallying cry for drone critics. The analogy was irresistible; the Air Force was actually looking for the skills of avid video gamers.
But those who had spent time at Creech knew that the psychological toll on drone pilots and sensor operators was, paradoxically, far greater than on those who flew traditional fighters and bombers. Matthew Atkins, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who after long experience believed in the value of drone strikes, wrote an essay in 2014 to refute those who considered killing from thousands of miles away “cold, clinical and impersonal.” In fact, he said, “Nothing could be farther from the truth.” Modern warfare had largely gotten away from the hand-to-hand combat of earlier epochs, and killing at a distance was the norm, whether from conventional air strikes, or artillery fire, or cruise missiles. In such circumstances, Atkins said, you rarely saw the enemy. But the team of drone operators not only saw the target, they lingered over it. “In order to deliver maximum pressure on an enemy network and minimize collateral damage, intelligence personnel spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours watching and studying potential targets,” Atkins wrote. “This method of killing takes a toll on our nation’s watchers and finders.” If the target had a family, the operators might watch him with his wife and children, eating dinner in a courtyard or hugging a daughter goodbye. “And when you recommend that target folder for approval, you do so with the explicit knowledge that you are recommending the death of not just an enemy of our nation, but a person. This creates an intense moral and psychological burden that intelligence personnel carry with them every day.”
The same point was made by drone pilots who, unlike Atkins, were deeply disenchanted with the campaign. Brandon Bryant, who had operated drones over Afghanistan, told the radio and television program Democracy Now that he had “watched this guy bleed out…and his right leg above the knee was severed in the strike. And he bled out through his femoral artery.” The image, he said, was “pixelated, but, I mean, you could see that it was a human being, and you could see that—what he was doing, and you could see the crater from the drone—from the missile, and you could see probably the body pieces that were around this guy.” His point in talking publicly about his experience, he said, was to show that drone operators “aren’t killer robots. They’re not like unfeeling people behind this whole thing.” He believed the government, with its obsessive secrecy about drone warfare, had done a poor job of “humanizing the people that do it. And everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke, that we are video-game warriors, that we’re Nintendo warriors. And that’s really not the case.” Security officials often hailed the fact that drones took on terrorism without putting Americans in harm’s way. That proved to be a gross oversimplification. The casualties were emotional and psychological, but
they were casualties all the same.
—
The very first experiment in the armed UAVs’ new capability for pinpoint killing outside a conventional war zone came in Yemen. That CIA Predator strike in the Arabian desert in November 2002 would capture in microcosm many of the issues that would become prominent over the next decade as the notion of killer drones gradually caught the public imagination.
The target was the head of Al Qaeda in Yemen, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harithi, also known as Abu Ali. In his mid-forties—an old man by jihadi standards—he had the kind of Al Qaeda résumé that merited the deepest respect from youthful recruits: he had received formal military training in the army of the United Arab Emirates as a young man; he had fought with Bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan; and he had been directed by Bin Laden to organize a training camp in Yemen. In 2002, with the CIA and other agencies consumed with the global hunt for Al Qaeda operatives, Harithi was high on their list. The National Security Agency had multiple phone numbers he had used in the past, and on November 3, 2002, a computer at the NSA’s headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland, sounded the alert. The satellite phone signal was located in the wasteland of Marib province in Yemen’s tribal territory. An analyst actually recognized Harithi’s voice, and an armed CIA Predator took off from Camp Lemonnier in the little nation of Djibouti in the Horn of Africa, crossed the Gulf of Aden, and headed inland. (Much later, Djibouti would ban armed drones for several years.)
In an odd coincidence, the American ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull, was on his way to Marib that very day for a visit to a regional hospital and discussions on development projects there. An Al Qaeda cell in Sanaa, alerted to the ambassador’s travel plans, took a shot at a helicopter as it took off, evidently believing it might be the ambassador’s. In fact, it belonged to Hunt Oil Company, and one Hunt worker was slightly injured by the gunfire. But as Hull and his entourage met tribal leaders in Marib and toured the hospital, the ambassador got word from the embassy: the Predator had spotted Harithi’s SUV as it sped along a desert road. One Hellfire missile had missed, but the second had destroyed the car, instantly killing Harithi and five other men. The Yemeni government, which had approved the American strike on the grounds that the US role not be disclosed, dispatched a helicopter to check the scene and confirm the deaths. Yemeni officials gave reporters a false cover story: Al Qaeda members had been killed, the officials said, when a bomb they were transporting accidentally detonated.
At CIA headquarters and at the White House, the operation looked like a stunning success, proving the reach of a formidable new technology to use against isolated terrorists. A veteran Al Qaeda leader and his posse had been eliminated; US and Yemeni counterterrorism officials had closely cooperated; the strike, on a desert road, had spared civilians. The promise of the Predator—clean, uncomplicated victories against a shadowy, scattered enemy—seemed fulfilled.
Then the complications began. First, there was the discovery that when things blow up and people are killed on the ground, secrecy is not plausible and cover stories quickly fall apart. The day after the strike, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported accurately, citing anonymous sources, that the strike was no lucky accident but a missile strike from a CIA Predator. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld hinted gleefully at a Pentagon news briefing that it might just be an American operation, saying of Harithi that “it would be a very good thing if he were out of business.” The next day the deputy defense secretary, Paul Wolfowitz, made it official, telling CNN that “it was a very successful tactical operation.” The secrecy that the Americans had promised had barely lasted forty-eight hours.
The Yemenis were furious. President Saleh made it clear that he would approve no more strikes, leading to a gap in American operations in Yemen that would last for seven years, during which Al Qaeda would build its strength in the country, especially after a major prison break in 2006. Though there was little popular outcry over the killing of Harithi, Yemeni officials had demanded secrecy because they correctly saw the possibility of a backlash. In a traditional, tribal Muslim society, American military action would inevitably breed resentment, they knew. The Yemeni reaction to that first strike underscored the impossibility of covering up American strikes and the fragility of the diplomacy necessary to sustain them.
Next, there was the legal and policy controversy, subdued at that point but unavoidable. That the American government was killing people outside a war zone raised obvious questions that many reporters tried to answer. A couple of days after the strike, I called Loch Johnson, who had served as a staffer on the Senate’s Church Committee when it investigated CIA assassination plots in the 1970s and was an intelligence historian at the University of Georgia. He used the “a” word that government officials were trying to avoid. “It’s a highly lethal machine the CIA is using to carry out assassinations,” Johnson told me. “If you’re going to accuse someone of being a terrorist, should you present some evidence? Should you arrest them and give them a trial? Is America going to send drones into any country we choose to kill people we think are terrorists?” His remarks anticipated the main issues in a much-needed debate, one that would be delayed for a decade by excessive secrecy. At the least, Johnson said, there should be congressional oversight and public discussion. “I think these questions merit much closer attention than they’ve received,” Johnson told me. Another expert, Larry Taulbee, a political scientist at Emory, called the strike legitimate, noting that “there’s a self-defense case to be made here” and saying that having to worry about lethal drone strikes could hinder Al Qaeda’s plotting. But Taulbee also warned of the possibility of a backlash, provoking retaliatory attacks or recruiting new, young militants for Al Qaeda.
The first drone strike outside a war zone had stirred up a hornet’s nest of legal, practical, and political issues. The United States was entering into a new kind of warfare, and the need for Congress to take up the matter in public hearings was already obvious. But the congressional debate on targeted killing would be delayed for more than a decade because Congress would be intimidated by classification rules imposed by intelligence officials and enforced by President Bush and, for a time, by President Obama. Those of us watching drone developments noticed an odd paradox: at national security conferences, when think-tank experts or journalists discussed the use of unmanned aircraft to kill terrorists, government officials and members of Congress would clam up. In other words, the people with real, inside knowledge of the pros and cons of drone strikes were the only ones not permitted to speak about them. The first substantive public hearings on drone strikes would take place only in 2013.
One final lesson from the Harithi strike was that despite the remarkable capabilities of the Predator to observe and record activities on the ground, the operators’ view was far from complete. The BDA, the Bomb Damage Assessment, was inevitably subject to inaccuracies and omissions. Contrary to the initial impressions of American drone operators, it would turn out that one Al Qaeda operative in Harithi’s car, Rauf Nassib, had survived and escaped. He would bedevil counterterrorism authorities for years to come. And American intelligence officials learned only after the strike that among those killed was an American citizen, Kamal Darwish. Darwish had joined Al Qaeda, and no one at the CIA shed tears over his demise. But the belated discovery added just a whiff of doubt to the celebration: Was it worrisome that the United States government had killed an American without knowing it or intending it?
The Harithi strike, a serious blow to Al Qaeda in Yemen and a demonstration of military and intelligence prowess, also showed more subtly the real limitations of the technology. In the years to come, the CIA and the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command would be killing people whose identities were uncertain, overlooking civilian deaths in poststrike assessments, stirring passions over sovereignty among foreign leaders, and fueling fury at the United States with uncertain consequences for long-term American security.
Still, there was no mis
taking the visceral appeal to counterterrorism officers of the destruction that the armed drone could hurl, literally, from the heavens. When the military first began buying the Hellfire missile in the 1970s, the name was lamely explained as shorthand for “Helicopter-Launched Fire and Forget Missile.” That was obviously only part of the story. Warriors liked the biblical resonance, which would be echoed in a later missile, the Brimstone, and in the larger armed drone called the Reaper. The shower of superheated metal fragments from the five-foot-long Hellfire when it detonated in a car or house left nothing alive. In a battle against religious fanatics who believed those who did not share their version of Islam were doomed to burn forever in hell, America was responding with her own version of hell on earth.
5
WE ARE THE BRIDGE
In the disorienting days after the 9/11 attacks, Ammar al-Awlaki, now a college student in New Mexico, e-mailed his older brother, Anwar, in Virginia, to hear the young imam’s thoughts on the momentous events and find out whether he might be appearing on American television to comment. An answer came back late on the night of Friday, September 14. Earlier that day Congress had passed a joint resolution “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the recent attacks launched against the United States,” a measure that would become the legal basis not just for more than a decade of war but for targeted killing with drones as well. Late that afternoon, President George W. Bush had stopped by the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center and grabbed a bullhorn. When a worker yelled, “We can’t hear you,” Bush replied, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” It was a time of boiling emotions, bewilderment vying with anger, tough talk masking deep fear.