Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (11 page)

As we have seen in the examples of Task Force Alpha, the Gulf War, and Kosovo, the U.S. military believes very strongly indeed in material, the more complex and technically ambitious the better. Thus Boyd’s ideas as well as his emphasis on personal integrity were most certainly not in harmony with the prevailing ideology. Nevertheless, since he applied those ideas with great skill, not to say rigor (once causing a general literally to faint with rage in the course of a telephone discussion), in bureaucratic combat inside the Pentagon, he achieved considerable success in chosen objectives.

Though highly unpopular in the commanding heights of the defense establishment, Boyd’s ideas had attracted a growing following in the military, especially among junior officers, as well as in the press and in Congress, giving rise in the late 1970s to what became known as the “military reform movement.” This alliance mounted serial campaigns against costly weapons programs of dubious utility, and the customs and practices of the weapons-buying culture that produced and nurtured them, exposing which involved revelations from whistle-blowers prepared, in many cases, to risk or sacrifice their careers for the greater good. For the most part these efforts were eventually defeated by entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex, but the movement, which for a time enjoyed potent support in Congress, did succeed in creating the post of Director, Office of Operational Test and Evaluation, mandated by law to test new weapons systems as a corrective to the services’ sorry record of buying systems that worked badly or not at all when deployed. As noted, the office was not popular with the military or with defense contractors, mainly because it regularly disproved claims by contractors and their service sponsors regarding the efficacy of lavishly funded systems.

Even as the smoke of the Balkan battlefields cleared and the Pentagon echoed with claims regarding the success of Predator, a gravel-voiced Floridian mathematician named Tom Christie was taking over as director of the testing office. Christie was a friend and longtime associate of Boyd’s, having worked closely with him in the 1960s formulating a theory of air-combat tactics that many years later became official air force doctrine. Analyzing weapons effects at the Air Force Armaments Center at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Christie had a front row seat as colleagues worked to implement the high command’s obsessive determination to destroy the Thanh Hoa Bridge in North Vietnam. “They even wanted to turn a B-47 (a strategic nuclear bomber) into a drone,” he told me. “They’d load it up with high explosives and fly it into the bridge. That never got anywhere, just like all the other crazy schemes they had.”

Technically able and skilled in bureaucratic maneuver, Christie managed to advance through the ranks of air force and defense department officialdom. By 1995 he had become director of the Operational Evaluation Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the Pentagon’s semi-independent think tank. In this capacity he reviewed an air force report on the sterling qualities of the performance of the JSTARS surveillance plane in the Balkans. As an example, the report cited an operation in which the system had detected the movement of a Serb armored unit while it attempted to hide in a cemetery. “We had built this beautiful topographical map of that whole area,” Christie told me, “and we knew exactly where the JSTARS had been at any particular time. So we were able to show that at the time they said they had spotted the Serbs in the cemetery, they were on the other side of a fairly substantial mountain. Even the air force couldn’t claim the thing could see through a mountain.”

When Christie took over the testing office, the very first system that came up for review was the Predator. So, in the mountains and desert that make up the vast Nellis Air Force Base complex in Nevada, Christie’s team put the machine through its paces.

The tests, carried out over nine days, mostly in a corner of the Indian Springs drone airfield, which had been activated five years earlier to preempt the army, did not go well. In fact, they were a disaster. One of the weaknesses revealed by earlier tryouts in the Balkans had been the aircraft’s vulnerability to ice on its wings, a fatal condition. In response, the technicians at Big Safari had developed a “wet wing” that could theoretically de-ice the wings in flight, and two of the four machines consigned to the tests were so equipped. But they didn’t work, a failure, as the testers later reported, that prevented “transition through clouds.” In fact the plane could not land or take off in any kind of bad weather, “including any visible moisture such as rain, snow, ice, frost, or fog.”

Assuming it did manage to take off and reach enemy territory, the plane had a variety of cameras for viewing the ground and detecting targets. One of these, a “day TV continuous zoom,” looked at a 300-yard-wide area of territory in daylight from 15,000 feet. A second, the “day TV spotter,” could see in greater detail, but only over a narrower area of 50 yards. An infrared (IR) camera enabled night vision, while a synthetic aperture radar made it possible to see through clouds. To grade the cameras, the testing team relied on the National Imagery Interpretation Rating Scale, which runs from 1, the ability to pick out a large aircraft, such as a Boeing 737, to 9, the ability to recognize a human face. Though the Predator cameras were supposed to score 6, “recognize supply dumps, identify vehicles” at a range of 6 miles, the day TV scored no better than 2.7.

Overall, Predator could find less than a third of its targets. As the testers put it, “[W]hen all targets are considered, only 29 percent of the targets tasked for the 7 days [of testing] were imaged.” The “day TV” camera that scanned the landscape could never deliver a picture sharp enough to enable a viewer to tell the difference between a tank and a truck. The infrared camera could manage that feat a fifth of the time. The close-up day TV spotter could tell the difference between a friendly and enemy tank just over two-thirds of the time, but since it captured only a small patch of territory—again, like looking through a soda straw—it was impossible to tell where the tanks were. The infrared camera could detect, as the testers reported, “something versus nothing,” but could discern what that “something” was, if a tank or a truck, only 21 percent of the time. Much of the time the aircraft failed to reach the target area, because of bad weather, engine problems (exactly half of the test flights flown under combat conditions never completed the mission), or some other breakdown. One or another component vital to continuing the missions failed on average every 19.5 hours, while some other major system failed every 3 hours.

It made no difference. The drone could relay pictures, in color, of the enemy landscape. In Vietnam, troops fighting on the ground had been supervised by ascending tiers of senior officers hovering high above the battlefield in their personal helicopters, trying to “fight vicariously through that frightened twenty-five-year-old down there beneath the tree canopy,” as one veteran later wrote. There were even stories of entire units hiding from micromanaging heli-borne commanders in the sky above. But now, when the weather was fine, four-star generals could take the role of junior squad leaders without having to leave the office and even help destroy targets themselves.

“The air force had had this idea that the [Predator] could be used for detecting patterns on the battlefield,” an air force officer intimately involved with the program told me later. “It would send back the FMV [full motion video] from a wide area, and that would be compared with previous video so they could find changes—new units moving in or whatever. But the quality of the video was lousy, as those tests out at Nellis showed.”

The testing team had been kept in ignorance of one aspect of the Predator program that was to prove all-important. While they monitored its progress, or lack of it, in the bleak Nevada fall weather, another team had been secretly working to “weaponize” the machine: to arm it with a missile so that it could kill people. The scheme, initially ordered by Jumper in June, had gained urgency following a series of Predator flights flown from a base in Uzbekistan on behalf of the CIA over eastern and southern Afghanistan in September and early October 2000. They had one objective: to find Osama bin Laden, who was a high-value target. An address receiving special scrutiny was a cluster of compounds east of Kandahar known as Tarnak Farms, thought to be frequented by the infamous terrorist leader. Sure enough, on one particular day a Predator beamed back tantalizing images of a figure in white, surrounded by others in dark clothes, moving down a street in the compound.

Those few seconds of footage had momentous consequences. Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, officials eagerly interpreted the pictures as showing the six-foot-five-inch Bin Laden himself—the white-clad figure seemed taller than the others—walking to the mosque, surrounded by deferential bodyguards. Just as the muddy pictures from Kosovo had kept General Clark glued to his monitor, so the Tarnak video had a potent effect across Washington. CIA Director George Tenet, who had shown little interest in the drone program heretofore, was suddenly a convert, screening the video for President Clinton and his National Security Adviser Sandy Berger at the White House, declaiming enthusiastically about the drone’s capabilities to the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill.

Yet, the closer one looks at those pictures, the less they reveal. The “tall man in white” is actually just a moving white dot surrounded by black dots. It takes imagination to read the black dots as “deferential” toward the white dot and more imagination to define them as bodyguards, since no weapons are visible. Blown up, the images do not reveal more information, but less. The white dot does not turn into a tall man with a beard but merely a fuzzy blur that becomes more indistinct the more it is magnified. Just as the Predator crew in the first chapter of this book interpreted a carload of praying Afghans as Taliban preparing an attack, so eager Washington policy makers saw what they wanted to see and proceeded accordingly. Had the drone only carried a missile, they surmised, the mastermind of the lethal attacks on the U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS
Cole
off the coast of Yemen could have been eliminated in a single stroke. The pressure to arm the Predator was overwhelming.

Ultimately it turned out to be surprisingly easy, the weapon of choice being a Hellfire missile originally developed by the army for use against tanks. The work went quickly: the first successful test firing of a Predator-launched Hellfire took place the following January. A few months later the air force had also devised the satellite-plus-fiber-optic cable system that transmitted the video feed, allowing a pilot sitting in Nevada to fly and shoot from a Predator thousands of miles away.

“They did it fast,” the air force officer closely involved with the program told me, “and that was a pity. It meant that no one stepped back and thought about what it meant to be able to kill someone from thousands of miles away.” Such pertinent reflections were not widespread in the air force, not to mention the government at large. As George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, “The leadership of CIA reasoned that if we could develop the capability to reliably hit a target with a Hellfire missile and could develop the enabling policy and legal framework, we would have a capability to accurately and promptly respond to future sightings of high value targets.”

It is not surprising, therefore, that when Tom Christie presented his team’s final report on the Predator tests, Report on the Predator Medium Altitude Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), on October 3, 2001, it did not go down very well. It was only three weeks since the 9/11 attacks. With the airwaves full of bloodthirsty threats and promises of revenge, demand for a weapon that promised to deliver what Tenet wanted was unstoppable.

The cover letter of Christie’s report, sent to the secretary of defense and the heads of all relevant congressional committees, including Jerry Lewis’, stated straightforwardly that “the Predator UAV is not operationally effective. This conclusion is based on poor performance in target location accuracy, ineffective communications, and limits imposed by relatively benign weather.” The following sixty-four pages spelled out just how and why the machine was so deficient.

The reaction did not appear until the following morning, but when it did, it arrived with force in the form of Darleen Druyun, the principal deputy undersecretary of the air force, known around the Pentagon as “the dragon lady.” Three years later she would be sentenced to a nine-month prison term for corrupt dealings with the Boeing Corporation, but on that October morning she was still immensely powerful and much feared for her commanding role in negotiating prices in multibillion-dollar contracts. The Pentagon building was still smoking from the devastating impact of American Airlines Flight 11 on 9/11 when Druyun marched into Christie’s third-floor office with, as Christie later related to me, “four or five sycophant generals trailing behind her.” Not known for diplomacy, she came straight to the point. “What the fuck is this?” she shouted at the testing office director. “What do you mean sending out this fucking report saying the Predator doesn’t work? Who is the fucking asshole that wrote this report? I’m going to ream him a new fucking asshole.”

“Hold on,” retorted Christie, unfazed by her foul language. “Have you found anything in this report that’s wrong?”

“Er, no,” admitted the official. “But couldn’t you at least take the bit about ‘not operationally suitable’ out of the cover letter? (All present were well aware that this was as far as most officials would ever read.) Christie gave no ground; the letter and report stood. But it didn’t matter; Washington was already entranced by the notion of killing people at a distance.

In December 2001, President Bush returned to the Citadel, where he had outlined his military program and the virtues of drones two years before. In his speech on this visit he hailed the new weapon and his own prescience: “Before the war, the Predator had skeptics, because it did not fit the old ways. Now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles.”