Predator (23 page)

When he got back to Langley and drafted the report Clarke had requested, Allen included both the telescope and the Predator in his list of new options. He also started talking about those ideas informally with Cofer Black, the head of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. Black liked the idea, but his boss, James Pavitt, was the CIA's deputy director for operations, and, as Allen would soon learn, Pavitt, who outranked him, was adamantly opposed to both the telescope and the Predator. Planting the telescope was too risky, Pavitt argued, and flying a surveillance drone over Afghanistan wouldn't significantly improve their chances of doing anything about bin Laden if he were found. Pavitt also made it clear that he did not want money taken out of his budget to pay for such operations.

After getting Allen's report, Clarke called a meeting of the Counterterrorism Security Group, a committee composed of the head of each federal agency's counterterrorism or security office, to talk about the telescope and Predator schemes. When Black described Pavitt's objections, Clarke exploded. The CIA's beloved HUMINT had produced nothing for years, he scoffed. “I want to try something else.”

Black coolly replied, “I will take the message back.”

*   *   *

Charlie Allen was equally respected and resented at Langley for his aggressive impatience and a tendency to go around people to get his way. He was also renowned for calling 6:30 a.m. meetings, working in his office until 9:00 or later each evening, and spending several hours there every Saturday and most Sundays and holidays. It was surprising, then, that the CIA's deputy director, Air Force General John A. Gordon, found Allen at home when he telephoned him there on Memorial Day 2000. But the general wasn't calling to trade pleasantries. Gordon had planned to spend the holiday at a picnic on a wealthy friend's Baltimore estate. Instead, largely thanks to Allen, the deputy director was on his way to Langley—and he was boiling mad.

Since asking his old friend for a report on new ways to hunt bin Laden, Richard Clarke and Allen had had several back-channel conversations about the Al Qaeda leader and the Predator. On April 25, Clarke had sent a memo to members of the Counterterrorism Security Group titled “Afghan Eyes.” In it, he advocated having the CIA fly the Predator to search for bin Laden. Formally, the Agency had yet to respond. Told by Clarke that the CIA was dragging its feet, President Clinton's national security adviser, Sandy Berger, chose Memorial Day to send a message demanding to know the Agency's position on the issue.

When Gordon got Allen on the phone early that Monday morning, he wasted little time. “Get in here!” he shouted.

“Yes, sir,” Allen replied.

When the meeting in the director's seventh-floor conference room began, Cofer Black and others from the CTC were at the table. So was their boss, James Pavitt; like Gordon, Pavitt was clearly not happy to be there.

“What the hell is all this about?” Gordon asked Allen.

“Well, we want to change the situation in Afghanistan,” Allen said. Then he explained how a covert Predator operation might work. To fly and take care of the Predators they used, the CIA could borrow Air Force crews and hire General Atomics technicians. After taking off and landing in a country neighboring Afghanistan, the Predator could circle over an area for hours, sending its video back to Washington, just as it had done for the military from Bosnia.

“Why would we want to do this?” Pavitt demanded.

The cost would be minimal, and the payoff potentially large, Allen replied. Allen then explained the high-powered telescope's role in the operation. His staff had thought through where to put it and how to get it there. One good spot might be a mountain near Darunta, where one of bin Laden's associates, Abu Khabab, was said by Afghan sources to be holed up in a camp known to the CIA, experimenting with chemical and maybe biological weapons by killing dogs and videotaping their death throes. Maybe some followers of Northern Alliance leader and U.S. ally Ahmad Shah Massoud, the Taliban's chief indigenous foe, would help a CIA paramilitary team carry the telescope over the mountains from Pakistan and set it up overlooking the area.

Pavitt dismissed that scheme. “We're not going to risk our people humping all this equipment over all these mountains and putting it up,” he declared.

“The biggest thing, of course, is to fly the Predator, which has both infrared and electro-optical capabilities,” Allen continued. With the Predator, the CIA could look for bin Laden night and day, and increase its knowledge of Al Qaeda and the Taliban in the bargain.

The debate lasted three hours, from about 10:00 a.m. until 1:00 p.m., with neither Allen nor Pavitt giving ground, but both frequently raising their voices. Allen sensed that Gordon, wearing blue jeans and clearly still hoping to make it to his Baltimore picnic, was only getting angrier as the discussion wore on. It was a “very ugly scene,” Allen recalled years later. “I still smart over it.” It also ended in a stalemate.

The next day, CIA Director George Tenet was briefed on the Memorial Day meeting. When he and Allen discussed the matter, Tenet asked, “Why do I care whether I have an image of a guy, whether he's six feet four or six feet?”

“Because we need to find and identify this individual,” Allen said. “We need to be able to locate him, know where he is, track him, geolocate him, and take whatever action's required.”

Four weeks later, on June 25, Richard Clarke sent Tenet a memo saying that other agencies in the Counterterrorism Security Group “are unanimous that the Predator project is our highest near-term priority and that funding should be shifted to it.” The CIA had been resisting the idea partly because the project was expected to cost three to four million dollars, a relative pittance by Pentagon standards but serious money for the CIA. Four days after Tenet received Clarke's memo, the so-called Small Group, a special interagency committee of top officials cleared to see the most sensitive information concerning bin Laden, approved Clarke's Afghan Eyes plan. Under an arrangement imposed by the White House, the Defense Department and CIA would share the costs.

As part of this compromise, the operation would be considered a mere test of the idea that a Predator could find Osama bin Laden. The CIA and the Air Force would try using the drone to hunt the terrorist leader. What came next would depend on how well the experiment worked.

*   *   *

Several days after the Afghan Eyes decision, Snake Clark phoned Captain Scott Swanson at Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field in Nevada. Scraped out of the desert forty-five miles northwest of Las Vegas after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, by the summer of 2000 the onetime Army Air Forces gunnery training field was home to the Air Force's 11th and 15th Reconnaissance Squadrons, the Air Combat Command units that flew Predators. For Swanson, however, Indian Springs was only a temporary home.

That spring, encouraged by Major Brian Raduenz and others who worked with Swanson during the WILD Predator experiment in the Balkans the year before, Big Safari Director Bill Grimes had asked the former special operations helicopter pilot if he'd like a green door assignment as the technology shop's chief Predator operator. The job would mean transferring from the 11th RS in Nevada to Big Safari's operating location at the General Atomics plant in Rancho Bernardo, California, just north of San Diego.
Single guy, San Diego, doing more of this neat stuff?
Swanson had asked himself.
Sure
. Swanson was still at Indian Springs only because his official orders to move to California had yet to take effect, which was why Snake Clark was calling from the Pentagon.

Clark wanted to know if Swanson could put together—without attracting attention—a briefing on the Predator and a flight demonstration for “a bunch of people in suits” who would be visiting Indian Springs in a few days. Bill Grimes would be among them, as would senior people from the CIA, the NSC, and other intelligence and military agencies. Clark and Grimes wanted Swanson to show the visitors what the Predator could do if used for a special mission in what Clark said was “a rugged part of the world.” Clark was vague about what kind of mission, but Swanson read intelligence briefings. He could guess.

The dozen or so “high political rollers,” as Swanson viewed them, spent a couple of hours at Indian Springs on the afternoon of July 12. Swanson briefed his visitors on the Predator's capabilities, showed them how it operated, and gave them a tour of the GCS. Then he answered their questions, some of which seemed to confirm his suspicions. By the time the members of the traveling party climbed back into their air-conditioned bus and drove away, Swanson was pretty sure he knew what kind of special mission the government officials had in mind.

A few days later, Swanson learned that Grimes and the rest of the delegation must have liked his briefing. The Predator was going to Afghanistan to hunt Osama bin Laden, and Scott Swanson would be the operation's chief pilot. Swanson thought that was neat stuff indeed.

*   *   *

Those planning the operation needed to solve a number of tricky problems. First, where could the Air Force put the ground control station? This was a major issue, for although the Predator was flown largely through the Ku-band satellite dish in its nose, taking off or landing via satellite link wasn't recommended. To be relayed through a satellite in geostationary orbit, signals from the GCS to the Predator, and vice versa, had to travel about 25,000 miles into space and 25,000 miles back to Earth. The signals also had to be processed on each end by equipment that added milliseconds to their trip. Even with the signals traveling at 186,000 miles per second, there was enough delay between a pilot's commands and the aircraft's response, and the pilot's reaction to that response, and the pilot's next move, to make takeoffs and landings risky. Once in flight, the Predator flew largely on autopilot, so the roughly one-second signal latency caused by the satellite connection was less problematic. But for takeoffs and landings, crews always used the line-of-sight C-band link; they switched to Ku-band once the drone was airborne to extend the Predator's range over the horizon and switched back to land. This was why the Predator couldn't fly much farther than four hundred or five hundred miles from its landing point if it was going to loiter over a target area for the optimum seventeen to twenty-two hours.

Which posed a problem. Draw a circle with a five-hundred-mile radius on a map of Afghanistan and the center of the circle located at Tarnak Farms—a rundown agricultural complex near Kandahar where the Taliban had settled bin Laden and his wives and children in 1997—and the circumference will run through Iran, Pakistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Even if any of the friendly countries on that list granted the United States permission to base Predators on its soil, there was no way to bring in all the equipment and personnel needed and still keep the operation covert. Besides a GCS, the operators would need a satellite earth terminal with a large antenna, a shelter where the aircraft could be kept and serviced, accommodation for several dozen people—you might as well put up a billboard.

Which raised a question. How remote from the Predator could the drone's controls be located? Could the three key elements of the system—the aircraft, the GCS, and the satellite earth terminal—be split up? What if the drone were launched somewhere near Afghanistan by a crew using the usual line-of-sight C-band link, then switched to the usual Ku-band satellite link, but then simultaneously taken over by a different crew in a full-up GCS that was far distant but somewhere within satellite range? The crew flying the Ku-band segment could perform the mission, then hand the Predator back to the first crew, who could land it using the C-band link. If the drone's flight were split up this way, the GCS and satellite terminal needn't be located with the Predator near Afghanistan; instead, they could be located someplace unobtrusive—at a U.S. air base in Europe, say, where security would be good and no one would pay much attention to a freight container or one more satellite dish.

Was something like that possible? That was the question Bill Grimes put to Werner that spring, as the Afghan Eyes proposal was being debated at higher reaches of the U.S. government's national security apparatus. Others within the Air Force and the intelligence community had tried to answer the same question but had come away stumped. Werner, however, reported back after a quick review of technical issues that “split operations,” as he suggested they call the concept, could be done—just not easily.

Providing a stripped-down pilot console that could be located with a small maintenance facility at a base in Central Asia and used to take off and land the drone via C-band link wouldn't be particularly difficult. But finding a satellite that covered much of Afghanistan would be a challenge, since the typical satellite beam creates a footprint—usually amoeba-shaped—only five hundred to a thousand miles in diameter. It would be an even greater challenge to find a satellite that not only covered Afghanistan but also had an antenna able to communicate with the Predator. The Predator's Ku-band transmitter was so weak that it “whispered” to a satellite, as Werner put it, and the drone's Ku-band dish was so small it could barely “hear” what a satellite transmitted back. Beyond those problems, there weren't a lot of satellites in geostationary orbit whose footprint covered Afghanistan—because, as Werner observed, “satellite operators realized that not many goat herders and mountain dwellers were equipped with satellite receivers.” The only candidate he could find, in fact, was a Dutch satellite aimed at India whose roughly circular footprint offered marginal coverage of Afghanistan.

Given those limitations, Werner later mused that “no satellite engineer in his right mind” would try to operate the Predator over Afghanistan using this method. Even so, he saw a way to make it work. The Air Force could fly the drone using New Skies Satellites' NSS-703. But the service would also need to put an earth terminal with an enormous dish antenna—an ear big enough to pick up the Predator's whispers—somewhere in Europe. Werner researched that, too, and found that the Air Force had only three terminals that were both large enough to do the job and sufficiently mobile to be packed into cargo aircraft and flown to Europe. Two were untouchable. The third was a terminal with an antenna dish eleven meters (more than thirty-six feet) in diameter called the Transportable Medium Earth Terminal, or TMET (pronounced “TEE-met”). The TMET was located in southern Virginia, at Langley Air Force Base. It belonged to Air Combat Command.