Predator (24 page)

When Bill Grimes heard it was ACC's, he couldn't help but grin.

One day in early August, a crew of about twenty contractors showed up at Langley Air Force Base with a couple of big trucks, a heavy crane, a satellite earth terminal with a 6.2-meter dish, and a set of special, classified orders. After unloading the terminal they'd brought along, they dismantled ACC's TMET and its 11-meter dish, packed it on pallets, and set up the smaller 6.2-meter dish in its place. Then they loaded their trucks and drove away with the TMET.

The next morning, Werner got a call from the same ACC chief master sergeant who had ordered the laser designators taken off the WILD Predators the previous year. He was irate. Where was his satellite terminal? he demanded.

Werner looked at his watch. “Right now, it's at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware,” he said, adding that the TMET was waiting to be picked up by a huge C-5 Galaxy cargo plane. The C-5 was going to take the terminal to a location he wasn't at liberty to divulge, but Big Safari had brought ACC a replacement satellite terminal with a 6.2-meter dish, Werner pointed out.

“After explaining that none of his satellite services were being interrupted or even diminished,” Werner recalled years later, “I seemed to unclaw him from the ceiling just a bit.”

*   *   *

A couple of weeks after the July 12 Predator demonstration at Indian Springs, Captain Scott Swanson threw most of his clothes in the backseat of his gold 1995 Lexus ES 300. Then he headed southwest on I-15 for his new assignment to Big Safari's office in the General Atomics Predator plant near San Diego. Along the way, Swanson took a side trip to the General Atomics flight control center at El Mirage to see a test of Werner's new split operations concept. Now refined, the plan was for a pilot assigned to a small “launch-and-recovery element” to put the Predator into the air using its C-band antenna, then hand the drone off to a crew in a ground control station elsewhere to fly the actual mission via the Ku-band satellite link. At mission's end, the GCS crew would fly the Predator by satellite to within the C-band antenna's roughly hundred-mile range, where the launch-and-recovery crew would once again take control and land the drone.

Before leaving for California, Swanson had been fully briefed about what Richard Clarke called Afghan Eyes and Big Safari was calling the Summer Project: the plan to hunt Osama bin Laden using the Predator. A CIA-led launch-and-recovery element employing just two contractor pilots and a couple of mechanics would take off, land, and service the Predators in Uzbekistan, one of three former Soviet republics bordering Afghanistan on the north. Uzbek President Islam Karimov, an authoritarian strongman and Taliban opponent, had agreed to let the drones fly from a small, rugged military airfield on his nation's soil. But since both the host country and the U.S. government wanted the American presence kept small enough to escape public notice, members of the CIA team would work in a heavy-duty cloth hangar and live in a tent.

Swanson and others flying the actual missions via Ku-band satellite would have it easier. Eight days after he moved into his new apartment in San Diego, Swanson was on his way to Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. Air Force facility in southwestern Germany. Ramstein was the headquarters of U.S. Air Forces Europe, a command known by the acronym USAFE (pronounced “you-SAY-fee”). Shortly before Swanson's arrival, the Air Force had created an ad hoc unit to conduct the Summer Project. To preserve secrecy, the 32nd Expeditionary Air Intelligence Squadron was formed by verbal rather than written orders, which were issued retroactively five months later. The unit's handpicked members would include Swanson, Big Safari sensor operator Master Sergeant Jeff Guay, and Major Brian Raduenz of the Big Safari detachment at General Atomics. A pilot and sensor operator borrowed from one of ACC's Predator squadrons, plus a dozen officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians from USAFE intelligence and communications squadrons, would work the CIA missions as well.

USAFE's director of intelligence, Colonel Edward J. Boyle, a Long Island native who had joined the Air Force in 1974 and worked with Big Safari often during his twenty-six years in uniform, was the ad hoc squadron's commander.

“If anything goes wrong, you're going to be kicked out of Germany,” USAFE's commander, General Gregory S. “Speedy” Martin, told Boyle with a laugh. “But don't worry about it, you'll get a good job.”

To plan and execute the Predator missions, Boyle recruited Major Mark A. Cooter, an intelligence officer recently transferred to the Pentagon from the Predator-flying 11th Reconnaissance Squadron. A thirty-six-year-old Tennessean popular with subordinates and superiors alike, Cooter had worked on Predator operations from the time his service took over the drone program from the Army in 1997. He had deployed to Taszár, Hungary, then Tuzla, Bosnia; he had also served as operations director at 11th RS headquarters in Nevada.

Boyle also brought Captain Ginger Wallace and a couple of other USAFE intelligence officers into the squadron. When Boyle told Wallace that she was going to help Big Safari and the CIA try to find terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and even Osama bin Laden himself using Predator drones launched in Uzbekistan but flown via satellite from Germany, Wallace thought her jaw would hit the floor.

“We're going to do
what
?” the cheery 1990 Air Force Academy graduate blurted in her Kentucky accent. “Really? We can
do
that?”

“We can,” Boyle said. “And we're going to.”

By the time Swanson arrived at Ramstein, the squadron's equipment was already in place. At one end of a runway, positioned next to another large satellite antenna, sat what members of the team quickly dubbed the Big Ass Dish—the TMET satellite earth terminal that Big Safari had commandeered from ACC. Nearby, on a fenced-off concrete pad nestled next to some pine trees, sat a Predator ground control station painted green-and-black camouflage. Ten feet from the GCS was a green-and-black camouflage tent roughly thirty feet square; outside the tent stood a couple of porta-potties. The tent would serve as an operations center, or “ops cell.” Inside, tables and desks were crammed with computers and big display screens so those working in the ops cell could easily see what the Predator's sensors were seeing.

The Air Force communications crew, advised by Werner, had set up a data link via a fiber-optic cable that ran beneath the Atlantic to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia. The data link would stream video shot by the Predator from the GCS at Ramstein roughly four thousand miles, to a new flight operations center on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters, just down the hall from Charlie Allen's office. Computer terminals lined the walls and filled an island in the middle of the CIA's operations center; wide video screens were mounted high on the walls. Here, CTC analysts and others would be able to see what the Predator saw with a delay of less than a second.

Among those watching around the clock, in shifts, would be thirty-one imagery analysts Allen had borrowed from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, which specialized in analyzing photo reconnaissance. Intelligence officers in the ops cell tent at Ramstein would relay information and orders from the CTC at Langley to the Predator crew in the GCS. The ops cell had secure computer chat rooms and phones that allowed the Air Force team at Ramstein to talk directly to CIA headquarters. Those in the ops cell could also communicate with the drone operators in the GCS via a separate chat room or over an intercom piped into the crew's headsets.

Members of the Air Force team at Ramstein were ordered to keep their mouths shut about their mission. To stress the importance of secrecy, USAFE commander Martin called a meeting with the unit's leaders: Boyle, Cooter, Wallace, communications specialist Captain Paul Welch, and Raduenz of Big Safari, who was there to help with logistics and personnel. Martin told them he was going to have the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations test the special Predator unit's operational security, or, in military parlance, its OPSEC (pronounced “OPP-seck”).

“I'm not going to tell them what you're doing, but I
am
going to give them access to your phones, your garbage cans, where you're located, and I'm going to have them try to find
out
what you're doing,” the general said. “And if they do, I'm going to kill all of you. So if you think you can gibber about this at the snack bar or you can talk on the phone about anything, I'm telling you, your phones are tapped. And if I catch anybody leaking any of this stuff, you're dead.”

The extraordinary security was mainly to keep Al Qaeda from finding out what was being done at Ramstein, but also to keep the mission secret from the German government. Someone well above the Summer Project team's pay grade had decided that although Germany was a NATO ally and Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder was friendly with President Clinton, it might be better to ask forgiveness rather than permission for using German soil to hunt a major terrorist. Why risk getting
nein
for an answer?

*   *   *

They found their quarry on live video a month into the operation—on Wednesday, September 27, 2000—during their seventh flight. Swanson was at the controls, and Big Safari sensor operator Jeff Guay was aiming the Predator's camera as the drone circled near Tarnak Farms, following instructions from the ops cell in the tent outside their GCS at Ramstein.

By now, Swanson and others on the Summer Project team were pretty familiar with the former agricultural complex the Taliban had provided bin Laden for his family and followers. The Predator had loitered over it several times during the previous six flights. To Swanson, the place looked like a typical Afghan village. Mud-brick buildings of various sizes sat behind walls so numerous that from fifteen thousand or more feet up they looked like a maze. The CIA had provided a written description of the compound and annotated satellite photos showing a building thought to be bin Laden's primary residence, a couple of other houses for his wives, and a meetinghouse of some sort used for prayer, though it didn't appear to be a mosque. The CIA also had a schedule of prayer times at Tarnak Farms, and on September 27 Swanson was directed to circle the Predator where Guay could keep both bin Laden's house and the meetinghouse in view around the time the Muslims might convene for prayers.

Just before noon, a tall man in white robes came out of the house believed to be bin Laden's and was met by a group of smaller figures in dark garb who had gathered in a courtyard. Nearby, the Predator team could see three vehicles, an SUV and a couple of trucks, which suggested a security detail. As the tall man in white emerged from the building, the group of shorter men rushed to him. As he began walking, they orbited the taller man as if to protect him, some bowing in an apparent show of obeisance. Having been briefed that bin Laden was six foot five, Swanson thought there was no question they had found their target.

“Yeah, that's definitely the dude,” he told Guay.

Mission commander Cooter, watching on a screen in the ops cell tent, agreed.

Swanson kept the Predator circling, awaiting further orders and wondering how long it might take for the submarine or ship he and the others at Ramstein assumed was in range to get the word, spool up some Tomahawk cruise missiles, and take out this enemy who had declared war on America twice and begun waging it in earnest two years earlier. But as they continued to fly their unseen drone several miles above and away from what their cameras were pointed at below, Swanson realized that although their “customers” back at Langley seemed very excited, judging by what he was hearing over his headset, nothing was being said to suggest that cruise missiles would soon be on their way.

“Okay, guys, are they going to be inbound?” Swanson muttered under his breath.

Shortly after the tall man in white and his entourage went indoors, Cooter got word from a different intelligence source that an Afghan air force unit at Kandahar airport, just three and a quarter miles northeast of Tarnak Farms, had spotted something strange in the air and was preparing to investigate. Talking to his CIA counterpart through an Air Force liaison officer at Langley, Cooter said he was going to have Guay slew the Predator's camera toward the Kandahar airport to see what was happening. He met resistance: the CIA wanted to keep the Predator's camera on Tarnak Farms. Cooter could be a bull when certain he was right, and now, unable to get the CIA to agree with him, he decided that at the moment it was more important to preserve the Predator than to keep watching Tarnak Farms. As Swanson got up to take a break, giving the left-hand seat at the flight control console to a pilot from General Atomics, Cooter told Guay to point the Predator's camera toward the airport.

“Oops, guess they spotted us,” Guay said, zooming in on a ground crew preparing a Russian-made MiG-21 fighter for takeoff. Minutes later, the Predator team watched the jet—one of five MiG-21s the Taliban's air force was still flying in those days—rise into the sky. Joined by Ed Boyle, who had arrived from his Ramstein office to see what was happening, the Summer Project team watched the jet make a climbing turn and head straight toward the Predator.

Everyone in the GCS and ops cell watched, transfixed, as the MiG silently flew toward them on the Predator's video screen. With Guay keeping the camera on the MiG, the General Atomics pilot—in his stocking feet, others would later recall—maneuvered the Predator to make the drone as difficult as possible for the Afghan pilot to spot. The MiG headed straight toward them, growing larger and larger, then simply zoomed past the Predator's lens. The MiG pilot launched no missile, fired no gun.
Man, that was close
, Swanson thought. Flying at several hundred miles an hour, the MiG pilot must have failed to see the tiny, slow-moving Predator, Swanson and others agreed.

The Predator team wondered how the Taliban had spotted the drone, which was circling several miles from the airport and roughly four miles high. They were sure the Predator was too high to be heard, too small to be seen flying at twenty thousand feet, and at less than a hundred knots too slow for Afghan radar operators to identify. The most likely possibility, the team decided, was that an alert hilltop lookout had seen sun glint off the Predator's wings. To ward off ice at Afghanistan's high altitudes, the wings had been modified to pump glycol de-icing fluid out of hundreds of tiny laser-drilled holes along their leading edges. The drone's “weeping wings” could keep ice from forming and adding so much weight the plane would crash, but the fluid coating gave the Predator's composite skin a brushed-aluminum look, which reflected sunlight.