Predator (31 page)

Leaders of the CIA agreed that Al Qaeda was a major threat, but the agency was divided on what to do about using the Predator against bin Laden. In meetings at CIA headquarters that spring, Clarke ally Charlie Allen pushed their view that the unarmed Predator should be sent back to Afghanistan as soon as weather permitted, and the armed version as soon as the Air Force had it ready. Allen ran into a wall of opposition.

Cofer Black, the CIA Counterterrorist Center director, argued against sending the unarmed Predator back for fear the Taliban would shoot one down. The Taliban had scrambled MiG fighter jets to go after the drone half a dozen times the previous fall, after all. “I do not believe the possible recon value outweighs the risk of possible program termination when the stakes are raised by the Taliban parading a charred Predator in front of CNN,” Black wrote in a memo to Clarke dated January 25, the same day Clarke sent his first memos on Al Qaeda to Rice. CIA Director George Tenet, meanwhile, was leery of using an armed Predator if his agency was to be responsible for pulling the trigger. He questioned whether the CIA director had legal authority to use such a weapon. He questioned whether a civilian intelligence agency should even be given such a mission.

Others at the CIA questioned how effective the Hellfire might be against soft targets, a doubt that led to a construction project whose nature, in later years, would become a media myth.

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Within days of the Deputies Committee meeting, Big Safari's Spoon Mattoon got word that the CIA wanted to know what the Hellfire would do to a mud-and-wattle building of the sort found in Afghanistan, and to any people inside. Cofer Black wanted the Air Force to prove that if a Hellfire hit Osama bin Laden's residence at Tarnak Farms it could kill the terrorist leader. The answer was unknown, for what a Hellfire's lethal radius in a mud-brick house would be, or what collateral damage it might cause, had never been tested. The CIA wanted Big Safari to find out.

The CIA officer who brought the request to Mattoon had already hired a contractor in Tucson, Arizona, to erect an imitation Afghan building on a desert range at China Lake. The CIA officer also sent Mattoon the substantial bill—$170,000, which Mattoon had to pay from the $3.1 million the Air Force had budgeted for the entire Hellfire project. The Tucson contractor began work at China Lake around the time Mattoon's team began test launches from Predator 3034 at tanks using the MTS ball. Though the Hellfire Predator was still little more than a technological experiment, Mattoon and his team were under rising pressure to make it work, and fast. Snake Clark was calling every day to get updates for the Air Force brass, the CIA, and others. So on Friday, June 1, despite the mixed results of the missile launch tests thus far, the Predator team moved its testing to the building in the desert at China Lake erected at the CIA's behest.

When Mattoon, project manager Chris Dusseault of General Atomics, and Army Hellfire expert Terry McLean went to see the structure, they were flabbergasted. “A hundred and seventy thousand dollars for this?” Mattoon sputtered. The edifice Mattoon and his colleagues observed that day would be described in an article published in 2002 in the
Washington Post
as a “stone-for-stone replica” of a “four-room villa” outside Kandahar where Osama bin Laden had once lived. In 2006,
U.S. News & World Report
called the building “a replica of the home that bin Laden lived in at Tarnak Farms, a square, squat building whose structure and density the technicians approximated with satellite imagery provided by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.”

In fact, it was nothing of the sort. The target building at China Lake resembled neither a villa, nor the housing at Tarnak Farms, nor indeed any structure typical of those found in Afghanistan. Instead, it was straight out of Southwest America, an adobe brick rectangle whose exterior walls stood a little over thirteen feet tall and were forty-eight feet long by about nineteen feet wide. The four walls rested on a four-inch concrete slab and held up an adobe brick roof resting on forty-nine rough-cut four-by-twelve Douglas fir timbers. Inside the building, two eight-inch-thick adobe brick walls divided the “villa” into three rooms. The bricks of the exterior walls were mostly eighteen inches long, nine inches wide, and six inches thick, and the walls themselves were two brick lengths thick. Besides an empty doorway, the structure had four big, empty windows. When McLean stuck his arm into one of them and reached in as far as he could, he found the walls were as thick as the distance from his armpit to his fingertips—thirty-eight inches.

Mattoon was outraged at what the contractor had built—by misreading the specifications the CIA had provided, apparently. The thickness of the walls, the strength of the foundation and roof, plus the yawning windows and doorway were going to make it tough to extrapolate the results of Hellfire test shots here to any structure in Afghanistan. When Mattoon walked around the south end of the adobe building, though, he got a surprise that brightened his mood. A China Lake surveyor had draped a big white tarp along the top edge of the pinkish structure that bore a cheerful sign. It read: “Hellfire Tacos,” with “Hellfire” written in red and “Tacos” in green. In a red circle above and to the right of those words, the sign maker had advertised “3/99¢.” The Predator team immediately dubbed the building Taco Bell.

When the team fired a K-model Hellfire at Taco Bell that Friday night, however, Mattoon's mood again turned sour. The rocket plume blinded the MTS laser designator, and the missile missed the building by such a wide margin that it flew into the side of a distant mountain. Afterward, the usually jaunty Mattoon came to Casey wearing a scowl.

“Bill, we've got to fix this,” he said grimly.

Casey and his Raytheon team worked through the weekend, and by early the next week they had come up with a way to deal with the blinding of the laser designator by the heat and light of the missile's rocket plume. Part of the problem was that the MTS ball's autotracker, the feature that allowed a sensor operator to lock the laser designator onto a target, worked by analyzing the Predator's video and using a computer algorithm to keep the laser beam aimed at the target. But when the Hellfire launched and its rocket fired, the video became nothing but a wavy heat mirage. Their solution was to program the autotracker to turn off automatically when the Predator's pilot pulled the trigger—there was an interval of one second before the missile actually launched—and to come back on four seconds later. By then, the missile was away and its rocket engine's three-second burn was over.

Five days after the first shot failed, the Predator team was ready to fire another K-model Hellfire at Taco Bell. To help answer the question of whether the Hellfire would kill bin Laden indoors, air pressure and temperature gauges were placed inside the hut. Chris Dusseault of General Atomics added another wrinkle after consulting a Redstone Arsenal expert on lethality against soft targets. As Dusseault learned from the expert—a five-foot-five blonde named Edith Crow and known to teasing colleagues as Lady Death or the Black Widow—small-arms lethality tests usually used special manikins filled with ballistic gelatin to mimic human flesh. Lethality tests of military weapons such as grenades and missiles, on the other hand, usually used “witness panels” of Sheetrock and plywood to imitate the ways battle dress uniforms, other gear carried by troops, and bone protect internal organs from penetration by shrapnel. Lacking time and money for such scientific methods, the Big Safari team cut human silhouettes out of plywood and propped them up inside Taco Bell. At Crow's suggestion, Dusseault also drove a pickup truck to a nearby grocery and bought fifty watermelons. The rind of a watermelon, Lady Death had explained, was imperfect for the purpose, but in a weapons test it could serve as a relatively good equivalent of human skin. If a piece of metal punctured a watermelon rind, it was also likely to go through skin, which is thinner but tougher.

The team propped the watermelons throughout the interior of Taco Bell, setting some on the floor to simulate someone sitting or sleeping, and using stacks of bricks to arrange them at heights where enemies might logically be caught standing. Then, with Captain Scott Swanson and Master Sergeant Jeff Guay of Big Safari operating Predator 3034, they fired a live K-model Hellfire into the hut's south wall. Aided by the autotracker, Guay guided the missile into the wall only a few feet below the “Hellfire Tacos 3/99¢” sign.

The missile's precursor charge—the explosive designed to punch a hole through armor by creating a jet of molten molybdenum—left a fairly small hole in the exterior of Taco Bell's thick adobe walls. But when the main warhead detonated milliseconds after the precursor charge, the high explosive blasted a circular chunk of bricks about six feet in diameter into the hut. Inspecting the interior afterward, the team found bits of brick and metal a bit larger than BBs in the plywood silhouettes and multiple holes in the rinds of the watermelons. The watermelons closest to the explosion had been split open by the concussion. The plywood silhouettes had been knocked over. Temperature and pressure gauges that had been standing lay on the floor, covered with loose bricks. There was also a fist-size hole in the sand, created as the molten molybdenum cooled nearly instantly and formed a solid metal rod that buried itself dozens of feet into the ground.

The next day, June 7, the team fired an M-model Hellfire into their Taco Bell, a newer “blast fragmentation” variant of the missile introduced the previous year and designed for use against boats and small ships, which are softer targets than tanks. As planned, Guay guided the missile straight through the roof, but the warhead exploded as it hit, failing to penetrate deeply enough into the room to spray it with shrapnel. Terry McLean had his doubts about the utility of the M model in any event, for it had a tendency to “dud” if it struck a target at the wrong angle.

Asked to gauge the Hellfire's effectiveness against other targets as well, the Predator team fired an M-model Hellfire at a white Chevy Suburban parked in the desert. Osama bin Laden was known to drive a Mitsubishi Pajero Mini SUV, sold in the United States as the Montero. To gauge lethality, the testers put a watermelon in the driver's seat of the Suburban. Just for fun, they also taped an eight-by-ten glossy photo of Snake Clark to the melon and tossed pictures of him, Mattoon, and Dusseault onto the front seat. This time, though, Guay tried so hard to keep the crosshairs on the target that he must have moved them slightly as the missile was in flight. The Hellfire exploded in the sand several feet to the side of the vehicle.

With that, the test shots ended for the time being. On June 8, Swanson and a General Atomics pilot ferried Predator 3034 from China Lake back to El Mirage. After thirteen missile tests at China Lake, the team concluded that a building as sturdy as their Taco Bell wasn't going to collapse if hit by a Hellfire K, though it would do a lot of damage and almost certainly kill most or all the people inside who happened to be close to the explosion. If a Hellfire M was used—and went off—people inside might survive, though anyone left standing was going to have a mean headache and a lot of trouble hearing for a good while. Of the thirteen test shots, six had missed their mark; given the experimental nature of the weapon, the team considered this an acceptable batting average. On June 9, Big Safari reported to Washington that the Hellfire Predator was ready to deploy.

When their report got back to Washington, the CIA sent two of its officers to Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville to talk about how they might make the Hellfire a better weapon for killing people outside tanks. Redstone assigned the problem to an expert on urban warfare, who immediately began figuring out how to make the missile more deadly to enemies caught out in the open or sheltering in their mud-and-wattle homes.

When Chris Dusseault submitted his expense report for the month, he included a request for reimbursement for more than two hundred dollars for watermelons. His boss at General Atomics, Brad Clark, was furious. Dusseault was thirty-three years old and known to enjoy a party.

“What are you guys doing out there,” Clark demanded angrily, “having a kegger?”

No, Dusseault explained, just improvising.

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They were improvising in Washington, too. Throughout the spring, the number and credibility of terrorist threats against the United States reported to and by the CIA and the FBI had been rising dramatically. Richard Clarke had begun the April 30 NSC Deputies Committee meeting by describing CIA warnings about Al Qaeda; in early May, a “walk-in” informant told the FBI that Al Qaeda was making plans for attacks on London, Boston, and New York. On May 16, a tip phoned in to a U.S. embassy warned that bin Laden allies were planning an attack in the United States using “high explosives.” As a government report would later phrase it, the “system was blinking red.”

On May 29, Clarke wrote a memo to Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, discussing the potential threats and warning that “When these attacks occur, as they likely will, we will wonder what more we could have done to stop them.” The CIA was getting worried, too. Cofer Black told Rice in May that on a scale of one to ten he judged the terrorist threat level to be at seven.

With the risk of an attack by Al Qaeda increasing and Big Safari reporting the Hellfire Predator tested enough to deploy, the CIA got down to discussing the nuts and bolts of how a mission to kill bin Laden with an armed drone might be conducted. Sometime in late June, Air Force Lieutenant General John “Soup” Campbell, who as associate director of central intelligence for military support was chief liaison between Langley and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, scheduled two “tabletop” exercises to help wring out the issues. A soft-spoken, gentlemanly fighter pilot from Kentucky, Campbell had gravitated into intelligence work after a stint on the Joint Staff in the 1990s and had arrived at the CIA the previous June. Now, in windowless conference rooms at the CIA, he led what amounted to a couple of “chair flies” of the first Predator drone strike ever contemplated. The first was attended by a large group of officials, action officers, and experts. Campbell wanted every agency that had skin in the game, including the NSA and what was then the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, to be part of the deliberations. The second tabletop, in the seventh-floor director's conference room, was an executive session for top CIA officials only.