Predator (37 page)

“We're making our way down your way,” Mattoon said cryptically. “We want to pick up some jalapeños.” Speaking over an unsecure phone line, he used a nickname for Hellfires they had cooked up while testing the missile against “Taco Bell” at China Lake that summer. McLean knew exactly what Mattoon meant, and told him whom he should call. When the C-17 landed at Huntsville, the pallet of Hellfires was waiting.

From there, the Globemaster flew to Charleston Air Force Base, in South Carolina, arriving at 4:00 a.m. Thursday. To the surprise and frustration of some of the plane's passengers, their ride remained on the ground there for the next twenty hours. The C-17's three-member crew was required to stop flying and rest; beyond that, the airplane needed inspection, maintenance, and fuel, and a new crew had to be found to take the Globemaster on the rest of its long journey to Uzbekistan. The C-17 was wheels up out of Charleston at midnight.

At Andrews, where they arrived at 1:30 a.m. on Friday, Swanson and the other pilots and sensor operators, plus a couple of contractors assigned to work with them at the CIA, were met by not only Snake Clark, but also Major Darran Jergensen, a Predator pilot most of them knew who had recently transferred to Air Combat Command. Jergensen had a white bus waiting to take them to the Marriott Residence Inn at Tysons Corner, a sprawl of shopping malls and office buildings just off the Washington Beltway in Virginia and a five-minute drive from CIA headquarters. The night of September 11, Ed Boyle had ordered a subordinate at ACC to book almost all of the Marriott's roughly one hundred rooms indefinitely. In addition to the small Predator flight crew cadre, Boyle figured three daily shifts of as many as thirty Air Force intelligence analysts would be needed to digest the drone's video and perform other tasks. Though the Predator carried no pilot, it might need fifteen to twenty people at a time in the GCS and the double-wide to monitor and assess the products of its video camera and other sensors during round-the-clock missions.

Recruited that summer for the Predator missions the CIA was planning, Jergensen had been summoned to the Pentagon on September 11 a few hours after the attacks on New York and Washington. A former special operations navigator, he would share mission commander duties with Mark Cooter, directing the flight crews in the GCS and, when useful, helping them fly their Predators. As Jergensen's charges boarded the bus, he invited them to take a beer from a case he had brought along; then, after asking the driver to step outside and away from the bus, he briefed the group on what they would be doing after they got oriented at CIA headquarters.

Jergensen told the group they would use the ground control station there to fly the Hellfire Predators over Afghanistan, picking the drones up via Ku-band satellite link after an LRE in Central Asia got them into the air with their portable C-band antenna. If the CIA's sources in Afghanistan could tip them to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or his lieutenants, they might launch a Hellfire strike, buddy-lase for warplanes with laser-guided bombs, or simply talk them onto the target. Their first priority, however, would be to use the Predator's cameras and other sensors to hunt bin Laden and other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders; at the same time, they would scout out targets that regular U.S. and allied military forces could attack if President Bush decided, as seemed increasingly likely, to go to war.

“Any questions?” Jergensen asked when he finished.

“Yeah, I have a question,” said a General Atomics pilot. “Who are you?”

Like everyone else, Jergensen was wearing civilian clothes.

When Mattoon turned in his rented Jeep Cherokee at Washington National Airport, the car company agent was befuddled. Mattoon had rented the vehicle in California, more than two thousand miles away. But according to the odometer, the Jeep had been driven only two hundred miles. How was that possible?

Someone must have made a mistake, Mattoon said with a shrug.

*   *   *

The armed Predator's call sign—the way the cadre would identify themselves to other military units by radio—would be Wildfire. The WILD Predators flown over Kosovo by Big Safari had carried a laser designator; these added Hellfire missiles. Someone did the obvious math: WILD
+
Hellfire
=
Wildfire.

By the weekend of September 15, the handful of technicians and engineers in the CIA-led LRE was fully in place at a secret, isolated airfield in Uzbekistan near the Afghan border. To cloak their presence as much as possible, LRE members were barred from going into the tiny border town nearby and told to avoid contact with locals. Living in a tent, working in an inflatable hangar, their duty would be to maintain, service, and operate the three Hellfire Predators at the start and finish of their missions over Afghanistan using the portable flight control console they had brought with them. After takeoff, the pilot was to fly the Predator to mission altitude, where a technician would bore-sight the MTS ball; next, the pilot would put the Predator into an orbit, at which point the mission crew in the GCS at CIA headquarters would take control using the Ku-band satellite link. The timing was worked out so precisely that no conversation or messaging was necessary.

After a couple of “functional flight checks”—test drives—over their host nation during the weekend of September 15–16, the first armed Predator entered Afghan airspace on Tuesday, September 18. The hunt for Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants that Charlie Allen, Richard Clarke, and the other Predator advocates had long been working for was at last under way—a week to the day after Al Qaeda's devastating attacks on New York and Washington.

Four days after the operation began, the Predator team suffered a major setback. A contractor pilot, radio call sign “Big,” was flying Predator 3038 over Afghanistan on September 22 when the screens in the GCS showing the video imagery and the airspeed, altitude, and other constantly changing numbers suddenly froze. “Crap,” Big muttered.

The Ku-band satellite link had been lost. In such a circumstance, Predator 3038 was programmed to return to base, but for these missions, only after loitering at about twenty-five thousand feet for fifteen hours. The long loiter time was meant to make sure the Predator crossed the border after dark; Uzbekistan's authoritarian leader wanted to do everything possible to prevent the Taliban and restive Islamists on his side of the border from finding out about the Predator operation. Fifteen hours after losing link, Predator 3038 was still missing. The team was soon certain that it had crashed.

A year earlier, the Summer Project had suffered a crash as well, losing Predator 3050 on the runway in Uzbekistan because of a malfunction of some sort. That accident caused a lengthy argument between the CIA and the Air Force over who would pay the roughly $1.5 million needed to replace the aircraft. When Predator 3038 crashed, no one was arguing over money anymore. As a satellite reconnaissance photo later confirmed, 3038 went down near Mazar-i-Sharif, an area held by the U.S.-allied Northern Alliance, so the Taliban, as far as U.S. officials knew, remained ignorant of the armed version of the Predator. But the crash left the Wildfire team with only two armed Predators, just at the moment when the Bush administration's former qualms about using such a weapon evaporated.

The day before the Predator team's hunt for bin Laden began, President Bush visited the Pentagon for a briefing on special operations and was asked by a reporter, “Do you want bin Laden dead?”

Bush replied, “There's an old poster out West that I recall that said, ‘Wanted Dead or Alive.'” Later that day, Monday, September 17, he signed a CIA Memorandum of Notification modifying the ban on assassinations in Executive Order 12333 and authorizing lethal covert action to disrupt Al Qaeda. The memorandum specifically empowered the CIA to use the armed Predator for that purpose.

Also on September 17, Colonel Ed Boyle officially assumed command of the Air Combat Command Expeditionary Air Intelligence Squadron—the unit that would be hunting bin Laden from the “Trailer Park,” as insiders quickly took to calling the double-wide and GCS on the CIA campus. As he did, Boyle was told by Air Force lawyers that he would be the officer authorized to issue the actual order to launch a Hellfire from the Predator, empowered to do so by the laws of war and Title 10 of the U.S. Code. First, however, CIA Director George Tenet or his designee would have to authorize Boyle or
his
designee to order the trigger pulled.

Soon, the question of who should decide when to launch the Predator's missiles would prove much more complex than that, and the way that question was answered would mark a new chapter in the history of the CIA.

*   *   *

On September 28, President Bush chaired a National Security Council meeting at the White House to set rules of engagement for attacking Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Ten days earlier, the president had signed a bill titled “Authorization for Use of Military Force against Terrorists,” which had been approved by Congress on September 14; Bush now had the legal right to wage war in Afghanistan. The United States and its allies expected the conflict to be mainly an air war, with small units of CIA paramilitaries and special operations troops on the ground to direct bomb and missile strikes. But Bush was particularly worried about collateral damage, especially damage to mosques. At the NSC meeting, he and the other principals agreed that Army General Tommy Franks, commander of U.S. Central Command and commander in chief for the coming conflict, would have to obtain the president's approval to attack targets where “moderate or high collateral damage” was a risk. If the Air Force unit flying armed Predators for the CIA could find bin Laden or other Al Qaeda leaders, however, Bush's okay would not be necessary: Tenet or his designee could authorize a Hellfire shot. But the CIA was to coordinate with Franks before launching Hellfires in situations where other U.S. and allied military forces were involved.

The Predator cadre at the Trailer Park was already working hard to give Tenet a chance to approve a shot. Three pilots per shift, with one or two sensor operators available at all times, were flying two twelve-hour shifts a day, changing shifts at 1:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. None would stay “in the seat” more than a couple of hours at a time, for flying and manipulating sensors by remote control was often a mind-numbing job that required keen concentration. At first, Big Safari's Swanson and Guay—the only Air Force pilot and sensor operator taking part in the operation who had ever launched a Hellfire from a Predator—were scheduled to overlap with the other crews during the meat of each mission, in case a chance to take a shot arose. One of the two General Atomics pilots, who had far more time flying the Predator than even Swanson, would sit or stand behind the military pilots, coaching them through any tricky situations. The General Atomics pilots and the other Air Force crews would fly the Predator on the roughly six-hour “ferry flights” necessary to get the drone to and from its base in Uzbekistan to the skies above the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar and other areas of interest in southern Afghanistan.

Summer Project veteran Cooter and Major Darran Jergensen, meanwhile, were swapping out each twelve-hour shift as mission commander, spending much of their time in the ground control station or the double-wide at the Trailer Park. From there, they would talk on a headset with the Counterterrorist Center in the “Big House,” as the Air Force contingent had begun calling the CIA headquarters building. As operations director for the Air Force cadre, Cooter also spent a lot of time in the CIA Global Response Center working with his counterpart there, Alec B.

Finding and killing Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders was the Predator team's primary goal, but keeping track of the Taliban's leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was also among the cadre's assignments. Omar, a former mujahedeen insurgent and reputed sharpshooter with rocket-propelled grenades, had by 1996 become “Head of the Supreme Council and Commander of the Faithful” within the Taliban, and thus de facto ruler of Afghanistan. Fanatically fundamentalist in his Muslim beliefs, Omar became Osama bin Laden's chief ally, providing the wealthy Saudi extremist a haven and training camps for Al Qaeda. Omar claimed Allah had appeared to him in a dream as an ordinary man and called him to lead the faithful, yet he was described as a “political hermit” whose lack of ambition was one reason the Taliban revered him. He was said never to have ventured much farther from Kandahar than Kabul, the official capital of Afghanistan, yet his goal was to impose his strict brand of Islam on the world.

During the last two weeks of September and the first week of October 2001, a Predator occasionally circled Omar's modest town house in downtown Kandahar and a walled hundred-acre compound northwest of the city that included a palatial residence bin Laden had built for Omar after a truck bomb exploded near the Taliban leader's home in 1999. Two hundred yards from that compound, Omar added a T-shaped bunker forty feet beneath the ground that had electricity and running water. By the time Bush decided irrevocably for war, bin Laden's whereabouts remained a mystery, but the CIA knew where to look for his ally and protector Mullah Mohammed Omar.

*   *   *

On Sunday, October 7, at 1:00 p.m., Eastern Daylight Time (9:30 p.m. in Afghanistan), President Bush addressed the nation and the world from the Treaty Room of the White House. “On my orders, the United States military has begun strikes against Al Qaeda terrorist training camps and military installations of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,” the president declared. The initial strikes had begun a half hour before Bush spoke, with fifty Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from ships and submarines in the North Arabian Sea and attacks by Air Force bombers against preplanned, fixed targets, mainly Taliban air defenses and military headquarters. The purpose of Operation Enduring Freedom, Bush said in his speech, would be “to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations, and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime.”