Predator (38 page)

Bush's address, delivered on a sunny Sunday afternoon in Washington, lasted just six minutes and thirty seconds. By then, on a clear, starry night in Afghanistan, Predator 3034, call sign Wildfire 34, carrying two K-model Hellfires, was flying past Kabul en route to Kandahar, and by midnight was circling within camera range of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar's compound northwest of the city. Forty minutes later, the drone's cameras saw a bright flash above the Taliban leader's nearby bunker—perhaps a gunshot, perhaps an explosion, but in any event, nothing dropped or launched by U.S. forces. U.S. planners had decided against bombing Omar's compound for fear of killing innocents.

An hour and fifteen minutes after the flash at the compound was recorded, a convoy of three vehicles departed, heading southeast toward Kandahar. The Predator followed, for those in command were sure one of those vehicles had the Taliban leader inside. Swanson and Guay were in the pilot and sensor operator seats in the GCS, controlling Predator 3034 from the CIA campus, seven thousand miles away from what their cameras were showing. Four F/A-18 fighter-bombers were also loitering in the vicinity of Kandahar, with a KC-10 aerial refueling tanker nearby to keep them from running out of gas. The fighter-bombers were waiting for the Predator to follow the Taliban leader to a spot where they could bomb and kill him.

Memories are fallible, especially memories formed in the infamous fog of war. Absent public release of whatever documentation still exists of what at the time was a highly classified operation, however, the memories of those participants willing to talk (including one who kept contemporaneous notes) provide the best evidence available to describe the drama that unfolded that night in Afghanistan. What can be said with certainty is that at the highest levels of the military, keen attention was being paid to the pursuit of Mullah Omar as seen in infrared Predator video.

Predator 3034's video was being viewed by General Tommy Franks on a screen at U.S. Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida; with him were several subordinates, including his chief legal officer: his judge advocate general, or JAG. In Washington, the CIA Predator's video was being watched in a basement office of the Pentagon by General John Jumper, with Snake Clark and the Air Force intelligence director, Major General Glen Shaffer, by his side, and with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Dick Myers, joining them from time to time. The drone's video was also being fed to Prince Sultan Air Base, a lonely batch of beige buildings in the desert about seventy miles southwest of Saudi Arabia's capital, Riyadh. Prince Sultan was home to the headquarters of the allied air war, the Combined Air Operations Center. From the main CAOC building—a big, hangar-shaped structure furnished with dozens of desks, phones, computers, and four theater-size screens to project imagery on two large walls—Air Force Lieutenant General Charles F. “Chuck” Wald was to run the air war.

Wald, a former North Dakota State University wide receiver selected by the Atlanta Falcons in the National Football League draft of 1970, was the Combined Forces Air Component Commander. While directing the air war, Wald would be joined in the main building by Major General David Deptula, the director of the CAOC; Colonel James Poss, Wald's intelligence director; and Major Peter Gersten, Wald's aide-de-camp. The four men would be sitting on an elevated platform known as the Crow's Nest, a cockpit formed by three modular office tables littered with computers, telephones, radios, and coffeepots and cups; here they could see all the imagery on the CAOC screens, which would help them command and control air operations. As the war began, however, no one in the main CAOC building—not even Wald or any of the other men in the Crow's Nest—could see the video from the CIA's armed Predator. The operation at Langley was regarded as so secret and sensitive that the screen receiving the Predator's feed was installed in a smaller building next door, the better to prevent French and Saudi officers at desks a few feet in front of the Crow's Nest from finding out about America's new weapon.

Swanson and Guay were still at the controls of Wildfire 34 as Omar's convoy entered Kandahar at 1:10 a.m., local time, on October 8. The small convoy consisted of an SUV (a Toyota Land Cruiser or similar model) followed by a white dual-cab and another pickup truck with armed men crammed into its cargo bed. “Vehicles joined by motorcycles at Kandahar,” an officer sitting near Wald and keeping notes at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia wrote forty-five minutes later. “Get the fighters up there ASAP.”

A few minutes later, the vehicles stopped in front of a compound in downtown Kandahar and some of the occupants went inside. At 2:12 a.m., Kandahar time, General Deptula told subordinates to get a direct line from the Crow's Nest to Colonel Ed Boyle at the CIA. A new set of F/A-18 fighter-bombers, recorded the officer taking notes, would arrive over this “time sensitive target” at about 3:10 a.m., Afghan time. As the planes flew, Deptula was amazed to hear that Franks planned to decide himself whether they should bomb the building they believed Omar was inside, or whether the risk of collateral damage was too high. Deptula thought such tactical decisions rightly belonged not to the strategic commander, the officer highest in the chain of command, but to the air commander and his staff.

Air commander Wald, however, was not surprised. He knew Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had made clear to Franks before the war that they regarded collateral damage in Afghanistan as a strategic issue. Their view was that killing civilians or damaging mosques could make it appear that the United States and its allies were waging war on the Afghan people and Muslims in general, as Al Qaeda and the Taliban were saying, and thus turn potential friends into enemies.

Franks would later write that, with his JAG telling him that the convoy now parked at the compound in Kandahar was a “valid target for Hellfire,” he directed Langley to have the Predator launch a missile, then waited as the drone lined up for the shot. For reasons unexplained in his book, neither Franks nor anyone else at U.S. Central Command—or the CIA, apparently—told those in the CAOC in Saudi Arabia that Franks had told the CIA to launch a Hellfire.

Unable to see the Predator's video, Wald, Deptula, and the two other officers in the Crow's Nest were also unable to see the convoy or the compound in Kandahar. Nor could they talk directly to the Predator's operators at the CIA. Communications about what Predator 3034 was doing were instead being relayed to the Crow's Nest by a CIA liaison officer in the building next door, who was fielding phone calls and reading computer chat room messages from Langley aloud into a Crow's Nest phone that Major Gersten had set to “speaker.” Wald, meanwhile, was talking and listening the same way to an AWACS communications and surveillance plane as it relayed his instructions to the leader of the Navy F/A-18s by radio. Suddenly, from one of the Crow's Nest phones on speaker, a disembodied voice no one recognized said blandly, “Cleared to fire.”

“Where'd that come from?” Wald demanded as he and the others in the Crow's Nest swiveled their heads in confusion. “Stop!” he ordered the AWACS, assuming the clearance to fire was being given by someone in the surveillance plane to the fighter-bombers. “Knock it off!” Wald ordered. “You're not cleared to fire! Don't do anything!”

After a flurry of phone calls, Wald was incensed to learn that the order to fire was a command to the Predator from someone elsewhere, not the AWACS. When he realized that fact, Wald decided it was time for Operation Enduring Freedom's air commander to get direct access to the CIA Predator's screen, too. “Get it here now,” Wald ordered a senior officer in charge of CAOC communications.

“Sir, we can't,” the officer said. “It's a classified system on a classified net.” The Predator screen was supposed to remain in the smaller building next door, which housed the CAOC's Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, a secured room with controlled access known as a “skiff” for its initials, SCIF.

“I don't give shit. Do it,” Wald said. “I need the system on the deck so I can make operational decisions. Bring it in.”

By 2:32 a.m., Afghan time, a boxy white TV monitor with a filter screen on its front sat on the table at Gersten's position toward the back of the Crow's Nest. A thin, black cable ran through a hole in the table, down the Crow's Nest steps, across the rear of the CAOC, under a door leading out into the Saudi sun, and across the sand to the SCIF in the building next door, where the Predator feed arrived from Langley. Wald and his key subordinates were asked to sign letters acknowledging that the air commander had ordered the CIA Predator screen be brought out of the SCIF. Although a computer showing chat rooms that those at Langley were using had to remain in the smaller building, Wald and his crew could now watch the silent infrared video the Predator was producing.

The vehicles in Mullah Omar's convoy had begun moving before the Predator was in a position to take the shot Franks wanted in Kandahar, Franks wrote in a memoir published three years later. By the time the Predator screen was set up in the Crow's Nest at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, the three vehicles had arrived at another destination after a journey of about thirty minutes.

Kandahar's winding streets made it tough for Guay to keep the infrared camera on the SUV and the two trucks as they made their way through the urban maze. But Guay managed, and as the convoy reached the countryside the Predator followed. Uncertain they could hit a moving vehicle with a Hellfire launched from the Predator, which had been tested so far only against stationary targets, Cooter told Swanson and Guay simply to follow Omar and his men, who finally pulled into a mud-walled compound about southwest of Kandahar. This compound featured two fairly large, one-story rectangular buildings oriented north–south; though situated parallel to each other, they were separated by a courtyard perhaps as big as a soccer field. On the north end of the compound was another, smaller building whose purpose, as with the other structures, was hard to discern in an infrared image shot at night.

Omar's convoy pulled into the compound from the west, crossing a small bridge over a creek or gully. One truck stopped just beyond the bridge, and a couple of armed men got out and began pacing. The other two vehicles turned south, drove around the first building, and parked in the courtyard on the other side. There, several men got out of the vehicles and stood next to the big building on the west side of the courtyard, fuzzy white figures on the Predator video screen. The infrared image, created by detecting and displaying contrasts in heat, provided no way to discern the features of the men below or guess which one, if any, might be Omar. But having followed the three-vehicle convoy from Omar's compound to this one, those secretly watching from thousands of miles away were all but certain that the Predator had the Taliban leader and his inner circle in its sights.

“I've got the shot,” Predator mission commander Cooter told the CIA Global Response Center, certain Swanson and Guay could put a Hellfire into the men as they stood there next to their vehicles.

Cooter was told to sit tight for a while. Someone at Central Command believed the small building at the north end of the compound might be a mosque. Talking over a speaker phone in the GCS, Cooter conversed with his counterparts on the sixth floor of CIA headquarters and described precisely how he would direct his crew to fly the Predator so that even if the Hellfire's twenty-pound warhead missed the Taliban leaders, there would be no risk of hitting the small building. As the higher-ups debated what to do, though, the potential targets entered the large rectangular building, disappearing from view. Cooter was furious.

Adrenaline was flowing at the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, too, where Wald, Deptula, and Gersten had clustered their chairs at one end of the Crow's Nest to watch the silent infrared drama playing out on the TV monitor now feeding them the Predator's video. Wald was distracted, still seething that someone had been ready to launch a missile at a building in Kandahar without even giving the air commander a heads-up. Deptula and Gersten had their blood up. Only hours into the war, the Predator had handed the air commander and his team an opportunity to take out the Taliban's leader and perhaps his most senior subordinates—a strategic blow of incalculable proportions. Knocking out the Taliban leadership would leave the enemy in disarray, strip bin Laden of his protectors, and possibly lead others to turn on the Al Qaeda leader and serve him up to the United States.

While awaiting a decision from Central Command, Deptula instructed two Navy F-14C Tomcats carrying thousand-pound bombs to go into a holding pattern twenty miles south of Omar's latest stop. The Predator, with its tiny engine and pusher propeller, could circle above the Taliban's heads unnoticed, but a loitering F-14's roar might be heard for miles. Deptula wanted the two fighter planes far enough away to keep anyone in the compound below from hearing them, but ready to strike as soon as Franks gave the okay.

At CIA headquarters, Boyle walked outside and hurried to the GCS. If a shot was taken, he was required to order it. Swanson and Guay, with contractor pilot Big standing behind them, kept the Predator circling with its infrared camera on the compound as they waited to hear from Cooter what they were to do. A Hellfire's relatively small warhead would be useless against the large building Omar, or the man they presumed to be Omar, had entered, but now the Taliban leader was in a place that could be obliterated with ease by warplanes. The excitement in the GCS was palpable. The war was on. The Predator team had in their sights a target they knew was important. Fighter-bombers were on hand, just waiting for the Predator crew to lead them to the target.

Thirty minutes passed. Swanson kept Predator 3034 circling. Guay kept its infrared camera on the building they were sure Omar had entered. The others in the GCS kept watching. A half hour stretched into an hour. One hour stretched toward two. The men outside the truck parked near the bridge at the entrance of the compound in Afghanistan split up, came back together, and meandered in circles. The F-14s were long gone, thirsty for fuel, but two new F/A-18s had been summoned and were close enough to kill the Taliban's leader. Yet from the sixth floor of the CIA, from the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, from U.S. Central Command in Tampa, no orders came down.