Predator (40 page)

“You'll get over it,” Deptula soothed.

*   *   *

The officer taking notes wrote later that night that the “actual fire order” for the first Hellfire launch by a Predator in combat was issued by Franks to the Centcom director of intelligence, Army Brigadier General Jeff Kimmons, who relayed it to an Army lieutenant colonel serving as Centcom's liaison in the CIA Global Response Center, who relayed it to a CIA official, who relayed it to Boyle, who then gave the order to fire to the crew in the ground control station.

By now—5:17 a.m. on Monday, October 8, in Afghanistan—the Predator was circling a building half a mile south of the compound where the Hellfire shot had been taken. The drone's cameras had followed some people who fled there in one of the vehicles from Mullah Omar's former convoy. Now officers at Centcom and analysts from the National Imagery and Mapping Agency were debating whether
that
building was a mosque, with the intelligence analysts sure that it was. “Picture up,” the officer at the CAOC taking notes wrote. “Boyle watching mosque area. Centcom guys have no idea what's going on. Argument between Centcom and NIMA over mosque. No coordination at all.”

In his memoir, Franks wrote that he was in the Fusion Cell at Centcom headquarters in Tampa, as the SCIF where his Predator screen was located was called. He saw the building the Predator was watching as a “large, multistory house behind a fortress-like wall” and figured that those inside were Taliban leaders. By his account, some F/A-18s (planes that the officer taking notes in the CAOC recorded as F-14s) were within striking distance. Franks ordered the CAOC to direct the fighters to the scene while he called Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to request clearance to bomb the building “as a high collateral damage target.” Rumsfeld said he would call Bush and get back in touch as soon as possible.

“Within five minutes, President Bush had approved the target for immediate strike,” Franks wrote, but when he got back to the Fusion Cell, an officer calling from CIA headquarters was on the phone with a member of Franks's staff. “Don't shoot,” the officer said. “We think this building is a mosque.” According to his memoir, Franks, with his legal officer concurring, called Wald and ordered him to have the fighters drop their bombs anyway.

In the GCS, contractor pilot Big raised the fighters on the Predator's unsecured radio and talked them onto the target building. With Wald's okay, Deptula had a colonel on the CAOC floor pass approval through the AWACS for the planes to drop their bombs. “Two on one building, two on the second building,” the officer taking notes wrote. The target, Franks wrote in his book, “disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke.”

Soon afterward, Wald was surprised—and annoyed—to get a call from Jumper. The Air Force chief of staff said he realized this was Wald's turf, but he wanted to be sure Wald knew that the people thought to be Taliban leaders had fled those buildings before the bombs hit. Jumper had seen them go on the Predator's video.

“Chief, are you watching this in real time?” Wald demanded, clearly suggesting Jumper shouldn't be.
Who else has got a Predator feed?
Wald wondered.
Mullah Omar?

As the buildings fell, the time was 5:48 a.m., Monday, in Afghanistan. The Predator had thirty minutes left before its dwindling fuel would require flying back to its base, a trip of about six hours, given the drone's slow cruising speed. Contractor pilot Big, who had taken over for Swanson, turned the drone north for home.

As the Predator poked along, Big was instructed to fly over Kandahar's airport, which was on the way. U.S. bombers had hit the airfield earlier that night, but three concrete buildings Osama bin Laden was known to have visited in the past were still standing. Boyle got CIA higher-ups to approve putting the Predator's remaining Hellfire into the middle one of those three buildings. Getting rid of the second missile would reduce the Predator's aerodynamic drag, making it easier for the drone to get home, and the airfield was a valid target in any event. Guay had given up the sensor operator's seat to another Air Force enlisted man, who after Big pulled the trigger kept the laser designator on the structure and scored a direct hit. How much damage the strike did, or whether anyone was inside the little building, was impossible to tell, but the Predator's camera showed debris blowing out of the structure's back wall.

A few minutes later, Boyle's phone rang.

“What the fuck, over?” Wald demanded. “You'll get no more fighters from us.”

Wald then called Franks, told him about Jumper's call, and complained about the “screwed up command and control of the Predator.” Franks agreed with Wald. The CIA's armed Predator should be part of the CAOC's daily Air Tasking Order, a document listing every allied aircraft flying in the theater of operations by radio call sign, aircraft type, and mission. The CIA's Predator operators should coordinate with the CAOC, not just fly around independently, even if their primary mission
was
to hunt “high-value targets” such as Osama bin Laden.

As soon as they were off the phone, Wald called Centcom operations director Renuart again and told him about Jumper's call. “Who is in control?” Wald fumed. “I'm ready to fold up and come home.”

In his memoir, Franks also reported getting a call about Jumper's observations on Omar's escape. “Within an hour, Dick Myers called on the STU-III,” Franks wrote, referring to a secure telephone. “‘Tom,' he said, ‘John Jumper has been watching the Predator scene at Air Force ops here in the Pentagon, and he tells me that the principals left the house before the bombs went in. He knows this is your business, says he's just trying to be helpful.'”

After calling Rumsfeld to thank him for his and Bush's quick reaction to his request to bomb what others thought was a mosque, Franks wrote, he called Myers back and complained about what he viewed as Jumper's meddling. Franks then quotes himself as telling Myers, “I'd appreciate it if you would remove the fucking Predator downlink from the Building.”

The next day, the Predator video feed into the Pentagon was cut off. A Predator video feed to the White House, though, remained in place, and had an avid viewer: President Bush. As Bob Woodward reported in his book
Bush at War
, on October 10, 2001, three days after the Afghan campaign began, Bush brought up the Predator during a National Security Council meeting in the White House Situation Room. “Why can't we fly more than one Predator at a time?” Bush asked, remarking on how impressed he was with the drone.

“We're going to try to get two simultaneously,” offered CIA Director George Tenet, alluding to a plan his agency and the Air Force were working on to add a second ground control station to the Trailer Park and get more Hellfire Predators to the base in Uzbekistan.

“We ought to have 50 of these things,” Bush said.

Later that day, Bush attended a news conference at FBI headquarters to announce a new list of the twenty-two “Most Wanted Terrorists.” Led by bin Laden, the list included his top two deputies, Egyptians Ayman al-Zawahiri and Mohammed Atef, the Al Qaeda military commander, whose daughter was married to bin Laden's son. “Bush took a classified version for himself that had photos, brief biographies and personality sketches of the 22 men,” Woodward reported. “When he returned to his desk in the Oval Office, he slipped the list of names and faces into a drawer, ready at hand, his own personal scorecard for the war.”

*   *   *

In the early days of the war, firing missiles was only a small part of what the Hellfire Predators did over Afghanistan. With 3034 and 3037 the only two remaining Predators modified to carry the missiles, with only a dozen or so Hellfire Ks left at their operating base in Uzbekistan after the first night of the war, with only one Air Force pilot experienced in firing them, and with bin Laden, Omar, and other Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders gone to ground, U.S. commanders had as much or greater need of the Predator's cameras and other sensors as for its weapons.

The first night of the war, before the botched pursuit of Mullah Omar began, the Wildfire team had flown 3034 undetected near Taliban anti-aircraft missile batteries and helped B-2 stealth bombers flying from Missouri bypass that threat. Rather than go through the CAOC in Saudi Arabia, however, the Wildfire team communicated with the B-2s through a special data distribution system. Following the first night's confusion over command and control during the Omar chase, Wald and Franks insisted the CIA-controlled Hellfire Predators be part of the CAOC's daily Air Tasking Order. After that, and for the next four or five days, the Hellfire Predators divided their time between searching for Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders—with help from CIA paramilitaries, tribal allies, and other agents on the ground—while also helping manned aircraft hit targets selected by the military. If the manned aircraft carried GPS-guided bombs, the Predator crew would provide a target's geographic coordinates; if it carried laser-guided bombs, the Predator crew would provide a laser spot or talk the attacking planes onto their targets.

The number of fixed targets U.S. commanders wanted to hit, though, diminished quickly. The first night of the war, U.S. and British warplanes and ships firing cruise missiles hit thirty-one Taliban airfields, air defenses, communications facilities, Al Qaeda terrorist training camps, and related sites. The second day, they struck only thirteen such targets. “We're not running out of targets, Afghanistan is,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld cracked on the third day of the war at his daily Pentagon news briefing with Joint Chiefs Chairman Myers. But targets worth striking were “emerging as we continue,” Rumsfeld noted, meaning Al Qaeda and Taliban forces were being hit whenever they could be found.

The Hellfire Predator was proving useful in both finding and striking targets. A given Predator mission typically lasted twenty to twenty-four hours, with four to six hours on each end needed for transit time. At the CAOC's behest, the Wildfire crew would sometimes watch a particular location for evidence of Al Qaeda or Taliban fighters for hours; every couple of hours, pilots and sensor operators in the GCS would shift in and out of the seat. When a bomb strike was ordered, the Predator crew would guide manned aircraft onto the targets. One Predator operator at the Trailer Park, a former F-15E Strike Eagle pilot, had dropped a lot of bombs on Serb targets in Kosovo two years earlier and was especially good as a virtual forward air controller, which required knowing how to conduct a “Nine-line Brief.” In a nine-line, a forward air controller talks a pilot onto a target by providing instructions and descriptions in nine standard steps, starting with “initial point,” meaning where to begin the bomb or missile run, and ending with “egress direction,” meaning which way the attacking pilot should depart the scene of a strike.

During the first weeks of the war, the Wildfire crews used the Predator's cameras and laser designator to help F/A-18, F-14, F-15, and F-16 strike aircraft, plus B-1B, B-2, and B-52 bombers find and hit targets ranging from Taliban helicopters found on the ground by the drone to groups of Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters detected by its cameras. With the enemy on the run, the Wildfire team worked frequently with AC-130U “Spooky” and AC-130H “Spectre” gunships—fearsome special operations ground attack aircraft equipped with side-firing 40 millimeter and 105 millimeter cannons and a Gatling gun. The gunships were called in several times after the Predator, lurking high above for hours, tracked men in trucks or SUVs to compounds or buildings clearly under guard by enemy fighters.

Sometimes, after a bomb strike on such a target, the Predator would help track and attack what the Wildfire crews took to calling “squirters” and those in the CAOC usually called “spitters”—survivors running from the scene of a strike. Sometimes, the Predator crew would be directed to launch a Hellfire at squirters as they climbed into a truck or SUV or some other vehicle to flee, or simply ran for cover. For CAOC commanders, the Predator's cameras were vital to maintaining the so-called chain of custody—the proof that their targets were indeed people positively identified as enemy fighters—required to attack.

Despite their initial frustration and Wald's anger over the CIA and Franks controlling the Hellfire Predator without consulting him, commanders at the CAOC found the drone extremely valuable in corroborating intelligence tips from other sources about activity on the ground. One officer recalled that CIA paramilitaries or other intelligence sources might report, “There's a meeting at such and such a location at such and such a time. So the Predator would go there and look. And sure enough, there'd be a group of people entering. You'd watch them enter, you'd loiter, you'd wait till the meeting came out. Then you'd watch the vehicles go away and then you'd assign an AC-130 to go take out those vehicles. We did that multiple times. You've got bad guys meeting, you don't take out the building with large-scale weapons because you've got potential for collateral damage.”

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld quickly became a Predator enthusiast. “In those first days of combat in Afghanistan, the Predator and other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) conclusively proved their value to our military and intelligence personnel,” Rumsfeld wrote in his memoir
Known and Unknown
—though the Predator was actually the only UAV in use in Afghanistan during the first month of the war. Rumsfeld added in a note that “with coalition operations underway in Afghanistan, George Tenet and I began to sort out Defense-CIA joint Predator operations. We came to an agreement over who owned and paid for the assets, where they would operate, and who would ‘pull the trigger' on the very few UAVs that were armed at the time.” Left unmentioned by Rumsfeld was that after the escape of Mullah Omar the first night of the war, the CIA often coordinated with Centcom but never again deferred to Franks before taking a shot at a high-value target.