Predator (42 page)

*   *   *

A few days before Ghengis launched her first Hellfire, the Wildfire team took on a new type of mission: using the Hellfire Predator's sensors to help troops on the ground. The first U.S. troops into Afghanistan were two Special Forces teams that infiltrated the country the night of October 19–20, flying in on MH-47E Chinook helicopters. One twelve-man detachment, Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) 595, landed in the mountains fifty miles south of Mazar-i-Sharif. The other, ODA 555, deployed in mountains farther northeast, above the Panjshir Valley. One of their missions was to call in air strikes on enemy troops, and on the radio, ODA 555 was “Tiger Zero One.” ODA 595 was “Tiger Zero Two.” Years later, Scott Swanson vividly remembered one radio call he had with a soldier from ODA 595 after the CAOC directed the Predator to help find some Taliban who had the Special Forces unit under fire near a former Soviet airfield at Bagram, just north of Kabul.

“Tiger Zero Two, this is Wildfire three four. Understand you need help,” Swanson said over the radio that day in early November 2001.

“Wildfire, I don't see you guys on my list. What are you?” the soldier replied.

“Cyclops,” Swanson explained, using radio code for a UAV.

“Oh, okay,” the soldier said. “So if you're not in the airplane, where are you?”

“The Land of the Big BX,” Swanson said, using a military nickname for the United States—in other words, the “land of the big Base Exchange,” where all the comforts of home can be found.

“Well, have a cold beer on me,” the soldier said, a sip of scorn in his voice.

The soldier's tone changed dramatically when the Predator's camera found the Taliban and put a laser spot on the target, allowing the intelligence analysts in the double-wide to pinpoint the enemy's geographic coordinates and pass them to a B-52 bomber. The B-52 dropped bombs, and the Taliban shooting stopped. There were no apparent survivors.

“I don't care if you guys are sitting at home drinking beer and playing video games or not,” the soldier told Swanson after the mission ended. “You can support us
any
day.”

 

13

NEVER MIND … WE'LL DO IT OURSELVES

He was an extraordinary enemy, perhaps more directly responsible than even Osama bin Laden for the American blood their Islamic fundamentalist followers shed in the final decade of the twentieth century. Born in 1944, according to most sources, Mohammed Atef (also known as Abu Hafs al-Masri, among many aliases) was a tall, thin-faced, heavily bearded, quietly imposing Egyptian. Atef went to Afghanistan in the 1980s to wage jihad against the Soviet Union with bin Laden and other Arab volunteers, and as the Soviets began leaving that country in 1988, he was among half a dozen jihadists who, with bin Laden, founded Al Qaeda. In the early 1990s, Atef traveled to Somalia to instigate and train fundamentalists there to fight U.S. troops, and in 1998 he was said to have masterminded the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. He preceded those attacks by publicizing, with other Al Qaeda members, a fatwa declaring it the duty of all Muslims to wage holy war on the United States and drive all Americans, military or civilian, out of the Persian Gulf region.

Three months after the embassy bombings, a federal grand jury in New York issued a 319-count indictment charging Atef, along with bin Laden and various others, with felonies that included “conspiracy to murder, bomb, and maim” and “conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against nationals of the United States.” The same day the indictment was made public, November 4, 1998, the State Department offered a five-million-dollar reward for information leading to the arrest or conviction anywhere in the world of either bin Laden or Atef for their roles in the bombings.

Following the success of his operations in Africa, Atef joined with Al Qaeda's second-ranking leader, fellow Egyptian and physician Ayman al-Zawahiri, in arguing that they should try to acquire biological and chemical weapons to use against the “enemies of Islam” rather than seeking the nuclear bombs bin Laden favored. In November 1999, Atef joined bin Laden and the later infamous Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in picking targets for “the planes operation,” as they called the plot to have suicide teams hijack airliners and crash them into U.S. military and civilian buildings. The next year, Atef publicly took credit for the bombing of the USS
Cole
, explaining that Al Qaeda had hoped the attack would provoke the United States into invading Afghanistan, where the jihadists could wage holy war against Americans just as they had against the Soviets.

Although Atef was the third most important member of Al Qaeda, he may have ranked higher in bin Laden's heart. Journalists who interviewed bin Laden in 1998, after the U.S. cruise missile strikes on Al Qaeda training camps, said Atef personally searched them. Two and a half years later, in January 2001, bin Laden and Atef arranged the marriage of Atef's fourteen-year-old daughter to bin Laden's seventeen-year-old son. At the videotaped wedding, bin Laden and Atef sat side by side, and bin Laden read a poem celebrating the bombing of the
Cole
.

With the exception of bin Laden and Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef was the highest of high-value targets for the United States. And with the United States waging war in Afghanistan, he was on the run.

*   *   *

On Thursday, November 15, after several days of intense U.S. air strikes in Afghanistan, reports that Mohammed Atef had been killed began filtering out of the country. The next day, when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld visited the naval training center at Great Lakes, Illinois, he was asked if he could confirm those reports.

“I have seen those reports,” Rumsfeld said. “Do I know for a fact that that's the case? I don't. I suspect—the reports I've received seem authoritative.”

Later that Friday, a Defense Department spokesman added a wrinkle. Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem said U.S. forces had hit a “series of targets” in Afghanistan over the past week that were thought to be Taliban or Al Qaeda “command and control.” After one such strike “a couple of days ago,” he said, “intelligence reports picking up discussions” indicated that Atef had been killed, but “we haven't been able to confirm that.”

On November 17, the day after Stufflebeem's comments, Taliban spokesman Mullah Najibullah, speaking from a town near Kandahar, told the Associated Press that Atef and seven other Al Qaeda members had been killed in a U.S. air strike three days earlier, though he refused to say where, and there was no guarantee he was telling the truth. Later that Saturday, quoting “U.S. officials,” CNN reported that after a bomb strike “south of Kabul”—no date was specified—the “United States intercepted communications from people sifting through the bombed wreckage who made frantic statements saying Atef had been killed.”

In succeeding days, and over succeeding years, various accounts of how Mohammed Atef died would emerge. The accounts often contradicted one another on fundamental facts, from the exact date of his death, to the precise place he died, to the aircraft and weapon or weapons used to kill him. Some accounts said Atef was killed in Kabul; some said in Gardez. Some said he was found by a Predator and killed by bombs from a fighter plane; some said a Hellfire missile launched by a Predator killed him; some reports included no mention of the Predator at all. The date Atef died has been reported to be anywhere from November 12 to November 16.

The nature and pace of military operations and the number of air strikes U.S. forces conducted in Afghanistan during October and November 2001 likely make it impossible—especially without access to relevant classified information that still exists—to verify any account of Atef's death beyond the shadow of a doubt. But a number of former senior officers who were in the U.S. military chain of command at the time, and who have never before disclosed their recollections of this event, retain distinct and vivid memories of how they believe Atef died—and all of them agree that the role played by the Predator was central. What they believe about how Atef died, however, cannot be considered proven fact, for as one explained, “We didn't control the site, we didn't recover the body or anything. It's been confirmed by the process of elimination.”

As with the escape of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, the recollections of participants or others who witnessed via Predator video the action believed to have eliminated Al Qaeda's chief planner of terrorist and military operations disagree on some points. Taken together and carefully weighed, though, they shed new light on what at the time was the most important blow U.S. forces had ever dealt Al Qaeda's leadership, and still ranks as perhaps the second most important, behind only the killing of bin Laden himself. The Predator made it possible—the Predator and a trip to RadioShack.

*   *   *

By Monday, November 12, 2001, there were two ground control stations in the glade on the CIA campus and, as Director George Tenet had promised President Bush, the Wildfire team was flying two Predators at a time. That afternoon, Washington time, Major Darran Jergensen was in the Trailer Park's original GCS, commanding Predator 3037; sitting in the pilot's seat was Ghengis, the former fighter pilot. It was nine and a half hours later in Afghanistan and already dark when the drone's infrared camera began following three vehicles heading toward Kabul, Afghanistan's capital. CIA paramilitaries on the ground had passed Langley a tip that the little convoy was carrying high-value targets, possibly one or more senior Al Qaeda figures.

Exactly who rode inside the vehicles was unclear; nor could the Predator's cameras help figure that out. Popular misconceptions aside, there was no way at the time to recognize a face at the resolution provided by a Predator's daylight TV camera, and its infrared sensor was unable to detect facial features at all. Depending on how the infrared sensor was set, a person simply showed up as “white hot” or “black hot.” The convoy's signature, however, seemed to confirm the tip. One vehicle was an SUV, one was a pickup truck with armed men in back, and they were moving toward Kabul at night—despite a Taliban curfew imposed as the war began that was still in effect five weeks later. As the convoy neared Kabul, moreover, the Predator was able to provide some supporting intelligence, for while its “eyes” were unable to detect who was in the vehicles, the drone also carried electronic “ears.”

More than a year before the war, during the Summer Project of 2000, Major Mark Cooter had been concerned when Taliban MiG-21 fighter planes came looking for what to them was an unidentified flying object circling over Tarnak Farms: the unarmed Predator. As the Summer Project team made plans before 9/11 to resume reconnaissance flights over Afghanistan in 2001, Cooter decided they needed a better way to receive warnings of MiG launches or other threats, so he asked Big Safari to put a standard, unsecure, multiband military radio on the Predator. When Bill Grimes, Big Safari's director, questioned the need for such a radio on a drone flying a covert mission, Cooter replied, “Mr. Grimes, I don't want to
talk
to the good guys, I want to
listen
to the bad guys.”

Cooter next asked one of the Summer Project's communications specialists, Master Sergeant Cliff Gross, to figure out how to feed what the radio's antenna picked up over Afghanistan to linguists able to understand Pashtun, Arabic, and other relevant languages. Gross went through a carton of cigarettes and a two-liter bottle of Coke studying the matter, then came back to Cooter and said, “If you want this operational, I need twelve dollars and ninety-five cents.” Cooter gave him a twenty.

Gross paid a visit to RadioShack and returned with a headset for a home phone. He soldered it to the inside wall of the ground control station, next to a speaker for the drone's radio, and plugged the headset jack into a secure telephone. Now language specialists at other locations could call in to that phone before a Predator mission, have the GCS crew leave the receiver off the hook, and listen to what the radio was picking up over Afghanistan on known “bad guy frequencies.”

On November 12, linguists were listening to Predator 3037's multiband radio as the drone flew above the three-vehicle convoy headed toward Kabul. As the vehicles approached the city, the eavesdroppers picked up a conversation between someone in the convoy and a man elsewhere who said something like “we're waiting for you at the traffic circle.” The Predator crew had already seen a vehicle parked at one of Kabul's several large traffic circles, and precisely as the intercepted call suggested, the convoy soon rendezvoused with that vehicle and followed it into the city. The Predator followed.

The suspected Al Qaeda convoy finally stopped in front of a house in Kabul's diplomatic quarter, Wazir Akbar Khan, a neighborhood of mostly two-story villas dating from the 1950s. After emerging from their vehicles, the convoy's occupants stood outside in the dark for a few minutes, then entered the house. Recollections vary on precisely how much time went by, but as the Predator orbited, keeping its electronic eyes on the building, Director Tenet showed up in the CIA's Global Response Center. His military liaison, Air Force Lieutenant General Soup Campbell, was also there.

Soon mission commander Jergensen was told by an Air Force liaison in the Global Response Center that his crew should watch the house in Kabul and get ready to talk fighter-bombers onto the target, which the building had now become. The Wildfire team now included a former F-15E weapon systems officer, radio call sign “Dewey,” who had arrived soon after the war began and who, like former F-15E pilot Ghengis, was skilled at talking planes onto targets. Now Dewey was summoned from the double-wide to the GCS. As the Predator continued its orbit, Dewey sat between Ghengis and the sensor operator, studying maps and freeze-frame images of the house and its neighborhood. He was putting together the data he would need to conduct a modified nine-line brief and lead incoming fighters to the target.