Predator (56 page)

In May 1999, the first test flight of a Predator rigged to guide bombs to targets ended with the drone nose down on the runway. It wasn't funny at the time, but Colonel Snake Clark (left) and Big Safari Director Bill Grimes (right) later shared a laugh with Air Force Secretary F. Whitten Peters when Clark was presented with a model memorializing the accident.

Special operations helicopter pilot and lifelong computer geek Captain Scott Swanson became Big Safari's first Predator pilot. Swanson was at the drone's controls when the Predator's cameras spotted Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in September 2000.

Master Sergeant Jeff A. “Gunny” Guay, Big Safari's first Predator sensor operator, was an innovative, resourceful renegade who was never afraid to stir things up. Guay would aim the laser beam that guided the Predator's first lethal missile strike.

As a cocky fighter pilot in Southeast Asia in 1970, Captain Johnny Jumper (third from right) learned to love laser-guided weapons, which hit targets accurately from much safer altitudes for fliers.

As commander of Air Combat Command, General John Jumper decided in 2000 to arm the Predator with laser-guided Hellfire missiles, a project he sped up after some senior officials at the CIA and National Security Council grew interested in using the drone to kill Osama bin Laden.

NSC counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke believed that President Clinton had given the CIA all the authority it needed to kill Osama bin Laden following the Al Qaeda terrorist bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. In the months before 9/11, Clarke was particularly eager to send the armed Predator to kill the terrorist leader before Al Qaeda killed Americans again.

In January 2001, Predator 3034 was chained by its landing gear struts to a concrete pad on a test range at China Lake Naval Weapons Station for a “static ground launch” of a Hellfire to see whether a missile rocketing off its wing would rip the aircraft apart.

Master Sergeant Leo Glovka (left) and Captain Curt Hawes stand triumphantly over the target tank they hit on February 21, 2001, with one of the first Hellfires ever launched from an airborne Predator.

Predator 3034 was initially painted white and bore the marking “WA”—the two-letter base code for Nellis Air Force Base, where the first Hellfire tests were conducted. When 3034 launched the first-ever lethal drone strike, in Afghanistan, the aircraft was painted air superiority grey and bore no markings at all.

In the spring of 2001, the CIA hired a contractor to build a residence typical of Afghanistan as a test target for Predator-launched Hellfire missiles. The adobe building constructed at China Lake bore so little resemblance to an Afghan villa that test participants dubbed it “Taco Bell” and hung up a mock sign advertising “Hellfire Tacos, 3/99¢.”

To help the CIA determine whether a Predator-launched Hellfire could kill Osama bin Laden indoors, plywood silhouettes and air pressure and temperature gauges were placed inside the Taco Bell for test shots fired in May and June 2001.

After one Hellfire shot in June, the test team inspecting the interior of the Taco Bell found bits of brick and metal a bit larger than BBs in the plywood silhouettes. They also found multiple holes in the rinds of watermelons, which, to save time and money, had been substituted for the manikins usually used to measure a weapon's lethality.