Predator (7 page)

Politically, the Blue brothers were dedicated to helping President Ronald Reagan win the Cold War, which in the early 1980s appeared increasingly likely to get hot. The Soviet Union and its chief allies in Latin America, Castro and the Sandinistas, had been growing bellicose in recent years, a factor that in 1980 helped Republican Reagan make Democrat Jimmy Carter a one-term president. The year before, the Soviets had invaded Afghanistan, Castro had celebrated his twentieth year in power, and the Sandinistas had forced Neal and Linden Blue's former business partner—and more recently dictator in his own right—Anastasio Somoza Debayle to flee Nicaragua. Somoza's overthrow was hastened by international outrage over human rights violations by his National Guard, whose atrocities were brought into clear focus when one of its soldiers was filmed murdering American TV newsman Bill Stewart in cold blood on June 20, 1979. President Carter refused to let Somoza settle in the United States; just over a year later, the exiled caudillo was assassinated in spectacular fashion in Asunción, Paraguay. Somoza died in a hail of bazooka and machine-gun fire that shredded him and his yellow Mercedes as it drove by a house that hid his ambushers.

Three years after Somoza's assassination, the CIA began supporting Nicaraguan rebels whose goal was to overthrow the Sandinistas, who had established a dictatorship of their own, leftist brand. The CIA-backed insurgents, mostly ex–National Guardsmen, became known as the Contras, from
counterrevolutionaries
. On September 1, 1983, the same year the Contras were organized, a Soviet fighter plane shot down a South Korean airliner over the Sea of Japan, killing all 269 passengers and crew on board. An outraged President Reagan went on national television to denounce the Soviets for the plane's downing and to announce stiff sanctions against Moscow. A couple of weeks later, the White House further announced that, to help pilots avoid Soviet airspace, the president would allow all nations free use of a revolutionary new constellation of navigation satellites the U.S. military was launching.

The still-incomplete array would consist of twenty-four satellites circling the earth every twelve hours in six orbital planes while emitting continuous radio signals. Read by the right kind of receiver, these radio signals would tell users their location, velocity, and the time of day with unprecedented precision. For the first time in history, humans or machines would be able to know where they were within a few yards, how fast they were traveling down to fractions of a mile per hour, and what time it was within a millionth of a second. Navigation Signal Timing and Ranging Global Positioning System was the name of this new technology; initially referred to by the acronym NAVSTAR, it later became known as GPS.

Interested in technology since he was a youngster, and familiar since his
Blue Bird
days with the difficulties of aerial navigation, Neal Blue found his imagination fired by the coming availability of GPS. He began following the system's development avidly, and when he heard of a Silicon Valley company named Trimble Navigation Ltd. that was already making products based on GPS applications, he flew to California to meet the firm's founder. He came back with a new idea: theoretically, an unmanned aircraft equipped with a GPS receiver connected to an autopilot could be flown with great accuracy to any point on the globe that its aerodynamics and fuel capacity would enable it to reach. If such a drone also had a couple of hundred pounds of TNT in its nose, and was built cheaply enough, it could be a poor man's cruise missile.

Neal had been following the turmoil in Nicaragua closely, and now it occurred to him that the Contras—or a covert ally of theirs, perhaps—might use a weaponized drone to destroy Managua's military aviation fuel supplies and thereby ground a fleet of attack helicopters the Soviets had given the Sandinistas in 1984. The heavily armed Soviet choppers had been chewing up the CIA-backed Contras. Well aware of the domestic and international pressure to stop supporting the Contras, Neal reasoned that the GPS-guided flying bombs might be just the covert weapon the Reagan administration needed. “You could launch them from behind the line of sight, so you would have total deniability,” Neal explained some years later.

Neal also believed that if the GPS-guided drones were inexpensive enough, the U.S. military could use them to stop the swarms of Soviet tanks that analysts expected to pour through the Fulda Gap, lowlands on the border between West and East Germany, if Moscow decided to invade Western Europe. The risk of a Soviet invasion of West Germany had preoccupied Neal for a long time, partly because his wife was an East German by birth. Anne Prause's father had smuggled his family out of the Communist German Democratic Republic before the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. For Neal, meeting Anne was one of the highlights of the
Yale Daily News
Asian Expedition—she had been a stewardess on his Pan Am flight to Europe—and they married in 1962. Over the years, they had talked a lot about the need to stop the Communists, and about the horrors of indiscriminate Allied bombing of Germany during World War II, which Anne and her family had witnessed. The precision of GPS-guided drones, Neal reasoned, could prevent such tragedies.

By the early 1980s, then, Neal Blue felt certain he had perceived the need for a unique new weapon. Brash as ever, he concluded that he and his brother, Linden, should look for the right opportunity to add the development of an armed, inexpensive, GPS-guided drone to their eclectic business portfolio.

*   *   *

One day in the summer of 1985, Neal read a report in the
Wall Street Journal
that Chevron Corporation, which the previous year had bought Gulf Oil for $13.3 billion in a deal financed largely by borrowing, was “circulating an informational packet among prospective buyers ‘identifying assets that might be for sale.'” Among the former Gulf properties Chevron wanted to spin off was GA Technologies Inc., a nuclear energy and defense research company in La Jolla, California, a palmy suburb of San Diego where Neal happened to own a house already. Neal and Linden's company, Cordillera Corporation, had just finished its annual planning meeting, and afterward Neal had decided that Cordillera should shift 50 percent of its business portfolio into high-technology products and companies. When Neal heard about GA Technologies, he thought,
My God, this fits perfectly.

Founded in 1955, GA Technologies was originally General Atomic, a division of nuclear submarine builder General Dynamics Corporation formed to explore peaceful uses of atomic energy. Renamed after it was acquired by Gulf, GA Technologies now had a staff of fifteen hundred—many of them scientists and engineers—and revenue of $170 million in fiscal year 1984. The company's businesses included building nuclear research reactors, experimenting with nuclear fusion, and doing research under Pentagon contracts for President Reagan's new Strategic Defense Initiative, the “Star Wars” program to create exotic ground- and space-based weapons able to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles. Neal had been interested in nuclear power since 1947, when experts first began saying that atomic energy would one day provide a clean form of power too cheap to measure, and GA Technologies was just the sort of high-tech enterprise he wanted to own.

In August 1986, the
Wall Street Journal
reported that Denver businessmen Neal and Linden Blue were buying GA Technologies for “more than $50 million.” (The price was closer to $55 million, Neal revealed years later, with more than $20 million in cash from their Canadian oil and gas holdings going into the purchase; the rest was borrowed.) GA Technologies had expanded into defense work earlier in the 1980s, when its president was Harold Agnew, a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. Now Neal Blue decided to expand the company's defense work into an entirely different undertaking: unmanned aircraft.

*   *   *

As his new employees pondered how to get into the drone business, Blue found someone to lead the way, an aviator who knew a lot not only about airplanes but also about the military, the Pentagon, and Congress. He also happened to be looking for a job.

Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., fifty-four years old when a banker friend introduced him to Neal, was a retired U.S. Navy rear admiral who had been one of that service's hottest fighter pilots for three decades. Born and raised in the Bronx, big in every dimension, Cassidy was brassy and gruff, and he could cuss like the sailor he had been his entire adult life. He could also employ Irish altar boy charm when it suited him. He loved to fly, and he liked to say he enjoyed it because it was complicated, which made it satisfying, and you could do it sitting down. A “good stick” in the cockpit, Cassidy left college after two years to become a naval aviation cadet, winning his wings in 1953 and finishing his academic degree later.

Cassidy started out in propeller-driven World War II F6F Hellcats and went on to pilot every type of jet fighter the Navy possessed and several Air Force planes to boot, flying all over the world. During the Vietnam War, when better-turning Russian-built MiG fighters were besting American pilots in aerial duels, Cassidy was selected to fly MiG-17s and MiG-21s, acquired through third-party nations, in secret mock dogfights conducted to develop new U.S. tactics. He later commanded Miramar Naval Air Station, home of the famous Navy Fighter Weapons School just outside San Diego known as “Top Gun.” When Hollywood director Tony Scott came to Miramar to film the eponymous 1986 hit movie starring Tom Cruise, Cassidy not only played himself in a cameo as base commander, but also flew an F-5 Tiger the script called the “black MiG-28.”

In all, Cassidy logged about six thousand hours in the cockpit over the course of his thirty-four-year Navy career. He also did several tours behind a desk in the Pentagon, including one year as an “action officer” and a second stint as director of the Navy's Aircraft Weapons Requirements Branch, followed by three years running the Tactical Readiness Division for the chief of naval operations. Cassidy knew how the sausage was made in the military-industrial complex—how defense equipment got marketed, sold, developed, tested, and put into service. He knew what aircraft the armed services owned, what aircraft they wanted, how they decided what they needed for the future, and how hard it was to get a new program started.

Privately, Cassidy thought Neal Blue's flying bomb drone idea was dumb, though naturally he didn't say so in his initial conversations with Blue about working for him. He knew about target drones and the parachute-recovery remotely piloted vehicles used in Vietnam to little effect; and as a fighter pilot, he knew you couldn't go after heavily armored Russian tanks with little GPS-guided drones. He also knew there was no demand for such a weapon within the armed services. Furthermore, even if the military decided it wanted a drone like the one Blue had in mind, Pentagon regulations would require that the services first write a formal Operational Requirements Document saying what the aircraft had to be able to do, then hold a big competition for a contract to build it—a competition in which a relatively small company like General Atomics would be presented with criteria it likely couldn't meet. Once Blue hired him, though, Cassidy learned that his new boss wasn't just daydreaming, and he wasn't going to be happy until his company was building GPS-guided drones. After all, Neal Blue had made several fortunes in his life by investing where others saw no opportunity. As Blue liked to say, “My golden rule is to always buy straw hats in the winter.” So Cassidy got busy.

One thing he and Blue quickly agreed on was that the newly renamed General Atomics would develop a drone on its own, without government involvement, adopting the “build it and they will come” principle. Blue's high school friend Norman Augustine, a highly successful and much-admired aerospace executive, had published a popular book in 1983 about the defense acquisition system containing pithy observations he called Augustine's Laws. One law addressed the inexorable rise in the cost of developing aerospace technology: “In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft.” The Air Force, Navy, and Marines, Augustine added, would have to share the plane. The last thing Blue wanted to do was get tied up in the “defense acquisition system” his friend Augustine had lampooned, a sclerotic bureaucracy that could mangle the execution of even the most elegant technological ideas.

Not long after joining General Atomics, Cassidy met Bill Sadler, an aviation entrepreneur in Scottsdale, Arizona, who had designed and was selling a single-seat “ultralight” plane that Cassidy thought had possibilities. Built for sport, the aluminum monoplane had an open pod cockpit made of fiberglass and Kevlar, a pusher propeller in back of that, and twin booms leading back to a horizontal stabilizer. The configuration resembled a 1950s British fighter jet called the Vampire, so its designer called it the Sadler Vampire.

Sadler, an electrical engineer with a master's degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was intrigued by the idea of turning his sport plane into an “attack drone” so inexpensive that thousands could be sold. After a meeting in June 1987 with the Blues and Cassidy at General Atomics' headquarters, he signed a time-and-materials contract to convert his Sadler Vampire into a drone with a computerized autopilot whose guidance would come from a GPS receiver. Sadler took one of his ultralights, shortened the wingspan from thirty to eighteen feet, gave it a smaller tail, and then installed a Trimble Navigation GPS receiver and connected it to the autopilot.

Soon Cassidy was flying from San Diego up to Phoenix about once a month to meet with Sadler and gauge his progress. They would rendezvous at Sadler's house in Scottsdale before sunrise and drive to Gila River Memorial Field, an abandoned single-runway airstrip on a dusty Native American reservation fourteen miles south of Phoenix. Sadler would haul the prototype down from his shop in Scottsdale on a trailer, folding its wings up into a triangle to fit. The two men had to launch early to catch the signals from the only four GPS satellites the military had deployed so far, and one of the men had to be in the cockpit to take off and land and make sure the plane flew properly. Cassidy could fly anything, but he was too big to fit into the little pod cockpit, so Sadler served as safety pilot during the tests, getting the plane airborne and remaining ready to take over when necessary. With each passing month, the autopilot did more of the flying. The goal was to get the plane to the point where its autopilot alone could fly it to waypoints using GPS signals to navigate. Part of the challenge was to program the autopilot so that it wouldn't put the plane into a stall or otherwise cause it to go out of control.