The Finish (15 page)

McChrystal would be handed the entire Afghan command soon after Obama’s election, turning over JSOC to Vice Admiral William McRaven, who signed a secret agreement in early 2009 with the new CIA director, Leon Panetta, spelling out guidelines for expanded cooperation. So at the same time Obama was pushing the CIA to find bin Laden, JSOC was deepening its relationship with the spy agency worldwide.

The right weapon had evolved. Just nine years earlier, President Bill Clinton had complained to General Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs, about his lack of options in going after Osama bin Laden. “You know, it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of a helicopter into the middle of their camp,” he said. It was the wish of a man who had more experience with the military in movies than real life. In order to rappel into an enemy’s camp, you first had to know where it was and who exactly was there. From time to time, as we have seen, the United States had obtained reasonably current intel about bin Laden’s location, but the ability to act swiftly and effectively on that knowledge, at acceptable levels of risk, did not yet exist.

Now it did. No matter how one felt about the wisdom of invading Iraq, or the seemingly unending conflict in Afghanistan, a near decade of combat had matured a generation of warriors and tools, battle tested and custom-made for finding and killing terrorists. This is what author Bob Woodward had hinted at when he caused a stir in a 2008 interview with
60 Minutes
by referring to a “secret operational capability.” It briefly inspired wild speculation about a crash military research program like the Manhattan Project in World War II that produced the atom bomb. Some imagined a “terrifying radar cannon” or a “thermal signature” device that could effectively fingerprint a target from twenty thousand feet. But there was no one secret weapon. The new tool was
everything
: reconstituted human spy networks, supercomputers, state-of-the-art software, global surveillance, and elite commando units.

There was, however, one more critical piece, one of the most dramatic developments in the history of modern warfare. One that began not at some secret lab with cutting-edge scientists, but on an airstrip in Hungary, with an air force colonel they called Snake.

James Clark had planned on a career in politics when he graduated from Catholic University in 1973. He had it all mapped out: law school, legal practice, then a run for Congress . . . But he had accepted an ROTC scholarship to help pay for school, and when he graduated the air force invited him to fly fighter jets. It was a thrill he found hard to leave behind, so his four-year commitment turned into ten, and then ten turned into a career. His call sign was “Snake.” He was based in Taszár, Hungary, in 1995 when he got the chance to play with something then called the Gnat. It illustrated how a good idea doesn’t always require a blinding stab into the unknown, because the Gnat was basically a glider with an Austrian skimobile engine. It would improve, of course: its surveillance tools would become state-of-the art and its engine virtually silent. Its hover time would greatly lengthen and its optics would become astonishing. It would eventually carry its own missiles. Called the Predator, it rapidly became the most sought-after weapon in the air force’s multibillion-dollar arsenal.

The drone, or, as the air force prefers, the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), was not new. Radio-controlled aircraft were used during World War II. President John F. Kennedy’s older brother, Joe, was killed on a secret mission when his specially engineered B-24, designed to fly itself to a German target after Kennedy had bailed out, exploded prematurely. Drones had been used in Vietnam, and the Israelis had used them to good effect over Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley in 1982. Several of the Israeli models were purchased by the CIA, which turned them over to the San Diego defense contractor General Atomics for further development. Clark got four of them in Hungary during this experimental phase. He housed them in small tents out on the runway at Taszár. They were an immediate hit. Soldiers had long sought the ability to see over the next hill and the Gnat gave them a sixty-mile panorama from a platform that could stay airborne more or less permanently, flown in twelve-hour shifts. Manned aircraft could stay aloft for only as long as a pilot could stand it, or until his fuel ran out. Satellites provided a nice view when they happened to be passing overhead, and were in great demand, but they were expensive and few, and not always overhead. Once Clark’s Gnats started flying missions over Kosovo they never stopped. Demand for them grew and grew. They have been in continual action ever since.

As the air force saw it, the problem during the Cold War had not been finding the enemy; they were, for the most part, in plain sight—tanks, missile silos, armies, and so on. The problem was how to attack them. The war that began in earnest after 9/11 posed the opposite problem. Al Qaeda terrorists made easy targets, if you could find them. At most they were holed up in compounds with a few armed guards. So a capability that allowed you to silently watch a target from fairly close range over days, months, and even years, in real time, was suddenly as valuable, if not more valuable, than a multimillion-dollar piece of hardware in orbit around the Earth.

General James Poss, working with Clark, commanded the first Predator mission over Iraq early in 2001, when the UN was policing a no-fly zone. The Iraqis would occasionally shoot at American planes patrolling the no-fly zones, aided by a large, clumsy Russian Cold War–era portable radar device called “Spoon Rest.” It was mounted on a large van with twelve giant antennae shaped like coat hangers on top. In other words, they were hard to miss. Except that after nine months of trying, the air force could not find any of them. How could something so big and distinctive remain invisible? Whenever an American plane detected it was being tracked by radar, the force would direct an AWACS—Airborne Warning and Control System—to fly over and scan for a Spoon Rest van. None was ever seen. Could the Iraqis be dismantling them after each use? The old Soviet manuals said a unit could not be taken apart in less than twenty minutes, and the AWACS would get overhead a lot faster than that. The air force tried spotting them with a U-2, which also turned up nothing. Poss tried everything he could imagine. He had every large building in the vicinity surveyed. He tried pattern recognition analyses to try to predict where they were likely to show up. Nothing.

The Predator found the answer on the first try. Able to silently watch an Iraqi town where a Spoon Rest van was known to operate, it saw the Iraqis drive the distinctive van through the central market and park it under a bridge. All of the Spoon Rest vans were quickly located and destroyed.

There were other uses for drones. Before the U.S. bombing campaign began over Baghdad in 2003, Poss and Clark flew an old Predator they had planned to retire low and slow over the capital, prompting the Iraqis to fire up the radar at all their antiaircraft installations. This enabled the air force to map the city’s defense system. When the Predator ran out of fuel they plunked it in the Tigris River, prompting the Iraqis to claim they had shot down an American fighter. They never recovered the aircraft. The next day, Poss and Clark did the same thing, but they miscalculated the fuel levels. Instead of splashing it into a lake on the outskirts of the city, the drone made it only to the water’s edge. Alerted again by claims that an American jet had been shot down, film crews the next day recorded the recovery of an old drone painted with graffiti, without a bullet hole in it.

These first experimental models could only transmit TV signals along a line of sight, but before long Predators were bouncing their feed off communications satellites, which meant the view from above could be monitored and analyzed from anywhere, in real time. This was the real breakthrough. Drones provided not just a view from above—balloons had been floated over Civil War battlefields to accomplish that. The revolutionary change came when drone surveillance was tied into the existing global telecommunications system. This allowed the U.S. military to mount “caps,” or permanent stable observation platforms, over whole cities. Tie that capability into supercomputers, with software capable of recognizing the “signature” of a specific target—say, a red pickup truck with a dent on its right rear fender—and you had the ability to track a target night and day.

By 2010, fleets of UAVs—which today include Predators, Reapers, Global Hawks, and a growing variety of others—were part of a worldwide integrated network that enabled remote operators at bases in the United States to fly missions almost anywhere in the world, funneling imagery and sensory data for analysis back to computers at Beale Air Force Base in California and CIA headquarters in Langley. The number of drones was well into the thousands, enough to sustain as many as sixty-five caps at once. For a selected target, the unblinking eye could establish things as simple as: How many people live in a compound? When do they wake up in the morning? When do they go to bed at night? What kind of weapons do they have? The air force was now using drones in teams, producing a system it called Gorgon Stare, that could cover an area four kilometers square—an area the size of Fairfax, Virginia. The image would not have to be monitored continually by human beings; it could be monitored by computers, which never get bored or distracted and are serenely undaunted by complexity. If, say, a vehicle belonging to a suspected terrorist was recognized by the computer—because it had some distinguishing feature that enabled the computer to track it—then the movements of that vehicle could be followed over a small city for months, or even years, permitting a detailed map of the suspect’s travels. Combine that map with cell phone tracking, with human intelligence, and you can begin to assemble a detailed and accurate chart of your target’s connections, or his network. Improvements in optics had enabled such observations from a great distance, so that the UAVs themselves would not have to be directly over a target. They could “stand off,” well outside the restricted airspace over a country such as, say . . . Pakistan.

The trail to Abbottabad that seemed so clear in retrospect represented a triumph of dot connecting. In this case, it began with a name. It was not even a real name, and the reference was to someone reported, falsely, to be dead.

The name Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti was first mentioned to authorities in Mauritania by an al Qaeda operative, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who went by the nom de guerre “Abu Musab.” Slahi was a veteran
mujahid
, having fought twice in Afghanistan: first against the Russians and then against the regime left in place when the Russians departed. He had sworn allegiance to bin Laden and was living in Germany in late 1999, pursuing a degree in electrical engineering, when he befriended two of the young Arabs who would become 9/11 hijackers: Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Marwan al-Shehhi. The two were looking to join the jihad in Chechnya, but Slahi advised them first to travel to Afghanistan for training. Joined by Mohammed Atta, who would become the leader of the 9/11 group, the young Mauritanian helped them make travel arrangements to Karachi, launching them on the road that would take them to the United States and flight training. Performing this service placed Slahi at the origins of the 9/11 plot, and he was thus a highly wanted man after the attacks. In just ten days he was located living in his home country and was brought in for questioning by Mauritanian authorities. He was arrested in November 2001 and underwent extensive questioning in Mauritania and then in Jordan, where he claims he was tortured, and probably was. He has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since 2002.

In telling the story of his travels and battles with the
mujahidin,
one of the names Slahi mentioned—one among many—was this Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, whom he said had been killed. It was obviously a pseudonym. The name meant “the Father of Ahmed from Kuwait.” It was just one name among thousands that were daily being entered into what would become the Terrorism Information Awareness database.

The same pseudonym, and person, would be fleshed out in more detail more than a year later by a true believer named Mohammed al-Qahtani, a baby-faced young Saudi who had pledged himself to al Qaeda and had planned to join the 9/11 hijackers as “muscle”—one of the enforcers trained to seize the plane and keep the passengers under control on the way to impact. He had arrived in Orlando about a month before the attacks—Mohammed Atta was waiting there to pick him up—but was turned away by an immigration officer, whose suspicions, even in that relatively unwary time, were aroused by the fact that Qahtani had a one-way ticket and could not speak English. When Qahtani grew indignant, he earned himself a return flight to Afghanistan. Denied martyrdom, he rejoined bin Laden and fought in the battle of Tora Bora. Fleeing that encounter, he was arrested crossing the border into Pakistan with other
mujahidin
in December of 2001. Qahtani claimed he had been in Afghanistan to learn the art of falconry. He was turned over to American authorities, who eventually matched his fingerprints with the young Saudi who had been denied entry to the United States in Orlando the previous August. This made him a subject of great interest.

Qahtani was interrogated relentlessly at Guantánamo from early November of 2002 until January of 2003. A daily log of his ordeal reveals a grinding effort to break down the young man’s resistance. He displayed heroic defiance. There were repeated hunger strikes and attacks on his guards and interrogators—he frequently spat at them, head-butted one, and threw himself bodily at others. When doctors tried to administer IV fluids he tore out the needle, and when his hands were strapped to his chair he got the IV line in his mouth and bit it in two.