The timing of the Predator’s development was most serendipitous for the CIA because the U.S. military had recently become involved in a war in the Balkans. The United States desperately needed a new reconnaissance aircraft to spy on the enemy in this complex civil war. Interestingly enough, the Predators (four initially) were deployed in July 1995 to spy on the Christian Serbs who had slaughtered thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the worst case of genocide in Europe since the Nazis.2 The United States intervened to fight on behalf of the Muslims to prevent further genocide and began an aerial campaign against Republika Srbska Serbian troops known as Operation Deliberate Force. To help U.S. attack aircraft spot Serbian targets, the CIA Predators, which were based in Gjader, Albania, made recon flights over Bosnia in an operation known as Nomad Vigil.3 The actual pilots for the aircraft were based in trailers in Indian Springs Air Force Base, Nevada (renamed Creech Air Force Base in 2005) and belonged to the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron. The CIA’s dream of using remote-control planes to collect data and intelligence from the skies had finally come true.4 Author and journalist Steve Coll describes the revolutionary development as follows: “In the first flights over Bosnia the CIA linked its Langley headquarters to the pilots’ van. Woolsey [the CIA head] emailed a pilot as he watched video images relayed to [CIA Headquarters] Virginia. ‘I’d say What direction for Mostar?… Is that the river?…’ Woolsey recalled. ‘And he’d say Yeah. Do you want to look at the bridge?… Let’s zoom further, it looks like he has a big funny hat on.’”5
These early surveillance drones were a huge improvement on the existing surveillance option: orbiting satellites. Unlike spy satellites whose views were blocked by clouds, the drones could fly under the cloud cover to monitor their targets. Once they found their target, they could follow it for hours at a time, unlike satellites, which flew over their designated targets only when their preexisting orbits took them there. And satellites, while useful in filming static targets, were less capable of filming small moving targets, such as vehicles or humans.
Drones were also far superior to “fire and forget” cruise missiles, which were usually launched from offshore vessels and took considerably more time to reach their destination. The situation in the targeted area could change dramatically while the less accurate cruise missiles made their way to their preprogrammed target. When finally armed, drones by contrast could fire in live time based on their pilots’ reaction to current information gained from tracking fluid targets.
For all their revolutionary advances, however, these experimental Predators were not yet equipped with radar systems that would allow them to see through cloud cover. They were finally fitted with radars that could allow them to see through fog and clouds in 1997, demonstrating that the Air Force was still perfecting the early drones.
In January 1999 Predators were flown to the Persian Gulf and used to spy on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as part of Operation Southern Watch.6 In the spring of that year Predators were also used against Serbian Christian forces that were once again engaged in genocidal assaults on Muslims, this time the Kosovar Albanians. By all accounts, the Predator “eye in the sky” gave the Americans unprecedented access to Serbian troop movements and facilitated the accuracy of U.S. bomb strikes.
At this time the Predators made another technical leap when laser designators and range finders were added to the censor balls on their “chins.” This meant that the Predator could lase a target and a loitering manned fighter jet could then use a laser-designated bomb to precisely destroy it.7 The ball under the Predator’s chin was one of its most expensive features and also came to contain two television cameras, including an infrared camera for seeing targets on the ground at night and the previously mentioned radar, which could see through clouds and dust. Pilots watching the screens back in bases outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, reported that this allowed them to see a license plate from more than two miles away in the air.8 This was a capability the Predator would need for its next mission in Central Asia.
AFGHANISTAN, 2000–2001
By 2000 America’s focus had transferred from the war-torn Balkans to the Taliban-controlled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. It was here that Arab terrorists belonging to bin Laden’s al Qaeda were plotting further terrorist attacks on the United States. In 2000 bin Laden’s agents set off a bomb next to the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen, killing seventeen sailors. The same year an al Qaeda agent named Ahmed Ressam attempted to infiltrate America to set off a bomb at Los Angeles’s LAX airport.
While many Americans, who lived far from al Qaeda’s targets in eastern Africa and Arabia, remained blissfully unaware of the danger posed by this terrorist group, many in the CIA saw the organization as the greatest threat to the continental United States. The United States had by this time established a Bin Laden Unit at the CIA; in fact, some CIA personnel called this unit the “Manson Family” for its members’ obsession with the little-known terrorist bin Laden.
In the spring of 2000 the United States gained permission from the dictator of Uzbekistan, President Islam Karimov, to fly Predator surveillance drones out of his country over southeastern Afghanistan to try tracking bin Laden. As mentioned previously, the Clinton administration had already overridden President Ford’s earlier directive against carrying out assassinations. It was hoped that the Air Force–piloted Predator could help the CIA track down bin Laden, who was known to live in a series of compounds in the Pashtun lands of southern and eastern Afghanistan. The drones, it was theorized, might then be able to direct a cruise missile strike against bin Laden from a submarine or cruiser operating in the Indian Ocean. This joint Pentagon-CIA surveillance operation was to be known as “Afghan Eyes” and was headed up by White House counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black, and Charles Allen, head of the CIA’s intelligence-gathering operations.9 Clarke in particular was worried about al Qaeda’s ability to hit the U.S. mainland in the months and years before 9/11 and was interested in any tool that might help him prevent such an event.
In the fall of 2000 a drone monitoring a known bin Laden compound in the Afghan south near Kandahar at a place called Tarnak Farms sent back live video feed to a screen at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center in northern Virginia. The extraordinary video was of a tall man (bin Laden was six foot six), “with a physical and operational signature fitting Bin Laden,” wearing white robes and talking to ten figures who were paying him respect. Those watching the screen in America were stunned and later said, “It was probably Bin Laden himself.”10 In fact the drone may have spotted bin Laden on as many as three separate occasions.
There was little the Predator could do because such drones were not armed at the time, and the CIA subsequently lost him. Those CIA operatives who saw the images of “the man in white” on their screen in America were frustrated. As one later put it, “If we had developed the ability to perform a Predator-style targeted killing before 2000, we might have been able to prevent 9/11.”11
Around this time the Pentagon and the CIA began to seriously contemplate arming the Predator and transforming it from a “sensor” into a “shooter.” As one general involved in the development by DARPA put it, “If the drones were equipped with laser-guided targeting systems and weapons, then the whole cycle—from finding a target and analyzing it to attacking and destroying the target and analyzing the results—could be carried out by one aircraft.”12 The drones would now be part of the “kill chain,” not just unarmed spotters for armed aircraft or cruise missiles.