How We Missed Mullah Omar: An inside account of America’s botched first Predator mission
Richard Whittle
Politico
September 16, 2014
By the time President Bush announced the beginning of the war in Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, at 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, the United States’ new secret weapon, the Predator 3034, was already en route to the outskirts of Kandahar. It was 9:30 p.m. in Afghanistan, a clear, starry night, and U.S. intelligence officials had already tracked their target to his home. Controlled by satellite link from 7,000 miles away by an Air Force captain and sergeant at the CIA campus in Northern Virginia, the Predator quickly entered camera range of a compound that was known to house the Taliban’s enigmatic leader and Osama Bin Laden’s key strategic ally, Mullah Mohammed Omar.
This was the Predator’s first big test. The military had long had an interest in unmanned aircraft, but before the Predator, drones were at best a niche technology. Introduced in 1994 under a new type of rapid Pentagon procurement program, the Predator could linger in the air well beyond 24 hours, pointing cameras at the earth and transmitting live video images back to its operators. The little aircraft owed its phenomenal endurance to its unique configuration, a design informed by the childhood hobby of its inventor, an Iraqi Jew named Abraham Kerem, whose family had immigrated to Israel in 1951. Like a weekend hobbyist’s glider, the Predator had thin, tapered wings stretching 49 feet from tip to tip and a slender fuselage just under half that long, eight feet shorter than a Piper Cub’s. Powered by a four- cylinder engine and propeller in the rear, it had a sluggish top speed of just over 80 miles an hour.
Perhaps that’s why the Predator was widely ignored inside the military at first, until a series of iconoclastic visionaries began transforming it from a simple eye in the sky into an exotic new weapon. Once the Predator became capable of firing laser-guided missiles at enemies half a world away, military and industry attitudes toward such unmanned aerial vehicles changed nearly overnight. The drone revolution began.
This is the story of the first armed drone ever to be flown by intercontinental remote control and used to kill human beings on the other side of the globe, a major coup for military futurists that has come to shape American foreign policy ever since. But it is also the story of how confusion over the technology’s first deployment effectively ruined the U.S. military’s clearest opportunity to kill the elusive Mullah Omar.
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Predator 3034 hovered above Omar’s compound for two hours, but U.S. planners decided against bombing for fear of killing innocents. And so the drone operators watched as people exited the building and climbed into a convoy of three vehicles, heading southeast toward Kandahar. The Predator followed, for those in command were sure one of those vehicles had the Taliban leader inside.
Predator 3034’s video was being viewed simultaneously by Gen. Tommy Franks on a screen at U.S. Central Command headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base, in Tampa, Florida. In Washington, the CIA Predator’s video was also being watched in a basement office of the Pentagon by Gen. John Jumper, a former fighter pilot who was now Air Force chief of staff. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Dick Myers, joined Jumper from time to time.
Finally, the drone’s video was being fed to Prince Sultan Air Base, a lonely batch of beige buildings in the desert about 70 miles southwest of Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, at the headquarters of the allied air war, the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) by Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles F. “Chuck” Wald, who was tasked with running the air war.
Yet, oddly, Wald could not himself see, in real time, what Franks and the others were seeing. Sitting with his aides on an elevated platform known as the Crow’s Nest—a cockpit formed by three modular office tables littered with computers, telephones, radios and coffeepots and cups—Wald and his officers were supposed to be able to see all the imagery on the CAOC screens. But as the war began, the operation at the CIA’s Langley, Virginia, headquarters was regarded as so secret and sensitive that the screen receiving the Predator’s feed was installed in a smaller building next door to Wald’s headquarters. That was to prevent French and Saudi officers at desks a few feet in front of the Crow’s Nest from finding out about America’s new weapon.
The two men controlling the Predator at Langley, Air Force Captain Scott Swanson and Master Sergeant Jeff A. “Gunny” Guay, were still at the controls as Omar’s convoy entered Kandahar at 1:10 a.m., local time, on October 8. The small convoy consisted of an SUV (a Toyota Land Cruiser or similar model) followed by a white dual-cab and another pickup truck with armed men crammed into its cargo bed.
A few minutes later, the vehicles stopped in front of a compound in downtown Kandahar and some of the occupants went inside. At 2:12 a.m., Kandahar time, Wald’s officer in charge, Maj. Gen. David Deptula, told subordinates to get a direct line from the Crow’s Nest to the CIA. A new set of F/A-18 fighter-bombers would arrive over this “time sensitive target” at about 3:10 a.m., Afghan time. As the planes flew, Deptula was amazed to hear that Tommy Franks, the overall commander of the war, planned to decide himself whether they should bomb the building they believed Omar was inside, or whether the risk of collateral damage was too high. Deptula thought such tactical decisions rightly belonged to Wald, the air commander.
Wald himself, however, was not surprised. He knew President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had made clear to Franks before the war that they regarded collateral damage in Afghanistan as a strategic issue. Their view was that killing civilians or damaging mosques could make it appear that the United States and its allies were waging war on the Afghan people and Muslims in general, as Al Qaeda and the Taliban were saying, and thus turn potential friends into enemies.
Unable to view the Predator’s video in real time, Wald, Deptula and the two other officers in the Crow’s Nest were also unable to see the convoy or the compound in Kandahar. Nor could they talk directly to the Predator’s operators at the CIA. Suddenly, from one of the Crow’s Nest phones on speaker, a disembodied voice no one recognized said blandly, “Cleared to fire.”
“Where’d that come from?” Wald demanded as he and the others in the Crow’s Nest swiveled their heads in confusion. “Stop!” he ordered the Airborne Warning and Control System, assuming the clearance to fire was being given by someone in the surveillance plane to the fighter-bombers. “Knock it off!” Wald ordered. “You’re not cleared to fire!”
After a flurry of phone calls, Wald was incensed to learn that the order to fire was a command to the Predator from someone elsewhere. Suddenly Wald decided it was time for Operation Enduring Freedom’s air commander to get direct access to the CIA Predator’s screen, too. “Get it here now,” Wald ordered a senior officer in charge of CAOC communications.
“Sir, we can’t,” the officer said. “It’s a classified system.”
“I don’t give shit. Do it,” Wald said. “I need the system on the deck so I can make operational decisions. Bring it in.”
Richard Whittle, global fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center and Alfred V. Verville fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, is author of Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution, from which this article is excerpted.
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