Some operations at Groom Lake in the 1970s involved the Agency’s desire to detect facilities for weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, including bioweapons and chemical weapons, before those weapons facilities were in full-production mode. This work, the CIA felt, could ideally be performed by laying sensors on the ground that were capable of “sniffing” the air. Since the 1950s, the Agency had been advancing its use of sensor drones to detect WMD signatures by monitoring changes in the air, the soil, and an area’s energy consumption. Early efforts had been made using U-2 pilots, who had to leave the safety of high-altitude flight and get down dangerously low in order to shoot javelinlike sensors into the earth. But those operations, part of Operation Tobasco, risked exposure. Several U-2 pilots had already been shot down. Because these delicate sensors needed to be accurately placed very close in to the WMD-producing facilities, it was an ideal job for a stealthy, low-flying drone.
Decades before anyone had rekindled an interest in drones, the CIA saw endless possibilities in them. But to advance drone technology required money, and in 1975, a Senate committee investigating illegal activity inside the CIA, chaired by Senator Frank Church and known as the Church Committee, did considerable damage to the Agency’s reputation as far as the general public was concerned. Budgets were thinned. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency, which began in 1977, CIA discretionary budgets were at an all-time low, and the CIA didn’t get very far with its drones—until late 1979, when the Agency learned about a lethal anthrax accident at a “probable biological warfare research, production and storage installation” in Sverdlovsk, Russia—the same location where Gary Powers had been taking spy photographs when his U-2 was shot down nineteen years before. As a result of the Sverdlovsk bioweapons accident, the CIA determined that as many as a hundred people had died from inhaling anthrax spores. The incident gave the CIA’s drone program some legs. But without interest from the Air Force, drones were perceived largely as the Agency’s playthings.
For twenty-five years, from 1974 to 1999, the CIA and the Air Force rarely worked together on drone projects at Area 51. This lack of cooperation was evident, and succinctly summed up in an interview Secretary of Defense Robert Gates gave Time magazine in April of 2008. Gates said that when he was running the CIA, in 1992, he discovered that “the Air Force would not co-fund with CIA a vehicle without a pilot.” That changed in the winter of 2000, when the two organizations came together to work on a new drone project at Area 51, one that would forever change the face of warfare and take both agencies toward General Henry “Hap” Arnold’s Victory Over Japan Day prediction that one day in the future, wars would be fought by aircraft without pilots sitting inside. In the year 2000, that future was now.
The project involved retrofitting a CIA reconnaissance drone, called Predator, with antitank missiles called Hellfire missiles, supplied by the army. The target would be a shadowy and obscure terrorist the CIA was considering for assassination. He lived in Afghanistan, and his name was Osama bin Laden.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Revelation
It was January of 2001, nine months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, and the director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Cofer Black, had a serious problem. The CIA had been considering assassinating Osama bin Laden with the Predator, but until that point, the unmanned aerial vehicle had been used for reconnaissance only, not targeted assassination. Because two technologies needed to be merged—the flying drone and the laser-guided precision missile—engineers and aerodynamicists had concerns. Specifically, they worried that the propulsion from the missile might send the drone astray or the missile off course. And the CIA needed a highly precise weapon with little possibility of collateral damage. The public would perceive killing a terrorist one way, but they would likely perceive killing that terrorist’s neighbors in an altogether different light. This new weaponized drone technology was tested at Area 51; the development program remains classified. After getting decent results, both the CIA and the Air Force were confident that the missiles unleashed from the drone could reach their targets.
Along came another hurdle to overcome, one that was unfolding not in the desert but in Washington, DC. The newly elected administration of President George W. Bush realized that it had no policy when it came to taking out terrorists with drones. Osama bin Laden was known to be the architect of the 1998 U.S. embassy suicide bombings in East Africa, which killed more than 225 people, including Americans. He masterminded the suicide bombing of the USS Cole and had officially declared war against the United States. But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved.