There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination. Then State Department lawyers warned the CIA of another problem, the same one that had originally sent the Predator drone to Area 51 for field tests; namely, potential collateral damage. The State Department needed to know how many bin Laden family members and guests staying on the compound the CIA was targeting could be killed in a drone attack. Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were known to visit there.
To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51. They engineered a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile–equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would come to regret.
Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Pentagon knew that it needed drones to help fight the war on terror, which meant it needed help from the CIA. For decades, the Air Force had been thumbing its nose at drones. The pride of the Air Force had always been pilots, not robots. But the CIA had been researching, developing, and advancing drone technology at Area 51 for decades. The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going into Afghanistan with drones.
The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/11, on September 18, 2001. Three weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar. The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and assassinate the most wanted men in the world.
Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A citizen of Yemen and a senior al-Qaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the morning of November 2, 2002, al-Harethi and five colleagues drove through the vast desert expanse of Yemen’s northwest province Marib oblivious to the fact that they were being watched by eyes in the skies in the form of a Predator drone flying several miles above them.
The Predator launched its missile at the target and landed a direct hit. The al-Qaeda operatives and the vehicle were instantly reduced to a black heap of burning metal. It was an assassination plot straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, except that it was so real and so dramatic—the first visual proof that al-Qaeda leaders could be targeted and killed—that Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz began bragging about the Hellfire strike to CNN. The drone attack in Yemen was “a very successful tactical operation,” Wolfowitz said. Except it was supposed to be a quiet, unconfirmed assassination. Wolfowitz’s bravado made Yemen upset. Brigadier General Yahya M. Al Mutawakel, the deputy secretary general for the People’s Congress Party in Yemen, gave an exclusive interview to the Christian Science Monitor explaining that the Pentagon had broken a secrecy agreement between the two nations. “This is why it is so difficult to make deals with the United States,” Al Mutawakel explained. “They don’t consider the internal circumstances in Yemen. In security matters, you don’t want to alert the enemy.”