Yemen pushed back against the United States by outing the secret inner workings of the operation. It was the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Edmund Hull, an employee of the State Department, who had masterminded the plot, officials in Yemen explained. Hull had spearheaded the intelligence-gathering efforts, a job more traditionally reserved for the CIA. Hull spoke Arabic. He had roots in the country and knew people who knew local tribesmen in the desert region of Marib. The State Department, Yemen claimed, was the agency that had bribed local tribesmen into handing over information on al-Harethi, which allowed the CIA to know exactly where the terrorist would be driving and when. Revealing Ambassador Hull to be the central organizing player in the drone strike exposed the Department of State as having a hand in not just the espionage game but targeted assassination as well. Surprisingly, little fuss was made about any of this, despite the fact that diplomats are supposed to avoid assassination plots.
In political circles, Ambassador Hull was greatly embarrassed. He refused to comment on his role in what signaled a sea change in U.S. military assets with wings. The 2002 drone strike in Yemen was the first of its kind in the war on terror, but little did the public know that hundreds more drone strikes would soon follow. The next one went down the very next week, when a Predator targeted and killed al-Qaeda’s number-three, Mohammed Atef, in Jalabad, Afghanistan. As the war on terror progressed, some drone strikes would be official while others would go unmentioned. But never again would the CIA or the State Department admit to having a hand in any of them. When Mohammed Atef was killed, initial reports said a traditional bomber aircraft had targeted and destroyed Atef’s home. Only later was the strike revealed as being the work of a Predator drone and a targeted assassination spearheaded by the CIA.
Almost everything that has happened at Area 51 since 1968 remains classified but it is generally understood among men who formerly worked there that once the war on terror began, flight-testing new drones at Area 51 and Area 52 moved full speed ahead. This new way of conducting air strikes, from an aircraft without a pilot inside, represented a fundamental reconfiguration of the U.S. Air Force fighting force and would continue to remain paramount to Air Force operations going forward. This meant that a major element of the drone program, i.e., the CIA’s role in overhead, needed to return quietly and quickly into the “black.” The Air Force has a clear-cut role in wartime. But the operations of the CIA, a clandestine organization at its core, can never be overtly defined in real time. Remarkably, after nearly fifty years, the CIA and the Air Force were back in the business of overhead, and they would model their partnership on the early spy plane projects at Area 51. As the war on terror expanded, budgets for drone programs went from thin to virtually limitless almost overnight. As far as developing weapons using cutting-edge science and technology was concerned, it was 1957 post-Sputnik all over again.
No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation. Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1 Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use. The company that built the Predator was General Atomics, the same group that was going to launch Ted Taylor’s ambitious spaceship to Mars, called Orion, from Jackass Flats back in 1958.
A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online. Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again, exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2. This was not simply a coincidence or a recurring moment in time. Rather it was the symbiotic reality of war. If the CIA and the Air Force are rivals in peacetime—fighting over money, power, and control—in war, they work together like a bow and arrow. Each organization has something critical the other service does not have. The CIA’s drones could now give Air Force battlefield commanders visual images from which they could target individuals in real time. Now, intelligence capabilities and military could work seamlessly together as one. Which is exactly what happened next, as the war on terror widened to include Iraq.