Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“It’s that first little door on the right, dear,” maybe-Rhonda said. “Just be sure to knock. It’s a one seater. Unisex.” As Sandra was about to knock, the narrow door opened and a man she thought was Vice President Menendez came charging out.

“Yes, he doesn’t have his own bathroom in his West Wing office. Neither does the Chief of Staff or Dr. Burrell,” maybe-Rhonda laughed when Sandra returned. “It really is a little old building, you know.” Sandra had never thought of the White House West Wing that way before, a sort of Big Brother house with everyone living and working on top of one another. The few times she had been in the West Wing before it had always been downstairs, on the ground level, in the Situation Room meeting space. And she had always been “backbenching” for the CIA Director, or the Director of National Intelligence. Now she was here by herself, wondering if that meant she was being left out to hang by herself.

“Burrell just wants an informal, kind of off-the-record update,” she had been told at Headquarters. “No PowerPoint, no Happy Snaps, no YouTube hits. Just walk him through it. You do it by yourself. You can do it in your sleep.” She might have to do it in her sleep, she thought, since she had been largely unable to sleep the night before, her mind processing, planning, unable to shut down.

When she returned from the restroom, a man thrust out a hand. “Hey, Sandra, great to see you again. How’ve you been?” She recognized him immediately.

“Ray, are you working over here now?” Raymond Bowman, the last time Sandra had worked with him, had been Deputy Director of the Policy Evaluation Group, a small and somewhat vaguely purposed, independent agency that sat above the Potomac on Navy Hill, across the street from the State Department.

“Same, same. Still at the PEG.” Ray beamed his good mood, in a way that was rare among people in the intel business. “No, Winston asked me to come over to sit in on your meeting. I think it’s just going to be the three of us.”

“It is,” Winston Burrell announced as he entered the cramped outer office. “Come on in.” The National Security Advisor’s office was spacious and bright, with a conference table on one side and a living room set on the other, a huge desk set in the back. Two walls had floor-to-ceiling windows, causing Sandra instant reflexive worry about snipers and laser beams linked to audio devices.

Burrell motioned her to the couch. The two men sat in the armchairs, one on each side of the lower couch. It did not look like a power group, more like a meeting of a prep school faculty. Winston Burrell was in his sixties, broad, balding, beefy. He was known for his rumpled look. He could have been mistaken for the prep school headmaster. Ray Bowman was two decades younger, six inches taller, and looked like he had escaped from a J.Crew catalogue. He might have been the crew team advisor or tennis coach. At five foot five, with short black hair, and businesslike manner, Sandra Vittonelli might have been the Dean of Students or head of the English Department. Rather than having power over a thousand adolescents, however, these three ran a global empire of killing machines.

Burrell began. “Hell, you’ve been running this operation out in Nevada what, two months now? Figured it all out?”

“Four months now, sir. It’s familiar in some ways. I was originating some of the Kill Requests when I was at Kabul Station and before that at Baghdad Station.”

“Well, I just thought I should get to know you better, rather than just have you be a face on a television screen in the conference room,” Burrell explained.

To know me better, or to know the program better? Sandra thought. She knew the National Security Advisor by reputation. He was a survivor, having worked in both the Pentagon and at State. He had done his cooling-off time in a think tank, and then come back in with the new President. He had been with the President early in his campaign, before anyone else in the national security business. They were said to be very close, the two meeting for drinks most nights up in the Residence after the President and First Lady put the twins to bed. Burrell must work very long days, she thought.

“Let me start with an admission that I will deny I ever said, but should explain why I want to know who is on the other end of the Kill Calls. The President has delegated the approvals to me,” Burrell explained. “I only go to him with the rare ones that pose new issues or close calls. As far as the rest of the world knows, he is making every decision.”

Burrell stared at her, looking for a sign that she understood the trust that he was giving her, the weight that was on his shoulders. “I understand,” was all that she could think of saying.

“I knew when I took this job that it would involve life and death. I wanted to save the good guys and I was willing somehow to be a part of getting the bad guys,” Burrell continued. “But now, I feel every day that if I mess up, if we mess up, if somebody I never met messes up, innocent people will die, and the bad guys will win. I know this sounds overly simplistic, but that is what it comes down to.

“But now, I am not just involved somehow. If I say yes when you call me, people die. If I say no, bad guys get away and may later kill innocent people, Americans, allies, people with families who I will have to meet with and console and explain things to.”

There was an awkward silence. Sandra and Ray were both trying to figure out if the National Security Advisor was done baring his soul. He wasn’t.

“All of which is to say, Sandra, that I am putting a lot of faith in you and your team to get it right. But I know that erring on the side of indecision, which means doing nothing, is sometimes not better than acting. You just have to maintain very high standards. No more Herr Stroeders.”

Sandra shook her head and looked puzzled at the name. “Wilhelm Stroeder, age twenty, a premed student at the University of Vienna,” Ray explained. “His mother is a doctor in Philadelphia, where he was born, making him an American citizen. He was the collateral fatality in the Palais attack. Officially, the Austrians have not figured out it was a drone attack. The new self-incinerating drone seems to have worked. A few people in their security service know, but they are looking the other way in return for some augmentations to their savings. The official After Action is that someone placed a bomb in the room, probably a rival drug gang. We have supplied the Austrians with intelligence that suggests that one of the Ukrainian drug cartels was possibly involved.”

Sandra was seeing layers to her business that she had no idea existed. “Ray here, whom I gather you know, he is your unofficial Guardian Angel, so appointed by me,” Burrell said. “He’s had your back, even when you didn’t know it. He’s also been the biggest advocate of the program in the interagency.”

Ray picked up where the National Security Advisor had left off, giving every impression to Sandra that they had planned the conversation. “Sandra, I remember before 9/11 when CIA and the Pentagon were fighting against the whole idea of the Predator and especially the armed Predator. But they had nothing that could find terrorists in real time, verify that there was no collateral at the site, and bring in an arrest team or a kill team. We had nothing. We were blindly sending cruise missiles at targets. Predator changed all that. It has almost completely eliminated al Qaeda Central in AfPak, it has been a huge force multiplier against the Taliban, it has kept AQAP in Yemen on the ropes, it has shattered al Shabab in Somalia, it helped to defeat Qadhafi in Libya. It has probably saved thousands of American lives. We need it.”