Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“What did you just say?” Ray said.

“How many other … you mean the ‘kill remotely’ part. Yeah, it’s like they are doing to us what we do to them,” Dugout noted.

“If so, this could just be the start of a campaign here, in the US. And, yeah, I get it, they would probably want to be here or have some presence here to help.” Ray Bowman suddenly looked up at the ceiling, as if he had just been hit by something falling on his head. “Damn it, Dug. Remember, way back during the summer when there was that report about somebody maybe doing attacks around Christmas? What if this is the start of it? What if they plan to attack the drone program like this and then maybe make other attacks around Christmas to blackmail us into stopping the drones?”

“Christmas isn’t even a month off and we haven’t seen any more about planned attacks since that one report last summer. That had everyone spun up then, but now they’ve forgotten about it,” Dugout observed. “I can run the Minerva Big Data program to see if they’ve overlooked some leads, see if there is a Disturbance in the Force anywhere.”

Ray sat quietly, running his own data analytics program in his head, his eyes darting back and forth as he thought through scenarios. Then he looked back up at Dugout. “Right. So let’s start looking for anything unusual, anything that could be reconnaissance, planning for attacks here. And don’t just look for typical AQ and Pakistani ISI types. What’s the Ukrainian connection? This has the feel of something new. Start running your data searches, Minerva, big data. I have to go to my gym, to see a reporter.”

“Not a good idea, Boss,” Dugout said.

“Tell me about it,” Ray replied.

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 6

SPORTS CLUB/LA

M STREET

WASHINGTON, DC

“Hi, I’m Bryce Duggan. If you don’t mind my saying so, that looks like crankcase sludge.” As had been suggested, he had shown up in gym attire. He was in a tank top and shorts. No notepad. No recorder. No place to hide one.

“It’s called Green Machine and it’s good for you, just like some other machines are good for you. Raymond Bowman. Sit down.”

For a time neither man spoke. Finally, the younger man began. “I don’t know which of our bosses asked for this meeting. I do know it is to be totally off the record.”

“Doesn’t matter who asked for it. You have questions for me. I have questions for you,” Ray said.

Bryce indicated for Ray to start. “Okay, the dead kids in Afghanistan. You do know that wasn’t an orphanage, right?”

“I tried to find out. They would only let me talk to certain people in the town. When I tried to get back later, the ANA troops wouldn’t let me in. They stopped me at a roadblock outside of the town. I reported all of that. I said I couldn’t confirm it was an orphanage,” Bryce replied.

“And the guys who told you to go there, who handled you there?” Ray asked.

“Qazzani guys, I think. I mean that was what I was told. I had no way to verify that. It’s not like the Qazzanis issue their men ID cards,” Bryce said. “Look, I put around that I wanted to interview people about what it was like to be hunted by drones. These guys, who said they were Qazzani guys, got back to me.”

Ray swallowed some of the green crankcase fluid. “And the drone they landed when you just happened to be in some little city in Pakistan. How’d that happen?”

“Same thing. Fares Sorhari, my cameraman and field producer, he’s an Emirati. From Dubai. Went to Georgetown. Hates the Islamists. He got a call when we were in Islamabad. ‘Fly to Mashhad tomorrow. In the afternoon, go back to the airport. Big story. It will win you the prize.’ So, we did.”

“You’re lucky you weren’t kidnapped,” Ray thought aloud.

“I know. We had GPS trackers hidden on us, but, yeah, we thought that could happen,” Bryce admitted. “Remind me to tell you about roadblocks in Yemen.”

“You know how much damage you have done to the program?” Ray asked.

“I know damage is being done. I’m not sure I’m the one who is doing it. We didn’t shoot down your drones. We didn’t hack the controls and hijack one. We reported on it,” Bryce replied. “Look, kids did die in that town and they did die because a drone attacked that building. You don’t deny that, you say it was a setup, but kids did die. That’s a fact and we report the facts.”

“The facts, Mr. Duggan, are that the terrorists kidnapped a bunch of little kids and they killed them by luring us into an attack. They wanted them to die and they killed them as surely as if they had put a bullet through each of their little heads. Did you report that?”

“We reported that you said that and that we were unable to prove who was right so far, because we can’t, but we haven’t given up trying to find out who was right,” Bryce replied.

“Moral equivalence, huh? Equal credibility to the U.S. government and to a bunch of terrorists who would just as gladly kill you if they couldn’t use you as their mouthpiece,” Ray shot back.

Bryce wanted to cool the conversation down. “You went to the Kennedy School for a year, so did I. Did you take Brenda Williams’s course on Government and the Media? She’s been teaching it for years, keeps updating it because it keeps happening? There’s a long record of the U.S. government lying to the media. So, yes, until we can independently verify something, all we can do is say that it is what the government tells us. And if their people say something else, we have to report that. If we can’t say we know which one appears to be right, people can judge for themselves,” Bryce said.

“Yes, I did take Williams’s course and yes, I know that government officials have lied and covered up over the years, less here than in other countries, less in recent years than in the past. But I don’t. I know you don’t know me, but, off the record, I don’t lie to the media. There are some things I don’t volunteer, some things I won’t talk about because doing so may get people killed, good people. But I do not lie, Bryce. Not to you, not to the Congress.”

“Okay, I buy that,” Bryce replied. As he said it, he wondered to himself if he really did buy it.

“What I am trying to do is stop a bunch of guys hopped up on some distorted version of Islam from continuing a wave of killing, to spread their control, to chop off hands and heads, to take girls out of schools, to burn down churches, and to blow up U.S. skyscrapers. That’s what I do, Bryce. That’s what I try to do and drones are one way I do it and there are not a lot of alternatives some times.”

“I get that, I really do,” Bryce replied. “I just got back from Nigeria. We were there last Sunday, by coincidence, no tip, when the Boko Haram guys, the local AQ types, set fire to a church with people in it and then shot at people fleeing. It’s amazing video.

“Week before, we were in Mali. We got near Timbuktu. We paid some Tuareg tribesmen, not Ansar Dine the AQ affiliate, but local guys. We caught, on camera, a Reaper strike you guys did on an Ansar Dine compound. My Tuareg friends applauded. Both the Africa stories and some stuff we shot in Djibouti and Somalia are running on an hour-long special on terrorism in Africa in the near future. It’s evenhanded, really.”

“Can’t wait,” Ray replied. “Nigeria, Mali, what’s happening across Africa is that radical Islamists are moving south, into what were moderate Islamic settlements, areas where Muslims lived side by side with Christians and others. And they are trying to drive the non-Muslims out and suppress the majority Muslims. They start by cutting off body parts. They smash gravestones because they say the stones are idols that people worship. This is really a case of a tiny percentage of people trying to impose some fourteenth-century version of a religion on a bunch of people who do not want it,” Ray explained.