Richard Clarke - Sting of the Drone

“You should shave. How long’s it been? You look like a park bench bum, even if the park bench is inside a highly guarded facility.” Dugout sat down next to him, holding a half lit cigar.

“Privacy. I know it’s a concept that’s foreign to you hackers, but,” Ray said to him. “And theft. Even theft of a Havana. It’s theft. Four days and I think I may not shave again for quite a few more.”

“The Bureau thinks they got the last guy this morning,” Dugout said. “He was a Yemeni American student at Temple. He was supposed to set off a bomb in Reading Terminal in Philly.”

“So it’s over?” Raymond Bowman asked.

“For now. Just in case I missed something, Metro, MARTA, BART, the T are all on manual. Their digital control networks are severed from the Internet. From what we found on a trick thumb drive at the ranch in Nevada, the FBI tracked down the facilitators in Philly and Chicago. None of them had ever gotten the go signal. Seems like the guy that got shot in Heathrow was going to send out the go code from Dubai or Karachi.”

“We think the guy in Heathrow was the guy that got on the boat to Canada? Doesn’t make sense,” Ray noted.

“He never got on the boat. He kept leaving false trails, just in case we got to any of the bombers. CIA thinks now that he was one of the two falcons. The guy you got in Vegas was the other,” Dugout explained. “Lived in Canada, but originally Pakistani, one Ghazi Nawarz.”

“Probably some facilitators in the U.S. the Bureau hasn’t identified yet,” Ray thought aloud. “Did you see the BDA on Kiev and DG Khan?”

Dugout shook his head in the affirmative as he sucked on his cigar, trying to keep it lit. “Bomb Damage Assessment, not Big Data Analysis? It’s pretty good. Those drone attacks fried both places. Also HUMINT says that the heads of both the Qazzani and the Merezha bought it, along with lots of underlings. Apparently some friendly country, I think the Brits, had a guy in the Qazzani compound and the Agency signaled him to leave just before we hit it.”

“Ah, the falcon watcher,” Ray said. “But this won’t be the end of the Qazzani enterprise. Too much money on the table. Where there are drugs to be moved, there will be movers.”

“Right, but now there will be a scramble among the deputies and lieutenants to see who gets to take over both groups. Probably end up killing each other in the succession struggle, as number fours become number threes, and number twos go after each other.”

“I’m sure the Kill Committee will update the target list,” Ray replied.

A white drone with a red stripe on it was headed south above the river. On its side, Ray could make out the words COAST GUARD.

Ray stood and looked down on the river. “Winston Burrell called this morning. Wants me to come up to Camp David. President wants to give me some bullshit award.”

“When?” Dugout asked, standing next to him and looking down at the river.

“Tomorrow. But I think I’m headed to the beach instead. Maybe Anguilla.”

“You do know it’s Christmas in three days?” Dugout said.

“So?”

“So, it’s happening without the attacks. You saved a lot of lives. You should accept the Goddamn medal,” Dugout said.

“I saved a lot of lives, except for the ones I knew, the ones I cared about most. There’s no great feeling of accomplishment when you kill the bad guys, knowing that there will just be more of them and you or someone else will have to do it again, and again. There’s just a feeling of emptiness.”

Ray turned to face Dugout and put his left hand on his friend’s shoulder. “Jennifer said there is a PTSD syndrome that happens when you survive and everyone else in the Humvee buys it. She said the best cure is to change your environment completely and chill out as much as possible, beer, sun, sand, waves.”

“And then what? When are you coming back? After New Year’s?” Dugout asked. “There are a lot more bad guys out there we haven’t gotten yet.”

“There will always be bad guys out there.” Ray pulled his right arm back behind him to gain leverage and then threw his cigar out as far as he could, toward the Potomac.

Readers of two of my earlier books may recall that I have some personal responsibility for the use of drones against terrorists. In full disclosure, here is that story. I served in the White House for over a decade beginning in 1992, for three successive Presidents. My job for many of those years was National Coordinator for Security and Counter-terrorism. In that capacity, I came to believe that we needed to capture or kill the leadership of a group that few people in the United States had ever heard of, al Qaeda.

The CIA was instructed to get bin Ladin, but proved incapable of doing so. They were then asked to locate him reliably in a place where he would be staying for at least four hours, so that we could launch cruise missiles at the site. That did not work either. Frustrated, I asked for an independent review by Charlie Allen, a legendary intelligence officer and iconoclast. Charlie suggested we deploy Predators to the region and fly them over Afghanistan. Predators were only available as unarmed aircraft in those days, but we thought that they might be better than past efforts to find bin Ladin. CIA and the Pentagon, however, opposed the use of Predators for this purpose.

Eventually, the White House had to order the CIA to do a test deployment of the unarmed Predators. I still recall my amazement, sitting in a darkened room well after midnight Washington time, watching the video feed live from Afghanistan, following a truck, zooming in on a camp. On the fourth flight, bin Ladin was located. Then the winter set in and the winds were such that we could not fly the Predator over the mountains into Afghanistan from its base in Central Asia. We would not be able to fly again until spring. It was the fall of 2000 and the Clinton administration was coming to a close.

During the winter, I tried to get the Air Force to arm the Predator with missiles. They had thought about it, but had no plans to try it for several years. With the help of USAF General John Jumper, we compressed that timeline into a few months. Predator, armed with Hellfire missiles, worked well in the experimental flights. We then sought approval from the new Bush administration to deploy this armed Predator to get bin Ladin. Once again, the CIA and the Pentagon opposed the mission. I pressed for a decision to override them again, but National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice delayed a decision for months.

Finally, on September 4, 2001, the Principals’ Committee met in the White House Situation Room. CIA Director George Tenet and the DOD leadership both spoke out against the use of armed Predators to get bin Ladin and the al Qaeda leadership. They were not overruled.

A week later we were attacked.

On September 12, 2001, CIA proposed deploying armed Predators to attack al Qaeda in Afghanistan. On November 14, 2001, in Afghanistan, Mohammed Atef, the head of al Qaeda’s military forces, became the first person to be killed by a Predator. Since then the United States has killed at least two thousand people in five countries using armed drones. And the killing continues.

Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror

Your Government Failed You: Breaking the Cycle of National Security Disasters

Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It

The Scorpion’s Gate

Breakpoint

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