Brian Williams - Predators

For this reason, the Pakistanis actively supported the Afghan Taliban in their battle for supremacy with a coalition of Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara ethnic opponents known as the Northern Alliance. While much of this support for the Taliban was ad hoc and consisted of thousands of Pakistani madrassa students (mainly Pashtuns) who came to fight for the Taliban in the summer, the Pakistani government also directly supported the Taliban with volunteer soldiers.

It did not bother the Pakistanis that on many levels the people of Afghanistan had begun to suffer terribly under the Taliban. The Taliban members had originally been greeted as Robin Hood–style heroes when they conquered the Pashtun mujahideen warlords of the south, but they had become more and more puritanical as they spread out into the Uzbek, Tajik, and Hazara lands. Among other things, they horribly oppressed half the population of Afghanistan, the women, by denying them the right to work. The Taliban also arrested women caught outside without a male relative, cut the fingers off women who wore nail polish, and enforced the Pashtun burqa in areas like cosmopolitan Kabul and the Hazara lands where it had not previously been enforced.

The men also suffered under Taliban rule. They had to grow full-length beards and appear in mosque at prayer time. The Taliban closed movie theaters; destroyed TVs, which were deemed “satanic devices”; executed homosexuals, elopers, and adulterers; closed girls’ schools; and banned almost all forms of recreation (for example, music, dancing, kite flying, and singing). Under the Taliban, Afghanistan was essentially converted into a grim religious prison camp dominated by Pashtun zealots.

Such issues did not originally bother Washington policymakers (although the Americans played no role whatsoever in the creation and rise to power of the Taliban as some have suggested). For all their distaste of the Taliban’s social policies, the distant Americans were content to see them consolidate power and create stability in this war-torn land.

But Washington eventually grew hostile to Afghanistan’s new Taliban masters when they began to play host to an international terrorist organization known as al Qaeda. Although the Taliban leader Mullah Omar tried to control his Arab terrorist guest, Osama bin Laden, and put an end to his angry calls for total jihad against the American “Far Enemy,” bin Laden proved to be uncontrollable. In August 1998 bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorists blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing hundreds of Africans and a few Americans. President Bill Clinton showed America’s resolve to kill the terrorists responsible for the slaughter by launching a wave of cruise missiles against bin Laden’s bases, found primarily in the territory of his old friend from the 1980s Afghan jihad, Jalaludin Haqqani (incidentally, the distrusted Pakistanis were warned only at the last minute that a wave of cruise missiles would be crossing their territory to hit bin Laden’s terrorist camps in eastern Afghanistan).

But the strikes failed to kill their intended target. Far from killing bin Laden, the strikes only infuriated Mullah Omar, who vowed to protect his own people and Arab terrorist guests from the American “infidels.”

President Bill Clinton’s lawyers at the time concluded that the United States could legitimately kill bin Laden and his lieutenants, despite a previous presidential ban on assassinations. The lawyers concluded that attempts to kill bin Laden were defensible as “acts of war” or as “national self-defense” under both American and international law. 7Clinton subsequently signed a presidential finding and issued secret orders allowing the CIA to assassinate bin Laden. 8These findings, and a later one by President George W. Bush, would give the CIA the authority to carry out the drone assassination campaign on al Qaeda and the Taliban after 9/11.

Although it was not discussed much at the time, Clinton’s presidential finding was a groundbreaking development. The ban on government-sponsored assassinations went all the way back to President Gerald Ford. During his tenure in the White House, Ford had discovered that under Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, the CIA had tried to murder a grand total of eight foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro of Cuba. In 1976 President Ford authorized Executive Order 12333, forbidding anyone in the U.S. government from engaging in such assassinations. 9

In the years following the failure of the assassination attempt on bin Laden, the United States scrambled to develop new means for carrying out more precise airborne raids on enemy targets. By the time Bush took over from Clinton as president of the United States, that mission was well on its way. As bin Laden prepared for his greatest terrorist outrage, the so-called Holy Tuesday attacks of 9/11, the ultrasecret Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was busy working on a new advanced weapon that would give the CIA the ability to kill enemies with unparalleled precision. This was to lead to one of the most important developments in air warfare since the first pilots brought guns and bombs into their aircraft during World War I.

The August 2008 Predator missile strike that killed Pakistan’s most wanted man, Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, did not come about overnight. The story of the development of the CIA’s top-secret Predator-Reaper program is one of the murkiest chapters in the war on terrorism. The story of how a clumsy, propeller-pushed, remote-control plane went from the drawing boards to becoming the most effective, high-tech assassination tool in history has been shrouded in mystery.

VIETNAM, THE BALKANS, AND IRAQ, 1970–2000

The origins of the program actually lay in the Vietnam War era. This was the time of the CIA’s infamous Phoenix Program, which saw the agency’s antiterrorism teams assassinate thousands of communist infiltrators and terrorists. During the Vietnam War the United States began using remote-controlled drones known as Lightning Bugs to fight the enemy. The CIA and Air Force used the jet-propelled Lightning Bugs to carry out high-altitude photo reconnaissance missions against the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. 1

The real predecessors to the Predator, however, were the UAVs known as the Gnat and Amber. The Amber drone was first built by a U.S.-based company owned by a former Israeli air force designer, Abraham Karem, called Leading Systems. It was developed in the late 1980s and then reconstituted as the Gnat, a drone that was similar to the modern Predator in shape and configuration. The Predator drone used in Pakistan with such deadly effect after 2004 was developed from the Gnat and made its debut flight in June 1994. This initial Predator, built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems in San Diego, was a spy/surveillance aircraft and was not armed.

The timing of the Predator’s development was most serendipitous for the CIA because the U.S. military had recently become involved in a war in the Balkans. The United States desperately needed a new reconnaissance aircraft to spy on the enemy in this complex civil war. Interestingly enough, the Predators (four initially) were deployed in July 1995 to spy on the Christian Serbs who had slaughtered thousands of Bosnian Muslims in the worst case of genocide in Europe since the Nazis. 2The United States intervened to fight on behalf of the Muslims to prevent further genocide and began an aerial campaign against Republika Srbska Serbian troops known as Operation Deliberate Force. To help U.S. attack aircraft spot Serbian targets, the CIA Predators, which were based in Gjader, Albania, made recon flights over Bosnia in an operation known as Nomad Vigil. 3The actual pilots for the aircraft were based in trailers in Indian Springs Air Force Base, Nevada (renamed Creech Air Force Base in 2005) and belonged to the Eleventh Reconnaissance Squadron. The CIA’s dream of using remote-control planes to collect data and intelligence from the skies had finally come true. 4Author and journalist Steve Coll describes the revolutionary development as follows: “In the first flights over Bosnia the CIA linked its Langley headquarters to the pilots’ van. Woolsey [the CIA head] emailed a pilot as he watched video images relayed to [CIA Headquarters] Virginia. ‘I’d say What direction for Mostar?… Is that the river?…’ Woolsey recalled. ‘And he’d say Yeah. Do you want to look at the bridge?… Let’s zoom further, it looks like he has a big funny hat on.’” 5