Sting of the Drone

16

They were up high, inside the dome of the Capitol. Ray Bowman’s legislative liaison officer had arranged for their black Chevy Suburban to be cleared through two gatehouses, allowed to drive onto the Capitol Plaza and then to park behind the main exterior staircase just below the Rotunda. He then escorted Ray and Sandra Vittonelli quickly through the magnetometer and the Capitol Police, past a tour group, to a small elevator door behind a velvet rope. The tiny elevator had shot them from the ground level of the cavernous U.S. Capitol building to the most secure hearing room on Capitol Hill, and the highest, built into the side of Bulfinch’s great dome.

The hearing room was used for briefings, but not public ones, only secret and top secret. There were no seats for the press or public, no television cameras from C-SPAN. Before Ray and Sandra were allowed into the room, Capitol Police took their phones and then ran wands over them to make sure there were no other mobile devices in their pockets. Inside, there were only Members and staff of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), or as it was known around town, “hipsy.” The committee were Members of the House of Representatives, elected to Congress from across the nation and sworn to secrecy about the workings of the U.S. intelligence agencies that they monitored on behalf of the House.

All the Members of the House were running for reelection in three weeks, but instead of campaigning back home, they were still in session because the President and Congress had not yet come to an agreement on a budget to fund the government in the fiscal year that had begun two weeks earlier. While the Congressional leaders tried to work out a compromise, some Members held hearings hoping to get media attention back in their districts. Unfortunately for the Intelligence Committee, its hearings were not televised. That combination of facts made the Members of the Committee somewhat out of sorts.

The Chair was Roberta Levinson, a liberal Democrat from Massachusetts. The legislative liaison officer had called her “Bobbie the Bitch” during his prebrief in the Suburban as they had driven up to Capitol Hill from Ray’s offices in Foggy Bottom on the banks of the Potomac. Ray had told him that was an inappropriate comment. Levinson may have come from the same party as the President, but she was a bit further to the left of the political spectrum than the Commander-in-Chief. As soon as Bowman and Vittonelli were seated, Congresswoman Levinson opened the hearing with a gavel.

“We’re here today as part of our ongoing oversight function on the use of armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by the U.S. Intelligence Community.” Some Members were still drifting in and getting seated. “We requested two senior officials with responsibility for the operation of the program and we have with us today Raymond Bowman, Director of the Policy Evaluation Group, and Sandra Vittonelli, a CIA officer assigned to the multiagency Global Coordination Center for UAV Operations. Welcome.”

Ray’s staff had set up video screens on which he intended to show the Members some film of recent attacks. “Madame Chairwoman, thank you for inviting us to brief you. I thought perhaps the best way to reveal what the program is like on a day-to-day basis would be to show you a short video, condensing into a few minutes the days of careful reconnaissance and consideration that go into a decision to attack a High Value Individual or a signature-based facility on the High Payoff Target List.”

The Chair cut him off. “Thank you, Mr. Bowman, if you will leave the video, staff can watch it later, obviously only in the vault.” Ray did not like the way this briefing was going and it had only just begun. “I think our time can be more effectively used by getting answers to some of the questions I know my colleagues on the Committee have, and I know I have. Let me start by calling on Congressman O’Connell, the gentleman from California.”

Sandra Vittonelli had never been at a Congressional briefing or hearing before. She found herself both charmed and intimidated by the formality of it, the wood paneling, the gavel, the formal language, and the fact that the Members sat behind a long curved, wooden dais raised three feet above the witness table. But the formality and courtesy quickly ended.

“Thank you, Madam Chairwoman,” Paul O’Connell began. “I want to start with how it was possible, if you actually do all this reconnaissance and review before killing people, how it was possible that you bombed an orphanage and killed over a dozen little boys. Can you explain that to us? Do you want us to show you a video, the WWN video of their charred, little bodies?” The legislative liaison officer sitting behind Sandra slipped her a handwritten note, “From Napa Valley, and overly fond of the wine.”

Ray took the incoming spear. “Congressman, we have investigated the incident you refer to, including an independent examination by our Inspector General. We do not believe it was an orphanage. We believe it was a trap designed to discredit the UAV program.”

Congressman O’Connell leaned forward, his chin almost touching the microphone in front of him. “Well, it certainly did discredit the program. You didn’t have checks and balances, internal controls in place to notice that there were a bunch of little boys in the building?”

“Congressman, our review indicates that there was a tunnel leading out from the compound,” Ray began. “That tunnel was undoubtedly used by the terrorists to smuggle the children in without our seeing them and to permit the terrorists to leave without being detected. We discovered that tunnel after the attack using one of the few drones we have with a multispectral camera and ground-penetrating radar. It was not flyable when the attack occurred. Our requests for funding for such UAVs were severely reduced.”

The Chair interrupted. “Mr. Bowman, do not attempt to blame the failure of the program to do its due diligence on this target on some funding decision that the Congress made.”

Ray regretted his response, but did not reveal it. “Congresswoman, if I may, we believe that this heinous, despicable act by the terrorists demonstrates both the depths to which they will go to discredit the UAV program and, therefore, how much they fear the program, how effective it is against them.”

Congressman O’Connell tapped his microphone to resume his questioning. “It’s effective, all right. Effective in alienating the very population we have been trying to influence, trying to turn away from terrorists. Your attack on the orphanage caused days of mass street demonstrations and protests in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan, attempts to storm our diplomatic missions, probably led to some of the suicide bomber attacks and roadside bombs that have killed our troops. This is what happens when you are not on the scene, when you are observing from thousands of miles away.”

Sandra felt a need to respond welling up inside her. She was there to provide Ray with technical details, but she thought she was coming under personal attack. “Congressman, no unit of Special Forces hiding up in the hills nearby and helicoptering in to raid that compound could have seen better than the UAVs. From above, we had a complete view of the compound that no one on the ground could have achieved. We were able to follow two separate targets as they drove to the compound. We confirmed through High Definition Imagery and Facial Recognition Software that both men were on the HVI list approved by senior level policy, intelligence, and legal officials from six departments and agencies. They were there.”

“Not when you fired missiles at that compound,” O’Connell shot back, almost screaming into the microphone. “Not when you murdered those boys.”

“Congressman, we learned a lesson from that attack,” Sandra replied, her face reddening. “We knew there was always a risk that the targets might escape through tunnels. We were willing to accept that. It did not occur to us that they would kidnap children and sneak them into a compound and then lure us to attack it. Maybe our minds were just not perverted enough to think of that. All of us involved in the program deeply regret the deaths of those innocent kids, but while it may have been our missiles that killed them, it was the terrorists who were the murderers, not us. If you want to yell at murderers, I think you are going to have to go to Afghanistan.”

The hearing room fell silent. O’Connell pushed away from the dais and leaned back in his chair glaring down at Vittonelli. “The Chair calls upon the Ranking Minority member, Mr. Scott of Virginia,” Levinson said.

“We are all, of course, in agreement that we have to deal with these terrorists,” Congressman Scott began. “But I think we are all a little concerned that this new technology may have made it just a little too easy to kill. So easy that you have stopped trying to apprehend them and put them on trial. And when you capture terrorists, you can collect all sorts of useful documents, as we saw with the raid on bin Laden’s house. And you can get them to talk, as we saw with the advanced interrogation techniques used on Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the mastermind of 9/11.”

Ray looked at Sandra, like a baseball player indicating that this was his ball to catch. “Congressman Scott, we have not abandoned arresting terrorists. Certainly in this country or any cooperating country which has control of its territory, we prefer to do arrests. But there are nations who will not cooperate and there are nations who would, but they do not control all of their own territory sufficiently to give us an environment in which it would be safe to try to perform arrests without placing an American arrest team at unacceptable risk.”

Congressman Scott looked unconvinced. “Well, I just can’t remember the last time when the United States actually staged an arrest raid to get a big terrorist target. See the thing is, when you say that it’s too risky, the result is that you have decided to implement the death penalty instead. And you do that without any kind of trial, any kind of defense, any kind of transparent, public process. It’s just the kind of government activity that the Founding Fathers, many of them from my state, opposed and tried to prevent through the Constitution. Now I know you two aren’t lawyers and while I am, I am no Constitutional scholar, but this worries me.”

After her last intervention, Sandra looked to Ray for a nod before commenting. She got it. “Well, actually, Congressman, I am a lawyer, graduate of the University of Virginia Law School, as I believe you are.” She waited for that remark to hit home. “But also like you, I do not pretend to be a Constitutional scholar. We do have them, however, in the Justice Department and the White House General Counsel’s office, and they have examined this question in great detail. Their view, which we can provide in writing, is that the Supreme Court has held that killing enemy combatants is not a part of the criminal justice system. On the traditional battlefield, there are no lawyers reviewing things before they happen. In our program, there are.”

The Chairwoman seemed agitated. “Ms. Vittonelli, I think you have put your finger on part of the problem that makes so many of us up here uneasy. For you, the whole world is the battlefield and anyone is an enemy combatant. And as a lawyer, a graduate of Harvard Law, I think that you and the Justice Department have overconstrued the Supreme Court case about the Nazi soldiers in World War II.”

Before she could respond, Congressman O’Connell was waving his hand at the Chair for recognition. “Madam Chairwoman, I think you are exactly on point. They not only can declare anyone an enemy combatant, they have declared American citizens as enemy combatants and killed them without a grand jury, a defense lawyer, a judge, a jury of peers, or an appeal court.”

Ray put his right hand on Sandy’s arm to indicate she should not respond. He did. “Congressman, to the best of our knowledge only four American citizens have been killed by the program and they were self-declared members of al Qaeda. They were engaged in planning the killing of Americans. They had been involved in terrorist attacks that did kill Americans. If we waited to the day when we could arrest them and give them their Miranda rights, there would be more Americans dead now.

“If an American in 1943 moved to Germany and put on the Nazi uniform and fought U.S. troops, no one would think his American citizenship should make him invulnerable to U.S. bombing raids, or that our troops should have tried to separate him out from the Wehrmacht and arrest him during a battle. With Americans who join al Qaeda and then scheme to kill their fellow citizens, they are a threat in being. Our first responsibility is to defend the other Americans they are trying to kill. And the best way to do that under current circumstances is often to use the UAV program. If we did otherwise, this Committee would, rightly, be criticizing us for not doing enough to protect Americans from terrorists.”

Sandra was wondering if there were any Members on the committee who supported the program. If there were, they were being quiet, or absent. The Chair resumed her questioning. “This battlefield you keep referring to, Mr. Bowman, where is it? What countries are you operating in today? How many aircraft do you fly a day?”

Ray asked Sandra to respond. “On a given day, like today, we have probably fifty UAVs take off. We are flying UAVs over Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Libya, Mali, Turkey, Iraq, the Philippines, and parts of the Indian Ocean. Some of those are armed, some are reconnaissance,” she said.

“What about Mexico and the Caribbean?” another Congresswoman asked.

“There are UAV flights there, for counternarcotics purposes, but they are run by the Coast Guard and Customs under a separate Homeland Security program,” Ray replied. “They are not under the Intelligence Finding signed by the President.”

“What about Vienna?” Congressman O’Connell asked. “Are you trying, Ms. Vittonelli, to hide from the Committee the fact that you staged an attack in downtown Vienna, in the capital of a friendly country, where an arrest would have been possible? Where instead you killed and injured innocent civilians and destroyed a five-star hotel?”

How does he know that? Sandra asked herself. The Vienna attack was under a special Presidential authority and only eight of the leaders of Congress had been briefed. Besides, the question was where are you flying today. “Congressman, I answered the question that was asked, truthfully.”

“Madam Chairwoman, I ask that we dismiss the witnesses and go into Executive Session to discuss whether we have had a case of perjury here, an intentional attempt to mislead the Congress,” O’Connell hissed.

Ray looked at the Chair. She was one of the eight leaders who had been informed of the Vienna operation, in advance of its being carried out. They exchanged nods.

“I think this briefing is over,” the Chair intoned. “But I want to leave the Administration in no doubt that there is concern up here. When you are launching fifty killer drones every day over a dozen countries, you are going to make mistakes. You are going to get America in trouble. And you are slipping into something potentially dangerous, where it is all too easy to kill and killing becomes like a computer game. Think about what our attitude will be when other nations do this. What would we think about a North Korean drone killing somebody in Seoul or a Chinese drone killing a Chinese dissident in San Francisco? Be very, very careful with this program. We will be watching. Meeting adjourned.” She dropped the gavel.

Ray’s legislative liaison officer moved the two witnesses quickly out of the room and to the elevator, avoiding any opportunity for Congressman O’Connell to say something more to Sandra Vittonelli, or vice versa. “Next time we are going to Little Big Horn, can you give me a better heads-up?” Ray said as the elevator descended. As the doors of the elevator parted, a bright light shone in. A television news camera crew had been waiting, along with a gaggle of about six reporters. Somebody on the Committee had leaked the fact of the top secret hearing. They had set up a press ambush. Sensing from the camera crew’s presence that somebody important might be coming out of the slightly hidden elevator, a crowd of tourists had gathered.

Ray whispered to Sandra, “disappear” and then he pushed out into the mob scene and began to talk to a reporter to draw the media attention to him. Sandra Vittonelli, hoping to avoid her picture being taken and her identity being made public, put her head down, brought her papers up close to her face and slipped into the crowd on the opposite side from Bowman. She found the Suburban still parked under the staircase. Inside, feeling secure behind the darkened windows, she turned on her secret level Blackberry. There was an e-mail from Colonel Erik Parsons. “We need a Kill Call this afternoon. The sooner the better.”