Sting of the Drone

23

“I don’t wear makeup,” he said.

“Well, you will for this,” Linda Greene told Raymond Bowman as she drove her Prius down the interstate. “I am your public affairs advisor for this, assigned by Winston Burrell. And I am not going to have you do badly or look badly. It would reflect poorly on the Administration, Dr. Burrell, and me. You are going to be persuasive. And you are going to wear makeup.”

They were driving together to the PBS Washington studios, which were actually in Arlington, Virginia. And they were lost. “I know, we are late, but we will be there in time for the show. Just tell me again where we turn,” Greene said into her iPhone as she drove. “No, I don’t see the Weenie Beenie. What the hell is a Weenie Beenie? Yes, I know it’s a live show and we have to be on time.”

As they finally pulled up to the nondescript building surrounded by high fencing, Linda Greene summed up one more time what Ray should say, “We have extensive checks and balances, a thorough review of every proposed mission. These missions are essential to the safety of the United States. They save American lives. Any Administration that had the capability to do this and failed to act would be guilty of dereliction of duty. Got it?”

“I know what to say,” Ray replied as he stepped out of the car.

Raymond Bowman was about to defend the drone program on nationwide television, because the National Security Advisor had told him to do so. He was not looking forward to it. For over twenty years in government he had remained out of the public eye; now he was going to be cross-examined for twenty minutes by one of the nation’s best-informed television personalities, Charlie Cross. After the opening introductions, Cross got right to it.

“Who decides who dies?” Cross began.

“I think our purpose is to prevent Americans from dying,” Ray replied. “Terrorists may think they can decide on which Americans will die and when. It’s our job to make sure that they don’t succeed.”

“That’s not what I meant, and I think you know that,” Cross countered. “Who decides who America kills with its drones?”

“American forces attack enemy forces based upon credible intelligence. When we use Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, UAVs, there is an extra process, involving lawyers, experts, and senior officials from five federal agencies. We have Rules of Engagement that require high confidence that the target is an active threat to American lives and America’s national security interests.”

“We’ll get to that, but my question was who decides. Is it the President? What is his role?” Cross persisted. “Or is it you?”

The studio lights were so bright that Ray could see nothing in the room except his interrogator. It reminded him of one of the advanced interrogation techniques he had helped to put an end to. “The President approves the list of people designated as High Value Individuals. He is presented with the recommendations of the departments. He is given the dossiers, demonstrating that the individual is an active threat to Americans. These are people, Charlie, who are trying to kill Americans. Such people, regrettably, exist. They have to be stopped, before they kill,” Ray said warming to his argument.

“So the President of the United States has become an executioner, deciding on who lives and who dies?”

“Charlie, the President is the head of the government. The government’s first duty is to defend its people. He does that,” Ray said, reaching for his glass of water. After taking a sip, he continued, “Another President might delegate this job, but he has chosen to be directly involved because, in his view, ultimately it is on his authority that these actions are being taken and he believes that he has a moral responsibility to ensure that we are acting ethically and responsibly.”

“Ethically killing?” Cross asked.

“Ethically using force, including lethal force, in self-defense,” Ray replied, “as Presidents have since George Washington.”

“So what are the Rules of Engagement? How are we acting in self-defense when we surprise some group of Arabs in a small town in Yemen? What are we defending, the corrupt Yemeni government?” Cross pressed.

He felt sweat breaking through the makeup on his forehead, but decided to ignore it. “If we attack a target in Yemen, it is because we have very good reason to believe that those people are sitting there actively planning to kill Americans, training people to kill Americans,” Ray answered.

“So we don’t attack targets or people who threaten other governments? The attacks in Yemen aren’t meant to prop up the regime there? You have never attacked a target there except to stop an attack on Americans?” Charlie Cross asked.

“I am unaware of any attack in Yemen except against AQAP, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and they are committed to killing Americans,” Ray hedged.

“Well, that’s a little different from saying all the attacks were to prevent some imminent attack on Americans. We also used drones against Qadhafi’s forces in Libya. Were they threatening America?” Cross asked. He had found a clear case when drones had been used when Americans were not in danger.

“In Libya, yes, back then we acted to enforce a UN Security Council resolution and under the authority of NATO. But now,” Ray responded, “we are only acting to defend Americans. Sometimes the people we target simultaneously threaten Americans and others, but the determinative criterion, the ultimate question is ‘Will these people kill Americans?’”

“Let’s leave that. Let me ask you, you know the people who pull the trigger, the people who you call the pilots even though they never leave the ground. Doesn’t it seem like a computer game to these guys after a while?” Cross probed.

“We call them pilots because they are. They have flown F-16s, F-18s in combat,” Ray shot back. “They fly on average twenty-two hours on patrol or in transit for every hour that they are engaging a target. They know they are flying real planes, with real weapons. And it is not up to them to fire their weapons; they have to be given approval after an extensive review. They don’t look at the target for seconds, the way other pilots do. They stare at the target for hours to be sure that they have the right target and that attacking will not endanger innocent people.”

“And yet, you blew up an orphanage,” Cross said.

Ray expected the orphanage question. “Charlie, we have flown over fifty thousand missions in the last five years. We do not want to make a mistake on any mission, but we have made rare mistakes. But we did not bomb an orphanage,” he replied. “Orphans were kidnapped by terrorists and hidden in a target. We learned from that and we take even more elaborate steps now to be sure that there are no civilians in the target area.”

“So how, then, did you kill an American, Wilhelm Stroeder, in Vienna, Austria?” Cross drilled. “Couldn’t the Austrian police arrest any terrorists, and was the American a terrorist?”

Ray did not see that coming. “Charlie, I can’t talk about specific operations. I can’t confirm allegations that there was a U.S. drone flight over this or that specific country.”

“Well, that sounded like an admission, but let’s get back to whether this new kind of weapon is a good idea. Is it really fair? You fly so high overhead, the enemy may not even be able to know you are there. Isn’t it like shooting fish in a barrel? The pilots are not at any risk, they can’t be hurt. Doesn’t it lower the barrier to lethal action?” Cross asked.

“It’s not fair,” Ray replied.

Cross was flummoxed for a moment. “So you agree with me?”

“The beauty of these weapon systems is that they defend American lives without risking American lives,” Ray said. “Our pilots are invulnerable.”

“What if drones were used against us?” Charlie Cross queried.

“We know that these weapons are not something that only the United States possesses. We would hope that any nation that uses them would use them with the care and high standards that we employ. If they are used against us, we will defend ourselves,” he answered.

“Do you think the people the U.S. is targeting with drones should defend themselves?” Cross asked.

“I’m glad that they can’t,” Ray shot back.

“So far,” Cross observed. “How long will these drone strikes go on, forever?”

“That’s up to the President, of course,” Ray answered. “But I think we all hope that the day would come when there is not an active terrorist threat to the United States.”

“Indeed, but maybe, just maybe as long as you are killing people, and leaving behind their sons and brothers, you are creating more and more terrorists and this becomes a war without end. Thank you, Raymond Bowman, for being with us tonight. We will be right back.” The bright lights faded.

Ray felt that he had been bettered by Cross, that he had not been as persuasive, as convincing as he wanted to be.

“You were great,” Linda Greene said as he walked off the set. “Dr. Burrell said to tell you.” She handed him a towelette to remove the makeup.

“I bet he says that to all the boys,” Ray said as he smeared off the makeup.

“And Dr. Burrell said to tell you that a K Call is under way, whatever that is,” Greene said as she dabbed his forehead. “They sent a car for you. It’s outside. So I guess I don’t get to drive you back.”

“That’s a shame,” Ray said, as he moved toward the lobby, “but thanks for your help.” Through the glass front door he could see a black Suburban sitting in front of the building. Nice, he thought, Burrell had sent the truck to rush him back to the PEG for the Kill Call. It probably had red and blue flashing lights in the grille, maybe a siren. As he approached the Suburban, the passenger door opened and an older African American woman emerged. “Are you Raymond Bowman?”

“You found me,” he said, smiling. “Thanks for coming.”

“This is a subpoena, Mr. Bowman. You have been served,” she said as she jumped back into the Suburban.

He looked at the document. It had the name of a plantiff, Janet Stroeder. He noticed that the list of defendants included Sandra Vittonelli. Her employment by the Agency, her relationship to the program was classified. “Fucking O’Connell,” he muttered.

“Mr. Bowman?” a pimply faced young man in an Army uniform said from inside a white Chevy Impala. “I’m your driver, sir. Where do you want to go?”

“Home,” he sighed, “but let’s go to Foggy Bottom.”

The large elevator reached the flight deck, ninety feet above the surface of the sea. It carried from the hangar below two men in blue vests and one thirty-eight-foot-long, matte gray, Sea Ghost aircraft, its wings folded up above the smooth, rounded fuselage. The drone, designated Caspar Six Charlie today, was reporting for duty. A man in a yellow vest, holding a remote control box with a joystick, steered the Sea Ghost from the elevator, across the flight deck, by the two alert F-18s, past a Seahawk helicopter, to a fueling area. He hit a switch that caused the aircraft’s wings to descend and lock into place. Its wingspan was now over sixty feet wide. Men in purple vests, known as grapes, leaped into action, running hoses and locking them onto each wing of the Sea Ghost.

Within minutes, the Sea Ghost’s tanks were filled and the yellow-vested controller moved the joystick again, gliding the Sea Ghost to the steam catapults that would launch it. Men in green vests bent below the drone, locking the aircraft’s wheels into the catapult’s channels. Nearby on the flight deck men in red vests, the armorers, watched. They had no role in this aircraft’s flight. It was flying unarmed, on a reconnaissance mission, patrolling the waters off Libya. Its bomb bay was filled with electronic spy gear instead of weapons. Two other Sea Ghosts sat below deck. If needed, they could be armed with air-to-air and air-to-ground missiles, fitted up inside a bomb bay in the smooth fuselage. When flying together the bat-shaped Sea Ghosts could swarm, flying in formation, communicating with each other with no human in the loop, deciding which of the drones should launch missiles against which of their assigned targets. If one were shot down, another would automatically assume its mission. If fired at, the aircraft could quickly pull such sharp turns that were there a human on board, he would quickly pass out. There were, of course, no humans on board. That would just have made the aircraft heavier, slower, and less effective.

Men in white vests did a last inspection of the Sea Ghost and then backed away, using hand signals to the yellow-vested controller. The controller looked one last time at his handheld device, checking the status of all onboard systems. Then he switched control to the aircraft itself. From now on it could fly a preprogrammed mission on its own, unless and until a human intervened. If none did, the Sea Ghost would patrol for four hours, then locate the Lincoln, signal for permission to land, and precisely set down on the rocking carrier flight deck, grabbing the arresting cable that would stop the aircraft’s forward motion.

Now, in autonomous mode, the Sea Ghost waited for the catapult. A second yellow-vested man knelt near the aircraft. He gave a thumbs-up to the Sea Ghost’s forward camera, then quickly dropped his arm, with his gloved hand pointing forward toward the sea. The forty-thousand-pound drone shot forward in a cloud of steam, left the deck, dropped briefly below the front of the Lincoln, then quickly rose as its one turbofan engine lifted the Sea Ghost up in a sharp climb toward the clouds.

There was no pilot assigned to that one drone, rather there was one flight supervisor below decks, monitoring the status of six Sea Ghosts aloft, some looking for aircraft, some looking for ships, others listening for electronic emissions. Two hours and fifteen minutes into the flight of Caspar Six Charlie something came up. Orders were received on the Lincoln and in minutes the flight “soup” got the kind of order he had been hoping to receive, an order to put a human in the loop. “Soup, take control of Six Charlie as its pilot and go feet dry. Set it on a vector to do photo recce of the Maaten al-Sarra air base.”

Caspar Six Charlie was about to fly into Libyan airspace.

It took only fifteen minutes, driving against the last of the rush-hour traffic, for Bowman to get to his office. The Kill Call videoconference was already up on the ten flat screens on the wall of his conference room. On the largest screen, he saw a single aircraft, a four-engine military cargo plane, sitting on an airstrip in a desert. “What have we got?” he asked as he sat down.

“We followed this AN-24 from Beirut International. CIA sources say it belongs to Hezbollah and is used to run guns throughout the region.” It was Sandra’s voice, coming from Las Vegas. “It’s now on an airstrip in the Libyan desert. As you can see, it’s being loaded from that storage bunker across the way. We believe that bunker is used to store chemical weapons, specifically VX nerve gas in artillery shells.”

The NSA officer on screen chimed in. “We can confirm the aircraft is run by Hezbollah. And that Libyan military communications has in the past referred to Special Weapons being stored there. That is their jargon for their chemical weapons.”

“Lovely,” Ray said over the network connection.

“One more thing,” Sandra added. “The Sea Ghost UAV we have giving us this image is a reconnaissance bird off the USS Lincoln in the Med. It’s unarmed. No missiles.”

“So what are our options?” Ray asked.

An Admiral at the Pentagon replied, “We recommend flying the Sea Ghost into the Antonov, ramming it, either on the runway or, better yet, in the air over the desert. The Sea Ghost has a jet engine. It can catch up with the Antonov once the cargo plane takes off.”

“Wouldn’t that spill the nerve gas?” the Justice lawyer asked.

“Most of it would burn up,” the Admiral answered.

“But not all of it?” the lawyer questioned.

“No, not all of it. Some would be vented, some would be ejected beyond the thermal zone,” the Admiral admitted.

“So what?” the State Department representative said. “Get real. The alternative is having the Hezbollah terrorist group getting its hands on nerve gas. They will use that against Israel, an American ally. The choice is between maybe killing a few camels in the middle of the desert or wiping out thousands of Israelis. That’s a no-brainer.”

“Legally, I don’t think it’s justified,” the lawyer responded. “We do not know that Hezbollah will use the nerve gas. Doing so would trigger an enormous Israeli response. Hezbollah probably just wants it as a deterrent, to stop Israel from attacking it again. Moreover, we oppose using ‘U.S. interests’ as grounds for using the drones. It should be a group committed to killing Americans. Is Hezbollah?”

No one answered.

“Well, you are right about one thing,” Ray finally said. “Our original guidance from the President was that we could use the UAV program to stop attacks against ‘U.S. interests.’ The proposed new guidance would drop that. We could only act against groups engaged in attacks on Americans. So, CIA, does Hezbollah engage in attacks on Americans?”

The image on the large screen showed the trucks driving away from the Antonov. The ramp from the rear clam doors was pulled back into the aircraft.

Ray could see the CIA officer on another, smaller screen talking to others off camera, but he could not hear their conversation. Their microphone was on mute. After a few minutes, the CIA man said, “Not in recent years. Hezbollah did kill Americans in the 1980s and was involved in the Khobar Towers attack on Americans in Saudi Arabia in 1996, but we have not seen an intentional attack aimed at Americans since then.”

“Ray, that proposed new guidance is just that, proposed. It is under discussion, not adopted. State feels strongly that we have to act to defend U.S. interests, our allies, and not just ourselves,” the woman from the Department of State explained.

Puffs of smoke rose from two of the propellers on the aircraft and then the rotors on two of the four engines began to spin. “All right. I am going to need the official, final view of each of your departments in the next very few minutes. Check up your tapes.” He then muted his own microphone and stepped off camera. He picked up his drop line to the National Security Advisor, who answered it personally on the third ring. Ray quickly summarized the situation.

When he was done, Burrell answered quickly. “Ram the fucker.”

“Winston, under the new guidance proposed by the Attorney General, he dropped protecting ‘U.S. Interests.’ He believes we should only attack those who pose an imminent threat to American citizens,” Ray noted.

“Raymond, there are Americans all over Israel. Probably a million Israelis are also American citizens, hold U.S. passports,” Burrell said. “Besides, whatever the President’s guidance on UAVs might be, his orders to me on protecting Israel are very clear. He’d be crucified if he could have stopped Hezbollah from getting CW and failed to act. Ram the fucker. Understood?”

Raymond Bowman saw the third and fourth engine start to spin and the aircraft begin to move slowly onto the runway. “All right, people. We have a decision. We will intercept the Antonov over the desert.”

The Justice Department representative hit her Request to Speak button. “The Attorney General does not concur. Such a move would be outside our recommended legal parameters.”

No one else spoke. “Noted for the record,” Ray said. “GCC, you are instructed to fly the Sea Ghost into the Antonov in such a way that the Antonov crashes or explodes over the desert.”

“Understood,” Sandra replied.

The conversation on the conference call stopped. Everyone on the network watched silently as the Sea Ghost camera tracked the AN-22 taking off from the airstrip. The image on the large screen from the UAV’s forward-looking camera showed the Antonov from behind, its four turbo-prop engines spinning as the aircraft climbed. The distance between the Sea Ghost and the AN-22 began to close.

“We’re going to fly above the Antonov and then dive into it from about five thousand feet above it,” Sandra said. “It should split in two and then explode. It’s going to be over open desert, empty desert, for at least the next hour, but we should be in position to ram in about ten minutes.”

The forward-looking camera no longer showed the AN-22, as the Sea Ghost climbed. The screen showed very bright blue, cloudless sky.

“We will have to tell the Libyans. This transfer of chemical weapons was probably not approved by the government in Tripoli, probably a rogue officer selling the stuff,” the State Department officer commented. No one replied.

Then the image on the screen shifted, spun, and became a view of the desert below. “What the hell was that?” Ray asked.

“The Sea Ghost is in a sharp dive,” Sandra said. That much was apparent. The ground was rushing up fast. Then the screen went black. “The Sea Ghost just flew straight into the ground.”

“Why?” Ray asked. “How?”

“I don’t know,” Sandra replied softly.

“Holy shit,” the Admiral said into an open microphone.

There was a long silence on the network.

“Admiral?” Ray called.

“Yes, sir?”

“Contact the Kirya op center directly,” Ray ordered. “Give them an intercept vector.”

“Roger that,” the Admiral replied.

“What is the curio, or whatever you called it, if I may ask?” the Justice representative asked.

Ray stood up and began to walk out of the room. As he got to the door, he heard someone on the call answer the question. “Headquarters of the Israeli Defense Force.”