Sting of the Drone

5

She could no longer pretend. Sandra Vittonelli had to admit to herself that she could no longer wait until after the meeting. She would, after all, do better in the meeting with the National Security Advisor if she weren’t squirming. Moreover, Burrell had not yet shown up.

His waiting area consisted of two chairs stuffed among three secretaries in his outer office. “We make most people wait in the West Wing lobby, but you can just sit here with us,” one of his secretaries had said. “After all, you’re one of us.” Sandra vaguely remembered the woman, maybe Rhonda, from the seventh floor at CIA Headquarters, but now she was in the West Wing working for Dr. Winston Burrell, the President’s alter ego on foreign policy, defense, and intelligence issues.

“It’s that first little door on the right, dear,” maybe-Rhonda said. “Just be sure to knock. It’s a one seater. Unisex.” As Sandra was about to knock, the narrow door opened and a man she thought was Vice President Menendez came charging out.

“Yes, he doesn’t have his own bathroom in his West Wing office. Neither does the Chief of Staff or Dr. Burrell,” maybe-Rhonda laughed when Sandra returned. “It really is a little old building, you know.” Sandra had never thought of the White House West Wing that way before, a sort of Big Brother house with everyone living and working on top of one another. The few times she had been in the West Wing before it had always been downstairs, on the ground level, in the Situation Room meeting space. And she had always been “backbenching” for the CIA Director, or the Director of National Intelligence. Now she was here by herself, wondering if that meant she was being left out to hang by herself.

“Burrell just wants an informal, kind of off-the-record update,” she had been told at Headquarters. “No PowerPoint, no Happy Snaps, no YouTube hits. Just walk him through it. You do it by yourself. You can do it in your sleep.” She might have to do it in her sleep, she thought, since she had been largely unable to sleep the night before, her mind processing, planning, unable to shut down.

When she returned from the restroom, a man thrust out a hand. “Hey, Sandra, great to see you again. How’ve you been?” She recognized him immediately.

“Ray, are you working over here now?” Raymond Bowman, the last time Sandra had worked with him, had been Deputy Director of the Policy Evaluation Group, a small and somewhat vaguely purposed, independent agency that sat above the Potomac on Navy Hill, across the street from the State Department.

“Same, same. Still at the PEG.” Ray beamed his good mood, in a way that was rare among people in the intel business. “No, Winston asked me to come over to sit in on your meeting. I think it’s just going to be the three of us.”

“It is,” Winston Burrell announced as he entered the cramped outer office. “Come on in.” The National Security Advisor’s office was spacious and bright, with a conference table on one side and a living room set on the other, a huge desk set in the back. Two walls had floor-to-ceiling windows, causing Sandra instant reflexive worry about snipers and laser beams linked to audio devices.

Burrell motioned her to the couch. The two men sat in the armchairs, one on each side of the lower couch. It did not look like a power group, more like a meeting of a prep school faculty. Winston Burrell was in his sixties, broad, balding, beefy. He was known for his rumpled look. He could have been mistaken for the prep school headmaster. Ray Bowman was two decades younger, six inches taller, and looked like he had escaped from a J.Crew catalogue. He might have been the crew team advisor or tennis coach. At five foot five, with short black hair, and businesslike manner, Sandra Vittonelli might have been the Dean of Students or head of the English Department. Rather than having power over a thousand adolescents, however, these three ran a global empire of killing machines.

Burrell began. “Hell, you’ve been running this operation out in Nevada what, two months now? Figured it all out?”

“Four months now, sir. It’s familiar in some ways. I was originating some of the Kill Requests when I was at Kabul Station and before that at Baghdad Station.”

“Well, I just thought I should get to know you better, rather than just have you be a face on a television screen in the conference room,” Burrell explained.

To know me better, or to know the program better? Sandra thought. She knew the National Security Advisor by reputation. He was a survivor, having worked in both the Pentagon and at State. He had done his cooling-off time in a think tank, and then come back in with the new President. He had been with the President early in his campaign, before anyone else in the national security business. They were said to be very close, the two meeting for drinks most nights up in the Residence after the President and First Lady put the twins to bed. Burrell must work very long days, she thought.

“Let me start with an admission that I will deny I ever said, but should explain why I want to know who is on the other end of the Kill Calls. The President has delegated the approvals to me,” Burrell explained. “I only go to him with the rare ones that pose new issues or close calls. As far as the rest of the world knows, he is making every decision.”

Burrell stared at her, looking for a sign that she understood the trust that he was giving her, the weight that was on his shoulders. “I understand,” was all that she could think of saying.

“I knew when I took this job that it would involve life and death. I wanted to save the good guys and I was willing somehow to be a part of getting the bad guys,” Burrell continued. “But now, I feel every day that if I mess up, if we mess up, if somebody I never met messes up, innocent people will die, and the bad guys will win. I know this sounds overly simplistic, but that is what it comes down to.

“But now, I am not just involved somehow. If I say yes when you call me, people die. If I say no, bad guys get away and may later kill innocent people, Americans, allies, people with families who I will have to meet with and console and explain things to.”

There was an awkward silence. Sandra and Ray were both trying to figure out if the National Security Advisor was done baring his soul. He wasn’t.

“All of which is to say, Sandra, that I am putting a lot of faith in you and your team to get it right. But I know that erring on the side of indecision, which means doing nothing, is sometimes not better than acting. You just have to maintain very high standards. No more Herr Stroeders.”

Sandra shook her head and looked puzzled at the name. “Wilhelm Stroeder, age twenty, a premed student at the University of Vienna,” Ray explained. “His mother is a doctor in Philadelphia, where he was born, making him an American citizen. He was the collateral fatality in the Palais attack. Officially, the Austrians have not figured out it was a drone attack. The new self-incinerating drone seems to have worked. A few people in their security service know, but they are looking the other way in return for some augmentations to their savings. The official After Action is that someone placed a bomb in the room, probably a rival drug gang. We have supplied the Austrians with intelligence that suggests that one of the Ukrainian drug cartels was possibly involved.”

Sandra was seeing layers to her business that she had no idea existed. “Ray here, whom I gather you know, he is your unofficial Guardian Angel, so appointed by me,” Burrell said. “He’s had your back, even when you didn’t know it. He’s also been the biggest advocate of the program in the interagency.”

Ray picked up where the National Security Advisor had left off, giving every impression to Sandra that they had planned the conversation. “Sandra, I remember before 9/11 when CIA and the Pentagon were fighting against the whole idea of the Predator and especially the armed Predator. But they had nothing that could find terrorists in real time, verify that there was no collateral at the site, and bring in an arrest team or a kill team. We had nothing. We were blindly sending cruise missiles at targets. Predator changed all that. It has almost completely eliminated al Qaeda Central in AfPak, it has been a huge force multiplier against the Taliban, it has kept AQAP in Yemen on the ropes, it has shattered al Shabab in Somalia, it helped to defeat Qadhafi in Libya. It has probably saved thousands of American lives. We need it.”

The two men continued to finish each other’s sentences. “And if we screw up in how we use it, people will demand we stop,” Burrell continued. “I have the ACLU and half a dozen other groups trying every legal means to stop the program as a violation of international law, or as a criminal conspiracy to conduct extrajudicial murders. ‘The President and Winston Burrell have set themselves up as prosecutors, judges, jury, and executioners.’ That’s what they say and the truth is, they’re right. We are all of those things.”

They seemed to have played out their script, so Sandra responded. “Dr. Burrell, we all feel personal responsibility for these life-and-death decisions. No one in the program thinks this is just another job; they are all acutely aware of how sensitive and important the work is, how necessary it is that we get it right, every day.”

“Okay, Sandra,” Burrell said, “What would you tell a Congressional Committee?”

“I’d tell them we do not initiate Kill Calls lightly. We track a target and spend days getting a Pattern of Life on him, what does he do every day, where does he go, when does he go there, who else is there. We work very hard to ensure that there are no women and children, no civilians anywhere nearby. We often wait until he is in a car alone or with another terrorist, off on a road by himself.

“If we are going after an HVI, we make sure it’s him, through facial and voice recognition, through human assets on the ground. Then we act under Title 50, Intelligence Act authority, under the Presidential Finding. If we see a signature of an imminent terrorist threat or an opportunity to do irreparable damage to the terrorist organization, we go Authorized Use of Military Force, under Title 10, Defense authorities, under the Law of War standards. Lawyers pore over every strike before I initiate a Kill Call. We are very careful.” Then she thought about the Viennese student. “We know how we missed the student in Vienna. We have run an After Action to figure out what went wrong. It won’t happen again.”

Burrell got up and walked over to his desk, picked something up and returned to the sitting area. He handed Sandra a picture of a handsome, young blond boy. “The President gave me this. It’s Wilhelm Stroeder. I have no idea where he got it. He gave it to me. I’m giving it to you. I should be giving you a picture of the thousands you’ve saved, but we don’t know who they are, so I am giving you Wilhelm to remind you and your team that this is about real people, not just HVIs and code names.”

Burrell rose and offered Sandra a handshake. ‘You’re doing a good job, but you have to keep it that way because there are people gunning for you, for me, for the program. And Ray’s right: it’s all we got.”

Leaving the suite, Sandra Vittonelli felt that the already heavy weight on her shoulders had just doubled. “Got time for a coffee?” Ray asked as he followed her out. “Let’s drop downstairs to the Mess.” On the ground level, outside the Situation Room doors, Ray Bowman seemed to know everyone, even the enlisted sailors running the take-out window of the West Wing’s little executive dining room. He talked them into opening a side dining room, where he and Sandra sat alone with big mugs of dark roast.

“Are you sure you don’t work here?” Sandra asked when they had settled into the chairs in the dark, wood-paneled private dining area.

“I do have a Mess account,” he admitted. “I am here a lot, doing special projects, off-the-books stuff sometimes, for Winston. He doesn’t trust the Bureau or the Agency.”

“But I’m Agency,” Sandra noted.

“Yeah, but your program is closely identified with the President. The program is a hybrid, half Intel, half DOD. And it’s kind of a redheaded stepchild. The boys up the river keep a safe distance. Notice that you were the only Agency person here today. No Director, no Deputy. If it goes splat, they will be nowhere near it, and if it does go wrong, they will let it go splat all over the President and Burrell. If it works, they will take the credit.”

Sandra laughed.

“What’s funny about that?” Ray asked.

“I thought you were a redheaded stepchild once. Weren’t you?”

It was Ray’s turn to laugh. “Very good memory, Sandy. I was, when my mother got remarried. Now it’s really darkened, kinda auburny brown,” he said patting down his hair.

Sandra Vittonelli’s secure mobile phone chirped. “I have to take this,” she said to Bowman. After a short, cryptic conversation, she returned to the table.

“Ray, Erik is acting when I am on the road and he wants to initiate a Kill Call. Is there someplace here? Can you get me into the Sit Room?”

Three minutes later they were sitting together in a small conference room in the Situation Room suite. On the main screen was an image beamed from a drone in Pakistan, an image that seemed to be mainly clouds. Erik Parsons’s face was on a smaller, side screen. “Ms. Vittonelli, we have been tracking an HVI code-named Packard for six days now. His Pattern of Life was that he kept to the house or the yard, receiving bad guys, but always with his wives and kids around, so No Joy. An hour ago he and two goons got in the SUV and they are driving south toward civilization. Right now they’re still on a back road, pretty empty, but they are about ten minutes away from a main road that will have traffic.”

Sandra muted the microphone and turned to Ray Bowman. “We give each targeted terrorist a code word name. Civil War battles. Whatever. Now we are on old cars.”

Winston Burrell walked in and sat next down to Sandra, who remained at the head of the table. “Keep going, this is your show,” he said.

“Erik, there is too much cloud cover in this image for me to authorize a shot,” she said.

“If we go lower, they will hear the bird,” the Colonel replied.

“Go lower.”

The image on the screen showed the clouds disappearing and then a lone SUV moving slowly on a road. Two minutes later the Toyota pulled abruptly off the road and halted. Three men burst out of the vehicle, each running in a different direction, diving under the low scrub bushes that lined the road.

“They think they can hide,” Erik’s voice said over the speaker. As he spoke, the image on the screen changed to black and white with shades of gray. “The infrared cam has all three targets fixed.”

Sandra looked at Burrell, who nodded, got up, and walked out of the room. She looked into the video camera above the flat screen. “I judge that we have located an HVI on the target list and two of his body guards. I have determined that there is no apparent risk of collateral damage. I have obtained the necessary clearances and I authorize weapons release.”

Within seconds, the image on the screen was showing three explosions. “How much do each of those missiles cost?” Ray asked, after muting the microphone.

“You don’t want to know. A lot more than a nine millimeter bullet,” she replied. “But a lot less than the cost of a U.S. embassy blowing up.”

The videoconference continued, as the operation went into the Bomb Damage Assessment phase and the wait for compatriots who might show up. Ray kept the microphone muted. “Sandy, Winston has asked me to watch out for you. That means intel support, being the political eyes and ears in this town, doing counterintel and force protection analysis, everything. In short, I got your back.” He hesitated a moment. “It’s been a few years, but, as I recall, it’s quite a lovely back.”

Sandra flashed on a night in London six years earlier. “Watch it, Ray.”

Erik Parson’s voice came out of the speaker on the wall, “Kill Conference closed.”