Predator (16 page)

The reality wasn't quite that bad. Cassidy didn't realize that the imagery analysts weren't freezing every video frame, just those that seemed to show something of interest, usually no more than a dozen or so at a time. But the point was the same: they weren't watching the video for its own sake.

The Predator's first combat deployment also got off to a slow start in other respects. It began on July 8, when a half dozen chunky C-130 cargo aircraft touched down at the same airfield in Albania the CIA had used to fly the Gnat 750 over Bosnia in 1994. Inside the holds of the C-130s were three disassembled Predators in tan polyester-plastic crates. The C-130s also brought a ground control station, two small Trojan Spirit II satellite earth terminals with 2.4-meter dish antennas, a UHF satellite antenna, and roughly fifty-five military and civilian personnel. Only five were military pilots—three Army, one Navy, one Marine Corps—but General Atomics had sent its chief pilot, Tim Just, to help out. The Air Force had sent no pilots, but some of its civil engineers had arrived in advance to set up a tent city.

After decades of Albania's peculiar brand of isolationist communism, followed by widespread looting after the system's collapse, Gjader air base was largely just a concrete runway with concrete aprons. The base's most interesting feature was a tunnel dug into a nearby mountain to the southwest; reached by a very long taxiway, the tunnel still served as a bomb-proof hangar for some old MiG fighter jets. At the base itself, there was no electricity, no running water, no toilets, and not a single building the Americans could use. The Air Force engineers had set up a portable clamshell hangar for the three Predators, and an array of tents to shelter, feed, and provide other needs for the multiservice detachment sent to fly the drones. Next to the ground control station, they set up an improvised work station consisting of two big “expando vans”—five-ton trucks with boxlike shelters on their trailers—parked with their rear ends facing each other and connected by wooden steps and a platform. One truck was the Predator unit's operations center, the other a “Rapid Exploitation and Dissemination Cell.” This RED Cell—the scene of Cassidy's rude awakening—had been added so that more intelligence analysts could be present to exploit the Predator's video, print screen grabs, annotate the resulting still photos, and transmit them to JAC Molesworth in England.

Before the deployment, imagery scientist Werner had been asked to figure out how the unit could stream the Predator's video almost five hundred miles up the coast of the Balkan Peninsula and across the Adriatic Sea to the Combined Air Operations Center at Vicenza, Italy, a NATO command center known by the acronym CAOC. The CAOC (pronounced “KAY-ock”) was a collection of trailers where U.S. and allied commanders ran and monitored air operations over the Balkans. For the Predator's first deployment to succeed, the CAOC's planners would have to see the value of the intelligence the UAV produced and get accustomed to including the drone in their plans. Werner and the Predator's other advocates also wanted to transmit the UAV's video to the CAOC to spread the word about this new reconnaissance tool to as many commanders as possible.

Getting the ground control station connected to the CAOC took some creative thinking, since the Predator's satellite uplink was the Trojan Spirit, whose mobile terminals could transmit only to their hub at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. After consulting with the CAOC, Werner devised a double bank shot. First he set up one of the two Trojan Spirit earth terminals at Gjader to send the Predator's video by satellite to Fort Belvoir; then he arranged to have the video signal brought back across the Atlantic to NATO's southern headquarters in Naples and to the CAOC in Vicenza through an existing Defense Department fiber-optic cable laid across the ocean floor. The signal would travel roughly 54,000 miles—25,000 up to the satellite, 25,000 down to Fort Belvoir, and about 4,000 from Belvoir to Italy—to cover the 476 miles from Gjader to the CAOC. Still, since radio waves travel at the speed of light, the video would arrive at the CAOC with less than a second's delay.

Tom Cassidy did his part to make sure people watched Predator TV, though the military's lack of video dissemination technology limited that opportunity. After visiting the Predator base in Albania, Cassidy went to Naples to see Admiral Leighton W. “Snuffy” Smith Jr., commander in chief of U.S. and NATO forces in the Balkans, and told him that the intelligence analysts at Gjader were converting video into printed freeze frames. “I said, ‘We built this thing so you could watch the war on television. You've got to get with it and do that,'” Cassidy recalled. “Fortunately I knew the guy, so he agreed.”

At first, however, there was no Predator video to watch, and except for an accident of geography there might have been none at all. The Predators sent to Albania that July were equipped only with the placeholder UHF satellite antenna. The broader-bandwidth satellite antenna, which would transmit and receive frequencies in the Ku band, was still being manufactured. From Gjader, pilots could fly the Predator up the Adriatic coast and turn east over Croatia to reach Bosnia using the line-of-sight C-band antenna, which offered bandwidth enough to both control the plane and stream its video back to the GCS. But once the Predator flew behind a range of mountains between Bosnia and Gjader, the C-band signal was blocked and the flight crew had to rely on the beyond-line-of-sight UHF satellite antenna to communicate with the drone.

Crews hated this patchwork solution, for the UHF antenna offered so little bandwidth that streaming video with it was impossible. The UHF antenna sent video at about 19 kilobits per second, which meant the video came back at a rate of one frame per
minute
instead of thirty frames a second. Worse, the single frames that came in were random and intermittent. The flood of data captured by the Predator completely overwhelmed the UHF antenna; in effect, all the Predator could do via UHF was take a useless still photo every one to five minutes. The Predator detachment could only hope that the Ku-band system would arrive before their deployment ended. Otherwise, the impression the drone made on commanders elsewhere might be embarrassing, if not disastrous.

One night, however, someone realized that the valley in which Gjader lay was oriented at a northwest angle pointing directly toward Sarajevo, scene of most of Bosnia's fighting. Better still, there was a gap in the mountains between Gjader and the Bosnian capital. Sarajevo was 157 miles away, far too distant for those at Gjader actually to see the Predator, even with binoculars. But for radio waves, Sarajevo was in Gjader's line of sight. The Predator's C-band antenna was guaranteed to operate at distances only up to 115 miles, but when Werner was told about the quirk in the geography between Gjader and Sarajevo, he advised the young commander of the operation, Army Captain Scott Sanborn, to try flying over Sarajevo within a certain altitude and zone. If his calculations were correct, Werner explained, the GCS antenna would find the Predator's C-band antenna if the drone loitered in that spot.

At the end of a regular mission, and with every bit of transmit-and-receive hardware in the system torqued to highest capacity, a crew flew the Predator to Sarajevo. To no one's surprise, Werner was right. As the drone reached the city at the altitude he had suggested, crisp color video of the Bosnian capital began pouring into the GCS; more important, the same images began appearing on Predator screens at NATO's regional headquarters in Naples and at the CAOC in Vicenza. Soon the phone in the Predator operations center was ringing constantly, as officers in Naples and Vicenza called with requests from commanders, who had long lists of “targets” they wanted the Predator to fly over, locations where the Serbs might be hiding tanks, artillery, or surface-to-air missile batteries.

Suddenly the Predator wasn't just a trifle anymore. Seventeen years after Abe Karem first began designing drones in his Los Angeles garage, the latest version of his invention was much in demand.

*   *   *

By August, the Mibli was flying missions so regularly the Serbs began to realize that when they heard something like a loud mosquito buzzing overhead they were being watched. Soon they began gunning for the Predator. While its small size and white composite skin made the drone hard to spot with the naked eye, and its slow speed was below velocities usually targeted by military radars looking for combat planes, Serb troops finally bagged one on August 11, 1995.

Chief Warrant Officer 3 Greg Foscue, a Mibli pilot, was in the ground control station at Gjader that overcast Friday, taking turns with Tim Just of General Atomics in flying the first mission using a Predator with a Ku-band satellite dish. They were tracking a convoy of Serb military vehicles traveling west on a highway out of Br
č
ko, a town in northern Bosnia, as Air Force Brigadier General–select Glen W. “Wally” Moorhead III, chief of staff for the NATO task force, monitored the mission from Naples. Army Captain Sanborn, the commander at Gjader, was nervous about the mission. Sanborn had asked for a three-day “stand-down” of flights so his crews could train with the new Ku-band aircraft, which had arrived only a couple of days earlier. He had been granted a stand-down lasting a single day. Keeping tabs on whether the Serbs were moving heavy weapons in violation of UN resolutions was a top priority, he was told, and his commanders were relying on the Predator to help them accomplish that for their civilian bosses.

Moorhead himself was relaying instructions to the Predator unit through Captain Greg Gordy, an Air Force intelligence officer, as they sat at either end of a long wooden table in a secure conference room at NATO headquarters in Naples. They were watching the Predator's video on a twenty-seven-inch cathode ray tube TV usually used for video teleconferencing. Gordy was communicating live with Sanborn, who was in the RED Cell in Albania, through a secure computer chat room when Moorhead said he wanted the Predator to fly lower over the convoy so they could see what the Serb trucks were carrying. Sanborn balked. The Predator crew was already flying the drone only about seven thousand feet above the ground because its sensor operators had so little practice focusing the camera over the Ku-band satellite link, which created a lag of approximately half a second between the GCS and the aircraft. Sanborn feared that the Predator was already within earshot, eyesight, and antiaircraft gun range of the Serbs below.

“Are you sure you want us to do this?” Sanborn messaged Gordy.

“Yes,” Gordy messaged back. “I've got the general sitting here, and that's what he wants to do and he understands the risks.”

“Roger that,” Sanborn replied.

As General Atomics pilot Tim Just took the Predator lower, Sanborn grew even more anxious. “We're at risk of getting shot down,” he messaged Gordy.

Undeterred, Moorhead ordered another pass, this time even lower. As Just put the Predator into a descent, the video screens in the GCS, the conference room in Naples, and the CAOC suddenly froze on a frame showing the road and a blurry vehicle of some kind. No one knew for sure what had happened, but Sanborn could guess.

On the chance that the drone had simply “lost link,” pilots Just and Foscue and other crew members spent several hours monitoring the GCS screens. Later, others scanned the skies above Gjader, hoping to see the Predator automatically flying back home. It never arrived.

That evening, in the group tent the Predator unit shared, Sanborn was sitting on his cot when the phone next to it rang. Sanborn answered, then listened silently for a bit as Tim Just, whose cot was next to Sanborn's, sat watching and munching on a snack.

“Yes, I do,” Sanborn said into the phone. “He's sitting right next to me, eating a bag of Cheetos.”

After Sanborn explained the call, he and Just had a good laugh. The caller had been an officer with a combat search and rescue unit assigned to the CAOC who was gearing up to launch a mission. The officer wanted to know if Sanborn had any idea where they ought to look for the lost Predator's pilot. Sanborn politely explained that since the Predator was unmanned, the rescue unit could stand down.

The next day, the Belgrade news agency Tanjug reported that Serbian forces had shot down a UAV that Friday. Whether by mistake or for propaganda, Tanjug called the UAV “Croatian,” but Serb TV later aired video of Serb troops standing on the Predator's wing.

*   *   *

Three days later, on August 14, Sanborn flew to Naples on the Mibli's twin-engine C-12 King Air supply plane to discuss with Moorhead and others at NATO why the Predator had been shot down. Just as Sanborn was headed into Moorhead's office, he was handed a message to call the Mibli in Albania—urgently. The unit's operations officer, Captain Mark Radtke, needed to talk.

“I don't have good news for you,” Radtke said when Sanborn reached him. “We lost another one.”

“You're kidding me,” Sanborn said. “What happened?”

As Sanborn was on his way to Naples, Tim Just had been flying a second Ku-band Predator whose engine simply quit over Bosnia. Like the seagoing albatross that inspired its basic design, the Predator soared easily, and the aircraft continued to glide. Even so, Just quickly calculated that there was no way to reach the coast and ditch the Predator in the sea, his preferred course of action. He knew from having flown these routes every day, though, that there was a big mountain nearby, a place where no one was likely to be or go, so he simply turned the drone left, put the aircraft into the steepest, fastest dive it could make without falling apart, and plowed the Predator into that isolated peak, trying to smash it into bits too small to matter if the Serbs found them.

The next day, the
Washington Post
reported on the Predator losses, which it described as “crippling an experimental intelligence-gathering effort begun only last month.”

Defense Secretary William Perry asked the Joint Chiefs of Staff to conduct an investigation into the Predator losses, and a team from U.S. European Command was sent to Naples to make inquiries. The Mibli was ordered to stop flying, and did for several days, until Admiral Smith himself intervened. The Predator was a work in progress, Smith told the Joint Chiefs, but it was already proving valuable. He had accepted the risk of flying the experimental drone over Bosnia, and would continue to accept it. The reward was worth the risk.