A pilot sits at a computer controlling a CIA drone loaded with weapons powerful enough to shatter a tank and accurate enough to be airmailed through a terrorist’s bedroom window. As analysts cross-reference video feeds with voice intercepts to confirm the target’s location, a weapons technician calculates the probability that innocent people walking nearby might get killed as well.
As soon as a senior CIA officer, monitoring the entire scene from a separate location, gives him the final go-ahead, the pilot, who is operating from a hidden operations center in the Nevada desert, squeezes a button on the joystick, and, if the laser beam lines up correctly and he’s a good shot, a cloud of debris will fly up and then settle down around a motionless human body.
When the senior CIA officer is finished issuing orders for the day, she can walk out the door and, instead of returning to a tent or a modular trailer on some desolate military base in the Middle East, get in the car and drive a couple of miles to the Capital Beltway or to the grocery store down the block, or the tanning salon or the pizza joint located along a landscaped boulevard in suburban northern Virginia—just another day at the office helping to kill terrorists five thousand miles away in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere.
Senior CIA officials guide tactical drone operations from offices that are not far from the headquarters of McConnell’s Booz Allen Hamilton. Not surprisingly, the agency buildings are sealed off by fences and armed guards and monitored by dozens of cameras. The people in the homes and luxury condos nearby are not privy to what goes on inside.
Top Secret America does not just supply the contractors, equipment, and technologies to operate overseas. For the sake of convenience, it has also extended the battlefield command to “the sanctuary,” as commanders call bases and offices like these in the United States. In the sanctuary, a person managing a kill in the morning can be a soccer mom in the evening or a Boy Scout troop leader on the weekend. Killer drones, the innovation that makes this surreal arrangement possible, are a particular invention of Top Secret America. No other weapon better symbolizes the revolutionary new style of one-way, remote-control warfare that arose from the desire to put as few American men and women as possible in harm’s way. For military special operations, the trigger is pulled (actually, a button is pushed on a joystick-like contraption) by air force pilots working on military bases in North Carolina and Nevada. The CIA drone operations are handled out of the one north of Las Vegas, Nevada, too, from where the conventional military’s Predators and their newer, more lethal cousin, Reapers, are also flown. The Arizona, California, New York, North Dakota, and Texas Air National Guards now also take part from their home bases. Although those bases are close to civilian cities, too, no secret location speaks more powerfully to the evolution of Top Secret America than the one in Virginia where the managers of the drone strikes sit.
Targeted killings—critics call them assassinations—have been conducted by the U.S. government for a decade, and drones have played a large part in the continuation and frequency of such activities. Armed Predators and Reapers have become the weapons of choice for killing individual terrorist leaders in foreign lands. The success of weapon-carrying unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) created a demand within every branch of the military and the CIA for as many of them as their corporate inventor, California-based General Atomics, could produce. It also spawned a development and production frenzy within the niche community of manufacturers experimenting with other types of unmanned aircraft, and with the many larger defense contractors whose technology is used to move a drone’s surveillance pictures and targeting information around the world—from the battlefield to the sanctuary—in a matter of seconds.
The number of drones in the U.S. arsenal has increased from sixty to more than six thousand since 9/11. Funding for drone-related projects and activities was about $350 million in 2001, when the first CIA Predator was being flown from a trailer once used as a daycare center in the parking lot of the agency’s headquarters. In ten years, spending on drones has ballooned to over $4.1 billion, and there are over twenty different types of UAVs in the government’s inventory. Most of them are used for surveillance. Some of the experimental ones are as small as a dragonfly, and disguised as one, too.
In the drone war, U.S. national security agencies have maintained at least three separate “kill lists” of individuals, several sources explained. The National Security Council (NSC) kept one list and reviewed it at weekly meetings attended by the president and vice president. Another was the CIA’s, with no input from the NSC or the Defense Department. A third list was the military’s, but that was really more than one, since the clandestine special operations troops of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had their own list as well. Some suspected terrorists were on multiple lists. But even these highly classified kill lists were not coordinated among the three primary agencies involved in creating them. Each group had its own set of lawyers looking at legal questions. The military and the CIA each had its own set of targeters developing the time and location of the strike. Each had its own pilots, command centers, budget process, and long logistics and personnel pipeline to maintain its own fleet of UAVs.
Permission to kill also was granted variously, depending on the agency involved and the location of the person targeted, said U.S. intelligence and military officials. Some individuals could be killed on the say-so of tactical commanders without approval from above, while others could not be killed without senior military or even cabinet-level approval; still others could not be killed without presidential approval. Until July 2009, the military’s lethal drones targeted individuals in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now most of the kills take place in Afghanistan; the CIA’s drones, on the other hand, killed people in countries where U.S. forces were not conducting military operations, including Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan. Presidential approval was absolutely required to operate in these countries. In Somalia, where there was no effective government, once the White House approved the overall mission, all that was needed were multiple CIA or JSOC confirmations of the target’s location—so the wrong person wouldn’t be killed. In Yemen, where the government of Ali Abdullah Saleh had agreed to allow the CIA and JSOC to operate, authority was delegated to commanders in the region. In Pakistan, however, in August 2010, after a number of civilians had died in drone attacks and the public there began to grow more vocal in its opposition to them, CIA director Leon Panetta announced that he would personally approve every drone strike. The director’s input had not been required since the first year after 9/11.
The CIA process for putting a person on the hit list begins at Langley headquarters. There, analysts and operatives in the Counterterrorism Center (CTC) pore over reports from informants and foreign intelligence services, as well as intercepts from the National Security Agency, whose interpreters and analysts have transformed voice files collected from sensors into English-language transcripts. They also watch hours of videotape from CIA or military special operations surveillance cameras, scrutinize satellite imagery, and collect information from observers on the ground. In the best cases, they also benefit from the forensic work of a new type of postindustrial secret agent whose expertise is the digital exhaust of captured thumb drives, hard drives, cell phones, and other electronics.
A couple of times a month, a pleasant-sounding secretary from the CIA’s CTC trekked across the agency’s campus to its old headquarters building, took the elevator to the seventh floor of executive suites, and handed acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo a manila envelope marked “top secret,” with a standard pink routing slip attached to the outside. Rizzo was involved in daily operations in the decade following the 9/11 attacks. He had been part of the spy world for thirty-three years, and never had he found himself in such a strange and lonely position. He would remove the two-to-five-page dossier from the envelope and read it alone in his office. It was information on the habits and history of the next man whom officers at the CTC wanted to kill—without a hearing, without giving the targeted man a chance to refute the information or even to admit guilt and surrender. Instead, Rizzo, the lawyers at the CTC, and the head of the National Clandestine Service (formerly the CIA Directorate of Operations) would act as judge and jury on these terrorism files.
Rizzo is a slight man with bright blue eyes, fluffy white hair, and polished fingernails. He had already served in the agency longer than most of his colleagues when he started reviewing the nominations shortly after 9/11. He approached the job with the detachment expected of a competent attorney, although, in private, he sometimes wondered what his Irish Catholic parents would think of killings like these and his role in them. Although he led these real death-panel reviews, he had a surprisingly hard time keeping the names of people on the list straight, which he blamed on his sense that “all those names sound alike,” as he would say to colleagues.
Still, it was a responsibility that weighed on him. “This was risky business,” he told me. “I would be second-guessed if the wrong person got hit.
“The thought never left my mind that I was giving legal approval for killings and I had never done that before. I just had to stay focused and detached. I had no problem with the morality of it because of the continued threat al-Qaeda posed…. In moments of reflection, it was daunting to be in that position.”
The duty to approve or reject putting an individual on the kill list was granted to this small group at the CIA by President Bush, and the responsibility was extended by President Obama. The agency’s approval process was orderly, vetted by legions of lawyers in the White House, the National Security Council, and the CIA, and then affirmed without much discussion or controversy by eight members of Congress, known as the Gang of Eight. They included the House and Senate Democratic and Republican leaders and the chairmen and vice chairmen of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. The CIA did not seek Congress’s approval for the program or to kill a particular individual on the list. But once the covert drone program began, the agency kept Congress informed of those who had been killed.
Intelligence officials involved in the CIA selection process say there were never more than two or three dozen individuals on the list at one time. To nominate a person for “lethal action” (the term used in the original 2001 Presidential Finding that made such killings legal, in the U.S. government’s view), CTC analysts would summarize the intelligence reporting they had on an individual using as much specific incriminating evidence as possible. The boilerplate request at the bottom of the case file was always the same: Based on the above, we believe (Mr. X) poses a current and ongoing threat to the United States and therefore meets the legal criteria for lethal action pursuant to the Presidential Finding.
Rizzo would then review the evidence contained in the file. Because there were no written criteria or words of guidance from the Department of Justice on exactly what constituted “a current and ongoing threat,” Rizzo knew the interpretation was on his shoulders, so he and his lawyers in the CTC poked and prodded the analysts about the freshness of their information, and he decided on his own that the outer edge of “current” would be information that was no more than six months old. Sometimes he and his lawyers would deny the CTC a request, usually for relying upon old and possibly outdated information.
The same was true for the renewal process. Every name on the list had to be reviewed by the lawyers every six months, and some people were taken off it because the information became outdated. The other key requirement was that the person in the file had to pose a threat to the United States—not a threat to an ally but a threat to the United States.
Being a U.S. citizen, native-born or naturalized, did not disqualify anyone from being on the list. New Mexico–born Anwar al-Awlaki was put on the CIA list sometime in 2010 when it became clear he was not just a fiery cleric spewing anti-American rhetoric but was helping to inspire and organize attacks. By then, however, Awlaki had been on JSOC’s list for some time. However, another American al-Qaeda member, Adam Gadahn, was never considered for execution because in the judgment of intelligence analysts he was all talk, a Tokyo Rose.
In Pakistan, where the United States used drones beginning in mid-2008 to go after al-Qaeda and Taliban members who had fled over the Afghan border, there was an elaborate Kabuki dance between Islamabad and Washington. The Pakistani government had given the CIA approval for such strikes as long as they were kept secret—which they never were because Pakistanis and local journalists sooner or later discovered the ruins, and the wrong people, civilians, were often killed. For internal political reasons, the Pakistani government usually publicly condemned the very strikes they had approved each time one became known. Sometimes there would be a temporary halt until the tensions subsided.
In Yemen, Obama took advantage of the political void caused by the popular uprising against the regime in June 2011 by secretly ordering a dramatic increase in drone strikes against leaders of the terrorist group there, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). The Yemen strikes were considered bold by international legal norms not only because the United States was not at war with Yemen but because, in the absence of a Yemeni government, Obama did not seek its approval. The unilateral move symbolized just how comfortable the new president had become with remote-control warfare.
Obama’s unprecedented use of drones began shortly after he took office, when he ordered an increase in lethal drone strikes in Pakistan. The strikes were facilitated by a coordination center set up near the border post not far from Peshawar, where Pakistanis sit alongside U.S. and British intelligence. With better intelligence and better coordination, the number of drone attacks increased between 2008, when there were 35, and 2009, when there were 53. They doubled in 2010, to 117.
The acceleration was aided by a number of technological advances: the more accurate Reapers had reached the region, better intercept technology was available, and Pakistan granted the United States permission to fly low-profile eavesdropping aircraft inside the country.
In all, from July 2008 to June 1, 2011, the CIA launched 220 strikes inside Pakistan, according to a senior CIA official. The agency said that some 1,400 suspected militants were killed, along with about thirty civilians.
The private Conflict Monitoring Center (CMC) based in Islamabad, which collects Pakistani and foreign news reports of casualties, had its own count. It believed that 2,052 people, “mostly civilians,” were killed in the five-year campaign through June 2011, and that this number included 938 casualties in 132 drone attacks in 2010 alone.
Rizzo and his colleagues at the CTC knew they were skating on the edge of public disapproval over the accidental civilian deaths, even with all the approvals they had in hand. The motto at the CTC was: “You have to plan and execute each shot to preserve your ability to do the next shot.”
Contractors were a critical part of the drone war. They remotely flew Predators and other unmanned vehicles on takeoff and landing. But they had to hand the joystick controls over to a federal employee—either a CIA officer or someone in uniform—once the vehicle got inside the kill box, meaning within range of launching its missiles. Government and military lawyers insisted that a service member or agency officer sworn first and foremost to act in the United States’ interest, and not some corporate interest, push the launch button.
Killer drones were maintained in the field by another cadre of private companies. Still other contractors, a who’s who of companies doing top secret work (including General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and SAIC), built, maintained, and staffed the global system that carried the drones’ surveillance data from overseas on to processing stations in the United States, including facilities in Virginia, California, South Carolina, Arizona, Nevada, Hawaii, and Alabama, and then on to military commands and Washington agencies and office buildings in Virginia where decisions got made.
Laid atop a map of the United States, the wiring diagram of this arrangement, called the Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), looked like the human circulatory system. With its near-countless branches and loops, the invisible data highway became the backbone of one-way drone warfare.
The CIA’s targeted killing campaign, no matter how successful, paled in comparison to the size of the drone war being waged abroad by the U.S. military, mainly through JSOC and mostly in Afghanistan. JSOC’s list of people to kill was much longer and more fluid than the CIA’s, and there was, in comparison, much less scrutiny of the background of the individuals on it. This is because the military is allowed—encouraged, even—to capture or kill all the people involved in an identifiable network of terrorists, not just its leaders. The military has “a lower high bar,” as one commander put it, for putting an individual on the list and for being able to kill or capture all of his associates, if they can be found. Documentation was still required but in the end the military leaders in the field had to provide much less in the way of rationale.
The rationale for using drones at all involved a trade-off between risking more soldiers’ lives by having them hunt and kill terrorists in ground raids, and using unmanned aircraft that involved no risk to soldiers or airmen at all. The choice was clear, given the mounting number of American casualties. But drone strikes denied the enemy a chance to surrender. That, actually, was another reason they had become so popular by 2011: there was really nowhere to put captives if the CIA didn’t want to hand them over to the military and if the military didn’t want to keep them in the politically unpopular prison on Guantánamo in Cuba.
Also, some JSOC operators told me that lawyers had warned them about the legal complications of killing someone face-to-face, in cold blood. This is one conversation I had on that subject with one JSOC commander: “We can kill them from the air, but the lawyers say, ‘No, you can’t just’ ”—the source put his hands together, stretched out his index fingers, stiffened his arms, and pointed his invisible pistol at my forehead—“ ‘blow someone away like that—pow!’ ”
When I tried to figure out whether any law actually said this, I got many different answers. There was no consensus, and after Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden at close range, the matter seemed to have resolved itself. Close-range killings, which felt more like executions than drone strikes, were permitted when they were permitted.
In June 2008, Arkin got a rare opportunity to have an inside look at the business end of these targeted killings when he scored a tour of the Combined Air and Space Operations Center in Qatar. The CAOC (pronounced “kay-ock”) was the control center for the air wars over Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s tribal provinces, as well as the nerve center for a whole array of missions flown by a range of piloted aircraft and unmanned drones, all overseen from computer consoles in the CAOC.
The CAOC was a heavily guarded convention hall–sized building within a cramped, Jersey-barricaded compound inside a guarded and fenced restricted area at the sprawling Al Udeid Air Base, in Doha, Qatar. The staff of one thousand hardly ever left the facility. Arkin, who at the time was writing a study on airpower sponsored by the air force, had read a lot about these command centers. He couldn’t believe he would be staying for ten days.
He was assigned a female escort, and soon he was checking into his room, a two-bedroom prefab trailer reserved for visiting VIPs. It was all of fifty steps from the dining facility, which was around the corner from the knockoff Starbucks kiosk. The grungy fitness center was in a modular building, and the communal latrine was no different from an airport public restroom; it was known jokingly as the Cadillac.
Late that night, Arkin was in the trailer when his roommate, a lanky, gray-haired officer, showed up. “Bill Holland,” the man said, introducing himself. Arkin did a double take: his roommate was the highest-ranking officer at the CAOC, a two-star general who was deputy commander for U.S. Air Forces in the Central Command region. They talked about the war, Washington, and the air force, and soon the general was suggesting things Arkin should take a look at, including the overall intelligence picture inside the ops center and the Predator drone operations.
The next morning, Arkin wandered into the public affairs shop to be greeted by his escort, who fidgeted nervously and told him, with equal parts disbelief and discomfort, that she had been informed that he could sit in on the classified morning briefing. Obviously, she said, there had been some mistake.
“Yeah,” he said matter-of-factly, “the general said it was okay.”
“ ‘The general said’?” she scoffed. “What general?”
“General Holland, my roommate.”
“Oh, shit,” she muttered, turning to her computer, “how the fuck did that happen? Fuck, fuck, fuck!”
Even with a general’s stamp of approval, inside the ops center Arkin was radioactive at first. But in time, he became part of the furniture, hardly noticed and left alone. One night, he found himself hanging out there trying to stay out of the way while operators with years of experience attempted to use some of the most sophisticated military technology ever created to kill a man in a mud hut.
After days of twenty-four-hour Predator surveillance—what is called “pattern of life” monitoring—special ops teams on the ground were pretty sure that they had found Gold 6—that is, the sixth most important person on the military’s high-value target list for Afghanistan at the time. Still, they couldn’t just pull the trigger. As Slash (the pilot call-sign name of the operations floor manager for that night’s shift) explained, if the target didn’t move, if positive ID could be established, if the visual chain of custody could be sustained, and permission could be obtained, and if the collateral damage estimate was accepted up the chain, well, then an air strike would be mounted. Such conditions had to be met in order to avoid killing civilians. Technology could only help so much. Software could show impact footprints, depending on various altitudes and angles that specific weapons were released from. In theory, the damage from a particular bomb delivered in a particular way should be neatly predictable, in reality it was anything but.
Nearby fighter jets on patrol were already being brought in as Slash’s decision tree blossomed; they’d have maybe an hour’s worth of fuel before they had to return to Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul. If a decision couldn’t be reached before then, new planes needed to be shuffled in behind them. It was a complex, procedure-dominated operation, involving a delicate balance between moving quickly enough to take advantage of real-time intelligence and not moving so hastily that the target hadn’t been fully confirmed and the collateral damage carefully considered. (This kind of operation was referred to as a “time-sensitive target,” or TST.)
For the men and women of the CAOC, from the special ops liaison to the lawyer and the two-star general, Holland, the killing of Gold 6 was in most ways just another job on another night, practiced with a kind of clockwork professionalism routine in this kind of war. But, as Arkin was to learn, the plan to eliminate Gold 6 was also a brief glimpse into the inner circles of secrecy that were no longer just augmenting our war effort but steering it.
The building adjacent to the Qatar ops center compound was called the ISRD building because it housed the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division. Visitors wishing to enter ISRD must surrender cell phones, pagers, laptops, and thumb drives before entering the 100,000-square-foot building, which is windowless and watched over by a military policeman, even though it is within a guarded compound inside a guarded base. Once inside, a Red Badge visitor—meaning someone who has not been cleared—is announced to all by flashing lights overhead.
In his various trips into and out of the ISRD, Arkin couldn’t help but notice that right down the hall from the strategy section was the STO—the Special Technical Operations division—a secure room within a secure room, where the space and information warfare specialists toiled. A similar cipher-locked and segregated secure room was located at the rear of the main ops floor—the so-called green door through which coalition members and the uncleared couldn’t go. Inside, someone told Arkin quietly, were “OGA and black SOF”—OGA for “other government agencies,” which meant the CIA; black for “clandestine”; SOF for “special operations forces.”
According to Sensitive Target Approval and Review (STAR) procedures, a sensitive target required going all the way up to the secretary of defense to get approval to strike. Some targets, such as electrical power grids or any locations inside Pakistan, were intrinsically designated sensitive. An estimate that more than thirty-five civilians might be killed also triggered the external approval process, which included almost any strike within an urban area. While the rules for Iraq were that all strikes (except STAR targets) could be approved by commanders on the ground, for Afghanistan, the Central Command in Tampa acted as the approval authority. And then there was the CIA and JSOC. They had their own chains of command; in other words, the CAOC was the air operations center for the entire Middle East—except for those special or secret elements that it didn’t control.
As the Predator desk officer explained, both the CIA and JSOC had their own Predators, and they had other unmanned drones, their own dedicated aircraft, their own weapons, and their own target shops and review processes. Up on the big screen in the ops center, the flight path of these clandestine missions could be displayed—if needed—but usually just a few people would be notified of any potential conflicts or overlap with conventional forces. Still, the CIA and the secret military forces wanted to be in the “fur ball”—that is, to have their basic positions known, if for no other reason than to avoid friendly fire when they were out there clandestinely operating.
The Predator video feeds were in real time, broadcast on television cameras to viewers in command centers around the world, as well as to people on the ground and in the air: the army or marine unit being supported, individual special ops teams with unique laptop receivers, analysts assigned to monitor every mission, manned intelligence collection planes, nearby fighter jets, and, of course, the very deadly Special Operations AC-130 gunships.
These battlefield movies were called “Predator porn” because of the hypnotic quality of the grainy black-and-white pictures. In the early days of the Afghanistan war, thousands of airmen were glued to the Predator “idiot box,” as it is also called, so much so that soon commanders yanked the feeds away from anywhere they didn’t absolutely have to be.
Each Predator flight fed its video to a separate color-coded channel (blue, orange, magenta), and, at the CAOC, those videos could be called up on a kind of cable feed. When Arkin was observing, three Predators were dedicated to secret military missions, then the Brits and the Italians were each flying one, and finally there were the drones belonging to the CIA.
There were a number of very interested parties camped around screens displaying a feed showing the probable Gold 6 location. A single Predator drone flew in the precise vicinity, and it was carrying a pair of Hellfire missiles. The Hellfires were powerful, but numerous times the targeters and the CAOC directors had watched a Hellfire with its 150-pound warhead go right through its target, only to have people walk away. More powerful weapons might, of course, compensate, but their increased impact could also multiply the risk of collateral damage. That night, the nearest jets were carrying 1,000-pound bombs, and analysts determined that the blast circle radii for those bombs would include a number of structures thought to be civilian homes. A conference call was initiated between the CAOC in Qatar, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters in Kabul, and Central Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida.
As the generals and lawyers went through the evidence on the targeted individual, on the blast circles drawn for the weapons, and on the chain of custody, there was no discussion of whether the mud huts that were in the drone’s sights actually contained civilians. As ops director, Slash decided to launch a pair of A-10 “Hogs” from Bagram Airfield. An A-10 is an attack plane that also mounts a Volkswagen-sized seven-barrel Gatling gun that can spew out sixty-five soda bottle–sized rounds per second. Its smaller, five-hundred-pound bomb loads also meant smaller blast circles and thus a lower probability of civilian deaths. In ISRD, the analysts drew a new set of blast circles.
The process of positive ID, a military lawyer explained, involved two parts. The first part was to positively identify Gold 6 as the particular bad guy he was suspected of being. As the lawyer explained, not only would “second sourcing” be necessary to confirm the identity of the target, but it would then have to be demonstrated that Gold 6 had been tracked in a near-perfect, unbroken chain of custody—from first identification all the way to the attack, 24/7. If Gold 6 was even momentarily lost—if he disappeared into a crowd or slipped from view under an outcropping of trees—either the entire ID process would have to be restarted, or the strike would be called off.
Within an hour, the senior intelligence officer announced that positive ID had been established. From behind the green door, word came that the National Security Agency had intercepted a confirming conversation. Approval was in hand from the command in Kabul, but the rules required that the director of operations at Central Command in Tampa also grant approval as well, which at first was a bit of a problem: on this Saturday afternoon in Tampa, the director of operations was not readily available.
Time slowed until the director of operations in Tampa was located, the strike was approved, and the two A-10s—which had received the handoff from the earlier aircraft, now heading back to base—were cleared to deliver their bombs, all under the watchful eye supplied by the overhead Predator.
Then, on the screen, clouds of debris and smoke jolted up from the ground, and the target area was momentarily obscured.
Almost instantly, the collective blood pressure in the operations center dropped. There were no high fives; such was one-way warfare. The mood was so blasé that Arkin might have even missed what happened next if he hadn’t been paying attention.
It was almost imperceptible from the Predator feed, but a line of bumps seemed to emerge from the ground across the target area, like a moving underground snake. “He’s strafing,” someone said, referring to one of the A-10s, now spewing hundreds of bottle-sized rounds. The A-10 pilot had circled back around after dropping his precision weapons, and as everyone watched, he came back low over the target and plastered it with withering deadly fire.
“Did I just see what I thought I saw?” Arkin asked, stunned.
“It was not unauthorized,” someone responded. In the many procedures laid out by the air force for pilots, one was that after all the work deciding which precision weapons to use to avoid collateral damage, the soldier on the ground calling in air support had the authority to attack again, knowing full well that doing so would unleash the most indiscriminate, lawn-mowing weapon around to do it, the A-10’s Gatling gun.1
But it seemed that this authorized strafing undermined the entire system. After all the effort and care, after all that went into drawing blast circles and selecting weapons, in the end someone on the ground, far from the more complete process happening at the command center in Qatar, had opted to rip through the whole surgical maneuver with a machete.
The next day, Arkin learned that Gold 6 was Baz Mohammed Faizan, a man U.S. intelligence identified as the shadow Taliban governor of Uruzgan province, then a mostly unconquered Pashtun district and opium poppy center. Since he was considered an HVT, military rules had allowed the A-10 to finish the job, however brutally, to get rid of him once and for all.
A couple of days later, Arkin was sitting in an office when an officer slipped a sheet of paper across the table. He had just a moment to take it in: “Top Secret,” with a bunch of code words on the top and bottom. An intelligence report from the CIA, Uruzgan province: Gold 6 had walked away.
Although Top Secret America is located in the suburbs and military bases of the United States, much of what it produces is intended for the war against terrorists overseas. Explicit in the remote nature of the new warfare was a stark trade-off: saving the lives of more American soldiers and airmen at the expense of accidentally killing more innocent civilians abroad. Or, as in the case of Gold 6, everything going according to plan but without any success. It was a trade-off never really debated in public, but one that seemed to sit well with most Americans, who themselves seemed increasingly distant and distracted from the gruesome and deadly realities of the longest war in the nation’s history.
No matter how good the intelligence is, or how effective the precision-guidance system, things on the ground are not always clear from the television show far away. Drone strikes have infuriated many Pakistanis, whose support for the overall U.S. war against al-Qaeda continues to wane. Fueled by the lies of their own political leaders, who insisted that the Americans were acting unilaterally and thus trampling Pakistan’s sovereignty, people took to the streets—sometimes in the thousands—in opposition.
Yet as hot as public tensions grew in Pakistan over issues of sovereignty and nationalism, something fundamental had begun to shift by 2011, indicating an acceptance of this one-way, remote-control warfare. In early March, a senior Pakistani military officer, Major General Ghayur Mehmood, publicly defended the CIA program and tried to set the record straight on civilian deaths. “Myths and rumors about U.S. Predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hard-core elements; a sizable number of them are foreigners,” he said at a news conference convened to address the matter. “Yes, there are a few civilian casualties in such precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements.” From 2007 to 2011, there had been 164 drone strikes and 964 terrorists killed, Mehmood told reporters. The change over time was apparent, too. In 2007, one terrorist had been killed; in 2010, 423 were killed. The general’s figures were close to the CIA’s count, which helped confirm their accuracy.
A subsequent flood of classified diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks further confirmed that, as far back as early 2008, the Pakistani government had been asking the United States for more drones to support its own military operations. The American and Pakistani press had been reporting this for years, but U.S. and Pakistani officials would always deny the reports. Now, there it was in an official document: Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani requesting “continuous Predator coverage of the conflict area” in South Waziristan, where the army was trying to clean out militants.
In another cable, in November 2008, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, addressed the high cost of secrecy in the drone war. “As the gap between private (Government of Pakistan) acquiescence and public condemnation of U.S. actions grows, Pakistani leaders who feel they look increasingly weak to their constituents could begin considering stronger actions against the U.S., even though the response to date has focused largely on ritual condemnation.”
Prior to 9/11, the idea that state-sponsored killing would become a normal part of American policy would have seemed unthinkable. But ten years after their debut, drone strikes piloted from the safety of Suburbia, U.S.A., had become an acceptable practice, even the norm. Funding Top Secret America with unlimited tax dollars during the deepest recession in memory had become normal, too, as had tacitly endorsing an incremental assault on individual privacy.
By the spring of 2011, the new way of war had become so routine that as the last cherry blossom dropped to the ground in Washington, President Obama approved the use of lethal American military drones in yet another country with which the United States was not at war: Libya. A United Nations resolution had authorized the NATO alliance to use military force to stop Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi from brutalizing opponents to his rule. But the air strike on his command-and-control compound in Tripoli, in which one of his sons and three grandsons died, seemed to indicate he had gotten himself on a kill list, too.