The young men of Uruk he harries without warrant,
Gilgamesh lets no son go free to his father.…
TABLET I, EPIC OF GILGAMESH
Ashipment of plastic men’s sandals stamped MADE IN CHINA and common in South Asia goes on sale in Peshawar. A wafer-thin tagging device no bigger than a business card has been embedded during manufacture, China being only a stamp. Some of the tags are passive and will register when they pass by special readers, with the location of the shoe transmitted to a central tracker. Others are active and will transmit a signal that can be picked up from tuned receivers, even in space. It’s a long shot, but the shoes will do the talking: when they cross the border or visit certain locations, the unknown wearer will be identified as a person of interest.
A sensitive-site exploitation team moves to search suspect buildings, leaving behind tiny motion-activated surveillance cameras. A grid of clandestine unattended motion-detecting ground sensors—eyes on the ground—is also left behind, blanketing the neighborhood with visual, acoustic, and seismic informants.
From more than one kilometer away, a close-access target reconnaissance team watches a suspect compound. A high-value individual on the target list has been followed off and on for weeks by Predator, and now a cell phone call locates an associate. Utilizing their long-range sensors, the team gets a decent biometrics profile of two individuals—height, estimated weight, 2-D facial, hyperspectral signature—and transmits the files to the tactical operations center, where it is relayed to the Biometrics Fusion Center in West Virginia for second-phase analysis and confirmation of identity.
Predators flying high overhead establish pattern of life, identifying a truck never before connected with any known bomb-making network. Predator footage, together with archival satellite imagery, feeds into geolocating software that determines the truck’s coordinates with one-foot accuracy. A small drone is then launched, a very special drone with a classified name. It silently lands near the truck, dispensing its micro morphing air-land vehicle, which skitters to the truck and then crawls underneath. Its camera, which normally faces forward during flight, flips up and gathers images of a bomb that has been placed on the truck’s underbelly.1
“Going Hollywood,” military people call it, when politicians and bureaucrats, inspired by movie and television special effects, propose some harebrained mission, their own imagination creating the illusion that anything is possible. Army General Henry “Hugh” Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the late Clinton years and himself a lifelong special operator, says he was constantly baffled by the parade of counterterrorism schemes offered up from the safety of desks at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, often by people who were seemingly indifferent to the life-threatening circumstances pursued on behalf of what he and others in the Pentagon felt were low-priority objectives.2 “You know,” Clinton is said to have told Shelton after one frustrating meeting, “it would scare the shit out of al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas rappelled out of helicopters into the middle of their camp.”3
The decision-makers, for their part, have never really understood the military’s passive-aggressive resistance to their civilian masters, thinking it mere alpha male posturing—we don’t do windows—or even risk aversion. What’s the use of having a superb military if it goes unused? Madeleine Albright once asked.4 Various military officers expressed their distaste, though, for the prospect of being turned into mere assassins. So it shouldn’t have come as much of a surprise to the civilians when one officer, after being badgered as to why the military seemingly couldn’t come up with any plan for counterterrorism short of war, answered: “That’s what we do, sir. If you want covert, there’s the CIA.”5
Unable to resolve the bigger question of whether terrorism was a form of warfare, gross criminal action, or some shadow confrontation meant for intelligence operatives and not the military, the clashing decision-makers lurched forward. Something had to be done, and the dynamics of endless briefings and proposals in secret echo chambers was that data ultimately determined the doing: thus the final arbiter of approval for any Hollywood-like mission invariably came down to the quality of the intelligence information needed to maximize success and minimize danger. It was a battle between Can you assure me that he’s there? versus “You fuckers won’t bust down the door unless we can tell you what color bin Laden’s socks are!”6 Then 9/11 came and, well, apropos our story line, everyone gained a greater appreciation for improving the means to confirm that he’s there and for the importance of knowing the color of his socks. A new class of warrior emerged, not quite military, not quite CIA, and certainly not lawmen. I call them the x-men.
During the Clinton administration, one replete with these very battles, a whole new field labeled “special reconnaissance capabilities” emerged. When operations were required in what are called denied areas or politically sensitive territories, when everything from terrain to reality got in the way of conventional solutions, when socks were uncertain, special reconnaissance kicked in.7 Operations behind enemy lines, these missions always demanded the best of the best, but now just a little bit of Hollywood was adopted. Equipment played a larger and larger role, special reconnaissance being described as “employing military capabilities not normally found in conventional forces.”8 That meant black boxes.
Where mechanical eyes and ears fail, where the Data Machine stumbles, or where the cloud fills to bursting, something akin to the dark arts begins. These are the most secret of all secrets: the how of how the United States and its allies find and confirm individuals, the individual, when satellites and drones overhead or intercepted digits just aren’t enough. The starting point of such a mission could be a tip-off from sensors demanding positive ID and greater precision, or it could be just a name leading to a link leading to a link, and on and on and on, as the global hunt proceeds to find the body. This is the cutting edge of what is both manned and unmanned. And not only that, but this is also where the seams are: these black ops—military operations—exist in a gap where things are neither strictly military nor strictly covert, nor in the realm of law enforcement. The lanes of the road separating those communities—soldiers, spies, cops—used to be clearly marked, and for good reason—military was military, civilian was civilian, war was war, and assassination was something that didn’t happen within war’s rules. Even if military special operations worked clandestinely, they weren’t covert, that is, operations where the United States sought to hide its involvement (and those operations were once solely the domain of the CIA). And the CIA wasn’t the military, that honor being reserved for those who operate in the open. Military special operators and CIA people might work together, and lawmen might even be brought into a hostage rescue or an individual takedown, but the basic distinction of each of their roles pretty much held up until 9/11. A conventional fighting force pursuing an unconventional foe just couldn’t do things in the old ways in the hopes of stopping terror (or later even just stopping IED attacks) before it occurred. Or more precisely, while conventional military forces fought in the light, another war went on in the dark.
Dense government budget documents, obscure PowerPoint briefings, corporate job postings, and coded insider language hint of what lies on this other side. It is practically indecipherable terminology, a fragment of a tablet of a larger body that doesn’t exist in the light. I’ve learned over the years to sniff out the signs of these secret programs: like rare birds, they lurk deep in jungles behind euphemisms: sensitive activities, technical applications, technical support, signature support, special technical operations (or STO), special communications enterprise, special capabilities. More recently, euphemisms include tagging; tracking and locating (or TTL), including hostile forces TTL and clandestine TTL; and close-access target reconnaissance. This is the territory literally of the x-men, the intelligence and operations staff offices called G2X or G3X (or N2X/3X in the navy and J2X/3X in joint organizations). These x-divisions have been newly established within directorates and secreted behind the STO door or inside the SAPF, the special access program facility, an organizational component attached to almost every battlefield organization.
Dispense for a moment with the jargon and the acronyms and just think special effects: an old house crackling in the night as humidity and temperature change. A wafting pheromone that imperceptibly stimulates on a meandering vapor that floats from neck to nose. We all know that dogs can hear what humans can’t, that flies or bats can see or sense in amazing ways, that animals and insects and plants have evolved to armored and camouflaged perfection. The digital world is no different, with its hidden messages and sixth-sense attributes: metadata, impulse, emanation, heat signature. The digital creak from integrated circuits or even in a carbon-based life-form can signal a dramatic presence; a scent can mystically identify a particular person, even a particular feeling. Electronic devices, even when not powered on, emit unintentional electromagnetic energy, a passive electromagnetic signature that can be used to characterize and eventually to detect and identify. If multi-and hyperspectral sensing is the height of computing and physics in the world of imagery, this is alchemy, part science and part divination. Everything reveals if one can get close enough, close enough to get a special tag onto a car or into the heel of a shoe, close enough to get between a cell phone call and its nearest cell tower to intercept the call, close enough to actually listen to the voices or take a picture.
Tagging, tracking, and locating (or TTL) can be broadly defined as a set of unmanned technologies used to physically mark a target while providing a means of tracking it at the same time. This is the world of BORAT, Gecko, Perseus, Wolfhound, Orion, Talon Sabre, UniTrac, Shadow Wolf, Jabiru, Kestrel, Silent Partner, Pinpoint, Datong, and Q Electronics tracking systems; such a nice list of black boxes that hints of the diversity, effort, and secrecy in this multihundred-million-dollar program.9 The tag is attached to whatever item is to be located or tracked. But the tags are not always exactly tags, and they can be either active devices (radio-emitting) or passive, that is, readable through interrogation. Passive tags can also be chemical (such as infrared fluorescent), dynamic optical, or biological in nature (“spy dust,” biochromophores).10 Passive tags are not unlike those now used to scan almost every postal shipment. The most complex tags can also be manufactured from phosphors, dyes, and nanomaterials, substances that show up when exposed to air or light or are viewed by special sensors or by multi-and hyperspectral imagers. Perhaps the most tantalizing advance of all is in the field of nanotechnology, where a class of nanomaterials is called quantum dots. By using quantum dot (QD) technology taggants, which can be aerosolized or dispensed in an inconspicuous powder, friendly and suspect individuals can be uniquely marked and covertly tracked. The tags are undetectable in the visible-light spectrum, and they dissolve, minimizing detection in the long term. A lightweight laser interrogator can simultaneously identify QD-tagged objects from as far away as two kilometers.
Since the early 1900s, bird-banding programs have been used to keep track of winter migrations and territory. Scientists started using radio transmitters to track wildlife in the 1950s, a tactic that went worldwide in the 1970s when the Argos satellite was launched, then achieved high resolution with GPS in the 1990s.11 Aided by improved communications and vastly shrinking everything, tagging and tracking has become a common and fully networked scientific discipline.
Industry also started using tagging technologies to track shipping containers, cargo, and other important assets, a field generally called Automatic Identification Technology (AIT).12 The military used GPS satellite technology and radio-frequency identification devices (RFIDs) to monitor convoy logistics, munitions, and hazardous materials.13 By 2007, the US Army operated the largest active RFID system in the world, over 3,000 read-and-write sites and more than two million tags. Information stored on the tag and affixed to an object like a pallet is remotely detected by specialized readers whenever they are within range, the small battery on the tag allowing it to transmit a signal. No one needed to point a gizmo at the bar code, and active tracking became a normal way not just to monitor movements but also to receive health status reports of sensitive shipments.14
Of course, the same technologies migrated to the secret world. Long before 9/11, law enforcement agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI began using microprocessor-based vehicle tagging and tracking systems, and the DEA even created a black box that could process the propeller noise of a small plane and identify it by the specific signature it emitted, based upon minute variations in balance and torque. Scientists at the CIA developed elegant covert agent communications, listening devices, and clandestine surveillance (remember Afghan Eyes from the pre-9/11 bin Laden search). Night vision and forward-looking infrared, and the entire world of search and rescue beacons, advanced on the military front. When the new black commandos of the Joint Special Operations Command were given the “national” assignments of hostage rescue and weapons of mass destruction search and recovery, no expense was spared and any potential technology was considered. And just to illustrate the utter irrelevance of any one administration, if it isn’t already obvious, the weapon’s developers began working on long-range facial recognition (the Human ID program) before Bush II came along, at first under laboratory conditions, until Afghanistan and Iraq became the laboratory.15 The capability to find a face, locate the eye, and focus for an iris capture was achieved at one meter, and then at three meters, and then went longer and longer until biometrics at a distance was a reality.16
At the end of 2004, with the bloom off the rose of victory in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the Defense Science Board assessed the state of TTL and special activities, the phrase that refers to all clandestine and quasicovert military action. A “Hostile Forces TTL Capability Development Document” had been approved at the Pentagon, and the tags-on program of tracking suspected terrorists and their networks of facilitators—clandestine TTL—became “SOF-operator defined,” that is, in direct support of the one-percenters already moving into clandestine battlefields like Pakistan and Yemen and East Africa.17 Special Operations Command told Congress that year that it needed to address “surveillance inadequacies in the Department of Defense’s ability to collect timely, actionable intelligence on difficult-to-access, high-value targets and on tagging, tracking, and locating (TTL) vehicles, aircraft, vessels, containers, and individuals.”18 The Defense Science Board didn’t mince words as to its sense of urgency: the Pentagon’s highest scientific advisors called for a new Manhattan Project to focus on programs that would find, identify, and track individuals. Having fully supported drones and all of the latest black boxes through hyperspectral experimentation, the board wrote: “We need close-in, terrestrial means. We believe an integrated, coherent approach is required in order to develop identification, tagging, tracking, and locating (ID/TTL) capabilities that will give U.S. military forces the same advantage finding targets in asymmetric warfare that it has in conventional warfare.”19 By February 2006, the SOCOM (Special Operations Command) commander General Bruce Brown designated TTL the highest-ranked capability need of his command.20
It would never quite become a Manhattan Project, but in five years, the special reconnaissance world moved more and more into TTL techniques as part of common operations, with pattern of life drone study from overhead, close-access target reconnaissance looking through the windows, and TTL and its supersecret methods going inside. Like the counter-IED empire that produced flocks of drones and other black box devices, a TTL patron emerged as well, this one with a budget of $450 million. Special reconnaissance capabilities rebranded itself Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Exploitation (SRSE), and in August 2010, its portfolio of developing new tagging, tracking, and locating sensors expanded to encompass the biometrics and forensics systems, the edge-of-intelligence work, and much more akin to what straight-up policemen did.21 State-of-the-art “technical surveillance collection” also moved forward under the x-men banner, a term once reserved exclusively for bugs planted behind light fixtures and vents, now including so-called technical audio and video systems used for reconnaissance and targeting, all, of course, made mobile and networked for remoting and reachback. At each step along the way, the black boxes of special reconnaissance needed to be more capable, be undetectable, have longer battery life, and be able to communicate outside normal networks. Man-carried devices also had to be smaller, smaller, and smaller, even to the point of being “wearable” by a soldier, the epitome being lightweight, low-power, body-worn cameras, eavesdropping and TTL command centers. The human was now the bug and the furthest forward probe of the unmanned Data Machine.22 A specialized unattended land mesh network for high-data-rate, long-range persistent communications was created; TTL at the edge would demand robust wireless communications.23
In those same five years, more than 2,500 regular soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines completed the close-access target reconnaissance course, and the less secret and more rudimentary tools of TTL proliferated to white special operators and intelligence units. As early as 2004, the Hostile Forces Integrated Targeting Sub-system (HITS) was up and running, melding geolocation computations of raw data with radio frequency modeling and error estimation, bringing black and less black together. Then came SpotterRF, the world’s smallest surveillance radar, a low-power unit that weighs about four pounds and can fit into a backpack. In February 2007, TTL was being heralded as “influencing the battlefield by providing location and intent of hostile forces.” Operatives could now contribute to persistent surveillance while collecting and extracting information “from denied areas.” The community of x-men merged with the “interagency partners” of the CIA and FBI to synchronize capabilities that would perpetuate counterterrorism and killing operations even after the troops were gone.24 The next month, John Young, the director of Defense Research and Engineering, testified that research was emphasizing “advanced nanotechnology, biology, and chemistry to give us a means to find, identify, and track individual human beings with minimal exposure of our forces and with an ability to project this capability into areas of limited access.”25
Manned close-access target reconnaissance—combining the four main technical surveillance disciplines (electronics, video, audio, and TTL)—puts the x-men in the riskiest positions, whether in penetrating deep into the mountains of Pakistan on lone missions, or in going into the urban areas of Fallujah and Baghdad (or even into cities and places not yet on the public target lists). But the development of these technologies and the risk assumed can also obscure the true transformation here and the ultimate hallmark of the x-men: They cross the lines. They go where others can’t. They are soldiers, policemen, and covert operators all rolled into one. No border holds them back, and similarly, no conventional law applies. They have ridden the wave of post-9/11 jingoism, of connect the dots, and they march forward on the simplest explanation of why those attacks came. They are armed with technologies that are only tangentially arms. They have access to nanotechnologies and MASINT and the sciences of biometrics and forensics, which previously were available only in the security and law enforcement domains. And they are the answer machines: what used to be complementary and a mere adjunct to traditional intelligence is now more often than not the second source, the positive ID or the right-down-to-his-socks conclusion that decision-makers and x-men use to pull the trigger, acting as both intelligence collectors and executioners. These nonsoldiers, nonlawmen are all-in-one: a manned unmanned.
In special corners of the Machine, special corners only hinted at in the killings of Zarqawi and bin Laden, the x-men incorporate an everything portfolio, “technical support systems, special communications, SIGINT, and satellites,”26 building a self-contained world. The tools have accumulated, just as the data that the NSA collects worldwide accumulates, almost to the breaking point. And yet still there is a deficit—the urban hunt, the global hunt, the jungle hunt, the desert hunt, the island hunt, the cyberhunt—none will be successful without something more. And the deficit isn’t the obvious falling behind in processing and making use of all the incoming information, though that problem haunts. When the Defense Science Board issued its report Summer Study on the Transition to and from Hostilities at the very time when wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were spawning more and more terrorism, it was mainly expressing a growing sense of a need to finish the two wars and just return to the hunt, the original mission. That in itself was the answer: extracting America from conventional war meant moving warfare even further into the shadows: close-access, terrestrial, as man-to-man as could be imagined to find and kill terrorists, manhunting perfected and, most of all, made invisible.
Somewhere along the way, the Data Machine and its growing capacity also facilitated (and maybe even demanded) the creation of two sets of rules—two sets that have profound consequences. One is open and the other is in the shadows, one subject to scrutiny by the news media and public opinion and even normal laws, the other doing the dirty work that is often too difficult for humankind—the very articulation of what justifies unmanned systems in the first place—but also that which floats above written law. It isn’t just bravado; there is literally a black-and-white special operations force, and there are even two sides of the CIA and the NSA and other institutions, one side that operates in accordance with laws and another that makes its own law in the name of security. And here is the ultimate irony: this other world of dead or alive, “bring me his head in a box,” of waterboarding and secret prisons, of targeted killings, of indefinite detention, and even warrantless surveillance and bulk collection, tries to minimize harm in order to evade detection and intervention. It is not just political cynicism. Even the task of the x-men, or at least the driving factor in developing their black boxes and special reconnaissance capabilities—all of the enablers of fighting in the shadows—is articulated in official documents as having to be accomplished so that capabilities can be provided “without undue exposure of [friendly] personnel to risks.”27
And manned versus unmanned? For all the talk of drones and black boxes, this hunt of the x-men is about as human as one could imagine. Yet when armed with so much information and so much power, it seems almost that remote and long-range begins to look pretty good in comparison. For to embody all of the attributes of military and civilian, soldier and policeman, surgeon and killer in one is essentially to create highly adaptive and essentially automated decision-making that leads to one answer, one continual answer. And it is hard not to condemn the enterprise as the toil of a rapacious Gilgamesh exercising the power of the gods.
Equipped with the greatest of real-world black boxes, sensors, communications, and weapons, with the Data Machine always at their beck and call, these x-men are the essence of imagined perfection—the x-men working at the edge also increase the level of confidence in the final decision. The willingness to make mortal sacrifices, the assumption of meticulous preparation, and the magic of the special ensure that commanders and decision-makers start from the assumption that the target is the most dangerous and deadly to friendly forces (and to the World), thereby justifying all of the effort, but also that once the penetration is made, they know enough detail to satisfy the unspoken color-of-the-socks test. As former air force chief scientist Dr. Mark Maybury says of the combination of persistence and closeness, they have “a very positive impact on increasing knowledge because you have a chance to loiter and see more things,” bolstering with positive identification and reducing civilian casualties.28
That might just be the end of the story: assassins sent out, modern-day snipers creeping and hiding just a little bit closer to danger than less-skilled warriors, but even here, the Data Machine has changed everything and the warriors of special reconnaissance are valued more as collectors than killers, humans to be sure, but not valued for their cognitive abilities or language skills or even because they make a choice at the end whether to pull the trigger or not. No, here, “close” is the key word: the human operative is valued because getting close, putting an RFID device on a car, tagging an individual to follow him or her, slipping an intercept chip into a phone, fiddling with someone’s computer or home router, picking up some cell phone call, or taking some picture; even just watching and listening to all of this activity peeping tom–style, is valued because it gains access and data that the central brain does not (yet) know. Yet the close-access operator is also merely a new platform and data processor for the unmanned.
The president and his advisors literally sit around the conference table at the White House Situation Room half a world away watching an operation unfold live because of these men. One might imagine that courageous political decisions are made in executing the mission that day, in taking whatever momentary risk there is in the willingness to take the heat for failure. But in approving the execution—We know the color of the socks! It’s a go!—the option of trial isn’t even seriously considered; and in military terms, capture isn’t even attempted. All these decisions are made a little easier because navy SEALs or other special operators are not quite soldiers. These are, after all, the elite of the elite, further obscuring all of the distinctions of military and civilian and just and unjust, a blurring that empowers other outlaw fighters to justify their own actions and their cause. From targeting Osama bin Laden down to designating the umpteenth al Qaeda number three to be killed, the machine facilitates a corrosive blight. The military mission from Desert Storm through this post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan period of no-name war is ever more obsessed with perfecting the process of finding and killing the target. Only the imprecision of using such a euphemism is left.