Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [180]
Along came another hurdle to overcome, one that was unfolding not in the desert but in Washington, DC. The newly elected administration of President George W. Bush realized that it had no policy when it came to taking out terrorists with drones. Osama bin Laden was known to be the architect of the 1998 U.S. embassy suicide bombings in East Africa, which killed more than 225 people, including Americans. He masterminded the suicide bombing of the USS Cole and had officially declared war against the United States. But targeted assassination by a U.S. intelligence agency was illegal, per President Ronald Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, and since the situation required serious examination, State Department lawyers got involved.
There was one avenue to consider in support of the targeted-killing operation, and that was the fact that the FBI had a bounty on the man’s head. By February of 2001, the State Department gave the go-ahead for the assassination. Then State Department lawyers warned the CIA of another problem, the same one that had originally sent the Predator drone to Area 51 for field tests; namely, potential collateral damage. The State Department needed to know how many bin Laden family members and guests staying on the compound the CIA was targeting could be killed in a drone attack. Bin Laden’s compound was called Tarnak Farm, and a number of high-profile Middle Eastern royal family members were known to visit there.
To determine collateral damage, the CIA and the Air Force teamed up for an unusual building project on the outer reaches of Area 51. They engineered a full-scale mock-up of Osama bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan on which to test the results of a drone strike. But while engineers were at work, CIA director George Tenet decided that taking out Osama bin Laden with a Hellfire missile–equipped Predator drone would be a mistake. This was a decision the CIA would come to regret.
Immediately after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Pentagon knew that it needed drones to help fight the war on terror, which meant it needed help from the CIA. For decades, the Air Force had been thumbing its nose at drones. The pride of the Air Force had always been pilots, not robots. But the CIA had been researching, developing, and advancing drone technology at Area 51 for decades. The CIA had sent drones on more than six hundred reconnaissance missions in the Bosnian conflict, beginning in 1995. CIA drones had provided intelligence for NATO forces in the 1999 Kosovo air campaign, collecting intelligence, searching for targets, and keeping an eye on Kosovar-Albanian refuge camps. The CIA Predator had helped war planners interpret the chaos of the battlefield there. Now, the Air Force needed the CIA’s help going into Afghanistan with drones.
The first reconnaissance drone mission in the war on terror was flown over Kabul, Afghanistan, just one week after 9/11, on September 18, 2001. Three weeks later, the first Hellfire-equipped Predator drone was flown over Kandahar. The rules of aerial warfare had changed overnight. America’s stealth bombers were never going to locate Osama bin Laden and his top commanders hiding out in mountain compounds. Now pilotless drones would be required to seek out and assassinate the most wanted men in the world.
Although drones had been developed and tested at Area 51, Area 52, and Indian Springs for nearly fifty years, the world at large would come to learn about them only in November of 2002, when a drone strike in Yemen made headlines around the world. Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi was a wanted man. A citizen of Yemen and a senior al-Qaeda operative, al-Harethi had also been behind the planning and bombing of the USS Cole two years before. On the morning