Area 51_ An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base - Annie Jacobsen [182]
No longer used only for espionage, the Predator got a new designation. Previously it had been the RQ-1 Predator: R for reconnaissance and Q indicating unmanned. Immediately after the Yemen strike, the Predator became the MQ-1 Predator, with the M now indicating its multirole use. The company that built the Predator was General Atomics, the same group that was going to launch Ted Taylor’s ambitious spaceship to Mars, called Orion, from Jackass Flats back in 1958.
A second Predator, originally called the Predator B, was also coming online. Described by Air Force officials as “the Predator’s younger, yet larger and stronger brother,” it too needed a new name. The Reaper fit perfectly: the personification of death. “One of the big differences between the Reaper and the Predator is the Predator can only carry about 200 pounds [of weapons]. The Reaper, however, can carry one and a half tons, and on top of carrying Hellfire missiles, can carry multiple GBU-12 laser-guided bombs,” said Captain Michael Lewis of the Forty-second Wing at Creech Air Force Base. The General Atomics drones were single-handedly changing the relationship between the CIA and the Air Force. The war on terror had the two services working together again, exactly as had happened with the advent of the U-2. This was not simply a coincidence or a recurring moment in time. Rather it was the symbiotic reality of war. If the CIA and the Air Force are rivals in peacetime—fighting over money, power, and control—in war, they work together like a bow and arrow. Each organization has something critical the other service does not have. The CIA’s drones could now give Air Force battlefield commanders visual images from which they could target individuals in real time. Now, intelligence capabilities and military could work seamlessly together as one. Which is exactly what happened next, as the war on terror widened to include Iraq.
On the night of March 29, 2004, an MQ-1 Predator drone surveilling the area outside the U.S. Balad Air Base in northern Iraq caught sight of three men digging a ditch in the road with pickaxes. Brigadier General Frank Gorenc was remotely viewing the events in real time from an undisclosed location somewhere in the Middle East. He watched the men as they placed an improvised explosive device, or IED, in the hole. Gorenc was able to identify that the men were burying an IED in the road because the resolution of the images relayed back from the Predator’s reconnaissance camera was so precise, Gorenc could see wires. Gorenc and other commanders in Iraq knew what the Predator was capable of. Gorenc described this technology as allowing him to “put a weapon on a target within minutes,” and he authorized a strike. The Predator operator, seated at a console next to Gorenc, launched a Hellfire missile from the Predator’s weapons bay, killing all three of the men in a single strike. “This strike,” explained Gorenc, “should send a message to our enemies that we’re watching you, and we will take action against you any time, day or night, if you continue to stand in the way of progress in Iraq.” Eyes in the sky, dreamed up in the 1940s, had become swords in the sky in the new millennium. Reconnaissance and retaliation had merged into one.
Simultaneous with the early drone strikes in Iraq, the CIA and the Air Force had begun comanaging a covert program to kill al-Qaeda and Taliban commanders in the tribal areas in the northwest of Pakistan, on Afghanistan’s border, using drones. To get the program up and running required effort, just as the U-2 and the Oxcart had. A drone wing, like a U-2 detachment or a squadron of Oxcarts, involved