• How the Predator went from eye in the sky to war on terror's weapon of choice

    Lt Col Leslie Pratt / U.S. Air Force via Reuters

    Undated handout image of a MQ-1 Predator unmanned aircraft.

    By Robert Windrem, Senior investigative producer, NBC News

    On Sept. 28, 2000, the first CIA Predator drone took off from a base in Uzbekistan on its maiden flight and soon spotted “a tall man in flowing white robes” in a compound just outside Jalalabad, Afghanistan.


     “While the resolution was not sufficient to make out the man’s face, I don’t know of any analyst who didn’t subsequently conclude that we were looking at (Osama bin Laden),” wrote former CIA director George Tenet in his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm."

    The new drone was unarmed, however, having been developed not as a weapon, but as a long-range reconnaissance vehicle.

    Wrote Tenet, “As technologically dazzling as that was, it was frustrating in almost equal measure. Yes, we might have been looking at (bin Laden), but we were not in a position to do anything about it.”

    That frustration, say U.S. officials and analysts, drove the development of an armed Predator a year later. But the process was fraught with technical, legal and budgetary issues and the armed drone was not operational until after bin Laden’s henchmen had slammed passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

    According to one U.S. intelligence analyst, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, the first consequence of the drone sighting of bin Laden was a series of “what if?” discussions.

    "There was some debate about what we would have done if the Predator had been armed," the analyst said of the conversations at CIA headquarters. "Part of it was who would pay for the arming, whether it would be the Air Force or the CIA, but there was a legitimate question on who should be firing weapons at targets on behalf of the United States."

    Lt. Gen. John “Soup” Campbell, the associate CIA director for military support at the time, agreed that the thorniest question was “literally who will pull the trigger.”

    Still, the prospect of taking out the leader of al Qaeda proved alluring. The National Security Council authorized the CIA to begin deploying armed Predators, along with more of the unarmed remotely controlled aircraft, aiming to have them in the air by Sept. 1, 2011.

    It was left to the CIA and Air Force to work out the details on cost-sharing and the legal and moral issues of having the military or an intelligence agency carry out the attacks against targets who were not legally enemy combatants.  

    There were also technical issues, particularly with arming the warhead.

    "The initial tests in Nevada didn't go well," said the analyst, recalling that in one, the Hellfire warhead didn't arm properly and the missile tore through a building in the desert without detonating. "There had to be a number of adjustments through that year-long period."

    Campbell said the Hellfire was an off-the-shelf solution, and not well-suited to its mission. “The Hellfire is an anti-armor, anti-tank weapon,” he said. “Ultimately, we came up with a better warhead.”

    By July 2001, in Tenet's words, the CIA had its "hair on fire." New reports indicated an increase in intelligence reporting about al Qaeda readying a massive attack somewhere in the West.

    On July 10, Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser to President George W. Bush, to lay out seven pieces of intelligence that indicated the increasing likelihood of an attack.

    The warning came amid a still vigorous debate among U.S. officials: Should the U.S. deploy the Predator again in an unarmed mode or wait until the armed Predator was ready?

    "There was pressure on the CIA to fly it in reconnaissance mode," said the analyst. "The counter argument was we didn't want to fly it and alert the bad guys."

    A National Security Council "principals meeting" on Sept. 4, 2001, “was dominated by the same subject that had been lingering all summer long: whether the president should approve our request to fly the Predator in a weaponized mode,” Tenet wrote. “Unfortunately, the Predator still wasn’t ready to do that.”

    The CIA director also remained skeptical that intelligence agencies should be pulling the trigger of a military weapon. Despite the presence of Tenet, Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the issue remained unresolved.

    A week later, approximately 3,000 people died in Pennsylvania, New York and Virginia in the al Qaeda-orchestrated hijackings of commercial airliners.

    The intelligence analyst said the attack changed everything: “No more debate on cost-sharing or legalities. The warhead would have to work.”

    On Sept. 17, Bush signed the NSC finding authorizing the use of the armed drone, and within weeks, unarmed Predators were flying over Afghanistan. Soon afterward, the first armed Predator was fitted with a Hellfire missile. 

    Things happened so quickly that the drone operators were first installed in a trailer at the edge of the parking lot at CIA headquarters.

    On Oct. 7, the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda began and armed drones were in the sky. There were problems immediately, however, presaging issues that have affected the Predator to the present.

    That night, said Campbell, who was at CIA headquarters, a Predator located and tracked a convoy in Afghanistan that U.S. intelligence believed carried an important passenger -- Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.  After the convoy stopped at or near a mosque, a Hellfire was readied.

    But a military lawyer at Central Command headquarters, in Tampa, Fla., refused to authorize a strike.  For nearly three hours, said Campbell, the issue was debated.  By the time an attack was approved, the target was out of reach.

    Rumsfeld and Tenet were not pleased. "We cut off (Centcom's) feed for a while," the analyst said of their reaction. At the same time, better operating procedures were instituted.

    A few weeks later, on Oct. 25, the Predator was used in an unplanned mission.  Abdul ul-Haq, a Pashtun leader and CIA ally, entered Afghanistan on a mule from Pakistan to help lead the resistance, but was soon surrounded by Taliban fighters.  He put in a call to associates in the U.S., who then called the CIA, said the analyst.

    "Unfortunately, there were no American assets anywhere in the vicinity … (but the) CIA did have an armed Predator UAV close by," Tenet wrote. "We sent it looking for Haq. When we found him surrounded, Agency officers remotely fired the Predator’s single Hellfire missile, hoping to divert Haq’s attackers, but one missile was insufficient to the task. Haq was captured and executed on October 25."

    The attack proved two things: The drone could quickly reach remote locations, but its use in tactical operations was limited.

    "It was a last-minute call,” Campbell said of the mission. “… There was no planning, no coordination, no situational awareness.”

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    But the operation proved the Predator could find targets and successfully fire its missiles.

    Three weeks later, on Nov. 16, those capabilities were put to use after a high-ranking bin Laden lieutenant, Mohammed Atef, the military commander of al Qaeda and its No. 3 leader, was found in a "safe house" in Kabul.

    "An armed Predator located him and directed an F-16 strike," said the analyst. Once the F-16 did its work, the Predator took care of what the analyst called "squirters," militants who escaped the attack.  

    In the weeks that followed, said Campbell, the Predator was used in a variety of operations, including tactical strikes. Soon it became the weapon of choice for targeting suspected terrorists hiding in remote locations, far from U.S. military forces.

     “The drone program has proven to be the single most effective tool in destroying al Qaeda’s leadership and infrastructure inside Pakistan. Nothing else we have done comes remotely close, “ said Roger Cressey, who was deputy for counter terrorism on the NSC staff in the Clinton and Bush administrations and now an NBC News terrorism analyst. “Every reason not to use the armed predator over Afghanistan evaporated when the first tower collapsed.”

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  • EXCLUSIVE: CIA didn't always know who it was killing in drone strikes, classified documents show

    An NBC News review of classified CIA documents for a 14 month period beginning in September 2010 lists 114 drone strikes that killed as many as 613 people. However, in some of those strikes, the CIA did not know the identity of the victims. NBC's Richard Engel reports.

    By Richard Engel and Robert Windrem, NBC News

    The CIA did not always know who it was targeting and killing in drone strikes in Pakistan over a 14-month period, an NBC News review of classified intelligence reports shows.

    About one of every four of those killed by drones in Pakistan between Sept. 3, 2010, and Oct. 30, 2011, were classified as "other militants,” the documents detail. The “other militants” label was used when the CIA could not determine the affiliation of those killed, prompting questions about how the agency could conclude they were a threat to U.S. national security.

    The uncertainty appears to arise from the use of so-called “signature” strikes to eliminate suspected terrorists -- picking targets based in part on their behavior and associates. A former White House official said the U.S. sometimes executes people based on “circumstantial evidence.”

    Three former senior Obama administration officials also told NBC News that some White House officials were worried that the CIA had painted too rosy a picture of its success and likely ignored or missed mistakes when tallying death totals.


    NBC News has reviewed two sets of classified documents that describe 114 drone strikes over 14 months in Pakistan and Afghanistan, starting in September 2010. The documents list locations, death and injury tolls, alleged terrorist affiliations, and whether the killed and injured were deemed combatants or non-combatants.

    Though the Obama administration has previously said it targets al Qaeda leaders and senior Taliban officials plotting attacks against the U.S. and U.S. troops, officials are sometimes unsure of the targets’ affiliations. About half of the targets in the documents are described as al Qaeda. But in 26 of the attacks, accounting for about a quarter of the fatalities, those killed are described only as “other militants.” In four others, the dead are described as “foreign fighters.”    

    In some cases, U.S. officials also seem unsure how many people died. One entry says that a drone attack killed seven to 10 people, while another says that an attack killed 20 to 22.

    Yet officials seem certain that however many people died, and whoever they were, none of them were non-combatants. In fact, of the approximately 600 people listed as killed in the documents, only one is described as a civilian. The individual was identified to NBC News as the wife or girlfriend of an al Qaeda leader. 

    Micah Zenko, of the Council on Foreign Relations, says that more civilians and non-combatants have likely been killed by U.S. drone strikes than the Obama administration has claimed.

    Micah Zenko, a former State Department policy advisor who is now a drone expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said it was “incredible” to state that only one non-combatant was killed. “It’s just not believable,” he said. “Anyone who knows anything about how airpower is used and deployed, civilians die, and individuals who are engaged in the operations know this.” 

    The CIA declined to comment, and the White House did not immediately respond to calls and emails requesting comment. Important reporting on the subject also was done previously by McClatchy Newspapers.

    A senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity, said, “In the past, and currently, force protection is a big part of the rationale for taking action in the Afghan theater of operations.”

    Separately, on background, the official noted that as President Barack Obama said in an address last month, as the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan declines, so will the number of strikes.  

    The CIA uses two basic methods to target people for killing, according to current and former U.S. officials.

    The first is called a “personality” strike. These strikes target known terrorists, whose identities have been firmly established through intelligence, including visual surveillance and electronic and human intelligence. In other words, the CIA knows who it is killing.

    In so-called “signature” strikes, intelligence officers and drone operators kill suspects based on their patterns of behavior -- but without positive identification. With signature strikes, the CIA doesn’t necessarily know who it is killing. One former senior intelligence official said that at the height of the drone program in Pakistan in 2009 and 2010, as many as half of the strikes were classified as signature strikes.

    Analysts use a variety of intelligence methods and technologies that they say give them reasonable certainty that the “signature” target is a terrorist. Part of the analysis involves crunching data to make connections between the unidentified suspects and other known terrorists and militants. The agency can watch, for example, as an unknown person frequents places, meets individuals, makes phone calls, and sends emails, and then match those against other people linked to the same calls, emails and meetings.

    A half dozen former and current U.S. counter-terrorism officials told NBC News that signature strikes do generally kill combatants, but acknowledge that intelligence officials doesn’t always know who those combatants are. Some of the officials said the moral and legal aspects of the signature strikes were often discussed, but without any significant change in policy.

    Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, former director of national intelligence, says that drone strikes can more effectively identify and target combatants than other types of airstrikes.

    Ret. Adm. Dennis Blair, who was Director of National Intelligence from Jan. 2009 to May 2010, declined to discuss the specifics of signature strikes, but said “to use lethal force there has to be a high degree of knowledge of an individual tied to activities, tied to connections.”

    He also defended the precision of drone strikes in general. “In Afghanistan and Iraq and places where you have troops in combat,” said Blair, “you know better with drones who you’re killing than you do when you’re calling in artillery fire from a spotter [or] calling in an airplane strike.”

    Said Blair, “This is no different from decisions that are made on the battlefield all the time by soldiers and Marines who are being shot at, not knowing who fired the shot, having to make judgments on shooting back or not. This is the nature of warfare.”

    Once a target has been killed, according to current and former U.S. officials, the CIA does not take someone out of the combatant category and put them in the non-combatant category unless, after the strike, a preponderance of evidence is produced showing the person killed was a civilian.

    A 2012 AP investigation reported that in 10 drone attacks from the preceding 18 months, Pakistani villagers said that about 70 percent of those killed were militants, while the rest of the dead were either civilians or tribal police. The AP report notes that Pakistani officials and villagers claimed that 38 non-combatants were killed in a single strike on March 17, 2011.

    According to the AP, U.S. officials said the group hit by the strike was heavily armed and behaved in “a manner consistent with al Qaeda-linked militants.” Villagers and Pakistani officials said the gathering was a “jirga,” or community meeting, in which locals were negotiating with a small group of militants over mining rights.

    U.S. officials listed 20 to 22 dead in the strike, according to the documents obtained by NBC News, and described them as “other militants.” A former U.S. official told NBC News the drone attack was a “signature” strike, while a U.S. human rights advocate who has interviewed local villagers – and is skeptical of Pakistani claims of widespread civilian casualties from drone strikes -- supported the Pakistani description of the meeting as a jirga and most of the victims as non-combatants. 

    Related story

    How Predator went from eye in the sky to war on terror's weapon of choice

    In a speech at the National Defense University in May, President Obama defended his administration’s use of targeted killings. He acknowledged that there had been civilian casualties, and that drone technology raised “profound questions” about “who is targeted and why,” but he also said the CIA’s drone program was “legal,” “lethal,” “effective,” and the most humane option for counterterrorism. He said the U.S. had a “high threshold ... for taking lethal action,” and that the drawdown of forces in Afghanistan and successful action against al Qaeda would likely “reduce the need for unmanned strikes” in 2014.

    On the same day, the White House released a fact sheet stating its standards for using force outside of the U.S. and war zones. It stated that there had to be a legal basis for using lethal force, and that “the United States will use lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons.”

    Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include a reference to previous reporting by McClatchy Newspapers.

    Richard Engel is NBC News' chief foreign correspondent; Robert Windrem is a senior investigative producer for NBC News.

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  • US surveillance drone approached by Iranian fighter jet, Pentagon says

    By Courtney Kube, Producer, NBC News

    An unmanned, unarmed U.S. surveillance drone was approached by an Iranian F-4 fighter jet on Tuesday, the Pentagon disclosed Thursday. The Iranian jet got as close as 16 miles.


    The drone, an MQ-1, was escorted by two U.S. military aircraft, Pentagon press secretary George Little said in a statement. “One of the U.S. aircraft discharged a flare as a warning to the Iranian plane, which then broke off pursuit,” the statement said.

    The American jets and surveillance plane were over international waters “at all times, it said.

    In November, two Iranian jets fired 30-millimeter cannons at an unarmed U.S. military Predator drone conducting surveillance in the Arabian Gulf. The jets “fired to take it down,” Little said at the time. The drone was not struck and returned to base safely. Following the incident, the U.S. said its military would continue surveillance flights over international waters of the Arabian Gulf.

  • Seattle cancels police drone program after outcry over privacy issues

    Mesa County Sheriff / AP file

    A Draganflyer X6 drone is seen in a photo from the Mesa County Sheriff's Office in Colorado.

    SEATTLE - A plan by Seattle police to send aloft miniature robot drones equipped with stealth spy cameras has been grounded, following heated criticism of the project by residents concerned about privacy rights, the mayor says.


    Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn said Thursday that he and Police Chief John Diaz decided to cancel the use of two unmanned helicopters to better focus on maintaining the public's trust.

    The miniature helicopters, known as Draganflyer X6 drones, weigh 3.5 lbs and are equipped to carry video, still and night-vision cameras. In Seattle, they would have been used to search for missing persons and in certain criminal investigations, police said.

    The aircraft would not carry weapons but the use of drones for even mundane tasks raises ire among some because of the association of pilotless crafts with covert U.S. missile strikes in places such as Pakistan and Yemen.

    Plans by a number of U.S. law enforcement agencies to use drones represent a new and controversial frontier for the technology.

    A recent push for unmanned police aircraft was driven by U.S. Department of Homeland Security grants, including $80,000 used by Seattle to buy the eye-in-the-sky choppers in 2010.

    "We agreed that it was time to end the unmanned aerial vehicle program, so that SPD can focus its resources on public safety and the community building work that is the department's priority," McGinn said in a statement.

    Related story: Anticipating drone boom, colleges train future pilots

    The drones, which could only remain aloft for 15 minutes before their batteries ran out, will be returned to the vendor, McGinn said.

    Police in Florida's Miami-Dade County and Houston are among the law enforcement departments that have acquired aerial drones. Actual U.S. domestic use of police drone surveillance aircraft remains limited.

    Colorado's Mesa County Sheriff's Department has operated two small drones since 2010, mainly to create three-dimensional images of crime scenes.

    During a public hearing in Seattle on Wednesday, opponents of the drone program and the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington voiced concerns.

    "Drones give law enforcement agencies unprecedented abilities to engage in surveillance and intrude on people's privacy," Doug Honig, spokesman for ACLU of Washington, said in an email to Reuters.

    At another Seattle public meeting held in October to discuss the drone proposal, residents erupted into yelling and angry chants of "No drones!"

  • Report: US expands secret 'shadow war' in Africa

    By msnbc.com staff

    The U.S. military is using small spy aircraft disguised as private planes as it expands secret intelligence operations across Africa, The Washington Post reported late Wednesday.

    The surveillance missions are part of a "growing shadow war against al-Qaida affiliates and other militant groups," the newspaper said.

    Citing a former U.S. commander, the Post said about dozen air bases have been set up for the unarmed spy planes in Africa since 2007. The newspaper said they include sites in Burkina Faso, Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya as well as in the Seychelles.

    The report added:

    "The surveillance is overseen by U.S. Special Operations forces but relies heavily on private military contractors and support from African troops.

    The surveillance underscores how Special Operations forces, which have played an outsize role in the Obama administration’s national security strategy, are working clandestinely all over the globe, not just in war zones. The lightly equipped commando units train foreign security forces and perform aid missions, but they also include teams dedicated to tracking and killing terrorism suspects."

    The Post said that the U.S. Africa Command declined to comment on "specific operational details."

    However, the command confirmed that it worked "closely with our African partners ... to conduct missions or operations that support and further our mutual security goals."

     

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  • Navy drone crashes off Maryland; no injuries

    Bobbi Zapka / US Air Force via Reuters

    A file photo of a U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft is seen in this undated handout. The Global Hawk is similar to the Navy's BAMS-D.

    By NBC News’ Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube

    A U.S. Navy drone flying out of Patuxent River Naval Air Station crashed Monday after operators lost contact with the aircraft, NBC News reported.

    The BAMS-D (Broad Area Maritime Surveillance), an unmanned demonstrator aircraft that’s still in development, went down in a swampy area of nearby Bloodworth Island on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The 44-foot aircraft was on a training flight when it went down.

    There were no reported injuries on the ground and no damage to property. The cause of the crash is still under investigation.

    The Coast Guard set up a safety zone around the marshy area along the Nanticoke River where the crash occurred, The Associated Press reported.

    The BAMS-D is basically the Navy's version of the Global Hawk surveillance drone, made by Northrop Grumman.

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  • Watchdog group sues FAA for details on domestic drone flights

    A Predator drone is seen Nov. 8 at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas.

    By James Eng, NBC News

    A digital rights watchdog group is going to court to demand that the FAA release details on drone spy flights within the United States.

    The Electronic Frontier Foundation on Tuesday filed a lawsuit in federal court in the Northern District of California against the U.S. Department of Transportation, the umbrella agency for the Federal Aviation Administration.

    "Drones give the government and other unmanned aircraft operators a powerful new surveillance tool to gather extensive and intrusive data on Americans' movements and activities," EFF staff attorney Jennifer Lynch said in a statement. "As the government begins to make policy decisions about the use of these aircraft, the public needs to know more about how and why these drones are being used to surveil United States citizens."

    A message left Tuesday night by msnbc.com with the FAA’s media office in Washington for comment was not immediately returned.

    Drones are pilotless aircraft whose flight is controlled from the ground. They typically are equipped with spying equipment, such as video cameras, infrared cameras and heat sensors.

    The U.S. government has been using drones to carry out sensitive spying and attack operations abroad, such as in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    However, U.S. Customs and Border Protection uses drones inside America to patrol the borders, and state and local law enforcement are increasingly using unmanned aircraft for investigations into things like cattle rustling, drug dealing and searches for missing persons, according to EFF.

    The group says such uses raise privacy concerns because drones, by virtue of their design, can fly virtually undetected in urban and rural areas.

    The group’s lawsuit says any drone flying over 400 feet needs a certification or authorization from the FAA, but says the federal government is withholding information from the public about who specifically has obtained these authorizations or for what purposes.

    EFF said that it filed a Freedom of Information Act request in April for records of unmanned aircraft activities but that the DOT so far has failed to provide the information.

    "The use of drones in American airspace could dramatically increase the physical tracking of citizens – tracking that can reveal deeply personal details about our private lives," said Lynch. "We're asking the DOT to follow the law and respond to our FOIA request so we can learn more about who is flying the drones and why."

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  • Report: US drones helping local police agencies

    By msnbc.com staff

    Predator drones are being used in domestic law enforcement cases, raising concerns that the aircraft are being deployed beyond the missions that Congress originally authorized them for, the Los Angeles Times reported Saturday.

    The Times said a North Dakota county sheriff asked federal authorities to employ a drone for surveillance in a standoff with three men on a large farm on June 23, resulting in the first known arrests of U.S. citizens involving the spy planes in domestic cases.

    Since then, the Times said, two unarmed Predators based at Grand Forks Air Force Base have flown at least two dozen surveillance flights for local police. The Times reported that the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration have also used Predator drones in domestic investigations.

    "We don't use [drones] on every call out," Bill Macki, head of the police SWAT team in Grand Forks told the Times.

    Congress authorized the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to buy unarmed Predators in 2005, the Times said, to search for illegal immigrants and smugglers on the country's northern and southwestern borders.

    The Times reported that officials in charge of the fleet said they have authority to perform such missions through congressional budget requests that cite "interior law enforcement support."

    But former California Rep. Jane Harman, who sat on the House homeland security intelligence subcommittee when the drone program was authorized, told the Times that no one discussed using drones to help local police in basic work.

    Read more of the Times report here.

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