Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
"We heard about it and thought it was a great idea," says Cressey.
In the late fall of 2000, as massive winds buffeted the mountainous region of Afghanistan where bin Laden was living, the Predator could no longer be kept flying safely, so it was brought back to the United States. The Air Force, at the prompting of the NSC, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs, began arming the Predator under the covert Night Fist project. But taking an unmanned prop plane and equipping it with Hellfire missiles lethal and accurate enough to kill bin Laden from the sky, without too much collateral damage, was a huge technical challenge, the former senior defense official said.
"It required an upgraded sensor system," says the official, "and we had to fly the airplane with the missile to see what challenges we had in the area of aerodynamics and what would happen when we fired a missile from the plane."
The secretive Air Force agency known as "Big Safari," whose technicians can work magic with any aircraft to modify it for complex military operations, equipped two Predators with two Hellfire missiles each. The CIA purchased 60 missiles from the U.S. Marine Corps, and shortly before the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. Army also began providing Hellfires, the official said. The Predators and Hellfires were tested at the Naval Air Weapons Station at China Lake, located in the middle of California's Mojave Desert. The station is home to the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons division, where the Navy and Marine Corps develop and test most of their airborne weapons systems.
As Big Safari technicians struggled to convert a recon plane into a killing machine under cover of darkness in the cold desert, the heat was on from Clarke and Cressey at the NSC, Allen at the CIA, and Fry and Gration at the Pentagon, according to knowledgeable officials.
"The Bush administration pushed very hard to get the Predator armed and into the area of operations," says the former senior military official, "so that efforts could be made to rid us of the threat of bin Laden and al Qaeda." So much so that the plane was ready for testing, in the late spring of 2001, three months after the process of arming it began, instead of the originally slated three years, the official said. By then the covert program had been renamed "Positive Plot." Allen felt a particular sense of urgency, according to Cressey and the military official.
"We need to hit him," Allen told his colleagues at a meeting in the summer of 2001, "before he hits us."
At the NSC, Clarke certainly needed no convincing. Just a few months earlier, on Jan. 25, 2001, he had submitted a memo and a copy of a 1998 plan he had drafted to combat al Qaeda. "We urgently need . . . a Principals level review on the al Qida network," Clarke wrote. According to the 9/11 commission report, Clarke wanted the principals – consisting of the members of the cabinet, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other senior administration officials–to educate themselves whether al Qaeda was a "first order threat" or "some narrow little terrorist issue" that was being overblown by "Chicken Little" alarmists." The commission determined that Clarke became convinced that Bush officials refused to treat his concerns seriously enough, failed to act on his repeated requests to schedule that principals meeting early in 2001, and failed to act on what he describes as a comprehensive plan to defeat the al Qaeda movement.
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