Clinton, Bush, and the hunt for bin Laden
That was the least of his problems. The whole Predator project had for months created huge angst both at the CIA and at the military. One unresolved issue was who would pull the trigger, if indeed the Predator were launched against bin Laden. Gen. Richard Myers, then vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, did not want the Air Force to be involved in what Myers and others in the military feared would be viewed by the public as an assassination of bin Laden and of de facto government leaders such as the Taliban's Omar.
Myers believed there were other, more viable military options that also would be more politically palatable and wanted an operation that would have "plausible deniability" for the Department of Defense, the former senior military official says. Myers believed it was sufficient to have the Predator used for spotting bin Laden and then have subs and surface ships stationed off the Gulf of Pakistan to fire Tomahawk missiles.
"It looks different to the military when you have 16 Tomahawks arriving and blowing the place up," this official said, "than when you have one Hellfire, killing one man."
There also was the question as to whether killing bin Laden would end the threat from al Qaeda. The military feared that in fact it could result in repercussions against U.S. forces abroad. Like Myers, the U.S. Air Force was extremely reluctant to get involved and wanted the CIA to do the killing and the funding.
"The CIA was always asking for more and more support," says the former military official, "and the Air Force was saying that the CIA wasn't paying them enough to do the work." Over at the agency, Tenet and his deputy director for operations, Pavitt, were reluctant to divert funds from other crucial programs to fund the Predator operation, administration officials say. Pavitt feared that bin Laden loyalists would target CIA case officers overseas if their role in Predator became public.
Even getting the Hellfire missiles was a challenge, because at first the U.S. Army simply refused to provide any, according to the former military official. So the Air Force turned to the Marine Corps. In the late summer of 2001, the Army finally jumped into the act and wanted to provide missiles, but U.S. officials say getting them from the Army's Redstone arsenal was always a bit like pulling teeth.
Another big question: If one of the Predators got shot down in Afghanistan, or crashed, who would pay to fix it? That resulted, former administration officials say, in a long period of negotiations between the CIA and the Air Force as to who would be responsible for what. The matter was finally settled through a memorandum of understanding that said that the Air Force would pay for the first plane that went down and the CIA would pay for the next. The debate over who would pay for repairs was "bureaucratic, not unimportant," the former intelligence official said. "But the debate did not slow down the deployment of the armed Predator. It was technically not ready."
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