Drone Warrior Read online

  DEDICATION

  THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY FAMILY,

  I’VE BEEN GONE TOO LONG.

  A PORTION OF THE PROCEEDS FROM THIS BOOK

  WILL GO TO SUPPORT USING DRONES TO SAVE

  ENDANGERED WILDLIFE AROUND THE WORLD.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PART ONE

  1 SHOULD WE KILL HIM?

  2 WHERE WERE YOU WHEN THE WORLD STOPPED TURNING?

  3 NEW GUY

  4 CAMP PIZZA HUT

  5 SPY GAME

  6 THE SHITBOX/GARBAGE CITY

  7 THE DOOR AT THE END OF THE HALL

  8 DAY ZERO

  PART TWO

  9 THE DRONE WAR BEGINS

  10 THE HUNTERS

  11 MY FIRST KILL

  12 FINDING A GROOVE

  13 WILD GOOSE CHASES

  14 HOME?

  15 THE BOYS ARE BACK IN TOWN

  16 THE SAUDI

  17 THE KIDNAPPING

  18 THE BOMBING

  19 DARK HORSE

  20 MANHATTAN AND BROOKLYN

  21 DOGS OF WAR

  22 THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY

  PART THREE

  23 GONE

  24 LIFE OUTSIDE THE BOX

  25 A NEW BEGINNING

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Let’s get one thing straight up front: I am not a hero; I don’t deserve praise for doing my job; but this story needs to be told.

  I was fortunate enough to be part of a new generation of warfare, a generation that has forever changed the way future wars will be fought. Every soldier has his or her role, and this was mine.

  Except for public officials and well-known individuals and/or entities in the public domain, the names of individuals involved in the operations mentioned in this book have been changed in order to conceal their identities. Most of my former colleagues are still involved in this work, taking the fight to the enemy day in and day out.

  Similarly, the terrorists referred to in this book have been given fake names, with the exception of well-known public terrorist figures. I have changed the methodologies we used to look for different terrorists with drones to ensure that no current tactics, techniques, or procedures are compromised.

  This manuscript was submitted to the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review and authorized for public release. It has been vetted and reviewed by organizations within the government most people don’t even know exist. This exhausting U.S. government review process to publication took longer to complete than it took me to write the actual book. Certain details of my work and the highly classified missions I was a part of have been redacted from the text at the request of the U.S. government. The views expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official views, policies, opinions, or positions of the United States government, including but not limited to the U.S. Department of Defense.

  Even though the book has been vetted and cleared for publication by the government, this is my story. The events that happened are true, recounted from the best of my recollection. I’ve reconstructed dialogue from memory, which means that it may not be word for word. But the essence of what was said is accurate.

  A few people have asked me why I’m writing this book. I’m writing it because I want my experiences and knowledge to help people and to provide much-needed perspective on a central feature of life, business, and war in the twenty-first century. I’m writing this book so that people understand what drones are actually about, and to show how they save lives and empower humanity, contrary to much of the persistent narrative that casts them in a negative light.

  WHEN I FIRST STARTED IN THE ARMY, THERE WERE VERY FEW DRONES. HAVING ONE available was a luxury. During the hunt for Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Iraq, most people were fighting over a single Predator for the search.

  By the time I left the Army, nearly a decade later, my team alone was directing the movement of three Predator drones over individual targets, stacking them on top of each other in the airspace to watch our prey from multiple angles.

  That’s why I called them our unblinking eyes; our drones saw everything and they never slept.

  When you look at how wars were waged before my generation, aerial support was essentially about cover and bombardment. Infantry units would go on long missions in the field blind, and just hope the airpower had softened up the resistance for them. Or they would navigate urban warfare terrain with little to no clue as to what was around the corner of that building, or behind that door, or poking through that window.

  Now, especially within the special operations community, missions don’t happen without drones overhead. That’s how valuable they are. You can bet that of any mission you see happening overseas—a SEAL team raid in Yemen, a hostage rescue in Syria, a terrorist snatched from a compound in Somalia—none of them take place without a drone. Before, during, and after the mission.

  It is astonishing how rapid this change has been: already, many in the military—particularly those who began their careers in the post-9/11 era—wonder how we even functioned without drones in the sky. Their importance cannot be overstated.

  I often think about all the missions of the men who came before me, and how many lives could have been saved if they’d had an armed Predator or Reaper watching over them. I think about the targets we could have taken out, people whom we might have stopped before they visited ruin on the world.

  But drone warfare is not always about nailing the bad guys. In fact, it’s not about that most of the time at all. It’s about finding the things that some of the most dangerous people alive don’t want you to see. It’s about connecting networks of individuals, families, money, matériel, and plots.

  My team and I lived in a Box in the hottest war zones of the war on terror. No one outside our black ops community really knew what we were doing. I doubt many would have believed it even if they did. We were high-tech detectives unlike any the world had ever seen, and our work represented a profound evolution in warfare.

  The drones we had allowed us to save lives. They reduced collateral damage. They gave our soldiers intel, allowing us to peer into the future on their behalves, predicting what would occur rather than simply letting it.

  This is the greatest beauty of drones. The ability to be proactive instead of reactive, to take the fight to the enemy before they can take it to us. With drones, we became faster than the terrorists, thinking a few steps ahead. Our targeting and raiding teams were built to ensure that we never gave those we hunted a moment’s rest.

  Conventional militaries have boundaries. All the enemy has to do is simply jump outside that boundary, slipping away or disappearing within a new one. But my team didn’t have boundaries. We moved like the enemy moved; we were as mobile as they were. We became the shadows that haunted them.

  Drone warfare will continue to evolve, as groups like ISIS start getting their hands on commercial drone technology and attaching grenades and bombs to them in order to conduct their own drone strikes. And we will have to use and develop technologies to combat them.

  Our new leaders in Washington are the same guys who helped build this drone revolution. General Michael Flynn, although he resigned from the National Security Council, was a significant driver of that revolution. General James Mattis, certainly.

  I have no doubt that the current administration will increase the use of drones and strikes overseas, because these were the leaders who saw firsthand the benefits they bring to the warfighter. Or
ganizations like Joint Special Operations Command are the only groups bringing the fight to the enemy every day, and they need more drones at their disposal.

  When President Donald Trump was running for office one of his basic arguments was that we need to be more proactive against groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda, to be on offense, and to use the tools at America’s disposal to destroy them. It falls in line with exactly what unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are good for, and that is projecting strength and striking the enemy, no matter where they are hiding.

  It is also worth noting that leaders like Mattis saw with their own eyes what happened when we reduced the pressure on those we were hunting: it gave us ISIS.

  The Trump administration by now surely understands the importance of the technology. I am guessing President Trump himself has been astonished by it, as most of what we are capable of (and have done) is completely off the books, highly classified.

  Most members of Congress and the intelligence committees still have no idea how, exactly, my team and I did our work. Occasionally members of my team were asked to visit and debrief officials on successful operations against terrorist targets, but those on the other side of the table never really understood or were allowed into the day-to-day of how our targeting machine really worked.

  That is what this book is about. An entirely new form of warfare that has emerged over the course of the last decade, my role in it, and the committed and forever-bound individuals who risked their lives to make it a reality.

  1

  SHOULD WE

  KILL HIM?

  I was wired on Rip It energy drinks, heart pounding, eyes glued open to the bright screens as we followed a white bongo truck for miles as it drove south, kicking up dust from the Syrian border through the open desert.

  “Raise altitude and switch to thermal sensors,” I called over to the team. “If this guy spots us in the air, we’re done.”

  It was midday, September 2009, and I was in the Box, a secret windowless bunker at the edge of an undisclosed military base south of Mosul, Iraq, not far from the Syrian border, staring at eight flat-screen TVs on the wall, stacked in two rows of four, the shittiest Best Buy you’ve ever seen.

  Some of the screens streamed live camera feeds from the Predator drone: current altitude, speed, missile laser target designator system, and detailed map of the land below. Others flashed pictures of our targets, their families, and their complex terrorist networks, which spanned the globe. Much of this came courtesy of experts from the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), National Security Agency (NSA), and FBI operating along my side.

  I was Delta, special ops, and my specialty was high-level capture and kill missions. My weapon was mainly Predator MQ-1 drones, equipped with two laser-guided AGM-114P Hellfire missiles. My job was to hunt down the most dangerous terrorists in the world. If I was chasing you, you never saw me.

  The room was sweltering from the computer servers and lit by blinking screens. A low hum of machinery was a constant in the background and stayed in our heads. When you walked outside the Box, you’d never know that behind the door was one of the world’s most technologically advanced operation centers, run by some of the best minds in the business of war. Some of the technology we had wouldn’t be publicly known for years to come.

  My team of six, a mix of elite military intelligence personnel with different specialties, was called when a terrorist needed to be located. I have no doubt that we could find anyone in the world, no matter how hidden they think they are. I prided myself on tracking down even the most senior terrorist leaders, people who others considered ghosts.

  Our target’s name was Abu Bashir. We’d been looking for him for weeks—until we got a tip on the ground that he was heading in our direction, south from the Syria–Iraq border. Bashir was an explosives expert for the group Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

  Mostly undetected, he moved the material and components for heavy bombs into Iraq, along with foreign fighters and suicide bombers waging war against the United States. His trip was going to end badly, with another attack against either innocent civilians or U.S. military personnel stationed at a base nearby.

  A fleet of helicopters were on call nearby if we needed them to intercept a target fast. We sat in a cramped room with cement floors, working off a makeshift desk built out of plywood. Jake, an Air Force tactical controller, sat next to me; he was my shadow. We had our laptops out, running a sophisticated chat program that allowed us to have about twenty different classified conversations with every intelligence agency running at once, including the CIA and NSA, our ground force elements, senior officials in the U.S. government, and the technical side of the operations in Iraq and across the globe.

  As I called out instructions—zoom orders, latitude, longitude, altitude, vehicle pursuit directions—Jake chatted everything to a camera sensor operator and Predator pilot, two Air Force personnel sitting next to each other in a trailer in Nevada who actually flew the drones at my every command.

  The bongo truck, similar to a pickup truck but with a wider body, was heading southeast now from the Syrian border—fast. They were definitely transporting something. We’d picked him up about an hour before in a desolate place in the desert that I’d been able to narrow down based on an analysis of his earlier movements.

  “Jake, why does every terrorist in Iraq that we track seem to own a white bongo?”

  “Groupon.”

  On the monitors, the bongo was kicking up dust everywhere and creating a huge signature visible from the sky. We had the bird at a two-nautical-mile standoff from the target, trailing at around 12,000 feet to keep it out of sight. If our target ever heard the drone’s engine or somehow caught sight of it, he’d abandon his mission and go underground—phones tossed, email accounts abandoned, everything gone. Months of our intelligence work destroyed.

  The road wasn’t much of a road, just some zigzagging tracks worn into the hard-packed sand for hundreds of miles. It was mainly no-man’s-land, with some dots of villages here and there, ten to twenty people at most to a village.

  The guys coming across the Syrian border usually followed a predetermined smuggling route, moving explosives or suicide bombers between the villages on the way to their ultimate destination.

  Sometimes the first stop was the nearest major town, where the vehicle would be used to blow up the closest U.S. military convoy.

  I had been up now for twenty hours. This was when I would fight to keep my eyes focused. The empty Rip It cans were piled at my elbow.

  What’s he doing? Where’s he going?

  It was another twenty minutes before the vehicle came to a stop outside a village.

  “Zoom in,” I said. “I need to see who’s inside the truck.”

  Kill or capture was always on the table, but we needed visual confirmation of Abu Bashir before we made the call, which most times didn’t get made until the very last minute. These life-and-death decisions would change people’s lives in the blink of an eye, even my own.

  Two people exited.

  “Looks like two military-aged males, wearing white dishdashas,” Jake said.

  “Confirm for me: no women or children,” I said.

  Jake went back and reviewed the drone feed, like a replay on ESPN, showing full views of both sides of the truck.

  “Confirmed.”

  “Zoom in two times. What are they waiting for?”

  “Prayer time, maybe.”

  “No, not for another hour.”

  Suddenly, the passenger began to walk out of view of our camera and into the open desert, while the driver walked around to the back of the bongo.

  “Stay with the driver,” I called.

  “Roger.”

  The driver began digging into the bed of the bongo and now I could see there were barrels in the back with a bunch of garden-size hoses sticking out.

  “You see the passenger anywhere?” I asked. “Zoom out.”

  I had them switch the camera from electro-optical, o
r daytime, TV, which shows everything in brown and gray, to infrared view. Both men were now on the monitors. Their bodies were suddenly a bright, ghostly black against the white fall desert. When the passenger lit a cigarette, a huge light exploded, like a house on fire.

  Why didn’t he want to smoke near the truck?

  Within a few minutes another white bongo pulled up and three men climbed out. I took note of how they greeted the others. All of them kissed the hands and hugged the driver of the first truck: Bashir.

  The men began cautiously offloading thick jugs about three or four feet tall to the first truck. Just like the ones already in the back.

  Now, a normal analyst might discount this because we couldn’t ever confirm 100 percent what those thick jugs were from the air. Maybe the first truck was just getting gas or maybe he was transporting the village water source. In the years I’ve spent hunting and watching in the cesspools of the Middle East, I have found that people do funny things. These guys could simply be locals not connected to the Al Qaeda network at all.

  What set our team apart was knowing that nothing in this business is a coincidence. These were explosives and, knowing Bashir, they could be rigging the truck to blow up like the Fourth of July.

  AT TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD I HAD THE POWER TO DECIDE WHETHER A MAN LIVED or died. That wasn’t an easy decision, even with hundreds of missions to my name and top-of-the-line intelligence networks at my disposal.

  I was part of a handful of people in the American military at the time with the responsibility to pick drone targets and order their deaths. I created a kill list—people in Al Qaeda in Iraq network or in ISIS whom we had prioritized for capturing or taking out—and acted on it day and night. We had to move faster than our enemy did, and we kept the pressure on, striking over and over again so they never felt at ease.

  Few had knowledge that our elite task force even existed. Delta was part of the Army but worked alongside other special elite forces like DEVGRU, a highly specialized SEAL team. To the rest of the world and even to most within our own government, we were officially off the books, and that was how we liked it.