Drone Warrior Read online

  When I needed a break, I walked out to the helipad and looked at the sky. At night it was pitch-black and so quiet that you could hear a bullet casing drop. I needed that peace after a day of computer monitors and radios.

  Thick cement blocks called T-barriers surrounded us. On one side was a U.S. military outpost and on the other was the wide-open expanse of desert—miles and miles of desert brown.

  One night Victor came out to the helipad. “You’re like a ghost, Intel,” he said.

  I looked at him. He pointed at my arms, which were paler than I ever remembered.

  “White as fuck,” he said. “You’ve been in that room too many days.”

  We’d just come off three straight days of hunting. I hadn’t slept in probably two days.

  “You gotta eat more than cereal and ice cream,” he said, then he walked away.

  I spent another few minutes there before turning to my trailer. In the darkness, I could hear some of the operators playing poker and pounding shots.

  Our sleeping trailers were the size of shipping containers, stacked in rows, back to back. Each one had a single bed stuffed inside and a flat TV on the wall, with hundreds of cable channels. Most nights, I tried to hit the sack around 2 or 3 A.M., and then fell asleep to the sound of the TV. Habits helped out here, I found.

  That night, I lay down and flipped on Stephen Colbert’s show, as I always did. I needed to laugh. When it was over, I turned on our drone feed streaming from the Box. It was piped into all of our bedrooms from the ops center and was burning circles in the sky. I liked to see what was going on, even though most nights at this hour, like tonight, it was just a sea of unmoving darkness. Our targets slept, like everyone else.

  I slept three hours before heading back to the Box when the sun came up to follow the leads I had thought through in my head the night before, Rip It can in hand. There was rarely a time I wasn’t thinking or strategizing about our next target. The lack of sleep and the twenty-hour days were hard the first few weeks. But I got used to it.

  WHILE WE WORKED ON OTHER MISSIONS, WE WAITED FOR WORD TO COME BACK from the interrogators who were pressing Usamah for intel at a secret black site. All of our detainees went to a tactical holding facility just for us, and we got to question them before anyone else in the military or government.

  Usamah was one piece in the larger picture of the new Islamic State.

  At the time, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) was going through a change. It had begun to grow into a new group called the Islamic State of Iraq, or ISI, which would later become ISIS when it moved into Syria. Few knew much about ISI yet, but we’d been watching them closely. We knew more about the transition of the group than even some of their own fighters did.

  ISI started with the death of AQI leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, AMZ, in June 2006. My predecessors at the unit had played a significant role in killing him. The very next day, the AQI leadership council came together at a secret location in Anbar province to choose a replacement—an Egyptian named Abu Ayyub al-Masri. We code-named him Objective Manhattan.

  While this was going on, Osama bin Laden and his number two in Pakistan, Ayman al-Zawahiri, were looking to completely revamp Al Qaeda in Iraq. Zawahiri and other senior Al Qaeda leadership believed AQI was losing support from fellow Muslims in Iraq for being too brutal and un-Islamic for all the killings in earlier years. They wanted a religious authority who could provide the religious context for their savagery and rally fellow Muslims around the AQI banner again.

  Zawahiri chose a longtime friend he’d met during jihadi-led training camps years before in Afghanistan. His name was Abu Umar al-Baghdadi (AuAB), who was considered the first leader of ISIS. We called him Objective Brooklyn. That day, Zawahiri ordered AQI to change its name to the Islamic State of Iraq.

  To my team and the others who came before and after us, there was no difference between AQI and ISI. Sometimes we’d get intel from a source who’d refer to one guy we were going after as AQI and then a completely separate source would refer to that same guy as ISI.

  The day Manhattan and Brooklyn became leaders was the day that they topped our kill list. But they quickly went deep underground because they knew our teams were after them. This was a different leadership strategy from Zarqawi, who preferred to fight alongside other fighters in large-scale operations.

  Manhattan and Brooklyn had learned a lot about drones and our targeting from Zarqawi before he was killed. Zarqawi seemed to know just about everything about our drones since he’d been constantly hunted. He’d passed the wisdom along to others.

  Knowing the extent of our capabilities now, Manhattan and Brooklyn chose to remain in the shadows, hidden from even their own fighters. We believed the two leaders were always together and rarely met their lieutenants in person.

  With every mission across the country, we scoured for them. When we captured people, we pressed for details. Most said very little about the two men during interrogations. Probably because they were mostly kept in the dark.

  That was the same with Usamah. He told the interrogators he didn’t know anything about Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  But he did know about someone else: Abu Nasir, the ISI emir of the entire Salah ad Din province. I called him Scarface.

  This was a major breakthrough. Usamah told us about a weekly trip Scarface made from Mosul to Bayji to meet with his underlings and collect money. But tracking him down was suddenly urgent: Scarface was planning a new attack very soon against a U.S. military base.

  Usamah didn’t know which base or any specific details regarding the timing of the attack. He just knew it would happen soon and that Scarface would likely deploy another foreign suicide bomber recently smuggled into Iraq from some other jihadi battlefield.

  When I learned about what Usamah had said in our custody that night, I stood up and walked outside into the desert air, past the other trailers to mine, where I climbed into my narrow bed. I tried to sleep but I couldn’t now; no time for that. It was only hours before the next mission would begin.

  And I had a feeling.

  We were getting some daylight on Manhattan and Brooklyn.

  11

  MY FIRST KILL

  Scarface had been on our kill list for a long time. He was a hardline extremist—as extreme as they came. There were stories that he’d raised his hand multiple times to drive bombs into American bases, insistent on killing himself in the process, but his bosses had instructed him each time to send others. He was too valuable to the overall insurgency. Thousands of fighters were at his bidding and he was probably the fifth or sixth most important boss in the overall terror network. I focused our team’s attention on him, our new ghost.

  Salah ad Din and Ninewah provinces had the most authority in the country (ISI placed its top guys in command of these regions, based on the higher concentration of fighters). Scarface wasn’t your typical leader, though. Unlike some, he didn’t seem to care about the money. Everything was about his Islamic cause and killing anyone who didn’t agree with ISI. This was the most dangerous kind of terrorist. Nothing could motivate him to stop the carnage. He’d rather die than be captured.

  Across Iraq, Scarface had become a kind of king grim reaper. He was responsible for coordinating suicide attacks in the northern half of the country, including American bases, and ran rackets that brought in millions of dollars: contraband trafficking, kidnapping, beheadings, extortion, you name it. Zain, Iraq’s largest telephone company, paid his group hundreds of thousands of dollars just so that he wouldn’t blow up their telephone towers.

  One of his biggest moneymakers was stolen oil trafficked from the Bayji refinery. His guys hijacked the oil as it headed north in large oil tankers into Syria, then resold it to the highest bidder, with the profits distributed among enemy fighters or reinvested into war (guns, explosives, suicide bombers). We assessed that their extortion rackets were pulling in about a million bucks a month, with a cut of that being funneled up to the top two leaders—Manhattan and Brooklyn. Money
, men, and materials, we called it.

  Scarface had a particularly important view into the current state of the insurgency, something we wanted a look at because it could open up a window into the group.

  We’d been collecting intel on Scarface even before we got Usamah, and his name had started popping up regularly in my team’s analysis. We’d get bits of information from one captured guy and then fuse it with information from another. We were filling intelligence gaps along the way as we built out the members of his inner circle. But he wasn’t easy to track. He was constantly switching out phones and sometimes used a cutout—a go-between person for communicating his orders. He was basically only a rumor—until Usamah started talking.

  “OUR PRIORITY IS SCARFACE,” I ANNOUNCED AT OUR BATTLEFIELD MEETING THAT night. “We have strong reason to believe he’s coming to Bayji to collect oil payments, and likely will try to fill the significant gap in their network now that Usamah is out of the picture.”

  We met every night around eight o’clock on video teleconference, the five intel chiefs and the overall commander. Because most of our missions were late at night, this was a strategy session.

  These weren’t the typical military planning sessions, either, where there were lots of bullshitting and staff officers presenting information that had no use for the larger audience. It was all business.

  The screens in the Box were split between the five chiefs and a PowerPoint on Scarface detailing everything we knew about him and the planned attack.

  Bill was there with his team. So was Jack.

  I flashed a photo of Scarface on the screen. He was heavyset, with long, bushy hair and thick mustache, like a Middle Eastern version of Tony Soprano.

  “You guys may remember Scarface from last year,” Bill said, “when he conducted that big suicide bombing at a local food market in the north. Hundreds dead.”

  I made my case to the overall commander. “Sir, we’ve conducted some heavy analysis on his previous pattern of life and also believe he has some relatives living in the area. These guys are creatures of habit. If Scarface is heading to the city, there is a solid chance he may stop at one of these locations.”

  I added some maps of Bayji to the screen and a nearby compound located along the outskirts of town where we’d heard some chatter of a possible meet-up.

  “In the morning we’re going to push our birds to the area around the oil refinery,” I said. “That’ll be our startpoint and we’ll go from there.”

  It was game on. “Happy hunting,” the commander said, signing off.

  I HARDLY SLEPT THAT NIGHT AND WAS ROLLING BACK OUT OF MY BED BEFORE DAYLIGHT. The intel that Scarface was likely in the midst of carrying out another major attack turned the mission into a ticking time bomb.

  Soon we had the Predator swooping over the compound I had pinpointed, the camera staring down, searching for any possible movement. The place was made of concrete and its size—three stories, with a wide open courtyard of dust and protected by tall stone walls—suggested wealth and connections to the city.

  Out front there were two white 4-door Toyota trucks, one with orange stripes. But more suspicious were the three to four large oil trailers parked on the east side of the compound. Most of them looked clean, like they’d recently been washed and detached from trucks. A few others were completely covered in dust, like they had been sitting there for months.

  We zoomed in, then panned out, then zoomed back in, looking at every possible angle, staring hard at the shadows along the courtyard walls. Everything was quiet, just a few truck tracks in the sand coming and going from the main gate that separated it from the highway.

  While we waited, I logged the location of the compound into the map on my desktop—GPS coordinates with a snapshot of the place. Nothing in our database suggested that we’d done a mission here before.

  The early stages of hunting hung largely on instincts and what you knew about the people and the enemy network. As we watched the screens, we were constantly filtering out what was, what wasn’t, and what could be—looking for any kind of aberration. What was out of place?

  We never assumed too much—assumptions were dangerous and got people killed.

  “What was that?”

  As the camera operator was zoomed in on a little nook in the courtyard, I noticed some movement. When we got the camera panned back out to see the full compound, the truck with the orange stripes was leaving. We’d missed the guy who got in.

  “Stay on the compound or follow?” Jake asked.

  We watched the truck pull out through the gate and then onto the highway toward the main part of Bayji. All kinds of questions raced through my head. It would be a gamble to go with the truck, because Scarface could still be in the house. And what if he left when we didn’t have eyes on the place? But the thing was, the truck was our only real lead at this point. And we didn’t know how many people were in the house. What if it was empty?

  Just then, I emailed the photo of the compound to the lead interrogator, who had been questioning Usamah for days. “Can you ask him about this place?” I wrote, wanting urgently to find out if Usamah had ever been to this location before with Scarface.

  The answer came back in minutes. He didn’t recognize it. Which wasn’t unusual, considering most of the population in the Middle East was not used to looking at photos of houses from the eagle’s-eye view of a drone.

  We needed to know where the truck was going.

  I had seconds to decide whom to follow. Hesitation led to missed opportunities, and you rarely got a second chance with targets. “Stay with the truck,” I said.

  “Roger that,” the pilot crew chatted back, sending the drone to follow at 12,000 feet.

  As the truck made its way along the highway and eventually into the city center of Bayji, traffic started to pick up, raising the possibility that the truck would get lost. Cities were the worst place to watch with a drone. Too many people. Too many places to disappear.

  We got lucky. In about ten minutes, the truck stopped in front of a long line of stores with colorful awnings and someone climbed out of the driver’s side. It was a man wearing a white dishdasha and sandals. No beard, clean-shaven. He moved quickly, suggesting to me that he was young.

  “Which shop is he walking into?” I said. But no one saw because the drone was circling around, losing that angle in the heavily populated strip mall.

  At that instant, everyone in the Box stood up and looked at the screens for clues as to where he went within the local market. We had another six minutes in the current orbit before it came back around to the angle we needed for a better look. Each minute felt longer and longer. The energy in the room was tense, we knew what was at stake if it was him.

  Four minutes now . . .

  This could be our only chance.

  “Jake, you see him?”

  “Not yet.”

  Two minutes . . .

  The camera slowly turned in the orbit, waiting.

  The problem was that the younger male who had exited the vehicle could be anywhere now. His trail had gone cold in a matter of seconds. Markets in the Middle East are like bees’ nests that have been kicked—people everywhere, crushed together, with the stall-lined paths winding this way and that like a honeycombed maze. Did we lose him?

  Ten seconds before the exact point came back in view . . .

  Jake looked up at me in disappointment. “We’ve lost him.”

  “Do you want to scan the storefronts to see if we can reacquire the driver or stay on the vehicle?”

  “Stay on the vehicle,” I said.

  I was betting that the driver would return to the truck at some point. “Switch to infrared,” I said.

  The camera operator changed the camera sensor to infrared, and as the drone orbited around to another angle, we noticed something that had been obscured. There was another person still in the truck on the passenger side. Who the hell was that? A few minutes later, the young male returned from the store and the truc
k started up and began to head back in the same direction it came from.

  A sigh of relief passed over the entire team. We had been given a second chance.

  The truck pulled back into the original compound and we watched the driver quickly step out. Out of the front door, three children and a woman ran up to the men.

  “Zoom to the passenger side,” I said.

  The camera operator zoomed in as close as possible without distorting the picture as the passenger opened the door and got out: a man with a very distinct, fat belly and huge hair. He wore a desert-colored dishdasha and sandals.

  My pulse picked up a notch. It’s him, I thought. It has to be. His body type fit the physical descriptions of Scarface; the compound was associated with him; oil tanks were littered throughout, indicating that whoever the owner was, he must have been connected to the oil industry nearby.

  We’d been waiting months for this moment, just to get a glimpse of him.

  Individually, none of these things were conclusive or enough to launch an operation. But collectively, they were enough of a reason to believe that this was our guy.

  Scarface.

  We got you.

  “CONFIRM FOR ME SLANT COUNT OF WHO’S IN THE HOUSE,” I SAID TO JAKE.

  “Two/one/three,”—two men, one woman, three children.

  It was impossible to know for sure if there were more inside. It was a big house and we couldn’t see everything.

  Often operations were put on hold because women and children were present and we couldn’t fully ensure they wouldn’t be injured. There was a specific procedure that the drone sensor operators had for diverting a Hellfire at the last second: “shifting cold.” If civilians came into view on our monitors, the sensor operator had a location on the ground to shift the laser, which would divert the Hellfire to a safe area with no civilians.