Cspan2. Booktv live coverage of the Annapolis Book festival continues. Starting now a panel on drone warfare. [inaudible conversations] good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Annapolis Book festival. We will be Getting Started in just a minute. This is being broadcast on cspan booktv. We ask that you silence yourself and then remain quiet during the discussion. It is my distinct honor to share the stage with these tremendous authors. Im going to start on my immediate right in introducing them. After my introductions, im going to let each of them talk for about ten minutes, then im going to take the power of the chair and ask a few questions and then open up to the audience for questions. On my immediate right is richard whittle. His book, predator the secret origins of the drone revolution, is the book well be discussing today. Richards a career journalist, he cut his teeth at the raleigh news and observer, then on to the Dallas Morning News where he covered defense issues for a number of years. I happen to be one of the larger fans of his earlier book called the dream machine. And then hes written this book, predator, both of which i would contend are remarkable biographies of machines. And so, again, a remarkable book. Then to my left is scott shane whose book objective troy most recently, just two weeks ago, received an award as the outstanding english book on Foreign Affairs given each year by Foreign Policy magazine and the university of toronto monk school of global affairs. I remember scott from my time at the Naval Academy when i was a young lad and he was writing for the Baltimore Sun where he spent, well, i guess 21 years from 1983 to 1994. His most recent book, objective troy, is about the assassination of anwr almaliki. So we start with the origins of the technology that allowed us this drone warfare and changed the way were fighting wars to a story of this drone warfare. Again, a tremendous book. And then lastly on my left is mark moyar whos done an analysis of the policy of drone warfare thats come about in the last 20 years or so. Again, another tremendous book. Mark is not a journalist like the first two but, rather, a practitioner, a researcher, a true academic but also happens to have served as an adviser to some of the most important operations that weve had from special Operations Command to Central Command to advising people like general mckiernan and general mcchrystal, general petraeus and general dunford. He also is an expert in counterinsurgency, not what his Book Strategic failure is about, but he has an entire generation of young officers that hes impacted from teaching at university. During my time in the marine corps, much of our time was talking about these issues, analyzing american Foreign Policy. Mark moyar was one of the guys we were always talking about, so i look forward to a fantastic discussion. With that, im going to turn it over to rick whit billion for him to talk about his book, predator. Thanks, scott, for that very generous are introduction. Im honored to be part of this distinguished panel and grateful for the chance to talk about my book, predator the secret origins of the drone revolution. Its a book that tells what i think youre going to agree is a surprising story about the predator, how the predator was invented and how in the words of air and space smithsonian magazine, it changed the world. This is, after all, the first weapon in history whose operators can stalk and kill a single individual on the other side of the planet from a position of total ambush and invulnerability. Think about that. My book is largely based on first person interviews with primary sources; that is, the people who did the things i write about. And i tell in detail how the air force armed the predator in 2001 and how air force pilots and sensor operators in a Ground Control station tucked away on the cia campus in langley, virginia, began using this exotic weapon in afghanistan late in 2001. I had been writing about the military for three decades when i started work on this book in 2009, but in the five years it took me to research and write it, i ran into a lot of surprises. The first was that the predator was not invented by the usual suspects in the military Industrial Complex. It was invented by this man, abraham carroll, a former israeli Aeronautical Engineer who many people regard as a genius. He got inspired to work on drones during the 1973 i dont mean yom kippur war in the middle east. A couple of years later he emigrated to the United States, the land of opportunity. And like all Great American inventers, went to work in his garage. His garage was in los angeles. Now, abe went bankrupt trying to sell his ideas to the u. S. Military who werent much interested in drones in the early 1980s. But in the late 1980s, a pair of billionaire brothers who decided to get into the drone business bought abes ideas out of bankruptcy and hired him and his top engineers to go to work for them. Their names are neil and lyndon blue. Theyre the private owners of the san diego area company that build built the predator, and theyre still very active and fascinating in their own right. In 1957 when the blue brothers were in their early 20s and still students at yale, they made the cover of life magazine by flying a small plane around latin america during summer vacation, a trip they decided to take, by the way, before they ever took their first flying lesson. Because neil and linden blue werent traveling for fun. They were born and bred entrepreneur, and they were traveling around latin america to look for a Business Opportunity they could pursue of after college. And as a result of that trip, after they graduated from yale neil and linden blue began working on a created a banana and cacao plantation on the east coast of nicaragua in partnership with the ruling family. For the blues, that venture lasted only a couple of years, but it was the first of many that by the 1980s had made them uncommonly wealthy, wealthy enough to buy general atomics for 65 million. Now, as the name suggests, general atomics began as a Nuclear Energy company, and it still is one, but it got into the drone bids after the blue brothers bought it from chevron in 1986. They had a number of reasons for thinking drones might be a Good Business investment. But among their motives was a desire to help the contra rebels in nicaragua overthrow the leftist sandinistas who in 1979 had overthrown their business partners. Gps navigation was brand new in those days, and neil blues idea was that the contras or an ally could pack a gpsguided drone with an explosive and use it as a poor mans Cruise Missile on behalf of the sand nice thats. Sandinistas. As i say in my book, if necessity is the mother of invention, war is the mother of necessity. And a few years later the war in bosnia and the difficulty of finding serb artillery that was bombarding sarajevo in 1993 led to the actual birth of the predator which was derived from a smaller, less capable drone called the nat750. In 1993 the cia brought two of them to use as spy planes in bosnia, and they got good results. That helped inspire the Defense Department to develop a derivative, the predator, which flew for the first time in july 1994. One of the big improvements over the nat750 was that the predator could be flown by satellite which is why it has that familiar bulbous nose. Theres a satellite dish inside. The predator wasnt armed at first. It just carried a video camera, radar and other sensors that could be used to gather what the military calls isr, an acronym for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. But the military found the predator very useful in the balkans wars of the 1990s because it could stay airborne as long as 40 hours at a time without landing to refuel. And all the while sending its video back to its Ground Control station. Partly for that reason in the spring of 2000, an innovative air force general named john jumper decided to arm the predator. Jumper assigned that project to a very special air force unit that goes by the exotic nickname big safari. In my book i describe big safari as a reallife version of q branch, the Technology Shop in the james bond movies. And thats where the cia comes into the predator story. Because as big saw farly was starting safari was starting that project to arm the predator, Richard Clark, the counterterrorism director at the National Security council, and charlie allen, a very senior cia official, had come to the conclusion that the United States needed to kill Osama Bin Laden before he killed more americans as alqaeda had done in bombing our embassies in kenya and tanzania in 1998, and as it would do again by bombing the uss cole on october 12, 2000, killing 17 american sailors. But if they were going to kill bin laden, first the cia had to find him. So in september of 2000, the big safari crew and a Ground Control station at an air base in germany flew an unarmed predator over a place near kandahar, afghanistan, called tarnac farms. The cia believed bin laden was living there as a guest of the taliban and, indeed, the air force predator crew found him. At that point, big safaris product to arm the predator project to arm the predator went into high gear. They quickly figured out how to put a missile called the hellfire on the predator and wired it so that the Ground Control station could aim and fire the missile from the other side of the planet. Starting with a test launch from a predator strapped down to a concrete pad on january 23rd, 2001, the big safari team, the predator team, launched test shots from the air and at a target tank and then into a building the cia ordered constructed to find out whether hellfire missiles which were designed to destroy tanks would kill Osama Bin Laden if fired into his residence in afghanistan. The arizona contractor apparently misread the specifications and built an adobe brick structure that bore little resemblance to the mud houses of afghanistan. So the testers nicknamed it taco bell and hung this sign on it. [laugher] they were in a hurry at this point, so to help measure the hellfires lethality inside a building, they had to dispense with the usual mannequins filled with ballistic jelly. Instead as you can see in this photo, they used watermelons to simulate people in test shots. Now, i was surprised to learn that in those days, before 9 11, the Defense Department didnt want its people to be the ones who pulled the trigger on a predator hellfire strike that killed Osama Bin Ladennen. So at first they had big safari create a trigger that was connected to the air force flight crews control panel by a long, white cable but was to be operated by someone from the cia. Then the cia argued that they shouldnt be the ones to fire a military weapon, especially in something that would count as an assassination. For years there had been executive orders banning assassinations. So an air force Master Sergeant who was working for big safari dubbed this remote trigger the monkey switch. Excuse me. Whoa, i lost my slide. With wheres the monkey switch . I had it, sorry. Ill dig it up later. [laughter] they called it the monkey switch because they figured that maybe they could just train a monkey to press the trigger, and nobody would have to take responsibility. But while big safari and people at the lower levels of the cia were getting prepared in that summer of 2001 to send an armed predator at Osama Bin Laden p, Richard Clark was having trouble getting the Bush Administration to focus on the threat he and others saw in alqaeda. The Bush AdministrationNational Security council held its first meeting to discuss sending the armed predator after bin laden on september 4, 2001. Many of the preparations had been made. Im not sure how well you can see it in these google earth photos, but this is the happeningly campus at the cia in early september, 2001. The inset shows a doublewide mobile home that was put there to is serve as a command center for an air force predator team. The small rectangle ajays are sent to it is a adjacent to it is a Ground Control station painted white to make it look like an ordinary construction bin. But at that september 4th National Security council meeting, neither the cia, nor the military wanted to take responsibility for pulling the trigger on this unfamiliar new weapon, even using the monkey switch. So they decided to wait. One week to the day later, of course, everything changed. And the day after that, three armed predators were on their way to a base in uzbekistan where they could take off and land for missions over afghanistan. Predator 3034, flown by big safaris captain Scott Swanson and Master Sergeant jeff with quaw, launched the fist lethal drone first lethal drone strike on the first night of the war there, october 7, 2001, a story that i tell in great detail in my book. Three days later president bush, at another National Security council meeting, said why cant we fly more than one predator at a time . We ought to have 50 of these things. And in december of that year, bush gave a speech to the corps of cadets at the citadel in South Carolina where he said, before the war the predator had skeptics because it did not fit the old ways; now it is clear the military does not have enough unmanned vehicles. I think thats when the drone revolution began, and now ill leave it to my fellow authors, scott shane and mark moyar, to talk about how the cias initial reluctance changed in succeeding years quite dramatically. Thank you. Thank you very much, richard. [applause] i want to, im going to give a quick personal vignette as i turn it over to scott shane. I had the great honor to serve as a Research Assistant for admiral turner when i was in graduate school in the early 990s. He was the director of the cia in the carter administration, and you mentioned during your talk, richard, about the executive orders banning assassination. In the aftermath of the Church Committee hearings which some in this room are not old enough to remember, there was a lot of consternation about some cia programs that had as their aim to assassinate political leaders. And executive order 11095 was signed by jimmy carter in february of 1976 that banned political assassination. President carter expanded on that two years later, in january of 78, that banned any sort of assassination. And then ronald reagan, in his first year in office, used that same language in executive order 12333 that banned any agent of the United States from taking part in any assassination. Lawyers within the government revisited that decision in 1998 after the embassies in kenning ya and tanzania were bombed and determined that anyone who was confirmed to be a terrorist could be the target of an assassination. And that was the legal logic behind those tomahawk strikes against those camps of bin laden in afghanistan in 1998. Boy, where have we come from there. The story of not just that, but also specifically the assassination of an american citizen is the story that scott shane has told, and so with that, i want to turn the floor over to him, and i look forward to hearing your few minutes. Thank you, scott. Thank you, scott. So my book is called objective troy, and the subtitle is a terrorist, a president and the rise of the drone. And if ricks book is the biography of the machine, the predator, mine is really the biography of a guy who got killed by one of these machines. Anwar alawlakiment one of my reasons for writing this book was actually to understand how somebody becomes a terrorist, how somebody in this case, Anwar Alawlaki, who had had a happy life for quite a few years in the u. S. , an american citizen, a very successful imam, muslim preacher, condemned 9 11, called for bridge building after 9 11 from his post at a big mosque outside washington, d. C. , how he ended up spending his last years with alqaeda in yemen trying to to kill americans. And so im going to sort of fast forward really to the second half of my book to where Anwar Alawlaki has moved to yemen, has joined alqaeda, and im really going to start with the moment when alawlaki is essentially, hes become essentially the leading spokesperson, certainly in english, for alqaeda and for the cause it represented. Looks like were having a little bit of trouble. Should with play it through the microphone up here . [inaudible] okay. Well, while he works on that, i will tell you what you would have seen. In march the first video is in march of 2010. Anwar alawlaki, this guy who was a, you know, sort of peaceloving preacher in the u. S. Shows up, hes dressed in a camo jacket with a traditional yemeni dagger in his belt, and he speaks right into the camera and says that it is hes speaking english, and hes addressing muslims in the west and in the u. S. In particular. And hes saying it is your obligation, your religious obligation to join the violent jihad