by Richard A. Clarke
Frustrated with the success American drones are having in decimating their ranks, an Islamic narco-terrorist called the Qazzanis plot revenge — by killing pilots who fly the craft from a base near Las Vegas.
Sounds like the latest from the Tom Clancy book factory, except the author is Richard A. Clarke, former chief counter-terrorism advisor to the National Security Council under President George W. Bush — and pioneer of our drone policy. Clarke not only pushed the Air Force to add Hellfire missiles to Predator drones, he advocated for their use against terrorists.
In an afterward to his new novel, “Sting of the Drone,” Clarke notes that the first person killed by a Predator was al Qaeda chief Mohammed Atef, on Nov. 14, 2001. Since then “the United States has killed at least 2,000 people in five countries using armed drone.”
While “Sting” is billed as fiction, you do have to wonder if Clarke is revealing what’s coming — or what’s already happened. Is it truth or fantasy that:
- The US decides to kill four terrorists meeting at a hotel bar in Vienna — without telling the Austrians. The National Security Adviser signs off on it, telling another official that they’re not going to tell the president to give him deniability. As for killing someone on friendly soil: “We’ve done this kind of thing before. A lot, actually. They never get caught.”
- But the adviser draws the line at hitting a drug cartel head in Mexico, saying he doesn’t want to open a “kill theater” so close to home. The nomination is a ruse, he notes, “They nominate a few every month for me to reject. Makes the other agencies think I’m being tough on the CIA.”
- The Austrian hit is accomplished with a “Myotis,” a small, black triangle-shaped drone that can accelerate to Mach 1 and is loaded with plastic explosive and steel that acts like anti-personnel shrapnel. It incinerates upon impact, making the local police think the men were killed by a bomb planted in the bar by other criminals.
- Terrorists are ruthless in their propaganda efforts. In the novel, Qazzani fills a building with orphans, then feeds false information to American informants. After a drone strike, the dead children are shown in the book’s version of CNN, and congressional committees are formed to question the drone program.
- There are so many targets for drone strikes that they regularly run out of code names. After “someone rejected to our using Native American names” (Osama bin Laden was code-named “Geronimo” in real life), the book characters use old car names and Civil War battlefields.
- “Chameleon software” changes the skin of the bottom of predator drones, making them indistinguishable from the sky above them.
- Some day soon, a very smart person will be able to hack, and then reroute, a drone.
- It’s not AI but it’s close: A program called “Minerva” can run through databases and make correlations, based on simple, plain-text questions. You can ask something like, “what do these two terrorist attacks have in common” and get an answer.
- Domestically, drones are being tested that can fire tear gas, fire-supressing foam, or even a noise generator that “operates at a frequency and power that makes people void.” Making for a messy form of non-lethal force.
- And while we may call them UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles), drone pilots themselves call them “F – – – ers” — for FKRs, or “flying killer robots.” Told the name, one official notes dryly, “I don’t want that to spread. Very bad messaging.”