How 9/11 almost didn’t happen

THEY were the tiny CIA crack team who almost stopped the terror attacks that changed the course of history. What went wrong?

THEY were the tiny CIA crack team who almost stopped the 9/11 terror attacks.

The group of engineers and whiz-kids, codenamed Big Safari and led by the freakishly intelligent “Man With Two Brains”, came within a whisker of killing Osama bin Laden a year before the World Trade Center bombings.

But their big chance was squandered.

THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN

Big Safari, a top secret band of elite operatives within the US military, has existed since the sixties, and is designed to react at high speed to critical situations. In 1998, a senior Defence Department officer approached them with a project.

He had just seen an early drone named the Predator in action. “I was blown away,” the anonymous officer told Wired, who interviewed him as part of an investigation into the story. He believed it was a breakthrough comparable to that of the World War II codebreakers at Bletchley Park, immortalised in Oscar-nominated Benedict Cumberbatch movie The Imitation Game.

What happened could be the plot of another Hollywood blockbuster.

Big Safari welcomed the challenge with open arms. They needed to hack the technology to make it work in the field, and fast. They set up an office at General Atomic in San Diego.

What they were about to do would mark the birth of modern drone warfare.

A crack team of elite CIA operators hacked Predator’s drone technology.

KOSOVO TEST

The “aha moment” came in 1999 during the Kosovo War, when the air force approached them asking for help steering laser-guided bombs, dropped by jet fighter, while keeping the planes safely above the clouds, away from enemy fire.

Big Safari decided to attach a laser missile guiding device to Predator. They had the modified drone ready in 45 days, along with a pilot — Scott Swanson.

They called their lightning-fast way of working “the 80 per cent solution”, deploying their aircraft for the first time before it was perfectly finished, something the air force would never do.

Swanson only took the drone into battle once in Kosovo, but it showed very clearly that the laser-targeted drone was a revolutionary weapon. “We knew it was the future,” he said.

MANHUNT

In 1999, Big Safari was called on to assist in the most crucial manhunt in recent years. The CIA was after Bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, after his US embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya the year before.

They needed a way to watch their target, and had even come up with a far-fetched idea to mount a giant telescope on a mountain. Then they realised Big Safari had something better.

In Richard Whittle’s definitive book on the drone published last year, Predator, he explains that the command centre couldn’t be anywhere near its target in Afghanistan, because word might get out.

Instead, the team were to be placed in the last place anyone would go looking for them: Germany’s Ramstein Base. No one could work out how the operation could be overseen from thousands of kilometres away from the action.

But there was one member of Big Safari who made it happen: a military hacker so intelligent he was known to his peers as The Man With Two Brains.

The drone had Osama bin Laden in its sights. But the order never came to kill the world’s most dangerous man.

THE MAN WITH TWO BRAINS

This little-known genius’s big, risky idea was something called “split operations”. A small team based in a country bordering Afghanistan would have to launch Predator using a line-of-sight remote control.

Once it was aloft, an antenna on the drone would connect to a satellite, which would communicate with ground control — Swanson, the engineers, the operators — at Ramstein.

To make it happen, the rogue crew effectively stole an 11-metre dish they found at Air Combat Command headquarters in Virginia, and took it to Germany.

In September 2000, on one of Predator’s first split operations missions, it found Bin Laden, living at a walled compound called Tarnak Farms near Kandahar airport. He was dressed in white and surrounded by bodyguards.

“When UBL [Usama bin Laden] walked out of that one building,” Swanson told Wired, “the way he appeared much taller than everybody, the people were deferential around him, the way he was dressed, Jeff and I just looked at each other and it’s like, ‘Yeah, that’s got to be him.’”

The pilot circled Predator above its target. At the time, drones still didn’t have their own weapons, so they told their superiors to order the strike from a jet above the clouds. The order never came.

THE BIG CHANCE

The military had missed the biggest chance it would have to stop Bin Laden before September 11.

They knew an opportunity had been wasted. It was clear Predator needed to have its own weapons.

The Man With Two Brains came up with a solution to enable complex data to travel between the armed drone and operators thousands of kilometres away. In September 2001, he travelled to Southern California to test the system in the field. His first trials were successful, and he planned more for the following day.

That day was September 11.

After the devastating attack, it became clear to the US military that Predator had been their best chance of preventing it. Development sped up and the completed lethal drone went on to kill Mohammed Atef, a top al-Qaeda commander, on one of its early tours.

Predator has changed the face of warfare, but it had a chance to change the course of the future.

This deadly weapon could have prevented the attack that heralded a new era in which terrorists rule by fear.