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FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012

THE PERMANENT WAR Secret ops grow at U.S. base At Forefront of drone wars $1.4 billion upgrade at post planned

by Craig Whitlock

DJIBOUTI CITY, DJIBOUTI — Around the Lemonnier. Virtually the entire 500-acre clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or camp is dedicated to counterterrorism, mak- land at a U.S. military base here, the combat ing it the only installation of its kind in the hub for the Obama administration’s coun- Pentagon’s global network of bases. terterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and Secrecy blankets most of the camp’s ac- the . tivities. The U.S. military rejected requests Some of the unmanned aircraft are from The Washington Post to tour Lemon- bound for , the collapsed state whose nier last month. Officials cited “operational border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. security concerns,” although they have per- Most of the armed drones, however, are sent mitted journalists to visit in the past. north across the Gulf of Aden to another After a Post reporter showed up in Dji- unstable country, , where they are be- bouti uninvited, the camp’s highest-ranking ing used in an increasingly deadly war with commander consented to an interview — on an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the the condition that it take place away from United States. the base, at Djibouti’s lone luxury hotel. Camp Lemonnier, a sunbaked Third The commander, Army Maj. Gen. Ralph O. World outpost established by the French Baker, answered some general queries but Foreign Legion, began as a temporary stag- declined to comment on drone operations or ing ground for U.S. Marines looking for a missions related to Somalia or Yemen. foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the Despite the secrecy, thousands of pages past two years, the U.S. military has clandes- of military records obtained by The Post — tinely transformed it into the busiest Preda- including construction blueprints, drone ac- tor drone base outside the Afghan war zone, cident reports and internal planning memos a model for fighting a new generation of ter- — open a revealing window into Camp Lem- rorist groups. onnier. None of the documents is classified, The Obama administration has gone and many were acquired via public-records to extraordinary lengths to requests. conceal the legal and opera- Taken together, the pre- tional details of its target- viously undisclosed docu- ed-killing program. Behind ments show how the Djibou- closed doors, painstaking ti-based drone wars sharply debates precede each deci- escalated early last year after sion to place an individual in eight Predators arrived at the cross hairs of the United COURTESY OF U.S. AIR FORCE Lemonnier. The records also A remote-controlled U.S. Air States’ perpetual war against Force Predator MQ-1B crashed chronicle the Pentagon’s am- al-Qaeda and its allies. in Djibouti on May 17, 2011. bitious plan to further inten- Increasingly, the orders Third story of the series sify drone operations here in to find, track or kill those This project examines evolving U.S. the coming months. counterterrorism policies and the people are delivered to Camp practice of targeted killing. The documents point to FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 2 OF 9

PABLO MARTINEZ MONSIVAIS/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE VIA GETTY IMAGES Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta speaks to military personnel during a visit to Djibouti in December 2011. Camp Lemonnier has become the Camp Lemonnier centerpiece of half a dozen U.S. drone and surveillance bases in Africa, created to combat a new generation of terrorist groups across the continent.

the central role played by the Joint Special Djibouti is the clearest example of how Operations Command (JSOC), which Presi- the United States is laying the groundwork dent Obama has repeatedly relied on to ex- to carry out these overseas operations. For ecute the nation’s most sensitive counterter- the past decade, the Pentagon has labeled rorism missions. Lemonnier an “expeditionary,” or temporary, About 300 Special Operations person- camp. But it is now hardening into the U.S. nel plan raids and coordinate drone flights military’s first permanent drone war base. from inside a high-security compound at Lemonnier that is dotted with satellite dish- Centerpiece base es and ringed by concertina wire. Most of n August, the Defense Department deliv- the commandos work incognito, concealing ered a master plan to Congress detailing their names even from conventional troops Ihow the camp will be used over the next on the base. quarter-century. About $1.4 billion in con- Other counterterrorism work at Lem- struction projects are on the drawing board, onnier is more overt. All told, about 3,200 including a huge new compound that could U.S. troops, civilians and contractors are as- house up to 1,100 Special Operations troops, signed to the camp, where they train foreign more than triple the current number. militaries, gather intelligence and dole out Drones will continue to be in the fore- humanitarian aid across East Africa as part front. In response to written questions from of a campaign to prevent extremists from The Post, the U.S. military confirmed pub- taking root. licly for the first time the presence of re- In Washington, the Obama administra- motely piloted aircraft — military parlance tion has taken a series of steps to sustain the for drones — at Camp Lemonnier and said drone campaign for another decade, devel- they support “a wide variety of regional se- oping an elaborate new targeting database, curity missions.” called the “disposition matrix,” and a classi- Intelligence collected from drone and fied “playbook” to spell out how decisions on other surveillance missions “is used to de- targeted killing are made. velop a full picture of the activities of violent FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 3 OF 9

ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES An MQ-9 Reaper takes off on a training mission at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. Drone wars Remote-controlled drones in Djibouti are flown, via satellite link, by pilots at Creech. extremist organizations and other activities Seychelles, but those operations pale in com- of interest,” Africa Command, the arm of the parison with what is unfolding in Djibouti. U.S. military that oversees the camp, said in Lemonnier also has become a hub for a statement. “However, operational security conventional aircraft. In October 2011, the considerations prevent us from commenting military boosted the airpower at the base by on specific missions.” deploying a squadron of F-15E Strike Eagle For nearly a decade, the United States fighter jets, which can fly faster and carry flew drones from Lemonnier only rarely, more munitions than Predators. starting with a 2002 strike in Yemen that In its written responses, Africa Com- killed a suspected ringleader of the attack on mand confirmed the warplanes’ presence the USS Cole. but declined to answer questions about their That swiftly changed in 2010, however, mission. Two former U.S. defense officials, after al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen attempt- speaking on the condition of anonymity, ed to bomb two U.S.-bound airliners and ji- said the F-15s are flying combat sorties over hadists in Somalia separately consolidated Yemen, an undeclared development in the their hold on that country. Late that year, growing war against al-Qaeda forces there. records show, the Pentagon dispatched eight The drones and other military aircraft unmanned MQ-1B Predator aircraft to Dji- have crowded the skies over the Horn of Af- bouti and turned Lemonnier into a full-time rica so much that the risk of an aviation di- drone base. saster has soared. The impact was apparent months later: Since January 2011, Air Force records JSOC drones from Djibouti and CIA Preda- show, five Predators armed with Hellfire tors from a secret base on the Arabian Penin- missiles have crashed after taking off from sula converged over Yemen and killed Anwar Lemonnier, including one drone that plum- al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric and prominent meted to the ground in a residential area of al-Qaeda member. Djibouti city. No injuries were reported, but Today, Camp Lemonnier is the center- four of the drones were destroyed. piece of an expanding constellation of half Predator drones in particular are more a dozen U.S. drone and surveillance bases prone to mishaps than manned aircraft, Air in Africa, created to combat a new genera- Force statistics show. But the accidents rare- tion of terrorist groups across the continent, ly draw public attention because there are no from Mali to Libya to the Central African pilots or passengers. Republic. The U.S. military also flies drones As the pace of drone operations has in- from small civilian airports in and tensified in Djibouti, Air Force mechanics FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 4 OF 9 FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 5 OF 9

COURTESY OF U.S. AIR FORCE ABOVE: Djiboutians gather to observe the wreckage of a $3 million remote-controlled U.S. Air Force Predator drone The last moments that crashed 2.7 miles short of the runway in Djibouti in May 2011. of Predator #07 3249

have reported mysterious incidents in which nowhere that is of marginal interest,” said the airborne robots went haywire. Amanda J. Dory, the Pentagon’s deputy as- In March 2011, a Predator parked at the sistant secretary for Africa. “This is a very camp started its engine without any human important location in terms of U.S. interests, direction, even though the ignition had been in terms of freedom of navigation, when it turned off and the fuel lines closed. Tech- comes to power projection.” nicians concluded that a software bug had The U.S. military pays $38 million a year infected the “brains” of the drone, but they to lease Camp Lemonnier from the Djibou- never pinpointed the problem. tian government. The base rolls across flat, “After that whole starting-itself inci- sandy terrain on the edge of Djibouti city, a dent, we were fairly wary of the aircraft somnolent capital with eerily empty streets. and watched it pretty closely,” an unnamed During the day, many people stay indoors to Air Force squadron commander testified to avoid the heat and to chew khat, a mildly in- an investigative board, according to a tran- toxicating plant that is popular in the region. script. “Right now, I still think the software Hemmed in by the sea and residential is not good.” areas, Camp Lemonnier’s primary short- coming is that it has no space to expand. It Prime location is forced to share a single runway with Dji- jibouti is an impoverished former bouti’s only international airport, as well as French colony with fewer than 1 mil- an adjoining French military base and the Dlion people, scarce natural resources tiny Djiboutian armed forces. and miserably hot weather. Passengers arriving on commercial But as far as the U.S. military is con- flights — there are about eight per day — cerned, the country’s strategic value is un- can occasionally spy a Predator drone pre- paralleled. Sandwiched between East Africa paring for a mission. In between flights, the and the Arabian Peninsula, Camp Lemon- unmanned aircraft park under portable, fab- nier enables U.S. aircraft to reach hot spots ric-covered hangars to shield them from the such as Yemen or Somalia in minutes. Dji- wind and curious eyes. bouti’s port also offers easy access to the In- Behind the perimeter fence, construc- dian Ocean and the Red Sea. tion crews are rebuilding the base to better “This is not an outpost in the middle of accommodate the influx of drones. Glimps- FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 6 OF 9 es of the secret operations can be found in an assortment of little- The last moments noticed Pentagon memoranda sub- of Predator #07-3249 mitted to Congress. The drone, armed with a single Hellfire missile, crashed on approach to the Last month, for example, the runway next to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti on May 17, 2011. Air Force investigators concluded that low clouds and humidity obscured the drone’s Defense Department awarded a camera sensor, rendering it blind, and that a malfunctioning global $62 million contract to build an positioning system device misjudged how close it was flying to the ground. airport taxiway extension to handle 23:15:28- PILOT — Gear down, runway 9 23:15:31- AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER — clear to land runway 9, CALL increased drone traffic at Lemonni- SIGN er, an ammunition storage site and (XXXX) 23:15:34- SENSOR — Dude, look at this camera. Seriously, I can’t do a combat-loading area for bombs anything. There’s nothing I can do. I just nuked it. and missiles. 23:15:41- PILOT — Alright. 23:15:42- SENSOR — Let’s try it again. In an Aug. 20 letter to Con- 23:15:44- PILOT — Yeah, see what you can get working and I’ll plan on landing on this for now. gress explaining the emergency 23:15:47- SENSOR — There’s seriously like something....This camera is contract, Deputy Defense Secre- completely [expletive]. 23:15:54- SENSOR — Like there’s something in the air. tary Ashton B. Carter said that 16 23:16:24- SENSOR — Alright 30 seconds and this will be the second nuke drones and four fighter jets take off at this altitude which if it doesn’t correct it, it’s unbelievable. 23:16:41- SENSOR — Did he say, “Cleared to land”? or land at the Djibouti airfield each 23:16:42- PILOT — Yeah 23:16:44- SENSOR — Ok. Checklist complete, links are set up, autopilots day, on average. Those operations disengaged, cleared to land, try to mess with this picture. are expected to increase, he added, 23:17:01- SENSOR — Yeah dude, I literally have ...No picture right now. This camera’s like, completely messed up. without giving details. 23:17:16- SENSOR — Can you land on that? In a separate letter to Con- 23:17:17- PILOT — Uh, I’m going around if I can’t see it. 23:17:21- SENSOR — What altitude are we at right now? gress, Carter said Camp Lemonnier 23:17:23- PILOT — Oh is running out of space to park its 23:17:27- PILOT — That was the ground drones, which he referred to as re- The pilot and sensor operator were part of a ground recovery crew at Camp Lemonnier that took over the remote controls of the drone for motely piloted aircraft (RPA), and landing. other planes. “The recent addition A “nuke” is a non-uniformity correction, or a procedure intended to reset or adjust the picture from the drone’s infrared sensor. of fighters and RPAs has exacerbat- The Predator crashes into terrain in Djibouti City, about 2.7 miles west of the runway next. No bystanders are injured but the $3 million drone is a ed the situation, causing mission total loss. delays,” he said. Source: U.S. Air Force Accident Investigation Board report Carter’s letters revealed that the drones and fighter aircraft at Whenever a military aircraft is involved the base support three classified military op- in a mishap, the Air Force appoints an Ac- erations, code-named Copper Dune, Jupiter cident Investigation Board to determine the Garret and Octave Shield. cause. Although the reports focus on tech- Copper Dune is the name of the mili- nical questions, supplementary documents tary’s counterterrorism operations in Yemen. make it possible to re-create a narrative of Africa Command said it could not provide what happened in the hours leading up to a information about Jupiter Garret and Oc- crash. tave Shield, citing secrecy restrictions. The Air Force officers investigating the code names are unclassified. crash of a Predator on May 17, 2011, found The military often assigns similar names that things started to go awry at Camp Lem- to related missions. Octave Fusion was the onnier late that night when a man known as code name for a Navy SEAL-led operation Frog emerged from the Special Operations in Somalia that rescued an American and a compound. Danish hostage on Jan. 24. The camp’s main power supply had failed and the phone lines were down. So Spilled secrets Frog walked over to the flight line to de- nother window into the Djibouti drone liver some important news to the Predator operations can be found in U.S. Air ground crew on duty, according to the inves- AForce safety records. tigators’ files, which were obtained by The FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 7 OF 9

Post as part of a public-records request. plane 2.7 miles short of the runway. “Frog” was the alias chosen by a major The site was in a residential area and assigned to the Joint Special Operations firetrucks rushed to the scene. The drone Command. At Lemonnier, he belonged to had crashed in a vacant lot and its single a special collection of Navy SEALs, Delta Hellfire missile had not detonated. Force soldiers, Air Force commandos and The Predator splintered apart and was a Marines known simply as “the task force.” total loss. With a $3 million price tag, it had JSOC commandos spend their days cost less than one-tenth the price of an F-15 and nights inside their compound as they Strike Eagle. plot raids against terrorist camps and pirate But in terms of spilling secrets, the dam- hideouts. Everybody on the base is aware of age was severe. Word spread quickly about what they do, but the topic is taboo. “I can’t the mysterious insect-shaped plane that had acknowledge the task force,” said Baker, the dropped from the sky. Hundreds of Djibou- Army general and highest-ranking com- tians gathered and gawked at the wreckage mander at Lemonnier. for hours until the U.S. military arrived to Frog coordinated Predator hunts. He retrieve the pieces. did not reveal his real name to anyone with- One secret that survived, however, was out a need to know, not even the ground- Frog’s identity. The official Air Force panel crew supervisors and operators and me- assigned to investigate the Predator accident chanics who cared for the Predators. The only contact came when Frog or his friends occasionally called from their compound to say it was time to ready a drone for takeoff or to pre- pare for a landing. Information about each Preda- tor mission was kept so tightly com- partmentalized that the ground crews were ignorant of the drones’ targets and destinations. All they knew was that most of their Preda- tors eventually came back, usual- ETHAN MILLER/GETTY IMAGES ly 20 or 22 hours later — earlier if Air Force Senior Airman William Remote control Swain operates a sensor control something went awry. station for an MQ-9 Reaper during a training mission at Creech Air Force On this particular night, Frog Base in Nevada. informed the crew that his Preda- tor was returning unexpectedly, 17 About this series hours into the flight, because of a This project examines evolving U.S. counterterrorism policies and the practice of targeted killing. It is based on interviews with dozens of current slow oil leak. and former national security officials, as well as with military commanders, It was not an emergency. But intelligence analysts, lawmakers and experts. as the drone descended toward Dji- s On Wednesday Over the past two years, the Obama bouti city, it entered a low-hanging administration has been secretly cloud that obscured its camera sen- crafting a next-generation plan to capture and kill suspected terrorists. sor. Making matters worse, the GPS device malfunctioned and gave in- s On Thursday correct altitude readings. White House adviser John O. Brennan is developing a “playbook” to codify The crew operating the drone the administration’s was flying blind. It guided the Preda- counterterrorism policies. tor on a “dangerously low glidepath,” washingtonpost.com Air Force investigators concluded, Tracking the drone war: For a detailed look at a database of 6 individual drone strikes, including numbers, locations and and crashed the remote-controlled related news reports, go to apps.washingtonpost.com/foreign/drones. FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 8 OF 9

couldn’t determine his real name, much less The 87-member squadron scrambled to track him down for questioning. secure the Predators and other exposed air- “Who is Frog?” one investigator de- craft. They managed to save more than half manded weeks later while interrogating a of the “high-value, Remotely Piloted Aircraft ground-crew member, according to a tran- assets from destruction, and most impor- script. “I’m sorry, I was just getting more ex- tantly, prevented injury and any loss of life,” planation as to who Frog — is that a person? according to a brief account published in Or is that like a position?” Combat Edge, an Air Force safety magazine. The crew member explained that Frog Even normal weather conditions could was a liaison officer from the task force. “He’s be brutal, with summertime temperatures a Pred guy,” he said. “I actually don’t know reaching 120 degrees on top of 80 percent his last name.” humidity. The accident triggered alarms at the up- “Our war reserve air conditioners liter- per echelons of the Air Force because it was ally short-circuited in the vain attempt to the fourth drone in four months from Camp cool the tents in which we worked,” recalled Lemonnier to crash. Lt. Col. Thomas McCurley, the squadron Ten days earlier, on May 7, 2011, a drone commander. “Our small group of security carrying a Hellfire missile had an electrical forces personnel guarded the compound, malfunction shortly after it entered Yemeni flight line and other allied assets at posts ex- airspace, according to an Air Force investi- posed to the elements with no air condition- gative report. The Predator turned back to- ing at all.” ward Djibouti. About one mile offshore, it McCurley’s rare public account of the rolled uncontrollably to the right, then back squadron’s activities came in June, when the to the left before flipping belly up and hur- Air Force awarded him a Bronze Star. At the tling into the sea. ceremony, he avoided any explicit mention “I’ve never seen a Predator do that before of the Predators or Camp Lemonnier. But in my life, except in videos of other crashes,” his narrative matched what is known about a sensor operator from the ground crew told the squadron’s deployment to Djibouti. investigators, according to a transcript. “I’m “Our greatest accomplishment was that just glad we landed it in the ocean and not we flew every single sortie the Air Force someplace else.” asked us to fly, despite the challenges we encountered,” he said. “We were an integral Flying every sortie part in taking down some very important he remote-control drones in Djibouti targets, which means a lot to me.” are flown, via satellite link, by pilots He did not mention it, but the unit had T8,000 miles away in the United States, gotten into the spirit of its mission by de- sitting at consoles in air-conditioned quar- signing a uniform patch emblazoned with a ters at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and skull, crossbones and a suitable nickname: Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. “East Africa Air Pirates.” At Camp Lemonnier, conditions are The Air Force denied a request from much less pleasant for the Air Force ground The Post to interview McCurley. crews that launch, recover and fix the drones. In late 2010, after military cargo planes Increased traffic transported the fleet of eight Predators to he frequency of U.S. military flights Djibouti, airmen from the 60th Air Force from Djibouti has soared, overwhelm- Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron Ting air traffic controllers and making unpacked the drones from their crates and the skies more dangerous. assembled them. The number of takeoffs and landings Soon after, without warning, a micro- each month has more than doubled, reach- burst storm with 80 mph winds struck the ing a peak of 1,666 in July compared with camp. a monthly average of 768 two years ago, FRIDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2012 KLMNO PAGE 9 OF 9 according to air traffic statistics disclosed onnier, played down the crashes and near in Defense Department contracting docu- misses. He said safety had improved since he ments. arrived in Djibouti in May. Drones now account for about 30 per- “We’ve dramatically reduced any inci- cent of daily U.S. military flight operations dents of concern, certainly since I’ve been at Lemonnier, according to a Post analysis. here,” he said. The increased activity has meant more Last month, the Defense Department mishaps. Last year, drones were involved awarded a $7 million contract to retrain be- in “a string of near mid-air collisions” with leaguered air traffic controllers at Ambouli NATO planes off the Horn of Africa, accord- International Airport and improve their ing to a brief safety alert published in Com- English skills. bat Edge magazine. The Djiboutian controllers handle all ci- Drones also pose an aviation risk next vilian and U.S. military aircraft. But they are door in Somalia. Over the past year, remote- “undermanned” and “over tasked due to the controlled aircraft have plunged into a ref- recent rapid increase in U.S. military flights,” ugee camp, flown perilously close to a fuel according to the contract. It also states that dump and almost collided with a large pas- the controllers and the airport are not in senger plane over Mogadishu, the capital, compliance with international aviation stan- according to a United Nations report. dards. Manned planes are crashing, too. An Air Resolving those deficiencies may not be Force U-28A surveillance plane crashed five sufficient. Records show the U.S. military is miles from Camp Lemonnier while return- also scrambling for an alternative place for ing from a secret mission on Feb. 18, killing its planes to land in an emergency. the four-person crew. An Air Force investi- Last month, it awarded a contract to gation attributed the accident to “unrecog- install portable lighting at the only backup nized spatial disorientation” on the part of site available: a tiny makeshift airstrip in the the crew, which ignored sensor warnings Djiboutian desert, several miles from Lem- that it was flying too close to the ground. onnier. Baker, the two-star commander at Lem- [email protected]