Shadow Wars: Chasing Conflict in an Era of Peace

1. Tinkerers, Dictators, and Soldiers of Fortune

3 1 Tinkerers, Dictators, and Soldiers of Fortune Abraham Karem was about to change the world, but he had no idea. It was 1980 in Hacienda Heights outside Los Angeles. Karem, a then-forty-three-year-old aeronautical engineer born in Baghdad and raised in Israel, was spending much of his time in his garage. The garage doubled as headquarters for Karem’s own aerospace design firm, Leading Systems, Inc. There Karem was building something. Something tube-shaped with wings. Sometimes Karem would sit in the living room tinkering with the circuits and black boxes of electronics.1 A year later the project had grown and, according to a newspaper account, “spilled into the guest room.” It was a remote-controlled airplane: a drone. Karem called it “Albatross.” His wife called it funny. So did the Pentagon, when Karem flew the Albatross in front Tinkerers, DicTaTors, anD solDiers of forTune 4 of a group of military observers at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah. Still, the drone managed fifty-six hours of flight between crashes—a big improvement over existing robot aircraft. Since World War II the military had used rudimentary drones as aerial targets for air defense gunners, and sometimes as photoreconnaissance craft. Previous drones had looked like miniature versions of manned planes. By contrast, Albatross wasn’t much to look at. The military dismissed it as “skinny.”2 And that would have been that, if not for an unlikely rescuer: the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the military’s fringe science incubator. DARPA was formed in 1958, in the months following the Soviet Union’s successful launch of Sputnik, Planet Earth’s first manmade satellite. DARPA was supposed to gamble a little cash on seemingly unlikely research projects, in hopes of occasionally scoring big with a major technological breakthrough. Karem’s skinny drone sure looked unlikely. It took a few years, but in 1984 DARPA ponied up $40 million for the robot. Karem rented office space in nearby Irvine and started hiring. His company would eventually grow to number 120. The seventh employee Karem hired was Frank Pace, an engineer then in his early thirties. Two years after his DARPA windfall, Karem’s improved Albatross was ready. “Amber,” as he renamed it, was fifteen feet long, had a twenty-eight-foot wingspan, and weighed 740 pounds. Its four-cylinder, sixty-five-horsepower engine drove a tail-mounted “pusher” propeller. It carried enough fuel for thirty-eight hours of flight. It also included what were, for the time, sophisticated sensors. “A high-altitude, long-endurance, high-Reynolds number type of airplane,” is how Pace described Amber. In aviation, the “Reynolds number” is a way of quantifying how air moves over a wing. A high-Reynolds airplane has a long wing and flies slow.3 This particular high-Reynolds plane was also loud—like “a lawn- Tinkerers, DicTaTors, anD solDiers of forTune 5 mower in the sky,” according to one observer.4 The noise isn’t necessarily what killed Amber. But it certainly didn’t help. After showing off Amber at the San Diego Air Show in 1988, Karem entered Amber into an army competition for a short-range reconnaissance drone.5 By then he had built thirteen Ambers.6 “We lost that program,” Pace recalled. Worse, “the company was essentially blackballed,” he added.7 Not only was Amber noisy, its creator could be “abrasive,” according to aviation historian Greg Goebel.8 With Leading Systems, Inc., in trouble, Karem and his engineers designed a simpler, cheaper version of Amber they called the Gnat 750 and offered it to the Turkish government, but Ankara didn’t bite. The CIA did, though. Agency director James Woolsey knew Karem personally and was eager to test the Israeli ’s new robot. The CIA purchased five Gnats.9 Foul-ups were frequent in the agency’s early experiments with its new toys. One Gnat flew headlong into a gust of wind that reduced its airspeed to zero—it was, in essence, hovering—and convinced the onboard computer that it had landed. The computer dutifully shut down the Gnat’s engine and it tumbled to the ground.10 WithitsDARPAmoneyallspentandnofurtherpayingcustomers in the offing, in 1990 Leading Systems went into bankruptcy. Its drones and its people were up for grabs. In an act of profound industrial foresight, General Atomics, a San Diego company most famous for making nuclear reactors, snatched up all of Karem’s robot...