Remote U.S. base at core of secret operations
This is the third of three articles.
DJIBOUTI CITY, Djibouti — Around the clock, about 16 times a day, drones take off or land at a U.S. military base here, the combat hub for the Obama administration’scounterterrorism wars in the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.
Some of the unmanned aircraft are bound for Somalia, the collapsed state whose border lies just 10 miles to the southeast. Most of the armed drones, however, veer north across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen, another unstable country where they are being used in an increasingly deadly warwith an al-Qaeda franchise that has targeted the United States.
Camp Lemonnier, a sun-baked Third World outpost established by the French Foreign Legion, began as a temporary staging ground for U.S. Marines looking for a foothold in the region a decade ago. Over the past two years, the U.S. military has clandestinely transformed it into the busiest Predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone, a model for fighting a new generation of terrorist groups.
The Obama administration has gone toextraordinary lengths to conceal the legal and operational details of its targeted-killing program. Behind closed doors, painstaking debates precede each decision to place an individual in the cross hairs of the United States’ perpetual war against al-Qaeda and its allies.
Increasingly, the orders to find, track or kill those people are delivered to Camp Lemonnier. Virtually the entire 500-acre camp is dedicated to counterterrorism, making it the only installation of its kind in the Pentagon’s global network of bases.
Secrecy blankets most of the camp’s activities. The U.S. military rejected requests from The Washington Post to tour Lemonnier last month. Officials cited “operational security concerns,” although they have permitted journalists to visit in the past.
After a Post reporter showed up in Djibouti uninvited, the camp’s highest-ranking commander consented to an interview — on the condition that it take place away from the base, at Djibouti's lone luxury hotel. The commander, Army Maj. Gen. Ralph O. Baker, answered some general queries but declined to comment on drone operations or missions related to Somalia or Yemen.
Despite the secrecy, thousands of pages of military records obtained by The Post — including construction blueprints, drone accident reports and internal planning memos — open a revealing window into Camp Lemonnier. None of the documents is classified and many were acquired via public-records requests.
Taken together, the previously undisclosed documents show how the Djibouti-based drone wars sharply escalated early last year after eight Predators arrived at Lemonnier. The records also chronicle the Pentagon’s ambitious plan to further intensify drone operations here in the coming months.
The documents point to the central role played by the Joint Special Operations Command(JSOC), which President Obama has repeatedly relied on to execute the nation’s most sensitive counterterrorism missions.
About 300 Special Operations personnel plan raids and coordinate drone flights from inside a high-security compound at Lemonnier that is dotted with satellite dishes and ringed by concertina wire. Most of the commandos work incognito, concealing their names even from conventional troops on the base.
Other counterterrorism work at Lemonnier is more overt. All told, about 3,200 U.S. troops, civilians and contractors are assigned to the camp, where they train foreign militaries, gather intelligence and dole out humanitarian aid across East Africa as part of a campaign to prevent extremists from taking root.
In Washington, the Obama administration has taken a series of steps to sustain the drone campaign for another decade, developing an elaborate new targeting database, called the “disposition matrix,” and a classified “playbook” to spell out how decisions on targeted killing are made.
Djibouti is the clearest example of how the United States is laying the groundwork to carry out these operations overseas. For the past decade, the Pentagon has labeled Lemonnier an “expeditionary,” or temporary, camp. But it is now hardening into the U.S. military’s first permanent drone war base.
Centerpiece base
In August, the Defense Department delivered a master plan to Congressdetailing how the camp will be used over the next quarter-century. About $1.4 billion in construction projects are on the drawing board, including a huge new compound that could house up to 1,100 Special Operations forces, more than triple the current number.
Drones will continue to be in the forefront. In response to written questions from The Post, the U.S. military confirmed publicly for the first time the presence of remotely piloted aircraft — military parlance for drones — at Camp Lemonnier and said they support “a wide variety of regional security missions.”
Intelligence collected from drone and other surveillance missions “is used to develop a full picture of the activities of violent extremist organizations and other activities of interest,” Africa Command, the arm of the U.S. military that oversees the camp, said in a statement. “However, operational security considerations prevent us from commenting on specific missions.”
For nearly a decade, the United States flew drones from Lemonnier only rarely, starting with a 2002 strike in Yemen that killed a suspected ringleader of the attack on the USS Cole.
That swiftly changed in 2010, however, after al-Qaeda’s network in Yemen attempted to bomb two U.S.-bound airliners and jihadists in Somalia separately consolidated their hold on that country. Late that year, records show, the Pentagon dispatched eight unmanned MQ-1B Predator aircraft to Djibouti and turned Lemonnier into a full-time drone base.
The impact was apparent months later: JSOC drones from Djibouti and CIA Predators from a secret base on the Arabian Peninsula converged over Yemen and killed Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born cleric and prominent al-Qaeda member.
Today, Camp Lemonnier is the centerpiece of an expanding constellation of half a dozen U.S. drone and surveillance bases in Africa, created to combat a new generation of terrorist groups across the continent, from Mali to Libya to the Central African Republic. The U.S. military also flies drones from small civilian airports in Ethiopia and the Seychelles, but those operations pale in comparison to what is unfolding in Djibouti.
Lemonnier also has become a hub for conventional aircraft. In October
2011, the military boosted the airpower at the base by deploying a squadron of F-15E Strike Eagle fighter
jets, which can fly faster and carry more munitions than Predators.
In its written responses, Africa Command confirmed the warplanes’
presence but declined to answer questions about their mission. Two former U.S.
defense officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the F-15s are
flying combat sorties over Yemen, an undeclared development in the growing war
against al-Qaeda forces there.
The drones and other military aircraft have crowded the skies over the Horn
of Africa so much that the risk of an aviation disaster has soared.
Since January 2011, Air Force records show, five Predators armed with
Hellfire missiles crashed after taking off from Lemonnier, including one drone
that plummeted to the ground in a residential area of Djibouti City. No
injuries were reported but four of the drones were destroyed.
Predator drones in particular are more prone to mishaps than manned
aircraft, Air Force statistics show. But the accidents rarely draw public
attention because there are no pilots or passengers.
As the pace of drone operations has intensified in Djibouti, Air Force
mechanics have reported mysterious incidents in which the airborne robots went
haywire.
In March 2011, a Predator parked at the camp started its engine without
any human direction, even though the ignition had been turned off and the fuel
lines closed. Technicians concluded that a software bug had infected the
“brains” of the drone, but never pinpointed the problem.
“After that whole starting-itself incident, we were fairly wary of the
aircraft and watched it pretty closely,” an unnamed Air Force squadron
commander testified to an investigative board, according to a transcript.
“Right now, I still think the software is not good.”
Prime location
Djibouti is an impoverished former French colony with fewer than
1 million people, scarce natural resources and miserably hot weather.
But as far as the U.S. military is concerned, the country's strategic
value is unparalleled. Sandwiched between East Africa and the Arabian
Peninsula, Camp Lemonnier enables U.S. aircraft to reach hot spots such as
Yemen or Somalia in minutes. Djibouti’s port also offers easy access to the
Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.
“This is not an outpost in the middle of nowhere that is of marginal
interest,” said Amanda J. Dory, the Pentagon’s
deputy assistant secretary for Africa. “This is a very important location in
terms of U.S. interests, in terms of freedom of navigation, when it comes to
power projection.”
The U.S. military pays $38 million a year to lease Camp Lemonnier
from the Djiboutian government. The base rolls across flat, sandy terrain on
the edge of Djibouti City, a somnolent capital with eerily empty streets.
During the day, many people stay indoors to avoid the heat and to chew khat, a mildly
intoxicating plant that is popular in the region.
Hemmed in by the sea and residential areas, Camp Lemonnier’s primary
shortcoming is that it has no space to expand. It is forced to share a single
runway with Djibouti’s only international airport, as well as an adjoining
French military base and the tiny Djiboutian armed forces.
Passengers arriving on commercial flights — there are about eight per day — can
occasionally spy a Predator drone preparing for a mission. In between flights,
the unmanned aircraft park under portable, fabric-covered hangars to shield
them from the wind and curious eyes.
Behind the perimeter fence, construction crews are rebuilding the base
to better accommodate the influx of drones. Glimpses of the secret operations
can be found in an assortment of little-noticed Pentagon memoranda submitted to
Congress.
Last month, for example, the Defense Department awarded a $62 million contractto
build an airport taxiway extension to handle increased drone traffic at
Lemonnier, an ammunition storage site and a combat-loading area for bombs and
missiles.
In an Aug. 20 letter to Congress explaining the emergency contract,
Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter said that 16 drones and four fighter
jets take off or land at the Djibouti airfield each day, on average. Those
operations are expected to increase, he added, without giving details.
In a separate letter to Congress, Carter said Camp Lemonnier is running
out of space to park its drones, which he referred to as remotely piloted
aircraft (RPA), and other planes. “The recent addition of fighters and RPAs has
exacerbated the situation, causing mission delays,” he said.
Carter’s letters revealed that the drones and fighter aircraft at the
base support three classified military operations, code-namedCopper Dune,
Jupiter Garret and Octave Shield.
Copper Dune is the name of the military’s counterterrorism operations in
Yemen. Africa Command said it could not provide information about Jupiter
Garret and Octave Shield, citing secrecy restrictions. The code names are
unclassified.
The military often assigns similar names to related missions. Octave Fusion was
the code name for a Navy SEAL-led operation in Somalia that rescued an American
and a Danish hostage on Jan. 24.
Spilled secrets
Another window into the Djibouti drone operations can be found in U.S.
Air Force safety records.
Whenever a military aircraft is involved in a mishap, the Air Force
appoints an Accident Investigation Board to determine
the cause. Although the reports focus on technical questions, supplementary
documents make it possible to re-create a narrative of what happened in the
hours leading up to a crash.
Air Force officers investigating the crash of a Predator on May 17,
2011, found that things started to go awry at Camp Lemonnier late that night
when a man known as Frog emerged from the Special Operations compound.
The camp’s main power supply had failed and the phone lines were down.
So Frog walked over to the flight line to deliver some important news to the
Predator ground crew on duty, according to the investigators’ files, which were
obtained by The Post as part of a public-records request.
“Frog” was the alias chosen by a major assigned to the Joint Special
Operations Command. At Lemonnier, he belonged to a special collection of Navy
SEALs, Delta Force soldiers, Air Force commandos and Marines known simply as
“the task force.”
JSOC commandos spend their days and nights inside their compound as they
plot raids against terrorist camps and pirate hideouts. Everybody on the base
is aware of what they do, but the topic is taboo. “I can’t acknowledge the task
force,” said Baker, the Army general and highest-ranking commander at
Lemonnier.
Frog coordinated Predator hunts. He did not reveal his real name to
anyone without a need to know, not even the ground-crew supervisors and
operators and mechanics 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 prepare for a landing.
Information about each Predator mission was kept so tightly
compartmentalized that the ground crews were ignorant of the drones’ targets
and destinations. All they knew was that most of their Predators eventually
came back, usually 20 or 22 hours later, earlier if something went awry.
On this particular night, Frog informed the crew that his Predator was
returning unexpectedly, 17 hours into the flight, because of a slow oil leak.
It was not an emergency. But as the drone descended toward Djibouti City
it entered a low-hanging cloud that obscured its camera sensor. Making matters
worse, the GPS malfunctioned and gave incorrect altitude readings.
The crew operating the drone was flying blind. It guided the Predator on
a “dangerously low glidepath,” Air Force investigators concluded, and crashed
the remote-controlled plane 2.7 miles short of the runway.
The site was in a residential area and fire trucks rushed to the scene.
The drone had crashed in a vacant lot and its single Hellfire missile had not
detonated.
The Predator splintered apart and was a total loss. With a
$3 million price tag, it had cost less than one-tenth the price of an F-15
Strike Eagle.
But in terms of spilling secrets, the damage was severe. Word spread
quickly about the mysterious insect-shaped plane that had dropped from the sky.
Hundreds of Djiboutians gathered and gawked at the wreckage for hours until the
U.S. military arrived to retrieve the pieces.
One secret that survived, however, was Frog’s identity. The official Air
Force panel assigned to investigate the Predator accident couldn’t determine
his real name, much less track him down for questioning.
“Who is Frog?” one investigator demanded weeks later while interrogating
a ground crew member, according to a transcript. “I’m sorry, I was just getting
more explanation as to who Frog — is that a person? Or is that like a
position?”
The crew member explained that Frog was a liaison officer from the task
force. “He’s a Pred guy,” he shrugged. “I actually don’t know his last name.”
The accident triggered alarms at the upper echelons of the Air Force
because it was the fourth drone in four months from Camp Lemonnier to crash.
Ten days earlier, on May 7, 2011, a drone carrying a Hellfire missile
had an electrical malfunction shortly after it entered Yemeni airspace, according
to an Air Force investigative report. The Predator turned back toward Djibouti.
About one mile offshore, it rolled uncontrollably to the right, then back to
the left before flipping belly up and hurtling into the sea.
“I’ve never seen a Predator do that before in my life, except in videos
of other crashes,” a sensor operator from the ground crew told investigators,
according to a transcript. “I’m just glad we landed it in the ocean and not
someplace else.”
Flying every sortie
The remote-control drones in Djibouti are flown, via satellite link, by
pilots 8,000 miles away in the United States, sitting at consoles in
air-conditioned quarters at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada and Cannon Air
Force Base in New Mexico.
At Camp Lemonnier, conditions are much less pleasant for the Air Force
ground crews that launch, recover and fix the drones.
In late 2010, after military cargo planes transported the fleet of eight
Predators to Djibouti, airmen from the 60th Air Force Expeditionary
Reconnaissance Squadron unpacked the drones from their crates
and assembled them.
Soon after, without warning, a microburst storm with 80-mph winds struck
the camp.
The 87-member squadron scrambled to secure the Predators and other
exposed aircraft. They managed to save more than half of the “high-value,
Remotely Piloted Aircraft assets from destruction, and most importantly,
prevented injury and any loss of life,” according toa brief
account published in Combat Edge, an Air Force safety magazine.
Even normal weather conditions could be brutal, with summertime
temperatures reaching 120 degrees on top of 80 percent humidity.
“Our war reserve air conditioners literally short-circuited in the vain
attempt to cool the tents in which we worked,” recalled Lt. Col. Thomas
McCurley, the squadron commander. “Our small group of security forces personnel
guarded the compound, flight line and other allied assets at posts exposed to
the elements with no air conditioning at all.”
McCurley’s rare public account of
the squadron’s activities came in June, when the Air Force awarded him a Bronze
Star. At the ceremony, he avoided any explicit mention of the Predators or Camp
Lemonnier. But his narrative matched what is known about the squadron’s
deployment to Djibouti.
“Our greatest accomplishment was that we flew every single sortie the
Air Force asked us to fly, despite the challenges we encountered,” he said. “We
were an integral part in taking down some very important targets, which means a
lot to me.”
He did not mention it, but the unit had gotten into the spirit of its
mission by designing a uniform patch emblazoned
with a skull, crossbones and a suitable nickname: “East Africa Air Pirates.”
The Air Force denied a request from The Post to interview McCurley.
Increased traffic
The frequency of U.S. military flights from Djibouti has soared,
overwhelming air-traffic controllers and making the skies more dangerous.
The number of takeoffs and landings each month has more than doubled,
reaching a peak of 1,666 in July compared with a monthly average of 768 two
years ago, according to air-traffic statistics disclosed in Defense Department
contracting documents.
Drones now account for about 30 percent of daily U.S. military
flight operations at Lemonnier, according to a Post analysis.
The increased activity has meant more mishaps. Last year, drones were
involved in “a string of near mid-air collisions” with NATO planes off the Horn
of Africa, according to a brief
safety alert published in Combat Edge magazine.
Drones also pose an aviation risk next door in
Somalia. Over the past year, remote-controlled aircraft have plunged
into a refugee camp, flown perilously close to a fuel dump and almost collided
with a large passenger plane over Mogadishu, the capital, according to a United
Nations report.
Manned planes are crashing, too. An Air Force U-28A surveillance plane crashed five
miles from Camp Lemonnier while returning from a secret mission on Feb. 18,
killing the four-person crew. An Air Force investigation attributed the
accident to “unrecognized spatial disorientation” on the part of the crew,
which ignored sensor warnings that it was flying too close to the ground.
Baker, the two-star commander at Lemonnier, played down the crashes and
near-misses. He said safety had improved since he arrived in Djibouti in May.
“We’ve dramatically reduced any incidents of concern, certainly since
I’ve been here,” he said.
Last month, the Defense Department awarded a $7 million contract to
retrain beleaguered air-traffic controllers at Ambouli International Airport
and improve their English skills.
The Djiboutian controllers handle all civilian and U.S. military
aircraft. But they are “undermanned” and “over tasked due to the recent rapid
increase in U.S. military flights,” according to the contract. It also states
that the controllers and the airport are not in compliance with international
aviation standards.
Resolving those deficiencies may not be sufficient. Records show the
U.S. military is also scrambling for an alternative place for its planes to
land in an emergency.
Last month, it awarded a contract to install portable lighting at the
only backup site available: a tiny, makeshift airstrip in the Djiboutian
desert, several miles from Lemonnier.
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