Spy Plane Woes Create Bosnia Intelligence Gap

With 20,000 U.S. troops poised to enter Bosnia on a potentially bloody peacekeeping mission, the CIA and the Pentagon had hoped to rely to an unprecedented degree on unmanned spy aircraft to provide GIs with vital intelligence as they slog across the steep hills and cloud-covered valleys of the Balkans.

Despite billions of dollars in spending and decades of research and development, however, the only surveillance drone that the Pentagon is now flying in Bosnia-Herzegovina is its oldest, least capable and most crash-prone system.

One of the Pentagon’s most advanced--and costliest--new drones has proven vulnerable to anti-aircraft fire and was pulled out of Bosnia in November after Bosnian Serb gunners successfully shot down two of the three in service there.

The problems with the drones have led to a significant gap in American intelligence capabilities in Bosnia, according to sources familiar with U.S. air operations in the region.

The Pentagon pulled its advanced Predator drones out of Bosnia because they were not equipped with the radar needed to see through dense Bosnian cloud cover, officials said. The Predators were being flown so low beneath the clouds that they were easy targets for Bosnian Serb ground fire. U.S. officials stressed, however, that none of the CIA’s drones, similar in design to those operated by the military, were shot down.

CIA officials declined to discuss whether the spy agency also has withdrawn its drones from the Balkans.

The Pentagon and CIA were flying the drones over Bosnia and Serbia from a secret base in Albania, sources said. But officials do not expect to return the Pentagon’s drones to duty in the Balkans until March, three months after U.S. troops are slated to arrive, officials said. The drones are now back in the United States being fitted with radar systems that will allow them to see through cloud cover and thus fly higher, officials said.

But today, the only drones operated by the U.S. military in the region are small, aging Navy aircraft--the short-range Pioneer--based on the Shreveport in the Adriatic Sea. The Pioneer produces relatively crude video pictures, cannot communicate with U.S. satellites and has crashed 20 to 30 times in the last decade, defense officials acknowledged.

“The Pioneers crash like apples falling off a tree,” said Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., the president of San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, which produces the long-range Predator.

But the short-range Hunter drones eventually slated to replace the Pioneer are plagued by severe technical problems as well, forcing the Pentagon to continue to rely on the older aircraft. A series of 10 crashes during the testing and development of the Hunter drones has prompted the Pentagon to put the program on the back burner.

And while the Pentagon already has spent $700 million on the Hunter program, congressional critics are now seeking to abandon it completely. A scathing report on the Hunter by the General Accounting Office in March found that the system “may prove unsuitable for use by operational forces.”

“The Hunter has been a disaster,” said Louis Rodrigues, a senior defense expert at the GAO.

Equally troubling, a bitter turf battle in Washington between the CIA and the Pentagon over control of America’s new fleet of unmanned planes remains unresolved. Sources said that the CIA, eager to get a piece of one of the nation’s fastest-growing intelligence programs, quietly obtained its own fleet of drones last year without fully disclosing its plans to Pentagon officials.

Defense officials said that the CIA considered obtaining drones from a shipment of U.S.-built aircraft originally earmarked for the Turkish government after the Turks were slow to pay for them. That plan was abandoned, and ultimately the CIA obtained its drones through other means, sources said.

The CIA bought a fleet of drones from General Atomics, designated as Gnat-750s, a smaller version of the company’s Predator.

But the CIA’s willingness to consider diverting the Turkish shipment underscores how eager the spy agency was to get back into the aerial reconnaissance field. Early in the Cold War, the CIA operated manned spy planes such as the U-2 and the SR-71 but later ceded them to the Air Force.

When Pentagon officials became aware that the CIA had gotten back into the drone business, military leaders were dumbfounded, officials say.

U.S. intelligence officials insisted that Pentagon policy-makers at “the very top of the chain of command” were aware of the CIA’s decision to obtain a fleet of drones, but there is little doubt that the CIA’s decision caused a firestorm of protest within the military.

“Some people [in the military] believed [the CIA] should get out of [drones],” said Dwight Williams, deputy director of the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office.

The dispute over the CIA’s initial purchase was resolved in the summer of 1994, after then-CIA director R. James Woolsey and the Defense Department’s vice chiefs of staff agreed to a compromise that allowed the CIA to keep its drones. But the agreement committed the spy agency to buy any further drones through the Pentagon’s Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office. Now the CIA’s drone operations in Bosnia are conducted under the direction of military commanders.

“The CIA has been operating under Pentagon tasking and at the Pentagon’s request,” said a U.S. intelligence official.

“I think there has been a reasonable, workable relationship between the CIA and the Pentagon, and they are integrating their efforts in Bosnia,” a senior Clinton Administration official added.

Still, congressional leaders are not convinced that the CIA needs to be in the drone business at all, many of them believing that the agency’s separate fleet of drones represents a waste of increasingly scarce intelligence resources.

In fact, some intelligence experts on Capitol Hill question whether the CIA, which is supposed to handle strategic and national-level intelligence matters, should play a role in a new technology designed largely for tactical military intelligence.

“It’s a confusing issue because it’s not clear who this should belong to,” said a senior congressional intelligence expert.

“Is this a tactical system or a national collection system? This technology has blurred the lines between what the CIA should do and what military intelligence should do.”

Yet the battle between the CIA and the Pentagon underscores the degree to which intelligence and military officials now believe that the drones will save the lives of U.S. pilots and emerge as America’s espionage workhorses of the future.

In 1996 alone, the Pentagon plans to spend $400 million on drones. Maj. Gen. Kenneth R. Israel, director of the Pentagon’s aerial surveillance programs, said the military is engaged in a multibillion-dollar campaign to develop a family of drones over the next five years that will provide everything from short-range flights over battlefields to endurance flights that last more than 24 hours.

Maj. Gen. Israel believes that drones, bouncing live television feeds off satellites down to U.S. commanders, offer the kind of intelligence military leaders have dreamed about throughout the history of warfare: the ability to look down at an entire battlefield, day or night, as combat unfolds.

And the fact that two drones already have been downed in Bosnia, officials stressed, only proves their value in saving the lives of U.S. pilots.

The Pentagon has invested roughly $4 billion on drones since the Vietnam War, when they were secretly used over Hanoi for damage assessment after bombing runs.

But while the Pentagon sees drones as the wave of the future, the military’s record has been badly tarnished by systems that either grew far too costly or were technically flawed.

In fact, the Pentagon’s operations in Bosnia demonstrated both the advantages of drones and the technical hurdles that they still face. As the United States increased its involvement in the Balkan conflict this year, the Pentagon rushed the Predator drone to a secret base in Albania, the impoverished former East Bloc country that borders Serbia.

Deployed just 18 months after its development began, the Predator was judged to be highly successful in its ability to help in U.S. bombing raids against Bosnian Serb gun emplacements. But the rushed deployment meant that the Predators had not yet been fitted with radar systems that would help them fly above the clouds--and at a safer distance from Serbian fire.

The Predator is designed to operate at an altitude of 25,000 feet but was operating at just 5,000 feet when at least one was known to be shot down by gunners over Bosnia. A second drone was apparently disabled by ground fire and was deliberately crashed into a mountain, Israel said.

The problems have not stopped the Pentagon from planning an ambitious development program for more expensive drone systems that will come with more sophisticated equipment.

In addition to the Hunter and its other existing aircraft, the Pentagon plans to develop another short-range drone, acquiring 53 of the systems at a cost of about $1 billion over the next 20 years.

The Lockheed Skunk Works, meanwhile, is developing the longer-range Dark Star system, a stealthy drone with a wingspan of 69 feet and a flying range of 1,000 miles. It is due for its first test flight this month, according to Garfield Thomas, Lockheed vice president for reconnaissance programs.

Meanwhile, Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical, based in San Diego, is developing the longest range system, known as TierII Plus, which would be able to fly from San Francisco to Maine and loiter for 24 hours over a target and then return to its base.

But the Pentagon is unlikely to get approval or funding to build all these systems, according to congressional and industry experts.

“It is a wish list,” Cassidy said.