Read 43* for Free Online Page B

officers and agency leaders, where Osama
     bin Laden and Al Qaeda were almost always front and center. And, contrary to his public
     image as a risk-averse pedant, Gore had distinctly hawkish impulses. He had strongly
     backed the 1991 Gulf War, and as vice president he had relentlessly pressured Clinton
     to use force to stop the Serbian slaughter in the Balkans. Gore had been kept abreast
     of the endless debates about how to confront bin Laden and the struggles among the
     CIA, the Defense Department, the White House National Security team, and the lawyers
     about what could and couldn’t be done.
    Could bin Laden be killed? Yes, according to a presidential finding, but only if it
     were done in the course of attempting to capture him. Could the United States insert
     Special Forces or CIA operatives into Afghanistan to go after bin Laden on the ground?
     Not without raising serious questions about international law and subjecting the CIA
     to the same kind of second-guessing on Capitol Hill that had all but crippled the
     agency in 1975. Could he be taken out with a cruise missile? Yes, but only if we had
     near absolute certainty as to his location and near absolute certainty that he would
     be there for the six hours it would take for that missile to be launched and to reach
     its target—and only if there were little risk of “collateral damage,” meaning civilian
     casualties.
    Now, in the spring of 2001, two new factors had been added to the mix: first, an all
     but forgotten piece of machinery that, properly retrofitted, could deliver a deadly
     blow against a figure who had declared war on the United States; and second, a new
     president who had become convinced that it was time to deliver that blow.
    * * *
    It began out of a growing sense of frustration: how to find out precisely where Osama
     bin Laden was. In January 2000, the National Security Council had directed the CIA
     to pinpoint his whereabouts, in order to attack and neutralize him. But how? The Defense
     Department wanted no part of a military presence; nor would it permit the CIA to put
     its counterterrorism personnel into the region. Finally, after abandoning option after
     option, a CIA team hit on the idea of an unmanned aerial vehicle—a pilotless drone.
     And what they found was a machine, an airframe, that had been very effective in the
     Balkans but had been banished to a hangar at an Air Force base.
    The weapon was known as the Predator—described by a CIA operations officer as “a simple
     machine, sort of like a big glider with two snowmobile engines powering a single propeller.”
     It wasn’t particularly big—twenty-seven feet long. It wasn’t terribly fast—top speed,
     138 miles an hour. But it could fly for forty hours at 25,000 feet, making it effectively
     invisible, and ideal for hovering over an area while sending back crystal-clear images
     via satellite to locations thousands of miles away.
    By the summer of 2000 a CIA team had built a command center, filled with banks of
     computer terminals and video screens high on the walls. The resolution was so powerful
     that it was possible to calculate the make and model of vehicles, and the height of
     a person on the ground. As it turned out, this feature of the Predator provided jaw-dropping
     intelligence to those gathered at the command center one day that summer: As the Predator
     aimed its optics at Tarnak Farms, near Kandahar, Afghanistan—a known Al Qaeda outpost—it
     spotted an exceptionally tall man leaving a vehicle, surrounded by acolytes, unaccompanied
     by any women or children. It was bin Laden.
    But that only solved half the problem; there was still no way to strike at Al Qaeda’s
     leader except with cruise missiles, which were based on Navy ships in the Indian Ocean;
     and it would take six hours for those missiles to reach their target. Well, the White House asked the analysts watching the live video feed, can you assure us that bin Laden will be there