The drone that almost killed Osama much before 9/11

New York: Months before 9/11, US Air Force captain Scott Swanson patrolled the skies over Afghanistan with a Predator drone. Mr Swanson and his team were hunting Osama bin Laden. And they found him.

But this was months before the new drones could fire missiles, and the pilots could only watch as bin Laden walked away. On Jan 23, 2001 — just three days into George W. Bush’s Presidency — a Predator drone test fired a Hellfire missile for the first time. A new age of war had begun.

Mr Swanson is the first human to use a Predator-fired Hellfire missile to take a life. From a trailer truck in a garage behind CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, Mr Swanson loosed a missile from a drone 2,500 miles away in Kandahar. The missile struck its target — a pickup truck outside a building that intelligence said was hiding Taliban leader Mohammad Omar. The missile hit and killed two of Omar’s bodyguards.

The CIA employed sophisticated new stealth drone aircraft to fly dozens of secret missions deep into Pakistani airspace and monitor the compound where Osama bin Laden was killed, current and former US officials said.

Using unmanned planes designed to evade radar detection and operate at high altitudes, the agency conducted clandestine flights over the compound for months before the May 2 assault in an effort to capture high-resolution video that satellites could not provide.

The aircraft allowed the CIA to glide undetected beyond the boundaries that Pakistan has long imposed on other US drones, including the Predators and Reapers that routinely carry out strikes against militants near the border with Afghanistan.

The agency turned to the new stealth aircraft “because they needed to see more about what was going on” than other surveillance platforms allowed, said a former US official familiar with the details of the operation. “It’s not like you can just park a Predator overhead — the Pakistanis would know,” added the former official, who, like others interviewed, spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the programme.

The monitoring effort also involved satellites, eavesdropping equipment and CIA operatives based at a safe house in Abbottabad, the city where bin Laden was found. The agency declined to comment for this article. The CIA’s repeated secret incursions into Pakistan’s airspace underscore the level of distrust between the United States and a country often described as a key counterterrorism ally, and one that has received billions of dollars in US aid.