SECONDS FROM OBLIVION
A gripping dispatch from the scruffy Lincolnshire hangar at the heart of Britain’s war on IS – as drone ‘pilots’ divert £50k missile streaking towards passer-by who is merely...
IT IS 2,400 miles from the airconditioned control room in rural England to the dusty, bloody battlefields of Iraq, yet Steve, the RAF squadron leader, can rain down death in seconds – with the gentlest touch of a button.
He is the future of war. Not some armour-plated super-soldier, but an ordinary RAF officer who has just dropped off his children at school and sipped a mug of tea.
His work requires physical precision and the finest moral calibration: Steve, whose name has been changed for security reasons, decides who dies and who gets to live.
For eight hours, a surveillance team has tracked a 4x4 carrying Islamic State fighters along a desert road in northern Iraq. The time to eliminate them has come. Above, silent and unseen, a £15million Reaper drone circles, feeding its split-second intelligence back to mission control at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire.
‘Three, two, one, rifle!’ comes the command as the drone launches a Hellfire missile towards the vehicle. Then the officer sees an innocent man walking into the kill zone. The decision alone is his: must he sacrifice the civilian in pursuit of the terrorists or abort the mission? He has a heartbeat to decide.
The scene echoes the plot of blockbuster movie Eye In The Sky, where Helen Mirren plays a hawkish British colonel who must choose whether to launch an air strike in which a little girl will become the human collateral damage. But there is no tension crafted on celluloid which can come close to what passes for real life at Waddington.
In this, the first interview with any member of a British drone crew fighting IS, Steve tells The Mail on Sunday how it feels to be the man who must play God.
On the day of the drama described here, he was in the staff canteen when his breakfast was interrupted by the news that a UK Reaper circling three miles over the IS stronghold of Mosul had identified three leading members of the terror group. The men had led attacks on friendly forces and distributed weapons across the group’s so-called caliphate.
Steve headed for the hangar containing three cabins with a steel perimeter of 10ft-high barriers topped with barbed wire. They are bedecked with camouflage netting as a reminder that this is a military base and not some lifesize computer game. Their names – Ground Control Stations – give no clue to the global controversy they generate and how much IS longs to strike back at them.
A pilot in a green flying suit, decorated with wings and patches signifying his membership of 13 Squadron (RAF), briefs Steve. The language is professional and military, outlining positive identification of an active and dangerous terrorist cell. But the question is this: ‘Do you authorise us to kill?’
‘I have chosen to use a Hellfire missile and we’re adjusting the Reaper’s position to facilitate the strike. The optimum location for the strike is here,’ says the pilot, indicating an area of desert scrubland. There are no buildings or people showing on his screen, ‘and no friendly forces in the area’.
On the pilot’s command of ‘wide to narrow’, a camera on the Reaper zooms in. Steve watches over the pilot’s shoulder as the vehicle crosses the display screen from left to right. The drone is prepared to launch.
Into the silence come the words ‘Three, two, one, rifle!’ and the Hellfire is released. There are
just 30 seconds to impact. Then, ambling in from the right-hand side of the screen, the civilian appears. There is no chance of blowing up the 4x4 without putting him in mortal danger. In fact, he’s about to be vaporised since he is walking directly into the path of the missile.
‘Assessing,’ says the Sensor Operator, his eyes fixed on his screen.
Without a gun to identify himself as a combatant, the man would have to be positively identified as an enemy fighter. Many civilians have fled from IS to this area, but geography is not proof of guilt. There are 20 seconds to impact, not enough time to run a close-up through the facial recognition software which the US has used to build a database of IS fighters. ‘Unidentified,’ says the pilot, passing on the result of an intelligence assessment.
‘Reacquire the target?’ asks the Sensor Operator controlling the Hellfire’s flightpath and where it will land. By now the man is just a few yards from the fighters’ vehicle. The time to impact is ten seconds.
‘No, shift cold,’ says Steve, clearly and firmly. The man will not die on his watch. ‘Shift cold’ means finding a safe area of desert for the missile to land, dumping a warhead costing £50,000 of UK taxpayers’ money in the sand and watching it go up in smoke. It also means letting known terrorists go free.
With a flick of his wrist the Sensor Operator adjusts the angle of his joystick and the crosshairs move up and away from the jihadis’ vehicle. Seconds later there is a huge explosion and the viewing screens are ablaze with fire and billowing black smoke.
The terrorists speed away from the area. Within hours, however, they will be dead. Another Reaper team will spot them and this time the Hellfire will not be made to miss.
The drone’s inspection of the blast area will show three confirmed kills. For Steve there will be a post-mission debrief with 13 Squadron colleagues, before he gets back on his bicycle and pedals home in the sunshine. It may have been the stuff of a Hollywood script, but for him it has been just another day at the office.
Such is the intensity of these shifts that the crews – the Safety Observers such as Steve, the pilot, the Mission Intelligence Co-ordinator and Sensor Operator – work for only two hours at a time. They are constantly monitored for signs of PostTraumatic Stress Disorder. And given their capture value to IS, their identities can never be revealed.
They are hated by IS, feared by civilians and, in some cases, despised by their own side. Some drone pilots who have not previously piloted conventional, manned aircraft can be stigmatised by colleagues who have risked their own lives over Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.
Britain has ten Reapers, or Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, as they are correctly known, controlled from RAF Waddington but launched from Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, though this has never been officially confirmed. They have flown more than 1,000 missions, killing hundreds of IS fighters and Taliban members.
They have also sparked worldwide debate about the ethics of waging war without putting military personnel in the line of fire.
And it is this remoteness which is at issue, and why on each team there is a Steve – an airman whose job is to put a price on every life he sees on the screen in front of him.