Reaper Force - Inside Britain's Drone Wars. Peter Lee M.

militia.

      ‘Does that make them the good guys?’ I ask. The question is intentionally mischievous. There is a long silence. The pilot is the first to respond. ‘Well, they are good-ish – at least for now.’ His hesitation is understandable. ‘Good’ and ‘bad’ are much-misused, malleable terms in this conflict. As are the names and allegiances of many of the militias involved in it.

      They move on from the good-ish, bad-ish technical to get on with the systematic area search south of Mosul. After half an hour of ‘watching buildings go round’ as the camera moves from building to building and small settlement to small settlement, I find my attention drifting slightly. There has been no sign of life in the last three places we looked.

      ‘Where is everybody?’ I ask.

      ‘Were you watching BBC News last night?’ came a reply. ‘The luckiest ones have family in safe areas. The other lucky ones are in a refugee camp or trying to cross the Med. by boat to Europe.’ The images of refugees being rescued from their pathetic, barely seaworthy boats are harrowing. There is something similarly shocking about the empty places that the refugees have left behind. Homes, schools, businesses, mosques. The spaces that were once filled with life and vibrancy are now empty shells, many destroyed or damaged in the fighting.

      While the discussion of the empty homes was going on, the MIC was receiving updated information from one of his chatrooms. He gives the pilot and SO an eight-figure grid reference – still some miles south of Mosul but further to the west – which the CAOC would like to investigate. Intelligence from the myriad of supported forces on the ground in Iraq has made its labyrinthine way to Nevada for visual confirmation from the air.

      However, before the crew reaches the location the flex crew reappears. Dinner time. The MIC updates everyone on the latest intelligence picture. Each crew member then gives a detailed description of what they are doing, what they are looking for and why. Then one by one the members of the relief crew settle into their seats. One hundred years on from the rapid growth of air forces in the First World War, control is handed over with the words that aircrew – often instructors and trainee pilots – have used ever since.

      ‘You have control,’ says the exiting Reaper pilot.

      ‘I have control,’ responds the relief pilot.

      The crew head off separately to make phone calls, answer emails, you name it. For those with children, it might be the only chance to speak to them between school and bedtime.

      One of the aspects of being a Reaper operator that is widely known is the disjuncture between home and work, particularly when work life involves observing often harrowing events and killing people who have been watched for long periods. What is not appreciated, and certainly did not cross my mind before I was confronted with it, is that the mental transition between war and peace does not happen at the beginning and end of every day. It happens at the beginning and end of every stint in the GCS during the course of single shift. That is a lot of mental readjustment on a daily basis.

      I head off to conduct an interview, my first here. There is a false start when my interviewee, an off-duty pilot, realises that he has arranged for the interview to take place in the briefing room – a SECRET classified location – but my recording equipment is forbidden. So we find a quiet room. Moments like this away from the GCS remind me of the seriousness of what is going on and that this whole squadron is at war, not just the people who are doing the flying.

      These first few interviews are crucial as I begin to engage with people who don’t know me and live in a continual ‘need to know’ mode. These opening interviews are particularly valuable in the practical information I glean and for understanding how the Reaper and 39 Squadron work. At this stage the interviewees are understandably cautious about how much personal information and experience they can risk sharing. That’s partly because of the politically and personally sensitive nature of what they do and how I might use it, and partly – as one pilot puts it over coffee – because of the Lee Rigby effect. Lee Rigby was the off-duty British soldier murdered in a London street in 2013 by two radical Islamists.

      Importantly for me, however, another factor is working in my favour. A lot of the RAF Reaper personnel are fed up with how they see themselves and their work presented in different parts of the media. After the first couple of interviews a trickle turns into something of a flood. At this stage they are very keen to tell me what they do and how they do it. Some even make an early foray into telling me what they think about what they do. A crude, initial summary: professional and proud. It will be some time before some of them eventually open up to me about how they feel about what they do. As the events to follow will show, this is too complex for a crude summary.

      Before I know it, I am called back to the GCS – dinner is over. I stand half way between the pilot and SO as they go through their handovers and retake their seats at the front of the box, as the GCS is known, and the MIC who is doing the same at his work station at the rear of the box. Do I detect a frisson of excitement? I have a random question. Why is the end of the box where the pilot sits seen as the ‘front’, while the MIC sits at the ‘back’? In an information-based war, maybe the intelligence coordinators are the ‘front’ end. I make a note to see if I can start an argument about this in the crew room some time. (The answer turned out to be yes, and very easily.)

      Once the flex crew left, I saw at the centre of the main screens a building with some kind of lean-to or temporary shelter in a small, narrow backyard that led into an alley. The MIC had located a technical as it entered this residential area and watched as it drove to this place a couple of minutes ago. It bore the hallmarks of IS and they had been in the process of identifying the weapon on the back when the technical reversed under the tarpaulin.

      We watched as four armed men emerged from where the vehicle was concealed.

      ‘Suspicious,’ observes the Boss, but suspicion without evidence does not take them to the point of asking for a strike. Also, the presence of children in the alleyway – never mind who might be in the house – ensures a positive collateral damage estimate (CDE) and therefore no strike. It is time to watch.

      Having had around just four hours’ sleep in the previous thirty-six, and feeling the effects of jet lag, I worry that I might doze off. No way. The adrenaline kicks in. Potential strike locations are being sought by the MIC. Not easy in a built-up area with children and adults milling around. The Boss zooms out the camera view so that a wider surrounding area can be recce’d for potential strike locations. Then everything changes. Quickly.

      The technical starts backing out of its hiding place, the camera zooms in and a sense of urgency permeates the GCS. A large gun on a tripod comes into view. Two different voices identify it as a 0.50in-calibre machine gun. The MIC starts to confirm the precise type of gun, as well as contacting his various intelligence sources to confirm ‘ownership’ of the vehicle.

      The vehicle begins to track slowly through the back streets.

      ‘The driver is looking for something or somewhere but probably does not know the area well.’ The Boss interprets what we are seeing for my benefit.

      Then it stops, reverses and moves backwards and forwards a couple of times as the driver tries to get closer to the adjacent building. He ends up further away than when he started.

      ‘This is an Austin Powers parking manoeuvre right now,’ says the pilot. It breaks the tension for a few seconds. I’m not sure if the others are laughing but I have to move my microphone away from my face. The people in that vehicle might only have minutes or hours to live and, frankly, I am fighting back laughter. Get a grip. I am the kid who laughed in school assembly and in church, then grew up to laugh in funerals (unfortunately, often when I was conducting them) and when I met Prince Charles. I am not a nervous or anxious person, I just like to laugh: and the darker the situation the funnier I find things. Firemen, doctors, nurses, undertakers and anyone else who deals with death and tragedy would get the humour. It is not trivialising what might be about to happen. It is a kind of pressure valve, a way to cope with things that nobody should ever have to cope with.

      The armed passengers