Free Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins by Andrew Cockburn Page B

fringe defense contractor, albeit one with a knack for cultivating useful connections.
    The Predator drone was originally designed by Avraham Karem, an Israeli once deemed so irascible by Pentagon overseers they insisted that his daughter be the chief financial officer and spokesperson for his corporation. Born in Iraq in 1937, Karem had grown up with a fascination for model planes, which took him to the Israeli air force and eventually to the design shop of the state-owned Israeli Aircraft Industries. After falling out with his employer thanks, he says, to his single-minded fascination with drones, Karem moved to California in 1977 and continued designing pilotless planes. One potential customer was the U.S. Navy, which was in the process of acquiring large numbers of cruise missiles, one of the projects fostered so assiduously by William Perry. The missiles, themselves essentially self-guiding drones, bore claims of impressive accuracy and gratifyingly extensive range capable of reaching far-off Soviet fleets should the opportunity for a future replay of the Battle of Midway present itself. But the navy had no way of finding the enemy’s precise location in real time; hence the promise of Karem’s drone. Code-named Amber, it was a cigar-shaped vehicle with an odd-shaped inverted-V tail so that the aircraft could be fired out of a torpedo tube. Once aloft, it had the capacity to beam back video images (though not over long distances). But, as in the case of so many earlier drone programs, after the funding of the design and prototype, official interest flickered and died. However, just as Karem’s company, Leading Systems, spiraled into bankruptcy in 1990, a rescuer appeared.
    The General Atomics Corporation had begun life in 1955 as an offshoot of the General Dynamics Corporation whose aim was that of breaking into the nuclear-reactor market. Coincidentally, its initial project, the Triga research reactor, was conceived by a group of nuclear-weapons designers who were active members of the Jasons recruited to the company’s San Diego headquarters by fellow Manhattan Project alumnus Freddy de Hoffman. The company also sponsored the same group in Project Orion, a scheme to propel spaceships by exploding nuclear bombs, which never progressed further than the lively imaginations of the physicists who dreamed it up. After parting company with parent General Dynamics, the company passed through the hands of various oil corporations until it was bought in 1986 for $60 million by the Blue brothers of Denver, Colorado. Neal Blue, thirty-five at the time, assumed the office of chairman, while his thirty-three-year-old sibling, Linden, was installed as deputy chairman.
    As they have told their story, these scions of a wealthy family were aviation devotees from an early age. By the time Neal was twenty-one, he and his brother were flying a single-prop plane around Latin America. Among the contacts they made south of the border was the long-standing Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Samoza, with whom they formed a business partnership that lasted right up until Sandinista revolutionaries ejected the Samoza family in 1979. As Neal later told an interviewer, he and his brother were “enthusiastic supporters” of the Contra rebels who sought, unsuccessfully, to overthrow the Sandinistas in the 1980s.
    In 1982 Neal was hired by the major defense contractor Raytheon to run their newly acquired Beech Aircraft subsidiary. In this capacity he battled the machinist unions, which were opposed to his plans to introduce labor-saving composite materials. Simultaneously he embarked on a scheme to turn a pristine Alpine landscape abutting Telluride, Colorado, into a major subdivision, complete with condos, hotels, and golf courses. Furious residents blocked the scheme, ultimately raising $50 million to acquire the land through eminent domain, and although Neal battled for twenty-five years, he never realized his dream of the subdivision.
    Though the