© 3dprint.comIsraeli drone awaiting its mission.
Under a classified program code-named "Anarchist," the U.K.'s Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, working with the National Security Agency, systematically targeted Israeli drones from a mountaintop on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. GCHQ files provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden include a series of "Anarchist snapshots" — thumbnail images from videos recorded by drone cameras. The files
© unknownHacked image from Israel's drone fleet.
Several of the snapshots, a subset collected in 2009 and 2010, appear to show drones carrying missiles. Although they are not clear enough to be conclusive, the images offer rare visual evidence to support reports that Israel flies attack drones — an open secret that the Israeli government won't acknowledge. "There's a good chance that we are looking at the first images of an armed Israeli drone in the public domain," said Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice, a history of drone warfare. "They've gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress information on weaponized drones."
The Intercept is publishing a selection of the drone snapshots in an accompanying article. Additionally, in 2012, a GCHQ analyst reported "regular collects of Heron TP carrying weapons," referring to a giant drone made by the state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries, known as IAI.
Anarchist operated from a Royal Air Force installation in the Troodos Mountains, near Mount Olympus, the highest point on Cyprus. The Troodos site "has long been regarded as a 'Jewel in the Crown' by NSA as it offers unique access to the Levant, North Africa, and Turkey,"according to an article from GCHQ's internal wiki. Last August, The Intercept published a portion of a GCHQ document that revealed that NSA and GCHQ tracked weapons signals from Troodos, and earlier reporting on the Snowden documents indicated that the NSA targeted Israeli drones and an Israeli missile system for tracking, but the details of the operations have not been previously disclosed.
"This access is indispensable for maintaining an understanding of Israeli military training and operations and thus an insight to possible future developments in the region," a GCHQ report from 2008 enthused. "In times of crisis this access is critical and one of the only avenues to provide up to the minute information and support to U.S. and Allied operations in the area."GCHQ documents state that analysts first collected encrypted video signals at Troodos in 1998, and also describe efforts against drones used by Syria and by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
A 2009 document notes that "no tip-off exists for Hezbollah UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicle] activity;" apparently the spies had few signals that they were sure were associated with Hezbollah's drone program. Another report recounts that Troodos had captured video from an Iranian-made drone flying out of a Syrian air force base in March 2012, resulting in "presidential interest in further samples of the Regime launching attacks upon the general populous [sic]," presumably referring to U.S. President Barack Obama, whose administration had first called for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down the year before, a few months after his regime began a crackdown on Arab Spring protests. Indeed, also in March 2012, unnamed U.S. officials told the press that Assad had been supplied with Iranian drones.
But much of Anarchist's focus was on Israel. The drone-watching documented in the GCHQ files covered periods of Israeli military offensives in Palestine, and also indicates that the intelligence agencies monitored drones for a potential strike against Iran.
The documents highlight the conflicted relationship between the United States and Israel and U.S. concerns about Israel's potentially destabilizing actions in the region. The two nations are close counterterrorism partners, and have a memorandum of understanding, dating back to 2009, that allows Israel access to raw communications data collected by the NSA. Yet they are nonetheless constantly engaged in a game of spy versus spy.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that, although President Obama had pledged to stop spying on friendly heads of state, the White House carved out an exception for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli officials. Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA and NSA, told the Journal that the intelligence relationship with Israel was "the most combustible mixture of intimacy and caution that we have." [...]
Drone's-Eye View
On January 3, 2008, as Israel launched airstrikes against Palestinian militants in Gaza, U.S. and British spies had a virtual seat in the cockpit.
Satellite surveillance operators at Menwith Hill, an important NSA site in England, had been tasked with looking at drones as the Israeli military stepped up attacks in Gaza in response to rockets fired by Palestinian militants, according to a 2008 year-end summary from GCHQ. In all, Menwith Hill gathered over 20 separate drone videos by intercepting signals traveling between Israeli drones and orbiting satellites. The NSA's internal newsletter, SIDToday, enthusiastically reported the effort, noting that on January 3, analysts had also "collected video for the first time from the cockpit of an Israeli Air Force F-16 fighter jet," which "showed a target on the ground being tracked." Menwith Hill had worked "closely with a GCHQ site in Cyprus for tip-offs."
In July 2008, GCHQ ordered Anarchist technicians to look for drones flying over a number of "areas of interest," including the Golan Heights (a region of southwest Syria seized by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War), the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and Israel's borders with Lebanon and Syria.
"Due to the political situation of the region there is a requirement for Israeli UAV operations in certain areas to be intercepted and exploited so that assessments can be made on what possible actions maybe [sic] taking place," read the request, dated July 29, 2008. The memo asked for analysts to record and send video to GCHQ, along with ground plots showing where the drones had flown, and information about the signal. Anarchist operators were able to snag the feeds of several different types of Israeli drones [...] dating between February 2009 and June 2010.
According to one GCHQ presentation, technicians first collected signals from a Heron TP in February 2009. [...] In several snapshots of the Heron TP, there are objects under the wings that appear to be mounts for missiles or for other equipment such as sensors. In one image, from January 2010, a missile-shaped object is clearly visible on the left wing, while the mount on the right appears to be missing its load. [...]
Reports surfaced of Israel launching missiles from drones in Gaza as far back as 2004, and more than a decade later, drones have become a fact of life for residents. [...] In 2014, the London Telegraph reported that [at least] 65 percent of Israel's air combat operations were conducted by drones. [...]
During Operation Cast Lead, a three-week Israeli offensive that began in December 2008, Human Rights Watch reported dozens of Palestinian civilian deaths from drone strikes. In diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks, an Israeli commander told a U.S. State Department official that a "UAV fired two missiles" against militant operatives outside a mosque, and that shrapnel from the strike hit civilians.
Yet the Israeli government still maintains an official stance of secrecy (a tactic akin to the United States' refusal to formally acknowledge its drone program until 2013, despite years of reporting and commentary on it). In sanctioned interviews, Israeli military personnel are careful to describe the drones they fly as being used for surveillance and marking targets for manned warplanes to strike. [...]
"Releasing full details about which munitions were used and how they were used can raise many other questions about these attacks — about the targets, about what the army calls collateral damage, about the command chain," said Feldman, the Israeli filmmaker. "I think it is really the Israeli military throwing sand in the eyes of outside observers on Israeli strikes." [...]
Decoding the Drone
Drones communicate with their controllers on the ground via satellite; the transmission to the home station is known as the "downlink." The antennas at Troodos grabbed that downlink by finding the right frequency for each drone. Drone feeds are vulnerable to interception not just from the NSA — even cheap, commercially available equipment can be used to get the downlink. [...] Indeed, in 2009, U.S. forces in Iraq discovered laptops with video from Predator drones in the hands of insurgents. [...]
In 1997, Hezbollah killed 12 Israeli commandos in an ambush in Lebanon. It emerged years later that Hezbollah had plotted the ambush after intercepting unencrypted drone video. The revelation caused a scandal, and led the Israeli military and drone industry to invest "significant efforts to encrypt the transmission of UAVs to their ground bases." [...]Israel appears to have since expanded encryption across its drone fleet, and many of the feeds grabbed by the Troodos analysts were encrypted or scrambled, showing up like the black-and-white snow on a TV screen. According to GCHQ Anarchist training manuals from 2008, analysts took snapshots of live signals and would process them for "poor quality signals, or for scrambled video." [...] The aim of the snapshots seemed to be simply to identify which signals belonged with which aircraft, weapon, or radar, and to demonstrate that the intelligence agencies had the capability to grab such snapshots if needed. [...]
The GCHQ documents describe the mission against Israeli drones in broad terms. An "outbreak of hostilities between Israel and Hamas" occasioned the intelligence agency's interest, and so did tension with Tehran. In reporting on flights of an armed Heron TP, a Troodos employee noted that "our ability to collect and track and report this activity is important for the initial detection and tip-off for any potential pre-emptive or retaliatory strike against Iran."
A 2008 Anarchist memo also notes that "interest by the weapons community in Israeli UAV's [sic] remains high," because Israel "provide[s] many countries with their UAV's" and is "developing large UAV's capable of being deployed for a variety of purposes." [...]
Israel leads the world in drone exports, and capabilities Israel developed would soon be passed to other countries. Its companies aggressively market the potential attack capabilities of their aircraft. In September, India made arrangements to buy 10 armed Heron TPs. This month, Germany's defense minister, Ursula von der Leyen, announced that the country would lease several TPs, citing the aircraft's attack capabilities. "This will be the standard in the future," von der Leyen said.
By most accounts, Israel, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Pakistan are the only countries known to have used drones for deadly attacks. But dozens of countries are believed to be developing armed drones, so that club likely won't stay small for long.
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Comment: Israel has been utilizing drone warfare since 1982 in the run up to the Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon and has since sold drones to over 50 countries.
Elbit Hermes drones were one of the two main unpiloted aircraft used to attack people in Gaza during Israel's 2009 Operation Cast Lead attack which killed over 1,400 Palestinians, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW). HRW state that "The Hermes can stay aloft for up to 24 hours at altitudes of up to 18,000 feet and has an array of optical, infra-red, and laser sensors that allow the operator to identify and track targets as well as to guide munitions in flight. The Hermes carries two Spike-MR (medium range) missiles."
Further, HRW report that the Hermes drone is equipped with a camera system which allows the drone pilot to see if a person is armed or if they are a child or an adult. The drone's missiles are also equipped with cameras and can be diverted up to the last second. This means that Israel's drone pilots and their commanders would have known that they were targeting civilians and are culpable for war crimes carried out by Elbit drones. HRW has also called for the disclosure of camera footage shot by Hermes drones, to assist in the investigation of war crimes. Needless to say, this request has not been granted.
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