By Spencer Ackerman
Email Author
June 15, 2012 |
That’s what the Washington Post‘s Craig Whitlock found after poking through an obscure program called Tusker Sand. Starting in 2009, Africa Command, known as AFRICOM, began paying private firms to fly MC-12 Beechcrafts outfitted with sensitive cameras to perform sensitive spy missions in places where the military doesn’t typically operate, like Uganda or Burkina Faso.
As some of those contractors learned, if their planes went down, AFRICOM wouldn’t go to any effort to recover American citizens. And there was a strong possibility those Americans would be captured or killed.
“Among the jobs to be outsourced: pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts, mechanics and linguists,” Whitlock writes. “The expectation was that the personnel would be veterans; most needed to certify that they had passed the military’s survival, resistance and escape training course, because of the possibility of aircrews being downed behind enemy lines.”
MC-12s have several virtues for spy missions. They’re relatively cheap, and they’re inconspicuous: As retrofitted Beechcraft civilian passenger planes, they’re indistinguishable from the small planes that take off and land from tiny airstrips around the world. That’s largely why the US military turned to them in 2007 and 2008 when it needed to rapidly surge airborne intelligence systems.
AFRICOM crafted Tusker Sand precisely to be inconspicuous. Political sensitivities make it so that AFRICOM publicly says its primary mission is to train African militaries. In truth, it’s vastly expanding its counterterrorism work in East Africa — a complementary spy program aimed at al-Qaida’s affiliate in the Sahel is called Creek Sand — regularly striking and raiding Somalia, and deeply involved in the hunt for the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But to stay discreet, AFRICOM decided many of its routinized spy missions would get outsourced, flying from nondescript African airfields that few would suspect are surveillance hubs. Finish reading @Wired
More: AFRICOM
Email Author
June 15, 2012 |
Even though these contractors are 'in the air', aren't they still truthfully termed mercenaries?
Africa is important enough to the United States to spy on. Just not
with official US military personnel. The military’s Africa Command is
outsourcing dramatic amounts of surveillance missions. And if something
should go wrong, the contractors are on their own.
Air
Force Lt. Col. Douglas Lee, commander of the 455th Air Expeditionary
Wing's MC-12 squadron, displays one of his Beechcraft spy planes in
Afghanistan, 2010. Photo: Spencer Ackerman/Wired
That’s what the Washington Post‘s Craig Whitlock found after poking through an obscure program called Tusker Sand. Starting in 2009, Africa Command, known as AFRICOM, began paying private firms to fly MC-12 Beechcrafts outfitted with sensitive cameras to perform sensitive spy missions in places where the military doesn’t typically operate, like Uganda or Burkina Faso.
As some of those contractors learned, if their planes went down, AFRICOM wouldn’t go to any effort to recover American citizens. And there was a strong possibility those Americans would be captured or killed.
“Among the jobs to be outsourced: pilots, sensor operators, intelligence analysts, mechanics and linguists,” Whitlock writes. “The expectation was that the personnel would be veterans; most needed to certify that they had passed the military’s survival, resistance and escape training course, because of the possibility of aircrews being downed behind enemy lines.”
MC-12s have several virtues for spy missions. They’re relatively cheap, and they’re inconspicuous: As retrofitted Beechcraft civilian passenger planes, they’re indistinguishable from the small planes that take off and land from tiny airstrips around the world. That’s largely why the US military turned to them in 2007 and 2008 when it needed to rapidly surge airborne intelligence systems.
AFRICOM crafted Tusker Sand precisely to be inconspicuous. Political sensitivities make it so that AFRICOM publicly says its primary mission is to train African militaries. In truth, it’s vastly expanding its counterterrorism work in East Africa — a complementary spy program aimed at al-Qaida’s affiliate in the Sahel is called Creek Sand — regularly striking and raiding Somalia, and deeply involved in the hunt for the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony. But to stay discreet, AFRICOM decided many of its routinized spy missions would get outsourced, flying from nondescript African airfields that few would suspect are surveillance hubs. Finish reading @Wired
More: AFRICOM
