U.S. Outsources Its Africa Spying

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.com

Africa is important enough to the United States to spy on. Just not with official U.S. 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.

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 U.S. 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 complimentary 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 non-discript African airfields that few would suspect are surveillance hubs.

Until something goes wrong.

In the summer of 2010, the New Jersey firm R-4 flew an MC-12 over the Central African Republic, looking for Kony. Something mechanical went wrong. The mostly-American crew had to make an emergency landing in a place called Obo. Trouble followed.

'The unexpected appearance of two foreign soldiers and some Americans aroused the suspicions of tribal leaders, who had been kept in the dark about Tusker Sand by their national government,' Whitlock recounts. 'They detained the crew for several hours as they debated what to do.' One of the contractors remembers: 'We felt like we were going to prison.'

R-4 'had difficulty' tracking down AFRICOM officials to get out of the mess. State Department and United Nations contacts weren't much help, either. So they did what contractors are good at doing: they paid off their captors and went free.

That was a near-miss. And, some fear, a portent of what's to come. Outsourced spy missions in Latin America resulted in U.S. nationals getting held captive by Colombian narcotraffickers for five years.

'From a purely political standpoint it is obvious the fallout of such an incident would be immense, especially if hostile forces reached the crash site first,' one contracting firm wrote to AFRICOM in 2010, according to Whitlock. 'This could turn into a prisoner/hostage situation at worst, or at the least a serious foreign relations incident highly damaging to both AFRICOM and the U.S.'

If there's an alternative, it might not involve the Beechcrafts. There's a move in the Senate to urge the military to send drones to AFRICOM to aid the Kony hunt. If those crash, at least the military won't have to pretend not to know why Americans were spying on Africans.