Predator by Richard Whittle Page B

hire Leading Systems to produce up to two hundred Ambers a year once he proved the technology. The CIA was also interested in the drone, though in just what way and to what extent still remained a secret that participants in the program were forbidden by law to reveal three decades later.
    The Amber project commenced during a memorable period in Karem’s life. On March 16, 1984, seven years after arriving in America from Israel, he and his wife, Dina, at last became U.S. citizens. Hearts swelling, they took the oath of allegiance along with hundreds of others in a naturalization ceremony held under the glittering chandeliers of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, a Los Angeles venue that hosted the Academy Awards that year as well. Karem’s new country also seemed to be recognizing that its new citizen was an aviation pioneer and an invaluable resource: a couple of weeks after his naturalization, Karem got a Top Secret clearance from the Defense Department. Following what a friend later described as his “wilderness years” in the garage, Karem was sure his vision was at last about to be realized.
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    From the moment Williams gave him the green light, Karem was a man in motion, doing a thousand things at once to get Leading Systems out of his garage and Amber into the air. He was designing, calculating, negotiating, researching, budgeting, buying, leasing, hiring—seemingly every day, seemingly all at once. Some nights he got by on only two hours of sleep. Weekends were workdays. He was going full throttle because at last he was living his dream. He was determined to build a company—a team, to be precise—that would defy the norms of the military-industrial complex, whose bloated bureaucracy, corporate mentality, and corrupting politics had made cost overruns, schedule delays, and outright failure in defense programs commonplace since World War II. Above all, Karem dreamed of leading the way into a new era of unmanned aviation the way pioneers of the early twentieth century led the way into the air—people such as Glenn Curtiss, Donald Douglas, Jack Northrop, Igor Sikorsky. These aviation greats—“people who should make us humble,” in Karem’s words—worked aeronautical wonders with small but talented teams of collaborators. They produced aircraft that pilots and passengers could rely on and nations could use to deliver the mail, expand commerce, and win wars. That was how Karem wanted to make drones.
    Knowing government money was on its way, he tapped his savings and borrowed cash from his mother, brothers, and other family members. He leased an industrial building in Irvine, thirty miles south of his Los Angeles home, figuring a town in coastal Orange County would be more attractive to the kind of people he wanted to hire. With eighteen thousand square feet of floor space, the structure had more than enough room for offices and the various shops needed to create prototypes. Karem also planned to use the facility to refine and produce a less capable drone called the Gnat. He and his first employee, Jim Machin, had created the Gnat in Abe’s garage, intending to sell it as a target drone and a trainer for RPV pilots. The Gnat was smaller than the Amber, and its wing attached at the bottom of its fuselage, rather than at the top as with both the Amber and the Albatross. The family resemblance among the three drones, though, was clear. All three had a high-aspect-ratio wing, a pusher propeller, and inverted-V tail fins.
    By the time Air/Space America 88 came along, Karem was in his fifth year of developing the Amber. A company brochure boasted that Leading Systems had “a team of 95 exclusively devoted to development, production and flight operations” of UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles. The term UAV was becoming more fashionable than RPV because of the increasing autonomy in air vehicles made possible by the rapid evolution of computer