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These satellite images show a remote airstrip deep in the
desert of Saudi Arabia. It may or may not be the secret U.S. drone base revealed
by reporters earlier this week. But the base’s hangars bear a remarkable
resemblance to similar structures found on other American drone outposts. And
its remote location — dozens of miles from the nearest highway, and farther
still to the nearest town – suggests that this may be more than the average
civilian airstrip.
According to
accounts from the Washington
Post and The
New York Times, the U.S. built its secret Saudi base approximately two
years ago. Its first lethal mission was in September of 2011: a strike on Anwar
al-Awlaki, the American-born propagandist for al-Qaida’s affiliate in Yemen,
which borders Saudi Arabia. Since then, the U.S. has launched dozens
of drone attacks on Yemeni targets. News organizations eventually found out
about the base. But they agreed to keep it out of their pages — part of an
informal arrangement with the Obama administration, which claimed that the
disclosure of the base’s location, even in a general way, might jeopardize
national security. On Tuesday, that loose embargo was broken.
The location of the airfield. Click to enlarge.
Image: via Bing Maps
The image of the
airfield, available
in Bing Maps, would be almost impossible to discover randomly. At moderate
resolutions, satellite images of the area show nothing but sand dunes. Only on
close inspection does the base reveal itself. In Google’s catalog of satellite
pictures, the base doesn’t appear at all.
The images show a
trio of “clamshell”-style hangars, surrounded by fencing. Each is more than 150
feet long and approximately 75 feet wide; that’s sufficient to hold U.S.
Predator and Reaper drones. The hangars are slightly larger, though similar in
shape, to ones housing unmanned planes at Kandahar
Air Field in Afghanistan. Shamsi
Air Field in Pakistan, which once held U.S. drones, boasts a group of three
hangars not unlike the ones of the Saudi base. No remotely piloted aircraft are
visible in the images. But a pair of former American intelligence officers tell
Danger Room that they are reasonably sure that this is the base revealed by the
media earlier this week.
“I believe it’s the facility that the U.S. uses to fly drones
into Yemen,” one officer says. “It’s out in eastern Saudi Arabia, near Yemen and
where the bad guys are supposed to hang out. It has those clamshell hangars,
which we’ve seen before associated with U.S. drones.”....."
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