And you know, certainly that sets up of dramatic tension in your fictional world. NEARY: Of course, in this story, the victims fight back with very serious consequences. And it does ask the question, where are the limits? Not drone attacks in Austria, but that sort of thing. And the Austrian security authorities wink, wink, nod, nod, and say, go ahead. There will be no collateral damage.īy doing the attack, they stop a big terrorist attack that was going to take place. How plausible is that?ĬLARKE: Well, I think that episode is meant to ask the question, what are the limits? Here the drone operators think they can do the attack.

And the drone comes in and blows them up as they're sharing cigars, I think.

NEARY: Well, at one point in the book, there's an attack on a group of targets, as they're called. And you get this cycle of revenge killing and revenge killing after that. It's highly accurate.ĭespite that however, there are times when, as in Yemen recently, we blow up a wedding and we kill innocent people. I think the prior question is should we be using lethal force to kill terrorists? And if the answer is occasionally yes, then this is a very safe way to do it because the American pilot is not put at risk. Does that seem wrong to you somehow that they can kill people that precisely and then leave it behind so easily?ĬLARKE: I don't think it's wrong.

But then when your shift is done, you leave the air-conditioned, darkened room and you walk out and you're in Las Vegas. And as the pilot, you sort of have the sensation that you are in Pakistan. RICHARD CLARKE: These things are actually airplanes that function like fighter planes except they can stay up for a really long time. In creating fictional Air Force pilots who spend their days guiding drones to targets thousands of miles away, Clarke puts a human face on the drone program and also raises some surprising questions about it. In his new thriller, 'The Sting of the Drone,' Clark uses his insider's knowledge to bring readers right into the boardrooms and bunkers where the decisions to launch a drone attack are made. He served three presidents and as national coordinator for security and counterterrorism, he was instrumental in developing the nation's armed drone program. Few people know the ins and outs of power politics in the nation's capital better than Richard A.

Sting of the Drone by Richard A. Clarke