Omaha World Herald February 12, 2012
Offutt crews are troops' ears in sky
By Matthew Hansen
In late November, as most of Omaha carved turkeys and strung Christmas lights, an Air Force captain named Daniel piloted an ancient, hulking airplane toward its top-secret destination high above Afghanistan.
Most of the time, Daniel is just another Omaha husband and father, just another 30-something trying to climb the career ladder, just another guy who enjoys a beer at a sports bar after work.
But once or twice a year, Daniel and more than a dozen other Offutt Air Force Base airmen deploy from Omaha, bound for a base in Southwest Asia — a base secret enough that the Air Force won't officially acknowledge it exists.
From that base, every third day, he and his crew members board an RC-135 known as the Rivet Joint and head out, usually flying toward Afghan airspace.
The Rivet Joint doesn't drop bombs or get into dogfights or do anything that would make it into an action movie.
The Rivet Joint that Daniel pilots is in the air for one simple and secretive reason.
To listen.
Since the start of the Afghanistan War, Rivet Joint crews stationed at Bellevue's Offutt Air Force Base have routinely deployed into a war zone, deployments devoid of fanfare and shrouded in secrecy.
Flying at altitudes of up to 40,000 feet, these crews do things they can't tell their families about.
They listen to cellphone conversations, according to outside experts — the Air Force won't speak about what they listen to — as onboard Dari and Pashto linguists translate what they hear into English.
They listen to coded language that insurgent leaders use when they communicate, the outside experts said. Cryptologists aboard the Rivet Joint work to break these codes.
They listen using equipment that can pinpoint the precise location of the talker, according to those outside experts. Crew members use that information to plot detailed maps that they send back to Offutt Air Force Base and sometimes to Army or Marine commanders on the ground.
They listen because it's their job. Crew members have trained at least two years, sometimes longer, before they ever get their first real-life Rivet Joint mission.
They listen, the crew members themselves said, because they hope that something they hear will help save American troops on the ground.
They listen because it's an honor to listen — there are only 17 Rivet Joints in existence, and an elite group of only about 1,750 Air Force airmen in the world are qualified to be crew members.
All those Rivet Joints, and nearly all those airmen, are attached to the 55th Wing stationed at Offutt.
"'Elite.' I like 'elite,'" said Scott, a master sergeant and the crew's airborne mission supervisor. "Stick with 'elite.'"
"My grandparents are going to be very happy," jokes Nick, a first lieutenant and the crew navigator.
Said Daniel, the crew commander: "I love what we do. For a pilot, we do a lot of fun stuff. ... Of course, we can't really talk about it."
Offutt leaders granted The World-Herald rare access to the Rivet Joint and five crew members in order to pull back the curtain on the post-9/11 life of a Rivet Joint crew.
These airmen can't discuss details of individual missions or disclose their full names. Any specific information about Rivet Joint missions in this article is based on interviews with several nonmilitary experts.
What the crew can and did talk about during an hourlong interview was the routine, and the stress, of a Rivet Joint deployment.
Upon arrival at their base in Southwest Asia in mid-September, Daniel's crew fell into its normal, three-day cycle.
Day one is flight day, which means a pre-dawn wakeup call if it's scheduled for the morning.
Crew members get their intelligence briefing while final maintenance is performed on their aircraft.
The plane they are about to board looks ordinary, even a little homely, on the outside. The RC-135 Rivet Joint is a modified Boeing 707. Most of the Air Force's Rivet Joint airframes were manufactured before these crew members were born.
Once inside, Daniel and his crew take their places at workstations stuffed with millions of dollars' worth of high-powered technology.
Imagine a passenger airplane with most of the seats ripped out and no side windows. A row of sleek, black screens and headphones runs down one side of the plane. The other side holds a maze of wiring. Bundles of wires snake up the wall and toward the ceiling.
Instead of passengers, the Rivet Joint carries a pilot and co-pilot, a navigator, three electronic warfare officers commonly known as RAVENs and, depending on the mission, maybe a dozen linguists, cryptologic operators and backup flight crew.
The "flight attendants" are four airborne systems engineers, referred to as ACEs, who maintain and fix the technology during flights.
What Daniel's Rivet Joint actually does when it gets over Afghan airspace is a closely guarded secret.
Unclassified Air Force briefings and interviews with Daniel's crew suggest that the Rivet Joint collects and delivers intelligence to U.S. military commanders on the ground far more quickly, and far more often, than it did during the Cold War.
"This is a real-time application of intelligence," said Brig. Gen. Donald Bacon, commander of the 55th Wing. "Today, this stuff happens instantaneously, or near instantaneously."
This might mean that a Rivet Joint crew member picks up chatter that insurgents in the Haqqani network are about to ambush a U.S. convoy, said Tim Brown, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, a nonmilitary, nongovernmental think tank.
The Rivet Joint crew zeroes in on the location of the commander's cellphone or walkie-talkie and quickly relays this information to both the convoy in danger and a Predator drone flying over the area, said Brown, a satellite and intelligence expert who previously was a security analyst for the Federation of American Scientists.
Then military leaders might weigh their options: Divert the convoy, use a drone's onboard camera to investigate further, or use that same drone to fire a missile at the Haqqani insurgents.
Brown thinks the Rivet Joint is still an essential part of this intelligence gathering, despite the fact that drones such as the Predator and the Global Hawk get much of the publicity.
"The Rivet Joint versus a drone is the difference between a pro football team and a high school football team," he said. "The Rivet Joint gives you a lot of people, a lot of capability, a lot of bandwidth. It's just a really big bus."
Rivet Joint crew members said their missions generally last 10 to 13 hours, with the plane usually refueling in midair once or twice.
After landing, the crew debriefs in a secure area and then is free to hit the sack after what has likely been a 20-hour day.
Except, after most missions, Daniel and the others are so keyed up that sleep is an afterthought.
Instead, they head to the Fox Sports Bar on base, they said, to drink beer and talk about anything but the mission — they aren't allowed to discuss what they have just done, even with each other.
Before he goes to bed, Daniel sent an email to his wife: We made it home safe, it said.
Day two is recovery day. The crew members hit the gym, play card games, do homework — many are studying to advance in the Air Force.
They start to prepare themselves mentally to do it all over again.
A Rivet Joint crew is rarely in danger, crew members said, but the long and often intense missions take a physical and psychological toll.
A typical Afghan deployment for a Rivet Joint crew lasts three or four months, with 30 to 40 missions in that time.
"It's like 'Groundhog Day,' kind of," said Dusti, a staff sergeant who is a cryptologic operator.
While the Rivet Joint deployments are shorter and safer than an Army, Marine or National Guard deployment to Afghanistan, these Air Force crew members deploy far more frequently.
Daniel, for example, has deployed five times and been away from home 510 days and nights since October 2008.
On day two, he tries to Skype with his wife and son. That's how he watched his son crawl for the first time — baby crawling toward the image of Daddy on the computer, simultaneously filling Daniel with joy and breaking his heart.
Jarred, a captain and a Rivet Joint tactical coordinator, is a husband and father of three.
"It seems like I always miss my wife's birthday and Mother's Day," he said.
Dusti and Nick, both unmarried, said it's hard to start a relationship when you are deploying to Southwest Asia three or four months at a time, and then can't talk about your work when you return home.
"It's like being stuck in inevitable singledom," Dusti said.
"I was dating a girl," Nick said. "She decided that's not what she wanted."
The teasing starts immediately.
"That's a different story!" yelled one.
Another suggested he needs a counselor, not a newspaper reporter.
Everyone, including Nick, laughed.
The crew members tend to bond tightly, they said, in part because there are so few of them.
Rivet Joint crew members, especially linguists and cryptologic operators, also tend to stay on the Rivet Joint for a large part of their Air Force careers because the training is so arduous and specialized.
On day three of their Afghan mission, crew members usually eat breakfast as a big, happy, surrogate family. Then they prep a plane that another crew will fly, sit through another intelligence briefing and ready themselves.
They will be flying and listening again tomorrow.
"If you or I went up there, we wouldn't know where to start," said Bacon, the wing commander. "But (Rivet Joint crews) are so effective. They know right where to look. They know right where to go."
© Copyright 2012, Omaha World Herald
