It was Neal who began considering the possibility of using primitive unmanned aircraft on kamikaze missions against Nicaragua’s gasoline infrastructure: “You could launch them from behind the line of sight, so you would have total deniability,” he told Fortune magazine years later. The duo wanted to use their new General Atomics company to research the possibility. That early project went under the name “Predator,” though it was a dead end. It would be another six years before the Blue brothers snared the prototype of the armed drone that now bears that name, acquired from an Israeli-American design genius.

Abe Karem—“the Moses of modern drones,” as one senior Pentagon official described him to me—had served as an aeronautical engineer with the Israeli Air Force before running a team of radical innovators at state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries (still a world leader in drone design). In the wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the country had “an emerging operational need for real-time intelligence on the front lines,” Karem told me via email. On leaving Israel Aircraft Industries, Karem set up his own company aimed at making unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) systems. Unable to break into Israel’s close-knit defense world, he instead moved his family and business to California, where he built early models of his new drone designs in his three-car Los Angeles garage.

Those designs soon caught the attention of the CIA and the Pentagon. In 1983, nearly 300 U.S. and French peacekeepers had died in Beirut in terrorist attacks, starkly highlighting the need to keep closer tabs on radicals in areas like Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Yet such places were difficult to access and harder still to insert human spies into. Satellites and U-2 reconnaissance planes could provide photographs at specific times, but the process was cumbersome and technically limited. What was needed was an unobtrusive aircraft that could fly at lower altitude, loiter at the scene unobserved, and then quickly deliver pictures. Karem’s Leading Systems was contracted as part of a $40-million “black ” Pentagon project to develop its UAV technology.

What no one gave any thought to at the time was arming such a platform. Major General George Harrison, the former head of the Air Force’s Operational Test and Evaluation Center, recalled in an interview that there was huge institutional opposition at the Pentagon and CIA to the idea of arming any surveillance aircraft: “[I]f you were armed it would divert you from your primary job of target development. So there was strong resistance, I mean strong resistance, I can’t overstate it.”

Karem’s two prototypes, the Amber and the Gnat, first successfully flew in 1986. Four years later, Leading Systems was bankrupt—the Pentagon had frozen its funding as a result of inter-services bickering and post‒Cold War cuts. In a particular irony, Pakistan at one point considered buying the mothballed prototype fleet. But in 1991, the Blue brothers happened to be looking for a UAV company to buy, and Karem’s was it. The Predator was back in business.

When Bill Clinton assumed the U.S. presidency in January 1993, a key priority was the escalating conflict across the former Yugoslavia. A lack of good intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance was hampering U.S. efforts to understand and, if possible, contain the civil wars. The CIA wanted spies in the sky, and agency director James Woolsey played an important role in the Predator’s early success. Briefed about the drone’s potential at an early 1993 meeting—and concerned about the quality of satellite coverage over the Balkans—the CIA chief is said to have personally flown to California to inspect the new system. Impressed, the agency bought five Gnats on the spot. It also brought into play its own expertise stemming from research it had done on how to remotely pilot an aircraft from thousands of miles away. CIA know-how now merged with General Atomics’ expertise.