Four years ago, as a new al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen was proving itself a potent adversary, the White House made plans to attack it with airstrikes just as the United States had been doing to the terrorist network's core in Pakistan.
But this time, the White House decided there would be a key difference: The strikes in Yemen would be carried out by the U.S. military, not the CIA.
Two years later, in mid-2011, a mysterious construction project began to emerge in the Saudi desert, an elongated compound with a ribbon of concrete running parallel to the ridgelines of the surrounding dunes. CIA drones were about to enter the skies over Yemen after all.