In My Time (32 page)

At the end of his briefing, I emphasized that we would stay as long as the Saudis wanted and leave when they wished us to, and I stressed the importance of acting quickly. If we waited for “unambiguous warning of attack,” it would be too late. The Saudis began a discussion among themselves in Arabic. Bandar stopped interpreting. I learned later that there was some feeling among the Saudis that there was no need for a quick decision, that they could afford to wait. King Fahd ended that line of argument. “The Kuwaitis waited,” he said, “and now they are living in our hotels.”

The king turned to me. “Okay,” he said. He knew that his decision was controversial, but he did not care, he said, since Saudi Arabia itself was at stake.

Back at the guest palace, I told Joe Lopez, my new military assistant, to connect me with the president. When the White House Situation Room was on the line, I picked up the handset of one of the dedicated U.S. government phones installed wherever the secretary of defense travels. The president came on the line from the Oval Office, with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at his side. She had come back to Washington with him from Aspen. “Mr. President, the Saudis have agreed to accept our forces. Do we have your approval to begin the deployment?” “Yes, Dick. Go ahead.” I thanked the president, hung up, and placed a call to General Powell. “Colin, begin the deployment.” Within hours of my call, F-15 fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base arrived in Saudi Arabia and began flying combat patrols. The next day, the first elements of the Ready Brigade of the 82nd Airborne arrived; the U.S.S.
Eisenhower
started for the Suez Canal and the U.S.S.
Independence
for the Gulf of Oman. In a week the first U.S. Marines were there, then the first three prepositioned ships, then the A-10 tank-killers, three thousand men from the 101st, and eighteen F-117s. It all started happening with a single phone call.

Defense Minister Sultan returned home that night, and we met the next morning. He wanted to be sure that it was clear to the world that Saudi Arabia had invited U.S. forces, and he wanted assurances that there would be no announcement of the deployment until our troops had arrived. I gave him my word on both counts.

I left Jeddah and headed for Egypt, where I was scheduled to meet President Mubarak in his summer home outside Alexandria, on the Mediterranean Sea. With the summer heat and a full load of fuel, my 707 required more runway to land and take off than was available at the Alexandria airport, so we stopped in Cairo, and I got on an old King Air Beechcraft propeller plane used by the U.S. Embassy for travel around Egypt. When we landed in Alexandria, we pulled up next to a much larger plane with an Iraqi flag on the side. Saddam’s representative, his close aide Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was making the rounds of Arab governments trying to encourage them not to go to war over Kuwait, and I had to wait in a holding room at the presidential palace while he finished meeting with President Mubarak.

As the Iraqi representative exited one door, I entered another, and I found a very angry President Mubarak. The Iraqis had lied to him, he said. Just days before the invasion, all the Arab countries had been together for an Arab League summit, and at dinner one night, the Iraqis had made a big show of sitting next to the Kuwaitis, calling them “brother” and promising never to invade.

When I told President Mubarak that the Saudis had agreed to accept the deployment of U.S. troops, he was ready to help. “What do you need?” he asked. I asked him for overflight rights so our planes could fly through Egyptian airspace. He agreed. I told him we also needed permission for one of our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the U.S.S.
Eisenhower,
to pass through the Suez Canal. Normally the Egyptians did not like nuclear-powered ships going through the canal and permission
could take weeks, but he agreed immediately. “When is it coming?” he asked. “Tonight,” I said. Mubarak also told me he planned to convene an Arab League meeting to discuss the crisis, and he conveyed strong support for U.S. efforts to defend Saudi Arabia. Throughout the crisis King Fahd and President Mubarak would prove to be two of America’s most important allies in the region.

That afternoon I left Egypt and headed for Washington. As my plane rose over the Mediterranean, I got a call on board from President Bush. He had just spoken with King Hassan of Morocco and asked me to stop there on my way home. He wanted me to brief the king on our plans and on my talks with the Saudis and Egyptians. Since the stop was unanticipated, our flight crew had to have landing charts faxed up to the plane.

We landed in Morocco in the middle of the night and took a motorcade to the king’s palace. I asked to see the king one-on-one, which actually meant there were three of us: the king, me, and his interpreter. Hassan asked if the information I wanted to discuss was secret. “Yes,” I told him. “It’s highly classified.” He removed a small box from within the folds of his robes and handed it to his interpreter, who held it in his hands while he and the king exchanged a few words in Arabic. Then the interpreter handed the box back to the king, who put it in a pocket in his robes. The king, who spoke some English, could see I was curious, so he explained to me that his interpreter had just sworn on a fragment of the holy Koran never to divulge the information he was about to hear. I was impressed. It seemed to be a pretty effective classification system—and conveniently portable too.

I told the king that the Saudis had agreed to accept U.S. forces and that President Mubarak was also supportive. I explained that President Bush would be announcing the deployment shortly and wanted King Hassan to know the details of our plans. When I finished, King Hassan told me he was prepared to send Moroccan forces to serve alongside the Americans.

I landed back at Andrews Air Force Base at 3:20 a.m. on Wednesday, August 8, 1990, and after a stop at the Pentagon, I went to the
White House for a 7:15 a.m. breakfast meeting with Baker and Scowcroft. At 8:00 a.m., the same hour the first U.S. planes were landing in Saudi Arabia, I went into the Oval Office to brief the president on my trip. At 9:00 a.m., President Bush addressed the nation and announced the deployment of U.S. forces to the desert of Saudi Arabia.

I believe it was in a meeting shortly after the president’s announcement that I fell asleep while seated in the chair next to his in the Cabinet Room—not delicately asleep, but full-on, mouth-open, snoring asleep. Probably because Brent Scowcroft had gotten him used to such behavior by nodding off from time to time, the president didn’t take offense, but he did take note and even called a photographer in. Later, at a cabinet dinner, he presented me with the Brent Scowcroft Excellence in Somnolence Award.

ON AUGUST 17 I left on my second trip to the Gulf in two weeks. On the way over I considered the implications of reports we were receiving about Saddam’s readiness to invade Saudi Arabia. Should he launch an attack, he could capture or disable Saudi oil production, and he could disrupt U.S. deployments, handing our forces a defeat. There was every reason for him to do this. Saddam’s forces were at their peak, unaffected as yet by the embargo we had put in place that would deny him such things as spare parts and munitions. U.S. and Saudi forces, on the other hand, were at their weakest and would only gain strength with the passage of time and increased U.S. deployments. I called both Colin and Brent to make sure that we were working this contingency—which they assured me we were. But we couldn’t have done much had Saddam decided to keep right on rolling into the Saudi oil fields.

I flew first to Saudi Arabia, then headed to three other countries that lie on the western side of the Persian Gulf—Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Saudi Defense Minister Sultan had helped arrange these visits, in which I intended to seek additional basing rights for U.S. forces and gain support for what was to become Operation Desert Storm.

leaving the Oval Office with President Bush after reporting to him on one of my trips to the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield. (Photo by David Kennerly)

Sultan’s help was key since Saudi Arabia is the dominant Arab state in the Gulf—the largest producer of oil, the biggest geographically,
the strongest militarily. Without Saudi approval, it would have been virtually impossible to gain the full cooperation of the other Gulf allies. Once the Saudis had signed on, the others were eager to join the coalition that we were building to oppose Saddam. The only exceptions were Jordan, where the king was dependent on Iraqi oil, and Yemen, which had also thrown in its lot with Saddam.

I was welcomed warmly in Bahrain, a longtime ally of the United States and the headquarters of the U.S. Navy’s activities in the Persian Gulf. When I stopped in the United Arab Emirates, I was the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to have visited. My host was the president of the UAE, Sheikh Zayed, a man held in high regard by all of his neighbors and revered by his people. He agreed to let us base C-130s and F-16s there. Oman, at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, also had an established relationship with the U.S. military. For some time we had prepositioned supplies and spare parts in Oman for just the sort of contingency we now faced. Sultan Qaboos, a graduate of England’s Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst, was also willing to provide bases that were important to our air and naval forces.

I had not intended to stop in Qatar, another country on the west side of the Gulf, because of strained relations between our two nations. The Qataris had asked us to provide Stinger missiles to them, as we had to our close allies in Bahrain. When we said no, the Qataris purchased a Stinger on the black market and put a photo on the front page of their newspaper of the Qatari defense minister holding the shoulder-fired antiaircraft missile. This in turn had generated protests to the government of Qatar by our State Department.

But Prince Sultan, one of our most important allies in helping us gain agreement and cooperation from Arab countries, had been working the phones from Jeddah, and late in the day he called to report that he had been in touch with the Qataris and that they would welcome a visit. It was a memorable stop, where I was received in a beautiful palace by the emir and his son—who would in 1995 depose his father and become emir himself. Under the rule of the son, also a graduate of Sandhurst, Qatar would become the location of an important U.S. military
base, perhaps the most important in the region, although Qatari actions would sometimes run counter to U.S. interests. At the end of our conversation, I headed back to the airport, accompanied by the minister of defense. He hadn’t been in the meeting with the emir and was clearly curious about our plans. He turned to me in the backseat of the armored limo. “So,” he asked, “are you going to nuke Saddam?” No, I said, that was not the plan.

AS WE WERE BUILDING up forces in the operation we now called Desert Shield, many senior military officers traveled to the Persian Gulf. Air Force Chief of Staff Mike Dugan and several generals on his staff flew to Saudi Arabia during mid-September. General Dugan had been advised not to take press with him on the trip, but he ignored the advice and spent many hours on the way over and back talking with journalists.

On Sunday morning, September 16, 1990, I opened my front door and retrieved the
Washington Post
off my front porch. Before I got back inside, I saw the headline “U.S. to Rely on Air Strikes if War Erupts.” I read through the article, my anger rising. During the hours of plane interviews, Dugan had apparently talked to journalists about specific targets we would hit if war came—Saddam personally, his family, and his mistress. He’d talked about numbers and types of aircraft deployed in the region, declared “air power” to be “the only answer that’s available to our country” if we wanted to avoid a bloody land war, and said the American public would support the operation in the Gulf—“until body bags come home.”

I called Scowcroft, who was scheduled to be on CBS’s
Face the Nation
in a few hours. He would be asked about the story. We agreed that Brent would make clear Dugan did not speak for the administration. Then I left and went for a walk alongside the C&O Canal to cool down. A few hours later, back at home, I read the piece again. And I got angry again. I picked up the phone and called the president at Camp David. He was on the tennis court, but when he called back a short while later, I told him I had decided I might have to relieve General Dugan based
on his comments in the piece. The president said I should do what I needed to do, and he would back me up.

I did not take the prospect of firing the air force chief of staff lightly. Dugan was a good man with a distinguished career, who had been in his job less than three months. But he had displayed terrible judgment. I worried that if I tolerated what he had done, other generals would step out of bounds, and as the nation prepared for the prospect of war, I couldn’t tolerate loose cannons in senior ranks. I made notes on the article and a list of the most serious problems arising from what Dugan had done. I decided I would call Dugan in and ask him whether the news stories were accurate. If they were, I would relieve him.