In My Time (35 page)

I
n the early morning hours of Wednesday, January 16, 1991, my limousine pulled to a stop on Constitution Avenue. Lynne and I got out and walked through a light rain down the sloping path to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We stood in front of the long black wall as visitors often do, silent and in awe. The fifty-eight thousand names etched on the wall are a reminder of the terrible cost of war. They were also a reminder to me, as operations in Iraq were about to begin, of the solemn obligation of America’s civilian leaders to provide our soldiers with a clear mission and the resources to prevail. We bowed our heads in prayer, thinking of the young Americans who would soon be flying in combat over Iraq.

By 7:15 a.m. I was at the White House for a meeting with Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft in Brent’s West Wing office. We went over the details of what would unfold in the coming hours and walked through the list of world leaders whom we would call to notify in advance that operations would soon be under way. I made my first call of the day back in my Pentagon office to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens,
with whom I had been staying in touch. We had offered to send Patriot antimissile batteries to help protect Israel from missile attacks that Saddam might launch. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had traveled to Israel with that offer, but the Israelis had declined. They had accepted our offer of early warning from our satellites of any missiles launched, and we had established the Hammer Rick hotline between my office and the Israeli Defense Ministry. In my 9:00 a.m. call to Arens, I told him that H-Hour, the hour when the operation would begin, was 7:00 p.m. Washington time, 3:00 a.m. in Baghdad. I urged him to use the secure communications link to call me anytime.

By the time I talked to Arens, seven B-52 long-range bombers had already taken off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, armed with cruise missiles and headed for Iraq. As H-Hour approached, F-15E fighter-bombers, AWACS, KC-135 refueling planes, and F-117 stealth fighters prepared to take off from bases inside Saudi Arabia. Sailors on board ships such as the U.S.S.
Wisconsin
and the U.S.S.
Missouri
in the Persian Gulf ran through checklists, readying cruise missiles for launch.

Because our F-117s were stealthy, they would be able to penetrate Iraqi airspace without being detected by radar. As they were flying toward Baghdad, eight Apache gunships would fly in low in the dark and take out two of the key nodes of the Iraqi early warning system, opening up a hole in their air defenses so that we could start flowing the rest of our airplanes through to attack Baghdad. Desert Shield was about to become Desert Storm.

As H-Hour neared, I sent an assistant to my home in McLean to retrieve the suitcase I’d packed. I planned to spend the night in the small bedroom connected to my office, but I hadn’t brought the suitcase in with me that morning out of concern that it might alert any close observers that the war was about to begin. By late afternoon, it was clear we had done all we could from Washington. The only thing left now was to wait. At 5:00 p.m. General Powell and Deputy Secretary Atwood joined me in my office for our daily evening wrap-up session. We turned the television to CNN, then the only twenty-four-hour news
channel. Bernard Shaw was on the air from Baghdad. He was interviewing Walter Cronkite in New York, who was telling stories about covering World War II as a young correspondent. After the two talked for a while, Shaw said he was heading back to the States. He said that he’d be on the first plane out of Baghdad in the morning. We knew that wasn’t happening. Not long after, the night sky outside Bernie’s hotel room window lit up as Operation Desert Storm began. This would be the first war Americans would be able to watch unfold, in real time, on live television.

The president spoke to the nation from the Oval Office at 9:00 p.m. to announce the beginning of military operations. At 9:30 p.m. General Powell and I appeared in the Pentagon briefing room to hold a brief press conference. I noted that great care was being taken to minimize U.S. casualties and focus on military targets and that we were hitting targets in both Iraq and Kuwait. We couldn’t say a lot at this early stage, but I wanted to establish the precedent of the American people hearing information about our military operations directly from the Pentagon briefing room. General Schwarzkopf would also conduct briefings from Riyadh.

Before the war my assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Pete Williams, had gone to see Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, the director of operations for the joint staff. Pete told Tom we wanted to hold daily briefings for the press once the war started and said that he, Pete, thought Tom ought to conduct the briefings. Tom resisted mightily. He told Pete there was absolutely no way, given his responsibilities in the upcoming conflict, that he had time to brief the press every day. It just wasn’t going to happen, he said. Pete came to see me with the suggestion, and I backed him up. I thought it made tremendous sense to put senior guys such as Tom Kelly and Rear Admiral Mike McConnell, the director of intelligence for the joint staff, out in front of the press each day. These were the same officers who briefed General Powell and me in the morning. They were knowledgeable enough to answer tough questions and experienced enough to know what they could and couldn’t tell the press. When Pete went back to see Tom a few days later, he said,
“You know, Tom,
the secretary
would really like you to give the daily briefings.” Kelly replied, “That’s an excellent idea, Pete. I’d be thrilled to do that.”

We had given a good deal of thought to ensuring the most accurate coverage of the war. Before Desert Storm began, Pete put together a plan that would have embedded reporters directly with our military units, an early version of the plan the Pentagon followed twelve years later. I supported Pete’s concept and one evening had him come to my office to brief General Powell and me on it. General Powell was decidedly unsupportive. There was absolutely no way we could embed reporters without compromising operational security, he said, expressing robust views on the subject in very strong terms. As Pete was leaving I told him not to worry about it. “Good briefing, Pete. We’re gaining on him,” I said with a smile.

At the end of the day, though, it was clear that our commander in the field, Norm Schwarzkopf, shared Powell’s strong resistance to having reporters embedded with the troops. Both Powell and Schwarzkopf and many of our senior officers had developed a deep distrust of the press based on their experiences in Vietnam. It was understandable, and I did not want to add to the already considerable pressure Schwarzkopf was under by insisting on the embed concept. So we agreed the war would be covered using a pool system, which ultimately had mixed results. Some reporters ended up with commanders who included them in key meetings and operational briefings. Others could barely get the time of day from the officers assigned to mind them.

It was also the case that most of the prewar action had taken place in Saudi Arabia—a country that wasn’t issuing visas to journalists as a general matter. At first the only American journalists who could get into Saudi were the ones who flew in with me. The restrictions opened up a bit when King Fahd realized how much airtime Saddam Hussein was getting and determined to allow more Western journalists into the Kingdom to level the playing field.

Ultimately, no matter what the Pentagon does with the press during a time of war, the U.S. government is likely to be criticized for it. If
they embed reporters and give them access to lots of information, the military is accused of trying to shape the truth or sugarcoat things. If reporters don’t get access then the military is accused of trying to hide the truth. In some sense it’s a no-win situation, but I think all in all we handled it pretty well.

One of my main concerns was not getting into a situation where the press was deciding whether or not we were winning. I wanted information about what was happening to come straight from the military and civilian leadership, not be filtered or skewed by the press in any way. Though we could not guard against this completely, I think our schedule of daily briefings and pool coverage helped ensure that plenty of accurate information did get through.

After Powell and I finished our briefing on the first night of the war, I called the president, a World War II veteran of carrier-based combat operations. “Mr. President,” I told him, “we have sent fifty-six navy planes out and we’ve got fifty-six back. We have over two hundred air force planes out and no sign of any missing.” Overnight, however, we would lose a pilot, Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher, whose F-18 was shot down over Iraq.

ON THE SECOND DAY of the war, Saddam began launching Scud missiles at Israel. These were low-tech 1960s Soviet hardware, but in an urban setting they could cause considerable damage, and there were repeated rumors, all of which turned out to be false, that the Iraqis were putting chemical warheads on some of them. Shortly after the first Scuds struck, my phone rang. It was Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens. He was urgently requesting the Patriot missile batteries and crews we had offered before the war began. Arens said the Israelis also planned to launch retaliatory air strikes, and he asked for the Identification Friend or Foe, or IFF, codes that would allow Israeli pilots to avoid being shot down by allied planes. I told him I would get back to him. Then I called Scowcroft at the White House.

In discussions before the war began, we had agreed that we had to do everything we could to keep the Israelis out of the war, because once
they got in, the conflict might look like an Arab-Israeli war, and Arab nations might well leave the coalition. Saddam, no fool, had launched the Scuds with that in mind. Scowcroft thought the best way to keep the Israelis on the sidelines was to hold them at arm’s length. My assessment was that we should keep them close, tell them everything we were doing, and do everything we could to ensure Israel’s safety, which did not include giving them IFF codes, but, I told Arens, we would go after the Scud launchers in the western desert. The Israelis had to know there was no reason for them to get into the conflict, because we were doing all that could be done.

In our discussions before the war, General Powell and the air commanders had assured me that we would have F-15E flights over the Iraqi western desert ready to take out any launch site from which a Scud was fired. As it turned out, the F-15Es had run into refueling difficulties and had not been flying the night of January 18. Nor did it seem—judging from CENTCOM’s plans for the next day’s air strikes—that General Schwarzkopf fully understood the importance of dedicating assets to hunting Scuds.

The next day Tel Aviv was hit again, and the Hammer Rick phone line got a workout. I could understand the Israeli anger. I myself was furious when I asked about the number of sorties that Central Command was flying against the Scuds and got a totally unsatisfactory answer. I knew the source of the problem. Norm Schwarzkopf didn’t want to take assets away from bombing Baghdad and divert them to what he thought was a militarily insignificant mission. This was a misjudgment on his part. Not only was it militarily significant for us to keep the Israelis out of the war, but it would turn out that the heaviest American losses in a single attack during Desert Storm came from a Scud attack against our barracks near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The way our military commands are structured, Israel is part of European Command’s area of responsibility, not part of Central Command, which was Schwarzkopf’s area. This may have added to Norm’s tendency not to factor Israel into his plans. Whatever the reason, I made it clear to Powell that going after the Scud launchers wasn’t an option, it was a necessity. He passed the
message to Schwarzkopf, and American sorties over the western Iraqi desert picked up the next night.

It was time for me to have a talk with Schwarzkopf, and when I got him on the phone, I told him he was doing a hell of a job, which he was, and that I understood his point: Civilians approve strategy and generals execute. But he needed to understand that the president considered this a strategic question. Whether our effort was successful or not could well depend on keeping Israel out of the war, and we had to devote resources to bombing Scud bunkers and launch sites. I also told him that he needed to understand my problem. “I’m the guy who gets to lean on the Israelis and who has to reassure them that we are doing everything we can. My credibility is crucial. If I tell them we are going to do something, then we will do it.”

The air sorties over the western desert didn’t bring an end to Scud attacks by any means, not on Israel nor on Saudi Arabia, which Saddam was also targeting. Part of the problem was that while we’d identified a number of fixed sites where we knew there were Scud launchers, the Iraqis were using mobile launchers instead. Although we weren’t able to stop the launches, the diversion of air assets to the western desert did go a long way toward convincing the Israelis we were serious about doing all we could to stop the attacks. I’d call Arens with daily updates: twenty-four F-15s, cluster-bomb units, flying at midnight; four F-15s flying combat air patrol from 0300 to 1000; forty-eight A-10s during twelve hours of daylight; twelve F-16s on a fixed target at 1100; twenty-four on mobile units at 1400; twelve on bunkers at 1500.

Larry Eagleburger from the State Department and Paul Wolfowitz from the Pentagon went to Israel again, which helped enormously in letting the Israelis know what we were doing and understand the size and scale of our effort. The deployment of Patriot batteries out of Germany and into Israel, which we managed in about forty-eight hours, was another sign of our commitment—though the missile turned out to be less effective against Scuds than we first thought. One problem was that the Patriot was developed to defend a point target, something like an airfield, not a whole area, not a city. If you’re protecting a base
and you hit a Scud warhead coming in and knock it off target, that’s a success. But if you’re protecting Tel Aviv and you hit the incoming Scud and it goes down two miles away, that’s not a success. It’s also the case that Scuds are really crude devices. They’d break up as they came down, so that a lot of what we were shooting at was junk, not warheads.