Front Burner

by Kirk S. Lippold

  As he had emphasized over and over again, the CNO patiently reiterated that a proper and just accountability determination had been made, with the firm conclusion that nothing the commanding officer or crew had done or not done would have prevented the tragedy. Although there were issues identified in the JAGMAN investigation, review by some of the most senior officers in the Navy, with years of at-sea command experience, as well as the civilian leadership within the Navy and Department of Defense had determined that punishment was not warranted. Inherent in every endorsement by the chain of command was the belief that there was a fundamental difference between accountability and blame. Senator Warner remained unwilling to see the difference.

  By early September 2002, the promotion list had been languishing at the Senate Armed Services Committee for two months without any action being taken. Finally, with the Navy unwilling to punish anyone for the attack, Senator Warner informed the Navy Chief of Legislative Affairs, Rear Admiral Gary Roughead, who had been relieved as Cole’s battle group commander and was now assigned to Washington, that unless the Navy removed my name from the promotion list, the entire list would be held up, no officers would be allowed promotion to captain, and the previously threatened SASC hearing would be convened to again reopen the Cole investigation where a suitability determination on my promotion would undergo additional public scrutiny.

  The Navy had already shown over the intervening time since the attack that it wanted to distance itself at every opportunity from the attack and its aftermath. The attack was an institutional embarrassment, which only reinforced their unwillingness to undergo this very public political spectacle. Admiral Roughead called me in my cubicle on the Joint Staff on September 16, 2002, and calmly informed me that my name was being removed from the promotion list for the good of the service to allow the rest of the list to move forward and be confirmed by the Senate. I could tell he was very disappointed in this development as he reiterated the Navy’s support for me; but at the same time, the Navy’s leadership was unwilling to publicly stand behind my promotion. Two days later, on September 18, the Senate confirmed the promotion list. My name was not on it and almost immediately all the media ran articles about how I had been denied promotion to captain.

  It was a powerful punch to the gut. While I always knew in the back of my mind that a future in the Navy might be nothing more than a mirage, the denial of my promotion was the toughest professional setback of my life, second only to losing my seventeen sailors in the attack. In very real terms, however, the very Constitution that I had served under throughout my career and was even willing to give my life for was being blatantly undermined and subverted by a single senator, John Warner. It was nothing short of a political ruse that he continued to claim, under the guise of holding Senate Armed Services Committee hearings, that he would allow my name to be submitted to the Senate for confirmation. He wanted someone to blame for the attack. Since bin Laden and the other terrorists were not readily available, in his eyes, the commanding officer must be the person held to account.

  For the next few weeks, I was disheartened and went through the motions of work only for the sake of the predictability it provided me. Still, my officemates and I continued to craft detainee policy that would have a positive and lasting effect on our nation’s ability to fight the expanding Global War on Terror. By early spring 2003, the Navy informed me that it intended to support my promotion again and forward it up the chain of command for submission to the Senate during the 108th Congress. I was very happy that I continued to enjoy the Navy leadership’s support as they stood behind me in the aftermath of the attack and investigations. Once again, I stayed focused on my work on the Joint Chiefs of Staff while a new promotion list was generated that contained only one name, mine, and slowly worked its way up the chain of command.

  While Admiral Clark and I never spoke, his staff informed me that on several occasions, he had approached Senator Warner about his insistence that I be held “accountable” for allowing the attack to occur. At every turn, the senator refused to budge. Knowing the single-item promotion list containing just my name now sat on the desk of the secretary of defense, Senator Warner sent a letter on April 13, 2004, to General Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In that letter he openly questioned the professional judgment of the CNO: “Given the adverse findings of the JAGMAN investigating officer, which were concurred in by Commander, United States Naval Forces Central Command, I questioned whether full accountability, which I view to be at the very heart of command at sea, was enforced. Admiral Clark stated that, despite some shortfalls in performance on the part of Commander Lippold, Admiral Clark concluded that nothing Commander Lippold did or did not do would have prevented the attacker from succeeding.” He then continued: “I believe that promoting an officer to the rank of captain, who, in his present capacity as a commander demonstrated questionable qualities of judgment, forehandedness, and attention to detail in complying with security regulations, is worthy of thorough review. I seek your guidance. Quite simply, has Commander Lippold, in your view and the view of the other Chiefs, exhibited the basic values that we have come to expect from our military officers?”

  The letter then went much further: “I request that you carefully review the entire investigative file compiled within the Navy and by the Crouch-Gehman [USS Cole] Commission and share with me directly your views about Commander Lippold’s qualifications in light of a full review of the facts. I also ask that you make arrangements to have the other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff fully briefed on this matter. I believe that this is a situation in which all members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should be consulted, and the impact it could have on the officer corps of all services considered.”

  The threat and expectation had now reached the highest level of the U.S. military. Senator Warner wanted to pinpoint blame and was willing to call out the entire military leadership of all the services to get it. Within days, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs ordered a “tank meeting” attended by all the service chiefs, the director of the Joint Staff, and the vice chairman. In the meeting, Admiral Clark specifically addressed the threat environment leading up to the attack on Cole, the JAGMAN investigation findings including the subsequent endorsements, and the issue of my accountability for my actions before, during, and after the attack. Lastly, he explained why a promotion board considered me, in light of all these facts, suitable for promotion.

  On April 29, 2004, Chairman Myers responded back to Senator Warner with a short, to-the-point letter. In it, he affirmed that he had thoroughly reviewed the Cole investigative files compiled by the Navy and Crouch-Gehman commissions to assess my suitability and qualification for promotion. He solidly affirmed the promotion board’s findings, answering Senator Warner, “The Joint Chiefs met and carefully reviewed these investigations. We all concluded that Commander Lippold is fully suited and qualified for promotion, and unanimously recommend that Commander Lippold be promoted to Captain.” Each service chief had combat experience, and all understood the responsibility of the action they were taking in affirming support for my promotion.

  Senator Warner would not be deterred, and once again my nomination was stalled, this time at the White House as the political theater of the 2004 election gained momentum. Ultimately, my nomination would once again not be forwarded to the Senate and it slid into the 109th congressional session for action.

  On July 22, 2004, while I was still assigned to the Joint Staff, the 9/11 Commission had concluded its findings into the attack on our nation and issued its report, finding that “the plot, we now know, was a full-fledged al Qaeda operation, supervised directly by bin Laden. He chose the target and location of the attack, selected the suicide operatives, and provided the money needed to purchase explosives and equipment.” No one in the military was held singularly or collectively responsible for allowing the attack to occur.

  In November 2004, I finished my assignment to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and was transferred to the staff
of the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Information, Plans and Strategy (N3/N5), once again working for Vice Admiral John G. Morgan Jr., who had been my commanding officer on USS Arleigh Burke. Since the immediate aftermath of the attack and throughout the intervening years, Admiral Morgan had provided me with a unique level of insight and professional mentorship as someone I could turn to for advice and counsel in how to best approach the now contentious idea of continued service in the Navy. He had been the keynote speaker at my change of command and still continued to keep me apprised of what the senior leadership of the Navy was doing in support of my promotion. But by this point, while I still maintained an impeccable work ethic, I knew I no longer had a career in the Navy; now I was on a quest for vindication of the finding my superiors had made, time after time, that nothing I could have done would have prevented the attack on my ship.

  Senator Warner’s attitude contrasted sharply with his approach to an earlier case, a celebrated historical instance of naval injustice in which he had intervened, years later, to rectify: the court-martial and conviction of Captain Charles B. McVay III, the commanding officer of the cruiser USS Indianapolis (CA-35) when it was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the waning days of World War II on July 30, 1945.

  In mid-1945, Indianapolis received orders to carry to Tinian Island parts and nuclear material to be used in the atomic bombs soon to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. After delivering its top-secret cargo, the ship was en route to other duties when early in the morning of July 30, 1945, she was attacked by the Japanese submarine I-58 under Commander Mochitsura Hashimoto. Commander Hashimoto launched six torpedoes and hit the Indianapolis twice, the first removing over forty feet of her bow, the second hitting the starboard side below the bridge. Indianapolis immediately took a fifteen-degree list, capsized, and sank within twelve minutes. Of the crew of 1,196 men, 879 died. It was the worst disaster at sea of the entire war for the U.S. Navy.

  About 300 of the 1,196 men on board died in the initial attack. The rest of the crew, more than 880 men, were left floating in the water trying to survive without lifeboats among sharks until the rescue was completed four days (100 hours) later. It was not until 1025 on August 2 that the few survivors were sighted, mostly held afloat by life jackets, although there were a few rafts that had been cut loose before the ship went down. A plane on routine patrol sighted them but because of Navy protocol regarding secret missions, the ship was not reported “overdue” and the omission was officially recorded later as “due to a misunderstanding of the Movement Report System.” Only 316 men survived.

  Captain McVay, commander of Indianapolis, was among those rescued. He repeatedly asked the Navy why it took five days to rescue his men. He never received an answer. The Navy long claimed that SOS messages were never received because the ship was operating under a policy of radio silence; declassified records show that three SOS messages were received separately, but none were acted upon because it was thought to be a Japanese ruse.

  There was much controversy over the incident. In November 1945, McVay was court-martialed and convicted of “hazarding his ship by failing to zigzag.” Several circumstances of the court-martial were controversial: one very obvious circumstance was that McVay’s orders were to zigzag at night, at his discretion. Zigzagging would make it harder for an enemy submarine sighting the ship to zero in on it with a torpedo. McVay said he decided that the intermittently poor visibility made zigzagging unnecessary. Incredibly, the Japanese submarine commander who sank Indianapolis was called as a witness for the prosecution at the court-martial, and he described visibility at the time as fair (corroborated by the fact that he was able to target and sink the Indianapolis in the first place). American submarine experts testified that zigzagging was a technique of negligible value in eluding enemy submarines. Hashimoto also testified to this effect. Despite that testimony, the official ruling was that visibility was good, and the court held McVay responsible for his ship’s sinking because he had not continued to zigzag.

  But there was also evidence that admirals in the U.S. Navy had been primarily responsible for placing the ship in harm’s way. Captain McVay requested a destroyer escort, but his request was denied because the priority for destroyers at the time was escorting transports to Okinawa and picking up downed pilots in B-29 raids on Japan. Also, the naval command assumed that McVay’s route would be safe at that late point in the war. Many ships, including most destroyers, were equipped with submarine detection equipment, but Indianapolis was not so equipped.

  On July 24, 1945, just six days prior to the sinking of Indianapolis, the destroyer Underhill had been attacked and sunk in the same area by Japanese submarines. Yet McVay was never informed of this event or several others, in part due to issues of classified intelligence. McVay was warned of the potential presence of Japanese subs, but not of the actual confirmed activity. After the torpedo attack, no rescue was initiated, because of the Navy’s failure to track the Indianapolis; as she was the flagship of the Fifth Fleet, this failure amounted to gross mismanagement of the resource by the Navy.

  Some 700 ships of the U.S. Navy were lost in combat in World War II, but McVay was the only captain to be court-martialed, and it was widely felt that he had been a fall guy for the Navy. Despite the fact that McVay was promoted to rear admiral when he retired in 1949, the conviction effectively ended his career in the Navy.

  I learned only in early 2005 that on September 14, 1999, Senator Warner had chaired a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing into the conviction of Captain McVay. After hearing testimony from Navy admirals and Indianapolis survivors, as well as other evidence entered into the record, he supported exonerating Captain McVay of his court-martial. In the FY 2001 Defense Authorization Act, signed by President Clinton, Senator Warner steadfastly supported a Sense of Congress resolution on his case:With respect to the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis (CA-35) on July 30, 1945, and the subsequent court-martial conviction of the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Charles Butler McVay, III, arising from that sinking, it is the sense of Congress, based on the review of evidence by the Senate and the House of Representatives—(1) that, in light of the remission by the Secretary of the Navy of the sentence of the court-martial and the restoration of Captain McVay to active duty by the Chief of Naval Operations, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz, the American people should now recognize Captain McVay’s lack of culpability for the tragic loss of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and the lives of the men who died as a result of the sinking of that vessel; and (2) that, in light of the fact that certain exculpatory information was not available to the court-martial board and that Captain McVay’s conviction resulted therefrom, Captain McVay’s military record should now reflect that he is exonerated for the loss of the U.S.S. Indianapolis and so many of her crew.

  The contrasts as well as the similarities were striking. There had been no doubt about the danger and hostility from Japanese forces in the Indianapolis case, while Cole had been attacked by surprise by perfidious terrorists without any indication of hostile intent. The sinking of USS Indianapolis left 1,197 dead, while the attack on USS Cole had killed 17. Both tragedies were a great embarrassment to the Navy. In the case of Indianapolis , the news was not released until after the Japanese surrender and the end of the war, and it was largely lost to sight; similarly, release of the investigation into Cole was delayed until just before the Clinton administration left office. Threat information was not transmitted to Indianapolis , just as no specific intelligence concerning an al Qaeda threat was available to Cole prior to entering port:

  CNO Endorsement: “I conclude, along with the previous endorsers, that the tools and information at the Commanding Officer’s disposal on 12 October 2000, coupled with the lack of any indication of hostile intent before the attack, severely disadvantaged the Commanding Officer and crew of Cole in trying to prevent this attack.”

  CINCLANTFLT Endorsement: “Nothing in the [Sixth Fleet Intelligence] message indicated a need for Cole to take a he
ightened security posture beyond the THREATCON Bravo measures directed by the in-theater Fifth Fleet Commander.”

  “Based on the general threat intelligence available to USS Cole, this was a reasonable decision.”

  COMUSNAVCENT Endorsement: “In fact, all of the intelligence assets of the United States and its allies, as well as the U.S. Embassy in Sana’a, did not identify the threat, let alone communicate the presence of that threat to the Commanding Officer of USS Cole.”

  Captain McVay’s superiors in the chain of command and my own both supported no punishment. In the case of Captain McVay, Fleet Admiral Chester Nimitz and Vice Admiral Raymond Spruance, who was McVay’s immediate superior, both legendary naval heroes of war, went on record as opposed to a court-martial. In my case, CINCLANTFLT’s endorsement stated that I “was not derelict in the execution of duty [and] did not act in violation of any regulation, order or custom of the Navy.”

  With circumstances mirroring Captain McVay’s, I was given discretion to make a judgment. I relied on the best information I had, which did not indicate an imminent attack. He exercised the same discretion in judgment. My chain of command supported me, as McVay’s had supported him. A duly constituted promotion board comprised of my fellow officers selected me for promotion (even after reviewing the JAGMAN investigation in my file) and the chain of command, including the President, supported that selection.