Zumwalt

by Larry Berman

  The White House liaison office had been closed, and Welander was now available for reassignment. Moorer advised Bud that “Welander had been caught in a three-way squeeze. That Mr. Laird had considered the possible leak by Radford to Anderson as cause to move to close the liaison office. Mr. Laird viewed the office as cutting him out of the communications pattern between Kissinger and the JCS.” In his own discussions with Welander, Bud learned that Welander had “blown the whistle on Radford for giving information to Jack Anderson.” Even though Zumwalt, Kissinger, and Moorer were aware that Welander had encouraged the pilfering of documents, “CNO was advised by both CJCS [Moorer] and Mr. Kissinger that RADM [Rear Admiral] Welander had done a fine job and should be given a good assignment.” They all had the goods on one another. Welander was assigned to Cruiser-Destroyer Flotilla Six, and in 1973 he was reassigned to duty as deputy chief of naval operations for plans and policy, in which post he continued to support Zumwalt directly.

  On January 15, 1974, Secretary Warner told Zumwalt that with respect to the Welander/Radford probe, he was “not able to remember anything concerning his involvement in this matter.”104

  By February 1974, Welander learned that he was going to be called before the Senate Armed Services Committee to testify under oath about the leaked papers. He called Bud to warn him that, if asked, he would have to say that Captain Burt Shepherd, who had been Bud’s executive assistant, once asked, after Radford returned from Vietnam, what type of information he had brought back. Bud wanted to know how Shepherd would have known that Radford had brought something back. Welander said that Radford must have told him; it was the only way he could have known. So for Zumwalt the issue was trying to know if he had seen information that Kissinger wanted him to have or information he was not supposed to have, supplied by Radford. There were so many papers going back and forth, Bud had no idea which was which from the “Machiavellian nature of Kissinger’s operation.”105 Bud wanted to see Shepherd’s detailed handwritten notebooks from all of Bud’s meetings. Don Pringle, Shepherd’s relief as executive assistant, called Shepherd to say that the CNO “wanted to see all of his notebooks that related to the spy ring investigation.” Shepherd dutifully sent them all in, which was the final time he or anyone else has ever seen the notebooks.106

  The circumstantial evidence puts Bud’s claim that he did not know anything about the Moorer/JCS bugging of Kissinger and the White House on shaky ground. “He wanted to know everything that was going to help the Navy,” recalled Shepherd. “He was always looking for people to ‘spy,’ but he was seeking information—they were told to keep him informed.” Bud’s NSC liaison officers had direct orders to brief him on Kissinger’s activities. Rex Rectanus received his third star and became Bud’s director of naval intelligence (DNI) in 1973. In that role, Rex most certainly knew what was going on with the bugging, especially Radford’s spying on Kissinger, Nixon, and the NSC. He also must have known about Laird’s using NSA and Army Signal Corps intelligence to do the same. Bud survived four years as CNO because he always had his antennae up. He was a savvy Washington player and it is difficult to accept the idea that he was ignorant of all this spying going on while he was CNO, especially with Rex as his DNI. How else can we interpret Rex’s subtle comment at the close of a lengthy oral-history interview when asked if there was anything else he wanted to say: “Someday you might want to keep in the back of your mind—I’m not going to go into it, but Rembrandt Robinson and his days in the White House with Henry Kissinger, the opening of China and the relationship of Naval Intelligence, with that whole thing.”107

  In a moment of rare self-reflection, Richard Nixon realized it was all on him. “Damn, you know, I created this whole situation—this, this lesion,” Nixon said in an Oval Office conversation. “It’s just unbelievable. Unbelievable. There have been more back channel games played in this administration than any in history ’cause we couldn’t trust the goddamn bureaucracy.”108

  Bud Zumwalt wondered how it was possible for rational men to act the way they did, concluding, “Maybe they weren’t rational.”109

  CHAPTER 13

  RUFFLES AND FLOURISHES

  Schlesinger talked about the fact that the worst period of his whole stewardship as Secretary of Defense was the period from the 27th of June to the 30th of June, when I was in my final hours. He reported that the instructions from Haig and Kissinger had been to fire me with only two days left in my watch.1

  Bud Zumwalt’s last eighteen months as a sailor were not what he had hoped for. Instead of steaming serenely toward the horizon, he was “awash in controversy and the target of recriminations that were not only acrimonious but personal.”2 Prior to Richard Nixon’s 1972 election, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird had announced that he would not continue for another term. Nixon nominated Elliot L. Richardson to succeed him, but Richardson, sworn into office on January 30, 1973, served less than four months before being nominated to be attorney general. It was understood that Richardson would guide the administration’s handling of the Watergate investigation, which had reached a critical stage.

  To replace Richardson, President Nixon chose Dr. James Rodney Schlesinger, then serving as director of the CIA.3 Bud had known Schlesinger only briefly from his time at the Bureau of the Budget (BOB), and he asked Captain William A. Cockell, Jr., to provide him with a detailed analysis of Schlesinger’s writings “with emphasis on his interests and perceptions of strategic issues.”4 The initial backgrounder might have led Bud to think he was reading about himself: “Tough, hardheaded and conservative, a mission oriented executive, capable of intense concentration, holds things close to his vest, is always pushing for the right answers, strives to excel in whatever he does.”5 At the bottom of Cockell’s report, Bud scribbled “very good” and asked that Cockell speak with Rand Corporation president and Bud’s longtime friend Henry Rowen “for his evaluation of Schlesinger.” Cockell soon provided an Eyes Only personal and sensitive assessment from Rowen: “I am confident that the best way to deal with him on issues is on an incisive, factual, analytical, no b.s. way. Clearly he is capable of understanding arguments that are subtle and complex, but arm waving, ideology, vagueness, etc, should be avoided.” Rowen wanted Bud to understand that Schlesinger lacked experience and background in “dealing with allies and a certain lack of sensitivity to their problems and concerns. I suspect a lot needs to be done to educate him in that area.”6

  Ever since 1972, when Nixon and Kissinger had rushed the SALT I accords—the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the Interim Agreement on Strategic Offensive Arms—through both houses of Congress as an executive agreement, Bud knew that the Kremlin had outmaneuvered Kissinger and Nixon, who wanted a deal before the election. The source of Bud’s angst could be traced to an error made by Kissinger at the key stage in the negotiations. As discussed in Sherry Sontag’s and Christopher Drew’s Blind Man’s Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, Kissinger had offhandedly agreed “not to ask for limits on the Soviets’ ‘massive efforts’ to build the Deltas, a new class of submarines that would far surpass the Yankees and carry ballistic missiles with ranges of 4,000 miles. Zumwalt was furious.”7 Bud believed that this opened the door to giving the Soviets a great advantage in submarine-based missile attacks.

  To undo his negotiating error, Kissinger went to Dobrynin and executed, without informing anyone in the chain of command, an agreed-upon “clarification.” Executed in secret and without any arms-control agency providing scrutiny, this clarification created a new loophole by defining a modern submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM) as one “deployed on a nuclear-powered submarine commissioned since 1965.” This faulty wording made it possible for the Soviets to build any number of diesel submarines and install new nuclear missiles on them. Bud and Paul Nitze were the first to pick up this error, but in 1973 the rest of the government discovered the “secret covenant” when the Soviets told the SALT negotiating team about it.8

  Dismissing State Departme
nt officials as “bed wetters” for advising him not to challenge Kissinger, Bud did all that was possible to force Kissinger to pay for the mistake by seeking approval of a more powerful new class of missile subs—the Tridents. “It was a battle he would win.”9 In the summer of 1973, Congress approved the funding of the Trident submarine, seen as the key component of the U.S. nuclear deterrence program.10 Zumwalt could not have accomplished this without the strong support of his new secretary of defense. “Though he had nothing of Laird’s flair for coaxing his projects through the bureaucracy and the Congress,” Bud wrote in his memoirs, “he had the equally important quality, which Mel Laird lacked, of formulating issues precisely and clearly and thus forcing the bureaucracy and Congress into making conscious decisions.”11

  A significant portion of Bud’s final eighteen months as CNO was taken up with the deep division within the chain of command on arms control. Bud had no doubt that Kissinger was the source of leaks portraying him as Dr. Strangelove, the unhinged general who orders a first-strike nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. In the film of that name, the president and his advisors must then try to recall the bombers to prevent a nuclear apocalypse. The U.S. SALT II negotiating team was approaching the next round of talks from the concept of “equality in capabilities,” meaning that, according to team member Paul Nitze, “our principal goal was to secure Soviet acceptance of the concept of ‘essential equivalence’ as set forth in the Jackson amendment.”12 The language of Senator Henry Jackson’s amendment, which passed Congress by a vote of 56 to 35 on September 11, 1972, expressed the consensus that Congress “urges and requests the President to seek a future treaty that, inter alia, would not limit the United States to levels of intercontinental strategic forces inferior to the limits provided for the Soviet Union.”13 Equality in capabilities did not mean that everything had to be exact, but rather that the strategic nuclear capabilities of the two sides should be essentially equal to each other. Going into the negotiations, the Soviets had not accepted this concept of “essential equivalence.” Instead, their position was premised on the concept of “equal security taking into account geographic and other considerations.”14

  The SALT talks had resumed in Geneva in March 1973, just as domestic political considerations related to the Watergate investigation began to preoccupy Washington, a situation the Soviets were carefully monitoring. Recognizing that the outcome of these negotiations was likely to have a decisive effect on strategic military forces and the national security of the United States and its allies, Secretary Schlesinger created a Department of Defense SALT Task Force so that Defense could play a vigorous and constructive role in the negotiations. Schlesinger was keenly aware that Mel Laird had been cut out of the SALT I negotiations, and he appointed Dr. N. Fred Wikner as director of the task force, with “the responsibility of the coordination of Defense SALT policy recommendation.”15 In another important selection that delighted Bud, Paul Nitze was appointed special assistant to the secretary of defense for SALT.

  For Henry Kissinger, the success of U.S. foreign policy depended on détente with the Soviet Union. The new relationship with China, the peace agreement with the Vietnamese, and an improved workable relationship with allies had all been accomplished because of détente and Soviet assistance. All of this threatened to unwind on October 6, 1973, when Egyptian and Syrian forces attacked Israel on the Yom Kippur holiday. The attack came as a complete surprise to Israel. The Soviets, who had advance knowledge of the attack, chose not to share this information with the United States. “Now it was evident that their commitment to détente was nil,” wrote Nitze.16

  Kissinger chose to define the situation differently, seeing instead an opportunity to broker a lasting Middle East peace agreement, so long as the Soviets exercised restraint. Kissinger was looking at the bigger stakes—a long-term peace in the Middle East and the effects of adverse American intervention on détente. He therefore favored a “partial” Israeli victory that would be accomplished without direct intervention and provide the seeds for a lasting settlement. “The best thing that could happen to us,” Kissinger wrote to Secretary Schlesinger on October 7, “is for the Israelis to come out ahead but get bloodied in the process.”17 Kissinger told Israel’s foreign minister Abba Eban that American foreign policy depended on creating a military position that would constitute “an incentive for a cease-fire.”18

  With Nixon distracted by the Watergate crisis and the need to look for a new vice president, day-to-day management of the crisis fell to Kissinger, who understood that Israel was an important ally, but who also weighed such issues as a potential oil boycott, the importance of not antagonizing the moderate Arab states, and most of all, détente with the Soviet Union. He seemed not to care that, while the U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies had been caught off guard, the Soviets knew of the invasion beforehand. “In reconstructing American policy during October 1973, it becomes evident that Kissinger persuaded Nixon that, once having broken out, the Arab-Israeli war should be manipulated so as to create the conditions he considered necessary for successful long-range peace diplomacy by the United States,” wrote Tad Szulc. “The rewards of such a policy, Kissinger reasoned, would be the disappearance of the threat of an Arab oil embargo, the establishment of a new relationship between the United States and the Arab world, and ultimately, the elimination of Soviet influence in the Middle East. But for this policy to work, it was necessary that neither the Arabs nor Israel win the war militarily. What Kissinger needed was a stalemate among the three bloodied and exhausted combatants so that, at the proper time, they would turn to the United States in search of peace. To Kissinger, therefore, the war itself was but a cruel sideshow, serving the larger interests of American policy as he perceived them.”19

  To accomplish this objective, Kissinger made the decision to delay providing Israel with equipment and supplies. This policy was based on two premises: that Israel would quickly defeat its foes and that the United States should maintain a low profile. He made it clear that Military Airlift Command (MAC) should not deliver supplies. As Israeli casualties mounted in the Sinai counteroffensive, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan advised Prime Minister Golda Meir that the numerical superiority and technological sophistication of Arab arms and supplies meant that there was no alternative other than “a supreme effort to secure planes and tanks as quickly as possible from America, and perhaps try to get tanks from Europe too.”

  Kissinger was awakened by a call from Israeli ambassador Simcha Dinitz with an urgent plea for help. Israel had suffered enormous losses in the counteroffensive, including five hundred tanks. Recognizing that they could not win a war of attrition, the Israelis requested a massive airlift of supplies and equipment. So desperate was their situation, Prime Minister Golda Meir offered to fly incognito to see Richard Nixon, which Kissinger rejected as looking like “hysteria or blackmail.” For two days, Kissinger let Israel bleed, stalling on the resupply.

  By now, the Soviets had reassessed the situation. Thinking the Arabs had a chance to win, on October 10, the Soviet Union began a massive airlift to Egyptian and Syrian forces, a clear violation of their understanding with the United States that both superpowers would stay out. The Soviets also began pushing for a settlement “in place,” one that would allow the Egyptians and Syrians to hold on to their current gains on the battlefield. On the same day of the Soviet airlift, JCS chairman Tom Moorer informed the chiefs in a Pentagon meeting that the secretary of defense’s “guidance in general about the way to respond to Israeli requests for supplies is that we are to be overtly niggardly and covertly forthcoming.” Bud immediately saw this as Schlesinger’s way of working around Kissinger.

  In his memoirs, Kissinger insists that the Pentagon, particularly Schlesinger, was dragging its heels on the question of resupply. He presents himself as Israel’s great protector. Schlesinger always denied this and claimed that his shoes were nailed to the floor by national policy. Bud was a strong proponent of resupplying Israel rapidly and was distu
rbed by Kissinger’s tactic of blaming Defense. Indicting Schlesinger was preposterous, “just a tale, and an extraordinarily disingenuous one at that,” wrote Bud, who knew that Kissinger, in the name of the president, had ordered Schlesinger to stall. “This is one of Henry Kissinger’s great lies. Incidentally, in 1978, when Golda Meir came to this country, she asked to see me. She said, ‘I want to hear it from you. Is it true that my friend, Henry, withheld the supplies?’ I had to say, ‘Yes.’ She was terribly crestfallen.”20

  Scoop Jackson was receiving daily communications on Kissinger’s fraud from both Schlesinger and Bud. On October 11, Bud took a step that by his admission he would never have taken if he’d been sure that “Richard Nixon rather than the unelected, unaccountable Henry Kissinger was making national policy about the war.” The CNO went directly to Jackson, pleading with one of Israel’s strongest Senate advocates to save Israel from defeat. Bud told Jackson that without resupply, Israel would lose the war. “Jackson met with President Nixon that day, exhorting him to act.”21 Nixon needed little convincing. When he asked Kissinger what had taken so long, his secretary blamed the Pentagon. Preoccupied and already drinking heavily, Nixon ordered Kissinger and Schlesinger to make certain that Israel got everything it needed. “Goddamn it, use every one [of the supply planes] we have. Tell them to send everything that can fly,” instructed Nixon. On October 18, Jackson cosponsored a resolution that sailed through the Senate with overwhelming support, calling for “decisive action to assure that essential military equipment be transferred to Israel on a time scale and in whatever quantities are required to enable Israel to repel Syrian and Egyptian aggression.”22