Within a few months, Rich became the head of the analytical “substance” directorate, at which point we reported to General Pfautz as peers. One of our chief tasks each day was to prepare him to brief the Air Force chief of staff at senior staff meetings, including preparing his slides with updates on intelligence systems and the current intelligence picture. Pentagon staff officers today often lament the rise of PowerPoint. They only complain because they’re too young to remember making Vu-Graph slides and printing them on cellulose acetate transparency sheets to display with an overhead projector. Rich and I had no idea how quickly one of our presentations would gain national prominence.
On September 1, 1983, a Soviet Su-15 Interceptor fighter jet shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. The Boeing 747 had taken off from Anchorage, Alaska, with 269 people aboard, including Representative Larry McDonald, en route to Seoul. Its autopilot had been set in the wrong mode, and the plane drifted northwest of its intended course. As it approached Soviet prohibited airspace over the Kamchatka Peninsula in the dark of night, Soviet air defenses scrambled three MiG-23 fighters, which failed to intercept the airliner. KAL 007 crossed the peninsula back into international airspace over the Sea of Japan as a flight of Su-15s were launched. As the fighters approached, the KAL 007 pilot asked Tokyo Air Traffic Control Center for permission to climb to conserve fuel. Tokyo Center, which didn’t have radar contact with KAL 007 and was unaware of the Soviet jets, approved the request. As the 747 climbed, it lost airspeed, and the interceptor jets flew past it. They interpreted the climb as an evasive maneuver, turned, regained visual contact, and fired two air-to-air missiles, destroying the civilian airliner and killing everyone aboard.
Immediately, and in typical character, the Soviets denied any involvement, asserting the airliner had crashed on its own, and began fabricating evidence to support their claim. In the Pentagon, General Pfautz asked Rich and me if the Air Force had any reconnaissance aircraft in the area, and whether any intelligence systems had collected data that would cast light on the matter. We pulsed all the Air Force collection stations and initially had nothing to report. We then learned that the intercept site at the northernmost tip of Hokkaido, Japan, had been conducting a test during the day and had left its receivers and recorders tuned to the Soviet air-to-ground frequency that night. The system happened to intercept the entire exchange of Soviet air-to-ground communications, although the linguists there hadn’t realized immediately the significance of what they had on tape.
Rich and I reconstructed the path of the airliner and plotted it on a map. We correlated the times of the Soviet radio transmissions on the transcript with the location of the airliner. Using Vu-Graphs, we put together a slide deck that showed the failed intercept by the MiG-23s when the airliner entered Soviet airspace, and how KAL 007 had already entered international airspace, not just when it was shot down, but as the Soviet general on the ground transmitted, “How long does it take him to get into attack position? He is already getting out into neutral waters. Engage afterburner immediately. Bring in the MiG-23 as well. While you are wasting time, it will fly right out.” Most damning, the Soviet general subsequently ordered the Su-15 pilots to shoot the “target” down immediately, without visually confirming its identity.
General Pfautz presented the Air Force Chief of Staff our findings, which were then sent that day to the secretary of defense and to the National Security Council in the White House. The Soviets continued their denials until the US ambassador to the United Nations played the recorded voice transmissions for the Security Council on September 5. On September 7, President Reagan declassified and published the transcript—a textbook example of a president’s appropriately asserting his prerogative to declassify intelligence information.
The Soviets finally admitted their involvement, but claimed they’d confused the airliner with a US military reconnaissance plane flying at the same time. The Air Force chief of staff asked Pfautz if we’d run any missions that day. Pfautz asked me to check, and I was told we hadn’t—information, it turned out, that wasn’t exactly correct. We had, in fact, flown an RC-135, the specific reconnaissance aircraft the Soviets said they thought KAL 007 was, that same day, but during daylight hours, long before KAL 007 was shot down. The reconnaissance flight was unscheduled and a reaction to indications that the Soviets were going to conduct an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test launch. The launch didn’t take place, but the RC-135 had been in position near Soviet airspace, ready to collect information if it had. Pfautz learned about the RC-135 flight very early Sunday morning and called me at home, yelling before I could even say “hello.” For the next ten minutes, I lay in bed at the position of attention as he informed me in very specific terms about the error of my ways. That was one of the many—many—times I thought my career was dead, but I never heard another word about the incident.
Almost two months later, on October 25, US Army Rangers, Airborne, Marines, and Special Forces invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada, to “liberate it” from the leftist organization that had taken control in a 1979 coup. The invasion itself was widely criticized around the world as unnecessary overkill, and even in the United States, opinion was mixed. The operation itself was an absolutely overwhelming—if chaotic—show of force, but troops on the ground didn’t have current charts from the Defense Mapping Agency and were forced to navigate the island with old maps from the Esso oil conglomerate. Communications weren’t established early—famously, troops had to use pay phones to coordinate movements. Military intelligence was blamed, but the actual problem was that the invasion planners didn’t bother to inform us of their plans. We were completely out of the loop and didn’t catch up until the action was almost over, only a few days later. This episode brought to mind the old Air Force saw “If you want me around when the plane crashes, have me around when the plane takes off.”
The coordination problem in Grenada wasn’t limited to intelligence. Each military service had made its own operational plans without fully coordinating with the others, and the result was less than optimal. We were very fortunate to confront this issue during the invasion of Grenada, which put up virtually no resistance, as it influenced the reorganization of the Department of Defense with the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act. Under this landmark law, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines—every branch of the military—were to “organize, train, and equip” the troops who would do the fighting. The combatant commanders—each with control of all the troops and equipment within their geographic area of responsibility—were tasked with planning and executing operations. In 1983, I had no idea that the nuances of Goldwater-Nichols would become important to me just a few years later.
That December, General Pfautz called me into his office and said he’d negotiated my next assignment—commander of the Air Force Technical Applications Center at Patrick Air Force Base, not far from Cocoa Beach, Florida. Since the 1950s, AFTAC had always been commanded by an Air Force pilot, never by an intelligence officer, so I honestly wasn’t sure whether he was rewarding or banishing me. Sue and I agreed that the AFTAC posting would be a pretty good “twilight tour” for us, after which we could retire and settle down. We’d also be able to keep Andy in the same high school for four years in Florida, so we bought a nice house on a corner lot in Satellite Beach, not far from the ocean.
AFTAC had the unique and important task of monitoring compliance with the 1963 Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which banned all nuclear tests except those conducted underground, and it lived by the wonderfully apt informal motto “In God We Trust, All Others We Monitor.” At the time, it had about three thousand people deployed all over the world, monitoring seismic signatures, ocean acoustic signatures, and overhead satellites for anything resembling a nuclear detonation. It would then try to collect samples from the air to see if the underground test had vented particles. The AFTAC laboratory at McClellan Air Force Base in California would then “torture the molecules”
for intelligence about the actual detonation. One of its major challenges was to distinguish nuclear tests from earthquakes and to try to compute the location, size, and type of detonation from this arcane data. It operated a series of small detachments intentionally located in remote, “seismically quiet” places all over the world. AFTAC had the global reach of a major command, but was small enough to be commanded by a colonel. It had a staff of wonderfully talented, dedicated people—Air Force active-duty officers and enlisted technicians and a small cadre of civilian experts, some of whom had been involved in the Manhattan Project to build the first atomic bomb. For the most part, it existed and did its work without any meddling from Washington. I arrived and took command in June 1984. During my brief tenure as commander, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, China, and, of course, the United States were all actively conducting underground tests, but we didn’t observe any treaty violations. AFTAC would be the last of three Air Force organizations I would have the privilege and honor of commanding. Unique to the military, command is a special responsibility—not only for the conduct of the unit’s mission, but also for the well-being of its people and their families; a heavy responsibility, but so rewarding.
That December the Air Force published the names of those nominated for promotion to brigadier general, and I was on the list. I was shocked. My parents and family were very proud, and Sue and Andy got ready to move again. (Fortuitously, Rich O’Lear succeeded me as commander of AFTAC, and he and his family rented our house.) I anticipated returning to the Pentagon as the deputy to the Air Force assistant chief of staff for intelligence, since that position was vacant, but then we got a second surprise: The Air Force was assigning me to be chief of intelligence for US forces in South Korea. My first thought was an old saying I’d heard from my dad: “There are four things in life you want to avoid: pyorrhea, diarrhea, gonorrhea, and Korea,” but I learned just how little influence brigadier general selects have over their destinies.
I reported to Seoul in June 1985 and quickly discovered the obvious—although the position in South Korea was designated for an Air Force officer, it was a job much better suited to an Army officer. It was a humbling experience as a new brigadier general to ask my team of Army colonels to mentor me on things like how to properly roll up the sleeves on my camouflage battle dress uniform. They also helped with Army slang and terminology used around the post, where initially I was almost as lost as I had been when I first reported to Tan Son Nhut Air Base as a lieutenant. I found that I was not just the senior intelligence officer for US forces, but also the deputy to a Korean Air Force two-star in the US–South Korea Combined Forces Command, someone who knew very little about intelligence and was looking to me for guidance. Fortunately, both of the Republic of Korea (ROK) generals whom I served as deputy were capable, smart, and easy to work with, and we eventually found our way.
My “big boss,” Commander of US Forces Korea, Army four-star general Bill Livsey, had been a lieutenant platoon leader with the 3rd Infantry Division during the Korean War and dug in on the front line when the armistice took effect on July 27, 1953. He knew his business and suffered no fools. He was salty, and in the tradition of General George Patton, excelled at colorful profanity when the occasion called for it. On day one, he made it very clear that the Korean War had never formally ended, the 1953 armistice was just a cease-fire agreement, and North Korea could, and would, invade the South if given the opportunity. From that premise, he gave me his very clear expectations for intelligence. He demanded forty-eight hours of warning ahead of a North Korean attack to give him time to activate the operations plan for the defense of the peninsula and to evacuate all US dependents in South Korea. And because taking those irrevocable actions would have huge diplomatic consequences for the United States and major political implications for the ROK, Livsey required a forty-eight-hour “unambiguous” warning—we had to know for certain that an attack was imminent, and not a bluff or a feint. General Livsey was not one for subtle nuance.
Andy enrolled at the Seoul American High School, whose wonderful principal, Sue Jackson, delivered a classic line at our first parents’ town hall: “I’ll make a deal with all of you. We’ll take with a grain of salt any stories we hear about what happens at home, if you take with a grain of salt any stories you hear about what happens at school.” We found the South Koreans generously warm and hospitable, somehow discovering our preferences and catering to them without our asking, and on our birthdays, sending enough flowers to make our house look and smell like a funeral home. As an eighth-grader, Andy took the subway in Seoul alone without our ever worrying, and we’ve always joked that Sue earned her black belt in shopping in Seoul’s famous Itaewon shopping area, not far from the Yongsan Army garrison where we were stationed in Seoul.
As Sue and Andy got settled, and as Jennifer was starting college in Virginia, I began to try to understand the operational situation. I read all the intelligence reports I could get my hands on and memorized the North Korean order of battle. While I had mastered the details, I was having trouble seeing the larger picture. One day, I was talking with one of my senior civilian intelligence analysts and asked for his advice on how to gain a broader, more strategic perspective. He suggested I visit the post library at Yongsan to read the official US Army history of the Korean War. I ended up spending several Saturdays there, immersing myself in the archives.
At the Pentagon I’d often heard the military truism that every nation is preparing to refight its last war. Militaries are led by bureaucracies that want to prove they’ve learned from their past mistakes, and they’ll apply those lessons to whatever situation they encounter next. The North Korea of 1985, much like the North Korea of 2018, was stuck in the paradigm of warfare in 1953. From reading the official history, I gathered that’s why leaders of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea amassed their forces and supplies along the north edge of the DMZ—so they wouldn’t be reliant on a lengthy mobilization and extended lines of communication. Also, because they remembered the impact of US carrier aviation during the war, they maintained two separate attack submarine fleets, one on each coast. Importantly, I read about the North Koreans activating two corps-level command-and-control entities not long before they crossed the 38th parallel on June 25, 1950, to manage their invading divisions, and so I considered that an important indication of a potential invasion.
Correlating the history I’d learned in the library with the daily intelligence reports, with help from a couple of my senior Army colonel mentors, I developed a briefing to explain the local situation to distinguished visitors, and I tested it on General Livsey. He liked the presentation, and even more, my starched battle dress uniform with glistening paratrooper boots and properly rolled sleeves. I think he had decided to consider his Air Force one-star as a reclamation project, so he took a personal interest in me. He enjoyed trotting me out and proudly pointing out to his Army general contemporaries “his” Air Force intelligence officer, who looked and talked so very Army.
Still, on at least one occasion, I proved to be pretty clueless. Among my responsibilities as the senior intelligence officer was oversight of what was called the Eighth Army Tunnel Neutralization Team (or TNT), a small contingent of US Army soldiers attached to an ROK Army engineer battalion. This joint unit was tasked with searching for DPRK tunnels under the Demilitarized Zone, which we assessed they planned to use to sneak Special Operations Forces into the South in the first stages of an invasion. Over a period of years, three such tunnels had been found, one of which had become both a major tourist attraction and a required visit for all military-age males in the ROK. Finding a fourth tunnel would have had huge domestic political impact and so was a high priority for the ROK government.
The major role of the Tunnel Neutralization Team was to provide intelligence to the ROK Army engineer battalion, which used several water-well rigs to drill wherever we assessed a tunnel might be. The battalion searched whenever we got repor
ts of underground compressor or drilling sounds, or when shreds of burlap, which were used to line the tunnels, turned up in nearby rice paddies. We tried to apply seismic detectors as well, but the geology near the DMZ was very “noisy.” I once inquired how many holes had been dug and was told 3,400—more than 13 holes per kilometer along the 254-kilometer length of the DMZ. I suggested that if we tore off the peninsula along the resulting perforated line, it would eliminate the tunnel threat. My ROK friends didn’t find the remark amusing.
One day in early December 1985, the commander of the US TNT detachment, Lieutenant Colonel Gary Kratovil, a career military intelligence officer with a master’s degree in geology, came to my office to tell me, rather animatedly, that his team had located a hot prospect for the fourth tunnel. He asked me to visit the drill site both to see what his team and the ROK Army engineers had discovered and to flash my new brigadier general star to motivate the US and ROK troops. On December 17, 1985, a date I’ll never forget, we boarded a UH-1 “Huey” helicopter for the short ride from the Yongsan military garrison in Seoul up to the DMZ and the drill site.
The Huey was fully loaded, with two Army pilots, Command Sergeant Major Ray Oeth, Colonel Del Morris, deputy US Forces Korea command engineer Lieutenant Colonel Mike Rodrigues, Gary, and me. I had earphones and could listen to the pilots conversing, but did not have a map. Gary had a map, but couldn’t hear the cockpit. As we learned, this was a less than optimal arrangement.
Facts and Fears Page 6