In crisis mode, we reported any updates from our military attachés in Beijing to PACOM leaders and to Washington. The situation worsened as the students keyed protests to a scheduled visit from Mikhail Gorbachev. Three days before his visit, three hundred thousand people staged a hunger strike and refused to leave the square, forcing the Chinese Communist Party to formally welcome Gorbachev at the airport. It was a huge embarrassment, and worse, coverage by Chinese media led to sympathy for the students across the nation. The government declared martial law and mobilized the People’s Liberation Army.
All of our military attachés were put on lockdown, which profoundly cut into the quality of our intelligence picture. We still had satellite imagery—snapshots of vehicle movements—but didn’t really know what units had mobilized, what they were doing, and what was happening in the streets. Outside some creative tradecraft on the ground that provided some insight into PLA activities, we were nearly blind, and unfortunately there wasn’t much we could do for the student protesters.
We watched, helpless, as the PLA rolled tanks and soldiers toward the square on the night of June 3. The protesters tried to block their entrance, but troops opened fire, killing protesters in rolling skirmishes. In the dark early morning hours, the students and PLA troops had a final, violent clash. We still don’t know for certain how many students and protesters died, but a very recently declassified British intelligence cable puts the number killed at more than ten thousand and details both the brutality of the slaughter and the desecration of human remains that followed. In US Pacific Command, we were shocked, outraged, and heartbroken, and for many of us, it was also a stark lesson on the limits of intelligence.
Within weeks, I had to put those somber events in China behind me and once again focus on another challenge. Just as Pacific Command forced me to open my aperture beyond the Korean Peninsula, moving to Strategic Air Command compelled a look beyond the Pacific region, as large as it was, to take in the entire globe. In 1989, SAC had responsibility for all US strategic reconnaissance aircraft (the U-2 and SR-71 spy planes), and the more prominent US arsenal of ICBMs and all the US strategic bombers (the B-1 Lancer and the B-52 Stratofortress bombers, which the North Koreans so feared). As Sue and I were unpacking in July 1989, the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber was making its first test flight.
Trying to hold on to my favorite part of living in Hawaii, I’d paid to ship my beloved yellow MG convertible to the mainland, but July in Nebraska was entirely too hot and humid to drive the car, which lacked air-conditioning. I stowed it for the summer and had a couple of months of joy in the fall until, in the first of the hard freezes Nebraska was famous for, it went into a deep coma and never recovered. As I worked to understand and master my new responsibilities, Sue and Andy settled into their own routines. Andy enrolled for his senior year in his third high school, in nearby Bellevue. Only later would we realize that he emerged from all the moves a better person. Jenny and Andy are both wonderful, and I’m incredibly proud of how well Sue raised them.
I only served at SAC for eight months, but it was a time of turmoil. In part inspired by the protests in Tiananmen Square, the Warsaw Pact countries began to shed Soviet control and free themselves of their Communist governments. During the short time I was at Offutt, we saw revolutionary elections in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania. On November 9, a confused member of the Socialist Unity Party in East Germany mistakenly announced at a press conference that guards along the Berlin Wall would begin allowing people to pass from East Berlin into West Berlin, effective immediately. That wasn’t true, but as crowds rushed the gates, the overwhelmed guards let them through. That night I watched the television coverage as people chiseled away at the Wall and celebrated in the streets. The Cold Warrior in me was amazed and delighted. The intelligence officer in me was concerned. So much instability surrounding the Soviets’ massive military forces, particularly their nuclear arsenal, was inherently dangerous. At Strategic Air Command, we focused on understanding what was happening to the vestiges of Soviet military power. By the time I left in March, things in the former Soviet bloc were tumultuous.
While at SAC, I flew thirty-seven missions in the “Looking Glass” airborne command post that’s featured in the film Dr. Strangelove. From any of the dozen or so Boeing 707 aircraft at Offutt, each specially reconfigured and redesignated as an Air Force EC-135, the command staff could maintain communications with vital elements of US strategic forces and could convey orders to the ICBM silos, strategic bombers, and ballistic missile submarines. The Air Force had a requirement that an EC-135 be airborne with a general officer aboard at all times, with no lapses ever, which translated to three missions of eight-plus hours a day. Remarkably, Looking Glass aircraft were airborne and mission-ready continuously for thirty-one years. As a two-star general, I found myself doing shift work again, taking my turns in the rotation of all the one- and two-star generals assigned throughout SAC. While airborne, we ran exercises to assess our readiness to respond if threatened. We could always respond with catastrophic force. We could never prevent the annihilation of our homeland. No one who’d held the responsibility for deploying nuclear weapons during an exercise could deny that reality. It was this experience that convinced me that neither side would ever intentionally inflict a nuclear attack on the other. Thankfully, the most exciting thing that ever happened on those flights was when an occasional Boy Scout troop or Chamber of Commerce group visited the underground SAC command post for a tour. They would call up Looking Glass, and I would answer as the disembodied voice in the sky, giving them a short, scripted briefing and reassurances they were well protected.
The orientation flight I took in January 1990 in a two-seat U-2 spy plane was a much more exciting experience. Over 68,000 feet up, at the edge of space, I could see all of Northern California. The sky was purple, fading to black above me. All the world’s problems—North Korea’s aggression, China’s oppression of its own citizens, the uncertainty of what was happening to all those Soviet weapons—seemed small and far away. For four short hours, the pilot and I were above all other concerns. “Fun” doesn’t fully capture the experience. It was transcendent, although I did wonder what I would do if the pilot had a heart attack. That March, the highly esteemed Air Force chief of staff, General Larry Welch, summoned me back to the Pentagon, where fun goes to die.
I left almost immediately, while the commander of SAC, General Jack Chain, graciously allowed Sue and Andy to stay in our quarters at Offutt so that Andy could graduate. Back in Washington, I joined the Air Force staff as its senior intelligence officer. I briefly lived with Jen and her husband, Jay, in their town house until Sue joined me in government quarters at Bolling Air Force Base in July.
While my two most recent career moves had opened my view of the world, my focus from the Pentagon narrowed to a tiny nation in the Middle East—Kuwait—and to the airspace above its neighbor—Iraq. Throughout the 1980s, the United States had grudgingly backed Iraq in its war with Iran, preferring almost anyone to Iran after the 1979 revolution. Invading Iran in 1980 had been a terrible miscalculation by the new Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, and support from the United States and Saudi Arabia was really the only reason Iran had not reversed the invasion and conquered Iraq. In the two years since the Iran-Iraq War had ended in 1988, Hussein had ruled as a brutal dictator, using executions as a management tool and even inflicting mustard gas and nerve agents on his own people in the ethnically Kurdish north. He had aggressively rebuilt his army after the war and boasted that he had a million soldiers, although US intelligence estimated the number as closer to six hundred thousand.
When I returned to the Pentagon in March 1990, the only person in the US government who really thought Iraq would invade Kuwait was Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Of course, he also thought Gorbachev was about to be overthrown and the Soviet Union was going to come roaring back. General Welch retired and was succeeded by General Mike D
ugan, who only lasted six weeks before Secretary Cheney fired him, a move I believe was more about Cheney’s asserting civilian control over the military than about Dugan’s allegedly overstepping his bounds with the media.
Meanwhile, Saddam had massed his troops at the Kuwait border, including his elite Republican Guard. A nervous consensus evolved that Saddam was bluffing. At that point, we were still sharing intelligence with Iraq and selling them arms. On July 31, General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of US Central Command and, under Goldwater-Nichols, the general responsible for running any military operations in and around Iraq, briefed the Joint Chiefs of Staff, including General Colin Powell, in “the tank,” the JCS’s secure briefing room in the Pentagon. He said that there were a lot of reasons for Saddam Hussein to bluff, most of them having to do with money Hussein owed Kuwait or his desire to manipulate oil prices. He concluded that the chances of Iraq invading Kuwait were “slim.”
Obviously, US intelligence hadn’t served General Schwarzkopf well in the weeks leading up to that meeting. We had an exquisite overhead capability to take digital pictures from space and beam them directly to the agencies in and around the Washington area. We had analysts who could count the precise number of tanks and artillery pieces in each formation, and we knew the Iraqi order of battle and its capabilities cold. We just were not as good at determining what Hussein intended to do with them. Schwarzkopf later said he hated the intelligence “words of estimative uncertainty” and that we almost never told him something was “certain” or “almost certain.” He heard a lot of “probably,” “probably not,” and “chances about even,” which he found particularly unhelpful. He also found it dysfunctional and less than helpful that the major intelligence agencies and the service intelligence components were all telling him different things, and no one was figuring out why they all seemed to disagree.
In 2014, when I was DNI and Russia had troops massed on the border of Eastern Ukraine, I remembered General Schwarzkopf’s complaints. We didn’t have any better insight into what was going on in Putin’s head in 2014 than we did in Hussein’s in 1990, but with the advent of social media and our expanded use of satellite imagery provided by commercial companies, we had progressed in seeing indications and providing warning of impending action. In the end, though, having such insight didn’t stop Putin from annexing Crimea in March 2014.
On August 2, 1990, two days after Schwarzkopf’s Pentagon briefing, Iraq invaded and then overran Kuwait. In less than two days, Saddam gained control and declared Kuwait the “nineteenth province” of Iraq. He parked his tank formations and his massive army along the Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia, pointed at the Saudi capital of Riyadh, less than three hundred miles away, about the driving distance from New Haven, Connecticut, to Washington, DC, with nothing but open desert in the way.
On August 3, General Schwarzkopf asked Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, the commander of the 9th Air Force and the Combined Forces Air Component commander for US Central Command, to design the coming air campaign and to work as the forward deployed commander of CENTCOM forces. He then dispatched Horner to Riyadh to receive US troops and equipment as they arrived in Saudi Arabia. My primary job in all this was to support the Air Force chief of staff as he managed the provision of Air Force resources to Schwarzkopf and Horner, so that they could defeat the Iraqis when President Bush gave the order in January 1991. Unfortunately, not everyone in the Pentagon saw it that way.
Four years later, in 1995, the Air University published a breathless account of Colonel John A. Warden III, the Air Force deputy director for warfighting concepts, and his “Checkmate” think tank in the basement of the Pentagon at the time. It described how Colonel Warden flew to Riyadh to present General Horner with the Air Force’s plan to win the war solely by using “Air Power”—a phrase always capitalized—without the need of any other military services. Horner unceremoniously dispatched Warden back to Washington but kept some of his staff who’d made the trip, including Lieutenant Colonel Dave Deptula, who ended up doing a lot of the real planning for Desert Storm when US and coalition forces routed the Iraqis the following January. I got to know and respect Dave as he advanced through the ranks ultimately to lieutenant general, and I often sought his opinion when intelligence and Air Force operations crossed paths.
On August 9, before Colonel Warden’s ill-fated attempt to lecture General Horner in Riyadh, Warden’s boss, Major General Minter Alexander, called and asked me to break off some of my intelligence staff, who were quite busy trying to keep the Air Force leadership current on the daily situation, and send them down to Warden in “Checkmate” to help him pick targets in Iraq. I’d been in contact with General Horner’s intelligence chief, and I knew Horner had no idea that the Pentagon staff were designing an air campaign. I don’t remember the specific words I used on the phone with Minter, but having had the experience of serving in Korea, at Pacific Command, and at Strategic Air Command, as well as having the ability to imagine how General Livsey would have reacted if a staff officer from the Pentagon basement showed up in Seoul to give him a battle plan for defeating North Korea without having to worry about ground forces, I told Minter in my politest two-star general peer-to-peer phrasing that I believed General Horner was in charge of the air war and that, regardless, my staff wasn’t configured to comply with his request.
Minter then appealed to the Air Force vice chief of staff, four-star general Mike Loh, who tried to force my hand. I believed they were way out of their lane and were not helping the efforts of Schwarzkopf and Horner, who actually had to fight the war. So I didn’t budge. General Loh, along with all the Air Power advocates, labeled me as recalcitrant, someone who just didn’t “get it.” The Air University account goes much further in excoriating me as an Air Power nonbeliever. My telephone conversation with Minter Alexander is scripted over three pages of direct quotes, which I informed the Air University commander were all fabricated, but he printed them anyway. Shortly after the book came out, I received a classy note of apology from Minter Alexander.
Obviously, this matter still sticks in my craw, but I’m writing about all of this because so much of the doctrinal infighting impacted me years down the road. The book correctly points out that Colonel Warden in the Pentagon had much better imagery intelligence than General Horner did in Riyadh. We had these great digital pictures in Washington, but to get them to the American forces in and around Kuwait, we had to print them out and fly them to the war zone on a courier plane, literally halfway around the world. We still had the same problem we’d faced in Vietnam—intelligence arriving too late to be useful. It was a great frustration at the time.
Also, in many ways the Air Force’s resistance to the reforms dictated by the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 foreshadowed the opposition some intelligence agencies—particularly the CIA—would have for the measures dictated by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which created the director of national intelligence. There are obvious differences between those two landmark laws, but both ask the individual elements (military branches or intelligence agencies) to subordinate their primacy to the larger enterprise. Four years after Goldwater-Nichols, powerful figures within the Air Force still resisted its role as force provider to the combatant commanders and were fighting a rearguard bureaucratic insurgency. Similarly, when I became DNI five and a half years after legislation to reform the IC was enacted, some influential voices within the intelligence agencies were still exhibiting passive-aggressive opposition to the notion that their component missions were part of the larger intelligence enterprise.
On October 30, 1990, General Tony McPeak became Air Force chief of staff. McPeak supported Goldwater-Nichols and General Schwarzkopf’s authority, through General Horner, to execute operations in the Central Command area of authority—which effectively ended the fight over the Air Power plan. But he also was a dyed-in-the-wool fighter pilot who had a reputation for disdain for the intelligence profe
ssion and those who engaged in it, a conviction shaped by his combat experience in Vietnam, when he believed intelligence professionals had held back information that pilots needed to safely and effectively conduct their missions. As the senior intelligence officer of the Air Force staff, I was in McPeak’s direct line of sight and, potentially, line of fire. I told Sue that we’d had a pretty good run, and that achieving the rank of major general was a respectable accomplishment.
On January 17, 1991, with doctrinal disputes behind us, General Schwarzkopf’s forces switched from Desert Shield to Desert Storm and went on the offensive. For the next five weeks, Air Force and Navy jets bombarded the Iraqi forces, quickly destroying their air and antiair capabilities and then command and control. Under General Horner’s direction, coalition forces flew unopposed bomb runs on Iraqi Army positions. The only seemingly difficult task in the air war was trying to find the camouflaged, mobile Scud-missile launchers in the desert before they could fire toward Israel or Saudi Arabia. Still, everyone braced for a brutal ground confrontation with the massive numbers of supposedly elite Iraqi troops in Kuwait and along the border of Saudi Arabia. We particularly were concerned that the Iraqis would use their stockpiles of chemical weapons on the invading coalition troops.
On February 24, after feinting a Marine Corps amphibious assault into Kuwait City from the Persian Gulf, coalition forces swept into Kuwait and Iraq from Saudi Arabia. US Army M1A1 tanks and Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt close-air-support jets dominated Iraqi armor. Iraqi forces put up almost no resistance, either laying down their arms and surrendering or running before the fight reached them. Schwarzkopf said he could have driven straight to Baghdad if he had been ordered to, but we stopped after liberating Kuwait, ending the ground assault just a hundred hours after it started.
Facts and Fears Page 8