Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War

by Gates, Robert M

  I ended my prepared statement at the hearing with a very personal one:

  I have eight months remaining in this position. We continue to find ourselves divided over the path forward in Iraq.… It was my hope sixteen months ago that I could help find a bipartisan path forward in our Iraq policy that would sustain a gradually much lower—but still adequate and necessary—level of commitment beyond this administration in Iraq [and] that would ensure [Iraq] is an ally against extremists and [able to] govern and defend itself. Now I fear that understandable frustration over slow progress and dismay over sacrifices already made may result in decisions that are gratifying in the short term but very costly to us in the long term. We were attacked at home in 2001 from Afghanistan and are at war in Afghanistan today in no small measure because of mistakes we made—mistakes I, among others, made—in the endgame of the anti-Soviet war there. If we get the endgame wrong in Iraq, I predict the consequences will be far worse.

  My comments notwithstanding, keeping the temperature down did not mean Iraq had disappeared as a campaign issue. After the president had spoken and Petraeus, Crocker, Mullen, and I had testified, Obama said, “There is no end in sight under the Bush policy. It is time to bring this war in Iraq to a close.” And Hillary Clinton asserted, “It’s time for the president to answer the question being asked of him: In the wake of the failed surge, what is the endgame in Iraq?”

  A critical element of the “endgame” was the negotiation of a Strategic Framework Agreement (SFA) and Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the Iraqi government. A successful SOFA—the legal basis for a continuing U.S. troop presence—negotiation was required during 2008 because at the end of the year the UN Security Council resolution authorizing our military presence in Iraq would expire. The Iraqis weren’t interested in extending, or “rolling over,” the resolution. Our negotiating team was led by Rice, Crocker, Brett McGurk of the NSC staff, and David Satterfield from State. Defense was represented on the team, and there was close coordination with both the department and Petraeus and his staff, but the military was more than happy to let State and the civilians do the heavy lifting in the negotiations. And it was heavy lifting. The obstacles to success were daunting, in substantial part because of the Iraqi political environment and strong opposition to any continuing U.S. presence in several quarters—above all, from the Iranian-supported Shia. Everyone soon realized the plan to sign the agreements on July 31 was completely unrealistic.

  The forces agreement was clearly the more problematic, and I suggested that the more it looked like similar SOFA agreements we had with other countries, the more acceptable it would be to the Iraqis. I proposed we tell the Iraqis to talk to the South Koreans and Japanese about their experience with the SOFAs we had with them. That was a monumentally bad idea. Representatives of those countries shared with the Iraqis their frustrations about U.S. troops breaking local laws. Immunities for contractors would be difficult given the Iraqis’ very unhappy experience with them. In a videoconference on February 5 with Mullen, Petraeus, Fallon, Edelman, and others, I set out the Defense Department priorities for the negotiations. Most important would be operational freedom of action (including legal protection for our troops) and keeping detainees (violent extremists we believed the Iraqis might release). “We could compromise on” contractors. The next day Edelman quoted Crocker as saying, with respect to protections for contractors, “This is radioactive and will blow up the SOFA.”

  By early summer, all avenues to our military remaining in Iraq seemed radioactive. I heard repeatedly that the SOFA “wasn’t going to happen this year,” the Iraqis hated the Coalition Provisional Authority decrees from 2003, and they hated the UN Security Council resolution. Without one of the three, we had no legal basis for our military remaining in Iraq after December 2008. Despite all the problems, by July 2008 both sides concurred we were close to agreement. The agreement would require us to withdraw our combat forces from Iraqi cities by mid-2009, with the timing of total withdrawal to be negotiated between Maliki and the president. Edelman told me, “This is as good as it is going to get,” and Odierno said it was “enough to do the job.”

  In September, jurisdiction over Americans in uniform who broke Iraqi laws became an issue, as we tried to find the balance between assuring our troops that they would never end up at the mercy of Iraqi courts and assuring Iraqis that if someone committed a horrible crime, he could be tried in Iraq. In my last videoconference with Petraeus as commander in Iraq on September 9, I told him that Defense Department lawyers “are gagging” over the contemplated compromise and worried that it could impact other SOFA agreements elsewhere. Here, too, we found a compromise we could live with.

  Petraeus told me an Iranian brigadier general had been arrested in Iraq for bribing legislators with $250,000 each to vote against the SOFA. Later in the fall, we learned that the head of the Iranian Quds Force, Major General Qassem Suleimani, had told President Talabani that Iraq should not sign any agreement with Bush.

  The same day I talked to Petraeus, September 9, the president announced that another 8,000 troops would come home by February 2009 thanks to the continuing decline in violence. The next day Mike Mullen and I testified before Congress. I said that we had now entered the endgame in Iraq and it was important to get that right. I urged our political leaders to be cautious and flexible and take into account the advice of our senior commanders and military leaders. I said “to keep in mind that we should expect to be involved in Iraq for years to come, although in changing and increasingly limited ways.”

  On September 16, 2008, Ray Odierno took Petraeus’s place as commander of the multinational force in Iraq. Immediately before the change of command ceremony, I promoted Ray to full general, a ceremony carried out in the headquarters videoconference room at Al-Faw palace in Baghdad so his wife and family could watch at the Pentagon in the middle of the night. I Velcroed Odierno’s four-star patch onto the front of his fatigues and then, out of the corner of my eye, saw him discreetly remove the patch and re-Velcro it right side up.

  While in Iraq for the change of command, I met with Maliki. He expressed his worry that if we were unable to reach agreement on the SOFA and the U.S. forces left, “the situation here would be very complicated. We need American forces here, at least for a while. If they leave, we lose all of our successes and accomplishments.” He said that it was in Iraq’s interest to have U.S. forces in Iraq and “to have a long-term relationship.” In fact, all the key Iraqi leaders wanted the agreements; it was just that no one wanted to be the first to say so publicly.

  On November 3, the day before the U.S. presidential election, I attended a meeting at the White House to try to wrap up the agreements. The Iraqis had made 120 suggested changes, of which there were three or four important issues. We made some adjustments and a few days later sent the agreement to the Iraqis one last time. The negotiating process was over as far as the United States was concerned. Both the Strategic Framework Agreement and the Status of Forces Agreement were signed on November 17, 2008, by Ambassador Crocker and Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari in Baghdad. The SOFA required U.S. combat forces to withdraw from all Iraqi cities and villages by June 30, 2009, and for the removal of all U.S. forces by December 31, 2011. In Baghdad, on December 14, 2008, President Bush and Prime Minister Maliki signed the agreements.

  As I watched the signing ceremony on television, I felt a great sense of relief. Considering the dire circumstances we faced in Iraq at the end of 2006, we had come a long way. The security situation in Iraq had improved dramatically, and while Iraqi politics were messy, and would remain that way, the factions were debating their differences, not shooting at one another. The path toward ending U.S. military involvement in Iraq was set, but thanks to the agreements, we would have three more years to help stabilize the country and work with its military. The end of the U.S. military combat role in Iraq would not be a calamitous failure or defeat but rather a handover to a democratically elected government with a U.S.-t
rained military. In December 2008 and thereafter, I believed we should and would have a residual military presence in Iraq after the end of 2011 to partner with the Iraqis in counterterrorism and in training their forces, even though that would require a follow-on agreement with the Iraqis.

  Given how difficult the negotiations on the SOFA had been in 2008, and the near failure then of the Iraqi legislature to approve it, I should have been more realistic about the challenges we would face in getting Iraqi approval for a post-2011 U.S. military presence. For many Iraqis, we would always be seen as invaders and occupiers, not as liberators. Like us or not, though, we had given them a much different—and brighter—future, though at a very high cost for Iraqis and for Americans.

  Inwardly, I was also proud of what had been accomplished on the battlefield that was Washington, D.C., since January 2007. Petraeus had told me the surge needed to last until January 2008; the last surge troops left Iraq in July 2008. Every effort by Congress to reverse or limit the surge, or to accelerate the rate of withdrawal, or to impose conditions on the Iraqis (and the president) had failed.

  As the saying goes, success has many fathers, and that is certainly true of the turnaround in Iraq in 2007–8. Among them were the president, for his courageous shift in strategy and the surge; our military commanders and troops, whose skill, steadfastness, and sacrifice made success possible; U.S. civilian officials, including above all Ambassador Ryan Crocker; the Republican minority in the Senate, who, under great pressure, resisted all attempts to thwart what we were trying to do; and the sheikhs of Anbar and the many other Iraqis who at great risk and sacrifice worked to bring a better future to their country.

  A new president would not confront significant problems in Iraq, at least for several years. But he would face a deteriorating war in Afghanistan. As Mike Mullen had testified on September 10, we were not winning in Afghanistan, “but I am convinced we can.” Barack Obama assumed the presidency committed publicly to do just that.

  CHAPTER 7

  One Damn Thing After Another

  A mid two major wars and myriad other national security challenges, I also had to deal with countless institutional issues at the Defense Department. Some were deadly serious and required dramatic actions; some were nuisances; some were mildly amusing. Many had significant political ramifications.

  THE AIR FORCE

  During the Bush administration, the Air Force, the branch of the military in which I had served briefly as a junior officer, was one of my biggest headaches. I thought the service did a superb job in Iraq and Afghanistan providing close air support, medevac, and transport as well as ordnance (IED) disposal and performing other important and often dangerous tasks on the ground. Earlier, I described my frustration in trying to get the Air Force leadership to provide more drones for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance use in the wars. But there were other problems as well.

  The most significant related to the Air Force’s responsibility for our nuclear-armed bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles. On August 30, 2007, a B-52 bomber took off from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota at 8:40 a.m. carrying six air-launched cruise missiles, each armed with a nuclear weapon capable of explosive power more than ten times that of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The plane landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana at 11:23 a.m. It was parked there without any of the stringent security measures required for such weapons. At ten that evening, a member of the munitions crew at Barksdale discovered that the warheads were not mock training rounds but actual nuclear weapons that had been loaded in error. Only then was the incident reported to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) as a “Bent Spear” event—“an incident involving nuclear weapons, warheads, components or vehicles transporting nuclear material of significant interest.” Air Force chief of staff General Mike Moseley reported the incident to me on August 31. I was incredulous at such a monumental screw-up. I immediately called Hadley and the president to inform them. With a justified edge to his voice, Bush told me to get to the bottom of this mistake and to keep him informed. The initial incident report from the NMCC stated, “No press interest anticipated.” Wrong.

  The Air Force immediately conducted an inventory to ensure that all its other nuclear weapons were accounted for, then launched an investigation. On October 19, Secretary of the Air Force Michael Wynne announced its findings, among them: “There has been an erosion of adherence to weapons-handling standards at Minot Air Force Base and at Barksdale Air Force Base.” The Air Force relieved three colonels and four senior noncommissioned officers of their commands or positions. As with the outpatient treatment scandal at Walter Reed, I wondered why the disciplinary measures had been limited solely to midlevel officers and whether ultimate responsibility for that “erosion” belonged higher up the chain of command. Accordingly, I asked former Air Force chief of staff General Larry Welch (retired), a member of the Defense Science Board (an advisory board appointed by the president), to lead a board panel to study the incident as part of a broader examination of procedures and policies for handling nuclear weapons. He briefed his conclusions to the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 12, 2008: “The military units responsible for handling the bombs are not properly inspected and, as a result, may not be ready to perform their missions.… If you look at all the areas and all the ways that we have to store and handle these weapons in order to perform the mission, it just requires, we believe, more resources and more attention than they’re getting.” Structural changes combining nuclear and nonnuclear organizations had produced “markedly reduced levels of leadership whose daily focus is the nuclear enterprise and a general devaluation of the nuclear mission and those who perform the mission.” At no time was the public in danger from the weapons—even had the plane crashed—but Welch’s conclusions pointed to serious problems in the Air Force’s management of its nuclear responsibilities.

  I allowed the Air Force to determine what disciplinary measures and organizational changes were needed as a result of this incident. I should have reacted more forcefully when I received Welch’s report.

  On March 21, five weeks after Welch’s testimony, I was informed that two days earlier a Taiwanese military officer had told his U.S. security assistance contact that four ICBM warheads had been discovered in a shipment the Taiwanese had received sometime before. U.S. military representatives immediately inspected the shipment and found four Minuteman ICBM nose cones (“forward assemblies”) with associated electronics, and took custody of the container. (There were no nuclear weapons in the shipment.) The container was mislabeled, carrying the stock number for batteries. In August 2006, the Taiwanese had placed an order for U.S. military helicopter batteries, and when the shipment was received, it was placed in storage without being opened. When it was opened nearly two years later, the Taiwanese recognized the missile nose cones and contacted U.S. authorities.

  Coming on the heels of the Bent Spear incident, it was clear that all hell was going to break loose. My staff and the multiple organizations in the Pentagon involved worked through the weekend trying to determine what had happened. I called the leadership of the Armed Services and Appropriations Committees on the twenty-fourth to inform them, and the Chinese ambassador was put in the picture by Defense at five p.m. the same day. We were very sensitive to the possibility that our mistake would be misconstrued or misinterpreted by the Chinese, and I wanted to do everything possible to underscore that it was a mistake, not a covert scheme to arm Taiwan with nuclear weapons. Throughout, I wanted complete transparency.

  I had not pursued General Welch’s concerns aggressively enough initially, and I would not make that mistake a second time. Because all our bombers carrying nuclear weapons and all our ICBMs are the responsibility of the Air Force, I wanted an independent non–Air Force officer to lead the inquiry. And so, I asked Admiral Kirkland Donald, the head of the Navy’s nuclear programs, to “conduct an investigation into the facts and circumstances surrounding the accountability f
or, and shipment of, sensitive missile components provided to the Government of Taiwan on or around August 2006.” I gave the admiral a sweeping mandate for the investigation and asked him for recommendations not only in terms of improvements in policies and procedures but also in terms of holding “accountable anyone at any level … who failed to perform his or her duties and responsibilities properly.” I asked for his report as soon as possible but in no more than sixty days. That same day I directed the secretaries of the Air Force and Navy and the director of the Defense Logistics Agency (the support organization that had handled the shipment to Taiwan) to inventory all nuclear and nuclear-related materials held by their respective departments.

  Admiral Donald gave me his preliminary report on April 15, reporting that nothing nefarious had taken place and that there was no evidence the Taiwanese had accessed or tampered with the nose cones. I asked him whether the standards of accountability had become lax over time. I recalled for him, and he heard me out patiently, that however briefly, I had been in the Strategic Air Command in the 1960s—General Curtis LeMay’s SAC—when discipline and accountability standards were very high. At any SAC bomber or missile base at any time in those days, a planeload of inspectors from SAC headquarters in Omaha might arrive without prior notice and take the unit apart piece by piece. Failure to pass one of these Operational Readiness Inspections almost always led to the unit commander being fired. It seemed to me, I told Donald, that those standards were no longer maintained in the Air Force nuclear mission. Accompanied by General Cartwright, I briefed the president on Donald’s preliminary conclusions the next day.