The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  “General Welch was freelancing,” Cheney said. “He was not speaking for the department. He was obviously up there on his own hook, so to speak.”

  Cheney was asked if he accepted that sort of action.

  “No, I’m not happy with it, frankly,” Cheney added, his voice steady.

  “I think it’s inappropriate for a uniformed officer to be in a position where he’s in fact negotiating an arrangement. I have not had an opportunity yet to talk to him about it. I’ve been over at the White House all morning. I will have the opportunity to discuss it with him. I’ll make known to him my displeasure. Everybody’s entitled to one mistake.”

  Wilson, the Post reporter who had written the story, said now to Cheney that Welch had “made very clear he was not preempting you or the President.”

  “Good,” Cheney replied. “Well, I’m sure he’ll make that clear when he talks to me about it.” There was laughter in the press room.

  Welch was stunned. One of the first rules they taught in any beginning military leadership course was that you praised subordinates in public and rebuked them in private. Nothing could be more humiliating or demoralizing than a public scolding. This reprimand had been broadcast to the entire world.

  The general took several minutes to compose himself, then walked out of his office and down one flight of stairs to the Secretary’s suite.

  “I am not a freelancer,” Welch said, standing before Cheney. “I have never been a freelancer. I support the administration’s position and have worked harder than anybody in this town to make it come out the way the administration wants it to.”

  Cheney said the issue was closed.

  Welch saw that he was not going to get an apology. Cheney seemed to want to smooth the issue over. Maybe, Welch thought, Cheney could not afford to backtrack. Welch did not mention the explicit permission he had received from both Taft and Scowcroft. After all, it had been his own idea to go to Congress; and he was senior enough to take responsibility for his actions, no matter who had approved them.

  Welch tried to convince Cheney that he could count on the military. The greatest support he would get in the building would come from the military leadership.

  Cheney did not want to discuss it further.

  • • •

  Downstairs in the Chairman’s office, Crowe was almost beside himself. He had had no advance warning that the new Secretary was going to dress down one of the chiefs publicly. Cheney had not discussed it with him.

  Crowe knew this was going to hurt. He had been trying to get the chiefs to be more open, more a part of the defense debate. Now this public lashing would drive them even further away from dealing with the Congress and the press.

  Pitiful, Crowe said to himself. In his first week in office, a new Secretary who has never served in the military, never served on any of the armed services committees, publicly chastises a senior officer? Crowe had never heard anything like it. Clearly, Cheney felt a need to establish his machismo, to lay down a marker that he was the number-one guy around the building. Cheney also was pandering to the media, where the rebuke would surely be given big play.

  Late that afternoon, Crowe and Cheney had their daily private meeting.

  “I hope that blast didn’t cause you a problem,” Cheney said. He added that Welch had not denied going to the Congress.

  Crowe had decided it would be best to speak frankly. “I just plain disagree with you, Mr. Secretary,” he began. “It’s not right.” Crowe explained the seriousness of the matter. Cheney effectively had accused Welch of willful disobedience of an order, which was a violation of a military officer’s oath. “You picked the wrong guy. If you want a chief to slap down, I can give you plenty.” Welch, Crowe explained, was the most quiet, buttoned-down and inhibited service chief. In the Tank, the second-floor Pentagon conference room where the Joint Chiefs of Staff hold their regular meetings, he was a listener. And of all the chiefs he was the most flexible and “purple,” Crowe said, using the Pentagon term for officers open to points of view outside that of their own service—“purple” referring to a combination of all the service uniform colors.

  Crowe went further. For Cheney to get in a public spat with one of the chiefs was below his dignity as Secretary. By trying to demonstrate his authority in such a public fashion, Cheney had suggested that he himself was uncertain of it.

  Cheney seemed a little chastened, Crowe thought, but very calm as he listened to his Chairman rake him over the coals.

  As Crowe expected, the story made a splash in the media. Most major newspapers carried it on page one, with headlines reporting Cheney “assails,” “rebukes” and “scolds” the Air Force chief.

  Within the military, it was soon known as the shot heard round the world. Officers traded analyses of what it foreshadowed for the military’s fortunes under Cheney, as well as for the Air Force and for Welch himself. Welch was considered one of the leading contenders to succeed Crowe.

  Welch went deep into his shadow. He said nothing publicly, but he felt it necessary to speak to the active-duty four-star Air Force generals. A veteran of 137 combat missions in Vietnam, he told one of the generals, “I’ve been shot at by professionals and I’m still here. So being shot at by an amateur is not likely to cause me any pain.”

  The rebuke also reverberated among retired Air Force generals, a tight-knit group that kept tabs on Pentagon politics. Two retired four-stars told Welch they were going to make a big stink. They planned to go to Congress and get some of the Air Force’s friends there to demand a public apology from Cheney. Both had access to influential congressmen and the media.

  Welch told them not to do it. A feud between the Air Force and the Secretary of Defense would be bad for everyone. Suppose they succeeded in making a big deal of it—how could that be to the advantage of the Air Force? By reducing the effectiveness of the Secretary of Defense? They had to be kidding, Welch thought. If Cheney needed this kind of small victory to be effective, let him have it.

  Welch said that he would resign his office at once if the two retirees did anything privately or publicly. They never did.

  Within several days of the rebuke, two former secretaries of Defense suggested to Cheney that he had taken the wrong course. Harold Brown, Secretary during the Carter administration, told Cheney that saving face was important in the service cultures, and that he should take care not to alienate the military.

  James Schlesinger, who had run the Pentagon under Nixon and Ford, told Cheney that he was in no danger of a military coup, and that the senior military officers would be his crucial supporters when he tried to get his programs and budgets approved. They knew how the system worked, and could implement or sabotage the Secretary’s agenda. Overall, Schlesinger added, the problem with the military was not that the senior officers were uncontrollable, but the opposite. After a lifetime of taking orders, generals and admirals were, if anything, too compliant.

  Representative Les Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who was Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, felt that he had played a role in selling Welch on the idea of a missile compromise in the first place. Several days after the rebuke, Aspin saw Cheney at a breakfast and took the Secretary aside.

  “Jesus Christ, Dick,” Aspin said, “Welch wasn’t doing anything like that, and he always made it clear it was your decision.”

  Cheney responded with a knowing half-smile. “It was useful to do that,” he said.

  “Okay,” replied Aspin, “I understand that agenda.”

  * * *

  7

  * * *

  BY THE TIME CHENEY HAD been in office about a month, Crowe was beginning to see how the inner councils of national security decision making were going to work under Bush, and he wasn’t happy. Much of the discussion at National Security Council (NSC) meetings was political. Decisions were made based on their likely impact on the Congress, the media and public opinion, and the focus was on managing the reaction. Crowe had serious doubts that these should be
the main criteria for military and foreign-policy decisions.

  Jim Baker seemed to think being Secretary of State was like running a big political campaign: Bush versus Gorbachev. Baker was looking for some dramatic arms control initiative to upstage the Soviets and make Bush more popular.

  Another problem with NSC meetings was Brent Scowcroft’s habit of engaging in prolonged academic discussions, picking through every angle. To Crowe, these were often a tedious waste of time. Bush himself brought one of these rambling talks to an abrupt end one day, remarking, “This subject is dying on its feet. Let’s adjourn.”

  “Amen,” Crowe said under his breath.

  For all the impressiveness of his title, Crowe knew he occupied a tenuous position in the government, and it frustrated him. By law he was the principal military adviser to the President, Secretary of Defense and NSC, but only an adviser. He commanded no military forces, and technically neither the Chairman nor the four service chiefs were even in the chain of command, which ran from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the CINCs of the ten major warfighting commands. The Chairman directly oversaw only the 1,600 desk-bound officers, drawn from all four services, of the Pentagon-based Joint Staff. Any power he possessed was based almost entirely on his relationships with the President and the Secretary of Defense.

  A January 14, 1987, memo signed by President Reagan effectively had inserted Crowe into the chain of command, directing that “communications between the President and the Secretary of Defense” and the ten CINCs “be transmitted through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” But advice and communications could be pretty thin gruel in a business where real command is the name of the game.

  The specific, day-to-day demands of the job were feeling more burdensome than ever. Capitol Hill was sometimes a downright ordeal. Presenting the annual budget to the key committees, he had to sit for hours and listen while congressman after congressman postured on pet issues. At the end of one of these hearings, Crowe whispered to one of his aides, “I’m not going to go through this one more time.” He went to Cheney the next day and said he had made a final decision to retire.

  Crowe realized that if Bush pulled out all the stops and ordered him to stay, he might have no choice. He had to find a way to be firm in telling the President, without appearing to reject Bush or his administration.

  Finally, he went to the White House and sat down with Bush. After explaining that he and his wife, Shirley, together had made the decision to leave, Crowe told Bush, “I’m going to regret this decision on occasion. I’m confident of that. But I’ll tell you, fifty percent of my job, or sixty percent, I won’t miss for five minutes.”

  Crowe had to finish out the spring and summer of 1989 before his term expired, and there were more than a few problems demanding his attention. Panama was near the top of the list. General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the strongman who ran the country, was a major irritant. Suspected of involvement in illegal drug trafficking, Noriega ran a notoriously corrupt regime. Although he once had been one of the CIA’s key Latin American assets, the administration now viewed him as an outlaw and an enemy of U.S. interests. With the strategically important Panama Canal scheduled to pass from U.S. to Panamanian control at the end of the century, and 12,000 American military personnel and many of their families living in Panama, the Bush administration wanted Noriega out.

  Crowe knew that the CINC responsible for Panama (known as CINCSOUTH), Army General Frederick F. Woerner, Jr., of the Southern Command, had a reputation as a wimp. Crowe liked and respected him, but he saw that Woerner, who’d never served in a senior Pentagon post, didn’t understand Washington politics. The new assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Bernard W. Aronson, was leading an effort to come down harder on Noriega, perhaps with military force if necessary, and Woerner was resistant. Woerner was opposed to aggressive U.S. military intervention in Latin America. Shortly after Bush’s inauguration, Woerner had publicly stated there was a policy vacuum in Washington on Panama. Scowcroft himself had scolded Woerner, saying, “I want you to know the President was furious with your speech.”

  A few members of Congress who visited Panama to observe the May 7, 1989, elections there thought Woerner was almost pacifistic, allowing Noriega to threaten Americans. Southern Command staff people joked that they answered the phone in Woerner’s headquarters, “Wimp Command.” The legislators were urging Bush to fire him.

  Crowe was present at a White House meeting when Scowcroft brought up the complaints.

  “Gee whiz, Brent,” Bush said, “if we changed everyone the congressmen complained of, I’d be out of a job in a week.”

  Everyone at the meeting laughed. Crowe was glad to see that Woerner’s job seemed safe for the moment. Later, Crowe had what he considered a real come-to-Jesus discussion with Woerner, in which he explained the importance of assuaging visiting congressmen.

  On Wednesday, May 10, Crowe was watching the evening television reports from Panama. Three days earlier, Noriega’s handpicked candidates had been soundly defeated, but he had nullified the election. The opposition candidates who’d had victory stolen out from under them had taken to the Via España in Panama City in a protest demonstration of honking cars that drew thousands. It was a rare bold action by the usually timid Noriega opposition. “Down with the pineapple,” the protesters shouted in Spanish, using a nickname that referred to Noriega’s acne-pocked face.

  In response, the so-called Dignity Battalions (or Digbats, as they were known in the Pentagon), paramilitary pro-Noriega units, attacked the opposition candidates.

  Opposition presidential candidate Guillermo Endara, 52, a 240-pound man with the benign face of an overfed boy, was hit in the forehead with an iron bar wielded by one of the members of the Digbats. The bodyguard of Guillermo “Billy” Ford, the opposition’s second vice presidential candidate, was shot dead. Ford himself was shown on television as he was struck by a fist and then another. He staggered out of his car and stumbled along the sidewalk. Blood covered his eyes and soaked his white shirt. As another man came up and swiped at him with a pipe, Ford struck out blindly with his arms.

  This film, and one of Endara in the hospital, ran again and again on American television. The image of the white-haired Ford, robbed of his elected post, bloodied and temporarily blinded, became an instant symbol of the state of lawlessness and chaos in Panama.

  The televised coverage jolted Crowe, who went to the Pentagon that evening in civilian clothes. Five inconclusive reports of harassment of U.S. servicemen in Panama had already been received. The Chairman soon received word that he was to be at the White House later that night for a meeting with President Bush and the rest of the national security team.

  Crowe was fed up with Panama. Nothing had worked—not the Justice Department’s drug indictments of Noriega in 1988, not the aborted negotiation to drop the indictments if Noriega would give up power, not economic sanctions and not CIA covert action designed to unseat Noriega. Crowe had had a real problem with the now departed Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s truculent assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, who had virtually called him a coward when Crowe had balked at using the military to throw Noriega out.

  Crowe was a skeptic about all uses of force, not just in Panama. He knew presidents sometimes had ambitious, extravagant ideas about the goals they could achieve with military power. War, to Crowe’s mind, was a nasty, unpredictable affair, not something to be treated as just another foreign-policy tool. He favored limited applications of force, small steps taken in pursuit of well-defined, achievable goals. The first serious military operation of his tenure, the April 1986 bombing of Libya, had taken just minutes to carry off and had smoothly achieved its goal of scaring Qaddafi back into his tent. Crowe had backed the 1987 decision to use the U.S. Navy to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, a mission with the limited, specific goal of protecting the free flow of oil shipments.

  The goals in Panama were obvious: protection of
U.S. citizens and interests, and installation of a friendly, democratic government. The question was by what means.

  In April 1988, Crowe had approved a detailed examination of the secret contingency plans, called ELABORATE MAZE, that the Joint Staff had on the shelf in case the military had to be used in Panama. Both Crowe and Woerner felt the ELABORATE MAZE plans were unsatisfactory because they did not reflect the full range of possible scenarios.

  He had had Woerner develop a new series of plans for Panama. One benefit would be to demonstrate to Elliott Abrams and the State Department that the Pentagon was ready.

  The new plans had been given the overall codename PRAYER BOOK, though each had its own secret name:

  POST TIME was a plan for the United States to unilaterally defend the Panama Canal in time of crisis by placing forces along its route so it could continue to operate. Crucial points like the locks and Madden Dam, a key water and power source for the canal, would be secured with military forces.

  KLONDIKE KEY was called a “non-permissive NEO,” meaning a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation conducted without the permission of the host country. It was a massive plan to take control of Panama City and use military and civilian aircraft, including aircraft carriers with helicopters aboard, to remove U.S. citizens. Because of the large number of U.S. noncombatants in Panama, many senior military experts felt this was too unwieldy a task to be carried off. But events in the Middle East had put everyone in the Reagan administration, including the President, on guard about possible hostage taking. So the plan was drawn up despite the doubts.

  BLIND LOGIC was a much smaller plan to provide military specialists with civil affairs skills to assist the Panamanians in setting up a new government. This plan was to be executed only in the event a new civilian government requested assistance.