by Bob Woodward
It was not only unclear what to bomb, he said, but he could not guarantee whose side the bombing would help. These were captured Philippine air bases, so there would be both rebels and loyalists all around. The United States would wind up killing some Filipinos. If we kill Filipinos, Powell said, no one in the Philippines will forgive us.
Anti-Americanism was always simmering just beneath the surface in that nation of 40 million people, so sensitive about its colonial past. Powell could even envision Mrs. Aquino attending the memorial service for the dead soldiers—whether rebels or loyalists—and denouncing the United States.
“Let’s try something short of bombing,” Powell proposed. “We can’t stick our nose too far into a family fight.”
After he had expressed his views, there was a lull in the video conference. He called Cheney to explain that something stupid was about to happen that could cause big political and public relations problems for the United States. There were lots of people who had never dropped bombs before about to make a decision to do just that. Powell said he could come up with an alternative.
Cheney said do it fast. He called Air Force One directly on his secure phone and urged that they wait for Powell’s recommendation before making a decision.
Powell was still worried that their information was not good. It was probably coming from some scared kid on the scene. He began dictating an alternative, devising new rules of engagement to govern the behavior and responses of U.S. pilots. He laid out the following guidelines:
First rule: the U.S. pilots were to fly over the captured air bases and to demonstrate extreme hostile intent—in other words, to buzz the shit out of the rebel T-28s on the ground.
Second, if the T-28s or other rebel aircraft began to taxi on the runway, the U.S. pilots were to shoot in front of them—the classic warning shot across the bow.
Third, if at any point the rebels broke ground from the runway in a takeoff, the U.S. pilots were then to shoot the planes down.
Powell believed this would achieve the same purpose as Aquino’s request: deter rebel aircraft.
General Herres and Admiral Hardisty both agreed with his proposal.
Powell had no time to ask anyone else’s advice, as he normally would. He didn’t clear his proposal with any interagency committee and did not show it to any lawyer. Instead, he immediately passed the suggested new rules to both Cheney at home and Quayle at the White House.
Quayle had asked that a call be placed to Air Force One, so he could talk to the President and forward a recommendation.
The NSC discussion resumed. Aware that he needed to buy time for his alternatives, Powell threw out more questions and objections.
“If the purpose is to keep the planes from taking off,” Powell said, “why do we have to destroy them?” His plan had the added virtue of less risk for the U.S. forces, at least initially, he argued, and minimized the chances of anyone getting hurt. Mrs. Aquino was asking for nothing less than a radical military intervention by the United States. There were smaller steps that needed to be taken first.
“We have interests in the Philippines that go beyond Mrs. Aquino,” Powell said. Suppose the coup succeeds? We don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with its leaders even before they take power.
The group agreed to recommend Powell’s plan to the President.
When Quayle got through to Air Force One, there was some tension. Scowcroft seemed reluctant to delegate management of this crisis to Quayle. The Vice President said there was no point in re-creating the tactical picture for those who were with the President somewhere over the Atlantic, because he had it fully in hand in the White House Situation Room.
Quayle asked to speak with the President. Scowcroft said he didn’t want to wake Bush, who was getting a few precious hours of sleep before the Malta meetings with Gorbachev. But Quayle insisted, and Scowcroft finally relented and roused the President.
With Gates listening in at the White House end, Quayle told Bush: we’re giving you the unanimous recommendation that we intervene, but in this way, and he proceeded to lay out Powell’s three rules of engagement. Bush approved.
By 1:30 a.m. Washington, D.C., time, the Air Force had launched the F-4s.
A request came in from the Philippines that the United States bomb some armored personnel carriers which the Aquino government believed the rebels were using.
Powell said there was no way to tell which of the armored vehicles were being used by the loyalists and which by the rebels. They were not easily identifiable like the rebel T-28s.
Let’s wait, he recommended.
Once the F-4 sorties had begun, there were no reports of any T-28s in the air or any new rebel bombing.
At about 2:30 a.m., Quayle called President Aquino. He wanted her to restate her request for assistance so that it would appear that the United States was providing what she had asked for, although in fact it had rejected her initial plea for bombing. This would allow her to save face, while the administration—well aware that support for Aquino was sacrosanct—could still say it had complied with her request.
Mrs. Aquino came on the phone to the Situation Room.
“Hello, Mr. Vice President,” she said in a booming, confident voice.
Quayle asked if Aquino had wanted the United States to keep the rebel aircraft on the ground.
She said yes, that was what she wanted, and she reported that the F-4s had been successful so far.
“We’re with you,” Quayle told her.
White House Counsel Boyden Gray, who’d been called to the Situation Room to handle the legal implications of any decision to intervene, thought Aquino sounded more in charge than Quayle. But to Gray, the most important performance during those early morning hours was Powell’s. Not only was the Chairman back-stopping Quayle, but his had been the only voice to challenge the growing consensus that Mrs. Aquino’s initial request for bombing should be approved.
Gray knew one seemingly remote country could leap up and play a disproportionate role in the fortunes of an American president. The Iran hostage crisis of 1979–80 had pretty much ended the Carter presidency. Six years later, the secret Iran arms sales had been the lowest moment of the Reagan administration. Gray felt that Bush would be interested to hear what had transpired that evening, and who had minded the store in the President’s absence.
Powell was still concerned about the murkiness of the situation. He knew from all the past coup attempts in the Philippines that most of the military and other key players waited to see who would win before declaring themselves for either side. The Filipino military was an important political force, yet no one in the Pentagon or the White House knew where Defense Minister Fidel Ramos stood. When Powell raised that question, Quayle suggested he call Ramos directly.
Powell was not worried that Ramos would go over to the rebel side. He thought Ramos would sit out the coup—an action that might, intentionally or not, be fatal to Mrs. Aquino.
The Pentagon command center had a number of commercial phone numbers for Ramos, and Powell directed a Navy commander to pick up the commercial phone line and start dialing them systematically. It took 40 minutes to reach Ramos.
Powell wanted to make sure he did not get into a policy discussion with the defense minister. He asked Ramos for an assessment. Ramos painted a rosy picture—the rebels were a small group and the loyalists were in charge. Despite the initial bombing, Mrs. Aquino would not think of evacuating the palace, he said. She was going to stay.
Powell explained the U.S. decision to try intimidation and noted that from his end it seemed to have worked so far.
Ramos did not complain that the bombs had not been dropped as requested and said the Philippine government was appreciative of the U.S. efforts.
By about 3 a.m., everything seemed to be on track, and the discussion turned to what to tell the press and Congress. Powell took over the question, proposing they focus on the reformulated request that Quayle had prompted President Aquino to make. It was
decided that this story would be put out, instead of the fact that the United States had denied Aquino’s request to bomb the rebel planes.
At about 5:30 a.m., Quayle, Powell and the others concluded there was nothing more to do. Darkness had fallen in the Philippines and the T-28s could not operate at night.
Powell went home for two hours of sleep.
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Quayle and his chief of staff, Bill Kristol, left the White House with a few major impressions of the evening’s decision making. It had been Quayle’s first chance to act as a crisis manager for the administration, but they were both well aware that Bush had really made the final decision.
They noted how well the JCS had performed, and particularly Powell. Quayle had strongly supported Powell for Chairman over Herres, who didn’t like the Strategic Defense Initiative, a pet program of the Vice President’s. During this long night of decision making, Powell and his JCS had dominated the Defense Department input. To the surprise of both Quayle and Kristol, Powell, rather than Cheney’s civilian representative Henry Rowen, had even controlled discussion of the purely political question of what to tell the press and Congress. Most important, Powell had come up with a less aggressive but no less effective way to solve the overall problem.
Pete Williams arrived at the Pentagon at about six o’clock in the morning to see what the media fallout was going to be. After he was briefed, Williams decided to make sure no one was peddling the story that Mrs. Aquino had wanted to bomb her own people. Soon calls began coming in from reporters who were trying to piece together the story. Some already had versions emphasizing that Dan Quayle had turned in a solid, steady performance filling in for Bush as crisis manager.
The news stories built on this theme. An article published the next day in the Los Angeles Times began, “Dan Quayle’s moment in the sun came shortly after midnight,” adding, “it was a chance to shine and one that he seized with gusto.”
Powell thought the episode confirmed a few of his own notions about the use of military power.
The first was that there is no legitimate use of military force without a clear political objective—the bombing idea hadn’t met that criterion.
Second was an idea Powell felt had been best expressed by the Athenian historian Thucydides (c. 470–400 B.C.): “Of all manifestations of power, restraint impresses men most.” Powell liked the thought so much he kept it displayed beneath the glass covering his Pentagon desk.
Third was that a demonstrated willingness to use force—the tip of a rapier in someone’s face—often did the job as well as, or even more effectively than, direct force itself. A neat, surgical application of a threat could work wonders.
• • •
Powell was feeling very good after two months in the job. The pieces were falling into place as he worked his way through the daily run of problems and crises. More than anything, he was the action officer connecting the military forces to the political system, and the political system back to the forces.
And the forces were trained and ready. Powell wanted to be sure there was never a repeat of the post-Vietnam years. He himself had served two tours in Vietnam, where he’d seen some action but had worked mostly as an adviser and staff officer. In the early 1970s, after he had returned to the States, he’d felt a deep sense of rejection and inferiority as a professional Army officer. The country seemed to be erecting a barrier between itself and the military. The Pentagon was then moving to an all-volunteer force. As far as he was concerned, the decision to eliminate the draft meant the country had told the military, “We do not want to be with you guys.”
The embattled Army turned inward in the 1970s, to try to solve its problems. Powell had a close-up view of the effort. In 1971, he was assigned to work as an analyst in the office of Lieutenant General William E. DePuy, the assistant vice chief of staff of the Army. In Powell’s view, DePuy was the brain of the Army, the man who succeeded in repairing it after Vietnam. DePuy was tough and aloof, but intellectually open and willing to listen. Powell had never seen anyone who could solve a problem better. He would conceptualize it, make plans, organize to carry out the plans, supervise the execution and then encourage ruthless criticism of the project and of his own performance.
Later in the 1970s, while many in the Army were suffering from malaise, DePuy had overseen the drafting of a new how-to-fight doctrine. Training standards were established on everything from the minimum number of push-ups a soldier should be able to do to marksmanship scores to the time a platoon should take to make a river crossing. DePuy saw that an army had to perform thousands of discrete tasks, many of them boring and repetitive, but they added up to overall success or failure. The key was making sure they were performed well under the pressure of battle conditions.
Relentless training was at the heart of the new Army. To Powell, the most important result of the DePuy legacy was the creation of the National Training Center on 1,000 square miles in the Mojave Desert south of Death Valley. Beginning in 1981, Army combat units had been going there to spend two weeks straight, day and night, fighting an opposing force specially trained in Soviet tactics. The battle realism and live fire brought the soldiers and their officers as close to real war as possible. Mistakes were practically encouraged. “Learning through failure” became the unspoken motto of these rigorous exercises.
In Powell’s view, DePuy had made war on the old Army, turning it into a ready force.
Army Chief Vuono, who also had worked for DePuy, was a believer in the gospel of training. Every month he made a trip halfway across the country to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to fire up the colonels and lieutenant colonels about to take command of major Army units. Speaking to an audience of about 70, Vuono would preach for two hours without notes. “Poor training kills soldiers,” he said at one of these sessions that fall. “If the American Army is not well trained, you can’t blame it on Congress, you can’t blame it on the media, you can’t blame it on the mythical ‘they.’ It’s your fault, your fault, your fault and my fault because we didn’t do our job. We can’t have one youngster die because he or she wasn’t properly trained, because if that happens, it’s on our conscience, it’s in our hands.”
Powell felt another key to the Army’s—and the entire military’s—success was a mature understanding of public relations and politics, and how to use them. On December 13, he addressed the officers at the National Defense University in Washington, where he had studied 13 years earlier. He spoke at length about the responsibility of the modern military officer to understand the political and media components of their jobs.
The Chairman described how he worked on his relationships with reporters so they trusted him and accepted his explanations of events. “Once you’ve got all the forces moving and everything’s being taken care of by the commanders,” he said, “turn your attention to television because you can win the battle or lose the war if you don’t handle the story right.”
Politics, he said, is fundamental. “A great deal of my time is spent sensing that political environment. People sometimes say, well, Powell, he’s a political general anyway. The fact of the matter is there isn’t a general in Washington who isn’t political, not if he’s going to be successful, because that’s the nature of our system. It’s the way the Department of Defense works. It’s the way in which we formulate foreign policy. It’s the way in which we get approval for our policy.”
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14
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LIEUTENANT GENERAL KELLY was at home on Saturday evening, December 16, when the phone rang at 9:25. It was the Southern Command’s operations director, Brigadier General William Hertzog, calling from Panama City. He sounded agitated.
“We just had a guy shot,” Hertzog said. “He might be dead.”
Kelly asked for more information.
Hertzog said it was an off-duty Marine lieutenant. “We don’t know what’s happening right now. We’re still working on it.”
Fine, Kelly said. He hung up
and began dialing.
Powell was at home at Quarters 6, up in the second-floor living area, which has a study, a TV room and a small dining room. The Powells spent most of their time there, away from the spacious, formal first floor used for official entertaining. All indications from intelligence were that it was going to be a quiet weekend around the world. Alma Powell was reading. The Chairman’s private phone rang.
“General Powell,” he answered.
Kelly reported the Panama shooting.
“Shit,” Powell said. He asked Kelly to report further developments.
Soon Powell received a report that the Marine was seriously wounded, followed by a confirmed report that he had died at the hospital. His name was Lieutenant Robert Paz.
Powell called Cheney at home. “It is starting to build,” Powell said.
Kelly went to his Pentagon office and was joined by his deputy for current operations, Rear Admiral Joe Lopez, a studious, low-key destroyer officer. They formed a small Crisis Action Team of a handful of Joint Staff specialists and began work immediately in the National Military Command Center (NMCC).
There were more details on the shooting. Paz had been one of four off-duty officers, unarmed and in civilian clothes, who had gone out into Panama City for dinner and had apparently made a wrong turn onto a street called Avenue A near PDF headquarters. Their car had been stopped at a PDF roadblock. They said PDF soldiers had tried to pull them from the car and aimed weapons at them, so the driver had attempted to speed away from the roadblock. The PDF had opened fire. Another of the officers had been grazed on the ankle by a bullet. Paz was wounded and later died at Gorgas Army Hospital.
Kelly was still personally tracking all the major incidents of Americans being abused or harassed in Panama. He had never been able to put his finger on anything conclusive establishing that Noriega or the senior PDF leadership was forcing a direct confrontation. Until now, no American serviceman had been killed by the PDF. As he read through the reports, Kelly saw that the Paz incident wasn’t a clear-cut incident of unprovoked PDF aggression—the car had sped away from a legitimate roadblock, lending an element of ambiguity.