In My Time

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In My Time Page 22

by Dick Cheney


  At the next NSC meeting, on Friday, August 3, it was clear that Scowcroft was about where I was. There was simply too much at stake, he said, for us to acquiesce in the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. We needed forces in the area, and Saudi Arabia was the logical place, but, as I noted in the meeting, they had been traditionally reluctant to have an American presence on their soil.

  But that might change if the Saudis understood that our forces were essential for their protection, and Scowcroft asked me to arrange a briefing for Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the United States, on the threat to Saudi Arabia and what we could do to defend the Kingdom. A former fighter pilot, Bandar was a gregarious, larger-than-life presence in Washington, a uniquely effective ambassador known for his sense of humor, his cigars, and his friendships with everyone from George Bush to Jerry Jones, owner of the Dallas Cowboys. Scowcroft said the president wanted Bandar to have a full brief on Operations Plan 90-1002, the plan prepared by Central Command for defense of our interests in the Gulf. It hadn’t been completed and, like all war plans, would be modified by events on the ground, but it would convey to Bandar how strong a response we were contemplating.

  Later that day, before Bandar arrived, I had another private meeting with Powell. I wanted to be sure he understood that the purpose of our meeting was not to debate what the American public would accept, not to discuss strategic alternatives. “Our purpose is to give Bandar the full laydown on Op 1002,” I said. “We want him to know the scale of the military commitment the president is willing to make.”

  Bandar was skeptical during the first part of our meeting. He reminded us of the story of the time when the Shah of Iran was overthrown and President Jimmy Carter provided the unarmed squadron of F-15s to the Kingdom, humiliating the Saudis and leaving a bitter memory of America as an unreliable ally. “We’re serious this time,” I told Bandar.

  We showed him the satellite imagery of Iraqi troops now massing near the Saudi border. Then Powell briefed him on what the United States was prepared to do to defend the Kingdom, laying out divisions, tanks, artillery, ships. “How many forces are we talking about?” Bandar asked when the brief was done. One hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand, we told him. He was taken aback, but we had convinced him we meant business. This wouldn’t be a rerun of the unarmed F-15s. I emphasized that we needed to begin deploying the force as soon as possible. We didn’t have time to wait while Saddam gathered strength and planned his next move. Bandar said he would leave that night to brief King Fahd on the plan. He said he would support the deployment and convey a sense of urgency to his king.

  The president called another meeting of the NSC for Saturday, August 4, at Camp David. We met in Laurel Lodge, a gathering place built by President Nixon. The main room, overlooking the woods, has a fireplace, TV, piano, backgammon board, and bar. There is also a dining room, a small study for the president, and a conference room for larger meetings. During George H. W. Bush’s presidency, the conference table had aircraft models displayed down its center.

  General Schwarzkopf briefed on Op Plan 90-1002—which forces we would use and how long it would take them to deploy. He stressed that it would be months before we had an effective force in place, which underscored a concern shared by many of us: that Saddam would move on Saudi oil fields before we had sufficient troops in place to stop him. Over the next few days, there would be several reports that Saddam was on the verge of moving across the Saudi border. Having missed Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait, our intelligence analysts now seemed to see signs everywhere of his invading Saudi Arabia.

  It became clear pretty quickly that if the Saudis didn’t agree to accept U.S. forces, we had few options. Israel would likely have accepted our troops, but we couldn’t launch military action against an Arab country from Israeli territory. Turkey was another option, with the large U.S. base at Incirlik, but the distances involved would have provided real logistical challenges. We got word while we were at Camp David that the Saudis were uncomfortable with the idea of U.S. forces in the Kingdom. As our meeting broke up, President Bush got on the phone to speak directly to King Fahd.

  Several hours later, I was back at home in McLean when Scowcroft called to say we needed to send a team to brief the Saudis on the possible troop deployment. Scowcroft said he would lead the team and planned to take General Powell with him. “Brent, I want to lead that team,” I told him. “The deployment of forces is my responsibility, and I ought to be the one to lead it.” “Okay,” Scowcroft said. “I’ll take that to the president.” As national security advisor, Scowcroft was an honest broker. I knew that even though he may have wanted to lead the trip himself, he would faithfully carry my request to the president. He called back awhile later to say the president agreed. I should lead the team.

  I also had concerns about Powell’s participating as the senior military official. He had been hesitant in discussions of military options, and we needed to convince the Saudis to accept troops—and accept them now. I wasn’t sure Powell would deliver the strong message they needed to hear. Additionally, Powell and I tried not to be out of the country at the same time. I decided Powell would stay home, and General Schwarzkopf would provide the military brief to the Saudis.

  It wasn’t clear the Saudis would accept such a high-level team. Scowcroft worked the phones with them all afternoon and through the night. “If we send Cheney,” he told them, “the answer better be yes.” It would be a clear setback to have the U.S. secretary of defense make the trip and get turned down. Finally, on Sunday morning, they agreed to receive me.

  We departed from Andrews Air Force Base that afternoon, Sunday, August 5, on one of a fleet of 707s I used as secretary of defense. Some of these planes had been used as Air Force One by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. One of them, tail number 26000, was the plane that flew President Kennedy to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and flew his body back to Andrews Air Force Base at the end of that tragic day. After more modern aircraft were brought into the fleet to serve as Air Force One, 26000 and the other 707s were used to transport cabinet secretaries.

  Just before taking off I received word of the strong statement the president had made to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” he had said. Sitting in the cabin of the 707, I wrote notes for a presentation to King Fahd that echoed the president’s words and laid out the dangers of acquiescence. Saddam Hussein “must not be permitted to get away with his aggression,” I wrote in longhand on a yellow legal pad:

  He will grow stronger—especially if he has all that Kuwaiti wealth. He will dominate the Gulf. He will dominate OPEC. He will acquire more, deadlier armaments—the kind that will allow him to totally dominate the region. At some point we will have to deal with him—it will be easier now—together—as part of an international effort.

  During the flight, I went back to the staff section of the plane and asked the CIA briefer to make the presentation he had prepared for the king. It was technical and equivocal, and it did not convey the urgency of the situation. I scrapped that part of the brief and decided that Schwarzkopf and I would handle it. Later I had our ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, up to the cabin to brief me on what to expect. You have to be cautious, he told me. If you are too aggressive or talk about too large a force, you will scare the Saudis and they won’t commit. Also, he said, you have to be prepared to wait around in Riyadh for hours or even days. They don’t make up their minds quickly and certainly won’t make a quick decision on something this important.

  We landed in Jeddah at around 2:00 p.m. Saudi time and went to one of the king’s guest palaces. Bandar came to see me while we waited for our meeting with the king. He had undergone a transformation, no longer wearing one of the Savile Row suits he was known for in Washington, but dressed in the traditional robes of a Saudi prince. “It’s very important,” he said, “that you demonstrate to the king that you are serious.” He wanted me to make sure the king knew we would com
mit a large force and do it fast. I couldn’t seem cautious or unwilling to do what was necessary, Bandar said. I was asking the king to take a big risk by allowing U.S. forces onto Saudi soil and had to convince him the United States was a worthy ally. In other words, Bandar was giving me advice 180 degrees different from the advice I had received hours earlier on board my plane from the U.S. ambassador. I decided to go with Bandar’s guidance.

  At about 7:00 p.m. we were ushered into our meeting with the king. Crown Prince Abdullah was there, along with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal and Deputy Minister of Defense Abdul Rahman. Prince Sultan, the minister of defense and Bandar’s father, was out of the country but would return the next morning. We sat in overstuffed chairs arranged in an L shape, my team—including General Schwarzkopf, Paul Wolfowitz, Ambassador Freeman, and Bob Gates, a future secretary of defense who was then Scowcroft’s deputy—along one arm of the L and the Saudis on the other. The king and I sat in the center, with Bandar between us and slightly back to do the interpreting. Servants wearing holstered guns, carrying silver pots in one hand and tall stacks of small cups in the other, made their way around the room, pouring Arabic coffee for each of us.

  Unlike all the other meetings I’ve ever had with Saudi royalty, there was no small talk. It was clear the king wanted us to get right to the business at hand, and I began by affirming the United States’ commitment to Saudi Arabia and emphasizing the danger Saddam represented. The president was personally working to build international support for economic, diplomatic, and military action against the Iraqis, I said, but in the meantime we had to prevent an attack on Saudi Arabia. Military deterrence would be critical, I said, “as economic measures began to bite and Saddam, feeling the pain, might be tempted to lash out.”

  I asked General Schwarzkopf to brief our hosts in more detail on the forces Saddam had deployed along the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saddam was in a position to launch in one or two days, Norm said. He also briefed on what the United States was prepared to do, the F-15s that would be deployed immediately and the air and ground divisions that would follow.

  At the end of his briefing, I emphasized that we would stay as long as the Saudis wanted and leave when they wished us to, and I stressed the importance of acting quickly. If we waited for “unambiguous warning of attack,” it would be too late. The Saudis began a discussion among themselves in Arabic. Bandar stopped interpreting. I learned later that there was some feeling among the Saudis that there was no need for a quick decision, that they could afford to wait. King Fahd ended that line of argument. “The Kuwaitis waited,” he said, “and now they are living in our hotels.”

  The king turned to me. “Okay,” he said. He knew that his decision was controversial, but he did not care, he said, since Saudi Arabia itself was at stake.

  Back at the guest palace, I told Joe Lopez, my new military assistant, to connect me with the president. When the White House Situation Room was on the line, I picked up the handset of one of the dedicated U.S. government phones installed wherever the secretary of defense travels. The president came on the line from the Oval Office, with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher at his side. She had come back to Washington with him from Aspen. “Mr. President, the Saudis have agreed to accept our forces. Do we have your approval to begin the deployment?” “Yes, Dick. Go ahead.” I thanked the president, hung up, and placed a call to General Powell. “Colin, begin the deployment.” Within hours of my call, F-15 fighter jets from Langley Air Force Base arrived in Saudi Arabia and began flying combat patrols. The next day, the first elements of the Ready Brigade of the 82nd Airborne arrived; the U.S.S. Eisenhower started for the Suez Canal and the U.S.S. Independence for the Gulf of Oman. In a week the first U.S. Marines were there, then the first three prepositioned ships, then the A-10 tank-killers, three thousand men from the 101st, and eighteen F-117s. It all started happening with a single phone call.

  Defense Minister Sultan returned home that night, and we met the next morning. He wanted to be sure that it was clear to the world that Saudi Arabia had invited U.S. forces, and he wanted assurances that there would be no announcement of the deployment until our troops had arrived. I gave him my word on both counts.

  I left Jeddah and headed for Egypt, where I was scheduled to meet President Mubarak in his summer home outside Alexandria, on the Mediterranean Sea. With the summer heat and a full load of fuel, my 707 required more runway to land and take off than was available at the Alexandria airport, so we stopped in Cairo, and I got on an old King Air Beechcraft propeller plane used by the U.S. Embassy for travel around Egypt. When we landed in Alexandria, we pulled up next to a much larger plane with an Iraqi flag on the side. Saddam’s representative, his close aide Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, was making the rounds of Arab governments trying to encourage them not to go to war over Kuwait, and I had to wait in a holding room at the presidential palace while he finished meeting with President Mubarak.

  As the Iraqi representative exited one door, I entered another, and I found a very angry President Mubarak. The Iraqis had lied to him, he said. Just days before the invasion, all the Arab countries had been together for an Arab League summit, and at dinner one night, the Iraqis had made a big show of sitting next to the Kuwaitis, calling them “brother” and promising never to invade.

  When I told President Mubarak that the Saudis had agreed to accept the deployment of U.S. troops, he was ready to help. “What do you need?” he asked. I asked him for overflight rights so our planes could fly through Egyptian airspace. He agreed. I told him we also needed permission for one of our nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, the U.S.S. Eisenhower, to pass through the Suez Canal. Normally the Egyptians did not like nuclear-powered ships going through the canal and permission could take weeks, but he agreed immediately. “When is it coming?” he asked. “Tonight,” I said. Mubarak also told me he planned to convene an Arab League meeting to discuss the crisis, and he conveyed strong support for U.S. efforts to defend Saudi Arabia. Throughout the crisis King Fahd and President Mubarak would prove to be two of America’s most important allies in the region.

  That afternoon I left Egypt and headed for Washington. As my plane rose over the Mediterranean, I got a call on board from President Bush. He had just spoken with King Hassan of Morocco and asked me to stop there on my way home. He wanted me to brief the king on our plans and on my talks with the Saudis and Egyptians. Since the stop was unanticipated, our flight crew had to have landing charts faxed up to the plane.

  We landed in Morocco in the middle of the night and took a motorcade to the king’s palace. I asked to see the king one-on-one, which actually meant there were three of us: the king, me, and his interpreter. Hassan asked if the information I wanted to discuss was secret. “Yes,” I told him. “It’s highly classified.” He removed a small box from within the folds of his robes and handed it to his interpreter, who held it in his hands while he and the king exchanged a few words in Arabic. Then the interpreter handed the box back to the king, who put it in a pocket in his robes. The king, who spoke some English, could see I was curious, so he explained to me that his interpreter had just sworn on a fragment of the holy Koran never to divulge the information he was about to hear. I was impressed. It seemed to be a pretty effective classification system—and conveniently portable too.

  I told the king that the Saudis had agreed to accept U.S. forces and that President Mubarak was also supportive. I explained that President Bush would be announcing the deployment shortly and wanted King Hassan to know the details of our plans. When I finished, King Hassan told me he was prepared to send Moroccan forces to serve alongside the Americans.

  I landed back at Andrews Air Force Base at 3:20 a.m. on Wednesday, August 8, 1990, and after a stop at the Pentagon, I went to the White House for a 7:15 a.m. breakfast meeting with Baker and Scowcroft. At 8:00 a.m., the same hour the first U.S. planes were landing in Saudi Arabia, I went into the Oval Office to brief the president on my trip. At 9:00 a.m., President B
ush addressed the nation and announced the deployment of U.S. forces to the desert of Saudi Arabia.

  I believe it was in a meeting shortly after the president’s announcement that I fell asleep while seated in the chair next to his in the Cabinet Room—not delicately asleep, but full-on, mouth-open, snoring asleep. Probably because Brent Scowcroft had gotten him used to such behavior by nodding off from time to time, the president didn’t take offense, but he did take note and even called a photographer in. Later, at a cabinet dinner, he presented me with the Brent Scowcroft Excellence in Somnolence Award.

  ON AUGUST 17 I left on my second trip to the Gulf in two weeks. On the way over I considered the implications of reports we were receiving about Saddam’s readiness to invade Saudi Arabia. Should he launch an attack, he could capture or disable Saudi oil production, and he could disrupt U.S. deployments, handing our forces a defeat. There was every reason for him to do this. Saddam’s forces were at their peak, unaffected as yet by the embargo we had put in place that would deny him such things as spare parts and munitions. U.S. and Saudi forces, on the other hand, were at their weakest and would only gain strength with the passage of time and increased U.S. deployments. I called both Colin and Brent to make sure that we were working this contingency—which they assured me we were. But we couldn’t have done much had Saddam decided to keep right on rolling into the Saudi oil fields.

  I flew first to Saudi Arabia, then headed to three other countries that lie on the western side of the Persian Gulf—Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman. Saudi Defense Minister Sultan had helped arrange these visits, in which I intended to seek additional basing rights for U.S. forces and gain support for what was to become Operation Desert Storm.

  leaving the Oval Office with President Bush after reporting to him on one of my trips to the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield. (Photo by David Kennerly)

 

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