by Tom Clancy
When the CHECKMATE briefing was presented to Chuck Horner in Riyadh, he found this line of thinking intriguing; yet he did not feel he could afford to throw the kind of effort CHECKMATE envisaged into a hunt for Saddam Hussein, or, more broadly, into a campaign to incite an overthrow of his government. Certainly a good case could be made for killing Saddam. He was, after all, the head of Iraqi military forces, he devised its military strategy, and he gave orders about the disposition of forces. Therefore, while President Saddam Hussein was not directly targeted, it is safe to conclude that the Black Hole’s target lists included all the military command centers where Field Marshal Hussein might have been directing his forces.
In their initial plans, the Pentagon planners selected thirty-seven targets associated with Saddam’s hold on Iraq. Some strikes were aimed specifically at the Iraqi leader, others at the tools or symbols of his rule, and some at targets (such as electrical power grids) whose loss would damage both the military capability of the nation and the political power of its leaders. By the start of the war, Black Hole planners had identified an additional 105 “leadership” targets, making a total of 142.
Because most of them were in Baghdad, however, the 142 targets covered a broader range than leadership. Many, such as the attack on the “AT & T building,” served to advance other strategic goals as well. The elimination of the telecommunications center not only hindered Saddam’s ability to issue political and military orders, but prevented Iraqi air defense centers from coordinating air defense.
During the first hours of the air campaign, F-117s and cruise missiles targeted command, control, and communications sites. Two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs destroyed five major telephone exchange facilities, including the “AT&T building” and its adjacent antenna mast. Telephone switching posts were destroyed, as were bridges over the Tigris River (in order to sever fiber-optic communications cables bolted under the roadway).
Command-and-control bunkers in the presidential palaces were struck, as were command centers for the Republican Guard, the intelligence services, the secret police, the Ministry of Propaganda, and Baath Party headquarters. Most of these targets provided capabilities needed to execute military operations, and General Hussein might also have been on duty at one of them; but, more generally, they represented Saddam’s means of controlling the people of Iraq. Likewise, command post bunkers for the Iraqi Air Force and for air defense operations were attacked, both in an effort to gain control of the air and also because General Hussein might be inside directing the air defense of his nation. A number of such targets were struck in the opening moments of the war, and attacks continued throughout the war.
Did these leadership attacks hurt the Iraqis?
Yes, up to a point, and sometimes very directly: At the primary presidential palace was a hardened concrete bunker, deeply buried under a garden that came to be called the “Rose Garden,” a target so difficult it could not be destroyed by ordinary bombs. Therefore, a pair of laser bombs dug a pit in the earth that covered the concrete shelter. These were followed by a third bomb, with a hardened steel shell and a delayed fuse, which was precisely guided into the crater dug by the first bombs. Because this third bomb did not have to fight its way through tons of earth, it easily penetrated the reinforced concrete roof and exploded inside the shelter. Very bad news for anyone inside.
The attacks also made it difficult for military leaders in Baghdad to communicate with the forces in the field (which might have been a mixed blessing, given the overall foolishness of Iraqi military leadership).
Was the leadership campaign successful?
No. It failed miserably.
American planners like to measure the enemy in numbers of tanks, ships, and aircraft, and shy away from measuring him in less certain terms, such as his morale, military training, or motivation. Yet — for good reasons — American planners endow adversaries with the same intelligence and efficiency as they themselves possess. They tend to attack enemies as though they were housed in some foreign version of Washington, D.C. They “mirror-image” the enemy.
The Iraqis are as intelligent as any people, but, as it turned out, when it came to Saddam’s system of maintaining political and physical control, intelligence and efficiency were beside the point. The Baathists maintained control of the country by creating an Orwellian climate of mistrust. Iraqis not only feared the president and the secret police, they feared each other. Husbands were careful what they told their wives, in case their thoughts were relayed to the secret police. Parents could not trust their children, since the young were raised to inform even on their own fathers and mothers. If a friend confided to you a criticism of Saddam Hussein, you immediately reported it to the secret police, in case the friend had been induced to test your reliability.
And so, all the leadership targets were struck, and the leader stayed in power. The American planners failed to change the government of Iraq, because they did not understand how that government operated, and therefore how to attack it. They did not understand that Saddam stayed in power by creating an aura of crisis that caused his people to need him more than they needed change. The fear that motivated the average Iraqi citizen’s loyalty to Saddam was beyond their comprehension, because they had never experienced life under a repressive regime. They did not understand that they needed to target the fear, and they did not have either the smarts or the intelligence analysis to destroy the hold of fear on the Iraqi people. They did not understand that the bombing of Iraq ensured that hold was increased and not decreased.
And yet, since Iraqi troops in the field had little reason to love their dictator, many were persuaded to surrender without a fight. Thus, the fear by which Saddam maintained control over his nation worked for rather than against the Coalition’s battlefield success. In other words, killing Saddam may have turned out to be a serious mistake.
Likewise, in his paranoia, Saddam often had his top generals executed. The threat of execution sometimes concentrates the mind, but more often it leads to paralysis. This weakening of his military leadership could only benefit the Coalition. And finally, as General Schwarzkopf pointed out after the war, Saddam was a lousy strategist, and thus a good man to have in charge of Iraqi armed forces, under the circumstances.
NBC
In the eyes of tinpot dictators and other insecure regimes, nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons — especially when mated with ballistic missiles — are the visible symbols that make small nations into big players on the world’s stage. The Iraqis have spent billions of dollars in research and development of such weapons.
The potential for large-scale tragedy is obvious, and tinpot dictators are indifferent by nature to the crucial insight that major powers long ago took to heart: that NBC weapons are not weapons of war but weapons of terror. What goes around comes around. You hit me; I hit you. To add to this unsettling thought, Saddam Hussein had already proved willing to use weapons of mass destruction both in foreign wars and against his own people.
Fortunately, the most fearsome of these weapons, the nuclear, are the hardest to make, and the programs to make them are the easiest to discover. The manufacture of nuclear weapons requires skilled engineers and scientists, a vast array of high-technology facilities, weapons-grade nuclear material, and other rare ingredients. Few of these are easily available to nations such as Iraq; and all of them can be protected and tracked. This requires more vigilance than is currently the case, but it can be done.
Unfortunately, the Iraqis have proved to be extremely skilled at avoiding existing protections, and brilliant at shell-game hiding of the pieces of their nuclear program (likewise of their biological and chemical program) — thus exemplifying the uses of paranoia.
Ten years before the 1990 Gulf crisis, the Israelis bombed Iraqi nuclear research laboratories. This delayed but did not stop the nuclear program (and may have encouraged them to greater efforts at concealment).
After the war, United Nations inspection teams uncovered large
caches of technical and historical records of Saddam’s nuclear program. These records indicated that U.S. intelligence organizations had been aware of only a portion of the Iraqi nuclear weapons efforts. Though prediction in this area is risky, some estimates claimed that Saddam’s scientists were within months of producing a workable nuclear device. Whether this could have been mated to the warhead of a Scud missile is another matter, and it is doubtful that Iraqi fighter-bomber aircraft could have penetrated the air defenses of Israel or Saudi Arabia.
Still, no matter how close Iraqi scientists were to building deliverable weapons, it was a no-brainer for Iraqi NBC programs to top Black Hole target lists. These facilities were going to be hit, and hit early. The risks were too great.
Precision munitions were dropped on the Baghdad Nuclear Weapons Research Center on the first three days of the war, though to what effect it was hard to say, except by counting holes in buildings and bunkers. Later, a mass raid against the Al Qaim nuclear facility failed. The forty F-16s found it defended by large numbers of AAA and SAM sites and obscured by smoke generators, and then the bombs from the first two aircraft raised so much dust that it was impossible for the remaining thirty-eight pilots to identify their aim points. The facility was later hit by a surprise F-117 night attack, which obliterated every assigned target.
But the fox, it turned out, had fled.
After the war, United Nations inspection teams learned that the Iraqis had already removed vital equipment from these locations and buried it in the desert (not a practice recommended for the sensitive, highly calibrated electronic devices used in nuclear research). In other words, from the Iraqi point of view, the cure may have been no better than the disease. If that was the case, then God was once again on the side of the good guys. Either way, the air attacks delayed the Iraqi quest for nuclear weapons for a few more years.
★ In an earlier chapter the problem of preventing biological attack was discussed. There is little to add to that here.
Because production facilities for biological weapons are difficult to identify, intelligence and planning concentrated on storage facilities, usually in air-conditioned concrete earth-covered bunkers. Attacking these sites, however, remained a dilemma, owing to the possible spread of toxic agents in the dust and debris resulting from bomb explosions.
Despite this risk, the cross-shaped bunkers at the Salman Pak Biological Warfare Center were hit on the first night of the war by the same one-two punch that destroyed the presidential Rose Garden bunker. And, as previously mentioned, the resulting explosion was spectacular. Aircrews reported that heat from the secondary explosions went thousands of feet into the air.
In the event, attacking bio-weapons storage may have been just as futile as attacking nuclear production — though for different reasons. After the war, credible reports (from Saddam’s sons-in-law, later murdered) indicated that the Iraqis were just as worried as Americans that biological agents could infect the entire region, and had therefore destroyed their anthrax and botulism spores before the aerial onslaught risked spreading them. If this was true — and Chuck Horner believes it was likely (due to the absence of cases of either disease during the war) — then greater effort should have been aimed at identifying and targeting biological research and production facilities.
★ Though chemical weapons are far from precision munitions, they pose less of a danger to attackers than biological agents, and their effects on an enemy are more immediate. Saddam possessed lots of them. U.S. intelligence sources indicated that large numbers of artillery shells and rockets were available for delivery of nerve and mustard gas.
The problem: though U.S. intelligence had located the manufacturing facilities for these weapons, there were so many of them, there wasn’t enough time for Chuck Horner’s bombers to destroy them all.
The initial attacks hit the largest of these facilities, at Samarra and Al-Habbanilyah near Baghdad, as well as chemical weapons, bombs, artillery, and missile warheads located in close proximity to delivery systems. For example, bunkers at Tallil Airfield were targeted the first night. And throughout the war, any indication of chemical weapons near Iraqi units that could face Coalition ground forces brought quick attack.
Just as with biological agents, the unintended release of chemical agents as a by-product of air attacks brought potential problems. Fortunately, the fallout of poisonous chemical debris had fewer long-term effects, since the hot dry desert air quickly degraded the potency of chemical agents, even in winter months.
THE GREAT SCUD HUNT
Finding and killing Scuds was part of the anti-NBC effort. No one in the Coalition or in Israel was eager to witness the successful mating of a weapon of mass destruction to a ballistic missile launched at Riyadh or Tel Aviv. In the event, finding and killing mobile Scuds proved to be a nightmare.
During the War of the Cities phase of the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, both nations tossed Scuds at each other’s capital. To military analysts, not much was achieved by this seemingly senseless expenditure of obsolete ballistic missiles. To civilians in Tehran and Baghdad, however, it was a very significant event indeed when an Iraqi or Iranian missile slammed into some neighborhood they knew. Later, Chuck Horner made himself familiar with that war (since it was waged in a part of the world he was expected to know well), yet these missile attacks did not greatly concern him. As he quickly came to learn in the early weeks of 1991, however, the people living near Iran and Iraq were not so sanguine. After the War of the Cities, Saudi Arabia had acquired very expensive long-range ballistic missiles, to deter its neighbors to the north and east. Israel also had missiles — and very likely the nuclear weapons to go with them.
No one had any doubt that Saddam expected to use his Scuds, and in October, his threats couldn’t have been more emphatic. “In the event of war,” he announced, “I’ll attack Saudi Arabia and Israel with long-range missiles… And I’ll burn Israel.” In December, he had test-fired his modified, longer-range Scuds. (This had a consequence he did not foresee: It gave U.S. space forces an invaluable opportunity to check out the space-based warning satellites and communications link from the U.S. Space command in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Now they could read out the infrared signals sent by the satellites, and from the template they put together after the December tests, they could tell with reasonable certainty whether or not a Scud had been launched.)
Chuck Horner’s team was ready.
Plans called for preemptive attacks against Scud production facilities and storage areas (including missile fuel tanks). All the fixed launch pads painstakingly erected in Iraq’s western desert were bombed in the opening moments of the war. And on day two, multiple attacks were made on the Latifiyah rocket-fuel plants and on rocket-motor production facilities at Shahiyat, all near Baghdad. Because the fuel the Scuds used was unstable, it could be stored for only perhaps four to six weeks. Therefore, fuel-production facilities were bombed, with the expectation that Scud attacks would stop when the “good” fuel was used up. Unfortunately, the Iraqis didn’t follow this script, either because the Coalition failed to destroy all the Scud fuel-production facilities, or because the Iraqis failed to read the instructions that told them not to use old fuel. They were able to fire the missiles well into the last nights of the war.
Meanwhile, billions of dollars of satellites over Iraq searched for the hot flash of a launching Scud and predicted the warhead’s target. There were civil defense warning systems. And there was the Patriot. In September, the antiballistic missile version, the PAC-2s, had been rushed to the region and deployed near airports and seaports, in order to protect entryways for forces deploying into the Arabian peninsula.
What was lacking, as Horner had informed Secretary Cheney, was the means to locate and kill the mobile Scud launchers.
The first of Saddam’s Scud launches were directed at Israel on the afternoon of January 17. Early next morning, Scuds fell on Dhahran and Riyadh.
Phone calls from Washington quickly followed: “
Do whatever you need to to shut down the Scuds.” The great Scud hunt had begun.
From the first, Horner’s planners had expected to hunt mobile Scuds, even though there was never great confidence that they would find them all. Still, until the hunt was on, no one realized the resources they would have to commit, even less how little the hunt would succeed. The day after the first attacks, A-10s, F-16s, F-15s, and an AC-130 gunship were deployed to search the deserts of Iraq, day and night.
First reports looked encouraging: A-10s in south central Iraq attacked a convoy of trucks that appeared to be carrying Scuds. However, it quickly became evident that if the trucks had in fact carried missiles, and if the missiles were Scuds (and not, say, shorter-range FROG 6s), the attack had had little effect on Scud launches, as missiles continued to rain down on Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Night after night missiles came down, five or more per night, and as Scuds fell, more and more scarce air assets were dedicated to hunting them: flights of four F-15Es were sent to orbit likely launch boxes in western Iraq. Any vehicle on the Baghdad-to-Amman interstate highway was attacked, much to the distress of fuel-truck drivers smuggling fuel to Jordan.
In Riyadh, the pressure for action was strong; in Tel Aviv, it was explosive. The Scud attacks had filled Israeli civilians with terror and outrage. They wanted revenge. Traditionally, Israelis did not delegate military action, and their traditional strategy was an eye for an eye. At the minimum, they expected to send their excellent air force against the Scuds. More dangerously, there was a real possibility that they would retaliate with nuclear weapons.
Hoping to put a lid on all this, Horner sent a delegation to Tel Aviv — including his deputy, Major General Tom Olsen, and one of the four TACC operations directors, Colonel Mike Reavy — to explain how Americans were working to suppress the Scuds. He also wanted high-level people there to consult in the event of an Israeli attack. If the Israelis weighed in, tangles between Israeli and Coalition air forces would have been very possible, and would have only helped the enemy. Washington wanted Coalition forces out of their way. Meanwhile, Washington was putting full diplomatic pressure into preventing Israeli action.