My American Journey

by Colin L. Powell

  For me, the war did not end on February 28, not while we still had the reverse logistical challenge of bringing thousands of troops and mountains of equipment home (which proved as hard as sending everything over), not until we had Operation Provide Comfort in place, not until the controversies quieted down. Early in June, Alma and I finally escaped to Maryland’s Eastern Shore to spend a few days at the weekend home of our close friends Grant and Ginger Green. I spied a hammock that Grant had strung up between two trees near a creek. I crawled into it and felt the bone-deep exhaustion finally start to seep out of me for the first time in nearly a year. I slept the sleep of the dead. The war was finally over.

  On July 22, I flew to the Soviet Union for another round of confidence-building sessions with my Soviet counterpart, Mikhail Moiseyev. Alma came with me. It was like old home week as we were reunited with Moiseyev and his wife, Galla. Once there, I was dragged through Red Army showcase exercises, paratrooper operations so choreographed that they resembled skydiving ballets; tours of mess halls where my guides would have you believe the Soviet chief quartermaster was Escoffier; inspections of fighter aircraft, T-80 tanks, and AK-47 rifles until I was ready to scream. The Soviet minister of defense, Dimitri Yazov, gave me a gift, a pistol. If I carried every weapon the Soviets had presented to me over the years, I would look like a poster boy for the National Rifle Association.

  We were in the port of Vladivostok on Navy Day watching a mock sea battle among gleaming ships of the line. This exercise, like everything else we had seen, had a Potemkin-village thinness. Behind the facade, the rot was evident. I was allowed to watch elite paratroopers, but my request to see how Soviet troops who had been pulled out of Eastern Europe were living was denied. The fancy photos of seven balanced food groups displayed in the mess halls did not square with the stew ladled out to Red Army soldiers from huge communal vats. Behind the shining warships performing for us we could see dock after dock of rusting hulks. Admiral Jerry Johnson, the vice chief of naval operations, who was traveling with me, cast an expert eye around Vladivostok harbor and said, “Here’s a fleet that’s going bye-bye.” And the Mikhail Gorbachev whom I met on this trip was not the supremely confident figure of earlier summits. He seemed beaten down by the incessant battering he was taking in this convulsed country.

  During the tour, I tried to meet and talk with ordinary Russians, though Moiseyev kept steering me to armored personnel carriers. We had flown into Vladivostok on a Friday, and while we were driving into town, I noticed heavy traffic going in the opposite direction. Then, on Sunday night, as we were driving back to the airport, the pattern was reversed. I asked our driver about it. “People get private plots, maybe five hundred to six hundred square meters,” he said. “So on weekends, they go out to the country and tend vegetable gardens. They can’t get anything decent in the state stores. The garden gives them a little more to eat and maybe a little income. They work like ants. You should see what they produce.” The fact that small individual plots were proportionately more productive than collective farms spoke volumes about the fundamental defect of communism.

  As we prepared to fly home from Vladivostok on July 28, I had trouble getting one present from the Far Eastern Military District into the hold of our 707. They had given me a massive elk’s head, complete with horns, mounted on a heavy wooden base. After it was crated, the elk required four burly Russian soldiers to lug it aboard.

  Moiseyev and Galla were there to say goodbye, the four of us standing in a cloud of Siberian mosquitoes attracted by the floodlights. I hugged Moiseyev and said, “Misha, take care of yourself.” I meant it. I had grown fond of this honest soldier, and I was worried about him. I saw a man perched on a structure that was verging on collapse. A fleeting look of sadness in his eyes told me he understood. We all embraced, and Alma and I boarded the plane for home.

  As for the elk’s head, it scared the devil out of my two-year-old grandson when we displayed it in Quarters 6 at Fort Myer. I finally managed to move the beast closer to home, at least symbolically. I gave it to my friend Ted Stevens, the senior senator from Alaska, to hang in his office.

  I had just fallen asleep, at about twenty minutes after midnight on August 19, when I got a call from the duty officer in the National Military Command Center. A coup against the Gorbachev government was under way. President Bush was in his summer place in Kennebunkport, Maine. Vice President Quayle was in Arizona. Cheney was fishing in Canada. Jim Baker was fishing in Wyoming. I was “home alone.” I called Cheney’s deputy secretary, Donald Atwood, and gave him a quick fill. I hit the usual buttons and found that there had been no change in the alert status of conventional Soviet military forces. The Soviets had a system called “Chegev,” using a device the size of an attaché case that allowed a handful of leaders to communicate in the event of a nuclear crisis. We were able to monitor the system and knew that there had been no change in the Soviets’ nuclear posture either.

  President Bush came back immediately to Washington and assumed a stance of watchful waiting. I had to go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center that day for a previously scheduled annual physical and stress test, feeling not exactly stress-free. The day after the coup, the President held a press conference and then gathered the Gang of Eight in the residence.

  “What do you make of this business, Colin?” the President asked me. “Did you notice how the tanks came into Moscow?” I said, “They were rolling down the middle of the road, headed nowhere in particular. People were waving, handing the tankers flowers, chatting with them.” I pointed out that no tanks had sealed off the Kremlin or the Russian parliament; no forces had taken over the central telephone exchange, standard operating procedure during coups. “What all this tells me, Mr. President,” I went on, “is that the plotters don’t own the army. The military is not backing this coup.” I further remembered seeing the five woebegone leaders of the conspiracy on television, and they looked to me like a variation on Jimmy Breslin’s book: this was The Gang That Couldn’t Plot Straight. I doubted if these bunglers could overthrow the dog catcher and take over the pound.

  Within three days, the coup collapsed, and Gorbachev was restored to power. The failed attempt marked the end of Soviet communism, the beginning of the end for Gorbachev, and the making of Boris Yeltsin. Dimitri Yazov, one of the failed conspirators, was replaced as minister of defense by my friend Misha Moiseyev. Marshal Akhromeyev, the old Leningrad veteran whom I had come to know, committed suicide in the aftermath of the coup. Moiseyev lasted one day in his new job. Evidently he had not rallied to the government’s defense fast enough to suit Yeltsin. And then Moiseyev vanished.

  His disappearance worried me. Maybe it was a different Russia; still, I was not sure how much the old methods of treating losers had changed. I tried to locate Moiseyev through Russians in Washington and people going to Moscow. I learned nothing. Four months later, I finally got a letter from Moiseyev telling me that he and Galla were alive and well. He subsequently became a consultant in high-tech communications, a blooming capitalist. And the last I heard, Moiseyev was rolling in rubles.

  … … …

  Months before, while flying back from one of our trips to the Gulf, I had sat next to Dick Cheney and remounted one of my hobbyhorses. I had ordered the Joint Staff to do a study on the usefulness of tactical nuclear weapons. The staff’s recommendation was to get rid of the small, artillery-fired nukes because they were trouble-prone, expensive to modernize, and irrelevant in the present world of highly accurate conventional weapons. I circulated the report to the four service chiefs, since its conclusions affected joint military doctrine. Carl Vuono, my old buddy, mentor, and champion, had supported me on many issues, but Carl had deeper loyalties. The nukes were a matter of prestige to the artillery. I was asking his branch to give up a part of itself. Carl, the senior artilleryman in the U.S. Army, was not about to preside over the dismantling of his nukes. He managed to line up the other service chiefs’ against the proposal. The report went to the Pentag
on policy staff, a refuge of Reagan-era hard-liners, who stomped all over it, from Paul Wolfowitz on down. This, nevertheless, was the proposal I pulled out on the plane and put in front of Cheney, a document scribbled all over with criticisms by his special assistant, David Addington, and riddled with nonconcurrences. Cheney groaned, but he began reading.

  “I know you’ve got a four-to-one vote against me with the chiefs,” I said, “so it’ll be easy to overrule me. But don’t worry, I’ll be back next year, because I’m right on this one.”

  Dick looked at me, bemused. “Not one of my civilian advisors supports you,” he said.

  I kidded him. “That’s because they’re all right-wing nuts like you.” Cheney laughed and went on reading. After we got back to Washington, he rejected my proposal.

  Cheney did not have a closed mind on nuclear issues. Quite to the contrary, he had demonstrated admirable vision. In November 1989, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he ordered his civilian analysts to take a fresh look at nuclear targets in the Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP). In effect, Cheney posed a question that had not been answered satisfactorily for forty years: how much is enough? His staff found the cart now pulling the horse. Every time a new nuclear weapons system came on line, the SIOP targeters went looking for something else to hit, to a point that had become unjustifiable. In the event of war, we were going to aim a warhead at a Soviet bridge and the city hall just blocks away. Under the then current plan, nearly forty weapons were targeted for the Ukrainian capital of Kiev alone. Debates even erupted over removing targets from Eastern Europe after the Warsaw Pact had collapsed and these countries had become democracies. Cheney and his civilian analysts reversed four decades of encrusted bureaucratic thinking and put nuclear targeting on a rational basis. Today, after subsequent agreements, the United States and Russia no longer target each other at all with nuclear weapons.

  Months after the Gulf War, on September 5, at a meeting of the national security team, President Bush began pushing us for more fresh thinking on arms control. The bloom was partly off the Gulf victory by now. We were back to the superpower chessboard, radically altered after the failed coup in the Soviet Union. “I want to see some new ideas on nuclear disarmament,” the President said. “I don’t want talk. I want solid proposals.”

  Within days, we had developed a proposal that far exceeded the elimination I had urged of artillery-launched nukes. The scope was sweeping. Get rid of short-range nuclear weapons, like the Army’s Lance missiles. Ground the Strategic Air Command bombers that had been on alert for the previous thirty-two years, and offload their nukes. Remove nuclear weapons from all ships, except for strategic missiles on Trident submarines. Get rid of multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missiles and stick to single-warhead ICBMs. Shut down as many Minuteman missile silos as we dared. The chiefs, now responding to a radically changing world, signed on, as did Paul Wolfowitz and his hard-liners. Cheney was ready to move with the winds of change. Within three weeks, on September 27, President Bush announced these unilateral nuclear reductions to the world.

  When I became chairman, we had 23,000 operational nuclear weapons in the armed forces. Between our own initiatives and the START treaties, we should be down to 8,000 warheads by 2003, a drop of over 65 percent.

  Although President Bush had nominated me for a second two-year term, I still had to be confirmed by the Senate. Senator Sam Nunn, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a supporter of sanctions and an opponent of going to war, made sure that I did not have a routine reconfirmation. The hearings lasted two days, and during them, Nunn criticized me for my discussions with Bob Woodward as reported in Woodward’s book. I did not deny talking to Woodward. Plenty of others in the administration talked to him too. The talks were no secret; Cheney and I discussed them regularly. Nunn also tried to establish that I had held the same view as he did about prolonging the sanctions policy. I reminded him that we had tried sanctions for almost six months, and they had failed to move Saddam Hussein (nor have they in the subsequent four years). Whether or not to give sanctions a longer ride was a political decision. President Bush had made that decision. My job, when it came to war, was to make sure that we would be ready. And we were. Nunn dragged the hearings out until September 30, the last day of my term. I pointed out to him that as of midnight, the nation would have an acting chairman, because, legally, I would be out of office. With that, he promptly brought my reappointment to a vote. I was unanimously confirmed by the Senate.

  After the Gulf War, Time magazine columnist Hugh Sidey had written: “Never before has an American President stood so grandly astride this capricious world as George Bush does these days. Historians scratched their heads … and looked for something comparable. There was nothing.” Even now, seven months later, the president’s approval rating was a healthy 66 percent. With my reconfirmation, it looked as if I would be chairman well into George Bush’s second term as President.

  Twenty

  Change of Command

  SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER DESERT STORM, I WAS SUDDENLY AND EMOTIONALLY pulled back one day to the paddies of Vietnam. In the fall of 1991, I saw again Captain Vo Cong Hieu. I had first heard from Hieu, after twenty-seven years, when he wrote me in December 1989. In that letter, Hieu congratulated me on my elevation to the chairmanship and then reported on his life in the intervening years. “While you have richly deserved such an excellent appointment,” he wrote, “I find myself in a rather difficult position.” Hieu had spent thirteen years in a communist reeducation camp. He and his wife had been approved by the U.S. embassy in Bangkok to emigrate to America. But, at the time, he did not have approval for his other married children and grandchildren, a total of seven family members. He asked for my help.

  I went to the ever-resourceful Rich Armitage, who knew his way around the Washington bureaucratic maze and Vietnam as well as anyone. Rich was able to arrange entry into the States for the rest of Hieu’s family.

  About a year and a half later, in October 1991, I was in Minneapolis to speak at a program called the Minnesota Meeting. I walked into the lobby of the hotel where the event was taking place and there stood a little man swallowed up in an ill-fitting overcoat, looking lost. I recognized Hieu instantly. He waited, smiling shyly. I embraced him. We both had tears in our eyes. He thanked me for my help and told me how he had found an American sponsor for his family in Minnesota. I invited Hieu to my speech and arranged for him to sit at a table in front of the dais. I began by saying, “I ran into an old friend here, one I haven’t seen for nearly thirty years. I want you to meet him, a new neighbor of yours and a new American, Vo Cong Hieu.” Hieu rose to thunderous applause, looking bewildered by a fate that had brought him to a new home in the American heartland, so far from and so unlike his native land, but free at last.

  On the same day that I was reconfirmed as chairman, Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the first democratically elected president in Haiti’s history, was overthrown by a military junta after less than eight months in office. With Aristide’s downfall, Haitians began boarding anything that would float in their eagerness to get to the United States. On October 29, President Bush banned all U.S. commercial trade with Haiti to punish the military dictatorship, which also made Haitians more desirous than ever to get out. The U.S. military drew the unwelcome assignment of detaining fleeing Haitians at Guantanamo Bay, the piece of Cuban territory we occupy, until the Immigration and Naturalization Service could determine if they were legitimate political refugees entitled to come to the States.

  By December, the Pentagon was being asked about military options to put Aristide back into power. My advice to Cheney was to go slow. “We can take over the place in an afternoon with a company or two of Marines,” I said. “But the problem is getting out.” We had intervened in Haiti in 1915 for reasons that sounded identical to what I was hearing now—to end terror, restore stability, promote democracy, and protect U.S. interests—and that occupation had lasted nineteen years. Cheney needed no a
rguments from me. We both understood why Haitians were eager to flee a country so desperately poor and politically repressive. But these conditions did not yet justify an American invasion.

  The CINC for the Atlantic Command, responsible for the Guantanamo refugee operation, Admiral Bud Edney, wanted to name this effort

  “Operation Safe Harbor,” which I rejected. It was like hanging out a welcome sign to Haitians and then locking them up in what was beginning to resemble a concentration camp. I wanted something neutral-sounding that would not raise false hopes. We settled on Navy shorthand for Guantanamo; “Safe Harbor” became “Operation GTMO.” Still, Haitians continued to put to sea.

  Also that December, I had a call from Congressman Ron Dellums of California. He wanted to see me at the Pentagon. Dellums was a black representing an essentially white middle-class district in the Oakland area. He could talk like an ADA liberal or the Marine he had formerly been, depending on his audience. We scrapped often in Congress, but got along beautifully outside. However, he had never asked to see me alone before.

  Upon his arrival, we sat at the little round table I preferred for one-on-one encounters. “I’ve been speaking to the top people,” Dellums began, “senior members of the Democratic Party. And you know what you are?”

  I waited.

  “You’re our fondest dream … and our worst nightmare.”

  I kept on listening.