The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  Thurman knew that Cheney was under pressure from a number of quarters, including the White House, to get the military more actively involved in the drug war. “Look,” Thurman said, “I don’t know where you come out on this, Mr. Cheney, but there are a lot more opportunities in the drug war.” This was a case where the military was dragging its feet.

  The Defense Department could be much more aggressive in the war on drugs, he said. The intelligence capabilities, as Cheney well knew, were staggering. The ability to spy overhead with satellites and to tap into the world banking transactions was quite extraordinary. No drug lord could begin to compete if the military’s espionage capabilities were turned loose. Routine radar surveillance could mean capturing many drug shipments.

  At the same time, U.S. special operations teams could teach the local police and military how to overwhelm any drug outpost. The United States was not helpless fighting the drug war, Thurman said. There had just been no decision to use what existed.

  Thurman got worked up as he delivered his monologue. It was a matter of seriousness of purpose, he said.

  Cheney thought Marsh was right about Thurman. Here was a no-bullshit, straight-ahead guy. Things clearly happened when Max was in charge. Where many senior officers saw obstacles or made excuses, Thurman saw possibilities. Although the general had an unfinished quality about him that made him wrong for the chairmanship, Cheney was pretty sure a CINC position was about to open up earlier than expected.

  • • •

  On July 6, Woerner received a call from Army Chief Carl Vuono, who said he wanted to come down to Panama to see Woerner. Why? Woerner asked.

  Vuono, a good friend of Woerner’s, wouldn’t elaborate. He said only that he would be staying about an hour.

  An hour? Certainly bad news, Woerner thought. But just a month earlier, he had been asked to extend his tour as CINCSOUTH for another year, to the summer of 1991.

  At the Southern Command headquarters, Vuono took Woerner into a small room so they could be alone.

  “Fred,” Vuono said, looking Woerner straight in the eye, “the President has decided to make a change.”

  Woerner felt ill, as if he had been kicked hard in the stomach. His 34 years in the Army, his whole life . . . “Why, Carl?”

  “I don’t know,” Vuono replied. “The Secretary of the Army came and told me and said I couldn’t tell you.” Vuono explained he had told Marsh that Woerner was a close friend who’d given years of loyal service, and argued that Woerner deserved the courtesy of hearing about the decision face to face. But Woerner had to keep it secret.

  Woerner pressed. Why was he being fired?

  “I don’t know why,” Vuono repeated. “All I know is it is an irrevocable decision.” Vuono proposed that they develop a reason—health, family, a job offer, anything.

  Woerner would not hear of a cover story. He understood the rules: he served at the pleasure of the President and needed the support of the Chairman and the Army Chief. Vuono left 45 minutes later for his flight back to Washington.

  Woerner kept the painful news to himself. He had promised to keep the secret, and there was no one he wanted to speak to about it anyway. It was often strange, he thought, the oaths an Army officer had to take. Imagine pledging to keep secret his own professional extinction.

  When Woerner finally spoke by telephone with Crowe, both men pretended they did not know the news. When you are in Washington next, Crowe said, be sure to stop by.

  The decision had been reached while Crowe was out of the country. When he learned of it, he had said to Cheney, “I wish you wouldn’t do something like that without involving me.”

  “The White House did it,” Cheney replied. He blamed the decision, as well as its suddenness and finality, on Scowcroft.

  A few days later Woerner was in Washington. He went to Crowe’s office.

  “Fred,” Crowe said, “I guess you know the President has decided to make a change. All I can tell you is that I know nothing. I was not consulted. The decision was made while I was in the Soviet Union.” Crowe suggested they go up together to the third floor and see the Secretary of Defense.

  Cheney pointed to the comfortable captain’s chairs at his small conference table, and took a seat himself.

  “The President has decided to make a change,” Cheney said.

  That sentence again, Woerner thought to himself, as if they had all been programmed. It told so much while it also masked so much. Cheney seemed relaxed, neither apologetic nor defensive, as he looked Woerner in the eye.

  “After thirty-four years of service,” Woerner said, bracing himself, “I believe I’m entitled to an explanation.”

  “This has nothing to do with you or your performance,” Cheney said. “It’s a political decision.”

  Why? Woerner asked. What does that mean?

  Crowe sat like steel in his chair, silent.

  Woerner pressed Cheney.

  “Time for a change,” Cheney said briskly. No matter how Woerner asked the question, Cheney would not amplify.

  “You can call it anything you want,” Woerner said. “In my terms I’m being relieved—the first time in my career.”

  Cheney said nothing. When Woerner had exhausted every way he could think of to ask the same question, Cheney said he wanted to arrange a timetable for the change of command.

  Woerner’s last day would be set two months away, they agreed, at the end of September.

  Crowe and Woerner rose to leave. As the generals always seemed to do, Cheney reflected, Woerner had accepted the ax, saluted, and in the end was quite a gentleman.

  Walking down the 27 steps to the second floor, Crowe and Woerner did not speak. Crowe did not say whether he agreed or disagreed. The decision had been made, the President had decided. That was the way. But Crowe felt bitter. Whenever they—the civilians—wanted, they could go merrily right around him. Crowe had had his own concerns about Woerner, but the dismissal was unjust. Woerner had been carrying out the essentials of the President’s policy, which was still to avoid direct military confrontation with Noriega.

  If the White House planned to change the policy, then they ought to face up to that, not slide around it by suggesting that some allegedly timid commander was the problem. But it was easier to fire Woerner, blame Woerner, make Woerner the issue. That was why Cheney couldn’t give a reason. Most chilling to Crowe was the indifference that the Secretary of Defense seemed to have about the career of a four-star officer.

  • • •

  Later in July, Army Chief Vuono tracked down Max Thurman in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was now less than a month before Thurman’s scheduled retirement and he was sending out invitations to his retirement ceremony, making sure he included all the colleagues, friends, mentors and protégés he had accumulated over 36 years of service.

  Vuono explained that Woerner was leaving the Southern Command sooner than expected—“an unprogrammed retirement,” it was called. Would you be willing to take it, go down there for a couple of years? Vuono asked.

  “Well,” Thurman replied, “let me think about it for about ten minutes and I’ll let you know.”

  “Let me know now,” Vuono said.

  “Okay,” Thurman said, “I’ll take it.”

  Thurman arranged a meeting with Woerner to begin learning about the command. “I want you to know I had nothing to do with this,” he told Woerner.

  “If I thought you did, I wouldn’t be here.”

  Woerner was still shaken, but he had had some time to sort out his emotions and he was aware that some of them were contradictory. He understood the prerogative of the President and believed in it. But he worried that the military issues in Panama had become politicized, setting a dangerous precedent. He was sure he had been doing a good job carrying out the precise instructions of Bush, Cheney and Crowe. No more, no less. If the only way a commander could survive was to anticipate the political winds blowing in Washington and try to get out ahead of formal policy change, the military co
uld be hopelessly contaminated.

  • • •

  Crowe and Cheney took their proposal to the White House that the Southern Command should begin a series of intensive exercises asserting the freedom of movement guaranteed to the U.S. military under the Panama Canal treaties. Some of the treaty rights had gone unexercised for years; it was time to send a clear message to Noriega. Woerner had authority to approve low-level training exercises called Category One and Category Two—movements of small numbers of U.S. troops. Category Three and Category Four exercises were defined as the severest provocations, involving hundreds of U.S. troops, and required notifying the President 24 hours in advance.

  On July 17, President Bush approved the plan to have the Southern Command aggressively assert U.S. treaty rights by conducting these new exercises.

  Three days later, Cheney announced that General Woerner was retiring. He would be replaced by General Thurman.

  In a comfortable, brightly lit suite of offices behind a special security checkpoint in the Joint Staff’s inner sanctum in the Pentagon, Lieutenant General Thomas W. Kelly roared into one of the telephones behind his desk. He was admonishing one of his immediate staff officers to be more watchful. Kelly, 56, a barrel-chested, take-few-prisoners three-star, was chief operational traffic cop for Crowe and the Joint Staff. As the director of the operations staff, or J-3, Kelly lived in the world of the immediate. If Qaddafi was stirring or Gorbachev had not been seen for a week or there was a coup on some Caribbean island, the problem landed automatically on Kelly’s plate. He was responsible for making sure the U.S. military was positioned with the proper forces, plans and approvals to respond to just about anything that might happen.

  J-3 was a coordination and information center. As director, Kelly lived between calamity and opportunity.

  A tank commander by training and temperament, he would insist on beer in a can and display his wisecracking, “so’s-your-mother” style at the most formal cocktail party. But for all his tough-guy talk, Kelly had a sophisticated side. A Philadelphian with a journalism degree from Temple University, he was a smooth writer. As a one-star, he had worked for Crowe in Italy when the admiral was the CINC for Southern Europe. When Crowe phoned Kelly to recruit him to work on special operations for the Joint Staff, Kelly had said, “That’s nice. I’m a tanker.”

  “What I need is somebody that can spell,” Crowe replied.

  Aware that the Category Three and Four exercises in Panama could flare up instantly into a confrontation that might require presidential decisions, Kelly had all his lines out. He knew that the plans for Panama were his most important contingencies for the moment and he hoped to minimize surprises for everyone.

  Except for a few incidents that didn’t amount to much—Kelly called them the “SouthCom Follies”—the U.S. exercises didn’t seem to provoke Noriega’s forces. Try as Kelly and his intelligence people might, they could not point to any positive proof that the PDF or Noriega was intentionally confronting U.S. forces. One American woman reported she had been raped, but it couldn’t be traced to the PDF. A U.S. sailor claimed he had been taken by the PDF, then forced to kneel and say his prayers while someone pretended he was about to shoot him, but he couldn’t pass a polygraph. There were shooting incidents around U.S. installations but they were traced to hunters. Kelly concluded that Noriega was carefully avoiding confrontation.

  • • •

  On August 5, Army Lieutenant General Carl W. Stiner took his seat among the dignitaries at Fort Monroe, Virginia, a historic seacoast fortress near Norfolk and the headquarters of the Army Training and Doctrine Command. General Thurman’s retirement ceremony had turned into a mere change of command, since he was going to be CINCSOUTH. Stiner, the commander of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps based at Fort Bragg, wanted to be on hand nevertheless. Thurman was an old friend, and Stiner didn’t like to miss the informal get-togethers that took place after major change-of-command ceremonies.

  Stiner, 52, a taut Tennessean, had one of the Army’s premier commands, charged with responding to a short-notice crisis anywhere in the world. Any of the CINCs could call on the 41,000 troops of his Corps for help in carrying out contingency plans or responding to other emergencies. The modern airlift capability of the Air Force, ready to transport the 18th Corps on short notice, gave the men of Stiner’s outfit a tremendous edge over most other U.S. forces. They could get to a crisis faster than any other American troops, unless Marines were already deployed in the immediate vicinity on Navy ships.

  Before this assignment, Stiner had been commander of the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the 82nd Airborne Division. There was probably no general in the U.S. Army with more experience in quick-response warfare.

  After the ceremony, Thurman stepped off the reviewing stand and approached Stiner. “Carlos,” he said, poking his finger gently in the three-star general’s chest, “you are my man for Panama. I hold you responsible for all contingency planning and any combat operations.”

  Stiner did not seem to fully understand.

  “I need a man to plan and to execute contingency operations down there if they have to be executed,” Thurman went on. “And I want you to go down there and take a look at this thing. Look at the staff.”

  “But you’ve already got a JTF down there,” replied Stiner, referring to the Joint Task Force in Panama. General Woerner had designated an Army two-star in Panama to have command of the task force, which would mainly use the forces already permanently stationed there to respond to a crisis, and bring in reinforcements if needed.

  “You absorb it,” Thurman said. “I’m gonna hold you responsible.”

  “I understand that, yes sir.”

  “I’ve got a whole theatre to run,” Thurman said. “And I’ll handle all CINC duties and you take care of the contingency planning, the training of the forces that are there and the operations. They’re all yours, all services.”

  Thurman had not commanded forces in the field for 14 years. As the CINC, he knew he was going to be an administrator and supervisor. He needed a warfighter and Stiner was the essence of the hard-nosed battle commander. Just as important, Thurman knew that as commanding general of the 18th, Stiner had all the best equipment, an operations staff three times the size of the CINC’s staff in Panama, a big intelligence shop, and the best communications.

  “Have you ever heard of Ulysses Grant Sharp?” Thurman asked. Admiral Sharp had been the Hawaii-based CINC of the Pacific Command (CINCPAC), with overall military command of the Pacific region, including Vietnam, at the start of major hostilities there in 1964.

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you ever heard of Admiral McCain?” Thurman pressed. John S. McCain had been the CINCPAC from 1968 to 1972.

  “Yeah.”

  “You notice Admiral McCain had a guy by the name of Westmoreland fighting in Saigon?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Me McCain, you Westmoreland. Get your shit straight,” said Thurman. “I can’t give you any instructions, but if I am confirmed and I take the job and get down there . . .”

  “Yes, sir,” Stiner answered.

  • • •

  Stiner put his staff to work at once. Like Thurman, Kelly and Powell, Stiner had not gone to West Point; he held a degree in agriculture from Tennessee Polytechnical Institute.

  Known for his aggressiveness and enterprise, Stiner was a very controversial figure. In 1985, he had been the special operations ground commander when the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked. In Sicily with the Delta team sent to seize the hijackers, he wouldn’t take no for an answer when the Italians refused to surrender them. He had nearly fired on Italian forces, and then without Italian permission he had shadowed the plane carrying the hijackers to Rome. This prompted a serious protest from the Italian government and set back U.S.-Italian relations for some time.

  Kelly thought Stiner was a great soldier, though tactless and too outspoken. As long as Stiner was not made ambassador to France,
he could be handled.

  • • •

  After leaving his command, Thurman reluctantly faced an interim period that, borrowing the British term, he called a “garden leave.” For the 50 days until he was scheduled to take over from Woerner, Thurman would be a general without a command.

  “What do you want me to do in this fifty days?” Thurman asked Crowe after setting up a temporary Pentagon office. “You got any orders for me?”

  “I want you to take a fresh look at everything,” Crowe said. “No holds barred—fresh look, new eyes. Whatever you recommend, if we agree to it in the JCS, then you’ll have to live with it.”

  Crowe said that the trend of events in Panama showed Noriega was heading over the cliff. His behavior was not predictable, and the push and shove was dangerous. “Noriega is proving he is an asshole,” the Chairman said. “You’re very much liable to have to go fight down there. And if you have to go fight—you better make sure you’re ready.” Crowe suggested that Thurman take a detailed look at the PRAYER BOOK contingency plans, pull them apart, report back on what was necessary. Get ready.

  Yes, sir.

  • • •

  Crowe also went to Cheney and suggested that he put Panama on a wartime footing. The best way to do this, Crowe said, was to move the overall Southern Command headquarters out of Panama to some place like Florida. The CINC was giving too little attention to the rest of his command outside Panama, and a fighting command could be left in Panama that could focus exclusively on the problems there.

  Big political problem, Cheney responded. No matter how it was dressed up, it would look like the United States was running. Just can’t do it, no matter what the merits, the Secretary told his Chairman.

  • • •

  From his J-3 vantage point, Kelly watched Thurman’s arrival with some wonder and much pleasure. “You don’t have to do nothing to mobilize Max Thurman,” Kelly said. “He is mobilized when he gets up in the morning, which is in the middle of the night.” For some time, Kelly had thought that General Woerner’s notion of keeping the warfighting Joint Task Force in Panama was byzantine. Southern Command didn’t have the horsepower, staff or communications to run any large contingency operation. Kelly figured that Woerner had kept operational control in Panama so that he had a better chance of preventing the use of U.S. military force there.