The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  Kelley said that when he himself was the most junior member of the Joint Chiefs, doing his rotation as acting Chairman when the Chairman was out of town, the other chiefs would stand when he came into the Tank. “Don’t worry about the Joint Chiefs,” Kelley assured the President.

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  10

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  POWELL HAD 40 DAYS before his Senate confirmation hearings. He decided he did not need to go off to the military equivalent of a nunnery to study how to handle the chairmanship. He had no secret plan for change, and he did not want to come crashing through the gate with new ideas. But he did want to look at the major operations that might have to be executed after he’d taken over.

  He figured that there were several crises that might leap up and grab him with little or no warning, and he wanted to examine what military plans were on the shelf to deal with them. Plans would be his stock-in-trade in his new job. Powell knew he had an image among some senior officers as a pampered Washington general who had run only on the political fast track. They would be asking if this White House kid knew anything about the nuts and bolts of field operations.

  Recognizing that Panama was a military crisis waiting to happen, he flew to Fort Bragg to examine the Panama plans. While he was there, a terrible storm hit, keeping him at Bragg for two days. Carl Stiner took advantage of the delay to brief Powell in extensive detail so he would understand that the 18th Corps was able to tailor force packages within 12 hours for just about any need that might arise in the world.

  They went over the Panama PRAYER BOOK plans, including the BLUE SPOON plan for offensive operations against the PDF. Powell was surprised that it took so many days for the force buildup. Within a day or even hours, the entire landscape of a crisis could change. The plans did not take this into account. He made it clear to Stiner that the 18th Corps had to be able to move as rapidly as events. The new, lighter Army had this capability, but the existing plans did not exploit it. Things had to move much, much faster.

  The plans offered no possibility of surprise, no invasion under the cover of darkness. Night-vision goggles and other technology gave U.S. forces the unmatched ability to launch a large operation at night, hitting multiple targets simultaneously. Night operations were the great advantage of the modern army. Hey, what gives? Powell asked.

  He didn’t see an urgent need to change the plans overnight, but he decided they ought to get working on a detailed review. They should see if it was possible to come up with a new concept that emphasized surprise, speed and the night.

  Soon Stiner had five of his best officers down in Panama on two-month rotations, reworking the plans. He provided them with a direct satellite communications hook-up so he could talk to them and be right on top of each refinement they made.

  • • •

  During the latter part of August, Cheney received intelligence reports that came from an FBI source alleging that Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria, the multi-billionaire head of the Medellin cartel, was in Panama and was perhaps planning to move his base of operations there. Escobar, listed by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s ten richest men, was the chieftain of the worldwide illegal narcotics industry. According to the intelligence, he apparently believed that Noriega could guarantee him more protection than he received in Colombia, where officials seemed to be getting serious about cracking down on the drug lords. Particularly good information for an area in which intelligence is usually spotty at best, thought Cheney.

  The administration was due to announce a comprehensive plan for its war on drugs and the President was going to address the nation on the subject in an evening speech on September 5. Cheney felt pressure to do something to assist with the drug problem. He could see Bush’s frustration mounting.

  One sign that the administration was leaning forward on drugs was a new, sweeping 29-page legal opinion from the Justice Department issued June 21, stating that the President had legal authority to direct the FBI to abduct a fugitive residing in a foreign country for violations of U.S. law. This could be done even if the arrest was contrary to customary international law, the opinion said. It overruled a 1980 Carter administration opinion that had concluded the exact opposite—that the FBI could not enforce U.S. laws abroad.

  The opinion could apply to both Escobar and Noriega.

  The new FBI intelligence on Escobar’s whereabouts seemed like a much-needed break. Cheney asked Crowe to see if the JCS could come up with something that could be done to assist the effort to apprehend Escobar. Though the military apparently could not make such arrests, Cheney felt his forces could provide substantial assistance.

  The President approved a tentative plan presented by Cheney and Attorney General Richard Thornburgh to apprehend Escobar. The first phase was to put “eyes” on the ground to conduct tactical reconnaissance of the location where Escobar was holed up according to the FBI informant. A special operations unit already in Panama could do this. It would confirm the FBI source’s information, and Escobar would be quickly snatched. The military would provide intelligence, communications and protection, but FBI or Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents accompanying the team would make the arrest.

  Three strong arguments were presented for the operation. First, the arrest of Escobar would be a big bonanza in the drug war, making the point that there was no sanctuary—especially in Panama—for drug dealers. Second, it would scare the hell out of Noriega, who would surmise that he might be next. Third, White House speechwriters were looking for concrete examples of successes in the drug war for the President’s upcoming speech, and the Escobar arrest would offer a stunning illustration.

  In the end, the operation did not come off. The FBI had irregular access to its informant, who had provided only a general location where he claimed Escobar was staying. The special operations unit went searching for the house but was unable to find it. And there was also evidence that the report that Escobar was in Panama had been planted as part of an FBI sting operation against other drug traffickers.

  Cheney was distressed they had not been able to provide more timely intelligence. He ordered the Joint Staff to increase its intelligence capability.

  • • •

  Because the Escobar arrest was not carried off, there was a blank space in the President’s planned speech on the drug war. To fill it, Bush aides had the DEA lure a suspected drug dealer to Lafayette Park across from the White House for a crack sale on the President’s doorstep. Holding up to the camera a sealed plastic evidence bag full of crack, the President told a national audience on September 5, “This is crack cocaine seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement agents in a park just across the street from the White House. It could easily have been heroin or PCP. It’s as innocent looking as candy, but it’s turning our cities into battle zones, and it’s murdering our children.”

  The Washington Post soon disclosed that the drug buy had been set up, an embarrassing revelation for the administration. All the publicity on the drugs put the spotlight once again on Noriega, an unpleasant symbol of American impotence in the face of illegal narcotics.

  On his last trip to Washington before relinquishing command in Panama, Woerner had visited the State Department for a talk with Deputy Secretary Lawrence Eagleburger. The new assistant secretary for inter-American affairs, Aronson, joined the discussion and raised the possibility of a military solution in Panama.

  Eagleburger, conveying the confidence of his three decades of foreign affairs experience, stated categorically, “We will NEVER invade Panama.”

  After a White House meeting in September, Crowe told the senior members of the Joint Staff: “I don’t know when it’s going to happen, I don’t know what’s going to precipitate it, but I am convinced that we are going to have to go in with military force into Panama to resolve the situation, and we need to be ready to do it.”

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  On a rainy Wednesday morning, September 20, 1989, Powell went to Capitol Hill for his confirmation hearing at
the Senate Armed Services Committee.

  He had fixed in his mind some goals for the hearing. First, he wanted the committee to know he realized it was a changing world. Second, he wanted to say that, despite these changes, he did not want to oversee a hollowing out of the armed forces through budget cuts. Third, he didn’t want to speak against Admiral Crowe. He wanted a hearing that made no news.

  “Secretary Weinberger laid down certain criteria for the use of U.S. military forces abroad,” Senator Nunn said to Powell toward the end of the uneventful hearing.

  Powell half-smiled. He remembered well. In the spring of 1984, Powell was serving as the Secretary’s military assistant when Weinberger drafted a major speech laying down six tests for use of military force. As soon as it was circulated for approval by the administration, bloody fights ensued. All the chiefs, except the Chairman, General John W. Vessey, Jr., were violently opposed. Reagan’s national security adviser at the time, Robert McFarlane, stalled the speech until after the fall presidential election.

  In the end, as was generally the case, Weinberger had his way. On November 28, 1984, he delivered the speech at the National Press Club. He felt it was the most important of his tenure. The tests were: (1) “The United States should not commit forces to combat overseas unless the particular engagement or occasion is deemed vital to our national interest”; (2) the commitment should only be made “with the clear intention of winning”; (3) it should be carried out with “clearly defined political and military objectives”; (4) it “must be continually reassessed and adjusted if necessary”; (5) it should “have the support of the American people and their elected representatives in Congress”; and (6) it should “be a last resort.”

  The speech, Powell knew, was part of Weinberger’s titanic battle with Secretary of State George Shultz. State frequently pushed for military solutions to its problems, while Weinberger and the military, who actually had to carry out the use of force, were more cautious.

  They were good rules, in Powell’s view, but he wasn’t sure they should have been publicly declared. This had the effect of chiseling them in stone, so that whenever the United States used force, somebody was going to object: wait a minute, you didn’t follow one of the rules.

  Nunn asked Powell, “Do you believe, as some so-called experts have said, that the Joint Chiefs under the Weinberger criteria are too reluctant and too reticent to use military forces abroad in certain contingencies?”

  “My experience over the last several years,” Powell answered, “is that the Joint Chiefs have been quite ready to recommend to the President the use of military force in situations.” He cited the Persian Gulf escort mission, Libya and the 1983 Grenada invasion.

  “So there is no hesitancy,” Powell went on, “to use the armed forces as a political instrument when the mission is clear and when it is something that has been carefully thought out and considered and all the ramifications of using military forces have been considered.

  “I do not sense that they go down the Weinberger checklist and say, ‘Ah-ha, condition number three has not been met,’ ” Powell continued. “Secretary Weinberger’s very famous speech and his guidelines are useful guidelines, but I have never seen them to be a series of steps each one of which must be met before the Joint Chiefs of Staff will recommend the use of military force.”

  The committee voted unanimously to confirm Powell. Within a day, the full Senate approved his nomination on a voice vote, a procedure reserved for the most uncontroversial questions.

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  11

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  ON SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, Max Thurman took over the Southern Command from Woerner in Panama. The senior U.S. military officers and the attachés from the embassies of the other Latin American nations attended the change-of-command ceremony in Panama City. Afterwards, Thurman went right to work, receiving extensive briefings—“the dump,” as he called it—on each country in his new area of responsibility. He worked a full day the next day, a Sunday. After supper, at about 9:30, he took a call from one of his assistants. The CIA station was reporting that it had received information from the wife of a fairly senior PDF officer—the name was unclear—that her husband was planning a coup against Noriega the next morning, and wanted the U.S. military to block some roads. The woman’s information was vague.

  “Okay,” Thurman said, “you’ve got to break through all of that crap and get to the guts of whoever it is saying what they want to do. . . . Find out what the hell’s going on.”

  Thurman went to his command center at the Tunnel, his secure complex in the side of a hill at Quarry Heights in Panama City. At about 2 a.m., two CIA men arrived.

  “I’ve got bad news,” one of them said. “We don’t like the guy that’s running it.” They identified him as Major Moises Giroldi, a quiet, 38-year-old member of Noriega’s PDF leadership. The CIA men had met first with his wife, then with him. As a major, one of the senior ranks in the PDF, Giroldi was in a position to carry out a successful coup. But they had discovered that he had helped Noriega crush a coup only 18 months earlier, in March 1988. Giroldi had turned in the coup participants, and Noriega had them jailed and tortured. Now this same guy was requesting U.S. military roadblocks at two key routes into Panama City, to block Noriega’s troops.

  Thurman suspected immediately that this was an attempt to drag him personally into some crazy sting operation, get him out front with military support, then expose him as a sucker, destroying his credibility in his first days of command.

  So what is the Giroldi plan? he asked. What do the plotters plan to do with Noriega?

  “They’re going to talk him into retirement,” one of the CIA men explained.

  “Say what?” Thurman exploded.

  “They’re going to talk him into retirement. They hope he’s not in the Comandancia when the coup gets going.” Giroldi planned to seize the Comandancia, Noriega’s headquarters, cutting the general off from his communications and staff, and then get in touch with him and convince him his rule was over and he ought to retire peaceably to the countryside.

  “Let me see if I get this straight.” Thurman said. “He’s outside the Comandancia and they’re going to talk to him on the telephone and ask him to retire gracefully?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s preposterous,” Thurman said. “Why wouldn’t they grab him and do something with him? I’ve never heard of such a thing—that’s cockamamie.”

  Just over 24 hours in command and now this. Thurman concluded he had better report to Washington. He reached General Kelly at home at 2:30 a.m. on his secure phone.

  “Got a report for you,” Thurman said. “There’s a coup going down.” He summarized what the CIA men had said, adding that the coup was scheduled for 9 a.m.—about six hours away—and that Giroldi said it was going to be announced 15 minutes in advance on the local television stations.

  “What’s your recommendation, sir?” asked Kelly, who had three stars to Thurman’s four.

  “Simple,” Thurman said. “This is an ill-motivated; ill-conceived—they are going to talk this guy into retirement, hoping he’s not there; ill-led—this guy doesn’t know who is going to be in the coup; fatally flawed plan. I’d recommend you stay out of it. Stay out of it big time.”

  • • •

  Powell, who had taken over the chairmanship of the JCS at midnight on October 1, without fanfare or ceremony, had spent Sunday at home waiting for his first duty day on Monday. He was asleep when Kelly called him.

  “We have some indications in Panama there’s going to be a coup,” Kelly told his new boss.

  Powell agreed to meet Kelly at the Pentagon within the hour, but first he woke up Cheney to tell him. Then he headed out into the rainy predawn to start his first day four hours early. Arriving at the National Military Command Center, the sealed-off part of the Pentagon where the Secretary, the Chairman and their top assistants often go to monitor and direct operations, he ribbed Kelly for getting him out of bed so early.
They put a handful of officers on stand-by as a Crisis Action Team (CAT) to follow the situation and coordinate any use of force.

  It sounds goofy, Powell said after he saw a summary on the coup. There seemed no reason for the United States to sign on. Neither Powell nor Kelly liked the idea of a snap involvement. Getting rid of Noriega was something to do on a U.S. timetable; not a half-baked coup with a half-baked coup leader, Powell said.

  Because he wanted to take minimal action and not have the United States commit itself to anything foolish, the specific requests presented problems. A normal exercise could be staged by a company of several hundred U.S. troops on one of the roads the coup plotters wanted blocked. This was recommended and approved by Cheney. The second request, to secure the Bridge of the Americas, which traverses the canal into Panama City, would take U.S. forces close to Noriega’s Comandancia headquarters and could not be masqueraded as a routine exercise. Powell did not recommend it.

  • • •

  One floor directly below Powell’s office, Rear Admiral Edward D. “Ted” Sheafer was busy culling through the intelligence. Sheafer, 48, was the deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for JCS support—Powell’s intelligence officer. He was a longtime Navy intelligence specialist who had good lines into all the military intelligence agencies and the CIA. He used them that morning to put together an assessment for Powell. In intelligence language, Major Giroldi could easily be a “dangle”—a decoy sent out to mislead or trick—Sheafer said, adding, “Noriega might be trying to make us look like assholes.” Giroldi seemed to be planning a coup against the Comandancia, not against Noriega. If it was genuine, it was based on the mistaken idea that seizing a building constituted seizing power. It was absurd, flaky, right down to the notion of retiring Noriega to the countryside with a full pension. Sheafer told his boss that the CIA was not on top of the situation.