The Commanders

by Bob Woodward

  Later in the meeting Glaspie told Saddam, “But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.” She went on to say that the United States would insist on a nonviolent settlement. “I received an instruction to ask you, in the spirit of friendship—not in the spirit of confrontation—regarding your intentions.”

  Saddam said that through the intervention of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak he had agreed to talks with the Kuwaitis.

  “This is good news,” Glaspie said. “Congratulations.” She added that she had planned to postpone a trip to the United States the following week, but with this good news, she would leave Baghdad on Monday.

  • • •

  Powell was relieved when he saw the cable Glaspie sent to Washington on her meeting with Saddam. It seemed to suggest that there was room for negotiations between Iraq and Kuwait. All the Iraqi troops on the border certainly indicated that something strange was going on. But his days seemed to be filled with people and documents reporting strange, inconclusive goings-on. It was in some respects a world filled with fuzzy, blurred pictures, and his approach was to let time fine-tune them.

  As he monitored the flow of information, Powell remained cool about the prospects for trouble. He knew what a field army had to do to prepare for combat, and the Iraqi Army was not acting as if it were really going to attack. Four things were missing: (1) communications networks were not in place—intercepts showed the traffic levels were too low for an invasion; (2) artillery stocks were not in place for offensive action; (3) other needed munitions were not there; and (4) there was an insufficient logistics “tail”—supply lines—capable of supporting attacks by armored tank forces.

  • • •

  Friday, July 27, was a fairly routine day for Powell—several foreign visitors and a meeting of the Defense Planning Resources Board, one of the Pentagon’s many policy committees and oversight groups. He also was going to attend the Marines’ weekly evening parade and a reception hosted by Al Gray at the Marine Barracks, a summer Friday night ritual.

  Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar had asked to stop by and see him at the Pentagon at 4 p.m. Powell and Bandar had known each other for more than a decade. They had played racquetball when Bandar was a major in the Saudi Air Force assigned to Washington in his pre-ambassador days and Powell was in one of his early Pentagon assignments.

  Powell was somewhat wary of Bandar, a specialist in out-of-channel solutions and relationships. In Bandar’s office in his lavish ambassador’s residence, he kept 15 to 20 locked attaché cases containing the details of covert operations or confidential arrangements with individuals and countries. Bandar’s fingerprints were all over the Iran-contra affair; he had been the go-between with the Reagan administration arranging the controversial $25 million in secret Saudi funding for the Nicaraguan contras; he had worked with Reagan CIA Director William J. Casey to set up the assassination of a suspected Middle East terrorist leader in Beirut with a car bomb which instead killed at least 80 bystanders and not the terrorist leader; he had arranged a huge, secret, $3 billion Saudi purchase of ballistic missiles from China.

  Bandar worked hard to keep in touch with the five key people in the administration—Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, Cheney and Powell. No more politically oriented group could be running the U.S. government, he felt. To a certain extent he found the five interchangeable—each half statesman, half warrior, half politician, half of everything. A very lethal inner circle, capable of playing at the highest level of political gamesmanship, he had once remarked. Of the five, he judged Powell probably the most cautious.

  This Friday afternoon, Bandar told Powell that Saudi King Fahd was being assured by everyone in Iraq and the Middle East that Saddam was not going to invade Kuwait. Saddam had given personal assurances to Mubarak of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan. It isn’t going to happen, Bandar said confidently. Saddam was saying it was only a military exercise of his crack divisions. Saddam’s summons to U.S. Ambassador Glaspie was a positive sign, he said. Clearly, the dispatch of the KC-135s to the United Arab Emirates had caught Saddam’s attention. Though the official Saudi position—Bandar said he had instructions on this from his government—was that the UAE was wrong to ask for the aircraft, the Saudi government believed that once asked, the United States was correct to provide the planes. Bandar said he personally felt the UAE had done the right thing.

  Powell agreed that Saddam was saber-rattling. His information supported that view.

  The crisis has peaked and will be resolved peacefully, at least for the moment, Bandar said. This week, this year is okay. But he predicted later trouble from Saddam.

  Bandar and the Saudis held Kuwait in deep contempt, generally viewing the Kuwaiti ruling family and leadership as a mercantile class with little national identity. Their land was a business before it was a nation. When Bandar was out with close friends and had to visit the washroom, he would say, “I’ve got to go to Kuwait.”

  Confident that there was no immediate crisis, Bandar was planning to leave for Europe the next week and take his family on an around-the-world August vacation, including stops in Singapore, China, Bali and Hawaii.

  Powell said he too expected August to be quiet and was planning to take some leave.

  “Well, Colin,” Bandar said, “it looks good. Everything looks on track. Of course, if he escalates this, you may have to come help us all.” The Saudis had spent tens of billions on American arms, additional airfields and vast military installations. The implied contract had for years been that the United States was the protector.

  “Let’s pray he doesn’t escalate it,” Powell said.

  “Well, what would you do if he did?”

  Powell waved him off. His eyes were very careful.

  What would be your recommendation? Bandar pressed.

  “I have no view,” Powell said. “That would be up to the President.”

  Bandar, probing and testing, pushed a third time. As a former national security adviser, as the Chairman, how would you look at it? Come on, Colin.

  “In the hypothetical,” Powell said, “if I was asked, should we go, I would say no. If I was told, I’d go, but I’d go to win. I don’t want to go to lose.”

  Bandar said that he hoped it didn’t come to that.

  “I hope, too.”

  • • •

  Since the deputy national security adviser Bob Gates was out of town, no deputies committee meeting on the Iraqi-Kuwaiti situation had been held. Robert Kimmitt, the undersecretary for political affairs at State, called a deputies committee meeting that same Friday, July 27, at the State Department.

  A general feeling of optimism characterized the meeting. Bandar’s positive interpretation of the Saddam-Glaspie exchange was circulating. President Mubarak had sent a personal message to President Bush, repeating his forecast of no imminent trouble and cautioning the United States to stop both saying and doing things to try to influence the situation. Let the Arabs handle it, Mubarak said. This message was carrying great weight with the White House, where Scowcroft interpreted it as saying, Hey, relax.

  A direct message from Baker to Iraq was drafted and circulated. Restrained in tone, it assured Saddam that the United States was trying to get along with Iraq and attempting to establish a way to work with him, and that Iraq must reciprocate.

  Paul Wolfowitz, on behalf of Defense, objected to the message, and urged something stronger. If a stiffer message could not be sent, he said it would be better to send nothing. But the general feeling was that Saddam was not going to cross fellow Arab Mubarak.

  CIA Deputy Director Richard Kerr said that the level of buildup made it hard to dismiss the possibility of military action, but his experts noted the strong counterarguments: Iraq’s real enemy was to its west—Israel. And it would be unprecedented for one Arab state to attack another.

  Baker’s restrained message was sent.

  At the Pentagon later, Wolfowitz was trying to figure out how the situation might be
influenced indirectly. He proposed moving the so-called MPS ships, Maritime Pre-positioned Ships, at the U.S. base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, the closest supply base to the Persian Gulf but still 3,000 miles away. These ships held 30 days’ food, ammunition and supplies for a Marine unit of more than 16,000.

  Powell was opposed to such a show of force. What for? What can it accomplish? What’s the mission? he asked.

  The Chairman did not normally like to use his forces as a signal, and didn’t want some bright idea by the civilians to get them committed with no clear objective in sight. Also, Powell didn’t want to get started on a vague objective, and then midway through the mission have the military told what the administration really wanted to accomplish. Moving MPS ships signaled a commitment of ground forces, and no one was talking about that. Sending the KC-135s to the UAE had not accomplished much, he noted, and in retrospect he thought it had been a mistake. The announcement had scared the hell out of the UAE, not the Iraqis. And deploying the MPS ships would leak to the news media, and then the administration would have to provide an explanation.

  Wolfowitz felt this attitude undervalued the impact such a show of force could have on the diplomatic moment. There are benefits in ambiguity, he believed.

  Kuwait had not requested any help, Powell noted. MPS ships were not an acceptable solution. Where would the Marines land? Wolfowitz conceded. The Kuwaiti ambassador had come to see him in the Pentagon earlier that week and talked about how worried he was. Wolfowitz had given the ambassador every opening to ask for assistance, but he had not done so.

  Hard to help someone who doesn’t want to be helped, Powell felt. Kuwait had not moved any of its small army of 20,000 to meet the Iraqis at the border.

  No MPS ships were deployed.

  • • •

  On Monday, July 30, Pat Lang sat down to write a top-secret electronic-mail message to the DIA director, Lieutenant General Harry E. Soyster, and the other division heads within the agency. The secure internal electronic-mail system, called E-Mail, provided a means of quick, nearly instantaneous communications by computer with the boss. Soyster would decide whether to give it further circulation.

  “I have been looking at the pattern of reinforcement along the Kuwaiti border,” Lang typed on his Zenith 386 computer. “There is some artillery and logistics moving; aircraft are moving. There is absolutely no reason for Saddam Hussein to do this, it doesn’t make any sense if his aim is to intimidate Kuwait. He has created the capability to overrun all of Kuwait and all of Eastern Saudi Arabia. If he attacks, given his disposition, we will have no warning.

  “I do not believe he is bluffing. I have looked at his personality profile. He doesn’t know how to bluff. It is not in his past pattern of behavior.

  “I fear that Kuwait will be so stiff-necked in answering his demands that they will not fulfill his minimal requirements.

  “In short, Saddam Hussein has moved a force disproportionate to the task at hand, if it is to bluff. Then there is only one answer: he intends to use it.”

  The interpretation that Saddam was trying to intimidate did not pass Lang’s common-sense test. Kuwait did not have the intelligence capability and satellites to see the large Iraqi force on its border. Only the United States would know for sure, and Saddam could not know whether this intelligence would be passed on. So, if the 100,000 troops were only a show of force, a demonstration, it was being lost on the audience it was designed to influence—Kuwait.

  He finally pushed the key sending the message on its way.

  There were too many people involved in preparing formal intelligence papers that went through too many hands and committees, Lang felt. These papers tended to iron out the differences into a whole that in the end said nothing. The general rule in intelligence was never be wrong. An analyst didn’t have to be right, but it was a great curse to be wrong. So the formal papers and national estimates hedged.

  Lang wanted his new analysis to serve as a thunderclap. The horrible truth, he realized, was that when the policymakers had some idea or interpretation in their minds, intelligence assessments, even thunderclaps, would not move them. The mind-set not to believe could be a potent force. And, after all, he could not prove this force was going to be used.

  He had another motive. Earlier in the month he had spent two days at a Rand Corporation seminar in which the participants examined an Iraqi threat against Kuwait. They had decided that the only effective way to forestall such a situation would be to get the President of the United States to warn Saddam that if he stepped over the border, the United States was going to come get him. Lang did not include this suggestion in his message; he was an intelligence officer and it was not his job to make policy recommendations.

  Soyster told Lang he did not believe his assessment. The DIA director just did not find it conceivable that Saddam would do something so anachronistic as an old-fashioned land grab. Countries didn’t go around doing things like that any more. But Soyster knew the message from Lang could not be ignored. He ordered copies hand-carried to Cheney and Powell, and appended a margin note saying he wanted them to see Lang’s conclusion.

  Powell considered Lang’s interpretation a mere personal assessment. It was not based on any new hard information. Iraqi communications and munitions were still at insufficient levels, and no Iraqi airpower was in place to support a ground attack.

  CIA Deputy Director Kerr, too, told Powell that an invasion could be launched, but the CIA had not yet put this down in a written intelligence report. This suggested to Powell that it also was an educated guess. Again it was apparently a personal conclusion, and Powell didn’t see any firm facts backing it up.

  After Lang had sent his message, he was dispatched to give the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington a briefing on the buildup. He described the situation in great detail and asked him, “Well, are you going to do anything?”

  “What can we do?” the ambassador replied.

  • • •

  At his regular noon press briefing on Tuesday, July 31, Pete Williams was asked about a story on page 16 of that day’s Washington Post. “Have the Iraqis moved 100,000 troops to the Kuwaiti border?”

  “That would get into intelligence information which we just can’t discuss,” Williams said.

  The reporter pressed, “You’ve not refused in the past to give the information, you’ve refused to say how you got it. You can’t confirm that the troops are there?”

  “I’ve seen reports about the troops there,” Williams replied, following the administration line that the issue be downplayed, “but we’ve never discussed here numbers or made any further comments on that. I think the State Department has some language they’ve been using about obviously being concerned about any buildup of forces in the area, and can go through, as we’ve gone through here, what our interests in the Gulf are, but we’ve never really gotten into numbers like that or given that kind of information out.”

  • • •

  When Lang arrived at his office about 6 a.m. on Wednesday, August 1, some of his staff were waiting for him. They directed him to the latest pictures of the Kuwait-Iraq border which had arrived at DIA moments before.

  All three Iraqi armored divisions had uncoiled and moved dramatically forward to within three miles of the Kuwait border. It was breathtaking, a beautiful military maneuver. Hammurabi and In God We Trust had taken up positions near the main four-lane highway heading into the center of Kuwait. Hundreds of tanks were on line—all facing toward Kuwait, spaced some 50 to 75 yards apart. It was a genuine line of death, miles long. Artillery had moved in behind the tanks.

  The Medina Luminous Division had moved around to the western side of Kuwait. These tanks also were on line, stretched out for miles.

  Command tanks had taken the traditional battlefield position in the rear of the line in the center of each division.

  He had been wrong about there being no advance warning, Lang realized. Here it was. Saddam was being very deliberate
. As Lang’s eyes raced over the images, he realized that armored units could not more vividly advertise their intent. It was as if a gun had been loaded and aimed, and a finger put on the trigger. Now he was watching the muscle in the finger tighten; it was happening in slow motion before his eyes.

  The photographs also showed that the Iraqis had moved some 80 helicopters closer to the border in a classic air-land assault posture.

  Lang drafted a top-secret, highest-priority flash warning message describing the situation and forecasting an attack that night or the next morning. A special top-secret bulletin was put out to senior officials in the Pentagon. The whisper raced through the building among those who were cleared: it was going to be a long night for the Middle East staffs.

  That morning Powell read a CIA assessment that said all indicators showed that Saddam was going to invade. Powell knew that this assignment of intent was a big deal. The CIA tried to avoid crying wolf too often. Now the DIA warnings landed on his desk. Not only had Saddam moved his tanks on line overnight, but the communications, artillery, munitions, logistics and airpower were in place. A crossover point had been reached militarily. Powell realized, however, that in a totalitarian regime, the only way to be sure of intent was to know what was in the leader’s mind, and neither CIA nor DIA had good human sources in the Iraqi government. He was no soothsayer. But a field army of great capacity had sprung to life before their eyes. Kuwait—my God, Powell thought, Iraq could have sent the local police force to take over.

  Later in the morning Powell attended a meeting with Cheney on nuclear command and control. Among the subjects discussed was fail-safe procedures worldwide in the U.S. military to make sure there was no unauthorized detonation of nuclear weapons. Afterwards, Powell went to a luncheon hosted by the visiting president of Togo, the small West African country.