In My Time

by Dick Cheney

At the end of the day, though, it was clear that our commander in the field, Norm Schwarzkopf, shared Powell’s strong resistance to having reporters embedded with the troops. Both Powell and Schwarzkopf and many of our senior officers had developed a deep distrust of the press based on their experiences in Vietnam. It was understandable, and I did not want to add to the already considerable pressure Schwarzkopf was under by insisting on the embed concept. So we agreed the war would be covered using a pool system, which ultimately had mixed results. Some reporters ended up with commanders who included them in key meetings and operational briefings. Others could barely get the time of day from the officers assigned to mind them.

  It was also the case that most of the prewar action had taken place in Saudi Arabia—a country that wasn’t issuing visas to journalists as a general matter. At first the only American journalists who could get into Saudi were the ones who flew in with me. The restrictions opened up a bit when King Fahd realized how much airtime Saddam Hussein was getting and determined to allow more Western journalists into the Kingdom to level the playing field.

  Ultimately, no matter what the Pentagon does with the press during a time of war, the U.S. government is likely to be criticized for it. If they embed reporters and give them access to lots of information, the military is accused of trying to shape the truth or sugarcoat things. If reporters don’t get access then the military is accused of trying to hide the truth. In some sense it’s a no-win situation, but I think all in all we handled it pretty well.

  One of my main concerns was not getting into a situation where the press was deciding whether or not we were winning. I wanted information about what was happening to come straight from the military and civilian leadership, not be filtered or skewed by the press in any way. Though we could not guard against this completely, I think our schedule of daily briefings and pool coverage helped ensure that plenty of accurate information did get through.

  After Powell and I finished our briefing on the first night of the war, I called the president, a World War II veteran of carrier-based combat operations. “Mr. President,” I told him, “we have sent fifty-six navy planes out and we’ve got fifty-six back. We have over two hundred air force planes out and no sign of any missing.” Overnight, however, we would lose a pilot, Lieutenant Commander Scott Speicher, whose F-18 was shot down over Iraq.

  ON THE SECOND DAY of the war, Saddam began launching Scud missiles at Israel. These were low-tech 1960s Soviet hardware, but in an urban setting they could cause considerable damage, and there were repeated rumors, all of which turned out to be false, that the Iraqis were putting chemical warheads on some of them. Shortly after the first Scuds struck, my phone rang. It was Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens. He was urgently requesting the Patriot missile batteries and crews we had offered before the war began. Arens said the Israelis also planned to launch retaliatory air strikes, and he asked for the Identification Friend or Foe, or IFF, codes that would allow Israeli pilots to avoid being shot down by allied planes. I told him I would get back to him. Then I called Scowcroft at the White House.

  In discussions before the war began, we had agreed that we had to do everything we could to keep the Israelis out of the war, because once they got in, the conflict might look like an Arab-Israeli war, and Arab nations might well leave the coalition. Saddam, no fool, had launched the Scuds with that in mind. Scowcroft thought the best way to keep the Israelis on the sidelines was to hold them at arm’s length. My assessment was that we should keep them close, tell them everything we were doing, and do everything we could to ensure Israel’s safety, which did not include giving them IFF codes, but, I told Arens, we would go after the Scud launchers in the western desert. The Israelis had to know there was no reason for them to get into the conflict, because we were doing all that could be done.

  In our discussions before the war, General Powell and the air commanders had assured me that we would have F-15E flights over the Iraqi western desert ready to take out any launch site from which a Scud was fired. As it turned out, the F-15Es had run into refueling difficulties and had not been flying the night of January 18. Nor did it seem—judging from CENTCOM’s plans for the next day’s air strikes—that General Schwarzkopf fully understood the importance of dedicating assets to hunting Scuds.

  The next day Tel Aviv was hit again, and the Hammer Rick phone line got a workout. I could understand the Israeli anger. I myself was furious when I asked about the number of sorties that Central Command was flying against the Scuds and got a totally unsatisfactory answer. I knew the source of the problem. Norm Schwarzkopf didn’t want to take assets away from bombing Baghdad and divert them to what he thought was a militarily insignificant mission. This was a misjudgment on his part. Not only was it militarily significant for us to keep the Israelis out of the war, but it would turn out that the heaviest American losses in a single attack during Desert Storm came from a Scud attack against our barracks near Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The way our military commands are structured, Israel is part of European Command’s area of responsibility, not part of Central Command, which was Schwarzkopf’s area. This may have added to Norm’s tendency not to factor Israel into his plans. Whatever the reason, I made it clear to Powell that going after the Scud launchers wasn’t an option, it was a necessity. He passed the message to Schwarzkopf, and American sorties over the western Iraqi desert picked up the next night.

  It was time for me to have a talk with Schwarzkopf, and when I got him on the phone, I told him he was doing a hell of a job, which he was, and that I understood his point: Civilians approve strategy and generals execute. But he needed to understand that the president considered this a strategic question. Whether our effort was successful or not could well depend on keeping Israel out of the war, and we had to devote resources to bombing Scud bunkers and launch sites. I also told him that he needed to understand my problem. “I’m the guy who gets to lean on the Israelis and who has to reassure them that we are doing everything we can. My credibility is crucial. If I tell them we are going to do something, then we will do it.”

  The air sorties over the western desert didn’t bring an end to Scud attacks by any means, not on Israel nor on Saudi Arabia, which Saddam was also targeting. Part of the problem was that while we’d identified a number of fixed sites where we knew there were Scud launchers, the Iraqis were using mobile launchers instead. Although we weren’t able to stop the launches, the diversion of air assets to the western desert did go a long way toward convincing the Israelis we were serious about doing all we could to stop the attacks. I’d call Arens with daily updates: twenty-four F-15s, cluster-bomb units, flying at midnight; four F-15s flying combat air patrol from 0300 to 1000; forty-eight A-10s during twelve hours of daylight; twelve F-16s on a fixed target at 1100; twenty-four on mobile units at 1400; twelve on bunkers at 1500.

  Larry Eagleburger from the State Department and Paul Wolfowitz from the Pentagon went to Israel again, which helped enormously in letting the Israelis know what we were doing and understand the size and scale of our effort. The deployment of Patriot batteries out of Germany and into Israel, which we managed in about forty-eight hours, was another sign of our commitment—though the missile turned out to be less effective against Scuds than we first thought. One problem was that the Patriot was developed to defend a point target, something like an airfield, not a whole area, not a city. If you’re protecting a base and you hit a Scud warhead coming in and knock it off target, that’s a success. But if you’re protecting Tel Aviv and you hit the incoming Scud and it goes down two miles away, that’s not a success. It’s also the case that Scuds are really crude devices. They’d break up as they came down, so that a lot of what we were shooting at was junk, not warheads.

  We also sent special operations forces into western Iraq to work behind enemy lines to hunt down the Scud launchers. As theater commander, Norm had ultimate sign-off for anyone operating in his area of responsibility, and at first he did not want the special operators there. He shared s
ome of the suspicion of others in the regular army that our special operations forces were overrated. I disagreed. I’d spent time learning about what they could do when I was in Congress, and after I was briefed by Wayne Downing, who commanded our joint special operations command and was an enormously capable officer and a true gentleman, I was convinced he and his men had an important contribution to make to our effort to shut down the Scud attacks. They did not disappoint. Once we combined special operations raids with air patrols, the number of attacks fell dramatically, and although they increased slightly as the Iraqis adjusted to our tactics, the Israelis did what we asked of them and stayed out of the war. It wasn’t until after the war that I came to understand what a near-run thing it had been. A senior Israeli official told me that at one point Israeli commandos were loaded into helicopters ready to fly into Iraq, but their mission was canceled after one of the phone calls I made reporting on the extent of our efforts to go after the Scuds. I emphasized that since we already had people on the ground, Israeli intervention could endanger American forces.

  THE SOVIETS HAD BEEN helpful in the early days after the Iraqis invaded Kuwait and had not opposed our efforts to liberate that country. However, once we launched operations, they began trying to arrange a cease-fire on terms we could not accept. They urged that we pause our bombing in response to a vague promise from Saddam to comply with UN Security Council resolutions. We knew that a pause would only give him time to rearm and regroup and we could not accept it. We had also been clear that Saddam had actually to withdraw from Kuwait, not simply make promises to do so.

  On January 28, a little less than two weeks into the air campaign, the new Soviet foreign minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh, was in Washington for meetings with Jim Baker. I had the sense that the Soviets, their empire on its last legs, were desperate to make themselves seem relevant by attempting to negotiate a cease-fire between us and the Iraqis. It also seemed that they wanted to show the world they could prevent their former client state, Iraq, from being on the receiving end of a massive military defeat. To his credit the president bore the brunt of the Soviet efforts to negotiate a cease-fire, patiently responding to call after call from Gorbachev himself. But on January 29 Jim decided to issue a joint statement with Bessmertnykh on Iraq without clearing it with the White House or showing it to us at the Pentagon. The statement was a problem because it suggested that we would in fact agree to a cease-fire in exchange for a promise from Saddam to pull out. The statement also suggested a linkage between a cease-fire and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Although the language of the joint statement suggested this wasn’t a change in our policy, it was in fact a change and caught all of us by surprise. It was released on the day of the president’s State of the Union address, and it caused a flurry of questions from the press about our cease-fire conditions.

  Jim, to his credit, apologized for the foul-up and said later it was one of his biggest mistakes as secretary of state. We all make mistakes. I had made my own with the Soviets two years earlier when I’d publicly predicted Gorbachev’s demise shortly after I became secretary of defense. I do think, though, that Jim was more willing to try to find a negotiated settlement than the president was. And the president held firm.

  ON FEBRUARY 7 Colin Powell and I flew to the desert. The trip gave us a chance to see the troops—and what an inspiration they were. We visited the 101st Airborne Division, and the atmosphere inside the tent where we gathered was electric. Colin had once commanded the second brigade of the 101st, and when he reached in his pocket and pulled out his coin—a souvenir he still had from his time in command—the place just went wild.

  We also had a session with pilots flying missions over Iraq. One pilot, who had been hit by Iraqi antiaircraft fire while flying an A-10, a 1970s-era tank killer, showed us the huge hole in his airplane’s wing and gave us a blow-by-blow of how he’d been hit and survived and made it back to base. I never tired of listening to the troops talk about their experiences. They were very, very good.

  Killing Iraqi tanks was a key mission for our air campaign. In early February, some of our F-111 pilots had discovered that their planes, developed for long-range bombing missions during Vietnam, had an advantage when it came to finding and taking out Iraqi tanks. The F-111s were equipped with an infrared targeting system. Many of the Iraqi tanks had been hidden under sandbags or behind berms. Our air force planners discovered that often the Iraqis weren’t turning them off at night, and even if they did, the heat the tanks had absorbed during the day would be released as night temperatures cooled. In either case, the F-111s could see the tanks, hotter than the surrounding sand, on their infrared systems and take them out. We started destroying a good number of Iraqi tanks this way. The pilots called it “tank plinking.”

  Although the method was successful, the kills were often difficult for the CIA to track using satellite photos. This meant their estimates of numbers of tanks destroyed varied widely from the CENTCOM estimates, which had the advantage of gun-camera footage from the F-111s and other planes firing on the tanks. Since we had agreed our aim was to degrade Iraq’s tank force by 50 percent before we launched the ground war, the difference in estimates mattered. At one point CIA Director Bill Webster went to the president to tell him we had not met our target. This led to a meeting in Brent’s office with Powell, Webster, Mike McConnell and me. We compared our estimates and convinced Scowcroft and the president that CENTCOM had it right and that we were, in fact, ready to begin the ground war.

  On our February trip to the desert, Powell and I spent eight hours in meetings with Schwarzkopf and his team to get up to speed on preparations for launching the ground invasion.

  In Saudi Arabia with Generals Powell and Schwarzkopf preparing for a press conference (Photo by David Kennerly)

  They walked us through the status of the air campaign and updated us on the bomb damage assessments for each category of strategic targets and the status of Iraqi forces in the Kuwait Theater of Operations. They briefed us on the current deployment of our ground forces, logistics issues, and our ability to guard against the possible use of chemical weapons against our troops.

  One of the key pieces of information Powell and I needed from Schwarzkopf was a date when he would be ready to begin ground operations. He told us what he thought made sense—sometime around February 21, with a window of three days. When Powell and I returned to Washington, we met upstairs in the White House with President Bush in the Yellow Oval Room and gave him the word.

  Those of us in charge of the war effort knew that the air campaign had succeeded in destroying much of Saddam’s air force and sending much of the rest of it fleeing to Iran. We had also degraded his army, but we still thought we’d have a fight on our hands. And there were some very troubling predictions: An expert at the Brookings Institution said between a thousand and four thousand Americans were going to die. Others warned that ten thousand Americans would be killed.

  A question in our minds all along had been whether Saddam would use chemical weapons. We made sure our troops had the gear for that, and we also made sure there was plenty of footage of our guys practicing the drill, putting those suits on. We wanted to be certain Saddam knew our guys would be much better prepared to deal with any chemical attack than his own troops would be. The president, Jim Baker, and I also made clear that the military had a wide range of options that could be used against Saddam Hussein if he used chemical weapons. I had warned that Saddam “needs to be made aware that the President will have available the full spectrum of capabilities. And were Saddam Hussein foolish enough to use weapons of mass destruction, the U.S. response would be absolutely overwhelming and it would be devastating.”

  After the war, Saddam’s foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, said that our statements, which Iraq had interpreted as threats of nuclear retaliation, had deterred Iraq from using its WMD. General Wafiq al Sammarai, who headed Iraqi military intelligence during the Gulf War, said in an interview that some of the Iraqis’ Scud missi
les had been loaded with chemical warheads, but they were not used, “because the warning was quite severe and quite effective. The allied troops were certain to use nuclear arms and the price will be too dear and too high.”

  ON FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 22, largely in response to continued Soviet efforts to broker a cease-fire, President Bush went into the Rose Garden and gave Saddam an ultimatum. He said the Iraqis would have until noon on Saturday to begin an immediate and unconditional withdrawal from Kuwait. Forty-five minutes before the deadline expired the next day, Gorbachev called the president again with yet another proposal that fell short of immediate unconditional withdrawal. No, the president told Gorbachev, a deadline is a deadline.

  ON FEBRUARY 24, THE morning after the ground war started, Lynne and I went to St. John’s Church near the White House. President and Mrs. Bush were there and I knew he would be anxious for news from the desert. I passed him a note that said, “Mr. President, things are going very well.”

  With President Bush in the White House residence briefing him on the first hours of the ground war in Operation Desert Storm, Sunday (Official White House Photograph)

  He invited Lynne and me to come up to the White House residence after church, and as we sat in the second-floor sitting room, I told him that there had been no major glitches so far. The campaign was going according to plan. Resistance was light all across the front. The most significant problem we were having was dealing with the Iraqis who were surrendering in droves to our forces.

  Time magazine had published an excellent war map that I laid out on the president’s coffee table. It showed the Iraqi forces arrayed along the Kuwait-Saudi border, the Republican Guard deployed on the Iraq-Kuwait border, and the general positions of the U.S. Army and Marines and our allies. It also showed our impressive naval assets: the aircraft carriers Saratoga, Kennedy, Theodore Roosevelt, and America in the Red Sea; the carriers Midway and Ranger and the battleships Missouri and Wisconsin in the Persian Gulf. Using a pen as a pointer, I walked the president through what had happened overnight.