In My Time (29 page)

Goldwater-Nichols also took the chiefs out of the chain of command. The air force and army chiefs as well as the Marine commandant and the chief of naval operations would no longer command forces
when they were deployed. They were responsible for recruiting, training, and equipping the force, but not for using it in combat. That role was reserved for the CINCs, the commanders in the field. The secretary of defense may, at his option, send military orders to the field through the chairman, which I chose to do.

The chairman about to be appointed would be the first to serve his entire tenure in the consequential position that Goldwater-Nichols had created, and I wanted to make certain that the man I picked was not a “political” general, someone who’d had his head turned by the rarefied atmosphere of the White House. I needed to know that General Powell was happy to be back commanding troops and satisfied with the idea of serving out the rest of his career in uniform. To find out if that was the case, I made a stop at FORSCOM headquarters at Fort McPherson and visited with Powell face-to-face. I came away impressed, my mind made up to recommend him to the president.

I knew Scowcroft had some hesitation about Powell, based, I thought, on Powell’s having been the national security advisor to President Reagan. Brent wasn’t enthusiastic about having a chairman of the Joint Chiefs who knew as much as he did about running the National Security Council and advising the president, but I thought his reluctance could be overcome.

President Bush had worked closely with Powell when he was vice president and Powell was national security advisor, and I knew he was a fan. But I was also aware that the president was worried about jumping Powell, a brand-new four-star, over fourteen others in order to put him in the military’s top job. Picking him would certainly ruffle some feathers, and when I made the case to the president that Powell was the man for the job, I said I would handle any blowback from those we passed over.

The president backed my decision about Powell and agreed to nominate him. On October 1, 1989, after confirmation by the Senate, Colin Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I knew we would have important work to do together. I believed we would be a good team. And for our time together at the Pentagon, we were.

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ON HIS FIRST DAY on the job, General Powell woke me early in the morning with news that we were getting reports a coup might be about to get under way in Panama. We monitored the situation through the day, and I left the next morning to take my Soviet counterpart, General Dmitri Yazov, on a tour of Gettysburg National Military Park. On a previous visit to the Soviet Union, my hosts had taken me to see the mass graves from the siege of Leningrad; Hitler’s troops had failed to capture the city, but more than a million Russians had died. I thought I would reciprocate for the tour the Soviets had given me by taking their official party to the site of one of the most important battles in American history. We got an expert from the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and loaded the delegation on a bus to tour the sites of the key events in the famous battle.

On the bus ride through the military park, I sat in the front row next to Yazov, a big, beefy guy, who had been chosen for his post by Gorbachev—and who would within two years be in jail for attempting a coup on the Soviet leader. We were well into our tour when my cell phone rang. Since this was 1989, the cell phone was bigger than a brick and my military aide carried it in his briefcase. Admiral Owens answered the call, leaned over the seat, and said, “Mr. Secretary, General Powell is on the phone, and he says he needs to speak with you.” Reaching behind me, I took the phone, put it to my ear, and listened as General Powell told me it looked like the coup in Panama had begun. When the call was finished and I handed the phone back to Admiral Owens, I noticed that General Yazov was clearly curious—not so much about the content of my call, but about my phone. Apparently mobile technology was still pretty rare in the Soviet Union.

For our new national security team, this was a first test. How would we operate in a crisis? Would we be able to generate options for the president and a timely response? In this case, with hindsight, I would have to say we did not perform as well as we might have.

The first question for us was whether this was a legitimate coup. Our reporting was spotty, and we did not want to fall into some kind of trap Noriega might be setting, trying to get us to take the first step
militarily only to find out later there hadn’t been a coup. On the other hand, if the coup was real and American aid to the plotters could help unseat Noriega, intervening on the side of the plotters would be worth considering.

By around one in the afternoon, we had developed a list of options to recommend to the president, ranging from what to do if the coup plotters brought Noriega to an American base to the possibility of using U.S. forces to extract Noriega. By 2:30 p.m. the coup had failed. Reports were that Noriega, outsmarting his captors, was able to reestablish his control over the situation and kill the coup leader. Shortly after that Noriega went on TV to denounce the coup plotters and the United States. Within the week we were being criticized by Democrats and Republicans in Congress for failing to take advantage of the situation.

While I don’t believe the United States would have benefited by siding with the coup plotters more openly in this instance, the truth is, we didn’t move fast enough to make a decision. It was made for us by events on the ground. We learned from this experience that we needed a better system in place to stay on top of fast-moving developments and to get good intelligence that we could act on. These were lessons we put to good use a few months later when we invaded Panama.

AS WE MONITORED EVENTS in Panama throughout the fall of 1989, we were also dealing with a potential coup in the Philippines. On November 30 we started getting reports that rebels opposed to the rule of Corazon Aquino had seized air bases belonging to the Filipino government. We also received a request from President Aquino for the United States to use the F-4 Phantom jets stationed at Clark Air Force Base to bomb the rebel positions. I did not believe we should agree to this—nor did General Powell. For one thing, President Aquino made it clear that she would publicly deny having made the request. Asking the United States to bomb Filipino citizens, even if they were rebels, would not go over well inside her own country. But we were committed to defending the government of the Philippines and needed to come up with a show of strength to discourage the rebels.

As the crisis was coming to a head, President Bush, Jim Baker, and Brent Scowcroft made an evening departure for a summit meeting in Malta with Mikhail Gorbachev. Later that night, Vice President Dan Quayle convened a meeting of members of the National Security Council in the Situation Room at the White House. I stayed home in McLean, Virginia, where I had secure communications that enabled me to talk directly to Powell, who was in the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon, and to Air Force One. When Powell briefed me on the response to the Philippine situation that he and the Pentagon planners proposed—to put up a combat air patrol of American-flown aircraft over Manila—I called Air Force One directly. When I learned that the president agreed with the proposed response, I called Powell with the order to get the operation started. The plan was the right one. It worked to keep Aquino in power without our ever firing a shot.

While our communications ability allowed us to do things our predecessors could not have dreamed of, we also ran into glitches from time to time. During my conversations with Powell the night of the Philippines crisis, he expressed extreme frustration at being unable, despite all the fancy equipment in the National Military Command Center, to talk to Filipino defense officials. The solution, as he described it to me in colorful terms as it was happening, was to have the floor of the command center ripped up and a regular phone line brought in so he could dial out to the Philippines.

AFTER NORIEGA PUT DOWN the coup attempt in October, we took steps to be better prepared for the next crisis—and it wasn’t long in coming. On December 15, the Panamanian legislature declared that Panama was at war with the United States, and the next day members of the Panamanian Defense Force, or PDF, shot and killed an unarmed United States Marine lieutenant, Robert Paz, when the car he was in took off in panic after being surrounded at a checkpoint. An American naval officer and his wife, witnesses to the shooting, were taken into custody by the PDF, harassed, threatened, and the husband beaten.

At ten the next morning, Sunday, December 17, I called a meeting in
my office to review our options. General Powell, Paul Wolfowitz, Dave Addington, Pete Williams, and Admiral Owens were there, as well as General Tom Kelly, the smart, straight-shooting officer who was director of operations for the joint staff. I went around the table to give each man a chance to be heard. General Powell was particularly eloquent on the consequences of Noriega’s PDF killing an American soldier in cold blood. This was not the kind of thing we could let go unanswered.

That afternoon, when we took our recommendations to the president, Christmas celebrations in the White House were in full swing. I made my way through hallways decked out for the season to the private elevator that goes up to the second-floor residence, where Generals Powell and Kelly briefed the president on our overall war plan, then called “Operation Blue Spoon,” and described its objective—taking down Noriega and the PDF and restoring the democratically elected government of Panama. All around the room there was support for taking action, and at the end of the meeting President Bush gave us the order—“Do it.”

Back at the Pentagon later that day, General Kelly and his deputy then, Admiral Joe Lopez, discussed the formal name of the operation. “Blue Spoon” just didn’t seem right, a little too frivolous. The two batted around some options until Lopez said, “How about ‘Just Cause’?” And the operation was named.

The next day was spent on a final check of plans that had been set in place weeks earlier. I knew as a student of history that in even the most successful military operations there are failures, but I also knew that it was the responsibility of those of us in command at the Pentagon to do as much as we could to plan for eventualities and minimize error. Civilian leaders also have to walk a fine line. You have a legal obligation to make certain the military is doing its job, that it assembles a force and puts together a plan to achieve the objective it has been given. But it’s important not to cross into Lyndon Johnson territory, where civilian leadership picks bombing targets from the White House.

PANAMA WAS THE FIRST military operation where I had to decide how to handle the reporters who wanted to cover operations. I understood
the press had a job to do, but I felt it was important that they not interfere with the job I had to do. In any military operation, the press will push for the maximum coverage possible, but we had to be aware, particularly in light of technology that now made instant reporting from the field increasingly possible, that their coverage could jeopardize the security of our operation.

For Panama, we used a pool system, which basically meant that certain reporters were selected to be on call at a given time. They would be the ones to go if something came up during their watch. We sent the pool to Panama, but they became frustrated when they got there and found themselves under the control of General Thurman. I understood the frustration, but we couldn’t divert assets we needed to fight the battle to the task of escorting journalists, so they had to cool their heels for a while.

In addition there were a few reporters who had gotten down to Panama on their own, not as part of the pool system. When the fighting started, one group hid out in the basement of the Marriott hotel. They placed frantic calls to their home offices in New York, which were in turn putting tremendous pressure on the White House. There were thirty-five thousand American civilians in Panama, but the journalists at the Marriott became the center of attention, and finally Brent called and told us we had no choice. The president wanted us to rescue them. The problem wasn’t only their superiors in New York calling in, but other reporters focusing on the stranded journalists. They were making it seem as though the military operation, which was generally going well, was somehow not succeeding.

We sent units from the 82nd Airborne to the Marriott, and they successfully freed the journalists as well as others who were there. But three American soldiers were wounded in the rescue, and a Spanish photographer covering the operation was killed.

Many at the Pentagon had a deep distrust of the media that was in part left over from Vietnam. There was a view—which I shared—that unduly negative reporting had helped sour public opinion on that war. The Tet Offensive, for example, was presented as a devastating blow to
our side, when, in fact, we dealt out punishing losses to the North Vietnamese. Operation Just Cause deepened my conviction that the press ought not be the final arbiter of whether we have won or lost a war. When it came time for Desert Storm, I would try to be sure that we had maximum opportunity to communicate directly with the American people—without going through the filter of the press.

BEFORE WE WENT INTO Panama, the air force came to me with plans to use F-117s, our new stealth fighter. I wanted to know why. Surely the Panamanian air defense system wasn’t sophisticated enough to require stealth capability. But the planes had never been used in combat before, and the U.S. Air Force wanted the opportunity to try them out—which seemed reasonable to me. They also recommended using AC-130 Spectre gunships, a very stable platform that has massive firepower and great precision. Because they are vulnerable to ground-to-air defenses and enemy fighter aircraft, we preferred to have air superiority before using AC-130s, but we planned to establish that quickly in Panama, then use these planes to take down Noriega’s headquarters, the Comandancia.