>>> This extensive history of the first Gulf War by William M. Arkin draws on lots of declassified documents and inside information to present previously unknown facts about that conflict. It was published in installments on the Website of the magazine Stars and Stripes (a privately-owned magazine, not the US military newspaper of the same name). At some point the Website disappeared and with it, unfortunately, went this important piece of work. A full copy had survived in the Internet Archive until just a week ago. Now that it has completely vanished from the Net, The Memory Hole is extremely pleased to resurrect it.

Week 1 through Week 10 (below)

Week 11 through Week 20

Week 21 through Week 30

Bio for William M. Arkin

"We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait."
It is perhaps one of the most famous lines of the Persian Gulf War.
The venue was a July 25, 1990, meeting between U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie and President Saddam Hussein.
In two years as ambassador to Iraq, it was her first private audience with Saddam. And it was her last.
A week later, on Aug. 2, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait, and to some, Glaspie's statement would symbolize appeasement in offering a "green light" to invade.
Glaspie's statement, and her "belief" that Iraq did not want to have a war, is cited as proof of ineptitude.
We now know that Glaspie presented exactly Washington's stance, and was, in fact, a minor player in a long-standing White House policy of support and accommodation for Iraq. Saddam Hussein may have been given a green light to invade, but April Glaspie can hardly be blamed.

More Oil Than You Think

Where to start?
On Oct. 3, 1989, after assuming a host of covert Reagan-era arrangements with Iraq that were intended to "balance" the Arab country against fundamentalist Iran, President George Bush signed National Security Directive 26 (NSD-26) "U.S. Policy Toward the Persian Gulf." With regard to Iraq, the Top Secret directive stated: "The United States should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence."
Reconstruction of Iraq's economy after eight years of war with Iran, particularly in its oil sector, was seen as a way of securing "a U.S. foothold in a potentially large export market." Saddam's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons ambitions were recognized irritants, but the administration thought commercial incentives would be more attractive to Saddam than political ambitions.
By April 1990, when the Iraqi leader thrust himself into the public limelight, announcing that Iraq would "make the fire eat up half of Israel," the Bush administration had made quite an investment. The CIA reported that month that "U.S. purchases of Iraqi oil have jumped from about 80,000 barrels per day [b/d] in 1985-1987 to 675,000 b/d so far in 1990 -- about 24 percent of Baghdad's total oil exports and eight percent of new U.S. oil imports." Iraq had become America's number two trading partner in the Arab world, and was the largest importer of American-grown rice. The Department of Energy had even purchased Iraqi oil for use in the strategic petroleum reserve for a future war.
Yet there was also mounting congressional pressure to impose economic sanctions on Iraq because of its human rights record, its weapons of mass destruction programs and its increasingly hostile policy. Intelligence specialists wrote of the country's increasingly precarious financial position, and there were enormous financial improprieties in Iraqi dealings, leading the Agriculture Department to recommend a cut-off of Iraqi loans, as was mandated by law.
But the Bush White House would have none of it. In May, National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft personally asked Agriculture Secretary Clayton Yeutter to stop any public announcement of a suspension. Yeutter then overruled the Agriculture official administering the program.
Administration spokesmen and apologists would later argue that their Iraq policy had not contributed to the very capabilities American servicemen and women would soon be facing. It is an argument that can hardly be accepted. The Reagan and Bush administrations had authorized $5.08 billion in loan guarantees to Iraq between 1983 and 1990. Investigators later found that the Italian-owned Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL) issued another $4.5 billion in unauthorized loans, $1 billion of which were guaranteed by the Department of Agriculture. Between 1985 and 1990, the Commerce Department approved 771 licenses for dual-use technology exports to Iraq, of which 82 went directly to Iraqi military-related establishments. Fifteen times between 1983 and 1990, the U.S. government waived restrictions to allow items that appeared on the State Department's restricted "Munitions List" to be exported to Saddam. The United States might not have armed Saddam, but it freed up resources that effectively achieved the same goal.

Talking Points

As April Glaspie rushed to her meeting with Saddam on July 25, 1990 (she had gotten only two hours' notice), the July 18th "talking points" from Washington, now declassified, governed her discussions. "The United States takes no position on the substance of the bilateral issues concerning Iraq and Kuwait," it directed. The day before the snap meeting, in fact, Glaspie got yet another secret cable from the State Department. "The U.S. is concerned about the hostile implications of recent Iraq statements directed against Iraq's neighbors," it read. Yet it repeated the now standard "we take no position" line, merely imploring Iraq to be mindful of the fact that use of force was contrary to the United Nations charter.
Were threats against Iraq emanating from other quarters? On July 19, then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was quoted publicly as saying that the U.S. defense commitment extended to Kuwait during the Iran-Iraq war was still valid. Later that day Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams said that Cheney's remarks had been taken "with some degree of liberty." Five days later, when Secretary of the Navy Lawrence Garrett told a congressional committee that "our ships in the Persian Gulf were at a "heightened state of vigilance," his spokesman said that he had made a mistake.
The day before Glaspie's meeting, State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutweiler said "we do not have any defense treaties with Kuwait, and there are no special defense or security commitments to Kuwait." Assistant Secretary of State John Kelly told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on July 30 that the United States was not obligated to come to the military aid of Kuwait if Iraqi forces crossed the border.
Did the U.S. military leadership think an Iraqi invasion likely? Conventional wisdom right to the 11th hour was that if the Iraqis moved south, they would perhaps take the Bubiyan and Warbah islands off the Iraqi coast, and possibly the southeastern sector of the Rumaylah oil fields, which extended into Kuwait.
Up to the very last minute, while analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and CIA argued that a full-scale invasion seemed imminent, U.S. military leaders didn't believe it. Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Gen. Colin Powell: "They're not going to invade. This is a shakedown."
On July 31, Chairman Powell chaired a meeting in the "tank," the Joint Staff's secure conference room, to discuss the situation in Iraq. Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of the U.S. Central Command, which is responsible for the region, had flown up from his Tampa headquarters to give his assessment of the situation. DIA hard-liners said there was little doubt that an attack into Kuwait was imminent. Schwarzkopf didn't agree. Like Kelly, he thought Saddam was bluffing, seeking to extort concessions from Kuwait. A senior Kuwaiti military official had told Schwarzkopf that they weren't even going to go on alert so as to not "play Saddam's game and give him an excuse to attack."
According to an Air Force oral history, "Heart of the Storm," when the meeting broke up, "The mood around the table was `Ho hum, thanks for the briefing, Norm. We'll try to attend your retirement next summer.' Seven thousand miles away in sand and darkness, Iraqi tankers were fueling for the push into Kuwait. When dawn broke, they would be rolling south."

At 11 p.m. on Aug.1, 1990, Col. John Mooneyham, chief of the U.S. military liaison office in Kuwait, got a telephone call from several Westinghouse Co. civilian contractors who were manning a radar observation balloon south of the Iraqi border.
The radar image, they said, was clear: a massive armor formation resembling an iron pipe several kilometers long was rolling downhill toward the Kuwaiti border. Mooneyham advised them to cut the tether to the aerostat radar and move out smartly.
Two hours later, three Iraqi Republican Guard divisions crossed the border. The Tawakalna mechanized and Hammurabi armored divisions conducted the main attack along the four-lane Highway 6 from Safwan. The Medina armored division crossed further to the west, through the Rumaylah oil fields.
Soon Iraqi warships appeared off the coast, some firing shells into Kuwait City. Iraqi special forces commandos using helicopters and small craft assaulted the city, keying on government buildings such as the foreign and defense ministries, and the emir's Dasman and Bayan palaces. At daylight, Iraqi ground attack MiG-23 Flogger and Su-25 Frogfoot jets entered the battle, bombing Kuwait's two airfields.
Within five hours of crossing the border, the two main divisions had linked up with the commando units, and Iraqi forces had secured the Kuwaiti capital.

What is your final destination?

It wasn't as if Iraq faced any opposition. Kuwaiti forces had gone on full alert on July 17, but Emir Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah subsequently ordered his troops back to their garrisons, fearful of provoking Saddam Hussein.
And Kuwaiti forces were hopelessly outmatched anyhow. One of Mooneyham's deputies, Army Lt. Col. Fred C. Hart, a liaison officer to Kuwait's armed forces, later said in a personal account of the invasion that the ruling family was "comfortable with this small force and felt they had no real cause to have a large or modernized Armed Forces." The reason, Hart said, was that the al-Sabah family believed "a small, poorly-trained and equipped force was less of a threat" to Iraq than a professional military force. The Kuwaiti Air Force got more defense dollars "because you can't occupy a palace with a fighter jet," Hart recalled Kuwaiti officers saying.
Hart's eyewitness account, written while a student at the U.S. Army War College following the Persian Gulf War, was never officially released by the Army but has circulated on the internet.
Of Kuwait's three Army units, Hart recalled after the war, only the 35th Armored Brigade moved to block the Iraqi invasion. Kuwait Air Force (KAF) A-4Q Skyhawk and French Mirage F1 pilots flew sorties against attacking Iraqi units, but within a day and a half, the planes had retreated to Saudi Arabia or Bahrain after their two home bases were overrun.
By mid-day Aug. 3, Iraqi forces had taken up positions south of Kuwait City. Iraqi tanks continued south along Kuwait's coastal highway to occupy the emirate's main ports. An Iraqi force pursued elements of the 35th Brigade into the neutral zone north of Saudi Arabia.
"I don't think there's any question at all that he [Saddam Hussein] would have eventually attacked Saudi Arabia," Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf would tell David Frost in a PBS interview at the end of the war. "Nobody on our side knew his intent; we had to assume that if he was militarily capable of something, he might do it," Schwarzkopf would later write in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero (Bantam Books, New York, 1992). Gen. Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, later said that at this juncture, everyone was "scared to death" of the possibility of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia.
On the day before the invasion, U.S. intelligence agencies estimated that Iraqi forces between Basra and the Kuwaiti border numbered 150,000 troops and more than 1,000 tanks, supported by at least 10 additional artillery battalions. Hundreds of logistics vehicles were moving men and massive quantities of munitions and supplies south right after the invasion. By Aug. 6, intelligence was reporting elements of at least 11 divisions either in or entering Kuwait. Though there was no firm evidence that an invasion of Saudi Arabia was Saddam's intention, no one wanted to be caught flat-footed a second time.

Tanks a Lot

But as Lt. Col. Hart reported from his vantage point inside Kuwait City, "Saddam's forces had reached their logistics culminating point and his units would have to live off the land." Iraqi units immediately began scavenging food and water in Kuwait, confirming the lack of in-depth supplies.
There were a lot of other signs that Iraq's performance in the invasion had hardly gone like clockwork. The emir and the crown prince of Kuwait escaped to Saudi Arabia, we now know, because the Iraqi operation to seize the emir failed when Baghdad planners failed to recognize a one-hour time difference between Kuwait City and Baghdad. Thus the seizure operation became an uncoordinated attack by special forces and the Republican Guard units that failed to capture the senior royal family members.
When Iraqi armor made it to Kuwait City, Hart later wrote, they decided to push their tanks and tracked vehicles through the city instead of circumventing the built-up urban area. As a result, the heavy units became bogged down and often lost. This permitted the bulk of the Kuwaiti 15th Brigade, located south of the city near the Al Ahmadi oil fields, to escape to Saudi Arabia. Despite the fact their command had not been placed on alert, some 30 Kuwaiti fighters still managed to fly to safety. And Iraq's naval force also failed to prevent two Kuwaiti missile boats from escaping the harbor.
The intelligence system might not have wanted to focus on this evidence, given valid concerns of Iraq's short-term intentions toward Saudi Arabia. But there were also reports that Kuwaiti military units succeeded in inflicting damage on Iraq that made it seem as if the vaunted and battle-hardened force was less formidable than its equipment inventories suggested.
The KAF claimed that its airplanes destroyed 37 Iraqi helicopters and shot down two Iraqi fighters in two days of battle, and killed numerous enemy armored vehicles on the ground as its aircraft flew to safety. Three Kuwaiti air defense units equipped with U.S. Hawk surface-to-air missiles reported that they shot down 23 Iraqi aircraft and helicopters.
Were the Kuwaiti claims valid? Who had time to validate them? Analysts from the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) and Defense Intelligence Agency evaluated the Iraqi force as more than sufficient to conduct a successful follow-on attack into Saudi Arabia's oil-rich Eastern Province. The White House was told that Saddam Hussein intended to further his advance into Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis didn't particularly want to quibble, given that the Iraqis never made an attempt to contact the Saudi government to express otherwise.
At the end of the war, U.S. Army intelligence would learn from the seven Iraqi general officers that were captured in the ground campaign that Hart's skepticism on the ground in Kuwait City was closer to reality than the tale told from satellite images.
"Regardless of how difficult and frustrating the mobilization and deployment of U.S. and coalition forces may have seemed to us, ours was a clockwork operation compared to that of the Iraqi Army," a now partially declassified CENTCOM debriefing summary says. "Most infantry divisions were sent to the Kuwait theater undermanned, short of equipment (or with poor equipment), and with little to no idea of what they were to do upon arrival in their areas of responsibility, other than to dig in and await orders."
It was a terrible quandary, and one that would confound U.S. intelligence through the war and beyond: not knowing in the least what Iraq's intentions were, and having to rely on mechanistic interpretations of the enemy's military capabilities based upon huge numbers of hardware and an enormous military infrastructure.

When the first shots of Desert Shield were fired on Aug. 18, many of the complications, internal and international, were hidden from public view, such as the conflicts over the frenzied movements to hold Iraq, deploy forces, build an international consensus and decide what to do next.
On Aug. 16, President Bush authorized U.S. naval forces to enforce sanctions under Security Council Resolution 661, passed four days after the Iraqi invasion. The resolution did not address the use of force, and the Soviet Union expressed its view that it did not consider the U.N. Charter or the resolution sufficient authority to do more than seek voluntary compliance.
Washington itself was not clear. According to Marvin Pokrant's wonderfully detailed Desert Shield at Sea: What the Navy Really Did, when Gen. Powell issued the first order on Aug. 11, he used the word "quarantine," a term that definitely connoted a belligerent stance, evoking images of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Within hours, the order was rescinded and quarantine was changed to "interception." Gen. Schwarzkopf's headquarters in Tampa followed with its own order for Operation Stigma, better known as maritime interception operations (MIO). Tampa authorized the use of force.

Starting WWIII

Within hours of the commencement of Stigma, the cruiser USS England had the first confrontation when it intercepted two small cargo ships, the Al Abid and the Al Bayaa, in the Persian Gulf. The two Iraqi ships claimed to be empty and refused to stop. The England asked what to do next.
Vice Adm. Henry H. Mauz, the newly appointed naval commander in the region, telephoned Schwarzkopf at Central Command (CENTCOM) headquarters in Tampa, who said there was nothing in his Operation Order or the U.N. resolutions that would suggest anything be done against empty ships returning to Iraq.
"Let them go," Schwarzkopf recounts telling Mauz in his autobiography, It Doesn't Take a Hero. "There's no use starting World War Three over empty tankers." A few hours later, Powell was on the phone from Washington: Secretary Cheney felt Schwarzkopf had failed to follow orders. Well, Schwarzkopf recalls saying, "Now that you've made it clear what you want, the next tanker that comes through, we'll blow it away."
Okay, they weren't tankers, and Schwarzkopf's own Operation Order stated explicitly at the time that even empty ships were not to be allowed to sail to Iraq. And according to Pokrant's account, "blowing away" was hardly that simple. On Aug. 18, the day after the two Iraqi ships were allowed to go, the England conducted the first boarding of a suspect vessel. But this time, it was a Chinese-flagged ship, the Heng Chun Hai, and though the England ordered the ship back to Iraq with its cargo, higher authority overruled, and the ship was allowed to proceed to Qing Dao without being diverted.
That same day, the destroyer USS Scott intercepted a Cyprus-flagged ship, the Dongola, which was carrying caustic soda and aluminum sulfate from Sudan to Aqaba, Jordan. The Dongola agreed to return to its port of origin. But the governments of Jordan and Sudan both protested, claiming that the ship was scheduled to pick up 800 Sudanese refugees from Kuwait who were trying to get home.

First Shots

Late on Aug. 18, the frigate USS Reid intercepted the Iraqi tanker, the Khaniqin, while in Iranian territorial waters of the Persian Gulf. Two other tankers were also intercepted by other ships, but Mauz decided to deal with the Khaniqin first. After a tense standoff, where the Iraqi master originally agreed to return to Basra and then quickly got his own new orders to go to Yemen, Reid requested permission to fire warning shots if the Khaniqin did not slow, and then fired six 25- and 76-mm rounds across the Iraqi ship's bow.
The Iraqi master sounded "terrified," the Reid commander reported. But still, he refused to stop, and some crewmembers donned life jackets. Mauz had the authority to disable uncooperative ships, but he again phoned Schwarzkopf to ask whether higher authority really wanted the Navy to shoot at a civilian ship. He worried about the efforts to build a coalition.
Mauz and Schwarzkopf each had phones in both ears; Mauz was talking to the on-scene commander, Schwarzkopf was talking with Powell. Powell spoke to Richard Haass, the principle National Security Council staffer dealing with Iraq. According to Pokrant's account, Haass "believed that if the United States disabled a vessel or two without much loss of life, it would not be a grave matter." The White House had previously been told that disabling one or two ships might be necessary.
Schwarzkopf had already called Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner, the air war commander and the senior officer in Saudi Arabia. "Put naval and air forces on high alert, ready to launch retaliatory strikes," he ordered. The Khaniqin master had notified Baghdad that it had been attacked, and perhaps coincidentally, U.S. intelligence did not know the answer. Iraqi electronic jamming also was reported for the first time during the incident.
"There is absolutely nothing between you and 4,000 tanks on the Kuwait border and they may be coming south tonight or in the morning," Horner told the A-10 commander at about eight p.m., according to the book Warthog: Flying the A-10 in the Gulf War. "If they do, you're going to have to attack them with what you've got and try to delay them. I can't tell you where to go or how to get away after that," he said.
"Yep, go ahead and do it," Schwarzkopf finally told Mauz. The destroyer Goldsborough, which had taken over from the Reid, was directed to get into position to fire into the stern if Iraq ignored a final warning. But he still did not feel right about firing, and as darkness was approaching, Mauz told Schwarzkopf that they would wait until morning rather than risk a nighttime engagement.

Who Didn't Shoot John?

In Kennebunkport, Maine, Bush and his advisers huddled. On the one hand they ran the risk of looking like "wimps"; on the other, they risked looking bad in the eyes of the world. Secretary of State Baker argued via phone from a fishing trip out west that he thought he could get a U.N. resolution authorizing force. Bush agreed, and decided to let the ship go.
Schwarzkopf received a "frantic call" from the joint staff rescinding the earlier order. All night, Mauz's staff was on the phone with Schwarzkopf's staff in Florida, who wanted to know this and that, driving the Navy officers nuts. In one instance, Tampa was told that the Navy would reestablish contact with the Iraqi ship at dawn. Early in the morning, a CENTCOM officer called, asking about the status of the helicopter that would contact the Iraqi ship. The Navy officer told him it was not dawn yet, and the Florida-based officer began to argue with him! By his calculations, he said, it was definitely past dawn in the Gulf. Well, the Navy officer responded, looking outside, it wasn't light yet. The CENTCOM officer adamantly insisted that his calculations showed that it was light.
On Aug. 19, interception operations were suspended and a flurry of diplomatic activity followed until a new U.N. resolution 665 was obtained on Aug. 25 calling on members to enforce sanctions by using "...such measures commensurate to the specific circumstances as may be necessary under the authority of the Security Council to halt all inward and outward maritime shipping...."
In his autobiography, Schwarzkopf would claim that his was the cooler head. And according to Bob Woodward's The Commanders, "Cheney was concerned that some Navy officer way down the line was going to start a war." But as Pokrant writes, "Several times on 18 August Mauz had permission to disable Khaniqin but chose not to do so precipitously."

On Aug. 20, 1990, at five minutes to 2 p.m., Air Force Col. John A. Warden III stood before Lt. General Charles ("Chuck") Horner at Royal Saudi Air Force headquarters in Riyadh, and committed professional suicide.
Warden was a mid-level deputy director for warfighting concepts in the office of the deputy chief of staff for operations and plans for the Air Force Chief of Staff, a special cell called "Checkmate." He had been on a roller-coaster ride since Aug. 6, four days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. On that day, Warden had gathered his staff to begin planning what would become known as "Operation Instant Thunder," a strategic air campaign to "incapacitate, discredit and isolate [the] Hussein regime, eliminate Iraqi offensive/defensive capability ... [and] create conditions leading to Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait" through long-range, pinpoint bombing.
In 14 days, the sketchy initial Instant Thunder brief had been given to Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Gen. Colin Powell, and others in the air force and military hierarchy. The plan had grown into two four-inch thick binders laying out targets, attack routes, and choreography for a week-long effort that its drafters said would defeat Saddam Hussein through airpower alone.

Bent out of Shape

Horner by nature is irascible, imperious, and opinionated, an old salt of an impatient fighter pilot. Schwarzkopf had told him on Aug. 6 that he was requesting Air Force staff help to develop "punishment" attacks inside Iraq while Horner's forward headquarters in Riyadh focused on halting an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. Worried about Washington "picking targets" a la Vietnam, where he had flown scores of combat missions from Thailand, Horner was also hearing a groundswell of irritation with Warden from his own subordinates.
Col. Warden could be his own worst enemy. When Lt. Gen. Jimmie Adams, the Air Force operations chief, told Warden during a briefing to drop the prediction of success against Iraq in 6-9 days and focus more on destroying the Iraqi army, Warden dismissed his boss, telling him "sorry, that's not what the Chairman wants."
Tactical Air Command (TAC), Horner's peacetime higher headquarter in Virginia, was particularly bent out of shape by the Warden effort. TAC officials agreed with Adams that Instant Thunder lacked "tactical perspective" and didn't support ground operations - particularly defense against Iraq's heavy divisions that then threatened Saudi Arabia.
It was an "academic bunch of crap," the TAC operations chief said. "I like everything after the last slide," he told Warden's immediate boss.
TAC faxed a purloined copy of the 30-page Instant Thunder briefing to Horner, along with its critique. "How can a person in an ivory tower far from the front" know what needs to be done, Horner wrote in the margins.
But it was not just the place of origin that displeased Horner; it was the Warden plan itself.
"It developed the idea that air power was going to smash Iraq, and they were all going to give up and go home," Horner said. "Well, that is pure bull."

The Confrontation

From the very beginning of his briefing, Horner unnerved Warden. "Go, go!" he said at first, waving impatiently at the slides, "I know all that."
Stonefaced, Horner listened to the Instant Thunder briefing, waiting until the end. And then came the questions. How well do we understand Iraqi command and control and leadership to sever the head from the body? Why spend so much time trying to destroy rather than neutralize air defenses? Why hit railroads or ports? "Is this a mulligan stew?" Horner asked.
At each question, Horner interrupted Warden as he started to answer, turning to one of his staffers and directing him to look into the matter. At one point Warden pried his way into Horner's monologue, offering assistance. "Not your job," Horner cut him off. "We'll make sure. You made an academic study. I've got to make it reality."
Horner directed his staff to eliminate the timelines from Instant Thunder: "They serve no purpose other than to advertise a totally unrealistic completion date."
Warden again pushed the idea of the isolation of Saddam Hussein. "It's not imperative to get him," he said. "We need only to isolated him for a while."
And that was it.
"Our goal," Horner responded, almost shouting now, "is to build an A-T-O." The air tasking order, the immediate defensive battle plan, was his immediate concern, and unlike Warden, he didn't believe for a moment that this was a mistake.
"You're being overly pessimistic about those tanks," Warden said at one point in reference to Iraqi armor. "Ground forces aren't important" to Instant Thunder. "I don't believe they can move under our air superiority."
A hush fell over the room. Warden quickly took it back.
"I'm being very, very patient, aren't I?" Horner said to no one in particular.
"Yes, sir!" came a chorus of voices.
"I'm really being nice not to make the kind of response that you-all would expect me to make, aren't I?"
"Oh, yes, sir!"
"If your army is getting overrun," Horner scowled, "who gives a shit what you take out deep?" And with that, to Chuck Horner, John Warden ceased to exist.
Fading Memories
Warden was dispatched by Horner back to Washington. But he hardly disappeared or became irrelevant: Checkmate quietly assisted Horner's planners, who took the handoff on Aug. 20 and began to build the ultimate air campaign.
Was it just a clash of personalities, and was Instant Thunder the actual air war, even if it was under new guise and with a new master?
One possible answer exists in the target list. Instant Thunder had identified 84 targets in Iraq. By Jan. 15, 1991, that number had grown to 487. At the end of the war, more than 1,200 had been hit.
In an interview from Montgomery, Ala., where Warden is now retired, I asked him to reflect. We "knew at an acceptable level" Iraqi centers of gravity in August, Warden says. I'm convinced that destroying those 84 targets would create "sufficient paralysis to take advantage of the unraveling of the system," he says. Warden likens the impact of Instant Thunder bombing to cutting off the top of an anthill; once you peel off 84 targets, then finding the next 100 is easier.
As Warden sees it, had Instant Thunder been implemented the first week of September, the Iraqis would have had no preparation time. As a result, he says, it could have had a more of a cataclysmic impact than in January 1991. "As we moved forward in time, the chances of successfully executing the plan decreased," Warden asserts.
This seems to be just another airman who laments that he didn't get to fight the perfect war. Yet many of Warden's confederates are not nearly as convinced that the effects of airpower are understood well enough to posit success in September. Says one senior officer from Checkmate, it took ten times more than Warden predicted it would take to achieve Central Command's goals. "We really overestimated our ability," he says. "What we achieved was orders of magnitude faster than World War II or Korea." But it was General Horner who was more realistic about what should be expected from airpower.

The Enemy Decides

Warden's was a brilliant conception and a bold start. Had he not taken the reigns of leadership and designed his war in August 1990, many Air Force veterans of Checkmate and Horner's staff believe today that it is possible that "air-land battle" or some other 1980's design for the use of airpower would have prevailed.
As Instant Thunder gained momentum, though, additional missions, targets, objectives, and constraints were added. Somewhere in there were the initial 84 targets and the original design. But the accumulation diluted and masked Warden's shot at surgical paralysis. By the time Schwarzkopf launched "Operation Desert Storm" so many more bombing targets had been added that became impossible to ascribe effects only to attacks in Baghdad or against specific targets.
Horner's own recollections of August 1990 are both charitable towards Warden, and rigid on the enduring debate over strategic bombing. Though he says now he could not fault Warden for the "glittering list of targets he laid out," he says Warden's problem is that he saw war "in terms of the SIOP," the Single Integrated Operational Plan model of nuclear targets in the Soviet Union. "Execute this plan and the enemy is defeated," Horner scoffs. "Well, good. But what if he decides not to be defeated? What do we do then?"
What would Saddam do then? By January 1991, Horner would have so many combat aircraft at his disposal that he could simultaneously fight on the battlefield and oversee an essentially autonomous strategic air campaign in collaboration with Warden's Checkmate.
But it is wrong for anyone to think that the plan that was executed in early1991 was the plan that Warden had proposed in the searing days of August 1990.

"I have always regretted the fact that I have a temper," General Schwarzkopf told the "http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/gulf/oral/schwarzkopf/7.html" after the Gulf War, "but I also have, you know, great love and respect for all of the people that have worked for me. I think like everything else, this is one of those things that has been blown out of proportion."
Well, not so far out of proportion.
"Stormin' Norman" Schwarzkopf, commander in chief (CINC) of Central Command, was described in the fall of 1990 as a "tough, gruff combat leader," a soldier's soldier. Nicknamed "the bear" because of his size, the 56-year-old was mostly known by his staff as the grizzly variety. Virtually every officer contacted today speaks of spending considerable energy during the war trying to keep the bear at bay.
But Schwarzkopf also could be a teddy bear, emotional and charming, exuding a dual personality that would come in handy when dealing with a delicate political coalition, inter-service rivalries and broken organizations. Various post-war accounts are split about the impact of Schwarzkopf's despotic side. But while two charismatic generals--Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell--were inspiring American culture for the first time since the Korean War, God forbid anyone should tell it like it was: Norman Schwarzkopf was a tyrant.

Stunned Mullets

CENTCOM was a relatively new and sleepy command prior to Desert Shield, hardly elite in the U.S. military hierarchy, with a staff that many would say were not up to the task of preparing for war. When Schwarzkopf moved headquarters from Florida to Saudi Arabia on Aug. 26, his subordinates were naturally fatigued. But they were also demoralized by months of pre-war tension and terror. "The Lucky War" (an Army history of the Gulf War) summed up Schwarzkopf this way: "He was.... a boss who 'shot messengers,' a big man whose leadership style was that of a classic bully, a commander who employed his size as a weapon of intimidation and tolerated neither fools nor honest disagreement gladly."
The treatment was hardly reserved for lower ranks. Schwarzkopf was particularly well known for bullying his intelligence chief, Brig. Gen. Henry F. Drewfs, Jr., during morning staff meetings--so much so that the Army general would be home by noon many days nursing a massive migraine.
In August, Drewfs was replaced by Brig. Gen. John ("Jack") A. Leide. "Schwarzkopf would cloud up and rain all over... Leide," Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner would later say. Leide proved a tougher assailant. "With General Schwarzkopf's temper if you knew what you were talking about and you stood in his face and told him, you survived--if you didn't know what you were talking about or you took him on when you were wrong, it was not very pretty," said Horner.
Horner points out, as does Schwarzkopf in his own defense, that people like Leide would go on to be promoted. Many participants involved in making decisions during the Gulf War agree that although Schwarzkopf was quick to express his displeasure, he also would tend to move on to the next subject. He would not dwell on whatever prompted his displeasure.
But there could also be major league grudges. After Schwarzkopf and Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, went toe to toe on the nature of the Iraq threat to Saudi Arabia prior to the invasion (DIA rejected CENTCOM's planning assumptions as too pessimistic), sources say Schwarzkopf never spoke to his old friend again.
In November, an old friend and subordinate, Lt. Gen. Calvin A.H. Waller, was specially imported from Ft. Lewis, Washington as Deputy Commander in Chief, CENTCOM to act as a buffer.
"To be perfectly candid and fair the atmosphere was a little tense," Waller would later say, "many people said to me when I arrived there that many of the staff walked around with a stunned mullet look, sort of a closed caption on their face, staring off into the wild blue yonder... not quite knowing what to expect or what was going to happen."
Though he denied that this was the reason for his assignment to Saudi Arabia, he said he uniquely knew "what was required in working with Norman Schwarzkopf" after four assignments together. "The blood would start around the shirt collar and then it would work its way up to the jawline and then to the ears and by the time it got to the ears you ought to watch out because there was going to be a minor eruption and if it got to the top of the ears, watch out, because usually there was going to be an eruption..." Waller said.
The bear wasn't the only one who needed to be caged. As Waller said, the staff "needed a little tender loving care and a few pats on the back and someone to let them know that they wouldn't suffer a severe sucking chest wound if they made a minor mistake." (Calvin A. H. Waller, who retired from the Army as a three-star Army General, died on May 9, 1996 of a heart attack in Washington, D.C. He was 58)

The Brass

All of the senior officers would find their own ways to deal with the bear. Most would make a cardinal rule of disagreeing with him only in private and would use their subordinates to float trial balloons. "Reconnaissance by fire," they called it, to feel out the CINC's views.
In some ways, senior officers point out, Schwarzkopf really had three personalities: his public persona, his staff behavior in front of subordinates and his "private" character. "Commanders in public are far different than in private if for no other reason than they are often ham actors," says one senior general officer. Schwarzkopf, he says, "acted like a different person in public than he did in private. He was driven to be remembered in a certain way and always was on stage when in public." In private, this general says of his experiences dealing with Schwarzkopf one on one, "he was intelligent, reasoned and quite open to ideas and arguments."
In contrast to many Army, Navy and Marine Corps commanders, who would all develop tense relationships with the CINC, Horner and his strategic air campaign chief, Brig. Gen. Buster C. Glosson, had cordial relations with Schwarzkopf, and unique personal access. The two briefed the bear privately every evening, and they became deft at catering to his mercurial demands (Glosson was particularly adept at passing late breaking gossip from Washington).
Horner recounts one of his tactics: "One night early in January, we had reports of helicopters coming across the border... [and] Schwarzkopf was very confused, the more confused he got the madder he got, because he wanted a straight story, and his staff kept calling me up" reporting back a childhood telephone game of confused information. "Well, I was busy trying to find out what was going on, so at 8 o'clock the hot line rang and they'd all warned me, so I picked up the phone and I said, what in the hell do you want? And he said, now Chuck, calm down!"
A Marine Corps post-war study on command and control quotes Brig. Gen. Richard Neal, Schwarzkopf's operations chief, describing the requirement for the top commanders themselves to have actual "face" time with the CINC and not leave matter to subordinate staffers or liaison officers. "Brigadier generals are link colonels, the CINC listens politely to major generals, but you have to be a lieutenant general to be believed," Neal said.
Reagan-like in his simplicity, on some matters, the bear made decisions based upon intuition--big picture decisions that would later distress his own component commands. He seemed to fully appreciate the psychological and unquantifiable impact of bombing, even if he didn't understand airpower. And when the ground war would begin, he "read" the Iraqi defeat, pushing to accelerate the army's advance. Okay, he didn't see how weak the Iraqi's were before the ground war, nor could he ever conceive that airpower had largely finished off Saddam's legions. He was army and armor down to his skivvies: The Schwarzkopf history book would have to be about ground war, which to the bear, was the only war there was.

"Second item," the Marine Corps chaplain said at his Sept. 8 briefing, "is Jewish holidays. We intend right now no advertisements on it, verbal only."
It was like a scene from "Guys and Dolls" where Nathan Detroit was seeking the venue for an illegal dice game. With the Jewish new year Rosh Hashanah approaching on Sept. 18, an abandoned warehouse in Jubayl port had been chosen for secret services. The chaplain was urging commanders to get the word out to American troops and civilians who wanted to worship.
"We will need to have the help of everybody to pull this off," the chaplain said.
In deployment to the "sandbox," as troops affectionately called Saudi Arabia, soldiers coped not only with the stress and boredom of impending warfare; they additionally suffered culture shock in defending the Saudi kingdom. No doubt the Saudi decision to allow infidel forces on their soil was a difficult one, and American commanders and politicians bent over backward to assuage Saudi "sensitivities." But in doing so, geopolitical interests outweighed American values. It is a scandalous compromise that continues to this day.

No Fun, No God

On Aug. 30, Gen. Schwarzkopf issued General Order 1. "Operation Desert Shield places U.S. Armed Forces into USCENTCOM AOR countries where Islamic Law and Arabic customs prohibit or restrict certain activities that are generally permissible in Western societies," the order began. There would be no alcohol, no gambling, no pornography--in fact, no "body building magazines, swim-suit editions of periodicals, lingerie or underwear advertisement, and catalogues ... [that displayed] portions of the human torso (i.e., the area below the neck, above the knees and inside the shoulder)." As soldiers say, in other words, no fun.
Although the order forbade entrance into mosques by non-Moslems, no other matters of religion were officially covered. Still, chaplains were told that while they would be allowed to deploy with their units, they would be referred to as "morale support officers."
They were further instructed to remove all of their branch insignia (cross or tablets) in the presence of Saudi personnel, and conduct worship services only behind closed doors or in private settings. Soldiers were told not to wear crucifixes or other religious articles. Photos, audiotapes or any publicity of American religious activities, Jewish or not, were prohibited.
As time went by, restrictions on certain religious activities, such as the overt presence of chaplains, were eased. In October, however, the news media reported on a Saudi orientation booklet for soldiers that advised troops not to talk about Israel or "the Jewish lobby." The pamphlet drew protests from Jewish organizations, which called the advice an affront to their beliefs and to the American way. It was a distasteful indignity with emotional and historical overtones.

Non-Combatants, Non-Persons

The presence of Jewish soldiers would continue to be kept quiet from the Saudis. But you couldn't hide the women.
"As the center of the Muslim world, we could not afford to be as flexible as some other countries in matters of public behavior," wrote Gen. Khalid bin Sultan in his autobiography, "Desert Warrior," (HarperCollins, 1995). Khalid, as joint force commander with Schwarzkopf, says he had to balance Saudi responsibilities with military needs in dealing with the American presence. He was willing, for instance, to accept American women truck drivers in combat uniform on military missions, but "I drew the line at their driving in civilian clothes for civilian purposes, such as shopping."
Particularly in urban areas, where most of the women tended to be based, self-appointed Saudi religious police would occasionally take it upon themselves to harass American women in enforcing Saudi Arabia's Islamic law. If female soldiers ventured off-base, they were required to have male escorts, wear Abayas, or thin black robes, and refrain from any physical contact with men.
When the treatment of women was reported in the news media, Democratic Rep. Patricia Schroeder of Colorado expressed the outrage of many "Can you imagine if we sent black soldiers to South Africa and asked them to go along with apartheid rules?"

No Thanks

Women soldiers, in fact, endured the oppressive conditions well. But Schwarzkopf and Khalid continued to spend way too much of their time working out additional rules to General Order 1 regarding the status of U.S. forces.
At one point early on, according to Rick Francona, an Arab linguist and intelligence officer on Schwarzkopf's staff, Saudi officials advised U.S. forces that all sewage generated by American camps would have to be removed so as not to contaminate sacred Saudi soil. Muslim and Christian blood would also have to be segregated in military hospitals. The demands, Francona wrote in his book, "Ally to Adversary" (Naval Institute Press, 1999), were taken all the way to King Fahd himself, where "saner heads" prevailed.
That matter dealt with, the king nevertheless would not relent on the ban against singing or dancing as part of entertainment of the troops. When Steve Martin visited Saudi Arabia early in Desert Shield, he wasn't even allowed to do a stand-up show.
Saudi sensitivities extended not just to women's dress, but also to men. At one point, Khalid says, a T-shirt was being sold with an American flag in the middle of a map of Saudi Arabia. "The implication was that the U.S. was an occupying power," he wrote. "I was mad about that, as was Prince Sultan, who had insisted that I raise the matter." The T-shirt was officially banned.
When word came back to Washington that the American flag was not being prominently flown, the Pentagon received a number of congressional inquiries asking whether there were any legal requirements for U.S. forces to use the Stars and Stripes in foreign countries. Army lawyers concluded that, with certain limitations, the practice of not flying the flag was appropriate under international law.

Thanks for Nothing

The Department of the Army's after-action report for Desert Storm condemned the religious restrictions in Saudi Arabia "In future world-wide deployments, current nomenclature, i.e., "chaplains" and "worship services," must not be modified or deleted in order to address different cultural/national sensitivities."
But a new, even more restrictive, version of General Order 1 is still in effect for U.S. forces who are still quietly stationed in Saudi Arabia; and the current Army orientation booklet for Saudi Arabia forbids any political discussions, instructing soldiers not to display a crucifix or Star of David in public, "even as jewelry." Female soldiers are still required to wear an Abaya while traveling off-post, and expected to sit in the back of the bus and submit to being second-class citizens, regardless of their equality in the ranks.
In the end, Khalid boasted, without alcohol, "Saudi Arabia was the biggest health farm in the world ... we should charge ... troops for the privilege of being there!"
Now ain't that nice. The Saudi prince conveniently ignored the fact that alcohol is widely consumed by Saudi men in the privacy of their own homes, and during Operation Desert Shield, alcohol also was openly consumed by Saudi military officers, while their U.S. counterparts refused to partake.
What Khalid also ignored is that tobacco use also increased enormously during the Gulf War among U.S. forces, according to the Army. And then there's the so-called Gulf War syndrome, coupled with whatever other "foreign" sicknesses American soldiers have picked up in their 10 years of continued deployments in the hallowed kingdom.
And sober or not, Americans died and were wounded in far larger numbers than Saudi troops during Operation Desert Storm, all to protect the Saudi way of life.

One day early on in Desert Shield, an officer of the Central Intelligence Agency walked into the "Checkmate" offices in the Pentagon, introducing himself as "Mr. Smith." Col. John Warden, the Checkmate head, had briefed agency officers on the Instant Thunder plan and Smith was there to help.
A former station chief in Baghdad, Smith had knowledge about a number of government buildings there. "I had lunch with the director of the Iraqi Mukhabarat in his office," he told Warden's targeters, pointing out, on a satellite photograph of the huge Iraqi Intelligence Service office complex, a specific window in a top-floor office overlooking Zawra park.
"The guy's office became the aimpoint," Warden says. "The most important files and key communications were likely to be real close."

No Ace in the Hole

"Leadership" was the center of Checkmate's strategic attack design, and Warden recognized no hierarchy or organizational diagram in the mad scramble to find targets. Former diplomats, defense attaches, Iraqi defectors and émigrés-many already on the U.S. payroll-were enlisted to help. The intelligence agencies got blueprints and plans on how the air defense, telephone, electrical and petroleum systems worked from French, Swedish and Japanese contractors. Bunkers and command and control centers inside Saddam's palaces were identified.
It is an article of faith that human rather than technical intelligence provides the best insight in the case of personality-based regimes. And all seem to agree that Desert Shield and Desert Storm were not human intelligence's (HUMINT's) shining moment. Gen. Schwarzkopf, in his autobiography "It Doesn't Take a Hero" (Bantam, 1992), says that "our human intelligence sources were poor" inside Baghdad for getting information about American hostages. Brig. Gen. John Stewart, the Army component G-2 in Saudi Arabia, says the U.S. was "critically short on clandestine HUMINT ... there was next to none that contributed to the military operation."
The partially declassified Army Intelligence and Security Command After Action Report for Desert Storm states that "Iraq was a tightly controlled police state able to impose maximum barriers against the collection of current intelligence through HUMINT."
Nonetheless, the HUMINT effort was extensive, and like Checkmate's seat-of-the-pants collection, there were some successes.

The Grateful Undead

The day after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. Army Operational Group at Fort Meade, Md., received authorization to begin HUMINT collection operations in support of CENTCOM. The Operational Group worked primarily with the CIA's Domestic Contacts Division in keeping track of, and "debriefing," émigrés and foreigners who might possess information of value.
Meanwhile, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) tapped clandestine sources with more current information: returning hostages; Kuwaiti military officers and refugees; foreign governments; U.S. and foreign businessmen who had operated in the country; and third parties in contact with Iraq, especially Arab contacts.
With the Army's new intelligence tasking on Aug. 3, case officers started the laborious process of going back through their reports and records, as well as files of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, looking for Iraqi sources living in the United States or elsewhere to "debrief." Sources then were interviewed about their military service, any barracks or airfields they were familiar with and Iraqi army organization and personalities.
The Iraqis were used to identifying mosques and hospitals, particularly in smaller towns, for "no-hit" target lists. Altogether, Army intelligence would contact or re-contact more than 400 sources through this effort. "Former Iraqi military ... provided significant insights into the Iraqi military operations and capabilities," says the partially declassified After Action Report.
Military intelligence and the CIA interrogated two high-level sources repeatedly. The first was WES 2901, the code name for a retired Iraqi major general who had been debriefed by the CIA at its "Westport" facility in Germany (hence the WES designation) and recontacted after the invasion. Warden even sent one of his colonels to speak with WES 2901 "to get a feel for the Iraqi mindset," the colonel says.
WES 2901 was later flown to Washington for exhaustive debriefings by the Operational Group. Set up in an office and given information on the invasion and Iraqi deployments, he provided his own assessments and analyses of the situation based on his experience. Throughout Desert Shield and into the war, intelligence maintained contact with WES 2901, and he provided analyses in response to intelligence requests.
While WES 2901 might not have possessed much "current" intelligence, the second U.S. source, IZAR-0002-91, did. IZAR-0002-91 was an Iraqi military officer who defected to Saudi Arabia after the invasion and underwent extensive debriefing by the CIA, DIA and the Operational Support Detachment of the Army's 513th Military Intelligence Brigade. More than 100 intelligence reports were produced on the basis of IZAR-0002-91's information. The officer identified dozens of leadership and command-and-control targets, all of which were subsequently attacked, sometimes within hours of their identification.

Cut In, Cut Out

As the standoff continued, Iraqi deserters, and later prisoners of war, would prove an abundant source of data, particularly tactical information. But in the early days, agents reporting to foreign governments were one of the most lucrative sources of information.
"Mountain Hall," reporting from Israel, was particularly voluminous: The CIA and DIA had established exchange programs with Israel to share intelligence, and Mountain Hall-compartmented material from Israeli analysts was particularly useful in providing insight regarding Iraqi ballistic missiles and nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapons.
Though publicly discredited because of exaggerated reporting-like the infamous but later discredited "incubator" tales of Iraqi soldiers removing babies from respirators at Kuwait City hospitals to die-Kuwaiti resistance actually proved to be an excellent source of intelligence, according to two officers involved in the program.
With access to fax machines and satellite telephones, the resistance provided a running commentary on Iraqi actions in and around Kuwait City. Within days of the invasion, an informal resistance already was taking down street signs and removing house numbers to confuse Iraqi special units that were canvassing neighborhoods for westerners, high-ranking Kuwaiti officials and military officers. In September, Kuwaiti resistance accurately reported that Iraqi engineers were placing 40-pound explosive packs on hundreds of Kuwaiti oil well heads.
"I never thought the Kuwaitis had it in them," says one CENTCOM intelligence officer.
Perhaps the most surprising HUMINT source, and one of the most secret, proved was a high-level Saudi officer who quietly agreed to provide intelligence from a source in Baghdad. Information derived from this source included Scud missile sites, ammunition storage sites, the identity of some foreign countries and personalities involved in the Iraqi research and production efforts and insight into Iraqi NBC weapons. Once the war started, the Baghdad source provided some bomb damage assessment (BDA) data.
Meanwhile, the CIA and DIA were running extensive HUMINT operations in the area, particularly in Jordan, among Iraqi refugees and defectors. When Schwarzkopf heard of one DIA operation being run out of Jordan without his knowledge, he banned further DIA HUMINT personnel from the theater.
Since Schwarzkopf had a habit of checking the list of "visitors" to the theater, his intelligence staffers used their own human intelligence and quietly decided not to list DIA people.

When the name "Salman Pak" was mentioned as Iraq's biological weapons facility in The New York Times on Sept. 5, 1990, there was an air of specificity that presented the implication that Saddam Hussein's arsenal was known, and vulnerable to the United States and its allies. The facility had actually first been publicly fingered by ABC-TV more than a year and a half earlier. And in Apr. 1990, NBC-TV had reported that the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had exported cultures of West Nile Fever virus to the laboratory.
Yet even though Salman Pak would soon show up on virtually every news media and expert map of prospective Iraqi targets, when the Air Force's Checkmate target planners finalized their first "Operation Insant Thunder" target list, Salman Pak was inexplicably absent. This would be the beginning of a tense internal effort to find, and destroy, Iraq's biological weapons (BW). Air war planners soon corrected their error, and it didn't take long before Washington made it clear that this was a national priority. But the intelligence establishment never could produce the goods, even as enormous energy went into meticulously planning attacks on "suspected" facilities.

Bugs and Things

With CIA Director William Webster's public acknowledgment that Iraq had a "sizable stockpile" of biological weapons (BW) in September 1990, America was largely introduced to a new Iraqi threat. House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Les Aspin, D-Wisc., told reporters that BW constituted "a new dimension to the problem ... more important and more serious ... than the chemical threat." Two germ weapons - botulinum toxin and anthrax - were "confirmed" to be under development, and Iraq's program was labeled the most aggressive and extensive in the Third World.
While the press filled with apocalyptic scenarios of Iraqi germ warfare, enormous internal U.S. government energy went into examining potential Iraqi civilian casualties that might stem from the destruction of biological agents in their bunkers. This was particularly the case after a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment concluded that "an attack on the Iraqi biological agent storages [sic] could result in the release of virulent microorganisms and/or toxins that could result in exceedingly high casualties/fatalities."
The worst-case official scenario was truly apocalyptic.
An Iraq Interagency Biological Warfare Working Group was established in response to Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney's urging, and its BW Technical Assessment estimated that if 1,000 kilograms of dried anthrax spores were stored in a bunker in bulk containers, and 99.99 percent were killed or somehow contained in the bunker during an attack, the resultant release of just .01 percent would mean about 100,000 billion spores in the air.
"This translates into 5-10 billion human lethal doses," the report stated.
Intelligence agencies had no hard evidence of BW production or munitions. Before the invasion, there were intelligence reports that Iraq had acquired 40 custom-built Mistral-2 aerosol generators able to spray micron size BW particles. A subsequent classified DIA assessment concluded ominously that "In light of the unscrupulous use of chemical agents in the Iran-Iraq war and the record of human rights in Iraq, we postulate that given a threatening or no-win circumstance, Iraq will launch a BW attack." By October, the intelligence agencies were speculating in Top Secret reports that Iraq probably also possessed clostridium perfingens, vibrio cholerae, plague, tularemia, brucellosis, and staphylococcal enterotoxin B.
In October, the Armed Force Medical Intelligence Center circulated their classified assessment:
We believe that ... agents have been weaponized and that biological and toxin munitions already exist. We further believe that deployment of BW munitions in significant numbers will take place by the end of this year, if not already implemented.

The Plan

Air war planners in Checkmate and the CENTCOM Black Hole in Riyadh were hardly equally seized with the problem. The disconnect was that destruction of Iraq's nuclear, biological, and chemical capability did not fit Col. John Warden's conception of Iraq's "centers of gravity." He believed, and Brig. General Buster Glosson, the newly appointed chief of the Black Hole, seemed to agree, that the Iraqi leadership was indeed the first targeting priority, followed by infrastructure such as communications, electricity and oil facilities.

Yet it was abundantly clear that Washington was obsessed with nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons. When Glosson went to Washington in early October to brief President Bush on the outlines of the plan to bomb Iraq, Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's staff suggested that the name for the target "priority-two" target category labeled "infrastructure" be re-designated "Nuclear-Chemical-Biological Capability" to reflect the national emphasis.
That didn't mean that the Black Hole had any new targets. Other than the nondescript Salman Pak center on a finger-like peninsula of the Tigris River 25 kilometers south of Baghdad, there was nothing else to bomb. By November, intelligence would identify three additional facilities near Baghdad that it labeled "suspect" BW-related. Two were in Abu Ghraib, a western suburb (one being the infamous "baby milk" factory, which will be addressed later in this series). The third was a suspect production site at Taji, north of the city.
Based on the design of the storage bunkers at Salman Pak, imagery analysts also identified 35 12-frame bunkers located at dispersed eight ammunition depots from Basra to northern Iraq as potential vaults for special weapons. Seventeen of the 35 had "probable" refrigeration equipment and duct work near or on their entrances, Top Secret reports stated. Air conditioning "might" be related to biological weapons, CIA and DIA analysts concluded.

In the Dark

A month before the Iraqi invasion, the CIA issued two Top Secret reports - "Iraq's Growing Arsenal: Programs and Facilities" and "Beating Plowshare into Swords" - on Saddam's extensive industrial infrastructure. Though the reports described in detail the functions of industrial facilities, they were also decidedly limited in terms of what the agency knew. The problem, "Iraq's Growing Arsenal" reported, was that "... many entities are false end users, passing the materials acquired from foreign suppliers directly to enterprises involved in military projects, including chemical and biological warfare." In other words, the BW program was being hidden behind vaccines, veterinary medicine and food research.
Intelligence analysts did not know if there were produced agents, nor where they were, but still the planners had to consider the possibility of infecting the Iraqi population, coalition soldiers, and adjoining nations. A fierce internal battle raged from October to well into December over whether even to attack BW bunkers. Many in Washington argued that it was too risky altogether to bomb BW facilities.
Generals Schwarzkopf and Horner argued that the risks could be minimized with the proper targeting technique. Attacks would take place at dawn, when there were low winds. Exposure to the sun's ultraviolet rays would then accelerate the breakdown of concentrated agents. The surest way of degrading BW toxins, scientists speculated, was to create very high temperatures. Weapons specialists suggested penetrating the refrigerated bunkers with 2000-lb. laser-guided bombs and then immediately dropping incendiary-filled cluster bombs to burn off any escaping spores. Using this technique, biological weapons would become first night targets for F-117 stealth fighters.
Meanwhile, a new "Fusion Committee" of the Interagency Working Group reevaluated the earlier report, concluding a mere six days before the Jan. 15 United Nations deadline for Iraq to withsraw from Kuwait that "the original estimates of potential Iraqi casualties resulting from U.S. and coalition air strikes on BW related facilities was far too high." They said that there was little likelihood that strikes would be a threat to coalition forces, and that Iraqi dangers, they believed, were minimal.
Little did the targeters or the decision-makers know that they had the potential of bombing just about any facility and unleashing biological agents, given the lack of accurate information. It would be five years before the United States would finally learn the true nature of Saddam's germ warfare arsenal.

On Sept. 16, 1990, the Illinois-based Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) sent a priority message to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and U.S. Central Command in Saudi Arabia asking for clarification. In its stack of movement requests for troops, equipment and munitions, TRANSCOM came across a message that, in the words of a planner on the Pentagon's Joint Staff crisis action team, "smelled fishy."
A CENTCOM message of Sept. 9, referring to a Top Secret Appendix 2 to Annex C of the Operation Desert Shield plan, called for the deployment of toxic chemical weapons (CW) in support of U.S. ground forces.
Was CENTCOM indeed saying it wanted poison gas to be deployed to Saudi Arabia, TRANSCOM asked? And if so, "what is desired mode of shipment, air or surface?"
Needless to say, the inquiry sent staff officers scurrying to decipher the genesis of CENTCOM's request, and to determine U.S. policy on the deployment and use of its own chemical arms. Officially, they found, there was no ambiguity: The United States reserved the right to retaliate in kind against hostile use. Yet strangely, no civilian authority had ordered that the controversial munitions be deployed to Saudi Arabia. Quite to the contrary, the crisis action team found that the prospective deployment was an "autopilot" decision, precipitated by the mad rush to deploy forces.
Four days later, Washington directed Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's headquarters to put a "hold" on any preparations to deploy chemical weapons. "It is important to keep a low profile on CW deliberations," the message said. "Approval is required before any further CW planning is undertaken."
Part of the reason that many felt it was necessary to respond so forcefully to Iraq was its repeated use of chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war, a key part of its pattern of law-breaking. But the discussion of U.S. options wasn't permanently put to rest: Instead, the Joint Staff told CENTCOM that any further deliberations were to take place only in a special compartmented category (SPECAT) of information with the codename "Nike Air" to keep it in a tight circle.

Definitely Not the Kitchen Sink

A week before CENTCOM issued its "requirement" for chemical weapons, Joint Staff officers caught another gaffe, this time a nuclear one. Officers slogging through the Army deployment list for Saudi Arabia flagged the 1st Battalion, 12th Field Artillery Regiment, a short-range Lance missile unit from Ft. Sill, Okla., as preparing to deploy. The unit's equipment was literally on railcars and ready to move to ports in Texas before the missilemen were ordered to stand down.
Though a "standard" part of corps-level artillery, no one wanted the political fallout or the image of deploying a unit with nuclear-weapons capability.
But again, this was the war plan running on autopilot. Outside observers might imagine that the Pentagon has "contingency" plans for every possibility, but in the case of Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, CENTCOM was caught unprepared.
Staffers had cribbed from Operations Plan 1021-88, the Cold War contingency plan to defend against a Soviet invasion of Iran, to piece together an American response. In the language of the military, the plan's time-phased force and deployment data (TPFDD or "tip-fiddle") provided a database of apportioned forces and personnel with their accompanying supplies.
What no one initially noticed was that OPLAN 1021-88 had an "Annex C," that is, a nuclear weapons annex, which foresaw not only deployment of chemical arms but nuclear forces as well. Nuclear options were discussed at a September meeting in the "tank," the highly secure chamber of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where the chiefs decided not to move nuclear warheads to the Persian Gulf. But still, units at bases across the United States received no clear direction from on high.

The Nuclear Umbrella

The chiefs may have decided to rule out the movement of weapons, but a variety of military organizations quietly began to examine nuclear options. Led by the "special weapons branch" in the Operations Directorate and the office of the Scientific Advisor at Schwarzkopf's headquarters, the Army staff, Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA), Strategic Air Command (SAC) and the Department of Energy's national laboratories all contributed ideas and proposals.
What precipitated the planning, CENTCOM officers say, was an off-the-cuff remark by Schwarzkopf two days after the invasion when he agreed that his science adviser could look into the feasibility of a high-altitude nuclear burst to create an electromagnetic pulse that might disable communications and missile-launch systems. Early in Operation Desert Shield, according to Rick Atkinson's Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War (Houghton Mifflin, 1994), Schwarzkopf also suggested the United States dispatch a formal "demarche" to Baghdad: "If you use chemical weapons, we're going to use nuclear weapons on you."
None of the potential nuclear options required Lance missiles or other Army short-range systems.
Besides, by mid-September, while the Army was still scrambling to deploy troops, particularly heavy forces with their massive logistics "tail," a variety of dual-capable air and missile forces was already on the ground. Navy aircraft flying from aircraft carriers had a nuclear capability, Tomahawk cruise missiles in-theater could be fitted with a nuclear warhead, and nuclear bombs already were stored at Incirlik airbase in southern Turkey, deliverable by F-16 and F-111F aircraft.
On Sept. 12, with the arrival of the last special operations AC-130 gunship at King Fahd airport in Saudi Arabia, 962 fixed-wing aircraft and approximately 1,100 helicopters were deployed. Lt. Gen. Chuck Horner, the joint forces air component commander, reported to Schwarzkopf that the last Phase I combat aircraft was in-theater.
Well, maybe not the last aircraft: There was another nuclear problem, this time involving the B-52 bomber.

A Nuclear Headache

On Aug. 11, less than nine days after the Iraqi invasion, the first seven B-52G bombers from Loring Air Force Base, Maine, arrived at Diego Garcia airbase in the Indian Ocean with full conventional weapons loads.
SAC was only too happy to supply its aging Cold War bombers to the Mideast crisis. Since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the command's focus had increasingly shifted to the bomber's conventional orientation and away from the nuclear mission.
By Aug. 16, SAC had dispatched 20 B-52Gs to Diego Garcia. Schwarzkopf was surprised and delighted by the speed of SAC's response. The "Bear" wanted the bombers available to pulverize the Republican Guard divisions, and before long, he wanted even more of the eight-engined aircraft.
That's when the State Department ran into considerable political opposition.
Though the British government accommodated the B-52 deployment to its colonial territory in the Indian Ocean, other governments wanted nothing to do with symbols of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The Pentagon undertook an exhaustive search for potential B-52 bases, surveying every possible site within a 4,000-mile radius of Baghdad.
Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney personally asked Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak for permission to base B-52s at the Cairo West Airbase adjacent to the Pyramids, and Mubarak refused. Saudi Arabia also said no to bringing the bombers into the kingdom. Spain dithered. Basing negotiations proved such a diplomatic hassle that Cheney abandoned the effort on Oct. 2.
Eventually, the Saudis agreed to allow B-52s at Jeddah, but the proviso was that the deployment be kept strictly secret and that the aircraft stay away until the shooting started. A dozen bombers would be prepared for first-night deployments, and six more readied for movement to Moron Airbase, Spain.
From the beginning, B-52 crewmen prepared for low-altitude bombing missions. Low-level had been adopted in the late 1950s to counter the threat posed by Soviet high-altitude surface-to-air missiles, a tactic seemingly confirmed in the Vietnam War, where most B-52 losses occurred from hits at high altitude.
But low-level also meant finer accuracy. What the crew found once the shooting started, however, was that Gens. Schwarzkopf and Horner didn't care about B-52 accuracy; crew survival was their top priority.
Besides, Schwarzkopf's goal in employing the massive bombers was to terrorize Iraqi soldiers, a goal that was as much psychological as physical. For the same reason that foreign governments were antsy about the B-52's link with nuclear weapons and their role in Vietnam, Schwarzkopf loved them.
Washington's solution to the political sensitivity of the nuclear machines was boilerplate Cold War non-responsiveness as well: No press visits would be allowed to B-52 units, no pictures would be released, carpet-bombing missions would be denied and the existence of the bombers in Saudi Arabia would stay an official "secret" even after the war.
But by late September, more was happening than mere efforts to employ nuclear-capable forces armed only with conventional weapons in the looming confrontation with Iraq. Under the highest security, another "specat" had been formed--this one so secret that its existence has not been revealed until now.
At the White House and in Cheney's office at the Pentagon, senior political and military officials were seriously studying what many would deem an unthinkable option: the consideration of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Saddam Hussein.

In the pre-dawn darkness on Jan. 16, 1991, seven B-52 bombers quietly took off from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., on a 35-hour, 14,000-mile mission, the longest in Air Force history. Flying a great circle route, the bombers funneled through the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco on the way to Iraq.
For veteran pilots, "shooting the straits" had become common practice after the United States lost the right to overfly Spain in the 1970's. As the bombers headed into the Mediterranean, the State Department was still awaiting word from Ankara whether they would be permitted to fly through Turkish airspace. In the topsy-turvy "new world order," overflight permission had been granted by former Warsaw Pact adversaries -- Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania -- while traditional Western European partners kept their airspace off-limits.
The Louisiana B-52s were armed with 39 conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs, pronounced "cal-cums"), a detail the Turks would not be told. The mere existence of the missiles was so closely held that when Air Force planners in the Pentagon "Checkmate" targeting cell compiled their first Top Secret "Instant Thunder" air war briefing in August 1990, they could only refer to the weapon as a "long-range bomb."
By the end of September, as the outlines of the planned air war solidified, the Navy's Tomahawk land-attack cruise missile and the F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter joined CALCM as central actors in the strategic air campaign. Not one of these had never figured in Middle East contingency plans prior to the Iraqi invasion. At least when it came to the cruise missiles, there was enormous skepticism about whether they could be relied upon to do the job.
One of the long-hidden facets of Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm was this top secret rivalry and maneuvering over advanced weapons systems that would receive their baptism of fire in Iraq.

Going Downtown

Checkmate's original attack plan called for sending Air Force F-111F "Aardvarks" and Navy A-6E Intruders into the heart of Baghdad, but computer simulations and calculations of aircraft attrition predicted that attacks would be too costly for the Vietnam-era planes, and planners eventually shifted responsibility to the F-117s.
Though the Tomahawk cruise missile was in the initial Instant Thunder plan, many in Washington - and many even in the Navy -- distrusted the never-before-used weapon. The press was filled with stories questioning the "high-tech toy."
Internally, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Colin Powell was the main skeptic. When the chairman was briefed by Brig. Gen. Buster Glosson on Sept. 13, Marvin Pokrant reports in Desert Shield at Sea (Greenwood, 1999) that Powell reportedly pulled out a study he had been given before leaving Washington showing the Tomahawk was not reliable. Powell allegedly told Glosson that he wanted the missile pulled out of the strike plan.
Initially, the Navy intended using the Tomahawks to suppress air defenses. The unmanned cruise missiles would attack key surface-to-air missile sites and command nodes, paving the way for aircraft to follow, or so the theory went. But with stealth fighters, air planners didn't necessarily need a missile to poke holes in the Baghdad shield. A technical issue led targeting planners in the Central Command "Black Hole" to mistrust the Tomahawk even more: Its "time on target" could not be accurately predicted, complicating the split-second choreography of massive air strikes. Moreover, the cruise missile's 1,000 lb. warhead was a lightweight pretender to its nuclear-armed cousins originally designed for Cold War missions.
Up to mid-September, all Tomahawk targets selected by the Black Hole were independent of manned aircraft strikes. But starting in October, after a series of Top Secret exercises code-named "Nemean Lion," some cruise missiles were incorporated into the choreography of the strategic attack plan. Air defenses were downgraded as a Tomahawk target and electrical power facilities in and around central Iraq were earmarked for the cruise missiles.
Skepticism about Tomahawk was not helped by the fact that preparing the missile targeting plan would take the entire five-month duration of Operation Desert Shield. The targeting process seemed plagued with problems and the workload to prepare the missiles even under the best of circumstances was enormous. One mission required several weeks to plot out, and only the command centers at the U.S. Atlantic and Pacific Fleets were capable of generating the complex and lengthy computer commands needed.
Tomahawk navigates by the "terrain contour matching guidance system," or TERCOM. A radar altimeter periodically scans below the missile and a computer measures a profile of the terrain features, comparing the "fingerprint" with an on-board digital map to adjust the flight route. Since the missile would drift as much as 2,200 feet during an hour of flight with inertial guidance, the TERCOM "scenes" had to be sufficiently large -- more one mile square -- so that the missile could find a landmark to correct its path.
For terminal accuracy, Tomahawk uses a supplement to TERCOM for its final leg. An optical sensor compares digitized data collected by the missile near the targets with stored black and white photographs, and the missile maneuvers based upon its location within the scene. The Defense Mapping Agency, working with the Navy, scrambled to produce the most basic digital scenes for Iraq. As targets were chosen, and as Iraqi air defenses were mapped, routes were selected to avoid having the missiles shot down or hitting tall objects, and terminal scenes near intended targets were produced. On numerous occasions in the fall of 1990, targeters found errors in scene preparation or procedures that sent them back to the drawing boards. In one instance, they found that many scenes were incompatible with the time of night Tomahawks were scheduled to fly, so thousands of additional hours were required to ready the missiles.

A Battle of the Missiles

Of course, F-117 stealth fighters also required enormous investments in time and unprecedented levels of detail in order for pilots to have the target folders required to hit their aimpoints. But it was the Tomahawk that developed a reputation as an unreliable drain on resources. If all systems operated as planned, the missile could strike within 100 feet of its aimpoint, or roughly double that of the Air Force's CALCM. With its early generation, single-channel Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) receiver, CALCM seemed to have greater flexibility to the Air Force-dominated Black Hole. But, of course, air planners never had to defend it in an open debate, given that the missile remained a closely guarded secret.
Tomahawk also had its own super-secret component, the ability to attack electrical power transformer yards with a cluster bomb-like warhead that disperses hundreds of spools of tiny conductive filaments to cause distribution lines and transformers to short circuit. The weapon -- code named Kit 2 -- had been developed under yet another Top Secret program, conceived by war planners fascinated with the potential for "non-lethal warfare." The special warheads would disable electrical distribution without destroying generating capacity. Saddam's highly advanced national electric grid, one of the finest in the Third World, would prove an optimum bullseye to test the new capability.
Thus, Tomahawk and the Kit 2 became central to the air war's systemic attack on Iraq, while CALCM ended up being a marginal weapon. In the original Instant Thunder plan -- 84 targets and a few hundred aircraft -- CALCMs were dominent. However, over the five months of Desert Shield, the allied air armada grew to almost 2,000 fighters and bombers, and the target list grew to some 5,000 aimpoints.
What is more, though Air Force boosters would later contend that CALCM's were the only systems that could reach northern Iraqi targets in the opening salvos of Desert Storm, only one out of the eight targets eventually assigned to the Barksdale bombers would be located in the north.
The Tomahawk, as we will examine later, would have its own share of problems. But CALCM had a most inauspicious debut. Classified Air Force records, an examination of the targets on the ground, and interviews with eyewitnesses to the strikes show that four of the 39 missiles failed to launch, and of the remaining 35, no more than 28 hit their aimpoints. Of the eight targets, two were missed completely, and civilian "collateral damage" occurred at three others.
Across the street from the Basra main post office, at least one missile hit a five-story apartment building, destroying the structure. The Amarah telephone exchange located in the Yarmouk neighborhood was destroyed, but four nearby homes and a Ba'ath party social club were damaged by an errant CALCM. The worst damage occurred in the southern Iraqi town of Diwaniyah. Eleven civilians were killed and 49 were wounded when CALCMs struck apartment buildings and homes adjacent to the downtown telephone exchange and telecommunications tower. The Diwaniyah strike would be the worst case of collateral damage on the first night of Desert Storm, but since the Air Force never revealed CALCM targets, the results would never appear to blemish its record.
For a full year after Desert Storm, CALCM would remain secret. Then, on the first anniversary of Operation Desert Storm, the Air Force revealed the existence of the missile. As the industry newsletter Navy News dryly reported, the revelation came only after Time magazine crowned the Navy's Tomahawk as "missile of the year."
Some wars never end.

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