BY THE TIME CHENEY HAD been in office about a month, Crowe was beginning to see how the inner councils of national security decision making were going to work under Bush, and he wasn’t happy. Much of the discussion at National Security Council (NSC) meetings was political. Decisions were made based on their likely impact on the Congress, the media and public opinion, and the focus was on managing the reaction. Crowe had serious doubts that these should be the main criteria for military and foreign-policy decisions.
Jim Baker seemed to think being Secretary of State was like running a big political campaign: Bush versus Gorbachev. Baker was looking for some dramatic arms control initiative to upstage the Soviets and make Bush more popular.
Another problem with NSC meetings was Brent Scowcroft’s habit of engaging in prolonged academic discussions, picking through every angle. To Crowe, these were often a tedious waste of time. Bush himself brought one of these rambling talks to an abrupt end one day, remarking, “This subject is dying on its feet. Let’s adjourn.”
“Amen,” Crowe said under his breath.
For all the impressiveness of his title, Crowe knew he occupied a tenuous position in the government, and it frustrated him. By law he was the principal military adviser to the President, Secretary of Defense and NSC, but only an adviser. He commanded no military forces, and technically neither the Chairman nor the four service chiefs were even in the chain of command, which ran from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the CINCs of the ten major warfighting commands. The Chairman directly oversaw only the 1,600 desk-bound officers, drawn from all four services, of the Pentagon-based Joint Staff. Any power he possessed was based almost entirely on his relationships with the President and the Secretary of Defense.
A January 14, 1987, memo signed by President Reagan effectively had inserted Crowe into the chain of command, directing that “communications between the President and the Secretary of Defense” and the ten CINCs “be transmitted through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” But advice and communications could be pretty thin gruel in a business where real command is the name of the game.
The specific, day-to-day demands of the job were feeling more burdensome than ever. Capitol Hill was sometimes a downright ordeal. Presenting the annual budget to the key committees, he had to sit for hours and listen while congressman after congressman postured on pet issues. At the end of one of these hearings, Crowe whispered to one of his aides, “I’m not going to go through this one more time.” He went to Cheney the next day and said he had made a final decision to retire.
Crowe realized that if Bush pulled out all the stops and ordered him to stay, he might have no choice. He had to find a way to be firm in telling the President, without appearing to reject Bush or his administration.
Finally, he went to the White House and sat down with Bush. After explaining that he and his wife, Shirley, together had made the decision to leave, Crowe told Bush, “I’m going to regret this decision on occasion. I’m confident of that. But I’ll tell you, fifty percent of my job, or sixty percent, I won’t miss for five minutes.”
Crowe had to finish out the spring and summer of 1989 before his term expired, and there were more than a few problems demanding his attention. Panama was near the top of the list. General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the strongman who ran the country, was a major irritant. Suspected of involvement in illegal drug trafficking, Noriega ran a notoriously corrupt regime. Although he once had been one of the CIA’s key Latin American assets, the administration now viewed him as an outlaw and an enemy of U.S. interests. With the strategically important Panama Canal scheduled to pass from U.S. to Panamanian control at the end of the century, and 12,000 American military personnel and many of their families living in Panama, the Bush administration wanted Noriega out.
Crowe knew that the CINC responsible for Panama (known as CINCSOUTH), Army General Frederick F. Woerner, Jr., of the Southern Command, had a reputation as a wimp. Crowe liked and respected him, but he saw that Woerner, who’d never served in a senior Pentagon post, didn’t understand Washington politics. The new assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Bernard W. Aronson, was leading an effort to come down harder on Noriega, perhaps with military force if necessary, and Woerner was resistant. Woerner was opposed to aggressive U.S. military intervention in Latin America. Shortly after Bush’s inauguration, Woerner had publicly stated there was a policy vacuum in Washington on Panama. Scowcroft himself had scolded Woerner, saying, “I want you to know the President was furious with your speech.”
A few members of Congress who visited Panama to observe the May 7, 1989, elections there thought Woerner was almost pacifistic, allowing Noriega to threaten Americans. Southern Command staff people joked that they answered the phone in Woerner’s headquarters, “Wimp Command.” The legislators were urging Bush to fire him.
Crowe was present at a White House meeting when Scowcroft brought up the complaints.
“Gee whiz, Brent,” Bush said, “if we changed everyone the congressmen complained of, I’d be out of a job in a week.”
Everyone at the meeting laughed. Crowe was glad to see that Woerner’s job seemed safe for the moment. Later, Crowe had what he considered a real come-to-Jesus discussion with Woerner, in which he explained the importance of assuaging visiting congressmen.
On Wednesday, May 10, Crowe was watching the evening television reports from Panama. Three days earlier, Noriega’s handpicked candidates had been soundly defeated, but he had nullified the election. The opposition candidates who’d had victory stolen out from under them had taken to the Via España in Panama City in a protest demonstration of honking cars that drew thousands. It was a rare bold action by the usually timid Noriega opposition. “Down with the pineapple,” the protesters shouted in Spanish, using a nickname that referred to Noriega’s acne-pocked face.
In response, the so-called Dignity Battalions (or Digbats, as they were known in the Pentagon), paramilitary pro-Noriega units, attacked the opposition candidates.
Opposition presidential candidate Guillermo Endara, 52, a 240-pound man with the benign face of an overfed boy, was hit in the forehead with an iron bar wielded by one of the members of the Digbats. The bodyguard of Guillermo “Billy” Ford, the opposition’s second vice presidential candidate, was shot dead. Ford himself was shown on television as he was struck by a fist and then another. He staggered out of his car and stumbled along the sidewalk. Blood covered his eyes and soaked his white shirt. As another man came up and swiped at him with a pipe, Ford struck out blindly with his arms.
This film, and one of Endara in the hospital, ran again and again on American television. The image of the white-haired Ford, robbed of his elected post, bloodied and temporarily blinded, became an instant symbol of the state of lawlessness and chaos in Panama.
The televised coverage jolted Crowe, who went to the Pentagon that evening in civilian clothes. Five inconclusive reports of harassment of U.S. servicemen in Panama had already been received. The Chairman soon received word that he was to be at the White House later that night for a meeting with President Bush and the rest of the national security team.
Crowe was fed up with Panama. Nothing had worked—not the Justice Department’s drug indictments of Noriega in 1988, not the aborted negotiation to drop the indictments if Noriega would give up power, not economic sanctions and not CIA covert action designed to unseat Noriega. Crowe had had a real problem with the now departed Elliott Abrams, Reagan’s truculent assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, who had virtually called him a coward when Crowe had balked at using the military to throw Noriega out.
Crowe was a skeptic about all uses of force, not just in Panama. He knew presidents sometimes had ambitious, extravagant ideas about the goals they could achieve with military power. War, to Crowe’s mind, was a nasty, unpredictable affair, not something to be treated as just another foreign-policy tool. He favored limited applications of force, small steps taken in pursuit of well-defined, achievable goals. The first serious military operation of his tenure, the April 1986 bombing of Libya, had taken just minutes to carry off and had smoothly achieved its goal of scaring Qaddafi back into his tent. Crowe had backed the 1987 decision to use the U.S. Navy to escort Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, a mission with the limited, specific goal of protecting the free flow of oil shipments.
The goals in Panama were obvious: protection of U.S. citizens and interests, and installation of a friendly, democratic government. The question was by what means.
In April 1988, Crowe had approved a detailed examination of the secret contingency plans, called ELABORATE MAZE, that the Joint Staff had on the shelf in case the military had to be used in Panama. Both Crowe and Woerner felt the ELABORATE MAZE plans were unsatisfactory because they did not reflect the full range of possible scenarios.
He had had Woerner develop a new series of plans for Panama. One benefit would be to demonstrate to Elliott Abrams and the State Department that the Pentagon was ready.
The new plans had been given the overall codename PRAYER BOOK, though each had its own secret name:
POST TIME was a plan for the United States to unilaterally defend the Panama Canal in time of crisis by placing forces along its route so it could continue to operate. Crucial points like the locks and Madden Dam, a key water and power source for the canal, would be secured with military forces.
KLONDIKE KEY was called a “non-permissive NEO,” meaning a Noncombatant Evacuation Operation conducted without the permission of the host country. It was a massive plan to take control of Panama City and use military and civilian aircraft, including aircraft carriers with helicopters aboard, to remove U.S. citizens. Because of the large number of U.S. noncombatants in Panama, many senior military experts felt this was too unwieldy a task to be carried off. But events in the Middle East had put everyone in the Reagan administration, including the President, on guard about possible hostage taking. So the plan was drawn up despite the doubts.
BLIND LOGIC was a much smaller plan to provide military specialists with civil affairs skills to assist the Panamanians in setting up a new government. This plan was to be executed only in the event a new civilian government requested assistance.
BLUE SPOON was a plan for offensive U.S. military operations against the Noriega-controlled military, the Panamanian Defense Forces (PDF). These would be conducted from Panama by the local U.S. Army commander, who would take command of a joint task force comprising units from all four services.
• • •
At the White House meeting the night of May 10, Crowe saw that Noriega’s decision to nullify the opposition victory was being perceived as a big setback to U.S. policy. President Bush was eager to do something to solve the Noriega problem. But he made what Crowe considered to be the key point: the U.S. could not run the risk of making Noriega an overnight martyr.
If the harassment of U.S. servicemen were to escalate to physical attacks on Americans similar to the attacks on the Panamanian opposition leaders, the situation would be intolerable, Bush said. Television pictures of Americans being clubbed and fleeing with blood-encrusted shirts would require immediate action.
Crowe said that he wanted to make sure the military forces were in a better posture to respond.
Knowing that Jim Baker had the most influence with Bush, Crowe watched to see where the Secretary of State now stood on Panama. As Reagan’s Treasury Secretary, Baker had argued that Noriega wasn’t worth so much attention. But later, Baker had been Bush’s campaign manager when candidate Bush took a tough, public anti-Noriega line, opposing a plea-bargained deal. This had given a new high profile to the Noriega issue, and had implied a promise that, as President, Bush would find a solution.
“If we had known we would win the election by so much,” Baker said now, only half-jokingly, “we would not have dug such a deep hole for ourselves.”
While Baker was not yet anything like Elliott Abrams, Crowe could see he was taking on the activist coloring of his department, where, it seemed to Crowe, military solutions were too often viewed as the first resort rather than the last.
Bush said that he wanted to exploit the obvious anti-Noriega sentiment that was on the rise in Panama, and also wanted to see if the videos of Billy Ford being beaten up could not be used to build some anti-Noriega support within Latin America.
The tenor of the meeting was that the administration should find some measured, symbolic step.
That night Marlin Fitzwater, Bush’s press secretary, read a mild public statement from Bush condemning the violence.
Over the next 24 hours Crowe and Cheney attempted to formulate a military recommendation to the President.
Like so many military plans, the carefully drafted, four-part PRAYER BOOK series did not apply to the situation at hand: the canal was not in danger, a full evacuation of civilians was not called for, there was no new government to assist, and an offensive operation against the Panamanian Defense Forces would be too extreme.
Crowe suggested to Cheney that they propose augmenting the U.S. forces in Panama with a brigade-size reinforcement of 2,000 to 3,000 troops. This could be done with some fanfare, sending an important psychological message to Noriega and the PDF. Cheney agreed.
Crowe called Woerner on the secure line. He first asked if Woerner needed or wanted some supplement to the rules of engagement—the guidelines for combat, dictating when force could be used and how much—so he could put his troops in a more aggressive posture.
No, Woerner said, adding that he had not had a single serious incident of undue use of force by his 12,000 troops and he wanted to keep the rules simple.
Crowe proposed sending the brigade-size reinforcement, but Woerner said he did not need it. When Crowe attempted to explain that they had to send some message, Woerner said an influx of thousands of troops could be an unneeded burden.
Things were moving pretty fast, Crowe said, and Woerner might have to accept some kind of force package for political reasons.
• • •
Crowe decided there was one more step that could be taken to prepare. A secret deployment of a small, super-elite special operations task force could be ordered. Soon after the failed Iranian hostage rescue operation of 1980, Desert I, the Department of Defense had created the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC (“J-sock”), to conduct counterterrorist operations. Headed by an Army major general, JSOC was based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and had several tiers of operators. The top tier consisted of three elite Army Delta squadrons and the Navy’s SEAL (sea-air-land) teams.
Each Delta squadron had 120 to 130 people with enough firepower to make any battle seem like a nonnuclear version of World War III. Delta assignments were for five years, and the average age of a member was about 30. Each was experienced and capable of moving covertly in most countries. Abroad, Delta members might dress as civilians, speak the local language, wear their hair long, do whatever else was necessary to blend into the culture or neighborhood. One squadron was always on alert, ready to travel within four hours.
SEAL Team 6, the Navy equivalent of Delta, was the most elite of the three formidable SEAL teams—the best of the best. Team members had an average age of about 20 and had to be in top physical shape because they might have to swim for hours before fighting on land. Based in Norfolk, SEAL Team 6 had hundreds of members divided into 30-man units; platoons of 14 could be deployed individually. Equipped with everything from advanced underwater breathing devices that make no bubbles to the latest high-tech surveillance equipment, SEAL Team 6 would add another dimension to the capabilities available to the United States as it poised to await Noriega’s next move.
Dispatching these special forces to Panama would give the President considerable flexibility, and would put the military’s best hostage rescue team on the scene. Crowe called the JSOC commander on the secure phone and alerted him that some of his forces might be needed.
Cheney approved Crowe’s suggestion to recommend to the President that they dispatch a Delta team and part of SEAL Team 6 to Panama.
Crowe then called Fred Woerner in Panama. Once again, the general said he did not desire the new deployment the Pentagon wanted to send him. It was one of the few times in his career that Crowe had encountered a commander who resisted additional forces. Crowe indicated that a force package of some 2,000 troops plus a Delta team and a SEAL unit were likely to be coming, if the President approved.
Woerner was troubled by the push from Washington. The BLUE SPOON contingency plan called for a Delta unit to capture Noriega, and now a Delta unit was coming down. The United States would be one step closer to executing an armed intervention, a move Woerner still strongly opposed. He made it clear that he felt a snatch operation—conducted either as part of BLUE SPOON or independently—was just too risky. If it failed, it would represent a major escalation, putting all the U.S. citizens in Panama in jeopardy.
The likelihood of pulling off a snatch was remote, in Woerner’s view. Noriega was hard for U.S. intelligence to track. Woerner only occasionally knew where Noriega had been, knew only rarely where he was at any given time, and never knew where he was going to be—a prerequisite to capturing him.
Through a secret source, Colonel Guillermo Wong, Noriega’s military intelligence chief, the Southern Command had learned that Noriega had two plans to put into effect if he was attacked personally or sought by U.S. forces. One was to go to the hills and conduct guerrilla operations; the second was to take American hostages. Aware that an unsuccessful snatch operation could trigger the ultimate nightmare of hostage taking, Woerner thought to himself that the snatch option, in any form, was “Looney Tunes.”
• • •
Although he had doubts about the wisdom of abducting Noriega, Crowe knew he had to consider that possibility. But before he reached his own conclusion, he needed to get a better idea of what would be acceptable to Cheney. Crowe felt he had not closed the loop with Cheney, had not come to know the man beneath the unrevealing surface. One day during a private discussion, Cheney had dropped his guard. “You know,” he said to Crowe, “the President has got a long history of vindictive political actions.” Cross Bush and you pay, he said, supplying the names of a few victims and adding: Bush remembers and you have to be careful.
What an important notion, Crowe reflected. Bush remembers and you have to be careful. Cheney’s mask had momentarily slipped. Was it intentional—a warning to Crowe? Or a reminder for Cheney himself? Crowe was not at all sure. But apparently Cheney was afraid of Bush.
The new Secretary did not appear to be squeamish about the kinds of aggressive actions now under consideration for Panama. In his first two months in the Pentagon, he had insisted on being briefed about possible retaliation for the December 21 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which had exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people. Libya, Syria and Iran were all suspected of involvement. He had approved plans for retaliation in the event the bombing could be traced directly to any of the suspect countries. Despite this early indication of Cheney’s willingness to use force, Crowe couldn’t be sure of the Secretary’s views on a Noriega snatch.
In one session, Crowe mentioned the possibility to Cheney, saying it would be very risky and not necessarily wise. Cheney explored the details of this option, and said he favored it if an opportunity arose—if there was good intelligence on Noriega’s whereabouts or if he did something openly provocative. But not, Cheney said, if such a snatch was going to have any political negatives.
On Thursday, May 11, Cheney and Crowe finished work on their recommendation to Bush: an announced troop deployment, plus a secret dispatch of a Delta squadron and part of SEAL Team 6. Bush agreed.
That afternoon, the President appeared briefly in the White House press room to announce that over the next several days he was sending an additional 1,881 American troops to Panama. Asked if the United States would look favorably on a coup attempt against Noriega, Bush sidestepped. “I’ve asserted what my interest is at this point. It is democracy in Panama; it is protection of the life of Americans in Panama.”
At a news briefing later, Scowcroft was asked what the new forces were going to do about the election fraud. He said, “I don’t remember the President saying the troops are there to restore democracy.” The deployment was simply “a precautionary, prudent step.”
The operation was code-named NIMROD DANCER and would consist of 1,716 Army troops and 165 Marines.
The next day, Friday, May 12, Cheney formally authorized the secret part of the deployment.
Most people cleared for access to details of this special operations deployment were told the units were being sent there for possible hostage rescue. Since Noriega and his Dignity Battalions might do anything to the Americans in Panama, it was considered a wise precaution to have the forces on hand to carry off a sophisticated rescue.
But there was another mission for the Delta squadron. A month before, a CIA operative named Kurt Muse had been arrested by the PDF for running a clandestine radio network which was part of the agency’s covert operation to unseat Noriega. Intelligence reports said that a guard with a submachine gun was stationed outside Muse’s cell with orders to kill him if there was any sign of hostilities by the Americans. The CIA was deeply concerned about Muse and wanted to avoid a repeat of the 1984 kidnapping and subsequent murder of their station chief in Beirut, William Buckley. In that episode, the agency’s inability to locate and rescue one of its own had made it appear weak. So CIA Director William H. Webster pressed Cheney to have the military draw up a rescue plan for Muse that would be ready for execution on short notice.
Muse’s wife was a Department of Defense employee in Panama, making Muse a dependent entitled by treaty to regular visits from an American attorney and doctor. They reported that Muse, who was being held in Modelo Prison across from Noriega’s headquarters, known as the Comandancia, was being treated well. As Noriega’s American hostage, however, he was very vulnerable.
A special plan, code-named ACID GAMBIT, was developed for a Delta team to rescue Muse in an operation that would take only nine minutes.
In operational terms, using Delta or the SEAL team to free an American hostage or prisoner was not much different from taking the heavily guarded Noriega from his bodyguards.
• • •
Crowe saw that the President—former CIA Director Bush—was very worried about the agency’s captured operative. Bush also had made it clear that he wanted the military to be able to seize Noriega and bring him back to the United States for trial. The implications of going into a sovereign country and seizing its leader could be immense; but Crowe saw no sign that the consequences were being fully considered.
“I can’t predict what the President will do,” the Chairman told the JSOC commander on the secure telephone, “but get ready.”
• • •
On Saturday, May 13, Bush boarded Air Force One to fly to Mississippi for a commencement address. He summoned the reporters traveling with him to his cabin to say that he had no quarrel with the Panamanian military, just with Noriega and his “thuggery.” In his strongest public comments so far, Bush called on the Panamanian people and military to overthrow Noriega. “They ought to do everything they can to get Mr. Noriega out of there,” he said. It was highly unusual for a president to call publicly for a coup, baldly declaring open season on a foreign ruler. When Bush was asked if there were any limits on what he meant, he said, “No, I would add no words of caution.”
• • •
Crowe sent General Woerner a personal secret message proposing a plan for the U.S. military to conduct new exercises in Panama that would aggressively assert U.S. rights under the Panama Canal treaties. On May 17, Woerner sent a message back saying he was ready.
In a secure phone conversation, Crowe told Woerner that Bush had decided to authorize the exercises. “But understand you are to do nothing provocative,” Crowe added.
Woerner had grown accustomed to executing a Panama policy that amounted to a sequence of subtleties and innuendos. He interpreted Crowe’s new instructions to mean that the command should be intimidating, show resolve, create doubts in Noriega’s mind about U.S. intentions, and act tough, but not pick a fight that would draw an armed response from the PDF. It seemed like a thin distinction.
In the following days, Noriega drew back. Woerner received intelligence reports, including some from the secret source Colonel Wong, showing that Noriega was telling his forces to be very careful during any encounters with Americans. They were not to give the Americans an excuse for a military response. According to one such report, Noriega warned, “Don’t piss off the Americans.”
• • •
Cheney realized that Woerner was an expert on Panama—perhaps too much so. The Secretary did not like the subtext of the Southern Command’s reactions to events. When anything aggressive was proposed, such as new deployments or asserting the U.S. treaty rights, Woerner argued against it. The general always provided good reasons, but his heart didn’t seem to be in a timely solution to the Noriega problem.
Cheney concluded that Woerner had gone native.
For Cheney, if push came to shove in Panama, the United States had basically two options: execute the BLUE SPOON offensive operations against the PDF, or snatch Noriega. Woerner was keen on neither. Furthermore, there didn’t seem to be any circumstances when he would be.
• • •
Outgoing Army Secretary Jack Marsh had heard that there was going to be a game of musical chairs in the upper ranks of the military. Cheney was going to have to select a new JCS chairman. On May 30, when Cheney came over to join Marsh for one of the Army mess’s famous catfish lunches, Marsh wanted to make sure Cheney considered an Army general for the post. So Marsh spoke to Cheney in glowing terms about one of his favorites—General Maxwell Reid Thurman.