In My Time - Dick Cheney [100]
It wasn’t clear the Saudis would accept such a high-level team. Scowcroft worked the phones with them all afternoon and through the night. “If we send Cheney,” he told them, “the answer better be yes.” It would be a clear setback to have the U.S. secretary of defense make the trip and get turned down. Finally, on Sunday morning, they agreed to receive me.
We departed from Andrews Air Force Base that afternoon, Sunday, August 5, on one of a fleet of 707s I used as secretary of defense. Some of these planes had been used as Air Force One by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. One of them, tail number 26000, was the plane that flew President Kennedy to Dallas on November 22, 1963, and flew his body back to Andrews Air Force Base at the end of that tragic day. After more modern aircraft were brought into the fleet to serve as Air Force One, 26000 and the other 707s were used to transport cabinet secretaries.
Just before taking off I received word of the strong statement the president had made to reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait,” he had said. Sitting in the cabin of the 707, I wrote notes for a presentation to King Fahd that echoed the president’s words and laid out the dangers of acquiescence. Saddam Hussein “must not be permitted to get away with his aggression,” I wrote in longhand on a yellow legal pad:
He will grow stronger—especially if he has all that Kuwaiti wealth. He will dominate the Gulf. He will dominate OPEC. He will acquire more, deadlier armaments—the kind that will allow him to totally dominate the region. At some point we will have to deal with him—it will be easier now—together—as part of an international effort.
During the flight, I went back to the staff section of the plane and asked the CIA briefer to make the presentation he had prepared for the king. It was technical and equivocal, and it did not convey the urgency of the situation. I scrapped that part of the brief and decided that Schwarzkopf and I would handle it. Later I had our ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Charles Freeman, up to the cabin to brief me on what to expect. You have to be cautious, he told me. If you are too aggressive or talk about too large a force, you will scare the Saudis and they won’t commit. Also, he said, you have to be prepared to wait around in Riyadh for hours or even days. They don’t make up their minds quickly and certainly won’t make a quick decision on something this important.
We landed in Jeddah at around 2:00 p.m. Saudi time and went to one of the king’s guest palaces. Bandar came to see me while we waited for our meeting with the king. He had undergone a transformation, no longer wearing one of the Savile Row suits he was known for in Washington, but dressed in the traditional robes of a Saudi prince. “It’s very important,” he said, “that you demonstrate to the king that you are serious.” He wanted me to make sure the king knew we would commit a large force and do it fast. I couldn’t seem cautious or unwilling to do what was necessary, Bandar said. I was asking the king to take a big risk by allowing U.S. forces onto Saudi soil and had to convince him the United States was a worthy ally. In other words, Bandar was giving me advice 180 degrees different from the advice I had received hours earlier on board my plane from the U.S. ambassador. I decided to go with Bandar’s guidance.
At about 7:00 p.m. we were ushered into our meeting with the king. Crown Prince Abdullah was there, along with Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al Faisal and Deputy Minister of Defense Abdul Rahman. Prince Sultan, the minister of defense and Bandar’s father, was out of the country but would return the next morning. We sat in overstuffed chairs arranged in an L shape, my team—including General Schwarzkopf, Paul Wolfowitz, Ambassador