In My Time - Dick Cheney [107]
I was also taken to the ancient Russian city of Tula, site of a training center for Soviet airborne forces that was roughly equivalent to our Fort Bragg in North Carolina, but a much less sophisticated facility. While I was there, elite Soviet troops staged an exercise, an airdrop of several hundred men in an impressive show—although it did not match what I’d seen our own forces do.
My host at Tula was Soviet General Alexander Lebed, commander of the 106th Division. A hero of the fighting in Afghanistan, he looked every inch the tough soldier he was, but he would oppose hard-liners like Yazov when they tried to overthrow Gorbachev for moving too quickly with reform, and he had an eye for politics. Later, as a civilian, he visited America, stopping to see me in Texas, where I was heading up Halliburton, and presenting me with his memoirs and a knife used by Soviet fighters. For a time he was seen as Boris Yeltsin’s successor, a position that eventually went to Vladimir Putin. Lebed was subsequently governor of Krasnoyarsk, a huge, mineral-rich region of Siberia, where he remained a political force until he was killed in a helicopter accident in 2002.
One of my last stops was at a large industrial site, a factory for MiG-29s, the top-of-the-line Soviet fighter. But the planes being produced were unfinished. Various key parts simply weren’t available. Rather than shut the plant doors, plant managers continued to operate in order to keep the workforce employed, but the products coming off the assembly line were worthless from a military standpoint. The managers of the plant indicated they were working on converting to the production of food processors similar to those found in millions of American homes, but when they showed me their prototype, I realized their plan wasn’t going to work. The food processor they so proudly showed me was the size of a small refrigerator.
The Soviets were clearly heading for a significantly diminished military capability. And what I saw, coming on top of the dramatic shifts that had occurred—the decision to free Eastern Europe peacefully and to allow Germany to reunify—convinced me that much of the talk about reform was real.
At a final meeting in Moscow, I found myself sitting across from members of the Supreme Soviet in an ornate room in the Kremlin, where I had attended a similar meeting in 1983. Then I had been a member of Congress and our delegation had had a very tense exchange with our Soviet counterparts over arms control, human rights, and Soviet treatment of dissidents. Now the feeling of standoff was gone, and the debates were mostly on the Soviet side as they argued over the merits and wisdom of different elements of economic reform.
AS I WAS FLYING home from Moscow, General Powell was departing Washington for Riyadh. His mission was to work with General Schwarzkopf to come up with a list of additional troops Schwarzkopf would need to go on the offense and liberate Kuwait.
In the meanwhile Paul Wolfowitz and his team had been working on the Western Excursion option, and it was time to staff it out. I called Admiral Dave Jeremiah, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to my office on the morning of October 23, 1990, and had him briefed on the plan and given the work Paul’s team had completed. I knew that as soon as the staff of the Joint Chiefs saw the plan, word would get around—and I was counting on that to convey my seriousness to the generals. We were going to provide the president with an offensive option, one way or another.
That task took on increasing importance the next day, when the president told me he was leaning toward action to remove Saddam from Kuwait. How many more troops would it