In My Time - Dick Cheney [111]
Late in the afternoon of January 15, General Powell came to my office with an order for me to sign. As secretary of defense, I signed a lot of orders. All deployments required my sign-off, and I usually just initialed them. But this order was different. This was an execute order, authorizing war. I signed my full name, and then I asked General Powell to sign his.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Desert Storm
In the early morning hours of Wednesday, January 16, 1991, my limousine pulled to a stop on Constitution Avenue. Lynne and I got out and walked through a light rain down the sloping path to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. We stood in front of the long black wall as visitors often do, silent and in awe. The fifty-eight thousand names etched on the wall are a reminder of the terrible cost of war. They were also a reminder to me, as operations in Iraq were about to begin, of the solemn obligation of America’s civilian leaders to provide our soldiers with a clear mission and the resources to prevail. We bowed our heads in prayer, thinking of the young Americans who would soon be flying in combat over Iraq.
By 7:15 a.m. I was at the White House for a meeting with Jim Baker and Brent Scowcroft in Brent’s West Wing office. We went over the details of what would unfold in the coming hours and walked through the list of world leaders whom we would call to notify in advance that operations would soon be under way. I made my first call of the day back in my Pentagon office to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens, with whom I had been staying in touch. We had offered to send Patriot antimissile batteries to help protect Israel from missile attacks that Saddam might launch. Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger had traveled to Israel with that offer, but the Israelis had declined. They had accepted our offer of early warning from our satellites of any missiles launched, and we had established the Hammer Rick hotline between my office and the Israeli Defense Ministry. In my 9:00 a.m. call to Arens, I told him that H-Hour, the hour when the operation would begin, was 7:00 p.m. Washington time, 3:00 a.m. in Baghdad. I urged him to use the secure communications link to call me anytime.
By the time I talked to Arens, seven B-52 long-range bombers had already taken off from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, armed with cruise missiles and headed for Iraq. As H-Hour approached, F-15E fighter-bombers, AWACS, KC-135 refueling planes, and F-117 stealth fighters prepared to take off from bases inside Saudi Arabia. Sailors on board ships such as the U.S.S. Wisconsin and the U.S.S. Missouri in the Persian Gulf ran through checklists, readying cruise missiles for launch.
Because our F-117s were stealthy, they would be able to penetrate Iraqi airspace without being detected by radar. As they were flying toward Baghdad, eight Apache gunships would fly in low in the dark and take out two of the key nodes of the Iraqi early warning system, opening up a hole in their air defenses so that we could start flowing the rest of our airplanes through to attack Baghdad. Desert Shield was about to become Desert Storm.
As H-Hour neared, I sent an assistant to my home in McLean to retrieve the suitcase I’d packed. I planned to spend the night in the small bedroom connected to my office, but I hadn’t brought the suitcase in with me that morning out of concern that it might alert any close observers that the war was about to begin. By late afternoon, it was clear we had done all we could from Washington. The only thing left now was to wait. At 5:00 p.m. General Powell and Deputy Secretary Atwood joined