In My Time - Dick Cheney [121]
IN ADDITION TO SUCCESSFULLY accomplishing our mission in the Persian Gulf, we’d worked hard to get other nations to contribute. My staff prepared a concept that they jokingly called “Operation Tin Cup” to encourage other countries to share the financial burdens of the war. With President Bush’s leadership and the fine help of such cabinet members as Secretary of State James Baker and Secretary of the Treasury Nicholas Brady, the United States received $53.7 billion to offset costs of $61.1 billion.
In the run-up to the war, General Kelly and members of the joint staff had conducted a series of in-depth briefings for me on different facets of the operational aspects of war. After the war was over, we did a series of seminars on lessons learned. They were important sessions that enabled us, for example, to learn about the capabilities of our Apache helicopters by hearing directly from a pilot who had flown one of the missions the first night of the air war in Iraq. One very significant area of advancement from previous wars was in precision-guided munitions, or PGMs. The first major use of these “smart” weapons, which can be guided with great accuracy onto a target using laser or other technology, came in Operation Desert Storm. Although most of the ordnance we dropped in that conflict were the older “dumb” or “gravity” bombs, we saw what PGMs could do. They could be precisely targeted on an enemy’s communications networks or electricity grid, enabling us to disable key functions of an adversary’s capital city, for example, with minimal collateral damage.
A FEW MONTHS AFTER celebrating the end of the Persian Gulf war, I was standing knee-deep in the waters of the Dean River in British Columbia, just about to cast my fly line and thinking about landing a twenty-pound steelhead. It was August 19, 1991. The fishing had been slow and the water high from late season runoff, but it was starting to clear, and I’d just seen the fisherman next to me hook a magnificent fish.
“Mr. Secretary,” I heard someone call. I looked over to the riverbank to see my communications specialist waving me down. “There’s been a coup in the Soviet Union!” he shouted. “Deputy Secretary Atwood needs to talk to you.” So much for my steelhead. I waded over to the riverbank, climbed out of the water, and walked downriver with the communicator to where a solar-powered satellite phone had been set up that morning. We placed a secure call back to the Pentagon. “Dick, Gorbachev’s out,” Atwood said—prematurely, as it turned out—when I got him on the phone. “We don’t know if the coup is still under way or complete. Things are moving fast.” I needed to get back to Washington.
The Dean River is remote, which is why the fishing is so good, and it was complicated to get back to Washington quickly. Some of the guys I’d been camping with on the Dean had a homemade rig, a flat-bottom jet boat built specifically to operate on this river. They took my security agent, communications specialist, and me, along with our gear, in the boat downriver to the head of the falls, where we got out and loaded our stuff into an old school bus for the journey down the rough mountain road around the falls. From there we headed to a nearby airstrip, where a single-engine wilderness charter, with huge rubber tires that enabled it to land on extremely rough runways, waited. It flew us to Prince George, British Columbia, where an air force C-20 was waiting to take us the rest of the way back to D.C.
As the C-20 climbed to altitude over glaciers and sharp peaks, I thought about what the events in the Soviet Union might mean. For the last two years I had been spending time in Saturday sessions in my Pentagon conference room with experts on the Soviet Union from inside and outside the government. I found these sessions extremely useful as a way to gather very smart people together