In My Time - Dick Cheney [91]
President Bush had worked closely with Powell when he was vice president and Powell was national security advisor, and I knew he was a fan. But I was also aware that the president was worried about jumping Powell, a brand-new four-star, over fourteen others in order to put him in the military’s top job. Picking him would certainly ruffle some feathers, and when I made the case to the president that Powell was the man for the job, I said I would handle any blowback from those we passed over.
The president backed my decision about Powell and agreed to nominate him. On October 1, 1989, after confirmation by the Senate, Colin Powell became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I knew we would have important work to do together. I believed we would be a good team. And for our time together at the Pentagon, we were.
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ON HIS FIRST DAY on the job, General Powell woke me early in the morning with news that we were getting reports a coup might be about to get under way in Panama. We monitored the situation through the day, and I left the next morning to take my Soviet counterpart, General Dmitri Yazov, on a tour of Gettysburg National Military Park. On a previous visit to the Soviet Union, my hosts had taken me to see the mass graves from the siege of Leningrad; Hitler’s troops had failed to capture the city, but more than a million Russians had died. I thought I would reciprocate for the tour the Soviets had given me by taking their official party to the site of one of the most important battles in American history. We got an expert from the U.S. Army War College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and loaded the delegation on a bus to tour the sites of the key events in the famous battle.
On the bus ride through the military park, I sat in the front row next to Yazov, a big, beefy guy, who had been chosen for his post by Gorbachev—and who would within two years be in jail for attempting a coup on the Soviet leader. We were well into our tour when my cell phone rang. Since this was 1989, the cell phone was bigger than a brick and my military aide carried it in his briefcase. Admiral Owens answered the call, leaned over the seat, and said, “Mr. Secretary, General Powell is on the phone, and he says he needs to speak with you.” Reaching behind me, I took the phone, put it to my ear, and listened as General Powell told me it looked like the coup in Panama had begun. When the call was finished and I handed the phone back to Admiral Owens, I noticed that General Yazov was clearly curious—not so much about the content of my call, but about my phone. Apparently mobile technology was still pretty rare in the Soviet Union.
For our new national security team, this was a first test. How would we operate in a crisis? Would we be able to generate options for the president and a timely response? In this case, with hindsight, I would have to say we did not perform as well as we might have.
The first question for us was whether this was a legitimate coup. Our reporting was spotty, and we did not want to fall into some kind of trap Noriega might be setting, trying to get us to take the first step militarily only to find out later there hadn’t been a coup. On the other hand, if the coup was real and American aid to the plotters could help unseat Noriega, intervening on the side of the plotters would be worth considering.
By around one in the afternoon, we had developed a list of options to recommend to the president, ranging from what to do if the coup plotters brought Noriega to an American base to the possibility of using U.S. forces to extract Noriega. By 2:30 p.m. the coup had failed. Reports were that Noriega, outsmarting his captors, was able to reestablish his control over the situation and kill the coup