Hugh Shelton Oral History

This is the General Hugh Shelton interview as a part of the Clinton Presidential History Project. First I want to thank you for giving us the time to do this.  

My pleasure.

This is your story, so anything you want to get on the record you ought to feel free to do, and then I’ll have questions as we go along. We’ve had a conversation off the record about the fundamental ground rules, and the most important is the one about confidentiality. 

I understand the rules.

The audience is not me but people down the road who want to understand something about your time as Chair of the Joint Chiefs and before.

A persistent feature of press reports when you became Chair of the Joint Chiefs was that you hadn’t had a lot of political experience. Sometimes press reports like that are not very accurate. Is it accurate in a sense? When you were growing up, did you pay attention to politics? Were you in any way politically active or attentive?

I was, but not to the degree that some are. As you know, my advanced degree from Auburn is in political science. But they failed to grasp the assignment I had had in Washington. I was the J-33 for the Chairman. The J-33 is a three-star, the Chief Operating Officer of an organization. I was his principal deputy in operations as a brigadier general. Lieutenant General Tom Kelly, who was the J-3, basically turned to me and said, I want you to do this stuff for me as a Brigadier.

So I went to the White House. I met in the Old Executive Office Building twice a week. I was the Chairman’s principal deputy on counter-terrorism and drug enforcement. 

This was what time period, General?

This was 1987 to ’89. I went over to the White House twice a week, came back, I was briefing all the heavyweights on the Joint Staff in terms of what transpired. I was also preparing papers for the Chairman as he went over to testify before Congress. You couldn’t have a better training ground to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs because you got to sit in the tank, the place where the Joint Chiefs meet, a conference room reserved for them. It’s the prerogative of the Chairman who comes in. It’s normally just the Chairman and the principal on an issue that they’re going to face. But I was in there a lot.

So I got to see both how the Joint Chiefs worked under [Barry] Goldwater-[William] Nichols [Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986], which had just come in and was not received very well by the Joint Chiefs. But they had been forced to adapt to it. 

I sat in these meetings. I went over to the White House. I prepared papers for Congressional testimony. I was concerned about the Chairman. So I watched CSPAN all the time. I couldn’t have asked for a better job. In going to be the Chairman, I felt as comfortable as if I were getting ready to put on an old worn shoe, because I knew what it entailed. I knew the issues I would face. I knew how important every word you said was when you went over to testify and how that would suddenly be politicized by whichever party didn’t like what you said. It was great.

How did you end up getting that position?

I was one of five brigadier generals, of all services, that they called the DDO, the deputy director of operations. You’re the shift workers. There’s always a general on duty in the Pentagon, and it’s that general. That’s another thing that helped me to know how the place operates. 

In those days we recorded every phone conversation that the Chairman (or the SecDef) was involved in, after hours in particular. We were required to monitor the conversations as the DDO. I had my own little office there. The Pentagon operators, who worked for me, were in another room. They were also the guys you used to set up protection against a missile strike against America. We would run operations called night blues, designed to train the entire DDO team on how to respond if we detected incoming missiles.

Occasionally something would happen. An explosion overseas would light up, and the radar or satellites would pick it up. We would immediately convene a real-world missile conference, as if we were getting ready to be hit. It takes a little while for the over-the-horizon radars to determine it’s not a missile. Five of us did that, and we rotated shift work.

This was during the [Ronald] Reagan administration?

No, it was [George H. W.] Bush. We would monitor these conversations so if the President tells the SecDef, I want to get this done, and I want to do it in a hurry, you can get the ball rolling even before the J-3 or the Chairman calls and says we have to do it. You already have taken action. In some cases, if it was a conversation between the SecDef and the J-3, and the SecDef said, I want you to move the carrier battle group out of the Mediterranean into the Persian Gulf, you’re already putting together the orders that the J-3 will have as soon as he walks in the office, to carry to the SecDef. And you’ve already alerted the carrier to get ready to start moving. It was educational.

One of the CINCS—one of the commanders-in-chiefs, as we called them in those days, a combatant commander out in the Pacific—was not doing very well. They were going to fire him. There was a conversation going on between the J-3 and the SecDef, and the SecDef and the President. You’re privy to all that; you see how the system really works.

I sat there as a DDO for a year. I watched this guy, a brigadier general at the time named Craig Boyce, Army, who was a J-33. We didn’t work for him—we worked directly for the J-3—but he was always in our office because we were the 24-hour-a-day op center. If I turned around and looked back to my rear, I had representatives from the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] and FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], all of them in this office. All of the different aspects of the Joint Staff had desks in here. It’s a 24-hour-a-day operation, and they worked for us. This was a hub of activity during the off-duty hours. So Craig Boyce would be in that office, and I watched the hours the man worked. All of us sat there thinking, Boy, we don’t ever want that job; it’s a killer. And it was.

One night, after I’d had about a year in the job as DDO—and normally one was kept there for about a year—General [James J.] Lindsay at Special Ops came to the director and asked to take me out of the Joint Staff and let me be the Special Ops liaison in Washington. General Lindsay and I went back a ways. He knew I was a quality guy, so to speak, and he wanted to have me work the Washington area for him. He was down in Tampa, where the Special Ops HQ is. It was turned down.  

Later on, a guy came in and asked for me to be Assistant Division Commander of the 82^nd Airborne, a job I would dearly have loved to have. That went through the system and was turned down. One has to spend two years on the Joint Staff because that’s what Goldwater-Nichols set as a minimum. So one night BG Craig Boyce, the J33, walked up to my desk, sat down, and said, I have great news for you. Tomorrow morning the J-3 is going to call you in and tell you you’re going to get my job. He selected you as the man.

He looked at me and said, What do you think? I said, It beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but that’s about as much as I can say. So, sure enough, the next morning, the J-3 called me in and said, You’re the man, I’ve selected you. I thought, I’d love to have been selected for something else. So I got it. 

I’ve told people many times, don’t dread going to the Joint Staff, because it’s the greatest educational experience you’ll ever have. If you’re going to go up in rank in the Army and you’re going to become a general—and particularly if you’re going to go up to two, three, four stars—you’ll never find a better training ground than that job.

You indicated it’s partly because you’re seeing civil-military relations from the White House to the Pentagon.  

You see the entire thing, the internal workings of the entire joint operation—how the Air Force, Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, all come together to give you the complementary capabilities you use to fight a war. You’re writing the orders; you’re sending them the tasking to do it.

Also, there’s a connection with other agencies outside the Pentagon, right?

Every agency. I’ll give you an example. Congress allotted $300 million to fight the drug war, the first time in history DoD was going to get involved. They gave the money to DoD and said, We want you to pull it together because you have a lot of assets in DoD. We know you’re not going to go out and fight the drug war, but you tell these guys what you have, and maybe you can support them. 

I was tasked by the J-3 to convene a meeting of all the drug-fighting agencies. We got the FBI the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency], the customs, the Coast Guard, everybody who has a dog in the fight to fight the drug war, and we brought them into the Pentagon. I’m the guy who had to stand up and brief them: we have $300 million. Here are the assets we can give you, and we want to help you become a cohesive team to fight the drug war. They all sat there looking at me, gritting their teeth. They thought we were going to try to steal their assets. It was a great experience, trying to provide leadership to a group that didn’t necessarily want to be led. They wanted to do their own thing. But we did.

Were there any surprises in the position, things you found that you didn’t expect to see?

Fighting the drug war came as a big surprise because we had never been involved in that. There were things like providing aircraft to the FBI or to the CIA to fly to another country to pick up a terrorist. We had to provide the aircraft so we could then set up a refueling track and fly the individual all the way from that country, wherever it was, back to the U.S. We had to land him in a particular district up in New York where there was a judge who knew how to deal with a terrorist, and do it all under cover, because people in the country we were picking him up from didn’t want anybody to know they were cooperating with the United States to give us this terrorist. 

The J-3 called me in and said, You’re the sole clearing authority for classified information that will be given to the FBI to feed to double agents, or to agents in this country in order to control the flow— It was a double agent working for the FBI. So I got these highly classified documents. The agent who was trying to get that information wanted us to provide it.

The FBI said, Give us what you can. I had to go through that classified stuff and sort out what I can give him and what I can’t. I carried it all to the J-3 the first time, and I said, I have this top secret document. He said, Get out of here; you’re the guy. I thought, They’re going to hang me out to dry. One day some really top secret stuff is going to pop in the newspaper and they’ll say, Shelton, what did you do? 

It was things like that, a comprehensive look at how the entire system worked from things like I mentioned right up through how the President deals with DoD. We’re running an exercise. I’m the center focus for the exercise. It’s a NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] exercise. It’s leading toward nuclear war, and it’s going to force us to react to our plans to reinforce Europe with our troops and to fight the Soviet Union at the time when the Berlin Wall had not come down. We were going to have to fight them. 

This exercise is going on, about eight days’ worth. We’re starting to deploy, and suddenly it looks like we’re going to have to use a nuclear weapon because our troops in Europe are getting overrun. All of a sudden I have Margaret Thatcher and Chancellor [Helmut] Kohl and President Bush, all engaged in what was going to be an exercise. The next thing we know, President Bush is coming over and he wants to be updated because he’s getting ready to talk to Margaret Thatcher. 

I’m wondering, What’s going on? This is an exercise. Well, they all got engaged, the key leaders of the free world. It turns out it was because of the sensitivity. Some of them knew that the Berlin Wall was getting ready to fall—and it came down a week later. They did not want anything like this to be leaked to the press, particularly if we decided to use a nuclear weapon. We were, in fact, planning to do it, which might lead the Soviet Union at the time to reassess whether they wanted the wall to come down.

Sure.

After it came down a week later, it all became crystal clear why these key guys had gotten involved in this exercise. There was never a dull moment.

Sure, and it’s pretty clear that the press accounts were overstated in terms of your preparation.

Without a doubt. It really made me mad because I was thinking, You just don’t understand what I’ve been put through. It was only a 13-month experience, but it was about a three-year experience rolled into one year. The job was just tremendous.

You finished that position in what year?

I finished up in 1989, and they let me go be an Assistant Division Commander, which is what a brigadier general background needs to do. I got out to the 101^st Airborne in July. Then Saddam [Hussein] invaded, and I was on the first airplane of the 101^st headed as a line in the sand and to throw Saddam out of Kuwait. 

Right, which you did.

Which we did, and stayed there about 11 months. Then we redeployed back to Fort Campbell with the 101^st. I had been selected for major general while I was in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Then I went on to command the 82^nd Airborne, 18^th Airborne Corps. From there I was selected for four stars and on down to Tampa to take over Special Ops command. 

Just to sequence this with the segment of time I’m trying to cover, where would you have been in 1992?

In 1992 I went to command the 82^nd Airborne division. I commanded that up until early 1994 or late ’93. The 82^nd was a great experience. It doesn’t get any better than that. Then I went to command the 18^th Airborne Corps right there at Fort Bragg. I was nominated and selected for the third star. Of course, there you go through the ritual of going before Congress and being grilled, and it gives you a little more insight into how Washington works. 

During that time, 1994, I led the Joint Task Force—again, great training for how all the forces come together. You learn a lot in that process. I was commander of the Joint Task Force that invaded Haiti and then I pulled out of there about 45 days later. I went back to 18^th Airborne Corps at Bragg. Then in 1996, I was nominated for my fourth star and selected to replace Wayne Downing as the Commander in Chief of the Special Operations Command in Tampa. I served there from early ’96 until I was called by Secretary [William] Cohen and asked if I would like to be the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, or would like to be interviewed for it. 

I’m going to dial back a little bit, because there’s a lot of stuff going on before you get there. I want to ask you first about the incoming administration. President Clinton’s military record—or absence of military record—had created a lot of stir in ’92 in the population at large, and I would guess within the military also. Do you have any specific recollections in ’92 about people looking at that race and thinking, of Clinton in particular, Maybe this is somebody the military would not want to deal with?

I don’t remember any of that as part of the Presidential race. I don’t think, to be very candid, that the lack of military experience per se would be something that would cause any—certainly not senior military people—to be overly concerned. We are concerned, for example, when we have elected leaders who can’t relate to what it takes to keep a force trained and ready, how important the quality of the force is. 

But we see that in Congress as well. The difference in Congress is it’s one at a time. We’ve watched a steady erosion of military experience in the Congress. It starts to create a concern about how much support you’ll continue to get if they can’t relate to what you have to do and how important it is that you stay trained and ready. Otherwise you go to war unprepared, and it costs hundreds of lives needlessly. But I don’t remember that being a key concern with Clinton. 

How much attention do military people pay to who has the ear of the Presidential candidates? Are you typically following who’s giving advice to the people on military issues, or are you just listening to the words coming out of their mouths?

You’re listening to the words that come out of his mouth. You really don’t pay that much attention to who’s behind the scenes, who they’re getting their advice from. I’ve had several Presidential candidates ask me to give them military advice. No one in the military knows that I’m behind the scenes giving advice—I mean for John Edwards. I just turned down an opportunity to be the advisor to [Barack] Obama. I didn’t want to get involved in it. But the military doesn’t pay that much attention. It’s more when individuals start speaking out on particular issues that you form an opinion of them. 

And your sense of Clinton in ’92 was that there was not an elevated level of concern about him on military issues based on the words coming out of his mouth?

I don’t recall, and I was a two-star then, 82^nd Airborne division, a pretty busy guy. But I did watch CNN, the news, etc. I didn’t have any concern about Clinton becoming the President at that time. It was only after he got in and came out on the gay rights issue that there was a lot of stir and concern throughout the military. 

I’m going to get to that in just a second.

I thought you would.

Did you have a political affiliation?

I did not then, and I do not now. Even though I was raised in North Carolina, where they seem to elect Republicans, I was raised in an environment in Speed, North Carolina, where we had only one registered Republican in the entire area. When we’d drive by the house, my mother would say, That’s where the Republican lives. So I was strictly Democratic. 

I grew up in Alabama, so I understand that environment.

That’s the way I was raised. But from the day I was old enough to vote, I’ve always been one who said, I’m going to vote for the right man and I don’t give a hoot what party he’s affiliated with. Even though I understand in general what their platforms are, I tend to go with who I think the best leader is going to be.

Do you think that’s true of most of the people you know in the military?

I do. Even though the military—and I know some studies done by various universities show that the officer corps is predominantly Republican—I haven’t found anybody in my 28 years in the military who said, I’m going to vote the Republican ticket or I’m going to vote the Democratic ticket; I don’t care. Unlike a lot of Americans who are going to vote strictly party, they don’t. They look at each of the individual candidates and their plusses and minuses and make up their mind which one they think would be the best to lead our armed forces as Commander in Chief.   

Take us back and reflect on what it was like to be a senior military official at a time when the Cold War had ended. There was a lot of talk at that time about the peace dividend and what that was going to mean. I don’t know that it played a huge role in the ’92 campaign, but that’s the kind of thing you probably would have been worried about based on your own sense of history and your commitment to your institution. Could you talk a little bit about that?

I don’t think there’s any question that there was quite a bit of concern in the senior military ranks about the peace dividend. First of all, the military—the last to want to fight a war—was elated that the Berlin Wall came down and that all of a sudden the dreaded Soviet Union was dissolving. We no longer would have to be concerned about our 4102 (or whatever it was) plan to reinforce NATO. So there was a lot of excitement about that. It was a burden off us. We had a lot of systems in place—like the plane of command and control that we kept airborne all the time. It could now land. We didn’t have to keep it up all the time. Things like that. There was excitement. 

But there was also great concern that we might start disassembling this great armed force that we had built up. We were already starting to come down in numbers. The Army, for example, was scheduled to come from about 795,000 down to somewhere in the 500,000 range. How much further down will we take it? We still have world-wide commitments like Korea and several others, and plans on the shelf. Until someone says, Don’t worry about that anymore, you have to have a force capable of responding. 

Do we suddenly start creating units that are unready because of this peace dividend, and how is all of this going to be managed? That was in the minds of the military.

Were you involved in internal discussions about how you were going to manage this potential contraction?

Not in the ’92, ’93 timeframe. At that time I was at Fort Bragg commanding the 82^nd. My job there was to keep the 82^nd trained and ready. The guys who were going to bring us through that era were Colin Powell and then later [John] Shalikashvili, who had become the Chairman. Those were the guys who had to be concerned about that.

Now, let’s go back to the early period of the administration. One of the first things that happen when they come through the Inauguration in ’93 is the gays in the military flap. I wonder if you could reflect on that time, what your reactions were and what you were picking up from others in response to this controversy.

Of course it meant a major change for the U.S. military, even to go to don’t ask, don’t tell. There was a lot of concern, a lot of consternation, over a President who suddenly does that with no military experience. We wondered if he really understood what this might mean to unit cohesion and esprit within the unit—in particular, when you get into certain units like the ranger battalions or into the submarine force. What is it going to do to us if this passes? How are we going to manage it? It was a tremendous shock. It created a lot of anti-Clinton feelings throughout the entire force. It was strong. 

Again, he’s the Commander in Chief, so there’s not much you’re going to do about it. But you can’t believe the guy has betrayed you in that way. That was the feeling. He doesn’t appreciate what he has. We worked so hard after Vietnam to rebuild America’s force into a quality force, and we had one, no question about it, and still do—considerably better than we ever had under the draft. But all of a sudden, this man is going to do us in. This is going to bring us to our knees; that was the feeling.

It generated a lot of coffee-table conversation?

Without a doubt. It originally was just an open door. We’re just going to start accepting gays in the military. Don’t ask, don’t tell came later on. But initially the antibodies that were there for starting to bring gays into the military were really strong. Don’t ask, don’t tell lightened it a little bit, but still there was an anti-Clinton feeling as a result. 

Was there a sense that the Pentagon was properly responding to this at the time? Did folks out in the field have confidence that Powell and others would be able to manage this, or was there a fear that because Powell had been held over—

No, it was a feeling that we would be well represented in Washington. But again, if the Congress didn’t step up and intervene, then the President could unilaterally declare that we were going to start taking gays in the military. So there was a lot of concern about whether the process was going to react and salvage something out of this for the military. 

Were people contacting their Congressmen about this? Is that something military people feel comfortable doing?

I think that during that period—maybe not so much today as it was back then—the answer is no, you normally don’t do that. In the military, to get a Congressional inquiry— A Congressman sends a little note down to Fort Bragg. It normally goes to the Pentagon and comes down. He would like to know about a certain issue. Maybe Private Smith’s mother has called in and said, My son’s being beaten and flogged three times a day with a bull whip. I need you to stop it, Mr. President or Mr. Congressman. You get an inquiry. Are you flogging this guy three times a day, and if so why? And you answer that.

Well, at the senior levels, you understand it’s all part of a process. But, down at the unit level, it’s a big deal. It’s a black eye that you got a Congressional inquiry. Why did a Congressional come in? So you normally don’t use the Congressmen. Once you get senior in rank, and you understand why this process is the way it is and how this is a good thing. In those days you wouldn’t call your Congressman. We did feel that we’d be well represented. But we also knew that the President had the power, if he wanted to—if Congress didn’t intervene—to make it unilateral.

Colin Powell had been held over from the previous administration—

Just like I was in the Bush administration.

Exactly. Does that create any anxiety out in the field about the relationship?

To the contrary. I think it’s a feeling that you have an experienced guy in there, and you’re not dealing with a neophyte trying to learn his job at the same time the President is. It’s the beauty of our system. He doesn’t get a brand new Joint Chiefs Chairman the day he shows up. He’s going to live with the previous guy. The military is apolitical for good reason. And you have to work hard to keep it that way when you’re the Chairman. At least from my perspective, that’s the way you do it. 

We all felt comfortable. Colin Powell was experienced. He would fight for what’s right. We liked the Powell doctrine. He knew the political landscape very well, having been National Security Advisor. So that was very comfortable for the military.

Had you known Powell from your time working in the Pentagon or earlier?

I had. And he had been down to Fort Bragg several times as well while I was in the 82^nd, the 18^th Airborne Corps.

Your relationship with him was good?

It was good, yes. Colin’s a good friend, and was then. So again, all of us who knew Colin Powell were very comfortable that he was in the position. We knew that he’d do everything he could to control the damage—and we think he did, given the political environment. 

So you were comfortable with the way this all worked out.

Yes.

What about the Secretary of Defense at the time. You have Les Aspin coming in during the first term. That was a controversial appointment. How was that viewed?

From my perspective, none of us felt that we were going to be well served by Aspin as a Secretary of Defense, but we didn’t know that much about him in terms of how— You know, people change when they go into certain jobs. While you may get a guy in there who wasn’t very strong on defense when he was a Congressman, suddenly it’s his baby now, and he’s going to do everything he can because it protects America’s national security, or is a key part of it. So you wait and see how the guy is going to react. Of course, he wasn’t there long enough to see very much. 

Had you known Aspin before?

No, I had not. 

Were there any other issues we ought to talk about in ’93? I’m trying to track before Haiti, which becomes a very important story. Were there any other appointments at the senior level—Aspin’s deputies and assistant secretaries? Anything that had any particular relevance for you? 

Not for me. Again, I’m a two-star, 82^nd Airborne, later on become the 18^th Airborne Corps. My focus there is doing the work in my lane and keeping that force trained and ready to go. A key guy like Aspin gets your attention, and you say, What’s this going to mean to our force and how is that going to affect DoD? But below that, you don’t pay any attention to it. He’ll bring in a bunch of political wags to do whatever the bureaucrats do and then be gone. That’s the attitude down at the lower levels. 

Let’s take up Haiti. Is this something on your radar for a while before you end up heading down there?

Ironically, when I was commanding a brigade in the 82^nd— I’m going to carry you back now to 1983 to 1985. I was commander of a brigade. One day I got a call from CG [Coast Guard]. I was what they call the division ready brigade in the 82^nd Airborne. That was the brigade that would be the first to deploy. We had two hours to start moving toward the holding area, and 18 hours later the first planes would take off. That’s the kind of readiness we lived with. We kept that for six weeks, and then we rotated through two more cycles of different types of missions, and then we’re back as the ready brigade. 

Okay. 

So I was the ready brigade. I got a call, Get ready. We’re going to jump you into Port-au-Prince, Haiti; there’s a crisis down there. I ran back. The plan on Haiti was about three pages long. It had Port-au-Prince airfield on it, and that was about it. That was all the plan I had. So we scramble, we start getting ready, and we start drawing up plans to jump into Haiti. We’re getting ready to get up to the N+2 room at the 82^nd Airborne, which is where we get the briefing from the division staff. Now everything is starting to roll. All our equipment is rigged for heavy drop and to be ready to be parachuted. The troops are getting ready. Just as all that’s starting to take place, I get the call, It’s off. Stand down. I didn’t know what generated that, but I knew we weren’t prepared to go to Haiti. We didn’t have a good plan.

So, all of a sudden in 1992, I found myself back in the 82^nd as the Commander. I looked at the plans, and the plan for Haiti was a little bit thicker. That had generated some interest at division headquarters. So we now had about a six- or seven-page plan. But it was still not very good. So we worked on that some as part of how we continue to improve our plans. We got it up to probably about ten or twelve pages, but again, it was not a great plan. It was something we didn’t envision, because Haiti is just a pain.   

What are you consulting? You say you’re working up plans. Are people making field visits down there to reconnoiter? 

You talk to people who’ve been down there. You have some Special Ops guys who’ve rotated through down there to do various things. You talk to them. You do a lot of research on the Internet about what kinds of forces they have. You look at aerial photos of the place and put that in the folder. You request aerial imagery from satellites of the Port-au-Prince airfield, and that goes in the folder. You continue to refine the plan. It’s not much of a real plan, because you really don’t know what the mission would be. What did we go to Haiti for?

Do you have corollary plans for every spot on the map?

Lots of places. It’s normally generated when you have a crisis there. You jump through it and form a plan. Then, if you don’t carry it out, you just stand down. Grenada is a good example. That had taken place three days after I joined the 82^nd in 1983. Fortunately, I was the support brigade then, and I pushed out the rest of the division. 

But at any rate, I go up to be the Corps Commander in 1993. I asked to see the plan on Haiti. It’s the plan we worked in the 82^nd. I called in my plans officer, a guy named Bert [William B.] Garrett, a Major at the time, and I said, I want to take this plan on Haiti and flesh it out. I want to develop a really good plan. Let’s not assume we’ll have to do it by ourselves, because we could probably get some Marines if we asked for them. We could probably get all the support from the Air Force. So let’s really look at how we would go into Haiti right now, given what we know about the force that’s there. 

Are you moved to do this just as a routine course of action, or are you following events in Haiti and thinking things are beginning to heat up a little bit down there? 

There had been a couple of spikes in Haiti, and that got my attention. What if they called me one day and said, Jump the 82^nd in down there or Go to Haiti. That piqued my attention. So I told the planner, Let’s develop a plan. I gave him the guidance: Use a joint force, and let’s get something going.

About a week later, he came back down and it was a pretty decent plan. It was looking pretty good. We spent three or four hours on it. I said, Let’s use some Special Ops. I know what they’re capable of. I’d been very familiar with Special Ops; they were right there at Fort Bragg. So we integrated them into the plan. Then we put it back on the shelf. 

Then we had the incident in Haiti where the Navy ship was turned around. I bring the plan down. Let’s look at this again. I take another look at it. Shortly after that, I got a call from Admiral Paul David Miller up at ACOM [Atlantic Command]: Come up here, we want to talk about Haiti. 

So I took my plans, I took Bert Garrett, I got on a C-12 aircraft, and I flew to Norfolk. They looked at the plan. We started talking about it. I said, We have a plan, let us show you what we have. We laid this out for them. They took the plan and said, Let’s look at this, and we’ll get back. Basically, over the next several weeks, that plan we had developed turned into what became known as the ACOM plan to go into Haiti. 

Miller called me up and said, If we ever do this, you’ll be the joint task force commander. It looks like you have a good plan here, and we’ll just issue this back to you and say ‘Go do it.’ I said, I assume, then, that you’ll provide the resources that this plan takes: Marines, Navy, Coast Guard—to set up a Coast Guard bridge so the Army aircraft flying over land could be rescued if they happened to go down in the water en route. He said, Oh, yes. You just continue to refine the plan.

At this time, we started turning the burner up because there had been a lot of activity in Haiti and we noticed that. So we really turned it up. Then one day I got a call from Miller saying, This is getting really serious; you’d better do rehearsals or whatever you need to do to make this happen. He had a meeting up in Norfolk and brought in what were going to be the component commanders. I had the Marine three-star; I had a Navy three-star. The Navy representative was Admiral Jay Johnson, later to become the CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] and who was there when I was the Chairman. We brought in an individual from the Coast Guard, a Captain who came in for that particular meeting. So we had Army, Navy, Air—we brought in a three-star from the Air Force whom I happen to know very well, a guy named Jim Record. I had worked with him when I was in the J-33. He had been the Ops officer down in Tampa with CENTCOM [Central Command] who was doing all the Persian Gulf operations, which we were doing throughout my tenure. So I had another familiar face there, a guy I really loved. Two of these guys were great. 

Shortly after that, we ran a joint task force exercise. It wasn’t a Haiti scenario; it was another scenario, but Bill Keyes, the Marine, was the Joint Task Force commander. It was at Camp Lejeune. I was going to have to come in with an Army task force and replace Keyes as the Marines pulled out. I would take over the operation. The continuity would be Admiral Jay Johnson, who would be the three-star Navy working for Keyes who would stay and work for me. 

We ran this exercise, and during the exercise I had a chance, of course, to get to know Bill Keyes a lot better. I got to know Jay Johnson really well. We did that exercise. It really worked well. Jay Johnson and Bill Keyes and I worked a little bit of Haiti off to the side. We all got in a room and went over this thing. Then I got back to Fort Bragg. The exercise had gone really well, and Miller called me and said, Come up here; this is really getting hot. I’m going to bring in the other commanders you’ve asked for in this. 

So we had a big meeting in Norfolk. We went through the basics of the plan. I got great support from all the component commanders. I’d given the Marines their own amphibious operating area up north at Camp Haitian. I had Air Force involved in the lift as well as flying air cover for me. I had Special Ops involved. I also asked for two aircraft carriers to put Army troops and Special Ops on. Everything went well until Admiral Miller started trying—I think for political reasons within the Navy—to force me to use some Navy air, because they were going to take the aircraft off  both carriers. Navy was not feeling good about aircraft carriers being used with Army. 

So I said no. I didn’t need them. My biggest concern in Haiti was, first, fratricide. The second one was safety, just in general. The third was the enemy. So I didn’t need any more air in this area. It was too small an area, and I had the Air Force. I just didn’t need Naval air. 

Admiral Miller said, What do you guys think about this? talking to the other guys in the room, to my fellow three-stars. I’ll never forget it. Bill Keyes said, You just heard the Task Force commander tell you he doesn’t need your God-damn Navy air in there, so why don’t you just not push it? Bill Keyes hammered it. I tell you, he nailed it. Jay Johnson said, I agree. So I didn’t have to take the Navy air. 

We went through this, and I said, Guys, I want to run an exercise at Fort Bragg. I have a big one coming up in about a week to ten days, and I’d like to turn that into a rehearsal of this plan. We’ll do it in remote locations so no one sees it all come together. But every piece of it will be part of our Haiti scenario, and we’ll exercise it. They all agreed.

A few days later we had a big rehearsal down at Fort Bragg. It was the Haiti plan. We used a room that we had set aside, a Special Ops room, top-secret data, etc. We built a model of Haiti about 15 feet by 15 feet, a to-scale model. Up on the walls around this room was the execution matrix for how we would do this. It was done by force: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Special Ops, Coast Guard. 

It started off at something like H-hour being the time we would initiate first contact in Haiti. We backed it up, H minus 36. What’s going on 36 hours before we do it? And we came all the way around to H plus 4 days. I had a couple of guys dressed up in referee uniforms, carrying big sticks. I had all the 21 flag officers, admirals and generals—in one room, who were going to be the commanding forces. My staff and I orchestrated this thing. 

We said okay, H minus 36. Army, what are you doing at that time? I had the Army guy tell me what he’s going to be doing. Okay, Navy, what are you going to be doing at this time? The Navy admiral spoke to that—all the way around the room until H plus 4. We started at 8:00 in the morning and finished about 4:00 that afternoon. Everybody then understood what the other elements were doing at the same time they’re doing it and how we were going to synchronize this entire operation.  

You’re pleased with the results?

I’m very pleased with that. Now, about 3-4 days later, the exercise kicks off, and we actually run it by this matrix. The difference was that the Marines are running theirs at some other location. Air Force is doing it in two locations; one of them is Fort Bragg. Army is doing their thing at Fort Bragg. They’re dropping all the heavy equipment, dropping the paratroopers, just as if it’s Port-au-Prince airfield. All of it was being synchronized from our war room at Fort Bragg. We made sure everybody was doing everything they said. They reported in when they completed it. I was very pleased with how that went. I felt confident that we had a good plan; this thing would work. 

About two or three days after that exercise, we made some minor tweaks, revised it. I flew back up to ACOM and briefed Admiral Miller on how everything went and how we stand. I got back to my office, and he called and said, I want to change something. I want to put the Marines into Port-au-Prince instead of up at Camp Haitian. I said, Why would you want to do that? He said, I just think that’s a better fit, a better place to put them. 

Now, in the plan, the Special Ops were going into Port-au-Prince because they were very small, discreet targets, and they’re ideally suited to take them. I had put the Marines up at Camp Haitian, because I could get in an amphibious operating area which allowed them to use their aircraft, their ships, and the Marines, and not have to go through the coordination required when you start mixing forces. 

Okay. 

Port-au-Prince was jammed chock-a-block full with Army 82^nd Airborne dropping in and Special Ops taking very specific targets. It didn’t work. I got on a plane and flew to ACOM at Norfolk, and I had a one-on-one with Admiral Miller. I said, This can’t happen; I’m not in favor of what you’re proposing. Let me show you why. 

I showed him how, by doing that, the Marines coming into Port-au-Prince would be running perpendicular to the flow of operations: Special Ops coming in out of Guantanamo and 82^nd coming in out of Fort Bragg. All the air flow is going west to east, and now he’s proposing Marines coming in basically from south to north. I said, This is a disaster. He looked me dead in the eye and said, Are you telling me you’re not going to do it? If I want to do this, I have to get a new Joint Task Force commander? 

I looked at him and said, Admiral, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. This is a lousy fix to the plan. It will result in loss of life. That’s my concern. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve talked to Bill Keyes, the Marine task force commander, and he’s not in favor of doing this either. This is a bad thing. The real driving factor there in my opinion was publicity for the Marine Corps. All the 400 media that had already started assembling in Port-au-Prince were going to be in Port-au-Prince; nobody was going to be at Camp Haitian. I had never even considered where the media would be, other than not having their hotel targeted, making sure we stayed away from the hotel where they were staying. And we knew where that was.

By the way, we had undercover guys on the ground down there already. We were getting pretty good reports coming out in terms of what the Haitian military did at night, what their activities were during the daytime. That allowed us to be very precise in who we would have to kill if we were going to do the invasion, and where we could probably be in their place of business before they got to work the next morning. All that had been worked in. 

So Admiral Miller said, Okay, do it the way you planned.  

So the pressure coming from Admiral Miller is inner-service rather than political pressure.

Right, no political pressure. Two things happened after that. He called me up and said, Now that the Marines are not going to participate, I need you to use the 82^nd. My original plan had been to secure the Camp Haitian area with two battalions of 82^nd jumping in, primarily for speed: take it right now and be done with it. Then bring the Marine forces in, leave the 82^nd, they re-deploy, the Marines now own that AOA [Amphibious Objective Area]. That was part of our plan. 

Okay. 

I had decided later that the Marines would be better, just go ahead and take it. They could do an amphibious assault. They could get their force recon on the ground and basically do a great job at that. So I revised the plan. Suddenly Miller said, Put the 82^nd back in. He didn’t want to keep the Marines floating around in a ready status that long. They were doing other things, exercises and whatever. We didn’t know when we would have to execute this plan. So rather than keep them bobbing around out in the ocean, waiting for the plan to develop, he wanted us to go ahead and use the 82^nd because we could fly them right in.

Got it, we can do that. I didn’t like it as well, but it would work. Now we have all that in place, I’m feeling very comfortable with the plan. I then go to Harvard for two weeks. All this is cooking. My plan is active. But I had been scheduled to go to the national security course at Harvard. 

[laughing] Forgive me, that just—

Yes, right in the middle, what a great deception, right? The guy who’s going to lead the invasion is up in Harvard right now, so the Haitians don’t have to worry about that. It was good deception. I carried my secure phone with me, and I’d plug in. At noon time I’d run back to the place I was staying and call back in, and at night I was back on the phone going over the plans and tweaking things. Finally I got back. Two weeks went by. This plan was still perking. 

You finished your course.

I finished the course. I had driven up to Cambridge. I drove back down 95 and went back to Fort Fisher, South Carolina, where my family had gone. We had planned a vacation for three or four days. I got in there Saturday morning. My Chief of Staff called me and said, Boss, this thing is really cooking right now. I wasn’t going to bother you, but I think it’s probably time you came back. 

I said, Okay, I’m on my way. So I loaded the family up, and we went back to Fort Bragg. I got a call then from Admiral Miller on Sunday or Monday, telling me that President Clinton wanted to hear about the plan. He was coming to Norfolk, but he’d like to teleconference me so no one sees me come to Norfolk. So we set up a teleconference in the secure facility at Fort Bragg.

President Clinton came in, and it was kind of funny. Admiral Miller briefed him at ACOM, and I was watching by telephone. The Forces Command component commander was going to be Denny Reimer. He asked him how things looked from his perspective and got a head nod; everything was going well. He went to the Marines and asked them. He went to the Navy and asked them. Then he said, Well, Mr. President, that concludes our briefing. 

I’m sitting there thinking, You have to be kidding. I’m the Joint Task Force Commander, and you’re not going to even ask me? I don’t know whether somebody handed him a note. He said, Oh, my God, I forgot. I need to ask the Joint Task Force Commander, Hugh Shelton, sitting at Fort Bragg. 

So I came on and basically just gave a little thumbnail: I think we’re up and ready to go whenever you’re ready. We need 18 hours’ notice; that’s the flow for Fort Bragg to be ready to go and the Marines to respond, get their stuff in position. President Clinton asked me three questions, one of which was, Are you using any Reserves or National Guard in this plan? I responded, Yes, we have some Marines that are National Reserve, Army that will be a part of it. Those guys are already here at Fort Bragg training; it won’t be a big deal. They’re already on their active duty cycle. We have some reserve aircraft, part of our Special Ops force, that will be involved. They work out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. 

He said, What are your greatest concerns in this operation? What’s the highest risk thing you think you’ll encounter? I said, Number one is fratricide of our own troops because of the close proximity; we’ve gone to great extremes. I have a lot of aircraft that are going to be operating in a very small area, so safety is a great concern. And the third thing would be the enemy.

He laughed and said, Well, it’s good that the enemy is the third priority. I said, From a safety and fratricide concern, they really are third. He asked me one or two other questions. That was my first encounter with the President other than the aircraft crash that happened at Fort Bragg on the day they had all those admirals and generals assembled. Two Air Force planes ran together. You may be familiar with this.  

I don’t remember that.

It occurred in 1993. An F-16 and a C-130 were coming in to land. The aircraft controller made a mistake, and they collided. The two F-16 pilots bailed out. Their plane came careening down into Pope Air Force Base, hit— These two guys parachute out and land there, right in front of their headquarters where their Commander is having a meeting. He saw two parachuters land outside, and about the same time he saw a fireball down at the end. 

The F-16 hit a parked C-141. A fireball ensued and went down between two buildings. Back behind those buildings I had 125 paratroopers preparing for an airborne operation. I had 123 casualties there, many of them burned severely, and 19 died. Four of them had amputations immediately. All survivors were hospitalized, about 100.

President Clinton flew down the next day. I think it’s important that I relay this. I’m interrupting the Haiti—but President Clinton flew down. I received the call that night that he was going to come in. He had a nationally televised conference from the Oval Office, but I was told that he was going to be coming down and would arrive at 10 o’clock that evening to visit the hospital. When you’re going to have a Presidential visit, you have to jump through it. There’s transportation to be thought of. My job at J-33 had prepared me, because I knew what an entourage he traveled with and the support requirements. So we jumped through it. 

We got every general officer sedan and van on post and had designated drivers. We laid on military police escorts. About 8:30 or 9 o’clock, I got a call: He’s not coming tonight. So I said, Stand down, the President’s not coming. The next morning at 10 o’clock I was getting ready to go upstairs to present the Audie Murphy award to seven Fort Bragg soldiers, noncommissioned officers. Only a very select group of people ever get selected to join the Audie Murphy Club—top notch, noncommissioned officers or sergeants. It’s very important to them. They had their families there.

So I told my secretary, Marie Allen, Okay, tell the Chief, same plan we had last night, get it started. I’m going upstairs and present these awards. So I went up, spent about an hour, and came down at 11 o’clock. I said, Marie, what’s going on? She said, The Chief has everything lined up. I said, Okay, I’ll leave and go to the airport. They said, We just got the call; he’ll be in the blocks at Pope Air Force Base—meaning he’ll stop—at 12:00 sharp. 

I said, Okay, I’ll be standing there at 12:00 sharp. I walked down to talk to Brigadier General Frank Akers, the Chief. I said, Frank, everything set? He said, It is. The band’s laid on; we’ll have an honor guard for him with flags. The Secret Service, the Fort Bragg office, has gotten involved. They checked our plan and they love it because it’s taking a big load off them, so everything seems to be in accordance. I said okay.

So about 20 minutes to 12:00, I started on the 10-minute ride over to Pope to be standing there when he arrived. He had landed. We immediately put him in the van. The Army Chief of Staff had flown down either with him or in a separate plane. We had vans laid on for the media that would be with him. So all that was set. We went straight to the hospital. President Clinton that day talked to every single troop in the hospital, visited every bed. I was amazed. 

Then he got ready to leave. As we got to the hospital exit, I said, Mr. President, there are three other troops on the top floor. They are severely burned, and they’re not going to live. The doctors had said they had zero chance of living, which is why we had not tried to fly them to San Antonio, where we had sent some of our severely burned, but not so severely we were afraid they would die. Those nine had gone to the University of North Carolina Burn Center. The three guys upstairs were just on life support.

President Clinton said, I really want to visit with them; let’s go up where they are. So the hospital commander and I went upstairs to the top floor. He had to change clothes three times, but he went into each module where they were, stood beside the bed, kind of put his hand on the bed. It looked like he was praying, standing next to them. He went to all three rooms. Then we went downstairs. 

As we were going down the stairs, Harold Timboe, a colonel at that time, later on commander at Walter Reed as a major general, said, Mr. President, thank you for visiting with these people. I think it’s important that you see what George Washington had to say about the Commander in Chief. This surprised me, but it was an excerpt where George Washington had said, The greatest attribute of a commander is that he takes the time to visit with the sick and the infirm, wounded— He said, I think that George Washington and you had a lot in common. 

How about that.

It was pretty good. So we went downstairs. The Chief, General [Gordon] Sullivan, President Clinton, and I got back in the van and started back to the airport. But before we did that, as we went out, a lot of the family members who had gotten word that the President was there had gathered outside. So he spent a good 30 minutes walking around, shaking hands and thanking them. He got back in the van. As we were going over, I pointed out the [Zack] Fisher House, a house built by the Fisher Foundation—there are now about 75 of them around the country. It’s about a half a million dollar project to build one, like a Ronald McDonald House where family members can stay when they have people in the hospital, at much reduced rates, beautiful homes, well appointed and everything. 

So he said, Who is this guy? So I explained to him that Zack Fisher was a guy up in New York. I went through the entire thing about Zack and his wife. He said, I’m going to make a note to call him when I get back and thank him. We got back to the airport and President Clinton got out. The honor guards lined up again. I walked him up to the edge of Air Force One and said, Mr. President, I can’t tell you how much this means to the troops. Thanks for spending the time today. He looked at me and said, I should have come last night, but my handlers convinced me that because I had that national press conference last night any press that showed up down here would be interested only in what I said last night and it would take the focus off my visit with the troops. I relented and said okay. But I woke up this morning about 2 o’clock and said, ‘I should have gone to Fort Bragg; that was the right thing to do.’ So I waited until people would be in downstairs, and I called down and said, ‘Get the plane ready, I’m going to Fort Bragg.’

Immediately they gave me a litany of reasons why I couldn’t go: ‘You have a state visit here; you have an interview with this guy; you have this schedule.’ I said to them, ‘Look, I’m the President of the United States. Read my lips: I’m going to Fort Bragg. Get the plane ready.’ So after I went downstairs, they said they had it ready and everything was set and we would take off around 11:00  and land at 12:00. I just knew it was the right thing to do.

I thanked him again for coming and said, It really was the right thing to do. He got back on the plane. I already had respect for him because I knew he was a brilliant guy from my previous interview with him on the Haiti operation. 

I had a lot of respect for the former Commander of Fort Bragg, General Gary Luck, who had gone to Korea. Ironically, when he got wind that the President was going to fly down the day before, he called me up and said, Listen, the President has been to Korea. We had him for dinner at the house. Leah [Luck] and I really like Bill and Hillary Clinton. Just keep in mind he’s a politician; you’re going to like him, but remember, what you see is not what you get. 

So my antennae were up. I kept saying, What’s not sincere about this guy? But that was a good insight into the man. I saw there was great feeling and compassion, and he didn’t bring any press in the hospital with him. He didn’t allow them to come in. Nobody knew he went up to visit those three guys who were going to die. That said to me, there’s more to him than just glitter. There really are some sincere feelings for our men and women in uniform.  

Sure. The sense of empathy that he has for people is something we hear over and over again, as genuine.

It definitely is genuine. He left there that day and went back. It was just a short while after that that we got the orders, after I had been called back from vacation. The wheels started rolling, and we implemented the plan. 

Your teleconference occurred after the visit?

Yes, after the hospital. 

In the teleconference, the first question he had was about Reserve and National Guardsmen. Did that strike you as an odd question? Would that be a typical question you would get in that kind of environment?

It would have been except for the fact that something had occurred previously in his administration, about the use of the Reserve and National Guard. I’ve forgotten what raised the issue. 

It wasn’t clear to me.

That was why I didn’t think it was odd. I hadn’t thought a lot about it, but I did know what part of Reserves we were using. But because of that previous publicity about the Guard and Reserve, it didn’t strike me as odd. 

He had been a Governor, and I didn’t know if that was just a natural question to come to his mind. 

It might have been otherwise, but it was that other issue somewhere along the line.

You’ve gotten us to that teleconference. Having dealt with him in the teleconference, your sense was that he was on top of things?

My impression of him—and it remained true throughout my association with President Clinton—is that he’s a quick study. He may not have served in the military, but he grasps things very quickly, has a razor-sharp mind. He can separate the wheat from the chaff. He sees what the big issues are, the important issues, and he’ll home right in on them. I saw that the first time in the teleconference, but every other deal I had with him, even after becoming Chairman, was the same. I didn’t have to worry about how complicated or complex it might be; he could pick it up.

So let’s pick it back up from the story after the teleconference.

At that point we went back to my headquarters, to what I’d say is a very high state of alert. I told all my component commanders, It looks like this thing is going to go, no question about it. I don’t know the time right now, but the President has gotten involved in it. 

I went off to my course, and while I was there, things started to go to hell in a hand basket in Haiti, so to speak. By the way, one part of the vignette at Harvard was on negotiating. It was about an eight-hour exercise and it was hands on. We had class, and then we followed up with a hands-on exercise.  

That’s the [John F.] Kennedy school?

It’s part of the Kennedy School. I was sitting there thinking, What in the hell am I ever going to use this for? I don’t negotiate. Maybe I can use this when I buy a car the next time. It really was well done.

So I got back to Fort Bragg. Now things were really heating up. I got the call from the Chief: Come back to Fort Bragg from vacation. I got back, and sure enough, the next day I got the call from Admiral Miller: it’s a go. We’re looking at going at this particular time. They’re working right now on getting a negotiating team to go in. [Jimmy] Carter and [Samuel] Nunn and Powell are going to go in and try to talk him out of it. But they’re going in on this date, and you’re going to get ready to start flowing the same day. They’re either going to acquiesce, or just as soon as we get them out of there, you’re going in. 

Is that how the diplomatic and political information is coming to you? I guess you’re watching CNN and getting information there, but are there any other back channels—? 

I’m getting everything the intel community has on what’s going on down in Haiti right now. I’m also getting reports from people on the ground in Haiti, the undercover guys, in terms of what’s going on down there and in terms of activity levels, which is zero. The Haitians are being Haitians; they’re laid back, and nothing is really changing. There’s no sense of increased activity on their part, no high state of readiness of their military or their police force. I’m very comfortable with the flow in terms of what we’re getting.

We’ve done some other things. There’s now a submarine offshore that’s picking up a lot of intel and feeding it back to us. I’m feeling good, and things are working well, so now it’s just a matter of when we go. Now I get the word that ACOM is getting ready to send me a deployment order, and it’s going to have a specific time and date on it. That’s what will start the real flow. That comes to us at Fort Bragg. We immediately send out our own op order to our components and say, Here’s the plan, and here’s the date and time. This is H-hour; we now have it established. 

So, when we establish that H-hour—the time the paratroopers will come out of the planes—now the matrix kicks in. Everybody’s going to start following what’s on the matrix and reporting in. We set up at that time a Joint Task Force headquarters in some buildings over in the old area of Fort Bragg. We had already done this months ahead of time and had phone lines put in and everything. So we activated our Joint Task Force headquarters, and a liaison from each of our forces starts flowing into Fort Bragg. We get a full headquarters set up on the ground.

We had an air ops center established. General Jim Record and his crew came into Fort Bragg and started setting up the air operations center, about 600-people strong, a big operation. We were doing all this so that we had a reduced headquarters footprint, and we were basically working out of Fort Bragg with a forward element. That’s where everything flows. All of my intel assets, which is very big, doesn’t have to go aboard the [USS] Mt. Whitney. It can stay right there at Fort Bragg. 

When I got the word we were going to go, the first thing I wanted to make sure I had was a capability to use our land-line system in addition to our satellite communications. So I called Jay Johnson, and one night under the cover of darkness, we flew an Army humvee vehicle that has MSE [mobile subscriber equipment]—our switchboard, our server, our router-type system—in the back. We flew it to Jacksonville, Florida. The Chief, a commo team, and I loaded this thing on the USS Mt. Whitney, and a couple of smart enlisted guys from the Navy and a couple of brilliant communications guys from the Army figured out how to hard-wire this MSE system into the ship. Now down in the war center, you can pick up the telephone and talk to anybody on the MSE network. Necessity is the mother of invention. So now there’s an Army system on the Mt. Whitney. We didn’t lash it down at that time; we carried it back with us. Then, when we got the order to go, one of the first things to deploy was that system down to the Mt. Whitney. 

Then things start flowing. We were monitoring all that right at Fort Bragg. Let me back up. Two days before we were going, I got a call from the Army that they wanted to send down about 300 members of the media for me to brief. They wanted me to go into all the top secret detail about how this plan would unfold. My first words were, You have to be kidding. They said, No, you need to be very honest with them, lay it out. They’ve all been sworn to secrecy, they all know the rules, they all will act responsibly. 

I said, Really? They sent them down. I thought my career was probably being terminated as we stood there and briefed them in great detail about how this plan would unfold. Then we took them and embedded them throughout the force. I had different people marrying up with different elements. All my people were told, Protect them; put them in the force. Don’t expose them unnecessarily to hardships or danger. And they went in.

About that same time I got a call from the Chief of Staff of the Army saying the Washington Post would like to have Bradley Graham go with me. I said, You have to be kidding. They said, No, they want him to live with you for the operation. 

The funny thing was, up at Harvard, I’d been in a seminar for two weeks with Bradley Graham, and I’d gotten to know him well. I liked him. He and I had become friends. So I said Okay, send him down. They sent him down. So Bradley Graham, the Chief of Staff, and I, 24 hours out, flew to Guantanamo Bay, where we had sailed the Mt. Whitney. It was sitting there, and we boarded. Then we set sail and headed down into Port-au-Prince. It was about 12-18 hours out, but that thing takes some sailing time. 

You said earlier that you knew the hotel where the media would be staying, but that wasn’t in anticipation that you were going to have these 300 people embedded with you. So you have 300 more people to account for.

That was the media that was already there. Now these 300 people are going to be embedded, and they’re going in.

How complicated is it to do something like that? 

Not hard. The biggest thing is transportation and getting them out to marry them up with the various forces and making sure they can accommodate them. All that had been worked out very easily by the task force.

You’re getting this from sources—if you wanted to raise an objection at that point, it wouldn’t— 

The plan had all been approved in Washington; we were going to do it. It was coming out of the office of the Secretary of Defense. 

Got you.

So we put them in. It will create complications later, because part of our force is going to fly with the UH-60s that night, stop on a little remote island, refuel. (That had all been laid on. We had flown that stuff in with C-130s, using what we called bladder birds. U-130s are just filled with bladders, and we run refueling out of them into the helicopters.) This is jumping ahead a little bit, but when I turned the helicopter force around to go back, because I wasn’t going to need them, it left a guy—I’ve forgotten who it was now, but it was one of the prominent newscasters, somebody like Sam Donaldson, stuck out there. He’s saying, I want to come home. How the hell do I get there? Now this is a flap, how do I get this guy down here? You just deal with it. 

At any rate, we sail into the claw of Port-au-Prince, about 50 miles off land, and it’s about this time that Carter and Nunn and Colin are down there negotiating. We’re following that live on CNN on the ship. 

But you don’t have any independent communications with those three?

Not with them. My communications are back to ACOM and to Shalikashvili. 

Okay, and those three guys are presumably communicating directly to the White House.

Shali is standing in the Oval Office in the White House. He’s walking out occasionally, I guess, into the Cabinet Room or into Betty’s [Currie] office outside to make a phone call. I’m talking to him. I’m on my time schedule now. This stuff is flowing. The Fort Bragg paratroopers are loaded, and the first planes have taken off; they’re en route. 

He says, I need an hour. Can I have another hour? I looked at my time line and said, Shali, I can give you one hour, but if you push me past one hour, I can’t guarantee that I can stop the force. If I lose communications with them, they’re going. He says, Okay, one hour, I’ll be back. 

I’m watching CNN. They’re showing live, and I’m saying, You better get your ass back on that plane and get out of there. What’s happening here? The negotiations continue. Thirty minutes drop down. I talk to Shali again, How are you coming? He says, They think they’ve got a deal. Just hold on; give me the other 30 minutes.

I say, You’ve got it. It was pretty tight. I was really very concerned because now I have the Navy Seals already loaded in their boats, engines running. They need to be released in about the next 30 minutes in order to keep the matrix going. Then I get a phone call of a sudden from Shali; I think I have about 10 minutes to go. He says, Okay, they have a deal. Turn it around. I’ll tell you what your mission is in just a minute.

I turn to Frank Akers and say, Put the word out. We had a code word for that. Put the word out and make everybody acknowledge receipt. They do. Then Shali tells me, Okay, you still have to go in tomorrow, but go in in a spirit of coordination and cooperation. I said, What does that mean in military terms? He said, Coordination and cooperation. Get a hold of [Raoul] Cedras when you get in there, set the rules, and just do what you have to.

The 82^nd had been the primary; General David Meade, the Commander of the 10^th Mountain Division, was the backup. Fortunately, I had the foresight to put him on the Mt. Whitney with me, just in case something like this happened. His troops, 10^th Mountain Division, were on the [Dwight D.] Eisenhower—the aircraft carrier we used other than the America—and ready to go in. 

I said, Okay, Frank, Dave—I called the J-3, Dan McNeil—let’s go back here in the conference room. Bradley Graham trailed along. I walked in and said, Okay, here’s what we have to do. Dave, tomorrow, we’re going to put your people in by helicopter. I’m going to go ahead and put the Marines into Camp Haitian as we planned. You’re going to go into Port-au-Prince, and you’re going to go to the same sites the 82^nd had identified as targets. You make a plan to do that. Again, your role there is to just watch what the Haitians are doing. Make sure your troops understand: no shooting, only in self defense. You go to the same targets and keep us informed about what’s going on there. I’ll land early on, same time you do, at Port-au-Prince. I’ll go directly to Cedras’ office and establish the ground rules. 

Here’s what I’m going to tell him: ‘As established and agreed to by you—’ this is where negotiating comes in— ‘here’s the way it’s going to work. I’m here in a spirit of cooperation and coordination, and the way it works, General Cedras, is I will coordinate with you as long as you cooperate. You basically are going to do what I tell you, and if you don’t, this will become a hostile environment very quickly, and your people are going to die in mass numbers. Do you understand?’ He will understand; he did. 

I said, Those are the ground rules, okay? Only shoot in self defense. As soon as I’ve had my meeting with Cedras, I’ll get back to you and tell you what to anticipate. That was it. 

Dave Meade took off to go back. We’d already done some vignettes as part of the training for the 10^th Mountain division about how to go into an area and monitor and supervise as well as fight. The troops today in the Army are very smart, very articulate. They can pick up on it in a hurry, and they did. So that was the end.

I went back, and my Chief of Staff, Frank Akers, was sitting there. I turned to Frank—Bradley Graham was still observing all this—and said, Well, Frank, it’s been a great career. I’m now the bag man. When this thing goes south on us, they have me to blame, and I accept that. That’s what I signed up for. But I’ve been handed ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag (if you’ll pardon my French). This is what we have. I really thought that was the end of my career. I never anticipated I’d be able to pull this thing off and have it as relatively bloodless as it turned out to be. 

The next day I landed. There were about 450 media there on the airfield, in a mob. Later on, Bradley Graham told me he was embarrassed by his cohorts from the media as I landed with my protection crew, a group of Navy Seals, well trained in how to take care of people. The Seals basically shoved them aside and made an alleyway for me to get through as they were trying to cram mikes in my face and get a shot. It was rough. 

We finally got into Port-au-Prince airport, where I met with General Jerry Bates, an Army two-star who had gone in with Powell and that crew. He stayed behind to brief me on what had come out in the meeting, which was good planning. Ambassador Bill Swing, a North Carolinian, was there. I just had time to shake hands with him and tell him and Bates what I planned to do after they briefed me, and we went straight—

What did they tell you, basically, about what—? 

Basically that Cedras and [Michel-Joseph] François, the police chief, and [Emile] Jonassaint had agreed that they would allow the U.S. forces to come in, and over a period of time, they would agree that President [Jean-Bertrand] Aristide could come back, that time still to be determined. My forces would be there in the spirit of cooperation and coordination, just to make sure that the Haitian people were not treated poorly in the interim before Aristide could be brought back.

So we did that. I went in and met with General Cedras and laid out for him what I just explained were my conditions of cooperation and coordination.  

You had been briefed previously, I guess, on Cedras himself?

Oh, yes.

So you knew what to expect.

I knew backgrounds on all the key people. I knew the guy standing on the Port-au-Prince airfield to defend it. I knew his rank, his name, his background. I left out that part. As I landed at the Port-au-Prince airfield, the Commander of the airfield, a Haitian, came to meet me, saluted, stuck out his hand. As we walked away from him, I carried with me my plans officer, Bert [William B.] Garrett—along with my lawyer, by the way—as I went in. Garrett said to me, General, that Colonel doesn’t know right now that he’s the luckiest man in the world. One of the predetermined targets that we weren’t going to ask questions about—we were just going to kill them as we went in—was a particular building. There was about a 25-man security force for the airfield that stayed in that building on that airfield, and there an Air Force C-130, a Special Ops bird with a 105 Howitzer that’s deadly accurate, was going to explode. That building was going to be blown to smithereens and all of them inside would die. We wanted no resistance for those paratroopers coming in. 

We also were going to hand Special Ops over to take over the palace. There was a very well-maintained and active crew with one of the air defense guns that sat in front of the palace. They kept two guys on that who normally were asleep during the night; one slept on the ground, one slept on the gun, but they were not active. We were going to take out that gun. Those were the two targets that were going to be hit first and simultaneously. 

Okay, so we got you to Cedras. Was he what you expected when you met him?

Yes, he was. He looked every bit military, very slim, a very fit-looking guy. He was, I could tell, somewhat nervous about this meeting. We met, we had pleasantries. I introduced myself. I was very stern. There’s no smiling with the guy. I wanted him to know I was 100% business. We sat across the table from one another. He had all of his thugs, all of his assistants, lined up beside him there. I carried with me a native Haitian, whose parents had lived right there near Cedras’ headquarters, [Major] Tony Ladouceur. He spoke fluent Haitian as a native, of course. He was my translator. Cedras understood some English. He told me that right up front. Very little. He preferred to speak in his native language. 

Sure.

I outlined the rules with Cedras, and he looked at me. There was a moment of a very stern stare between the two of us. He had just heard what I said, and he reached down—he took very meticulous notes, and he had very fine hand-printing—and he started writing. He looked back up at me and said, Okay. I knew I had him. The negotiating was over. The course had worked. Set the needle all the way to the right. If the guy wants to negotiate, then you’ve got some wiggle room to come back a little bit, to maybe move more towards the center. It’s just like buying a car: bid a thousand dollars below what you think he’ll sell it for.

At any rate, it worked. I warned him at the time, I have well-trained and well-armed troops here, and we’re anticipating you’re going to get the word out. He said okay. I said, Whether or not you carry it out will be evident from the manners I observe from your troops. I’m anticipating that this word will get out to them very quickly. He said, It will.

So I left General Cedras and got the word out to my commanders: Here’s what we agreed to and here are the conditions, but I want you to stay armed and ready. Wear your protective vests, wear your helmets, keep your weapons at the ready throughout this period. I want them to know we’re 100% business. I kept an AC-130 flying around that city all the time, and he was to stay overhead for about two weeks, 100% coverage, ready to respond at a moment’s notice. So that set the ground rules, and we started out. 

A day later, it was going pretty well. I said, Here’s where we find out if he really is going to allow us to take over. I went back to see him at another meeting. Again, I always had the Ambassador with me, Bill Swing.

You said earlier your lawyer.

And my lawyer, John Altenberg. 

Why do you have a lawyer with you?

Because the rules down there were going to be peacekeeping, and I wanted to know what I could do and not violate any international rules of land warfare.

This is a JAG [Judge Advocate General]. 

This is a JAG, and he’s very good. I carry him with me all the time to make sure that anything I do doesn’t violate anything or might later come back to bite us. Two things happened there. I went back the next day and said, Let’s talk about Camp—[D’Application]. It’s a few miles from Port-au-Prince, and it’s where they kept all their heavy weapons. They had their howitzers, a couple of armored vehicles, and a large troop cantonment there. It’s a well-maintained and well-kept place. I knew it was the center of gravity of his military. If he loses that, he doesn’t have much capability left. 

So I said to Cedras, I’m going to move troops into Camp [D’Application], and we plan to take out all of those heavy weapons. We’re either going to load them aboard ship or we’re going to destroy them. If he gives them up, he’s given up his real military capability. This is where I expected pushback from him.

He looked at me and said okay, and I knew it was over. He was now going to agree to leave because he was losing his heavy stuff. I went back to Ambassador Swing’s office. He and I developed a great relationship. I let him know right away that he was in charge. I was there in support of the military operation, but I understood he was the President’s emissary to Haiti, and therefore I would coordinate everything through him. I said we’d talk about our plans two days in advance to make sure he’s comfortable with them.

We were standing in his office looking out, and all of a sudden on the sidewalk we saw an old man walking along, and a little pickup truck loaded down with Haitian police flying down the street. They stopped, and the police got out and just beat the hell out of that old man with sticks.   

Bill Swing said, That has to stop. That’s the way they’ve operated around here for years. Who knows why they’re beating that old man? So I left his office and went back to Cedras’ office. I said, Stop the beating of citizens. You get that police chief François under control—if you don’t stop it, I’m going to take every one of these police into custody or kill them. Do you understand, Cedras? He said, I understand. I said, Get on them in a hurry, because I’m— 

It was about four in the afternoon by the time I’d gotten around to that. I went back to the ship; I stayed on the Mt. Whitney every night. I got a call that night from the Secretary of Defense. They wanted to have me on CNN, all the major networks, the next morning. They wanted to interview the Joint Task Force commander. So I got my pubic affairs office in, and we sat there and war gamed what could happen. The next morning I agreed to do it down at Ambassador Swing’s public affairs office. 

I went down. All the networks were there. There were to be separate interviews; they just change the cameraman, change the mike. Charley Gibson—from ABC, I guess—was going to be first up. He said, How’s it going, General? I said, It’s going well. We were not on the air yet, we were just talking, getting ready, warming up.

He said, It looks like you’ve all done a really great job. I said, We have great troops. We give them good guidance. He said, It looks like it’s really going well. I said, It is. In the background I heard the Morning Show music starting to play. He said, General, we’ll be going live in just a minute; I really look forward to talking to you. I said, Thanks, Charlie. 

I sat stand-by with my earplug. The camera was rolling, I started smiling. All of a sudden Charlie Gibson said, This morning, we have coming live from Port-au-Prince, General Hugh Shelton, Commander of the Joint Task Force—very pleasant sounding, good introduction. He said, General, for the last few days, we’ve watched innocent Haitians get beaten by the police down there. What are you going to do about this? When are you going to stop that? 

Well, I’d been given nothing from the White House about changing internal policies. In fact, I’d been told, You’re just there to monitor for the time being. But I’d already had this discussion with Cedras. So without any clearance whatsoever, I said, Charlie, I agree with you. In fact, in my meeting yesterday with General Cedras, I said we no longer would tolerate that; we’ll take out every policeman on the island, and we’ll start policing—which we normally don’t like to do. We’re not going to let that continue.

I got through the rest of my interviews, which were much more polite—the rest of them were not hard questions. My public affairs officer said it all went well. 

I walked out of there and said, Oh, man, I just set new policy. I haven’t cleared this with anybody. Then, all of a sudden I was getting kudos from the Secretary of Defense and ACOM: Thank God you saved the day on this thing. It worked. We didn’t have any more incidents.

I had only two other things worth commenting on. One day I was walking with General Cedras, and he looked up at the AC-130 and said, What’s that plane that keeps flying around up there? I looked at him and smiled. I said, General Cedras, you’d better hope you never have to find out. And as long as things continue to go well, I’m sure you won’t. He never understood, I’m sure, exactly what I meant, but he knew that that plane had some special features on it. About two days later I told them to stop the C-130s. 

Prior to that, we had one incident when one of our Special Ops guys got shot. He was at a remote site and went out to use the latrine at night. Somebody took a shot at him and hit him in the leg. It wasn’t life threatening, but that evening I deployed an entire company of Rangers right into the site. We disarmed every Haitian military person who was anywhere around and took them prisoners. I called Cedras about 5 o’clock in the morning and said, I’ll meet with you at 6:00. Be in your office.

I flew in there, and I flew off the handle: What in the hell are you doing? Why did this happen? You shot one of my men. If you do that again, I’ll go a thousand fold on you. I’ll leave more bodies out than you’ve ever— I came down ruthlessly on the guy. He said, I understand, I understand. I said, I thought you already understood. Get the word out right now. Don’t let this happen again. We never had another incident. 

No, I take it back. About a week later, we were up at Camp Haitian, and some Marines there on patrol with a young lieutenant were fired on by somebody. No one was hit, but they opened fire and killed nine Haitians. I called General Cedras the next morning and said, We’ve had another incident; we were fired on. 

He said, I understand you killed some of my people. I said, About a tenth of what we should have killed, but yes, we did. He said, I’d like to go up and see them tomorrow morning. Can I go up and see their bodies? I said, Yes, you can go up and see the bodies. I’ll go with you. In fact, I’ll pick you up in a UH-60, and we’ll fly up together. So I did. 

Meanwhile, I talked to my guys at Camp Haitian. We had killed 12 people, and they had body parts, because some had been hit so badly. We had 12 bodies, but we had 13 body bags because they had picked up everything, and one of them was filled with nothing but parts like arms and legs. I really hated for Cedras to see that. 

I said, Lay out the 12 bags and keep the other bag up on the truck until we finish; then we’ll drop them off at the morgue. So he flew up and went over and unzipped every bag, looking in at them—just like President Clinton had done with the troops. After that, I flew him back. On the way back down I said, I hope this stops. I told you before; we can’t tolerate it. He said, It will never happen again, I promise. We never had another incident after that. 

So you felt he did have the ability to control the folks out in the countryside? 

Yes. I knew I had to hold him accountable for it, whether he did or didn’t. He was going to have to be held accountable. 

Some of the stuff in the briefing book focuses on the police violence after you got down there. Had you planned for this? Had you contemplated whether this would happen?

No, we’d been told, You’re not going to be the police of the island. The police will be the police. We’re going to bring Aristide back in. The Haitian police were going to remain in charge. There was no plan at that point to take out either the Haitian police or the military. Later there was, but there was no plan at that point. They were going to remain intact. 

That just happens. You have to make that decision after a couple of days on the ground.

I stood there and watched them get beaten and said, We can’t tolerate this. American soldiers standing around and letting the Haitian police beat the Haitian people? It’s not going to happen; we’re going to get involved.

My plan was to come down ruthlessly on the police and François, the chief, not take over the role of policing. We just didn’t have enough troops to do that. As they have found out in Iraq, you might be better off with a corrupt police force than trying to do it yourself. Lesson to learn.

Was François meeting at the same time—

No, I was doing it all through Cedras.

So you were allowing Cedras to control François.

And I knew he did, through communications we picked up early on.

What was going on with Aristide at this point?

Aristide was back in Washington with his lawyer, and they were trying to get their act together to determine when it would be appropriate for them to come back in. I was going to have to negotiate Aristide’s arrival and Jonassaint’s departure with Cedras—and Cedras getting the hell out of there, too. I had already learned that they weren’t going to allow Cedras to stay when they came back. One of my roles was to convince Cedras that he had to leave. We’ll cover that at a separate time. 

Why don’t we take a break here?   

Before we get back to the Haiti narrative, you said you had done two long days worth of interviews with the Army War College. That’s something readers of this transcript would probably want to have a look at. You say we may be covering some of the same ground, but there may be some additional things.

Exactly.

Was that over the entirety of your career?

Yes, my family and everything.

We’re more focused on a particular piece. So anyone interested in those things would find that useful. 

So we have you in Haiti, and the mission has changed to account for the realities on the ground. Part of your mission was to be there and provide security for the transition from Cedras to Aristide. 

Yes, from Jonassaint, the appointed President, and a figurehead for Cedras. Cedras told Jonassaint what to do, and Jonassaint, a congenial, 75- or 81-year-old guy, was a figurehead for Cedras to be able to say they had a civilian President. 

But your role in this was not as a negotiator. Someone else was there to do the negotiating with Cedras about the terms of his departure and Aristide’s arrival.

No, there was no one else there. I was the negotiator. Bill Swing and I together, working as a team, were expected to carry this out. 

So what were you finding? Cedras hadn’t packed his bags to leave when you got there.

Oh, no, Cedras didn’t plan to leave. It’s obvious that he was not planning to leave that island. Two other things happened. The Lavalas Party in Haiti is President Aristide’s party, and they were also a bunch of thugs who had been intimidating and beating people and everything else. Some real criminals worked for an admittedly homosexual guy, Toto Constant, who was very outspoken and got a lot of air time as the head of the Lavalas Party. He was creating all kinds of problems for us. 

He had some people there who had committed all kinds of human rights crimes, and we were planning to start picking these guys up. I really wanted him to knock off the beatings and the shootings and the attacks taking place throughout the country by the Lavalas. My guys had done a lot of intel work on him and had basically told me anything you could imagine about him. So I said, Contact him, and we’ll have a meeting. 

They contacted Constant, and he came to the Port-au-Prince airport where we were going to meet. We had a room set up. I asked General Meade, who had the land forces there, to be present. Dave got there, and the guy came in, and they went back into the meeting room. They were sitting there talking, waiting for me to arrive. It had all been orchestrated, by the way. Dave said, Have you ever met General Shelton? 

The guy said, No I haven’t. Dave said, This is a very powerful guy. Have you ever seen the movie The Godfather? The guy said, Yes, it’s my favorite movie. He said, Well, you’re getting ready to meet the real godfather, and I tell you, watch out what you say around him. 

About the time he said that, my two security guys, Navy Seals, burst into the room armed to the hilt with dark glasses and ear plugs, and they went around checking everything. The guy turned to Dave and said, What part is that? Dave said, That’s just a part of the godfather’s force. It means he’s getting close. 

This guy was starting to break out in a sweat. So Dave said, Let me go check since he’s getting close. He walked out. I was outside. Dave told me, This guy is scared to death, you’ve got him. So I walked inside, and I was very straight-faced. The guy stuck out his hand to shake hands, and I said, Sit down. He sat down. I told him that I understood he was head of the party. I knew that for a fact and I knew he could control the violence and stop all the stuff that was going on. 

I said, Let me tell you what you’re going to do. First and foremost, we know you have a computer that has the name of every member of your party on it, and I want that right this minute. Within the next 30 minutes when we leave here, I’ll have a guy go with you. I want to pick up that computer. I’ll give the computer back after we have some forensics guys take a look at it. You understand? Sweat continued to pour down his face.

He said, I’ll give it to you. I said, Now, tomorrow, I’ll arrange for CNN to be present, and I want you to stand in front of the palace and talk about how you welcome the return of President Aristide, and we’ll work in harmony with our fellow Haitian citizens. I want all that to be on the public record, and you’re going to do that, you understand? He said, I understand. 

I said, Okay, be there. And the final thing is I want a phone call from you, or a radio communication from you today to all your people, telling them to knock it off as of today. You got that? These three things you have to do if you want to live. If you don’t want to live, then you just don’t do any of them, or miss one of the three, and you’re going to die. You understand that? He said, I understand. Then he started to shake—literally, physically shaking. He was sweating profusely.

I said, Okay, that’s all. I’m leaving. I got up and left; I didn’t shake hands, nothing. Dave immediately followed me out of the room. The guy came out a few minutes later. He burst through, and my guy was right there with him. To make a long story short, he made the phone call immediately. We monitored his communications. He called. He gave us the computer. We got all the names of his people. The next day he showed up at the appointed time and did the CNN thing. So we had that under control. 

Now things were starting to percolate fairly well. We planned an event for the media to go to every day. It was a proactive program, knowing that they can’t just stay down there and not report something. Rather than letting them go out and find some troop who got only two MREs [meals ready to eat] (he can eat probably only one a day, but he’s going to complain because he didn’t get three a day), let’s give them something to see. Let’s carry them out to the camp and let them see the weapons being destroyed. Let them see us loading them on the ships. Move them with government transportation; get them out there so they can report. We did that every day. 

All of that went along pretty well, and now we were down to the point where we had to plan for Aristide’s return and Cedras’s departure. The first thing to do was to set up the return. So I made arrangements to meet with President Jonassaint, Cedras, and Ambassador Swing. I tried for the palace. They wanted to meet at Jonassaint’s house up on the hillside. We showed up at the appointed time, but there was no one there. I’m mad. I drive back to Port-au-Prince. I go storming into Cedras’ office unannounced, and I just read him the riot act. I said, If at 2 o’clock today, you don’t show up with Jonassaint, it’s all over. You’re no longer in charge of anything, and I’ll take over this island. He said, I understand. 

So we went back out, and there were about 100 Haitian soldiers surrounding this house. Ambassador Swing looked up, and I could tell he was really nervous. I said, Don’t worry, Ambassador, we have them outnumbered. I have four security guys with me; we have them outnumbered four to a hundred. So we went in and they met us. It was President Jonassaint, Cedras, and two other individuals I didn’t recognize—one of them, in civilian clothes, with a very short haircut, was military looking. They introduced them. It was the Secretary of Commerce and the Secretary of something else, and neither one of these guys had lived in Haiti for the last 25 years. They were the secretaries of Jonassaint. 

So Ambassador Swing started it off, a very gentle man. We’re very pleased to meet you, Mr. President. He used typical diplomatic language and laid out how important it was that we get the offices set up for Aristide’s return and have everything working well so that there will be no lapse in government when Aristide comes back. 

Jonassaint nodded. Cedras was not saying anything. Finally Ambassador Swing said, In order to do this, we need you to evacuate these government buildings with your people so we can get in to clean the palace, do some painting, get some communications set up, and so on. We need that to start by this date. Is that agreeable?

Jonassaint said no. About that time, the Secretary of whatever it is, with the short haircut, started speaking in perfect English, and he said, I’m former U.S. Navy, and I’m the Secretary of whatever. You’re not going to come back into these buildings. This is the legitimate government of Haiti right now. The President is Jonassaint. You have no right to come into our buildings; that was not part of the agreement with President Carter and Nunn and Powell, and therefore you will not have access. 

Ambassador Swing said, We must get back in. The guy said, You’re not getting in. Jonassaint nodded his head. Cedras nodded his head. I’ve forgotten what else was said. I was getting really mad, starting to tense up, and my Haitian translator, Major Tony Ladouceur, was sitting right next to me. When he felt me start to tense up, he pressed down and said, still, still, easy, easy. Finally Ambassador Swing turned and said, General Shelton, do you have anything you’d like to say?

I said, Ambassador, I do have something I’d like to say, and I’d like to direct it to you, Jonassaint, and to Cedras, and to your two secretaries. Let me tell you something. You are going to get your ass out of those buildings, and you’re going to get out by the time the Ambassador said, or everyone in those buildings is going to die. We’re going to take the buildings, and people probably will be killed in the process. The four of you are going to be arrested for obstruction of justice and obstruction of this government coming back in. Do all of you understand that? You understand how it’s going to be, whether you like it or not?

They looked at me, and the guy with the Navy haircut said, Yes, we understand. Jonassaint said, in Haitian, That will not be a problem. We will be out just as you have said. Cedras said, We understand. 

I said, Now let me tell you something else. Every individual who comes out of there had better not be carrying anything. From this minute on, if I see anybody walking out of there carrying anything but their body, the snipers surrounding that place right now, and the security force there, will immediately swing into action. The sniper will kill the person carrying whatever it is, and the security force will take over the building immediately. We will use whatever force is necessary. So as of right now, we own the buildings. Do all of you understand that?

They all understood. We said, That ends the meeting. We have work to do. We got up and left. We got back in the car, Ambassador Swing said, I’ve never seen anything to beat that. People talk about coercive diplomacy. That was coercive diplomacy at its best.

I said, Ambassador, we have to do what we have to do. We’ll be kind and gentle where we can, and we’ll use whatever force we have to. So we immediately put out the word: Watch the building. Don’t let them leave with anything. They evacuated. We went back in. Swing had crews to go in and start cleaning and painting. 

A few days later the big day came. President Aristide arrived. We had security laid on. But, before that, we had to get Cedras out of there. He had to leave.

Was that part of the agreement, that Cedras would physically leave the country? 

No. I don’t believe that that was agreed to, that he would physically leave the country. But, in the meanwhile, two things had transpired. The lawyer with Aristide had insisted that we dismantle the police force and the military and that we take every weapon off the streets of Haiti, get rid of all the weapons. I pushed back on that. I said, Listen, I’ll take all the weapons out of here when you tell me how many weapons there are. I have no way of knowing, and I’ll tell you every Haitian down here has anywhere from two to ten weapons. So that’s a mission impossible. I’m not going to do it, period, unless I’m directed to do it by the President. So that never transpired.

But they did say, We want you to dismantle the police force, and we want you to dismantle the military. I argued against both, and I was successful, except they wanted to make sure that we had someone in charge of the military that Aristide trusted, knowing that the police worked for them. 

There was a guy there, Major General [Jean-Claude] Duperval, who had surfaced during the 30 days I had been there. He was one of the more reliable guys who worked for Cedras, and he seemed to be very quick to do things that would please the Americans. They did a background check on Duperval, and he came out okay. Aristide agreed that he could be in charge of the military. So we had a change of command for General Cedras set up with Duperval. 

My job then was to get Cedras to agree to leave. I talked to the State Department through Ambassador Swing, and they said they would fly him anywhere he wanted to go, just tell us the country. So I went to have a meeting with Cedras at his home, a very nice home. I also knew he had two boats, one big boat and one small fishing boat. I said, You have to leave. Aristide’s coming back. Our government wants you off this island when he lands.

He said, I can’t go. My wife, Yanick, will kill me. We knew Yanick ruled him with an iron fist. I said, You have to leave, so start making plans. The deal is you can go to any country you want. He said, I’m not leaving. I said, Is there anyone who can hear anything we’re saying? He said no. I knew he understood English, and he could understand what I was saying. I asked my translator to step outside and close the door. So now it’s just the two of us, and I know that creates a sense of anxiety on his part. 

I said, General Cedras, you have to understand something. We had the change of command between you and Duperval set up for the day after tomorrow. I’m providing protection for you. As you know, I’ll keep any harm from coming to you until after you leave this job. But the minute you leave this job, you’re no longer under my protection. You’re going to be fair game. Now I have to tell you, there are elements of my government who think you should have been assassinated on day one; you shouldn’t be here. You’re going to be a dead man within two days of the time we change command if you’re still on this island. You’re going to be dead, you understand that? 

He looked at me and said, I cannot leave. I said, Then it’s been nice knowing you. When I pass the flag, that’s the end. I understand.

I left. Two o’clock in the morning, my guys came running in. I was trying to sleep. They ran in and said, General Cedras is on the line, says he needed to speak to you.

You’re on the boat.

I was on the Mt. Whitney. He said, In regard to our conversation today, I will leave. I would like to go to— and he named the country. I’ve forgotten. I think it was Venezuela.

I said, Okay, I’ll make arrangements for that. We’ll do it the same day. We have an airplane here. We’ll fly you out with your family and any family members you want to carry to Venezuela. I just need to know how many, and we’ll make arrangements.

He said, Okay. I need to be compensated for my house and my boats. I said, We’ll compensate you for the house and the boats. I’ll get the money figure, and I’ll get back to you in the morning. I called Swing and said, Wake them up in Washington; we have a deal here. The next morning it worked out he couldn’t go to Venezuela; they wouldn’t take him. They had one country in Latin America that would take him—Panama. 

I called General Cedras back and said, Here’s what they’ll give you for your house. Here’s what they’ll give you for your boats. We have only one country that says it will take you, and it’s Panama. He said, Panama’s okay, I’ll go to Panama. But that’s not enough money for my house. I need more money; I need an extra $5,000. 

I said, Okay, I’ll go back to the State Department. But right now, here’s what you’ll get. I went back to the State Department, and they said, No, we have to keep him there. In the meanwhile they brought the plane in. The plane was costing them $10,000 an hour to sit there. We now have Cedras agreeing to leave, and he’s given me a list of about 27 family members who want to go with him. The State Department has agreed to fly them to Panama, but he refuses to get on the plane until we pay more for the house. 

You think he studied negotiation at Harvard?

He may have, or he learned it from me during the short period I was there. I finally went back and called Swing. He said, They won’t give any more. 

I said, Listen, Bill, go back to the State Department and tell them they’re paying $10,000 a day for the airplane. Give him $5,000, and let’s get him out of here. It’s one-half day’s worth of airplane. They finally agreed to do it. Cedras agreed to leave. We changed command that afternoon, and under the cover of darkness, as we had prearranged with him, we had a convoy go to the plane to load him up and get him out of there. They flew to Panama. 

The next day Aristide arrived.

Is that the last you heard from Cedras?

Never heard from him again. I followed him a little bit in the press. He was living above a Pizza Hut or something down in Panama. I never heard another word from him. I don’t know where he is today.

Meanwhile, the next day we brought Aristide back in. My timing may be a little bit off on this. I don’t remember the specifics of the chronology.

Were you finding out anything about Aristide and his people that made you at all uncomfortable about following through with the commitments to get him back in there?

I was getting uncomfortable about what was going to happen when he came back, because this idealistic lawyer he had with him was thinking in terms of disarming all the Haitian people and getting rid of the police and the military and everybody living happily ever after with Aristide dictating, or presiding, as he saw fit. I knew that wasn’t going to work.

This lawyer was with him back in the United States?

Yes, in Washington. He hired him; he was his right-hand man.

So you’re getting those reports— 

Directly from the lawyer, the lawyer was calling me.

How much contact were you having with Shali and the White House?

There was a constant flow of communication with Admiral Miller, with Shali, with Secretary of Defense Bill Perry. Shali came down a couple of times. I had Congressional delegations, Chris Dodd and Jack Murtha, coming down. They were arguing about setting a deadline to get out of Haiti, just like we’re going through now [in Iraq]. I was telling them, You set a deadline and I’m screwed, because these guys will wait me out. Don’t set a deadline. Let me rule ruthlessly with them and make this thing happen. If you set a deadline, I can’t do it. It won’t work. 

So they agreed and cooperated. Perry and Shali came down and got a Cook’s tour of the entire island. They did a press conference. My flow is daily with a video teleconference with Admiral Miller in ACOM, keeping him informed about everything that has transpired and what’s coming up in the next 24 hours.

You feel that you’re getting the proper level of engagement from the White House or—

No, I’m not. I talked to President Clinton about it, too. He called twice. I’m telling him something analogous to what’s going on in Iraq today. The military was giving us a safe and secure environment. But an interagency meeting took place in Washington before we ever went into Haiti. Admiral Miller chaired it with the inter-agency. I was doing something else that day, and I couldn’t go. There were a total of 51 big things that had to be done to make Haiti work again: fix the transportation, fix the power system, all kinds of things that we were going to do. Everybody agreed it was their responsibility, but the only people who followed through were the Justice Department and the FBI. 

They came in and started training a new police force, established a police academy, did a lot of really good things, started making a plan for fixing the jails. Nobody else followed through. I kept telling Swing, and I told the President every time he called: In the long term, Haiti is not going to get fixed unless we fix everything else that’s wrong with it. The plan is there to do it, but no one’s following through.  

Bill Swing finally told me, Tell him I need directive authority over those other Cabinet levels. I said, The President’s going to call tomorrow about this time, so why don’t we both be there, and you can try for that? He did, but it didn’t work. He never got direct authority over the Cabinet, and I knew he wouldn’t. We didn’t fix the other pieces. 

I told the President that on two occasions. When I did my exit interview with him up in Washington, I told him the same thing. It’s more than just the military. Military gives you fast action; they produce results. But the country internally is going to still be broken badly. That’s what was going on.  

What you needed from the President at that point was some concentrated attention to the non-military aspects.

The electrical power, for example. He had to get some experts in here on power grids to figure out how to put this thing back together. I had brought in some guys from the reserves who were power experts. They had gotten the lights back on and made things work again, but it was a patchwork arrangement. I actually carried fuel. They had a couple of big power plants that were short on fuel. We arranged to bring that in with a Navy ship and pump fuel in and get them up and operating. 

Again, if the people see things improving with a new government coming in, it creates excitement and energy. When they see things getting worse, they think, What did we bring this guy back for?

You’re right, there’s a remarkable parallel with what has been happening on Iraq, isn’t there?

Of course, I’ve been sitting here seeing this, and I said the same thing from day one. Until people see their lives getting better instead of more people dying on the streets, you aren’t going to have them supporting the thing. You just have to get their systems up and running. 

So now we have Cedras and his 27 brothers and sisters on the airplane.

They’re gone.

Then you’re preparing for— 

Aristide’s arrival. 

How’s that going?

It goes well. Of course, at this point Ambassador Swing’s people swing into action because now it’s their President coming back. They make all the big plans, and we provide the security force for it and all the logistical things we can do to help them. The President arrives, and there’s a big event at the palace. All the people he wants invited are sitting there, the Haitians and the Americans. The white doves are released symbolizing that peace and prosperity has returned to Haiti. Everything goes according to Hoyle. It works very well. We get him reinstalled. Our guys are still out on the street providing that safe and secure environment, letting them see American soldiers. 

I’m still out on the ship. At this point I ask Admiral Miller if I can start making plans for my 18^th Airborne Corps headquarters—which is America’s contingency corps, quick response—to start redeploying back to Fort Bragg. I realize we have to leave a force in place down there, and they’ll be there for quite some time, but the UN [United Nations] now is going to make plans to come in and take over this operation. 

Miller says, There’s no way in the world I’m going to get the White House to let you leave there. You’ve become the symbol of Haiti. The only way you’re going to leave is if we don’t see you on TV for about ten days. Keep that beret out of sight. He said, jokingly, Get Dave Meade from the 10^th Mountain Division to start wearing a red beret so we get a new symbol.

I laughed, because Dave at that time was not in a unit that wore berets. But I did make him start taking all the meetings, and I stayed out on the ship. I basically was in quarantine. After ten days, things were going well. Dave Meade was doing a great job. It worked, and I was allowed to board an airplane and fly back to Norfolk. Surprisingly, Admiral Miller had flown my wife, Carolyn, up to Norfolk, and they presented me the nation’s highest peacetime award for the operation. 

From there I went back to Fort Bragg, glad to get back home, to get my corps staff reassembled and get ready to go again.  

You said you had an exit interview with President Clinton after that?

After that I was called and told, President Clinton wants to bring you up to Washington and give you a big award. I said, I’ve already gotten the highest one he can give. They said, We’ll give you something else. I said, I really don’t want to do that. I had a lot of great troops out there who did this operation. I don’t want to be singled out as a symbol. I’d feel much better if you could make it a presentation to members of the Armed Forces and have enlisted members of the forces present in the Rose Garden for the ceremony.

They said, Let us work that. They called back a short while later and said, Okay, we have an agreement. We’ll have one member of each service there with you, and they all will be given awards as symbolic of the job the forces have done. 

I don’t know how much later, maybe two weeks later, my wife and I were flown to Washington. I had an exit interview with President Clinton and then went out into the Rose Garden where they had the assembled masses and the four members of the Armed Forces up on the platform. It was a nice ceremony, well done.  

Was there anything else about the exit interview we ought to get on the record?

Not really. He just thanked me for the job we had done. We joked a lot about what a close call it was with Carter and Nunn and Powell just getting out before we came in and getting the whole thing turned around. He was very complimentary. But he then asked me, How do you recommend we proceed? I once again used that opportunity to say, This has to be an inter-agency fix. If we really want to spend the money that’s been allocated to fix Haiti and do it wisely, you have to have the other members of the inter-agencies working as well. 

Military does a temporary fix on power. We don’t do a great job of putting a government back together. We’re not the best in fixing the court system, etc. Let’s use the people who are the experts, and let them work with the Haitian government to fix it and do it well. Give them the money. Make sure the money we give them is spent wisely. 

But your sense is that it didn’t happen.

It didn’t happen. In fact, the feedback came later on that that was still a big issue. I made a couple of visits back down there while I was the Chairman, and it was kind of patchwork. But, in the meanwhile, we had started pulling the troops out of there. One of my goals going in as Chairman—I put them in there—was to get them out of there. Two years later we had them out.

All of them?

All of them out, yes. 

Was there a sense of disappointment with Aristide after that time?

I really think so. First of all, he was building himself a palace down in the slum area, out near Port-au-Prince airport, being very carefully guarded. It was a walled home with Haitian military and police all around the outside. 

Inside made you kind of sick to your stomach, because all the Haitian people live in relatively modest accommodations and slums, and for this house he was building, he was importing Italian marble and gold-plated fixtures for the bathrooms. It was something to behold, spending money for himself that should have been going to fix the country. Then, of course, he became almost adamant that the U.S. government would not put their hands on his government. He was going to be independent, and he’d spend the money as he saw fit. You just saw it was not going to work the way we envisioned.

Was that professionally something you still were tracking after you came back—you were redeployed back to Norfolk, you said. 

That was just for the ceremony. 

Then you were back in—

Back in Fort Bragg.

Was the Haiti element still a piece of your—?

Oh sure, and it remained that, even when I went from Fort Bragg to Tampa to be the CINCSOC [Commander in Chief, Special Operations Command] and back up to be the Chairman. I was hoping we’d continue to try to fix the place and get it back on its feet, but I also was concerned about having to leave our troops down there over an extended period of time.

Did you learn anything else from the experience down there that became useful for you later on, either when you become Chairman or just more generally about the use of troops?

It reinforced a lot of things we already knew that I thought were extremely important. First and foremost, when you’re going in, if you want to do the job quickly and have sufficient troops on hand to do any of the things that may pop up that you didn’t plan for, you have to have the right size force and the right mixture of forces to do it. I started off with a force that was about 22,000 strong. They were going to be introduced into that area overnight. It was going to take place during the hours of darkness—and that’s to our advantage, because we have night vision capability. 

By the time the sun came up, we were going to own the island, including the palace, all the jails where the police congregated, the airfield, everything there, the big camp I talked about where the heavy weapons were. It was going to be ours. So take an overwhelming force to go in.

Now, in the process, I started to get a little bit of pushback about the size of the force. I even had an order to keep it down to 20,000. I decided at that point that I would keep it at 20,000 within Haiti, but I would not count the joint operational area under my control, which included the sea and the air as a part of my 20,000. So I ran about 22,000 to 25,000 in there at any given time. That was the force I needed to make sure I had the right stuff. I just used the rules to my advantage. They said, Have no more than 20,000 in Haiti. They didn’t say in the joint operational area.

It’s a good accounting mechanism.

It’s an accounting mechanism, and it worked and it worked well. We used the right force for the right job. If you’re going to make an amphibious assault, use the Marines. If you want to make an airborne assault on pinpoint objectives or sea invasion for pinpoint, use the Special Ops. For mass and highly trained troops who are going to occupy territory, use the airborne. And that’s what we planned. 

Are there any other inter-agency issues we ought to talk about in relation to Haiti? You said you weren’t getting the contributions you needed because priorities were elsewhere. Were you picking up other things either about the intelligence community or the diplomatic community that struck you as interesting or that stayed with you?

No real lessons learned from that, to be very candid, but two things. Admiral Miller, back in Norfolk, was working the interagency and working it pretty hard—unfortunately, with not much result. But he took the burden off me in that regard. The media was a lesson learned.

Interesting.

The embedding of the media worked very well. I gained a great respect for the media’s ability to keep secrets, to publicize only those things they cleared through us. They did a great job. I would almost say it’s a model of how to work if you really want to have the media involved from day one. I couldn’t have asked for it to go any better. 

I do think it’s important that commanders understand that the media have a job to do. If you don’t provide opportunities and things for them to see and do, they’re out looking for anything they can find. A lot of times it’s nothing, but they’ll try to make it into something. 

Christiane Amanpour from CNN was a great example. On one day when they were anticipating vast riots throughout Haiti, we had soldiers everywhere. We were at general quarters for the day. One store was broken into and looted and burned by the Haitians. Allegedly our intel told us this was a guy [the store owner] who was very high priced and treated Haitians very poorly, and it was a little bit of retribution on the Haitians’ part. 

While they were burning it, Christiane was standing in front of the store reporting live from Haiti. It was all that was shown on CNN that morning. But if you listened to what she was saying, she was saying throughout the island things were very calm except at this one store, and they’re just taking revenge on this guy who treated them poorly; otherwise, it’s a very quiet day down here.

I gave her kudos later on. We invited her out on the ship. Her intel is very good. We invited her out to exchange some behind-the-scenes things that were going on and to let her know how accurate she had been. But she didn’t have the full story in a lot of cases. That was a good example, I think, of the way the media—she was responsibly reporting that day, and I gave her credit for her accurate reporting, even though the scene shown on TV was different.

Well, the pictures usually drive the story on television, so what she was saying wouldn’t have had the same impact as the picture did.

Fortunately, the White House understood. And we were providing hourly reports that day back to the White House about what was going on down there.

Did anything every come of the person, one of the Grahams from the Washington Post who was—? 

Bradley Graham?

Yes, did he write it up? 

Oh yes, yes. He wrote good stories. Bradley Graham came up to me later on. I forgot to tell you that. I told you about how he was standing there when we got the mission, Turn the troops around and now go in in a different manner. Bradley told me later, You know, given the magnitude of what you had to do—you had this plan flowing, going so well, and then, all of a sudden having a total mission change overnight— I really would have anticipated that there would have been all kinds of slamming of books, very upset, not having a plan, having to really scramble. But I’ve never seen anything work that well in my life. 

The way you guys walked into that conference room, very calmly, and went about revising the plan, and then implementing it six, seven hours later— I never would have believed it if somebody had told me that that’s the way it went. He got a real lesson out of that. He and I became good friends as a result of it. We spent a lot of time together. He’s still my favorite reporter.

Bradley, even when I was Chairman, is very factual in what he reports. He’ll call a spade a spade, but normally it doesn’t have any emotion in it, and it’s not swayed one way or the other. It’s just good reporting. 

So you went back to North Carolina? Are there any other issues we ought to talk about in North Carolina before you go to Tampa?

No, the rest of it was fairly uneventful.

How do you end up getting to Tampa?

They nominated me. I got a call one day to tell me they wanted to nominate me for my fourth star, to go be the Commander in Chief, Special Ops command. 

They being?

They being General Reimer, who was the Forscom [US Forces Command] commander, my immediate boss. I was elated. They had been considering sending me to Korea. I had never served a tour in Korea. So the Korean Joint Chief of Staff, Shali’s counterpart, was coming to the U.S. for a visit. As we always do, they were going to fly him off throughout the country, let him see some of our installations. They wanted to send him to my command at Fort Bragg, which is home of the airborne and Special Ops. He didn’t want to go to Fort Bragg. The whole reason for wanting to send him there was that he would get to know me, so that maybe I could strike up a relationship with him and therefore when they nominated me to be the commander in Korea—

I had reached the point in my life where I had to decide whether to go to Korea or get out of the Army and just hang it up. I’d had a great career. I’m not a guy with a big ego. I’d go do something else. I don’t know what happened, but he did come from Korea to Fort Bragg, and I got to meet him. We had a great relationship. I felt very good about his visit. But then a short while later, I got the call from General Reimer saying they were going to nominate me as Special Ops Command. 

I guess they’d been looking at all the what if’s? and who we have available, and how do we make the best fit for who is going there. So I ended up going to Tampa. 

How long were you in Tampa?

A little bit short of two years, about a year and a half, I think, somewhere in that neighborhood. 

Who actually makes the designation here? Is this something that happens at the Presidential level? 

It is, yes. The way it happens is you throw out the nominations from the services to fill a four-star position. Then you get the nominees in. The Chairman will normally prepare a package that goes to the SecDef, and the SecDef will look at it and make a recommendation. The SecDef is the final approving authority. If he selects Shelton for Special Ops command, he’ll send a package over to the White House saying, This is the man I want to put in there. Then the President will nominate you to the Congress for confirmation.

Your relations with the White House at this time must have been golden.

Yes, I had a lot going for me at this time because President Clinton was there, it had gone so well down in Haiti, and he’d gotten to know me. We had a couple of dialogues, one-on-ones. I was over in Special Ops command, and I was out in the hither and yon with one of my Special Ops teams, doing some training of the Namibians in Africa. 

I got a call from Judy Miller, the White House General Counsel, saying, You’re being considered for nomination for the Chairman’s job. In order for you to be nominated, I’ll have to ask you 21 questions, and some of them are very personal. You have the opportunity of saying, ‘I’m not going to answer it, I decline’ which would take you out of the running. Or you can answer them as you see fit. 

I said, I’ve got it. So she asked me all these questions, one of which is, Have you ever had an extramarital affair? I answered all the questions and gave her good answers for what they’re looking for. She got down to the last question, and I answered it. She said, Is there anything else in your background that could cause you embarrassment or the White House embarrassment? I said, There’s one thing you need to know about. She said, What’s that?

All of this is being done by satellite telephone. I said, I have a second wife. There’s a long pause on the other end, and she says, You want to tell me about it?

I said, Yes, when I was in Vietnam as a captain, one day I was at a village ceremony to celebrate having just killed a water buffalo that gave us good luck. I was drinking rice wine with the village chief, along with a couple of other people who had straws in this big crock of rice wine, the way they do it, when the village chief tells me that he’s presenting the woman there to my right to me as my new wife. There’s a brand new long house, right there behind me, made out of bamboo, that’s mine for my wife and me to live in. It’s because of the deep respect they have for me and the job that I’ve done with them. 

I thanked the village chief profusely, but I told him I was married and already had a couple of children, and therefore I did not need another wife. But I was very honored to have been presented her. I left there that day and I never saw her again, but it’s a true story.

She laughed and said, You’re telling me there won’t be any paternity suits against you? I said, I can’t guarantee you that, but I can guarantee it won’t be a real one. She laughed. 

A short while later I got back to Tampa, and then I got the call from the office of the Secretary of Defense saying he wanted to interview me. I said, Let me check with my wife. I’m not sure I’m really up to this job. I thought that would be enough to turn them off, but it wasn’t. They called back again the next morning. 

I said okay. So I flew up. He interviewed me over lunch. He said, Okay, let’s go to the White House. We went to the White House and into Sandy [Samuel] Berger’s office, the National Security Advisor, and they said, You’re the man. Now you have to go in for an interview with President Clinton. 

I asked when, and they said right now. So I went into the Oval Office. They said it would take about twenty minutes. I walked in. The President and I sat there. An hour and a half later, after he had asked me lots of questions and gotten my answers, there was a crowd assembling outside—people who were scheduled when our meeting ran on, along with Berger wondering, What’s going on in there? What’s happening? 

At any rate, the interview with him was very easy, because he and I had a good dialogue. President Clinton is the kind of individual who, when he talks to you, you get the feeling that you’re the only person in the world, and he’s very interested in what you’re saying. He listens intently, unlike some people who ask you something but really don’t care what you say. They’re just waiting for you to finish talking so they can start talking again. 

He asked me a whole series of questions, but I remember only one. That one was, If we found out who blew up the Khobar Towers and killed the American Air Force members and wounded so many, what would your recommendation to me be? 

I told him that if we determined who bombed the Khobar Towers, they should be required, in accordance with our policy, to pay about a thousand-fold for what they did to us. We have to have a strong retaliatory policy, and we have to follow through with it immediately when we learn who. 

I wasn’t sure how he’d accept that. Again, for a non-military guy, that’s a pretty straightforward and hard answer to have to deal with if you don’t believe that’s what we ought to do. But that’s the way I felt, and I thought he ought to know it. That was probably right in the middle of the interview. 

Then the interview ended and I left. I walked back out and over to Sandy Berger’s office in the West Wing. He said, How’d it go? Cohen was still there. They said, Boy, that was long, how’d it go? I said, I don’t know. You’ll have to ask the President. All I know is I was candid and straightforward. About that time, Berger’s phone rang. Berger picked it up, made a couple of comments, hung up and said, You got the job. I didn’t know whether laugh or cry. What have I gotten into? 

But on the way back, Cohen said, There will be a rollout tomorrow morning in the Rose Garden. You need to bring your wife up for that. So we jumped to it. I called Carolyn and told her, You’re coming up here. Get yourself a ticket. 

On the way back, Cohen had told me, We’ll use your plane, my Special Ops plane (Boeing 707), to fly her up here. I told him I couldn’t do that; it was against regulations. He said, No, no, we’ll do it. So he picked up the phone and called retired General Jim Jones, a four-star Marine, his exec. He said, Do some double checking, check the legal aspects; we want to use the plane to fly her up here. A few minutes later the phone rang, and it was Judy Miller, the same general counsel who had interviewed me, saying, You can’t do that. 

I told him not to worry about it. I had already told Carolyn to get herself an airline ticket, and she did and flew up. We went over to the White House the next morning, into the Oval Office, and had a normal, brief conversation. We walked out into the Rose Garden, and he announced that I would be the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I said a few words that I had scrambled that night to write out. That’s how it went down.  

In the interval before you come there, when you were in Tampa, was counter-terrorism a big piece of your portfolio?

It was.

What can you tell us about the prominence of that issue for the White House during the period you were there, ’96, ’97? You said the President was asking you about Khobar. 

Yes. I wasn’t involved during that period to any large extent in policy per se. The policy had remained constant for a number of years in terms of our retaliatory policy for a terrorist attack. The FBI and the CIA were primarily working the overseas areas, the FBI being in field offices, the CIA overseas. Whenever there was any kind of contemplated terrorist activity, or a requirement for part of our counter-terrorist force to go, I was the guy to put them in position, provide the forces. 

Normally, when they would go in, they would be working under whoever the combatant commander was. The primary things we’d do during those periods were what they call renditions— go over and pick them up and bring them back. Those were our primary responsibilities during that period. Our counter-terrorist forces based at Fort Bragg were my primary responsibility. It was making sure they stayed trained and ready and equipped. That was our number-one priority.  

What were the other big things in your portfolio?

We were in about 80 countries at any given time with Special Ops teams training other people’s Special Ops, or working in a training mission of some sort. A lot of times, it was also intelligence gathering. It was looking at, for example, an embassy, from a counter-terrorism standpoint. What if terrorists break into this place? What if they capture the Ambassador? I was making sure we had good video recordings of all the embassies so we knew where the doors and windows were. Having a good, detailed plan on each one of those embassies was part of our responsibility, a whole portfolio on each embassy. 

That was primarily it. We would run exercises all the time, for both the counter-terrorist forces as well as our conventional forces, and participate in other CINCs—other combatant commanders’ exercises—as well. 

Were there were any prominent interventions during that time?

Not really.

The Balkans?

No, nothing. It was relatively quiet. The Balkans did flare up, and we did deploy forces there. But, again, we provided basically Green Berets in support of George Joulwan’s forces going into the Balkans. These guys were well trained and ready, and it was an ideal mission for them. 

Was there a lot of proactive counter-terrorism activity going on? There’s a criticism in some sectors that the Clinton administration was not as attentive as it might have been to terrorism. Some of that is obviously politically motivated. Is there’s anything you can say for the record that could help illuminate whether this was a prominent feature of the American government’s existence during the period you were there? 

From a Washington perspective, from a policy and plans perspective, programmatic perspective, all that is handled at the Chairman level. As the operational arm of it, I’m not seeing any of that. My job is to make sure the forces are trained and ready, and to be prepared to respond and fight to get the equipment they need, and the budget. You have your own budget down there, an acquisition and procurement program. So that’s where you spend a lot of your time, that and the training. 

But there were no fundamental changes to account for in the organization of your operation, either just before or just after you’d come in? 

I inherited a force, basically the same force, and I left it intact—hopefully better trained and more ready than I found it, but nothing I saw that would dictate that they were interested in expanding the force. We looked at that all the time, but we had real trouble expanding because of our selection criteria. 

Your relations with General Shali are still good during this time? 

Oh yes, and as a CINC, we talked at least once a week. We’d be on the phone. I’d update him on everything we were doing, what my plans were. Occasionally I’d talk to Secretary Cohen, but not very often. Usually Cohen worked military issues through the Chairman.  

And you would not have had any independent relations with the Hill at this point, or you would through the committees? 

I did through the acquisition procurement side, and also there’s an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, low-intensity conflict, a guy named Allen Holmes up in the Pentagon whom I stayed in very close contact with. We became good friends and have stayed that way. He worked the Pentagon and the political issues for me. I worked the military side of it. 

I’ll ask a parallel question to what I asked about Haiti. Did you feel that you were getting from the White House what you needed to the extent that they were attentive?

Sure. I never had any real issues with the White House in that regard.

Very good. So I guess that brings us to the role of Chairman.

I got the call, and now I’m en route to Washington. On October 1, 1997, I assumed the helm. 

Your hearings went fine?

First of all, the director of the Joint Staff at that time, a guy named Denny Blair, had put together on the Joint Staff a team of colonels who were good guys, really smart, experienced in the Joint Staff in the Washington area. Before I took the role, I flew up to Washington and met with them. A guy named Dave Petraeus was the exec to Denny Blair. I identified him immediately as a very bright guy who had a good handle on the way things worked, very energetic, with a great work ethic. 

I told Denny, The first thing I want to do is steal Petraeus from you. He said, Well, there are a lot of other good guys up here, so I’ll start looking for one to replace him, and I’ll let you have him. So Dave Petraeus was my transition exec. He did a tremendous job. He stayed with me about a year and a half to two years.

We then formulated a plan for what my priorities would be during the period I would be Chairman. With that I went back to Tampa, and then came back up with my wife on the first of October. But I already had this program put together that I wanted to pursue. 

I was sworn in by Secretary Cohen in his office, he and John Hamre, Deputy SecDef, and my wife. I went downstairs, picked up a briefcase that was already loaded down with NATO stuff, proceeded to Andrews Air Force Base, and got on the 707 Air Force Two headed to NATO, my first NATO meeting. I had been sworn in about four hours before that. When, the next day, I had a newspaper reporting what I had for dinner on the airplane that night, I knew I was in the fishbowl for sure. That was my first day on the job.

The second day on the job I was sitting in the NATO meeting as the senior military guy for U.S. forces. I learned very quickly that they all looked at the American to provide the leadership and the guidance. But, on the airplane going over, I’d had all the experts. I had the books, and I had spent most of the night getting ready for the meeting the next morning. 

This is late ’97; expansion is a big issue?

Later on NATO expansion, but now not really a big issue. We had identified and prioritized the countries that might be part of a NATO expansion, and basically they were almost going down the prioritized countries in terms of who was ready, who most closely fit the NATO model. 

What were the big issues you were inheriting at that point?

Well, Bosnia, of course, was ongoing. The big issue I inherited was when we were going to start drawing down Bosnia. Shali, unfortunately, on his way out, during one of his final hearings, had told the Senate Armed Services Committee we’d be out of there within a year. My assessment was there was no way we were going to be out of there in a year. It was kind of like saying we’ll be out of Iraq in a year. Yeah, we’ll be able to do it, but we’ll leave behind a blood bath. 

So my first hearing then was very contentious. [John] McCain in particular came down hard: Your predecessor—why can’t you get us out in a year if he could? Now I’m trying to keep from really bad-mouthing my predecessor and saying he must have been on drugs that day, to saying we just can’t do that. We’re going to come out, but we’re going to set some goals about accomplishing this, this, this, and this, and as we accomplish each of those goals, there will be a corresponding number of troops we can take out. That’s my game plan. I have that plan in place, and we’re starting to execute it now. 

It’s what we should be doing in Iraq and should have done about four years ago. But they fail to follow history. 

How did you get up to speed on Bosnia? You may have had a small piece of that with—

When I left that NATO meeting, I flew to Bosnia.

Did you? So you knew that was going to be where you’re—

That’s where we were deployed. That’s where the action was then. I didn’t want to be speaking second hand. I had already made a couple of trips to Bosnia while I was the CINCSOC. I was all over the world, and at least two times— if not three times, probably more—I went into Bosnia, and talked to my troops on the ground, making sure they were being employed correctly, seeing how they felt about how things were going. 

So I had a good feel for Bosnia already, but as the Chairman I have the entrée to go in and talk to the main man on the ground and say, Now tell me how the whole picture looks. 

What can you tell us about that first trip to Bosnia? Do you have any recollections of it? 

It was very positive. They had their challenges on the ground, but things were getting better, and getting better relatively faster than we anticipated. We could see that it was going to take time, because these people hated one another, the three factions there, just like in Iraq. They’re going to have to live side-by-side for a long time, with somebody standing there to keep them from slashing each other’s throat or shooting each other. But eventually, it might work.

It was a constant fight, as we tried to reduce the force, as we were making progress. The State Department always wants us to have more, not less. The Ambassador always loves having all these Americans around, and they’ll back through State Department. So that’s a natural friction between State and Department of Defense. 

Is there a routine to your interaction with the President when you become Chief? Do you see him on a regular basis? 

You see him fairly frequently. But the way it normally works is—depending on who your Secretary of Defense is—you work basically for the Secretary of Defense. You’re the principal advisor to the President, National Security Council, and the SecDef, but he’s your civilian boss. He would be more apt to talk to the President more frequently, or get calls from the President, than would the Chairman. 

Occasionally the red phone rings, and it’s the President. But President Clinton normally let the National Security Advisor chair the National Security Council meetings. Once we had fleshed out an issue and were ready to go to the President with a consensus— or, maybe, as one case happened, a dissenting opinion from the Chairman—you go to the Cabinet Room and the President comes in, and you meet with him. 

You normally would have a couple of options for him. Sandy Berger, the National Security Advisor, would talk through the pro and cons that we looked at and our recommendation. Then each member of the National Security Council would have a chance to say how he felt about either one of them, and then the President would make a decision.

Cohen was the Secretary of Defense throughout your term?

For the first three years, and then [Donald] Rumsfeld the last eight months. 

How did you assess Cohen’s relationship with the President?

Very good, a great relationship. Secretary Cohen and I would meet with the President in the Oval Office. Of course, he was the only Republican on the President’s staff. I never saw party politics come into it. I always thought that was one of the smartest moves President Clinton made, to bring a Republican in to be the Secretary of Defense. Later on, when [Monica] Lewinsky moved into the thing, he had two guys whose integrity was—I could be very egotistical and say beyond reproach—He had two guys noted for their integrity, an apolitical guy and a guy from the opposing party.

So when it came later to accusations about why we bombed Iraq or whatever, he had two guys who could go to Congress with some credentials and say, Uh-uh, let me tell you the real reason why we did that. You can try to politicize it if you like, but these are two guys—Cohen said one time during testimony when I was being accused (again by McCain, I think) of giving him a politically correct answer (it was a very frank and candid answer, but it didn’t happen to suit what he thought was the right answer), Senator, this is the most politically incorrect general I’ve ever met. That was one of the greatest compliments I’d ever received. As he said that, he looked over at me and winked.

Cohen had a great relationship with President Clinton, as did I. It was always easy meeting with the President. 

What about your relationship with Sandy Berger? 

Very good. I never had any problem with Sandy whatsoever. There were lots of occasions when I didn’t give Sandy the answers he wanted to hear or when he would get very upset at something that had happened involving the military. For example, one day, one of our Commanders in Chief, General Tony Zinni, was over in the Middle East, his area of responsibility, and had said something that Sandy and the White House didn’t like. 

Sandy called me up ranting and raving about this dumb SOB. Finally he reached the end and said, Hugh, what gives him the right to say something like that? Who does he think he is? I just felt myself smiling. He was on the red phone, and I said, Sandy, it’s called the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. It’s what we fight and die for. The phone went click. 

Later on that day I was over at the National Security Council meeting, and he was telling this as a funny story, because he realized I was right. He might not like the answer, but the guy said it, and he’s entitled to say it. We had a good relationship. Every now and then, Sandy—having been goaded, I’m sure, by guys like Dick Clarke with some hair-brained scheme about how we could fly 900 miles in a 200-mile helicopter and snatch a terrorist—would get all excited, and we’d be called over to present plans about how we could do it. 

We’d basically have to tell him it wouldn’t work. It sounds great, and I’m sure if you contact Steven Spielberg or [Jerry] Bruckheimer, they can make a great movie of it. But this won’t fly. These things crash after 200 miles without fuel. In order to do that, we’d have to build up a footprint in the area, and it would tip our hand. They didn’t understand some of the military nuances.

But Sandy would go over some of our military plans in great detail, ask a lot of really good questions, and then say, Okay, I’ve got it, and we’d go brief the President. 

You picked Clarke out. Was Clarke prone to enthusiasms about—? 

I personally think every administration needs a Dick Clarke because they’re very untactful and they come up these wild schemes every now and then. Given proper controls, you want people like that around you—very brusque, but again, they get a job done. He would force people to have to answer. So I like that. Now, from a military perspective, he watches too many Rambo movies, and he really thinks the military is a Rambo. 

I mentioned the 200 miles. Dick was always pushing to go into the northern reaches of Afghanistan with Special Ops and snatch Osama bin Laden. There were two things wrong with it. Number one is the intel we had to show us where bin Laden was. But also, you can’t parachute guys in there and leave them on the ground knowing that bin Laden has the capability of reacting, as we found out in Afghanistan. You have to be able to support them with some kind of fire power or some kind of rescue if they need it.

To do that, you have to have an airbridge set up. You have to have a helicopter refueling capability, which means it’s going to be your Special Ops helicopters with your C-130s that can provide refueling for these helicopters. It’s 900 miles. You have to have a search and rescue in case one of them goes down en route—lots of moving pieces that say you aren’t going to hang them out to dry. 

We’d have to bring Clarke back to reality. He came up with a hair-brained idea one time, that bin Laden was going to try to escape from Afghanistan on a commercial aircraft that was going to land and pick him up and fly him to Chechnya. Therefore we should position F-16s to shoot down this civilian aircraft. 

My argument was, number one, my lawyers tell me you can’t shoot down a commercial aircraft in international air space without creating one big mess for America. Number two, who’s going to assure me bin Laden’s on the airplane? Number three, who’s going to give me the order—and it’s going to have to be in writing—to shoot down this tail-number aircraft? 

The other thing you need to understand is we don’t just keep F-16s sitting there with the engines running, because the flight is fairly short and we have to locate him, identify him, and then shoot him down. Eventually they decide that’s not a very good idea. But invariably, eight months later, the same idea pops up again, and I’m back briefing Berger why it’s a dumb idea. 

Clarke would come up with those kinds of hare-brained ideas—not hare-brained, but not very feasible either.  

Were there other people on the White House staff who were also notable in this regard?

No, not really. 

Clarke just sort of stands out?

Clarke stands out for sure. No one else in my four years ever really came up with anything that was—I won’t call it hair-brained—but was trying to help you with options that might be available. In Afghanistan we had about 16 options, of which probably about three were feasible. But they were developed around, If you want me to do it, we can do it, but here’s what we have to do to do it. I never said, We just can’t do it. I would show them what the price and risks were. 

Invariably, they would decide it’s not worth the price we were going to have to pay to do it. I felt as Chairman that I had to lay out for them, on any of these options they proposed, what the cost would be to do it, in terms of the number of people, the number of countries we’d have to have involved. To go into northern Afghanistan, I’d always start off by saying, You have to violate Afghanistan’s air space, but first of all you have to violate Pakistan’s air space or Iranian air space. Now, which one of those do you want me to violate?

Okay, if you want me to violate [Pervez] Musharraf’s, he happens to have some planes that can shoot our aircraft down. So, number one, I have to tell him we’re going to do it, or I have to try to figure out a way to do it without telling him. In one case, I figured out a way to do it without telling him. It was to have Joe Ralston fly to Pakistan and have dinner with Musharraf at the same time we were going to violate his airspace. 

Our concern was if we violate the airspace and he doesn’t know, his radar picks it up, and he thinks India’s attacking or firing a missile at him. Then we have a real problem. So Joe Ralston flies in and has dinner with him. And while they’re having dinner, we violate his airspace and nothing happens; he doesn’t pick it up. We go low. Actually, it was TLAM [Tomahawk Land Attack Missile] missiles, and we flew them very low to the surface across Pakistan, so they never detected them. 

You had to have those kinds of things in place.

What about the Secretary of State at the time you were there, Madeleine Albright. How were relations with her?

I had good relations with Madeleine, I think. I don’t know if you ask her. There was that natural friction between State and us, at every turn in the road. They like to use the military. They like to have DoD do the heavy lifting, because—to be very candid—they don’t have much of a budget when it comes to operations, and they don’t have people who can do it. Every now and then they try to get involved in your business. 

The biggest friction would come in situations like pulling forces out of Haiti. Cohen and I would go in with a plan and have a meeting with Berger and all the NSC staff. We’d sit there and present our case, and always State was opposed to taking one person out for fear the world was going to collapse if we did. The Ambassador always wants to hold onto them.

This would have been [Warren] Christopher at that time. You’re talking about Haiti? Or was it Albright later?

Albright. No, I never had any problem with Christopher. Of course, while he was there, I wasn’t trying to take them out. We were just holding count of what we had. I was back as Commander-in-Chief Special Ops while Shali was working with Christopher. By the time I got there, Albright was in place. 

It was good to work with her; there were never any personal issues. We remained friends in spite of our professional differences over these operations. I don’t remember anything that was very memorable other than the constant arguments about take ten out, put ten in. They were almost petty things we had to argue over. 

Do you remember when bin Laden first came on your screen?

Oh, he was on my screen back in ’96, down at Special Ops, when I went in. I put together a task force down there then, using open source, based on the Internet, that started trying to track what he was doing and how he was doing it. I basically pulled about, I think, six or seven bright, young, very computer-literate guys from different services into a little cell, locked them up in a room and said, Get with it. Let’s find where he spends his money, where he gets his money. We quickly determined that he was laundering money through the fertilizer and fishing industries, and how much it was. They did a really good job. 

All that came to a head about the time I went up to Washington. So later on I took that data and presented it to Secretary Cohen. We had two meetings with the President, one when [Robert] Rubin was Secretary of Treasury and one while Larry Summers was there. We argued that we needed to try to start bankrupting this guy. We knew how to do it and where to do it. But I couldn’t win either case. Both times the President’s decision was to go with Treasury. He was very concerned that we’d be hurting our own banking systems, because he would come after our banking systems. 

While I was Commander-in-Chief Special Ops, I’d already met with one of the regional vice presidents for Bank of America down in Tampa, Alex [Adelaide] Sink. She had assured me that they had one of the most secure systems around. I even had one of my smart computer-literate guys go down and spend some time with these guys. He came back convinced there wasn’t any concern over the Bank of America system. So I felt good about it.

Their concern was that they would be basically hacking—

Hacking into our banking system and trying to bankrupt us. So we couldn’t win the argument; we just could not go after his money. That was when he first surfaced for me. Throughout my tenure as Chairman—and particularly while Berger was there (not so much after Condoleezza [Rice] came in)—there was an intense look at where this guy was, how he operated. And, as you know, we actually attacked his camps there a couple of times and tried to get him. 

I think, personally, there was about as much emphasis put on it as one could, short of what we did after 9/11—with one exception. The military wanted to attack Mullah [Mohammad] Omar and the Taliban, because they were supporting this guy, and we felt they ought to pay the price. So we developed a whole series of targets including the residence of Omar. We got it cleared through the lawyers, but we never could sell it, never could get them to go after the Taliban. We demarched them to stop, as I recall, two times during my tenure. But they never stopped. We knew they didn’t stop. 

We, of course, were constantly trying to track bin Laden during my tenure. We had plans to go after him immediately with TLAMs to try to hit him if the CIA’s operatives on the ground in Afghanistan could ever give us reliable or timely enough information to get it. Here’s an example: One Sunday, I was with my wife headed down to Quantico to the Marine Exchange. I got a call. They think they have him. I’m on my cell phone, I think we’ve got him; you need to get here ASAP. They’re going to convene a meeting of the NSC. 

So I turned around and drove up I-95 on a Sunday, going 95 miles an hour. I was speeding to get to the Pentagon. My wife dropped me off there. In the meanwhile, I’d made a call to my guys and said, Start rolling the TLAMs. A TLAM has to turn for about an hour and a half before you can actually fire it. I’d already given the order on my own to start the process. 

I get back to the office. My guys brief me quickly. My sedan is waiting, and I head for the White House, the only time I think I ever went there in other than Class A uniform. I later got kidded by President Clinton about whether I even owned civilian clothes.

Anyway, I get the TLAMs turning. We all convene right there in the White House. George Tenet is, of course, the primary speaker, because his guys have given him the information. It happened to be in Kandahar. Bin Laden and his lieutenants were supposedly meeting there. The problem was there were about 150 civilians in this location. George gets a little bit flaky about how timely it is and whether bin Laden will still be there if we hit it. 

After a lot of deliberation that day—and I knew Tony Zinni was adamantly opposed to it, the Commander-in-Chief, which I, representing him, let them know—we decided not to try it. If bin Laden had gone and we killed 150 people, we’d look like terrorists ourselves. So we didn’t do it.

Of course, the tracking and trying to find him continued. At one point Madeleine Albright really put the screws to us when, I think it was at the National Press Club, she made a little quip about we know where he is because we track him with his cell phone. After that, they didn’t hear from him on a cell phone again.

 It was those kinds of things that were constantly going on. Then the CIA started the program to arm one of our Predators to have something overhead where they could control it right from Langley and push the trigger and kill him. It was always something. I would say, in the Clinton administration, we met over bin Laden and terrorism on average at least once a month, if not more often.  

You said you felt you had done pretty much everything you could have done short of hitting the Taliban. But to put this in the appropriate historical perspective, at that time, bin Laden’s name would have to have been among a cluster of potential concerns for elevating the terrorist problem in the United States, wouldn’t it? 

No, it was. We had everything from the Islamic Jihad, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, to the Hamas, Hasbollah, the whole range of terrorist groups. I knew from my experience at SOCOM [Special Ops Command] already that the one we really had to be concerned about was bin Laden, because he was already operating in about sixty countries with cells. 

So it was his capabilities that raised him to a level that would have been above—

His capabilities, his rhetoric. I could tell you immediately who the leader of Osama bin Laden’s organization is. I couldn’t do that for all the others; they were just faceless names. 

Let’s take a break. 

Over lunch you mentioned that you had a conversation with, I think, Colin Powell, just before you came in as Chief. Did you seek out your predecessors in that position as you were preparing to take it, to get their advice about how you would go about doing the job? Or did you feel that because of your proximity to things previously you didn’t have to get that kind of outside input? 

First and foremost I had a meeting with Shali, the outgoing Chairman. I flew to Washington and met with him to get the lay of the land from his perspective and how things were stacking up as he saw it and where the challenges in the future were going to be. He was very helpful. We had lunch and spent probably two or three hours in conversation, which was priceless.

I called Colin and asked for his advice. I called Admiral [William J.] Crowe, the man I had been the J-33 for in an earlier life. Those were the three guys, and those were the most recent three. Then, after I became the Chairman, I felt that it was important, for two reasons, to call these guys and extend an invitation to the six surviving former Chairmen to a meeting in the Pentagon. It normally started about 2 o’clock in the afternoon, and we’d meet for about three hours. During that time I’d brief them where we were on all the current hot subjects and invite them to dinner in our home that evening. 

The reason for that was number one, to get their input, to see what advice they would offer, or what they saw up ahead that maybe we missed. The second thing was to keep them tied in. You want these former guys to be in synch with you and know that you have their support if things don’t go well. So I did that. On average once every six months I would extend an invitation, and normally all of them came. They were some great guys: Admiral Tom Moorer, who just died; David Jones, who was the Goldwater–Nichols; Jack [John] Vessey Jr., a direct appointment on Normandy, a former Chairman. I brought these guys in. They were very helpful and also very supportive. Occasionally, I’d get a letter from one of them saying, Saw your comments on TV, or Saw your testimony. You don’t get much feedback at that level, so it was good to hear from them. 

That continued. While I was in office we had the celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the position of the Chairman, and we had a big celebration. I invited President Clinton to come, and he did. It turned out to be a great time, and all these guys were there. It went well. I thought it was very important. 

To contrast that, after Rumsfeld came in, he did not want the Chairman to have any of those former chairmen come in. He just was anti anything that involved anybody outside from the military. So, as a result, since Dick Myers had one before we invaded Iraq, we haven’t had a former Chairmen’s meeting in the intervening four years. 

On the bin Laden piece, if I heard correctly, you indicated that you felt that maybe at the NSC, Condi Rice had not had her sights focused as much on bin Laden as Sandy Berger had previously. I wondered if I could get you to elaborate on that a little bit.

In general, what you had in that transition was Condi Rice coming in to take over as the National Security Advisor, who was, in retrospect, more of an aide-de-camp to President [George W.] Bush, than she was a National Security Advisor. I like Condi; she’s a great person, very smart, but the difference in style here is that President Clinton used Sandy Berger as what you’d call a Chief of Staff to coordinate the inter-agency pieces, to bring him a refined product. 

When President Bush came in, he helped make the sausage rather than waiting until they brought him something that looks like sausage. He would chair the National Security Council meetings. All the principals were there, of course. Condi was there, but she’s down in the pecking order, so she was not really running the meeting. Therefore, it was a lot more fragmented effort than you had under President Clinton.

Here’s just one example. For the Sunday morning talk shows in DC—Face the Nation, Meet the Press—Sandy would always orchestrate a conference call with those going on that morning and the principals. Then we’d play what I used to jokingly call stump the chump. You ask a question and let somebody try to answer it. Then everybody on the conference call says, I thought it was a great answer, but I think you’re a little bit off the mark here. What you said is not really correct. 

So when you went on the program that morning—maybe I’m going on Face the Nation, Secretary Cohen is on Meet the Press—you all had—I hate to use the word party line—but you all fully understood the White House policy on the issue. You were not there freelancing.

When President Bush’s team came in, we didn’t do that. We had National Security Council meetings in which the issues were not as fleshed out as they could have been because we had the main man sitting there. You’re just not going to roll out all the dirty laundry, or roll out as much as you would if there were a Chief of Staff sitting there like Condi or Sandy. And there was no coordination before the morning talk shows.

So it wasn’t infrequent that you had the Chairman go on one and the Secretary of State, Colin, go on another one, and a third one go on a third one, and all of them give a little bit different answer to the same question. 

Did your relationship change with Powell when he became Secretary of State? I guess it must have.

It changed in that instead of calling him Colin, I called him Mr. Secretary. We were still good friends. We became closer, I think—allies. We saw that Rumsfeld and his team were so misguided in several areas that he used to ask me jokingly, When you going to get that damn team in the Pentagon on course? The frustration level there for him working with Rumsfeld was pretty high, and I was more of an ally who understood where he was coming from. In many cases I thought he was dead on target as opposed to my own immediate civilian boss there, Rumsfeld. 

Were there other areas of contrast you would note between what you saw working as the Chief under Clinton and with Bush?

People often ask me to contrast the two guys. I start off by saying—in spite of how Bush looks on television and occasionally sounds—both of them are bright guys. Both of them can separate the wheat from the chaff pretty quickly. Both of them will listen to you, which I think is tremendous. When you’re talking to them, you’re the only person in the room as far as they’re concerned. 

I walked into President Clinton’s office one time with Secretary Cohen, just as the lawyers who had been in regarding the impeachment proceeding (which was taking place the next day) were walking out. I remember thinking as I walked in, How will this man be able to concentrate on what we’re getting ready to talk about? But you would have thought nothing had transpired, and that we were the only game in town that day. He really can divorce himself from other stuff and concentrate on the issue at hand. 

I didn’t have a chance to see President Bush in that way, but I have no doubt he probably can do the same thing. So there’s a lot of similarity there. 

I found President Clinton to be decisive, but only after careful consideration of all the facts. I found President Bush to be decisive, but you had to be careful because he would be prone to make a decision without all the facts. So I thought President Clinton’s decision-making style was better in terms of making sure he had considered all the facts involved and all the potential consequences of a decision before making it. They were both great guys to work for. If you asked me which one I prefer, I’d say President Clinton by far. 

Let’s go back and pick up the chronology at the point when you’re designated Chairman in ’97. We talked a little bit about your going to Bosnia. What are the major issues you deal with as Chief? What are the two or three biggest things?

Bosnia, Kosovo, or—? 

I would presume Kosovo would be one of them—not just Bosnia, but are there some other things we ought to track during your time as Chairman?

Of course, when I go into Bosnia, I’m inheriting a plan that’s already in place, and a force in place. My challenge is to make sure the command on the ground is properly supported, and at the same time, start trying to devise a plan to draw down the force, which is a challenge in itself. Those were the two principal issues I worked on Bosnia. I made a number of trips there, as I indicated, always talking to the people on the ground like Ric Shinseki, who at one point headed the entire force there. You understand where they are and their challenges, and you make sure you’re giving them the proper degree of support. 

Any time we would think about doing anything to change what was going on, I always worked back through the Commander in Chief, or the combatant commander—in this case, a guy like George Joulwan or his replacement, Wes Clark—to make sure that we were speaking with one voice and that what I was going to recommend to the Secretary was palatable to the guys who would have to execute it. 

When I went to the White House, it was to make sure that no one was going to try to force a decision that would be disastrous when it came to implementing it on the ground. So those are what you had your antennae up for. A lot of times there might be pressure to say, Let’s take 10,000 troops out of Bosnia and you have to be able to say, Okay, we can take 10,000 out, but here’s the risk. Here’s what we’d have to change if you did that. That’s what you wrestle with.

Kosovo is a little different. Now you’re talking about the use of force and what you have to think your way through before you go in, and what transpires, how you orchestrate it once it gets started. 

In both cases, you have alliance concerns to deal with, right?

You do.

How does that work? As the chief military officer, are you responsible for serving as a principal liaison for other countries’ chief military officers, or is that handled through diplomatic channels?

That’s basically handled through the Chairman. Here’s what happens. You have your NATO meetings. There are two different sets here. You have the Secretary of Defense-level meetings and you have the Chief of Military, the CHODs as we call them. In the NATO meetings with the military, you know what your secretary has approved, what the plan is. You’ve talked to your combatant commander, Wes Clark or George Joulwan. Then you go into the meeting with the NATO Chiefs of Defense, all 19 of them—or 16 of them, as it was for most of my tenure. It’s your job to convince them that this is the right way to do it and to get their support for it, to get their commitment where you can: We’re going to be behind this and we’re going to contribute to it. 

If it’s a NATO plan, you’re basically taking the combatant commander’s plan and trying to sell it to all of them in there and make sure they’re willing to support it at the levels the worker bees at NATO headquarters have said they think their country can do. In the case of Kosovo, that’s exactly what we did. Then you get down to the execution of it, which is handled by the combatant commander—in this case, Wes Clark. Of course, all the heads of government have bought into it by this time. All the Presidents and Prime Ministers have signed off on it, and now it’s rolling. You’re doing it. 

Then your job as the Chairman becomes making sure that the Chiefs of Defense—particularly Germany, Great Britain, France, and Italy—are all kept well informed about what’s going on. So, every day during that period, during Kosovo, I’m making a call to these guys to make sure they’re up to speed. When you get concerns from them about the use of their forces or the way ahead, what we’re planning to do, you work those issues. 

In one case, after we started a NATO operation in Kosovo, the Chiefs of Defense got very concerned that they didn’t know where Clark was going with this. They didn’t see any kind of plan; it seemed to be day-to-day. Their pilots were being told, Here are the targets for the day, without any clue about the overall strategy. 

So as the Chairman, I pulled my Joint Staff team together and devised what we called a strategic campaign plan for Kosovo. I sent a copy over to Wes Clark and said, Listen, we have to have something from you that looks like this. Use this or develop your own. And on top of that, I want to bring the Chiefs of Defense of the four countries I mentioned to your headquarters, and I want you to brief them. They’re not happy that they don’t see a campaign plan. Well, here’s a campaign plan. You either take it or come up with something different.  

We developed a strategy that basically was almost a targeting strategy. We’re going to take these types of targets, and we’re going to keep increasing the severity of our attack until we finally bring them to their knees, the last targets being the key bridges that were psychological things there in Belgrade. The next ones were to put people out of jobs by bombing the tank plant, which also made tractors, and which employed 30,000 people. Put them in the street. And we’re going to take out, finally, the power grids, so now their food’s rotting in their refrigerators. They don’t have lights in their place. We’re going to put the people out in the street. If anything will bring him to his knees, that will do it.

So we start with this campaign plan. I had him bring these four guys in. I flew over to be there with them. We had Wes Clark stand up and say, This is how we’re going to do it. It appeased them that we had something working. That’s the role you play. 

Now, back in the Washington, D.C. area, Wes Clark had prioritized targets he wanted to hit. I would have to go over to the White House each day with a list of targets we’re going to be bombing 48 hours out, and make sure they understood what we were doing and how we were doing it. I’d walk the President right through it: here’s what’s coming up. Once he got comfortable with the methodology and the rationale, those briefings went very quickly. Early on there were lots of questions—What’s the impact of this? What’s the impact of that? But as they started to understand what some of these targets were, they’d see repetitive types of targets coming up, and it got to be a lot faster. 

Then finally, with the President, whenever you’d have trouble—France, right toward the end, was refusing to allow us to bomb a tractor factory, the bridges, or the power grid, the three things we really needed to hit to make the people turn out in the street. I asked President Clinton if he would call [Jacques] Chirac and get him to approve those targets so we could proceed. He said, It’s late over there [France] right now but let’s get him on the phone in the morning. Within 24 hours, I had approval to hit those targets.

I got ready to leave the room that day. I’ll never forget it. We had a talk, and then Madeleine Albright and somebody else came in. So there were about four or five of us there. We finished talking about the operation, and we all got ready to leave. President Clinton got between me and the door. Everybody was filtering out, and he was talking to them. Every time I made a move to the right, he stepped to the right. I couldn’t get around him to get to the door. Finally Bill Cohen was the last one at the door, and then Clinton and me. President Clinton said, Bill, I’ll see you later or something, and he closed the door. He turned around and looked at me and said, Hugh, if you were king for a day, what would you do at this point in this war? 

I knew where he was coming from; we’d been at it for 45 days, and on the surface, to the American people, it didn’t look like the end was in sight. I had warned the President early on that an air campaign alone cannot guarantee victory. The only thing that could give us a victory for sure was if we decided to invade. Of course, Clark had come in with a grandiose plan of 500,000 people about a week or two before that, and the Joint Chiefs basically had laughed him out of town. They thought that was one of the dumbest things they’d ever seen put together. It would not work the way he had it outlined. 

I looked at the President and said, Mr. President—and I’m feeling the pressure now, because I’ve put all my eggs in this one basket. I said, I would not change a thing. We’re starting to see, through intel, cracks and fissures in his armor over there. I really believe, with your help in getting Chirac’s approval on this, if anything is going to turn him around and make him surrender, this is what will do it. If this doesn’t work, we’ll have to have another session here, and I’ll have to reassess. But right now, I would stay the course; I wouldn’t change a thing you’re doing. He smiled and said, Good, okay. I left. 

Two days later, I was in my office in the Pentagon and got a frantic call. I think it was my intel guy, J-2. He said, Mr. Chairman, we’re picking up on the intel net now that the Serbs have just surrendered. They’re just making noise over there; they’re going to give up. [Slobodan] Milosevic is trying to get out of town. The Serb military is not supporting him any more; they’re with the people. 

Well, here’s an ironic thing that had happened. About a week before that, I’d had a visit from one of my NATO counterparts. I always hosted a dinner for them. On their last night in Washington they’d come to my house, and there’d be a full-blown dinner with entertainment and everything. That evening, during dinner, he told me that he knew the Chief of Defense for Serbia really well, and in fact, that guy had been over to see him about two weeks before that. 

I said, Do me a favor then, when you get back. Get in touch with him [the chief of Serbian forces] and tell him that if things start going south on him, if he sees that the political leadership is starting to give up or to weaken, he should not join Milosevic and try to protect him. Let him go. Stay with the people there, and we won’t treat your forces as war criminals. We basically won’t do anything harmful to your forces after that, as long as they’re on the right side. 

I got a call back from him about two days later saying, Message delivered. So when they told me that the military was now siding with the people, I really felt good. And sure enough, he surrendered, and it worked. I felt a lot better. 

That was a momentous decision, one-on-one with the President in the Oval Office, what would you do differently? I didn’t know whether it was going to work. It runs counter to the grain to say we can win a war with air power alone. 

We skirted the original decisions that were taken to go down that road. A lot of the contemporaneous accounts indicate that there was some division of opinion within the administration about whether we could do it with air power. 

All of us in the military recognize that airpower alone normally is not going to win a war. You have to occupy the ground. You have to take his headquarters away from him. But there was no stomach for that in NATO. There was no stomach in NATO even to carry out the vigorous air campaign we had. The Americans started doing the heavy lifting in that. Of course, we were providing the preponderance of air power and all the air refueling, and so on, that you have to have to do, because we were the only ones with the capability. 

But, having said that, the other NATO countries jumped in. When I went over and visited, like at Aviana [air base]—which I did two or three times during the war—it would be two American F-16s taking off, followed by two Spanish, followed by two French. It was pretty impressive to watch. It really was working; the teams were working well together. But there was that initial—and even continuing, right on up to the end—Clark himself, thinking that he had been short-circuited in this process and that he should have been given 500,000 troops to put on the ground. Well, if he had gotten 500,000, my guess is about 425,000 would have been Americans, and another 50,000 Brits, and the other 25,000 from the remaining 14 countries, a thousand each. It doesn’t work unless you have everybody saying, We’ll give you what you need. 

You were doing contingency planning through the early stages of this air campaign to figure out how you were going to get troops moved in there in the event you needed them.

Yes, Clark’s responsibility was to start figuring that out. We tried to support him. For example, when he came in with a request to put Apaches into Macedonia, to get ready to use them in Serbia, we had a big debate among the Joint Chiefs, and we ended up splitting 4 to 2 about whether we should even let him have them over there. My position was that we should allow the CINC to have the assets he needs to fight the war, but that we needed to make sure he did not employ them inside Serbia until such time as the conditions had been set that they would survive. That meant taking out a lot of air defense. We would know when that happened, because we had means of telling. 

General [Michael E.] Ryan, the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, and one other Joint Chief (I don’t remember which one) did not agree with that. They thought we shouldn’t even go down that road. We should just keep them here in the U.S. So I went to the President and told him that I recommended we go ahead and allow Clark to deploy the Apaches in Macedonia, let the pilots get familiar with flying the terrain over there, which has some density altitude problems. Let them learn how to do it. 

Then, if the conditions were right in Serbia, he could start using them. He could kill a lot of targets pretty fast. But we had run a computer model of that, using Apaches in Serbia with the current air defense system, and it said that basically he would lose all 18 of them within three days. We could not allow that to happen. I briefed the President on that, told him the recommendation was to deploy them, but don’t allow him to employ them until we give him an order that says he can.

We did that. It took him forever to get the Apaches in there. He brought them out of Europe. We knew it was going to take a while. We weren’t concerned about them, because they were going to self deploy, meaning they’d fly down. But you have to move their 50 big trucks—with all their parts and everything else—over land, and that was going to take a while. 

The press made a big deal of the fact that it was taking forever to get the Apaches in and so on. How long it took to get there was never any real concern to the military; it was just media hype. So we did that. Of course, we took some heat in that we had reserved the right of the CINC to use those assets. We did that for good reason, which I will stand behind until the day I go to my grave. We ended up winning and never had to employ them. The model said it would have been a lousy thing to do, and I don’t know how you would explain doing it. It would have given the Serbs a real advantage to be able to shoot down Apaches and capture the crew and all that. 

We had a decided advantage in air power in that campaign. Of course, I took some criticism for it, because, given the advancement we had made in precision munitions since Desert Storm, we now could have aircraft flying at 30,000 feet, using either GPS or a television camera in the front of a bomb that can pinpoint accuracy like we’ve never seen in the history of mankind. We have TLAM missiles that can put missiles not only on the target, but we can choose which floor of the building. If we’re sitting on the third floor, we can program the TLAM to come through the third floor window and detonate as soon as it gets inside. 

We have incredible accuracy. So we were killing Serbs left and right without them being able to even come close to hitting us. Of course, people in Washington, the pundits, were saying, You’re not fighting a fair war. My answer is, I never intended to fight fairly. I intended to fight to win. That’s how we approached it, and it worked.

Did you have to help resolve other big issues or disputes related to the prosecution of the Kosovo campaign?

There was one when the Russians made a run to one of the key airfields there. Clark called me about 2:00 in the morning and said the Russians had moved out—2:00 in the morning eastern time, probably about 8:30 or 9:00. The Russians were making a mad run towards this airfield to seize it. He wanted basically to go head-to-head with them using his forces and some of the British tanks to stop them. I told him I didn’t agree with that at all, and I was sure that Charles Guthrie, with the Brits, would not agree.

He called Charles Guthrie, and Charles Guthrie disagreed. So the Russians seized the airfield, and that became a big political issue in the middle of the war. But, to me, it was a pimple on an elephant’s rear end, to say the least, in the grander scheme of things.

You were talking about the accuracy of the munitions, but that’s subject to the quality of the intelligence you’re using, and there was a problem with the Chinese embassy. Can you tell us how that information came to you?

Sure. We had a targeting list. Of course, we also had a do not hit list; every embassy, hospital, etc. in Belgrade was off limits, marked as do not hit. Not only do not hit, but we did an impact study. We looked at how many people would be killed by flying glass, by flying rubble, how many people would be deafened by the sound. We drew a circle around each target and made sure there wasn’t anything in there we didn’t want to hit. We tried to do it as humanely as you can fight a war. 

You had cultural sites on these?

Oh, yes. We had everything—hospitals, you name it. We got the embassy list from the State Department, and we marked each building. One of the buildings we were planning to hit was not marked as anything. We had some intel that said it was a facility that provided something that made it a good military target. So Clark put that on the targeting list and hits it.

Immediately the news comes that the Chinese embassy was hit. Well, the Chinese embassy is over here, and we hit this building down here. But one of the former defense attachés saw the report and saw a picture of the building on CNN, and he called in and said, Hey, you guys hit the Chinese embassy. Our guys said, Hell no, it was an intel— We didn’t hit the Chinese embassy. 

He said, Oh yes, they moved. You may have thought they were still in the old building, but just recently they moved to this building. That took us all by surprise. We said, Okay, we screwed it up. But it was based on an approved State Department list. The irony of it is that our remedy for that was to send the list back over to the State Department and say, Please verify the accuracy of these damn embassies you’ve given us. Get in touch with somebody to make sure we’ve got it right. 

About three or four days later, we got that thing back, and they still had the Chinese embassy located where it was. [laughter] The irony is that in the building we hit, the Chinese embassy—which was a mistake, we didn’t mean to hit the Chinese embassy—we found out later they had some of their super-sensitive intelligence-gathering gear along with some highly qualified intelligence experts who were killed. So they lost not only their intelligence gathering for Serbia, but apparently it was a regional site. It disappeared. That’s one reason they got so upset about it. They lost that instantaneously. But it wasn’t by design. We were just lucky. 

As clean as that war went, we were just lucky the collateral damage and the number of people killed by mistake were limited. In another good example, a young F-16 pilot hit a bridge. He used a television-guided bomb, and his target was to take out this bridge. It was a train bridge the Serbia military used to haul their supplies from up in the Belgrade area out to the Kosovo area. We were going to take it out. 

The pilot released a thousand-pound bomb with a TV camera in front of it. He was up above the clouds. He went down, broke through the clouds, and immediately he had a good view—albeit a distant view. It was like a postage stamp. I saw the film. That bridge was a postage stamp. He flew that bomb right toward that postage stamp, and it got bigger and bigger, and before long you could see it was a bridge. It really started closing in fast on the bridge, and right at the last second, you see a train coming onto the bridge. 

Well, it wouldn’t have been a big deal except there were about 20 civilians riding on the train in addition to the military and the military supplies. He got the train—I called it a two-fer. It wasn’t a big deal to me, but Clark apparently got pretty upset about it and launched an investigation. 

I happened to be at the fighter unit based at Aviano; the families of those pilots flying out of Aviano live right there at the base. So every night their husband finishes dinner and puts on his uniform and says, I’ll be back in the morning. He gets in his jet and goes and flies a mission. Well, you can imagine the tenseness of the families. One of their lieutenant colonels was the first guy we lost, and we had to use Special Ops to pick him up and bring him back.

I flew in there, and they were having a picnic. They had all the family members out there. They were in shorts, and they were having a good time. The lieutenant colonel commanding the unit walked over and said, You see the tall captain standing over there? I said, Yes. 

He said, Well, that’s his wife there with him. He’s the guy who was flying the F-16 that hit the bridge. He’s having a tough time with it. On top of that, Clark has launched an investigation, and he’s concerned that there’s going to be some kind of action taken against him. This has really gotten to him. He’s one of our very best pilots. In fact, he’s going to be a member of the Thunderbirds when he gets back to the U.S. 

I said, Let me talk to him. I walked over to him and introduced myself. My wife was with me. I introduced her to them. I met his wife. Finally I turned around and looked at him and said, Hey, Jim, I understand you’re the guy who flew the F-16 that hit the bridge and took out the train. I could see the tension come up in him immediately. He was wondering what the hell was coming. Am I going to be relieved; are they going to strip my rank off here in public? He said, Yes, sir, yes, sir. I didn’t mean to hit the train. 

I said, Captain, you hit the target we paid you to hit. You’re one of our very best. You did exactly what I asked you to do, and God bless you. Screw the train. Who gives a shit? I’ll be with you throughout—you don’t have to worry about any investigation. If anybody wants to do anything to you, they’ll have to do it to both of us, okay? You’re on my team, and you did what we asked you to do.

The guy broke down, out of control with tears, sobbing. I put my arm around him and said, Hey, you’re okay, you got it. I left. The lieutenant colonel came over to me. He was just elated that I had done that. I called back over there in about three days and said, How’s he doing? He said, Oh, sir, since you left, he’s a new man. He’s fighting to get back there and go again. 

I said, Good, good. I never heard a word about any investigation. I knew the word would get back very quickly that you’re spinning your wheels if you think you’ll do anything to this man. That was a great day. I got to meet all the pilots and their families. I was right there with the people fighting it, and I got to hear their concerns. I got to see what we could do better to support them in this endeavor where decisions are needed fast, and what they needed. 

I landed at one point over in Italy, and I was met by the Chief of Naval Operations along with the guy who headed the air operations center for General Clark. Jim Ellis, a four-star admiral, down in Naples, Italy, grabbed me and rushed me into a conference room, closed the door and just started talking about how dicked up everything was, how Clark was micromanaging the air war. They didn’t know until about 10 o’clock at night what they were going to be flying the next morning. It was out of control. Ellis was about to quit. It was really bad news.

I flew into Mildenhall to refuel on the way back and met John Jumper, who later became Chief of Staff of the Air Force, but then he was the guy for Air Force in Europe, AFEUR. He grabbed me, took me upstairs to his headquarters, and I got the same thing from him. 

So when I got back, I called Wes Clark and said, Hey, Wes, we have some major issues right now. Let me tell you the feedback I’m getting. We need to straighten this out today, right now. I talked to him like he was my son: here’s what you have to do. Then I followed up with all three of those guys, and I got the feedback that it was getting a lot better; things were starting to smooth out. That’s the role you play as Chairman. 

Then you walk back to the President, and he says, How did your trip go? You say, Oh, it was wonderful, Mr. President. Things are going great. 

You don’t burden him with the details. 

No need to tell him the stuff you can take care of. Now, if it’s something you pick up on that’s becoming a big issue, like we have a shortage of a particular type of bomb or something. Occasionally you’d pick up stuff in the press. They’d be saying, They’re running out of TLAMs or whatever. You assure the President, The press reports on this are dead wrong. We have more TLAMs than we could fire in the next year. You keep him informed, but you don’t burden him with stuff.  

And is the same true with Sandy Berger? Do you come back and have a conversation with Sandy and tell him that things are—? 

You get him involved a little more in the nitty-gritty than you would the President himself, just so he has a better feel. If you’re working with a guy like Wes Clark—and you probably read about this later on, why he was taken out early over there—Wes would tell me one thing because he thought it was what I wanted to hear. He’d tell Bill Cohen something else, and then he’d pick up the line and call Madeleine Albright. He knew the State Department had a different twist. It was like playing three sons against one another. 

That was what I wanted to get you to elaborate on. Clark’s a little difficult for those of us on the outside trying to figure out where the alliances were internally with him, especially as it related to his promotion—or lack thereof.

I went to my first four-star meeting, which the Army Chief of Staff has. It’s only the Army four stars. At that time I think there were 12 or 13 of us. I was the new guy on the block. They were sitting around a table like this. The Chief was sitting there, and he said, Okay, the Secretary has just nominated Clark for his third star. Are all of you okay with that? 

They went around the table. He started with the senior guy over here, and I was the last guy sitting over there. I knew Wes from the War College. I came out of the War College with Wes in ’83. We’d been classmates. That was my only association with him. When I was working on personnel assignments for the Army, I knew of a Wes Clark who at that time was a captain, a bright guy who was moving so fast through the ranks that he never had time to really get into a job before he moved on to the next one. There were many officers who were critical of him. I thought, That’s somebody who’s just envious of how fast the guy is moving. I never paid much attention to it. 

But then, these four-stars start in on Wes. It was like confession for every one of these guys. They were all down on him. All of them were saying he’s egotistical, he lacks integrity. I was sitting there wondering, How did he ever get where he is now if he worked for you guys, and you didn’t cut him off? I was mad by the time they got to me. I looked at the Chief and said, Chief, I have to tell you. I only know him from the War College. He’s personable, he’s articulate, he’s intelligent. Short of that, I don’t know. I hear comments being made about his integrity, but I haven’t seen him, and I just don’t know. I stopped. I couldn’t add anything further. 

Well, they all were crying the blues, but he got the three-star job. And then, of course, once he gets the three-star job, they don’t have anything to say about it. The three stars and four stars are nominations and appointments, and they don’t get to vote. That was my introduction to Wes. 

My findings about him in the job were that he would tend to take an issue he wanted to work, and he would call me. I would tell him I think it’s a great idea, or I think it’s the dumbest idea I ever heard. Some of his ideas fell into both categories. If I thought it was a good idea, he’d ask me to work it with the Secretary. If I said, Wes, that’s the dumbest freaking idea I’ve ever heard. Who in the hell came up with that? he’d come back with, Some of the guys just suggested it, and I thought I’d run it by you.

He didn’t know that there were a couple of guys on his staff who knew me a lot better than they knew him. They would be concerned that he was getting ready to do something really dumb. So they would call one of their friends on the Joint Staff and say, Tell the Chairman Clark is getting ready to do so-and-so. So I would already know about it and would already, in most cases, have thought through it before he ever came to me with it. 

If he didn’t like the answer I gave, if I said it was a really dumb idea, he would turn in some cases and go over to Madeleine Albright and sell it to her. Then he’d let her go into one of these inter-agency meetings and suggest we ought to be doing that. You’d recognize immediately where it came from. In a couple of cases, Wes was caught red-handed at it, having tried one and missed it with the other one, so he’d try it with somebody else.  

Why would Madeleine Albright listen to someone in a position like that?

She likes Wes. She always has. Theirs was a great relationship. I don’t know where it started. Oh, I guess it was when he was the J-5 for Shali. He worked closely with the State Department at the time. I guess in those latter months there, before he ended up going over to NATO and I went to be the Chairman, he got to know her well. He probably traveled with her a couple of times.

Cohen caught him at it a couple of times, red-handed. He told Cohen one thing, and then he’d be in a meeting with Madeleine Albright and Madeleine would say, Well, Wes called me this morning. Cohen told me one time, You call that son of a bitch, and you tell him if he calls Albright again, he’s fired.

So I’d call him. I wouldn’t tell him exactly the words the Secretary used, I’d say, Hey, Wes, let me give you some warning, friend. You have to quit calling Albright. If the Secretary finds out you called her again, you’re going to be looking for a new job. That’s still pretty blunt. But that went on for a year. Cohen grew to detest him because he couldn’t trust him. That was where the friction came.

Were these things issues unrelated to Kosovo? This was before Kosovo picked up?

It was rated a Bosnia draw-down, and then it carried over into the planning for Kosovo, and then finally into the execution of Kosovo, spread out over about a year, a year and a half. 

Is it possible to make an evaluation of his performance only on Kosovo? What’s your sense about how well things went generally there? 

If you backed off from the guidance he got, the things he was told directly to do, we start off first of all with him scrambling in the first two days to come up with enough targets to have the NATO campaign that he’s getting ready to execute. We had the Joint Staff working targets to try to get him enough targets to keep going. It was a very poor performance, to be very candid. There was no campaign plan. We put it together and gave it to him and said, This is what a campaign plan looks like. 

You attribute that to a lack of seasoning?

I attribute it to a lack of war-fighting capability. A good political military guy, now in an operational environment, has suddenly been thrust into having to put together an operational plan and execute it, and it falls short. For example, he comes to Washington to argue with the Joint Chiefs that he needs—actually, he’s going to the White House, but he’s going through the Joint Chiefs—500,000 troops on the ground.

The timing of this is before the air campaign?

No, no, after the air campaign. It’s about a month into the air campaign, before the surrender. There had been a lot of concern there about not having a ground plan. Even a lot of retired Army generals were very concerned about roles and missions and whether the Air Force was going to be viewed as the preeminent force because we can win a war. They’re arguing that we need ground troops; we’re not going to win without ground troops. You have all that being played out in front of you in the press. 

Now you have Wes suddenly seeing visions of being another [Norman] Schwarzkopf with 500,000 ground troops, and you know where that leads. So he comes to Washington with a military plan to invade. It’s going to carry us in through a couple of really shaky ports, and our guys had done some port studies. He’s had the engineers visit some of these sites to make sure that what he’s going to recommend to the Joint Chiefs is feasible. 

One of the places he has in his plan is a logistical over-the-shore plan, where he will bring in the big ships to support this plan logistically and offload over the beach. His engineers had just gotten back the day before from their site assessment, and their assessment was it’s not feasible; it won’t work. 

He briefs a plan to the Joint Chiefs that has that linked as one of the key assumptions that has to hold true in order for the plan to work. Before he comes to the tank, we already know the engineers have said it won’t work. Yet he briefs the plan without telling anybody that that information is already there, and it won’t work. The only thing I could ever figure out is that he didn’t have time to change his plan or to come up with a new plan. He was already scheduled to come to the White House. He just tried to slide it by, and then he’d say later on, I just got news it won’t work. Now I need some time to work a new plan. I thought that was an integrity issue of the first order.  

The Joint Chiefs weren’t going to be in favor of a ground plan anyway. We’d already discussed that in the tank. Everybody agreed Clark needed to come up with a plan, but not until we knew for sure the air plan that we’d need to start wasn’t going to work. Then we’d have a period during which we’d just continue to bomb the hell out of them while we deployed the ground plan. So it didn’t fly. 

What about Clark’s relationship with the White House? Was that problematic for you? Was Clinton enthralled with Clark in the way—?

President Clinton told me one time, You know, there’s this feeling out there that General Clark and I are very close. We’re both from Arkansas, and we were both Rhodes Scholars. But I hardly know the man; you need to understand that. I don’t want any military officer to get hurt because of his association with me, one way or the other. So that’s where I stand with General Clark. 

I think there was a feeling with President Clinton—he’d have to answer the question—that Clark was very bright. He knew the man had capabilities; otherwise, he wouldn’t be where he was. 

Sure.

President Clinton probably never saw firsthand the integrity issues with the man. So probably he thinks a lot higher of him than most who know Wes Clark well. 

Armed with that information, does it become a part of your role to try to reassure people you’re dealing with in military planning that, in fact, ultimately the President is going to listen to reason and not be won over by somebody they may feel has an inside track with him?

Yes, for sure. I tried to convince the Joint Chiefs, Don’t worry about Clark going to the White House. Don’t worry about Clark making a presentation to do this or that. Ultimately right will prevail; I’m confident of that. 

One person we haven’t talked about at all is Al Gore. Is Gore a presence in your—? 

I’ll give you a little vignette about Gore. Kosovo is ongoing. We have a concern along the Serbia–Kosovo border. There have been a lot of exchanges of gunfire. The concern is to be sure we don’t have another Somalia where one of our guys gets captured and dragged through the streets of Belgrade. After talking to Wes and talking to the Secretary, we decide we will pull our troops back from the international border there by three kilometers, about a mile and a half, to give us a safety margin, so we don’t stray into Serbian territory.

Clark calls me one afternoon and says, I’ve now completed the pullback. We are three km away all along the border. I said okay. I went to the White House that afternoon and reported that. Gore was present. Clinton was present. It was in the Oval Office. 

But in the middle of the night, three Americans strayed into Serbian territory and had been captured. The initial report coming in that morning from Wes Clark said, as best they can determine right now, they were fired on by someone, and in the darkness got disoriented and drove straight into Serbia instead of driving straight back to the headquarters. They drove the wrong way and ended up being captured. Well, things happen. It makes sense that that could happen in the middle of the night.

The next morning, I’m over for a morning update for the President on how Kosovo is going. Cohen and George Tenet and I go in. I don’t think Madeleine was there that morning, but she may have been. I start off with the President: Mr. President, since I’ve talked to you last— 

But before I can say anything else, Al Gore jumps in and says, Mr. President, before we go any further, I think you’re owed an explanation. Yesterday you were assured that these soldiers had been pulled back by a kilometer and a half, and now this morning you’re going to be told that we have three captured. This is God-damn wrong, and I think you deserve a better explanation and a good explanation as to how that could happen. Really ugly as hell.

President Clinton turns around and looks over at Gore and says, Al, you know, this is a war, and everything doesn’t go just as you plan it. Now how about you just sit there and let’s hear what’s going on. I mean basically, Shut up and be quiet. I understand we had three captured. I could have jumped up and applauded. I’m going to get to the status of the three guys and how it could happen. I went on to brief him.

A lot of times Gore would be very supportive in recommendations and would jump in and say, I agree with the General; that’s where we want to go, or whatever. Most of the time he was either a non-player, or he was absent. He was absent more than he was present. I don’t know whether that was by design. He wasn’t at a lot of meetings.

The story you just told then was atypical of the relationship you saw that Clinton had with Gore?

Yes. As far as I could tell, they seemed to have a good relationship. I never detected any animosity between the two. I really thought that clearly Gore was attacking me. I’m a military guy. I’m the one who told the President they’d all been pulled back. I did tell him that, and I told him that based on the reports I’m receiving in Washington, which should be another indication for everybody there that all the news you get in Washington isn’t necessarily true. 

I thought it was President Clinton defending me. Would you shut your freaking mouth and let the man explain what we’ve got going on? I’ll make my own judgments whether I think he was wrong or told me something that wasn’t true at the time. He was very good.

Did Clinton have a temper? Does he have a temper that you saw?

Yes. I saw him get red a couple of times, but I never really saw him flare up. Very levelheaded, very evenhanded. 

Is a part of your role as Chief during this period also going up on the Hill and dealing with people there?

Oh yes, for sure. 

Tell me a little more about that.

It was on everything you can imagine. For example, I’m in Japan visiting my Chief of Defense in Japan. I’m planning to be there for two or three days. The second morning I get up and I have a phone call from Sandy Berger. Cohen was in Australia. Both Cohen and I were being called back by the President to testify on the Stockpile Stewardship Program. That’s a fancy name for a supercomputer that can basically carry out the arithmetic or computer formulas that will show you how your stockpile of nuclear weapons ages over time. We don’t make any more of them, and the ones we have are degrading. It’s all tied into how many weapons we can draw down and still have enough to protect the country.

I was being asked, along with Cohen, to return to Washington that day to testify the next morning at a Congressional hearing on whether that program would survive. So I immediately got on the aircraft, an Air Force two, 757, and they rolled out the king-size bed. I went to sleep. We flew all night and got into D.C. the next morning at 8 o’clock. They never stopped so I could go from the plane straight to Congress to testify. Things like that occurred, not too infrequently. 

Now there are other standard times you have to go to Congress: when you have your annual posture statement hearings, when you’re testifying on the readiness of the armed forces, which are very extensive. Some of them involved three or four of these catalog briefcases, big briefcases loaded with books, all of them about 40 subjects each. Everything from the passage of the right whale down in Georgia and the impact on sonar submarines to the number of nuclear weapons in our stockpiles. There’s just a whole gamut. The readiness of our C-5 fleet. Every service and every issue they have, and every politician who has something out of his state that he’s worried about, you’re likely to be asked about. 

For the most part I found testifying to be high adventure, because they’re listening to every word you say. But for the most part, it got to be relatively easy to do, particularly by the third and fourth year, because I had gotten pretty familiar with most of the subjects. Some time I’d know a particular Congressman on there is going to be anti-me or anti-military or whatever. 

McCain is a good example. It was almost like he didn’t like Army guys because he had been Navy. He took great pride in trying to slash me up when I was up there—to the point that one time I had a lot of barbs I was going to throw back at him. I’d had enough. 

I told Secretary Cohen that one day. The last time we were testifying together, he said, How do you feel about going over tomorrow? I said, I don’t feel too good about it, simply because I know McCain is going to try to use me as a whipping boy, and I’m not sure I’m going to take it. I hate for you to be there when I beat up on him. Cohen said, Oh, John—you don’t have to worry about him. I was the best man at his wedding. He’s a piece of cake. Don’t worry about him. I’ve got that. 

I said, Good. So we go over to the hearing the next morning, and McCain’s there. Sometimes he wouldn’t show up. I said, Oh boy, this is going to be good. He starts off, he asks Cohen a question and then he commences to tongue–lash Cohen like you’ve never heard in your life, up one side and down the other. So I write a little note, and I hand it to Cohen. It says, I’m glad he’s your friend and not mine. 

Cohen starts smiling while McCain is up there lashing him. It was an adventure to go over there, to say the least. But I never worried about it, because they’re all basically harmless. They can sit there and ask you anything they want, and you can say, I’ll check and get back to you with an answer for the record. You don’t have to answer it. 

Did anybody else give you particular trouble, beyond taking whacks at you in testimony?

No, the only other time I ran into a problem was before we went in front of the committee one day. I had a meeting with Senator [John] Warner, head of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He said, I’ll tell you, I don’t know how we’re going to deal with this proposal for cutting the Department of Defense. The majority leader is insistent that we do it, but I’m going to ask you about that today. I’d like for you to come out as strongly as you can against that, because I know your problems and your challenges. 

So I got up there. I had been in a meeting the day before in Cohen’s office with him and John Hamre. John Hamre said, You know, if they cut us, this is just going to be incredible. We’re going to have to cut people. It’s an across-the-board cut; you can’t determine which departments it comes out of, or which of your programs. Everything takes a decrement of 3 to 5%. In our case, that means we’ll have to cut 30,000 people out of the inventory instantaneously before the end of the year. That will be a disaster.

When Warner asked me about it, he wanted something like that. What I didn’t know was that the night before, the Majority Leader had called a meeting of his key people, including Warner, and said, Okay, I’m getting some resistance on this cut. I want you all to get off that. I want you to get in line; we’re going to cut everybody 3% across the board. 

He asked me, and I came out strong against the cut. I said, As an example, we’ll have to take 30,000 men and women out of uniform, and we can’t afford to do that right now. But that’s what it’ll require. 

The next day the paper carried my comment that it would be disastrous, or something like that, incredible. [Theodore] Stevens from the Appropriations Committee became the stalking dog. They tried to trash me. They did everything they could to try to belittle me because I had used that word. Again, it was a Republican thing: You’re after us. That went on for about a month. My guys worked behind the scenes to try to defuse it, get him off it, but they weren’t having much success. 

Finally, I’m going to go testify again before Stevens and the Appropriations Committee. So I had about ten sharp, deep-cutting quick things, like, If you’d cut 5% out of the pork that you put into Alaska, that would solve the problem, Senator. I had some really ugly stuff in there. I had come up with it on my own because I was mad. My guys are saying, Chairman, don’t do that. God, don’t do that. I said, No, I’ve had it. They’re taking shots at my character, taking shots at my integrity, and I’ve had all that I’m going to take because I’ll put that up against all of them put together.

So I go in there, and it’s a piece of cake. They don’t say anything derogatory. I guess they got word. I think my guys probably fed their guys saying, Don’t do it. This is going to really get ugly. I couldn’t believe the difference. I walked out of there—it took me a while to figure out, that’s probably what made the difference. But, again, it may have taken the threat just to get them off it. 

But other than those isolated incidents, I had a good relationship with the Congress. I’ll give you two quick examples. This involves President Clinton. When I was Commander in Chief, I had been party to the cuts in the military. All of us agreed that the Berlin Wall had come down, and we had Desert Storm behind us. We didn’t have a Soviet threat any more. We could afford to decrease the size of the military—walk it down slowly, but walk it down. 

We had a plan that started carrying this out. We did that in ’96, when we had the final cuts come in. It actually started about ’94, after Desert Storm. It had started before Desert Storm, got stopped, temporarily spiked, and then it started down again. Well, by ’96, ’97, what we started seeing was that the decrease in the size of the military would have been great, except for the increase in the amount of ethnic tribal and religious warfare had been going up—the Balkans being one prime example—and the use of force in many other places around the globe, to the point that we were too thin, and we were starting to have some readiness problems.

When I was Commander in Chief of Special Ops, we didn’t have readiness problems. I fought for the budget I needed, and everybody understood those are the guys at the tip of the spear. They get it. So when I went up to D.C. to be the Chairman in ’97, all this ground noise about lack of readiness was starting to build, and you’re starting to see reports. I have Congressmen coming to Tampa to look at my readiness, and I’m wondering—I’m in good shape. Congressman [Isaac] Skelton is a good example. 

He came down and said, General, the reason I’m here is we’re getting all kinds of reports about lack of readiness. I said, Mr. Congressman, you’re in the wrong place. The only problem I have is an AC-130 part that I can’t get, which has grounded four AC-130s, but it’s not lack of money. I have the money to buy the part, but the guy who made the part has gone bankrupt, and he’s the only guy who could make it. So now we’re scrambling.

So he said okay and went back. I went before these committees, and they kept asking me about readiness. I went back in the tank, talking to the Joint Chiefs. I said, Do you have readiness issues? They all said, No, we’re in good shape. That went on for about two months.

Finally, I called my guys in and said, Pull out the readiness reports of every battalion-level or ship-level in the Navy. I want to see 20 examples of the commanders’ comments— meaning the 05, the lieutenant colonel-level of comments— from all services. I want to see what they’re saying. 

When I saw those, I almost fell out of my chair. I have lieutenant colonels out there, Air Force guys, saying, I have four planes sitting out on the tarmac that don’t have engines in them because I have no money to buy new engines.

Armed with that data, I went back in the tank, and I had all the Chiefs. I said, Okay, do you have readiness problems? I went around, and all of them said no. I said, Guys, I’m telling you, some of us in this room are out of touch. Let me read you some examples of things I’m getting out of your readiness reports. Well, when I read them that, they just flat out said, Okay, it’s bigger than we thought. They hadn’t read them.  

They just had not done their homework.

They hadn’t done their homework. I said, This is a damn abortion, guys. We have to get on this; we have to fix this. And working with the Chiefs over the next week or so, I determined that it was going to take a lot of money to fix it. 

Analogous to this, when I first got up there, before I left Tampa, I had eaten lunch with six Air Force sergeants out on the beach one morning. They set up a rapidly deployable camp for Special Ops when there’s nothing there. They’re all Air Force, it’s a unit. I had breakfast with them. I was really impressed with all six Air Force NCOs. I asked, How many of you are going to re-enlist? They had between three and six years of service. Four of them said they weren’t. I asked why. 

They told me about our broken retirement system. It had come into effect in 1986. It was a different one than I was under or anyone else before 1986. But, here we are in 1996 or ’97, and they’re telling me this thing has been in effect for 10 years and it’s broken. So I went back to my headquarters and asked my Army colonel there, a J-1, to come tell me about the new retirement system and what the differences are. I looked at it and said, This is incredible. 

I got to Washington about a month later, as the Chairman. I called my Air Force brigadier in and said, Take this briefing I got in Tampa, go back, flesh it out. I want you to go in and brief the Chiefs on the retirement program. This is something we have to get on. He briefed it. He titled the thing, Houston, we have a problem. He showed it to the Chiefs, and none of them believed him. He said, It’s true. They said, Surely it’s better than that.

When we combined that retirement system with the readiness problems, the price was going to be $155 billion to fix it.  

You’re discovering this in ’97.

Just as I get up there, ’97. I take over 1 October ’97.

I’m cross-referencing, because ’97 is the same year they reach a balanced budget agreement. [laughter]

Right. But it’s also the time when the surpluses are building big time. The deficit is gone, the projected surpluses are astronomical. I’m not even paying attention to that at the time, per se. We were in a period in the Pentagon, when I brief the Joint Chiefs on the bill, the Marine Commandant, [Charles] Krulak, said to me, First of all, I don’t support your program to ask for an increase, because if it comes, it will come out of hide, and I don’t want to break my modernization programs. 

I looked at him and said, Chuck, your troops and their families are 14 percentage points behind their civilian counterparts in pay. We have a retirement system that’s broken—for our NCOs in particular, but for the officer corps as well. And you’re telling me that you’re going to lobby for not doing that? Who the hell do you think will lobby for the troops if it’s not the six of us in this room? Okay? Now, Air Force? 

The Air Force Chief said, I’m against it also. I just don’t think we’ll get any more than a billion dollars. I think we’ll waste our efforts if we ask for any more than that. 

So I said, Joe Ralston? He said, Chairman, I don’t think you ought to adopt this program, because if you do, you’re probably going to fail. I don’t think you’ll get more than a billion dollars, and I don’t think you want your legacy to go down as a guy who came in and fought for some big program and didn’t get it. You’ll be viewed as a failure. 

I said, Okay, I hear all of you. But let me tell you where I stand. We’re the lobbyists for our troops, to keep their pay up to speed and to make sure that they and their families can put food on the table every night. When it comes to the programs that succeed or fail, I’d rather be noted as one who tried to do what was right and failed than one who set a low standard and achieved it. So I’m going to talk to the Secretary, and if the Secretary agrees with it, I’m planning to go forward with this. Now, let me go around the room. If I tell you I’m going forward with it, how many of you will be with me? 

I started around on Joe Ralston’s side. Joe said, I’ll be with you. It went around. By the time it got around, Krulak recognized the handwriting on the wall, and he said, I’ll be with you too. So I went up to the Secretary. The Secretary looked at it and said, Okay, let’s get Bill Lynn in. He was the comptroller for DoD.

Bill came in and said, I think you can get a billion dollars. I don’t think you’ll get any more than that. The Secretary said, I’ll tell you what. You go out and revise your figures to line up with the ones the Chairman has. We’re going forward.

And we did. We called President Clinton over to meet with the Joint Chiefs along with all of our combatant commanders. I told the combatant commanders, Okay, here’s your chance. I don’t want to hear what you’re going to say, but I’m going to go around the room and ask you to comment about your readiness with the President here, unrehearsed. You just say what’s on your mind. 

The President came over; it was at Fort McNair at the National War College, with John Hamre, Bill Clinton, Bill Cohen, the Joint Chiefs, and me, and with all the combatant commanders. Just as I’d promised, I went right around the table. In one case, my guy out in Scott Air Force base who heads TRANSCOM [U.S. Transportation Command] spoke up and said, It has gotten so bad, Mr. President, that we actually have retirees in the San Antonio area putting up billboards saying ‘Don’t enlist in the Armed Forces. They don’t keep their commitments. They break their promises.’ 

When it was all over that day, I summarized by saying, Mr. President, what you’ve just heard is where we are. Now we figured out that in order to relieve this—and I’m glad you’re sitting down, because the figure is pretty high—to fix all this stuff takes $155 billion over five years. We have to testify in front of Congress in about a week and a half, and they’re going to ask us about it. We’ve already gotten hints that they think readiness is broken. We don’t think it’s broken, but we think it needs a lot of work.

He didn’t hesitate. President Clinton said, Okay, you tell Congress I think they ought to appropriate that. I’m with you on this. We have to fix this stuff, both the personnel programs and the maintenance. 

So we went forward to Congress. We asked for $155 billion, and they ended up giving us $112 billion over the five years, which was a far cry above the $1 billion that was thought to be all we could get. And that was the force that started deploying in Afghanistan, because it takes about three years for that to get approved, appropriated, and then for the programs to kick in to put the engines in the aircraft. I felt very good about the state I left them in as we went into Afghanistan.

Now, the other thing that happened in my relationship with Congress: for two years in a row, Trent Lott, the majority leader, asked me to fly down to his home state of Mississippi to attend a cotton festival in one case and a barbeque in another, to meet the people. I agreed to do it. On the aircraft going down, Eric Womble, his chief of staff, had asked me, What would you like to talk to the Senator about? We can talk about it and see what you want to set as priorities next year for the military, for the Defense Department. 

So Lott told John Warner, Get behind the pay increases, get behind the medical for the military. Let’s fix this. Let’s fix the readiness; let’s go. You had Republican control of Congress and the support of a Democratic President, both vying to make sure they were known as the father of this fix.  

Or, at a minimum, not being on the bad side of the equation.

Exactly, and it was all during the period when elections were getting ready to come up again. It really worked well. I jokingly called it my Special Ops way of doing business: try to get both sides to compete, stay behind the scenes, but make it happen. It worked well, and I felt really good about it. 

But throughout that period, President Clinton supported everything we asked him to do. He was there. I’ve heard people criticize him, saying the problem was he didn’t know enough about the military to be hard on the military and make them toe the line. Well, we never asked him to do something we didn’t need to get done, and in some cases it was almost dire.

Let’s take a break here and we’ll come back and finish up. 

We haven’t talked much about Iraq, and Iraq was very much on your plate as Chief. Why don’t you give us an overview of what was happening in Iraq.

The mission in Iraq for the armed forces was two-fold. We were there to enforce the NATO no-fly and no-drive zones, as well as enable the forces in place in the Middle East to be prepared in the event that the Iraqis decided to pull another 1991 fiasco and come south. The other thing was to have plans on the shelf to go in and take out Saddam if we wanted to take him out. Also, what happens if a plane gets shot down? We had nine or ten different plans associated with Iraq. It ran the full gamut. 

Did you take a direct interest, or were you able to pay more direct attention to this because you had been on the ground in Iraq earlier?

Probably. Certainly my understanding of what was over there—you’d almost have to have spent a little bit of time on the ground, either in a TDY [temporary duty] status or in a war status, to have a feel for the vastness of the area and the difficulties you could encounter from the weather and so on as you look at these different plans and decide whether they’ll work or whether they’re even feasible. 

But, as I went in, we were in a status quo of containment. It worked, and it had been working, but it was an issue every day. Our planes were being shot at every day. When I went in, basically the Iraqis were shooting at our planes, and they were not paying a price. 

So after I’d been there about a month, I said, There’s something wrong with this picture. Every day we give this guy a free shot at our airplanes. He doesn’t hit anything, but he gets a free shot. So I put together a plan where every day, when he shot at us, our planes would have already been pre-loaded with the right ordnance to hit a number of targets. We knew where they were, radar sites, communication bunkers, buildings. So every day he shot at us, we would take him down one notch. He’d have one notch less. We’d have one more notch on our gun than we had the day before.

In order to do that, of course, I had to run the gamut. So I went to the Secretary with my grandiose plan, and he liked it. He said, Let’s go to Berger. So we went to the National Security Council with it. Everybody in there liked it. We divided up so that we had certain prerogatives at each level. For example, a pilot who is shot at has the right to return fire, in self defense, so he can attack the target if he has the right munitions. 

If they turn on their early warning radar, that’s an offensive system by international law, so our wild weasel guys had permission to fire their anti-radiation missiles at the radar, immediately, without anybody approving. Then, if they fire at us and miss, there would be pre-designated targets that would already be approved, that the commander in the air could carry out. If it was bad enough that we wanted to go after a particular target as a result, it might require the CINC to be involved. Ultimately it has to be the National Security Council, if it’s big enough. Anything within a radius around Baghdad, for example, required NSC approval.

I went over and saw the National Security Council, and they liked it. We carried it to President Clinton, and he blessed it. From then on, up until the time we attacked Iraq, that policy was in effect, and he was being degraded every time he shot around at us. Over time, we had taken out a lot of stuff, a tremendous amount of his capabilities. 

We had one glitch in that plan right after President Bush came into office. He was briefed on the plan. Rumsfeld and the National Security Council all knew what the plan was, and we carried it out. We did that every day, and it worked well until President Bush happened to be down in Mexico making a speech. We hit a target that was about 25 miles away from Iraq, but it was an inversion day. Whenever you get that inversion, sound carries a lot further because the clouds suppress it and it goes over that desert floor.

Baghdad thought they were under attack. They lit up the skies around Baghdad with anti-aircraft fire. CNN immediately reported it; they thought the place was under attack. The next thing I know, I’m getting a call from Rumsfeld: What in the hell are you guys doing? Why are you attacking? Who authorized this?  

For the next two days, we went through a big, elaborate explanation again: what we’d done, everything according to the rules, back through the matrix. Everything is just as you approved it prior to this, Rumsfeld and Mr. President. They put us on hold for about a week and then finally said, Okay, matrix is still good; keep doing it.

We talked earlier about the intel in Belgrade, and there was a problem. How did you feel about the quality of the intel you were getting about Iraq?

I felt good about the quality of intel. Again, the quality of intel we were most concerned about at the time was not so much WMD [weapons of mass destruction] as it was the delivery means he had for both high explosives and any types of munitions he wanted to put a mixed WMD package together with. 

But when we did a major strike on Baghdad—which was about 400 cruise missiles and 800 air sorties, I think, at one time—it was big. We went after his delivery means and his machine millings, where he made the stuff. That’s what we tried to eliminate in that process, and we did a pretty credible job of it. They estimated we set him back about four years in that strike. We were not after WMD. In fact, if we could identify WMD, that would have been a no-strike zone, because we didn’t want to release it and kill Iraqi civilians. So we felt good about it. We were constantly getting intel about his WMD capabilities, but it was all stuff that would be used locally, because he didn’t have the delivery means to put it anywhere else. 

We watched the movement of his aircraft like a hawk. We tried to target them where we could, but he was smart enough to protect those.

Maybe you didn’t have an opinion one way or the other, but did you agree with former President Bush’s decision not to go to Baghdad?

I did at the time. I was in Iraq, and we basically were killing privates. Saddam had early on pulled all of his officer leadership back into Baghdad to protect them. So the units we were running into, normally, we could fire one hellfire missile into the middle of them and we’d see 600 white flags go up. They’d surrender. It was a turkey shoot by the time he called it off.

The politics of it, what had transpired with the coalition—promising them we would only kick him out of Kuwait, we wouldn’t go any further—all that makes perfectly good sense. But, even that aside—I don’t want to say you ever fight fair, you don’t—just killing soldiers for the sake of killing soldiers is not something the military feels good about. And that’s where we were. 

My boss and I, General [J.H.] Binford Peay (III), who’s now the Commandant at VMI [Virginia Military Institute], talked about that the night before they announced we were stopping. He said, We really ought to call this off right now. Either we go to Baghdad or we call it off, because we’re just killing soldiers now.

I remember seeing the photographs published afterwards of the highways.

Yes, it was a turkey shoot. 

You mentioned earlier that there had been questions about the President being distracted because of the Lewinsky business. What was your reaction when the news first came out about the President’s problem?

To be very candid, I was very disappointed. First of all, you never know if it’s true, so you reserve judgment in terms of saying you believe it—you have to say where there’s smoke there may be some fire. So you just wait and see. I was disappointed when I heard it because I think everybody up until then thought that President Clinton had been doing a pretty darn good job from the economy to our military involvement around the globe. And to have a blight on your record like that is not something you like to see for anybody, but in particular for a President. So it was disappointing.

I guess I ought to say this. I also separated this act from his abilities as a Commander in Chief. By this time, I’d gotten to know him fairly well. I know he’s an extremely talented guy, very bright guy. This is something you don’t want to see happen to a President, particularly for the impact on our nation. But, on the other hand, it didn’t bother me a bit in terms of what I had to get done on the military side. This is a separate issue for him. He’s not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; therefore, he doesn’t have to live by the same rules that those in uniform have to live by. So let’s put that aside. Let the American people judge him. The military still has him as Commander in Chief, and nothing has changed.

Did you get bubbling up disgruntlement from people who were saying—? 

Yes, we have a pretty high standard in the military because we have to. We have to maintain respect.

It became an issue when you’re on appointment. You addressed this earlier with your own ability to say that even though you had two wives, one was not—

Exactly, one had never been consummated. It had become an issue for my Vice Chairman who would have been the Chairman. I’d have gotten to stay in Tampa had Joe [Ralston] not had that affair. It’s a high standard we have. You have to have the utmost respect for the people above, because you may send them to their death if you give the wrong order—or the right order.

A lot of people could not separate that. You find a tremendous number of the military—particularly older veterans—who are downright hostile, openly hostile toward President Clinton for that reason. It’s just a different standard. 

It never bothered me, not for a minute. As I say, I hated to see it happen, probably for his sake more than anything else. But from my working, professional relationship with him, it didn’t make any difference.

There were, I guess, two crucial military interventions. At least one of them was in late ’98, and one in early ’99 as the impeachment business was reaching a crescendo. In a couple of places, there were accusations of wag the dog. 

Wag the dog, yes.

Can you take us back to your—? 

First of all, I would never have been a party to anything—neither Cohen nor I—that was not based on sound military logic and something that needed to be done militarily. In both cases, the recommendation to carry out the attacks came from the Department of Defense, from us. The timing of those events, which really tied into wag the dog—the accusation that we would have attacked Iraq to take away the impeachment announcement was absolutely ludicrous. The timing of that particular one had been made by Cohen and me, primarily based on my recommendation because of the light conditions, the attack conditions, the weather conditions that were forecast, and Ramadan that fell in that particular area. We had about a three- or four-day window when we could carry out the attack when the light conditions were right and before Ramadan and Christmas started. I’ve forgotten the details of it. 

You keep talking, I’m going to check my calendar while you talk.

The bottom line is, we carried out the attack, and immediately the accusation started, wag the dog. Before that, after one of the meetings in the National Security Council, Secretary Cohen had asked me to step out of the room, the only time during my tenure, under either Secretary, that I was asked to leave the NSC room while they were deliberating. To Bill Cohen’s credit, he called me in the second he got back to the Pentagon, to tell me what it was all about. 

He wanted to let the people in the White House know that he had just learned of the announcement of the coming impeachment. He’s a smart guy, and he could foresee wag the dog being a part of it. They had to know that and take into consideration that this was what the accusation would be, in case the President had any second thoughts about approving the dates we had given him. He said, I asked you to leave because this is a political issue, and I didn’t want you dragged into the middle of it.

The U.S. embassies were bombed on August 7, 1998. Clinton testified on August 17. He had his television address admitting an inappropriate relationship on the 17th. On August 20, the U.S. fired cruise missiles at targets in the Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy bombings. That’s the first set.

Okay. 

The second set, I think, was Iraq.

Some of them were right around December or January.

That’s what I’m looking for, December 16, three days before the impeachment vote. Actually, I think the impeachment vote was supposed to have taken place on the 16th, but they made a mistake and backed it up. Britain and the U.S. launched four days of air strikes against Iraq—

I think that’s the one.

In a televised address, Clinton said the attacks came as a result of Iraq’s failure to cooperate with UN weapons inspectors. 

That’s exactly it. As I say, all that was based on light data and Ramadan. 

In the earlier discussion we talked a little bit about bin Laden’s position in this. I guess there had been some questions about the Sudanese attack? 

Oh, yes. In the case of the Sudan, all of that was based on the CIA’s intelligence. The CIA had two targets there, a pharmaceutical plant and a leather tanning facility. They briefed that both were related to manufacturing WMD of some type. I’ve forgotten the specific name for the agent. They had soil samples taken by somebody and delivered to them from both facilities, and they showed a high concentration of some chemical clearly associated with the manufacture of this chemical agent. So they felt that was something we could strike and be getting a two for one: a retaliatory strike for having been part of an attack on us, and second, to potentially wipe out a source of weapons of mass destruction. 

We in the Joint Chiefs looked at both of those targets and looked at the evidence presented by the CIA, and in a unanimous decision, the Joint Chiefs voted to go only after the pharmaceutical plant. There was something about the leather tanning facility that bothered us. The next meeting on it was in the Oval Office. Cohen and I voted for going only after the pharmaceutical plant. George Tenet pushed for both. The President made a decision we’d go after only the pharmaceutical plant. 

We did a great job of hitting it. We destroyed it and didn’t kill anybody. I think we injured one old man walking by at 2 o’clock in the morning. Our intel told us that they didn’t operate it at night. We weren’t trying to kill people; we just wanted to get rid of the plant and send a clear signal: we can reach out and touch you. The arm of the U.S. military is long. 

After that, when the challenge came out and they said, We’re going to sue the United States; you committed a terrorist act against us, all of a sudden the CIA’s evidence got weaker and weaker. It was from a British source. It was two years old. It came from 50 yards down the street from the pharmaceutical—I could not believe my ears. George had been so positive about this as the right targets. I said, Thank God we didn’t hit the leather tanning. It was currently manufacturing baby diapers and had been for the last 50 years. That’s just how it goes.

One-third of all the military people in Washington, D.C. are intel. Two-thirds of the intel community up there are civilians. So you can imagine the number of people who work intel. As the Chairman, you can’t be smarter than organizations like that. You have to rely on and trust these guys to give you the best. You can bounce different agencies against each other: DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] versus CIA versus NSA. But when all three are speaking with one voice, as they’re supposed to be with George Tenet (now the director of intelligence, but then the Central Intelligence Agency), he was supposed to pull all that together.

You worked closely with Tenet throughout? 

Oh, yes.

What were his strengths and weaknesses as a director?

He and I are still good friends. I think number one, he’s a guy of integrity. He has a big organization there. Again, he can’t check every little thing they come up with. He can try to, but not a thousand a day. He’s a guy of integrity. You don’t put words in George’s mouth that he doesn’t want put there. Sandy Berger tried that at an NSC meeting one day. George got up and said, If that’s what you want, make up your own damn story. I’m out of here, and walked out the door. 

You don’t remember what the issue was?

I really don’t. I just remember we sat there, and Sandy didn’t like what he was getting out of him. He kept pushing George, and George kept pushing back. Finally, he slammed a book down and got up and stormed out the side door. He went into the communications room as he said, I’m out of here. 

Does he tend to be emotional?

No, not at all. He’s normally very calm and cool-headed. But he doesn’t like to be pushed. He’ll push back if you’re trying to get him to say something, or if you’re trying to take his words and make them say something else. On that day, Sandy had just pushed him a little bit too hard, and he flared up. Otherwise, I thought George did a great job. He’s very approachable, always returns phone calls, always takes phone calls. He’s the kind of guy you like to work with. 

Does he have any perceivable weaknesses as a director? All of us have them. 

From my perspective, I didn’t really see anything I’d call a weakness. When he had a really detailed or technical subject that needed to be discussed, like most of us, he was smart enough to drag the guy along with him to meetings who’s the real pro in that area. If you want to go 18 levels deep in this, I can carry you 20 levels deep and have you talking to yourself when you come up. He’s very good. He spent a lot of time as a staffer in Washington, D.C. Some of those guys turn out pretty good; some of them aren’t too good.

Staffers don’t always make good bosses.

No, they don’t. But I got the impression from the organization—and I’ve talked to a lot of guys there—that most of them liked Tenet. They respected him and his abilities. He wasn’t a typical staffer who goes on to get into the White House and then tries to build himself into something else. George got where he was because he was good at what he did.

Did you think the working relationship with all the various intelligence agencies was pretty functional when you were there? Or were you beginning to see problems?

I thought the relationship between them was fairly functional. But I saw there was a problem in the intelligence world. I started trying to put something together down at Fort Belvoir, which is an Army facility. That’s where we put it together. 

Here’s the issue. You have a world-wide organization like bin Laden’s, like UBL [Usama bin Laden], al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda has cells in about 60 countries. On the military side, out in the Pacific you may pick up intelligence that’s very interesting to them because your intelligence back in Washington coming out of CIA, DIA, NSA, says there’s a cell from al-Qaeda out here in some Pacific country, let’s say Malaysia, that has sent out a message requesting more money to buy WMD. Okay, that’s in the Pacific. 

In the military, that means that our Commander in Chief, Pacific based, in Fort Shafter, Hawaii, starts to get excited. What’s going on out here in my area? The order came out of Afghanistan, which is in Commander in Chief Central command’s area. So he’s concerned: what are these guys doing? 

There’s another cell operating out of UCOM’s [Unified Command] area—let’s say in Albania—that indicates we’ve received requested shipment and have started to export at this time. That generates excitement back in the UCOM area. Who in the hell is looking to see how all this ties together with what’s really going on here, not just these three disparate pieces? How do the CIA and FBI and NSA tie into all this?

I had put together a group down in Fort Belvoir trying to get the CIA and the FBI to put full-time representatives on this and start trying to pull it all together. I wanted to put a brigadier general in charge of it, somebody I could put my finger in his chest and say, We ought not to ever be surprised. We have too much invested around the world in our intel. You are the man, and you will have support from all these others. 

I had talked to George Tenet. He had agreed to put a guy down there. I was en route to see Bob Mueller when I went in and briefed Secretary Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld thought it was a great idea, but it wasn’t invented by him, so he put it on hold and said let me have my staff take a look at it and see if we want to do something even bigger. That’s where it was when 9/11 went down two months later. 

How do all of them work together? They work together fairly well, but their biggest strength is they can inundate you with information, reams of it, a hit every five minutes on something. The weakness is pulling it all together so it’s not information, it’s intel. All these pieces start to paint a picture for you. That’s where the weakness was—and still is, I might add.  

Were you involved, in either the Clinton or the Bush administration, in discussions about how best to present this kind of stuff to the President?

No.

That would be a decision the NSC Advisor would make? 

Yes, and the NSC Advisor, the National Security Advisor, should be dead on top of that along with the guy going in to present the information who, of course, is George Tenet, the CIA. I assume the Director of Intelligence Agency is there, whatever they’re calling him, the Chief. 

Did you have to testify before the 9/11 Commission?

No, I didn’t testify, I was interviewed by them. When I sent word back that the only way they’d get me to testify would be to subpoena me, they never did. 

But you did provide them information out of your experience. So a future reader could go back and find that. 

Let me tell you one other thing that occurred on the morning of 12 September 2001. After the 9/11 incident, George Tenet first briefed the NSC with the President sitting there, and then Bob Mueller from the FBI briefed. When Mueller finished his briefing, he said, We have some other information I can’t share in this room. He was putting stuff, still, behind the door, because it was evidentiary in nature and he couldn’t afford to have too many people touch it or know about it and have it stand up in court. That’s when AG [John] Ashcroft went off and screamed at him and told him to lay this stuff out. We’ll worry about going to court later. He said, Maybe Shelton’s guys will get him, and we won’t have to go to court. It was pretty heated. 

Mueller said something about the laws, and Ashcroft—of all people—said, We’ll get the law changed. Lay it out here; we have to get on with it. 

And he laid it out?

Oh yes, he laid it out then. Bob was doing his job.

That’s my question, about the so-called stovepipes. Were you finding stovepipes a problem?

Yes, yes. NSA is an example. It depends on who in your organization has the clearances for it. If you’re J-2—I sat through many a briefing from my J-2, knowing a lot more about what he was telling me than he did, because I was cleared at echelons above my J-2. So that’s an issue. To my knowledge, it’s still an issue today. I’m not sure how they will ever totally resolve it short of having what they have, a director over all the agencies. But I don’t envy him, because if he isn’t careful, they’ll inundate him with stuff that doesn’t make sense. It’s information and they’re concerned if they don’t tell him and it does end up meaning something, they’ll be at fault.

Is the principal problem with stovepiping a legal problem, or is it just an organizational behavior problem? 

It was both—it was threefold. One is an organizational behavior and natural firewalls that have been there over the years. Information is power, and if I have the information, and I’m the guy they have to get it from, that protects my jobs and my position and my agency, etc. 

Then there’s the issue of legalities. If a law says information about people in the United States is protected under the law of domain—or whatever it is, I don’t remember what the term is—you can’t share it in a public forum. So there’s that stovepipe—and a couple of others, ranging right on up into the fact that there’s just a natural— You have security clearances.

I had a program in DoD, and the Secretary and I were the only two people in the Pentagon who knew about it. That’s all, zero. One person in the White House knew about it: the President. That’s how tight it is. And it has to do with an agent who travels around the world in other countries, a pretty high-ranking guy who everybody thinks is just another guy, and yet who has access to a lot of leadership. What did President Bush call them, the axis of evil?

Axis of evil. 

Axis of evil. He’d die in a heartbeat if they knew who he was. So it’s those kinds of things that create stovepipes. They’re still there to some degree, but I think less today than they were before 9/11. I saw some of them come down that very day. Ashcroft was told to go get the laws changed so we could get this stuff flowing again. 

Were you at all invited into discussions or negotiations on broader Middle East stuff? I know the President, when he was trying to broker a peace agreement, was relying on a lot of people in the United States government to help give assurances to various parties. Were you taken to Camp David or Wye River? 

Not Wye River, no, nor to Camp David. We did have some discussions related to things that might be offered as part of the negotiations—for example, the provision of a permanent U.S. force as part of the deal to go in. The Pentagon was asked to come back with comments on that. But in terms of the Wye River type stuff, no, not at all.

You did trigger one other thought, the International Court of Justice. Throughout my tenure, the President was inclined to go with that; he would like to be a party to it. Both Bill Cohen and I were adamant that we did not want to be a party to it. Our concern was that we would then have members of our armed forces—in particular, all members of our senior government leadership—who could simply be going on leave or on a holiday or whatever, and be traveling through one of these countries and be snatched up and hauled off to the Hague as a criminal and put before a politicized court system. 

Our argument was that we have a great court system here, in the civilian sector as well as in the military, for dealing with people who violate international law or national law. We fought hard to stay out of that. It finally boiled down to three countries left outside: North Korea, Iran, and the United States. About the last day President Clinton was in office, he called me up and said, Hugh, I’ve just made the decision that I’m going to sign the ICJ [International Court of Justice]. I wanted you to know because I know you and Secretary Cohen had been opposed to it, and I’ve stuck with you, but we’re down to the wire now where it’s only us, Iran, and North Korea. My rationale in signing this is that we can probably have greater influence with our nose under the tent than we will as an outsider teamed up with those two guys. 

I said, I understand, Mr. President. And you have much broader things to consider than the military. I was simply giving you my best military advice. I appreciated the phone call telling me he was going to do it.  

Was that typical of him? If he disagreed with you, you knew about it? Or was he—? 

Yes, I thought I always knew where I stood. I knew President Clinton really wanted to sign that, for sure. I knew what had happened. Madeleine had been in and made one final plea. I also knew it had to feel very uncomfortable being teamed up with Iran and North Korea. Although, you know, maybe we’re the three that are right, the three smart ones in the crowd. But it didn’t bother me. The reason it didn’t bother me is we have a great system, a legislative, a judicial, and an executive branch. And I knew that as long as my friend Senator Jesse Helms was up there, it wasn’t going to get ratified anyway. [laughter] So it wasn’t a major concern. But I gave my advice based on what I thought was best for the country. 

One other time I went into the Cabinet room on an issue of drawing-down of nuclear weapons. Everybody wants to draw down nuclear weapons—I do myself—and get rid of as many of them as we can. But I had some really, really smart people on that Joint Staff. Two of them were admirals who had worked with nuclear weapons all their life. One of them was really into the J-5, or the political military piece of it, as well. 

We had done analysis after analysis of what we could do and what combinations of weapons we could keep that would enable us to draw down to the minimum levels that could let us survive against not only what North Korea might throw at us at some point, but specifically what Russia—and later the Chinese—could put at us, particularly given the projection of the Chinese based on the CIA estimates. 

We had pared it down. I went to a couple of National Security Council meetings, and they were really trying to get it down. Berger was pushing to go to a much lower number than we would even think about being comfortable with, in terms of protecting us not only today but at least five years out in the future, ten years out in the future. It takes ten years to make a nuclear weapon right now. You don’t even have the pits to do it with, so it’s a big issue, a big deal. That’s why I’ve become one of the testifying experts on the stockpile stewardship program. Again, if that program had been approved and gone full speed ahead, we might have drawn down a lot more. 

But, as it was, everybody in the room was voting to go to the lower number except me. I said, Look, you can go to the numbers you’re talking about, but it’s without the concurrence of the Joint Chiefs. Here’s our number. So we went to President Clinton. It was in the Cabinet room, and the thing was filled, packed. It went around the table. Because this meeting was supposed to last only an hour, I had a guy and his family waiting for me that day. This was his third attempt for me to promote him and present an award to him. He had elected each time to wait until I could do it. I had rescheduled three times.

Now we’re into the second hour of this thing, and I’m watching my watch. But I disagree with everything that has been said thus far. President Clinton sits there and patiently hears everybody. Now we’re into the second hour of the meeting. In about 30 minutes, I’m supposed to be back in the Pentagon. Finally, at about the time I’m supposed to speak, I write a note to President Clinton saying, Mr. President, I hate to have to get up and leave a meeting, but I have an officer waiting who’s been waiting three different times for me to promote him. I really have to go. I would beg to be dismissed or excused. 

I passed the note around. It gets around to President Clinton—but just before he gets it, he calls on me. As I start to speak, they hand him the note. He holds the note in his hand. I speak for probably five minutes. I explain, as quickly as I can, why the Joint Chiefs are adamantly against going below any number we’d come up with and the rationale behind it. 

I say, Could we live with the other? Yes, we could. But the risk to United States national security goes up quantumly for each ten of these you go down. I had some figures on the percentages, by numbers. So President Clinton hears it all and says, Does anyone else have anything else to offer? 

Normally I don’t get uptight against any of these, but I had a little bit of sweat trickling down—it’s not easy being odd man out in a group like that. We get to the end and he says, Anybody else have anything you want to offer? He looks around the room. Some guy makes a comment from the other end of the table, somebody like Treasury, who has no dog in the fight. 

President Clinton said, We’re pressing on towards lunch. I know General Shelton has people waiting for him in the Pentagon to promote, and here’s my decision. I think the Joint Chiefs have got it right, I agree with what Hugh said, that’s the decision. Have a nice day. He got up and headed toward the Oval Office. It was over. I found myself having trouble standing up. We won. 

I didn’t like winning because I really did want to pull it down, but I just had to do what I thought was right for the country, and that’s what our rationale was based on.

So you felt by the end of his term he turned around his doubters in the Pentagon for the most part?

No. I think he turned around only the people who got to know him up close and personal and saw his sincere concern about the men and women in uniform. I think to this day there are still people out there, lots of them, who don’t have a very high regard for President Clinton. They don’t understand the other side of him, the side that went back up to visit the guys who were wounded and weren’t going to recover. Who never had a chance to see him in action. 

Every decision he made during my four years was basically in support of the military. Holding off on the International Criminal Count as long as he did, right up to the bitter end, was all because he knew the military didn’t want to see it go that way. I don’t think he’ll ever be given the credit he’s due from the men and women in uniform—and I might say, from the veterans in particular, the old veterans who saw the change. They’ll always remember him for gays in the military. Lewinsky. I don’t think he’ll ever recover from that. 

He may not, given the problems he had with the ’92 campaign, with his own checkered past. They may have been disposed not to.

You’re right, exactly, a poison pill, so to speak.

You served in Vietnam, yet for some reason it wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle for you. Why is that?

I guess I’m a little more open-minded than a lot of my counterparts. Even in the Vietnam era, Joan Baez was singing anti-war things. Okay, sing your anti-war things. I still listen, I like her music. I listen to her. I had counterparts who broke her records, I mean literally destroyed them. I’ve never been a fan of Jane Fonda; I deplore what she did. I have an appreciation for people who have a different point of view on every issue. I think that’s what makes our country great.

The reason Washington works so well is that it has checks and balances. You may get a wild man in the White House, but he’s going to have a Congress to hold him in check, or a judicial system to keep him in check. Just like today, people protesting the Iraq war. Does it hurt us? Yes, I think it does. Do Americans have a right to do that? Yes, they do. That’s what makes us a great country. So I can look past a checkered past. I can look past the fact that I differ with you in my personal opinion about a particular group of people. That hasn’t bothered me.

It’s interesting. In my last National Security Council meeting, we’re sitting there and the meeting is over. President Clinton says, Hugh, I need to see you a minute before you leave. Everybody looks. What’s he want to see Shelton for again? He gets up and walks around where I am. We step out the side door into the combo room, the Sit room. We step in there. Of course there are people all over the place. He says, This won’t work. Let’s find a more private place.

I said, Follow me, Mr. President, because I knew where Donald Kerrick’s office was, and I knew he was not there. He was the deputy NSA at that time and a three-star Army general, deputy to Sandy Berger.

So you’re going to step into his office.

I knew Kerrick was on leave because he had told me he was going. So we walked into his office. I walked in first and turned around and said, Will this do, Mr. President? He said, This is great. He reached around and closed the door. I thought, What’s coming now? 

He came over and he got in my personal space. Basically we were nose to nose, and he said, Hugh, I’ll be leaving here shortly. I just want you to know how much I personally appreciate the leadership you provided for our men and women in uniform and the advice you’ve given me during your term as Chairman. 

He looked at me and said, You know, you and I are cut out of different pieces of cloth, but I want you to know how much I admire and respect what you stand for. If I’ve caused any embarrassment to the men and women in uniform, I sincerely regret it.  

I looked at him and there were tears trickling down his face. This was a no BS session here. He really felt deeply that he owed it to me to say that, which I really appreciated. To be candid, I’ve never told anybody about that side of him. It was like saying, I know I’ve done wrong; I know I’ve probably embarrassed a lot of people in the military by my actions, but I want you to know how much I appreciate the men and women in uniform, how much I respect you all for what you stand for.

That was consistent with your experience with him?

Yes it was, sure was. It didn’t surprise me that he said that. I didn’t expect it, needless to say. It caught me by surprise, but it wasn’t surprising. It was a good experience. 

By God, the thing I really liked about him was, he’d stay up—he called me one night at 2 o’clock in the morning during Kosovo. Fortunately, I’d been on the phone with Dick Holbrooke up in New York. So he didn’t wake me up, but I don’t even think he knew what time of day it was. We talked about something going on with the war. I’ve forgotten what it was now. The next morning my wife said, Did I hear the phone ring about two? I said, Yes, it was the President. She said, Right. I said, It was. I guess he couldn’t sleep or something. But he never slept.

I’ve heard that.

He had a handle on all of it, from the economy right on through the war fighting. 

Let me ask you about one more issue. The [USS] Cole was attacked in October of his last year. There was some criticism in external quarters about no action being taken to retaliate for that. Do you have any comments about that?

Yes, and it deserved criticism, because it’s against our policy. But it comes back to retaliate against what? Against who? The first thing you have to have is for our intelligence community to tell you who did it. The second thing you have to have are targets to attack. When you have a non-nation state and a terrorist organization like UBL that doesn’t have good targets for the military to attack, you have a real problem. 

It’s one of the problems we’re going to face in the future as long as al-Qaeda stays on the move and uses asymmetric means to come after us. What do you go after? I tell people when I’m talking about counter-terrorism or anti-terrorism, unlike a conventional military, there’s no infrastructure, no tanks, no planes, nothing you can go after. It’s like fighting organized crime. You have to go after the head of it and after the sanctuary. You have to eliminate both of those. 

When you can’t find the head of it, Osama bin Laden, and when there’s no sanctuary to eliminate short of the Taliban—and that was one of those times we demarched the Taliban. Our goal was to go after the Taliban and take out Omar and anything around that we could find, and kill it. 

It worked out that Madeleine won that argument. We go back first and demarche them and tell them, That’s the last time. That’s the last straw. You either turn this guy over to us, or you’re going to be put on the ‘public enemy number one’ list. So we didn’t retaliate.

Sure. And you felt that you had enough information that you might have been able to do something?

I’ll be candid. I didn’t feel strongly enough about it because the CIA had not stepped up and said, For sure, it’s UBL. That came later on in the process. 

I have a couple of quick questions about the transition and then into the other administration—again, by way of comparison. Anytime we talk to people who have served in two administrations, it’s always useful to have some contrast. 

Sure.

Are there any other things you can say about the differences in approach to military issues between President Bush 43 and Clinton? Did you find Bush 43 to be as responsive to the kinds of issues you supported as you evidently found President Clinton?

That’s a tough one to answer, and it’s made tougher by the fact that the working relationship between Bush and me was not as direct and as informal, to some degree, as it turned out to be between Clinton and me. I think for two reasons: number one, first and foremost was Rumsfeld. 

Rumsfeld is a control freak. He tried to tell me in my first meeting with him. I was trying to tell him, I want to be considered a part of your team, a person on your team, not a holdover from the old team, because when the President was sworn in today, my allegiance shifted to you and to him. I’m no longer a Cohen–Clinton guy; I’m a Bush–Rumsfeld guy. 

But instead it turned into, Tell me what your primary job is. I quoted right out of Title 10: Principal military advisor to the National Security Council and the President. To which he immediately responded, No, you’re not the principal advisor to the National Security Council. I am. 

I said, By Title 10, Mr. Secretary, I am the principal military. You’re the principal policy advisor, not military advisor. Then he tried to shift; to show lack of ignorance, he shifted to, Well, not to their staff. I said, No, not to their staff. I don’t deal with the staff. I deal with principals only. 

So that combined with the fact that during Bush’s campaign—and it’s really ironic, the analogies to this Iraq war and Bush. I had not realized until we started talking today how close they are to analogies made with the prior administration, some of the issues they faced. While I was still the Chairman and Bush was a candidate and was out campaigning, we had two division commanders serving in Bosnia, one of whom was John Abizaid, the four-star who went down to Central Command. I’ve forgotten who the other one was, but he went on to be a three- or four-star. Both of those guys had downgraded their readiness from C-1, which is top-level readiness, to a C-2, which is the next level of readiness. They did it because of one thing and one thing only. Both of those divisions, which were now in the Balkans, were war-listed to go to Korea if we had a flare-up there. 

Because of where they were and the fact that the redeployment time it would take if you pulled them out of there and sent them to Korea exceeded the timeline the plan called for, they automatically are required to downgrade their readiness. They can’t get there in time to meet their wartime requirements. 

Now, that’s complicated to explain to a group of civilians who had not worked in this environment. The military who have worked in it all their life understand it. Well, Bush makes the comment that afternoon—it hits the Washington Post—that this administration—meaning Clinton— has led to the degradation of readiness as witnessed by the fact that two division commanders, right now, have just reported not prepared for duty, Sir. A big deal, big flare. 

I’m speaking that afternoon after he makes that statement, out in Beverly Hills, at the Beverly Hills Hilton, to a very large gathering and lots of press. My guys warned me, They’re going to come after you on this. This is red-hot right now. You have to counter it. Sure enough, when I finished speaking, the first question asked me was, What do you think about what candidate Bush has had to say about readiness? 

I answered straightforward and candidly, more candidly probably than I should. I said, First of all, let me say, I’m not in the business of going around and responding to every political candidate’s comments about readiness in the Armed Forces. They’re entitled to their opinion. However, I praise the two division commanders for reporting it as it is, not as they wish it was. Their timeline drives them to report it. For clarification for the record, it has nothing to do with their readiness to fight. It has to do with their ability to deploy to get to a new area in which they might have to fight, and that’s something probably a lot of the candidates don’t understand. I let it go right there.

Well, you can imagine how that comment went over. Later on I found out that it was Condi Rice who had written that script for him and didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Therefore she had set him up for some bad press. He got hammered on that one a little bit. But you call it like you see it. 

Although he never treated me that way, I always felt that he probably never forgot that I’m the guy who set him straight one time. He’s not a guy who takes criticism very well, as evidenced by his time in office. But, other than that, I enjoyed working for him. 

His biggest flaw, I thought, was that he was too prone to make an instantaneous decision without thinking it all the way through. The one time I did see him think it through was when Rumsfeld and [Paul] Wolfowitz started pushing really hard on 12 September ’01 to attack Iraq. I was adamantly opposed to it, as was Colin Powell. 

So it did, in fact, flare up that early.

The night of 11 September, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld had me up in Rumsfeld’s office. They knew we were going to the White House the next morning. They were trying to get me to pull out the Iraq war plans and recommend, as a part of their recommendation, that we go to Iraq and use this as an opportunity to get rid of Saddam. I told them, Not until I see some evidence that says Saddam was involved in this, and I don’t think there is any. I think it will be al-Qaeda. I know that’s what my J-2 thinks already, based on what he’s gotten from the FBI and the CIA. 

Sure enough, the next day at the morning National Security Council meeting, the first one after 9/11 when Tenet and Bob Mueller briefed, not one mention was made about al-Qaeda, no UBL, no Osama bin Laden. Without any hesitation, Wolfowitz, who had accompanied Rumsfeld to the meeting, started pushing to go to Iraq, and Rumsfeld chimes in with him. Bush said, Wait a minute, I didn’t hear a word said about him being responsible for the attack. A few days later at Camp David, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz pushed again. What do you think, Shelton?

I said, Mr. President, I think you’ve got it exactly right. One thing we don’t want to have happen is all the people in the Middle East think we have used this just as a tool to attack Iraq. We have to go after whoever is responsible, and I’m hearing that’s bin Laden, and that means Afghanistan and the Taliban and the al-Qaeda organization, not Iraq. 

Wolfowitz brings it up again, and this time the President puts a harpoon through his chest. He says, You heard me say one time, we’re not going after Iraq right now. Let’s get on with worrying about where we are going, or something like that. Then at the break, the President comes up to me and looks at me and says, Hugh, am I missing something? Should we be attacking Iraq? I sure don’t see it.

I said, Mr. President, you have it exactly right. Stand where you are, because right now we have to go after those who did it, and that’s not Iraq. The President looked at me, a twinkle in his eye, and said, We’re going to get that guy out of there, but we’re going to do it at a time and a place of our choosing.  

I went home that night and told my wife, We’re going to attack Iraq during President Bush’s first administration. He’ll go after him. So when Afghanistan died down, I had no doubt that both Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld would start pushing again. 

Now, the irony of all this is that—unlike Clinton and Cohen, who worked everything through the Chairman—you now have Rumsfeld, who doesn’t like having a guy who’s viewed as almost a co-equal with the military. He doesn’t like sharing the spotlight—or having someone to share the blame, as the case may be—so he wants to minimize the involvement of the Chairman. He wants to work directly with the combatant commander, with Wes Clark. A civilian is not normally equipped to deal with a fast-talking, smooth-talking guy like Wes Clark. 

The same could be said for Tommy Franks. Tommy did not like having the Joint Chiefs because he came up early on with his Afghanistan plan and got his rear end torn up. It wasn’t well prepared. It was a far better plan once he incorporated the suggestions made by the Joint Chiefs, but he didn’t like that constructive criticism. He had trouble dealing with it. So when Rumsfeld offered him the opportunity to bypass the Joint Chiefs and come directly to him, he took it, which he liked, and Rumsfeld loved. 

So now you have basically put the Joint Chiefs out to pasture, and you no longer have 200 years of military experience there to look at it and help shape your plans. That’s how Iraq evolved, and that was all part of Rumsfeld’s way of doing business. 

So you create a process that makes it possible for you to achieve an end that you had predetermined you wanted to begin with.

Exactly. And you take those who might be opposed to it and just set them over to one side.

This may be too hypothetical a question, and if it is, you can just tell me. If Bill Clinton had been President after 9/11, what differences would you have seen in the response?

I still think we would have gone to Afghanistan. I don’t think we had any choice, whether you wanted to or not, certainly whether Madeleine wanted to or not. She’d have been the wild card, the one pushing not to go, probably. But I think President Clinton would have had to, with the mood of the country right then, and with the support of the Chairman, and the Joint Chiefs saying, We have to do something to these people; we can’t let them go. We had all the targets already pre-arranged. I think we would have done exactly what we did with Afghanistan. I don’t think we would have gone into Iraq. 

Clinton was a smart guy, and he could see we had Saddam contained. He wasn’t doing anybody any harm. Was he a pain in our rear end? Yes, he was. But if you could not build a NATO consensus to go after Saddam based on his violating every one of the 16 rules the United Nations had laid down for him, you’d never build a case for NATO to do it. I think Clinton would have worked that and had NATO go after him.  

Let me ask you another hypothetical question. And again, feel free not to deal with it if you want to. The commentary you get from people like Clark and others seems to indicate that the Clinton people really did have their eye on the ball with respect to bin Laden and terrorism. Is it possible 9/11 might have been avoided if the Clinton Presidency had continued?

No, I don’t think so. I think 9/11 was coming. I think 9/11, if I must say so, was probably the price we paid for our failure to go after the Iranians for having blown Khobar Towers. We knew that during the Clinton Presidency. We also knew it during the Bush Presidency, and he knew that early on. We didn’t react. We didn’t react to the Cole bombing, and we didn’t react to the Tanzanian and the Kenya embassy bombings. They had three big successes in a row without paying a nickel, so to speak.

There were some strikes, but your sense is that they weren’t—

They weren’t effective strikes. And we had not done enough of the other things—like the $25 million reward on bin Laden, anything that would show we had to stop this. So I think 9/11 was going to happen. The way these guys work, if the truth is ever known, I bet that thing was in planning for three to five years. It may have even started in Bush One’s Presidency.

Who knows when they started to plan to pull off—we know in ’93 the first attack on the World Trade Center was designed to do the same thing. They just happened to park the van in the wrong place, and they ran out of money to buy the WMD they wanted to put in there. Otherwise, they’d have had an early strike. I think it was preordained that something like that was going to happen, regardless of the President at the time. 

Let me ask one final broad question. What about your time as Chairman do you look back on with the greatest satisfaction? What do you feel was your biggest accomplishment? 

Legacy? I think getting the largest pay raise in 18 years for the military, getting the $112 billion to get the readiness back up so that the force President Bush decided to deploy into Afghanistan was trained and ready and well sourced. Fixing our military health care system and establishing Tricare for Life. That gave me a great sense of satisfaction.

But I guess the really greatest is knowing I did something good for the men and women in uniform while I was Chairman, and that I always gave my frank and candid advice. I was never afraid of what the political consequences might be for doing that. It never bothered me. I never aspired to be the Chairman. I did not want to go to that job from the greatest job any four-star could ask for. I was jumping out of airplanes at 24,000 feet.

That’s a good job?

That’s a great job; that’s the best that comes; it’s the thrill of a lifetime. Opening up at 2500 and piloting that chute right into where I wanted to go, and serving with the finest people we had in uniform. It didn’t get any better than that. It was down in Tampa, Florida on top of that, even though I was only there about a third of the time. I was traveling the rest of the time. And Carolyn didn’t get to go with me, so that was a downside of that job. But it was tremendous.

So going into a job that you really didn’t care for and then giving it your best shot and walking out feeling very good about what you accomplished is where I stopped.

General, I’m really grateful for the time today.

You’re certainly welcome.

I’ll say thank you for your service first, and recognize secondly the thanks that the service continues. We have a very broad definition of public service in our program, and we like to remind folks that you’re continuing your public service by helping educate folks who don’t have the pleasure that I’ve had of sitting across a table from you for a day. It has been a privilege and an honor, and I appreciate it.

Thanks, it’s my pleasure.