Datasets:

TigerResearch

/

pretrain_en

like 15

Follow

Tiger Research 66

I lifted my hand, signaling him to stop for a moment, because a wave of bitterness began to surge through my mind. I started searching back three years. As chairman of Senate Intelligence, I had worked long and hard to restore the CIA. When the President and Casey wanted much more funding for the agency, I had been the one who put out the fires of opposition in the Senate and elsewhere. I had helped reduce the impact of the Hughes-Ryan amendment, which required that the CIA brief eight committees of the House and Senate on its covert actions. In a heated controversy, I had led the fight to reduce the eight committees to two. In exchange for the reduction, the Administration had agreed to keep the two committees fully informed in a timely manner about any "significant" covert operations. There was no question but that mining Nicaraguan harbors was "significant." The Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 had been signed by President Carter. It was one of his last acts in the Oval Office, and—to give him credit—it restored to the CIA the ability to conduct effective covert action. The act was clearly known to Casey, since he had discussed it in detail with our committee, and the law had to be known to President Reagan.

I had pulled Casey's nuts out of the fire on several occasions. One case had involved a public uproar about a Contra manual that appeared to support assassination. It hadn't been written by CIA personnel, nor did it have any Administration sanction. Casey ducked the publicity. Instead, the Administration asked that I go on television and defend it and the Contras. Casey even had some of his top people fly to my home in Phoenix to brief me while he laid low. Contrary to Woodward's claim, I defended the ninety-page manual and the CIA. I explained that only a few passages had been singled out of the booklet, which had been written for men fighting a war. No one in the Administration or the CIA had written the text. The Contra cause was being wholly and wrongfully characterized in terms of assassination. The manual actually emphasized educating the Nicaraguan peasants about the Sandinista regime's Marxist goals. On another occasion, when Casey needed help to protect the identities of our secret agents, I had fought to relieve the CIA from some provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. With those recollections still fresh, I turned to Simmons and said, "I feel like such a fool."

The President and Casey had known about the mining for more than six months. Yet their fellow Republican, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had not been informed. Instead, he had learned it on the floor of the Senate from a Democrat. Not only Biden but Senator Leahy, another Democrat, knew of the CIA mining. Now I was being held up to ridicule as perhaps a liar and certainly uninformed by my own Administration. Finally, I said to Simmons, "I feel betrayed." Simmons, a gentleman who bided his time and place, shot back, "The President and Casey didn't tell you because they knew you would try to talk them out of it. You would have said it was crazy and might even have publicly opposed them." Such mining was tantamount to an act of war. International law is very clear on the point. Nicaragua is a coastal nation dependent on its harbors for food and other necessities of life. The purpose of covert action is to augment a clear and understood policy, not to put us in the doghouse.

After a weekend of reflection, I returned to the office on April 9 and sent this letter to Casey: "All this past weekend, I've been trying to figure out how I can most easily tell you my feelings about the discovery of the President having approved mining some of the harbors of Central America. "It gets down to one little, simple phrase: I am pissed off! "I understand that you had briefed the House on this matter. Now, during the important debate we had last week and the week before on whether we would increase funds for the Nicaragua program, we were doing all right until a member of the committee charged that the President had approved the mining. I strongly denied that because I had never heard of it. I found out the next day that the CIA had, with the written approval of the President, engaged in such mining and the approval came in February! "Bill, this is no way to run a railroad, and I find myself in a hell of a quandary. I am forced to apologize to members of the Intelligence Committee because I did not know the facts on this. At the same time, my counterpart in the House did know.

"The President has asked us to back his foreign policy. Bill, how can we back his foreign policy when we don't know what the hell he is doing? Lebanon, yes, we all knew that he sent troops over there. But mine the harbors in Nicaragua? This is an act violating international law. It is an act of war. For the life of me, I don't see how we are going to explain it. "My guess is that the House is going to defeat this supplemental [request for Contra funds], and we will not be in any position to put up much of an argument after we were not given the information we were entitled to receive: particularly, if my memory serves me correctly, when you briefed us on Central America just a couple of weeks ago. And the order was signed just before that. "I don't like this. I don't like it one bit from the President or from you. I don't think we need a lot of lengthy explanations. The deed has been done and in the future, if anything like this happens, I am going to raise one hell of a lot of fuss about it in public."

Someone leaked the letter to the Washington _Post,_ where it appeared in full on April 11. The following day, Casey openly lied about the matter in the _CIA Employee Bulletin._ He claimed that press reports saying the agency had not briefed Congress on covert action programs in Central America were not true. The last line of the _Bulletin,_ which he signed in his own handwriting and later apologized for, was outrageously false: "The agency has not only complied with the letter of the law in our briefings, but with the spirit of the law as well." I was really steaming about Casey's disregard for the facts when Robert McFarlane, the President's assistant for national security affairs, bombed me at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis. In a speech that was splashed across the front page of the Washington _Times,_ McFarlane said that "every important detail" of the mining of Nicaraguan harbors had been "shared in full by the proper oversight committees." He told a large audience at a Navy foreign affairs conference that he could not account for why I didn't know of the CIA-led harbor minings.

I had flown to Taiwan just before the McFarlane speech. Pat Moynihan took charge of the Intelligence Committee. Pat went on ABC television and resigned as vice chairman of the committee to protest Casey's _Employee Bulletin_ statement and McFarlane's address. He later described it to me with his inimitable flair: "When I read the newspaper account of McFarlane's speech, I said: 'Sonofabitch, he's calling Barry Goldwater a liar. It's not true. I'm acting head of this committee now. I'm going to tell the facts to David Brinkley on ABC. I'm not going to let this stand.' " So Pat went on television and, putting up his political dukes, boomed that he would have no choice but to resign as vice chairman of the committee unless Casey and McFarlane retracted their statements. It was a bravissimo performance. On April 25 Casey sent me a handwritten letter on CIA stationery. I still have it. The first sentence reads: "I'm as sorry as I can be about the misunderstandings and failure in communication which have developed to impair an activity which I thought we were handling well together."

It was about as close as Casey could come to an apology in an official letter. The following day, at a committee meeting, he apologized profusely for not keeping us properly informed. We had heard nothing from McFarlane, so after the Casey retreat I wrote him a letter challenging his statements at Annapolis. On May 9, writing on White House stationery marked CONFIDENTIAL in red stencil, McFarlane replied that, at the time he had given the speech, "I had been advised that the material had been adequately addressed. I so stated this in my remarks." That is a bureaucrat in top form. McFarlane well knew his statements would make us look like jackasses. Under the moral pressure of my note to him, he finally wrote us an antiseptic response that could have been read six different ways over a two-minute breakfast. By marking it CONFIDENTIAL, he implicitly asked us to remain silent. Moynihan told me that McFarlane had later confided to him, "I fear that what I was told was either disingenuous or outright wrong."

He apparently believed Casey had misled him. My disagreements with Bill still flared up from time to time. Trouble seemed to dog Casey everywhere. On several occasions, allegations about past financial irregularities swept him into the headlines, compromising his authority at the CIA. Since he never appeared to be able to put these charges behind him and controversy seemed to be his middle name, I finally blew my stack and called for his resignation. I was simply tired of all the fights he was getting into, almost every week. Then, just as suddenly, he would become the white knight. I remember distinctly the time Casey signed an agreement that he would inform the Senate and House Intelligence Committees promptly on any future significant covert operations. He met with Moynihan and me after the Nicaraguan mining flap. I could tell Bill didn't want to sign it because he kept looking into the distance and wouldn't touch his pen. Here was an old wild horse who didn't want to be broken. I could see the pain in his eyes, the fear of what was happening to him. When he finally signed, he immediately dropped the pen as if it had been poisoned. He shook his head and tried to smile at the same time. Bill wasn't happy, but he could take his medicine.

Despite our disagreements, I liked Casey. There was, contrary to what some claim, never a feud between us. Nor did we have any differences going back to his 1966 race for Congress, when he was defeated in the GOP primary by a Goldwaterite. I never even knew the man who ran against him. I liked Bill because we were cut from the same cloth—stubborn, bullheaded men who knew what we wanted and fought for it. Actually, when both of us were calm, we got along like partners in a million-dollar deal. At the end, I don't believe Casey had a better friend on the Hill than me. To show what an upside-down, inside-out town Washington is from one season to another, the CIA eventually presented Moynihan and me with fine tributes and the Agency Seal Medallion. It meant, in effect, that they were handing us back our white hats. It's important to recall the details of the mining incident because it's an example of the President's knowledge and approval of a very questionable operation. Also, it exposes attempts by Casey and McFarlane to protect the Administration and their own involvement by trying to shift the responsibility to Congress. More significant, the incident shows that the seeds for the Iran-Contra fiasco had been sown long before the affair occurred.

It is not easy to achieve the proper balance of governmental authority, as the events surrounding our public division over Nicaragua show. To put the debate in its rawest form, most Republicans support President Reagan's policy, which rests on the expressed purpose of denying the Soviet Union, Cuba, and other Communist governments another base in the Western hemisphere. The GOP aims to remove the threat of an inflexibly Communist Sandinista regime. Most Democrats claim the President's policies risk war. They maintain we should seek to end our differences with the Sandinistas by negotiation. Today our two major political parties still have little confidence in one another's policies. The Democrats have decided that the most effective way for them to halt President Reagan's help to the Contras is to challenge and limit it. That is the real struggle. The Democrats, who control both houses, want to substitute the judgment of Congress for that of the President. To do that, they have to tip the balance of power. Though the liberals will not admit it, they effectively want to change the Constitution.

I believe that Reagan made serious errors in mining the harbors of Nicaragua and selling arms to the Iranian terrorists, even to obtain the release of American hostages. But these are not sufficient reasons to limit or change the President's constitutional authority or responsibility. On a practical level, without Reagan's support of the Contras, there would never have been Sandinista concessions to a regional peace plan. The real issue is how to establish the understanding and trust that is essential if both the executive and legislative branches of government are to fulfill their distinct duties under the Constitution's separation of powers. Edward Boland, a distinctly partisan House Democrat from Massachusetts, is at the center of this constitutional conflict. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, he was the author of the Boland amendments. The original legislation was passed in December 1982 and has been rewritten five times since then. It forbids the CIA and the Defense Department to fund military equipment, training, advice, or other support directed at overthrowing the Sandinista regime. The term "overthrowing" was never defined. That is important, since other Contra actions were thereby permitted. People have said to me: "How can you pick on gentlemanly Ed Boland and constantly refer to him as a partisan Democrat? He's no more partisan than you are. He always puts the country first."

Well now, let's see about that. During the same year in which Congress first approved the Boland measure, I was deeply involved in trying to obtain funding for a sophisticated new technology that could help us enormously in detecting significant military movements behind the Iron Curtain. However, Republican House colleagues told me Boland would not allow the plan out of his committee for floor approval. This was despite the fact that they had told him the new system would represent a major breakthrough in intelligence collection. I and others worked hard and the money was approved by the Senate, but Boland sat on his hands. We met in conference. I made a short speech in the closed door session, saying that the new system would revolutionize U.S. intelligence collection for at least a decade. Boland spoke for about twenty minutes. He attacked the program, saying it would have big cost overruns, and strongly suggested that some technical problems, still to be worked out, could not be overcome. I was taken aback at his argument because of the enormous military advantage to the Western allies with such a breakthrough. It might even prevent war.

I explained that cost overruns could amount to perhaps $200 million at most. Such overruns were hardly new, but the amount was a pittance compared to the program's vast potential. Indeed, it would greatly bolster the defense of Western Europe at a time when Russian and other Communist troops greatly outnumbered those of the Western allies. As far as problems were concerned, every new technological system faces such barriers. There was nothing new or unusual about that. Every member of both parties finally agreed to support the plan—except Boland. He was adamant. I quietly played my trump card. I told Boland I was going to take a walk and see Senator John Tower about getting the money. He didn't understand what I meant. I advised him that, as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Tower could have the funds appropriated as part of military spending. Boland squinted but said nothing. I rose from my seat. He quickly protested, saying I was undercutting the authority of the Intelligence Committees. I replied that it didn't bother me a whit. I was concerned about the security of the country. Boland asked me to sit down. The debate continued for another ten minutes. Boland finally said he could not agree to the funding. I got up, and Boland began sputtering something about where was I going. I muttered, "I'm going to see Tower" and walked out. Boland turned to Rob Simmons, our staff director, and asked, "Is he really going to see Tower?"

Simmons answered, "I assume so. He doesn't bluff." "But he's undercutting us!" Boland stammered. Simmons responded, "I really don't think he cares." I walked over to see Tower, who was holding a committee meeting. I went in, sat down, and waited for the conference to break up so I could speak with him privately. About ten minutes later, Simmons slipped in a back door and crept up to a seat next to me. He said, "Boland backed off. They've all accepted your position." I didn't say anything, just smiled. The program was saved, and it's still going on. The Russians are much the worse off for it. I know that Ed Boland is a good American. But his amendments represent strict Democratic Party positions. Ed lived too long with Tip O'Neill, who was so partisan he thought U.S. taxes were part of the Democrats' party treasury. The various changes in the Boland amendment are reflected in major modifications of aid to the Contras from its 1982 passage to the present. The Democrats want the country to believe that Reagan and the Administration violated the Hill's budget mandate. That's nonsense. Even a cursory reading of the public record shows that Congress flip-flopped on aid to the Contras, first approving military and intelligence support, then reversing itself. Even when aid to the Contras had been approved, Congress constantly changed the amounts and conditions under which the money could be used.

The Democrats wanted to keep the Contras alive with a minimum of funds but increase appropriations when it appeared the freedom fighters might collapse. The American people and the Contras themselves have watched one funding crisis after another. If any one characteristic describes congressional policy regarding the Soviet-Cuban presence in Nicaragua, it is a lack of continuity. Ambivalence has long been the centerpiece of the Democratic majority's view of Nicaragua and all of Central America. The result is that Congress has copped out on its limited responsibilities and thus put pressure on the Reagan administration to go it alone in Central America. This created the rise of North, Poindexter, and others involved in the transfer of Iranian funds to the Contras. Casey saw no way to deal with Congress's contradictions other than to go around them. Bill thus went directly to Poindexter and then North to launch new ways to keep the Contras alive. I don't think the subsequent Iran-Contra hearings accomplished a damn thing except to harm Reagan's presidency. I've tried to look at them objectively. I believe the President did know of the diversion of Iranian funds to the Contras. If he knew about the sale of weapons to an enemy country and various ways in which Americans were aiding the Contras, Reagan knew about the transfer of funds. He had to know. The White House explanation makes him out to be either a liar or incompetent. There's evidence that some of the President's top aides were incompetent. They were supposed to have their fingers on every button, but some of them, like Don Regan, the former White House chief of staff, clearly didn't.

I warned the President when he mentioned to me privately in January 1986 that he wanted to "get closer to the moderate forces in Iran." I said, "Mr. President, there are no moderate forces in Iran. They're all dead or have fled the country." Unfortunately, I believe that the Iran-Contra crisis cost Ronald Reagan the chance to be among the greatest presidents of this century. History will judge him much more harshly because of that unfortunate episode. The selling of arms to terrorist Iran unquestionably did the President irreparable harm. He will never regain his former stature. Now I think history will give him a passing grade—in some instances, such as domestic politics, an outstanding mark—but not the credit he deserves overall. Reagan hurt himself by some of his top staff choices. Chief of staff Regan, as well as Poindexter and others, were among the worst I've seen in Washington. The President was not well served. The biggest loser in the Iran-Contra mess has been Congress. The reason is that it was so hypocritical in its questioning of North and others while never accepting any blame for its own funding contradictions and other failures.

The immediate reason for the Iran arms deal was to get CIA Station Chief William Buckley out of captivity. Soon after Buckley's capture by Mideast terrorists, Casey came privately to Senate Intelligence and begged us to help him with funds to free Buckley. He made it clear that the Administration would go to extraordinary lengths to free the veteran CIA chief because he had considerable intelligence background on Mideast terrorism and our efforts to halt it. Buckley was tortured to death to pry those secrets from him. Stung by Buckley's death, the President and Casey kept the deal alive to secure the release of other hostages. The Iran moderates were only a secondary consideration. Senate Intelligence lost nine senior committee members at the end of 1984. The members' tenure was limited to eight years of consecutive service. I moved to Senate Armed Services, and the new bunch, led by Durenberger and Leahy, was unable to keep up with the fast-moving Casey. Bill was a terrifically hard worker, and they simply fell behind him. That is one of the major reasons why the whole Iran-Contra affair got out of hand. Casey was involved in so many activities that Durenberger and Leahy were unable to hop and skip with his many leaps and bounds. He also avoided the two because of what some in the intelligence community viewed as Durenberger's lack of personal stability and Leahy's weakness for leaking. These critical aspects were never brought out at the Iran-Contra hearings because they reflected negatively on the committee. The Democrats wanted to bash the President, never revealing why Casey felt he had to outrun and outfox them. Casey never revealed publicly his mistrust of Durenberger and Leahy.

In reflecting on the Nicaraguan mining episode and the Iran-Contra affair, I believe this country needs to accomplish two major goals: (1) Define the precise responsibilities of the President and Congress in foreign policy and intelligence. This will require going to the U.S. Supreme Court. (2) Spell out and agree on the extent of secrecy in covert operations. This would include severe penalties, including removal from office and/or sentencing to prison, for anyone in Congress or the executive branch who breaks the new law. The aim is to create an atmosphere of clear understanding and genuine trust between the two branches. If we do not accomplish these aims, more of the same policy problems and errors on both sides are inevitable. As it stands, in my opinion, we are headed for a national catastrophe. The American people do indeed have a right to know what their government is doing, but the government also has a legitimate need and right to guard state secrets. The Democrats have to stop their self-righteous posturing, especially their insistence on full disclosure of covert operations to Congress. They seem to believe that any operation is questionable or even evil unless it is blessed by the full membership of the two committees. The implication is that no one can be trusted but Congress, yet Congress has repeatedly violated that confidence.

I was not surprised when Senator Leahy leaked secret Senate Intelligence Committee material to "NBC News." His reputation as a leaker was already well established. In October 1985 Leahy requested a special private briefing from the CIA involving the hijackers of the _Achille Lauro._ It was a short-notice request, but the CIA complied because Leahy was committee vice chairman. The reason soon became apparent. Leahy rode out to CIA headquarters in a CBS silver stretch limousine. It waited for him, and, after the briefing, Leahy was immediately driven to the CBS Bureau in Washington, where he appeared on network news. Leahy revealed that, despite a statement by President Hosni Mubarak that the hijackers had left Egypt, U.S. intelligence knew they were still being detained there. By leaking that information, Leahy disclosed that we had penetrated the highest levels of the Egyptian government. The disclosure substantiated what I and others who had been associated with the committee already knew—that not all its members could be trusted.

Leahy was an especially egregious case. The New Englander flagrantly used his place on the committee to help himself get reelected. It was a despicable performance, especially since we had agreed as a body not to use the committee for political purposes. Nor were the Republicans blameless. Durenberger also had a reputation as a blabbermouth and had been investigated for other leaks. Also on the GOP side, an aide to Wyoming Senator Malcolm Wallop was disciplined in connection with a leak. Any member of the Intelligence Committees, plus dozens of their staffers, can blow a secret operation for any political or other reason. Other major congressional leaks included our knowledge of a 1984 New Delhi plan to strike at Pakistan's nuclear facility, China's transfer to Pakistan of vital atomic bomb technology, a secret CIA plan to undermine the Khadaffy regime in Libya, and revelations by the House which gave the Russians and others detailed knowledge about deployment and other problems with our new MX strategic nuclear weapons.

House Democrats used classified information from secret CIA briefings to gain public support for their views about Nicaragua. Incidentally, they never informed Republican colleagues of what they were about to do. The Democrats disclosed that the agency had concluded that the Contras could not defeat the Sandinistas. Only the use of American troops could affect the military outcome. The CIA was right in saying the Contras couldn't win. That conclusion was based, however, on the vacillating and limited backing Congress was willing to give the freedom fighters. I and others strongly believed—and do today—that the Contras can be victorious if we support them with sufficient military hardware and other backing. I am not suggesting the use of any U.S. troops in that support. Nevertheless, if Nicaragua or any other Central American nation were clearly dominated by Cuba or the Soviet Union as a base exporting revolution, I would send American troops there to deny communism further subversive footholds in the hemisphere. We cannot risk more Cubas at our back door.

Former CIA director Turner has admitted that President Carter delayed notifying Congress about three secret CIA operations in Iran. Carter wanted to restrict information about the initiatives because he didn't trust members to keep them quiet. Even Ed Boland, as House Intelligence chairman, accused his Democratic colleagues in 1985 of "regularly and recklessly commenting on intelligence matters." In all these horror stories, I know of no one in Congress with more contempt for his colleagues and the concept of trust than Representative Stephen Solarz, a Brooklyn Democrat. His rush to publicize himself beyond Flatbush was exceeded only by his speed to disclose confidential information that might hurt the GOP. Solarz descended to one of his neighborhood sewers in December 1986 after Bill Casey testified on behalf of the CIA for more than five hours before a closed door session of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. No sooner had the session ended than Solarz appeared before waiting television cameras. He announced that, based on Casey's testimony, it was now "absolutely clear" that a "higher authority" had approved the diversion of Iran arms-sale profits to Nicaraguan Contras. That authority was "almost certainly" President Reagan.

Contrary to Solarz, only two things were "absolutely clear"—that he had betrayed the confidence of the CIA director and his colleagues and that his judgment was, to say the least, premature. Other committee members, including Democrats, agreed there had been nothing in Casey's testimony to support Solarz' conclusion about the President. Members of both houses and parties were outraged by his contemptible conduct. Not only did Solarz violate confidentiality in speaking, but he or another member of the committee may have leaked extensive parts of Casey's testimony to the Washington _Post._ The _Post_ ran excerpts of Casey's remarks in the next day's editions. This was the same Solarz who regularly lectured the Administration on the morality of its foreign policy. He has a strange notion of ethics and honor. The Solarz incident came during my final days in the Senate. It was a real downer because some of us had long tried to instill a sense of bipartisanship in the conduct of our intelligence and foreign policy. The episode is an example of how much the caliber of congressmen has degenerated over the past three decades.

Some claim there is an inherent contradiction between secrecy and democracy. Yet England has managed to be a free and democratic country for centuries while keeping its national secrets. The free world certainly believed it necessary to maintain secrets during World War II to preserve the democratic values for which it was fighting. I have never understood how Congress and the executive branch can expect foreign governments, our own agents, our military, and others to trust the CIA and other intelligence agencies when we have so many leaks. Corrective action must be taken. The present two intelligence committees and their staffs should be combined into one. In 1984 I spoke in the Senate against a joint committee. I disagreed with the claim that Congress could not keep a secret and stated that a joint committee would improve security. I based those statements on the performance of my committee over the previous four years. However, the astonishing rise in leaks over the last four years has caused me to change my mind. Leaks are now so pervasive that we will be forced to reduce the numbers of those who know any classified information.

A total of only four members—two in the House and two in the Senate—should be fully briefed by the President, his national security chief, and/or the CIA director. I would not include the majority and minority leaders. The entire joint committee should be made aware of top secrets only for the most urgent and compelling reasons. The executive branch leadership must severely limit access to such secrets among itself. The United States is only part of the intelligence scene in Washington. The Soviet Union and other Communist regimes have attempted to penetrate the Senate and House Intelligence Committees as well as other sensitive government bodies with spies and bugs. The case of David H. Barnett, a former CIA agent who began spying for the Russians in the mid-1970s, is one example. He tried to obtain a position on the Senate and House Intelligence Committees but failed. Barnett was finally convicted of espionage and imprisoned. There are other instances in which the Soviets tried to infiltrate the committees and intelligence community. So have friendly powers, such as Israel.

Both the Senate and House now have secure meeting places—one in the Hart building and another on the House side of the Capitol itself—where we can discuss highly sensitive material without fear of Soviet or other electronic penetration. As Senate intelligence chairman, I insisted on the secure room in the Hart building and on hiring our own reporter to provide verbatim transcripts of our meetings, hearings, and briefings. The reason was that I had learned two things: Certain Senate reporters had been selling such transcripts to the KGB, and the KGB had recruited a member of Senator Lowell Weicker's staff in 1983. On discovering the fact, Weicker fired the individual. Regarding my own responsibilities, I either placed any sensitive documents in a safe every night or burned them. Woodward's report on counterintelligence problems in my office while I was intelligence chairman is grossly inaccurate. My office was not swept twice a week for bugs. It was swept only when I held discussions on sensitive committee matters there. That usually occurred when the pain in my knees became so great that it was extremely difficult for me to walk. Woodward also was wrong in saying that a microphone had been found in my desk with a wire or recording device which we were unable to trace. I built a microphone and recording device into my desk myself. I recorded important conversations, always asking the permission of whomever was present, so that I would have a clear and full record of what was said. There was no possibility, as Woodward suggested, that I could have allowed secrets to slip into the hands of either the KGB or another foreign spy service.

I met with Woodward in my office only once regarding his book. Most of the material he wrote about me and my work was not gotten through me. His inaccuracies are clear evidence of that. The Soviets are still making extraordinary efforts to penetrate Congress, the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House, and other sources of top secrets in Washington, New York, and California. They have already begun to establish their new embassy, located on Washington's second-highest peak, as one of the world's most sophisticated electronic spy centers. The Soviets have been tapping Washington phone lines for more than a decade. They also have maintained electronic and other spy operations in New York and California. These include Moscow's diplomatic facilities in Riverdale, New York, and Glen Cove, Long Island, as well as their high-ground consulate in San Francisco. The latter eavesdrops on high-technology centers in the Silicon Valley as well as U.S. military facilities on the West Coast. Soviet satellites, spy planes that fly along the East Coast and elsewhere, submarines, and ships off both U.S. coasts complete a sweeping network of efficient electronic spying.

In Washington, D.C., the Soviets have constructed a $70 million city-within-a-city—even their own school and gym—in a sweeping complex of eight buildings that has become the Communist capital of the United States. Two structures are eight and nine stories tall. The new citadel rises atop Mount Alto, about 350 feet above the city, near the intersection of Wisconsin and Massachusetts avenues, where Georgetown and Glover Park crest. It has a clear electronic line of sight to the Capitol, White House, Pentagon, and various federal buildings that are centers for U.S. intelligence, finance, and commerce. The compound also has a partial electronic sight of the CIA in Langley, Virginia. Electronic spying equipment, already installed on its rooftops, can zero in on communications from the West German, British, and French embassies. The Russians are also positioned to tap into key microwave relay towers that serve telephone and other transmission communications on the East Coast. They now listen to supposedly private conversations among our military and defense contractors, as well as to discussions of big agriculture and other business deals that could affect them. Their computers start tape recorders when certain words or expressions are used among hundreds of thousands of phone calls. The ten-acre site, surrounded by high prisonlike walls and steel wire fence that stretch about a half mile around the complex, has become a fortress.

Before leaving the Senate in 1986, I flew over the compound in a helicopter to find how badly we were getting snookered. The roofs of the two tallest buildings were porcupines of antennae. I could barely see the roofs. Laser beam listening devices had already been installed. They were partially concealed by large, wooden enclosures—we called them "doghouses." The Russians were already using lasers against the windowpanes of the White House, Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon to pick up conversations inside as well as electronic emanations. The equipment has been in operation for some time. In return, we are "tempest-proofing"—a technical term meaning we are shielding our office equipment with devices to prevent the escape and interception by the Russians of electromagnetic emanations from the White House and elsewhere. Washington quipsters have managed to come up with some grim humor about the place. The tallest building, a 165-unit structure used as apartments and offices by hundreds of Russians, some of whom have lived there since 1980, has a large underground parking garage. They call it Russia's "Washington bomb shelter."

Washington and Moscow have spent billions of dollars in attempting to intercept each other's communications. U.S. ground stations have been built around the world to track Soviet communications. The Russians have long operated satellites, ships, and other means of spying on us. This includes their most sophisticated collection facility outside the Soviet Union at Lourdes, near Havana. Some two thousand Soviet technicians work around the clock at the electronic eavesdropping facility established more than twenty years ago. Both the United States and Russia consider monitoring telemetry—electronic data transmitted by missiles and reentry vehicles in tests—vital to their security. As missiles are launched, they are tracked by satellites, ground stations, aircraft, and ships with electronic equipment. This monitoring is particularly critical to the United States because the Soviets have played all kinds of games to avoid compliance with arms control agreements. Certain verification is absolutely crucial to us.

In return for the gleaming new Soviet diplomatic listening post in Washington, the Russians traded us swampland on the Moscow River and a highly bugged new embassy. It was our own damn fault—specifically, that of Nixon and Kissinger, as well as Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. I learned from the CIA and others that Nixon and Kissinger were originally responsible. They offered the land swap to Moscow as part of a package deal to get the Kremlin to agree to the Salt I arms accord. Carter and Vance signed off on actual construction approval as part of another pact to obtain Soviet agreement on Salt II. The land deal was actually cut in 1969 and signed by Jacob Beam, then our ambassador to Moscow. A building agreement was signed in 1972 by Walter Stoessel, then our ambassador to the Kremlin. Obviously, neither could sign without presidential and secretarial approval. Nixon, Kissinger, Carter, and Vance should all hang their heads in shame. Their sellout in the name of detente is a national disgrace.

All of them knew that they were putting us in a fix. The National Security Agency, which conducts American electronic surveillance, warned as early as 1966 that the Mount Alto site would allow the Soviets to intercept sensitive American communications. Secretary of State Dean Rusk confirmed that view at the time to Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. CIA and FBI officials kicked and screamed behind the scenes as Carter and Vance moved to hand Mount Alto to the Soviets. As Soviet Embassy spokesman Boris Malakhov put it, "We did not capture the site. We were given it." Carter and Vance not only accepted the Moscow swamp as the site of our embassy but even killed CIA and other intelligence community insistence that American workers—specifically Navy Seabees—be used to build the place. Vance personally confirmed that Soviets—not Americans—would construct our new Moscow embassy. This decision, pushed by the State Department, was made in the name of showing our good faith in detente. It ranks with the stupidest of my time in Washington.

The new ten-acre U.S. embassy compound in Moscow, originally scheduled for completion in 1983, is a house of construction horrors. The roof atop the nine-story central structure leaked so badly at one time that rain and snow created puddles down to the fourth floor. More seepage dripped down elevator shafts to the basement. Chunks of concrete, plaster, and other parts of that and other buildings in the complex simply fell down and collapsed in piles of rubbish. The building was one big electronic bug, not a normal structure. In 1983 Russian workers walked off the construction site for several weeks to protest our use of an X-ray machine to detect structural flaws. They called it a health hazard. The Soviets were really more concerned, however, about the use of such machines to detect their implanting of bugs in walls and elsewhere. The Russian "construction crew"—actually trained electronics experts—had accomplished their bugging mission well. Hundreds of sophisticated listening devices now riddle the walls, columns, beams, and floors of the structure. When it was discovered that the crew was not following certain construction plans—and we told them so—they walked off the job in a huff. Then we discovered that one steel girder was fitted to act as a large antenna.

The State Department, which is rarely intimidated by facts and warnings when its own order and authority are involved, had reported for years that all was well at the construction site. It finally faced reality and marched the Russian workers off the grounds several years ago, belatedly halting construction. The General Accounting Office reports that State's Foreign Buildings Office has screwed up a good number of our foreign embassies—in Hong Kong and New Delhi, among others. Lousy workmanship compounded by cost overruns mark the FBO's reputation. But it has never botched anything quite as badly as the Moscow swamp construction project. Needless to say, our new Moscow tomb has not been occupied, and there is already a big cost overrun. The original structure was to cost $89 million, but that total now runs at $200 million and is still rising. It could cost another $50 million to debug the central embassy structure—such as it is—or we could spend several hundred million dollars more and start from scratch. We could debug part of the chancery and hope it would be a complete job. Also, we might build a separate building for secret conversations and work. But this would be patchwork.

I believe our new Moscow embassy should be completely torn down. So should the new Soviet complex in Washington. The entire agreement should be scrapped because this is an incredible ripoff. The State Department is concerned about our reopening the embassy matter. State argues that such a discussion might upset the Soviets. To hell with the Russians. This is business, not high tea. The department expresses these arguments behind closed doors and in confidential memoranda. They don't want to do anything that "might jeopardize relations." Our relations have been in jeopardy since at least 1945. I also agree with Bobby Inman, who has called for replacing or renovating more than half of our 262 embassies and consulates around the world because they are vulnerable to spies and terrorists. Congress has approved the first appropriations in a $4.4 billion program to protect these missions. It is of more than casual interest to me and others that not a single State Department official connected with the new Moscow embassy fiasco has been disciplined. On the contrary, several officers involved in overseeing Soviet construction have been promoted. Not only that, they have been given performance bonuses of $10,000 or more.

Instead, the Marine Corps has taken the rap, and Sergeant Clayton Lonetree has been convicted of espionage. The Navajo Indian was sentenced to thirty years in prison. He is the first Marine to be found guilty on such a charge in the 212-year history of the corps. I would remove the Marines from guarding our embassies for two reasons: They are rarely, if ever, allowed to carry loaded weapons on duty. The Leathernecks cannot defend the embassy without getting permission from the ambassador, often a laborious and difficult process. These men are also targets, particularly of Communist regimes, for two reasons: Marines are a symbol of U.S. power, and their guard jobs are boring, certainly not what they were trained to do. It goes without saying that the Reds want to embarrass America's fighting elite. Let's put the Marines back on their regular ship and shore assignments where they belong. I recommend we hire senior, perhaps retired, military officers for such work. With wives and families, they will not easily be tempted. This system is working well in China, which refuses to allow Marine guards at our embassy in Beijing. That is because Marines protected foreign legations during the Boxer Rebellion.

I weep not for Lonetree, who certainly compromised himself, but for the corps, because it has largely become the fall guy for the striped pants crowd at State. That is true not only in Moscow but in Eastern bloc capitals and other embassies around the world. Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman dodged blame for the Marine episode, although it was clearly his responsibility. The Marines were not alone at the embassy. If some of them fell for the traps of professional Russian spies, it was essential for the ambassador and his security chief to have airtight backup systems that would allow no one to compromise U.S. security within the embassy itself. Obviously, they failed. Hartman also opposed new and tougher security measures at the chancery three years before the Marine security breach took place. He argued along the classic department line: Changes might harm Soviet-American relations. The FBI gave the White House, the State Department, and the National Security Council a devastating critique of embassy security under Hartman after one of its counterintelligence agents ran a sweep of mission offices in 1983. The report said that security was so lax that Soviet intelligence could have penetrated the embassy's three secure floors by avoiding guards and alarm systems. Even earlier, in 1977, the NSC had repeatedly warned the White House and State about slipshod security under Hartman.

Under Hartman, a nightclub called "Sam's" operated within the complex. Large numbers of people, including Russians, moved in and out of the compound in the late evening. Identification was rarely verified. There was no systematic supervision of guards on duty, not even random checks by the regional security officer. Nor were there any unscheduled inspections of so-called secure areas during the night. Members of Congress, who conducted an investigation of such procedures, reported, "The technical [monitoring and detection] system did not take advantage of available security technology. The system's lack of coverage of the entire complex was appalling." Our intelligence sources report that at least six Russians working secretly for the United States within the Soviet Union were arrested and executed between late 1985 and the close of 1986. They said the leaks had come from our mission. Experts estimate the disclosures set back American intelligence efforts in the Soviet Union a full decade.

Two other independent studies of our Moscow security pointed out problems at the mission. These ranged from the ease of outside access to the vulnerability of young, single Marines. Hartman maintained that the primary purpose of the embassy was not keeping secrets but "penetrating closed Soviet society." That is a stupid comment from a career diplomat. When it was pointed out to Hartman that his chauffeur in Moscow was a KGB agent and that there were other such plants on our embassy staff, he said, "No big deal. Everybody who has ever been to Moscow knows things like that." The former ambassador then blithely told the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee, "I want the Soviets to know what we're thinking in Moscow." An ambassador might adopt that attitude in some South Sea island nation where the biggest problem is fishing rights, but certainly not in Moscow. We clearly must practice special rules of engagement with the Russians. Some of my Senate colleagues thought I was too critical of State's general performance in Moscow and elsewhere. That is a fair question. Consider some examples.

In 1985 it was announced that embassy typewriters there had been bugged with electronic devices. Sensors placed in these typewriters as well as embassy walls signaled to KGB listening posts outside what was being typed. Neither Hartman nor the department, however, broadcast the fact that it had shipped the typewriters to Moscow by ordinary commercial carrier, unaccompanied by security personnel, and that the Russians had planted the devices as easily as a child playing spy. Nor did State report an earlier ominous incident. In 1978 department officials sent embassy typewriters from Antwerp, Belgium, to Moscow via a Soviet shipping firm. Fortunately, security officers learned of the mistake and had the typewriters shipped back to the United States before they could be placed in service. Yet in the ensuing years, our Moscow embassy sent its typewriters to a friendly little repair shop around the corner, where the KGB systematically bugged them. Foreign service officers do not repair typewriters. They do not wash windows. And they most certainly do not carry out the trash. More than 35,000 foreign nationals working in our embassies and the homes of Americans abroad accomplish those cumbersome tasks. The Japanese, West Germans, British, French, and Italians use much less foreign help than Americans do—from one half to as little as 15 percent of our total. Not one American works at the Soviet embassy in Washington or for their chancery at the United Nations. The United States employs some 120,000 foreigners on U.S. military installations around the world. This is not to suggest that our embassies and other installations do not need foreign assistance. They do. But not on such a lavish scale. Today's foreign spies do not have to work out of a murky back alley. They just walk in the front gates of U.S. embassies and other installations and get a job.

If lax protection of our secrets in Moscow seems a nightmare, consider an example of State Department security at its headquarters in Washington. The file cabinets of foreign service officers and others are regularly sent for refurbishing to Lorton prison, about forty miles downstate in Virginia. The maximum security institution houses District of Columbia inmates under a special agreement. Lorton prisoners discovered classified documents in some of the drawers. One even wrote to the Washington _Post_ about it. Some at Foggy Bottom didn't think the foul-up was so funny. State vowed it would never happen again. It did, of course. Some 260 Soviets, including members of the KGB, were employed at our Moscow conclave. These were drivers, maids, cleaners, translators, and others. The Kremlin withdrew them in 1986, also kicking ten U.S. diplomats out of the Soviet Union, in retaliation for Washington's booting out eighty Soviet spies from the United States. Hartman and State opposed our expelling the eighty Soviet spies. The NSC and CIA learned that the ambassador had fought the expulsions in blistering cables with extremely intemperate language. Yet it's generally agreed that our expulsion order broke the back of Soviet KGB and GRU espionage leadership here.

After the Soviets withdrew their people from working at our Moscow mission, Hartman drew up what I call "Operation Maid." He developed a plan that would have placed more support personnel in Moscow at the expense of intelligence and other key functions. Both the NSC and CIA strongly opposed him. The nation is fortunate that Hartman is no longer our ambassador to Moscow or anywhere else. State is now recruiting Americans to serve as typists, telephone operators, translators, security monitors, and other such positions. Meantime, American diplomats and their wives are washing windows and carrying out trash in Moscow. The foreign service cadre is unhappy about the situation. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the rest of the world. The United States and Soviet Union have restricted one another to 251 diplomatic personnel in each country. The official Communist presence here is, however, much larger. There are about 475 Soviets and some 1,250 nationals from Communist bloc countries at the United Nations in New York. In all, about 4,250 Communist diplomats, commercial officials, and other representatives reside in the United States. About 2,100 are from the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries.

Between one third and one half of those at the United Nations and elsewhere engage in some kind of espionage or intelligence work. The State Department has long avoided a congressional oversight directive that would force the Soviet and Eastern bloc delegations to reduce the size of their U.N. staffs. The United States and other Western nations are paying most of the Russians' U.N. salaries. The Soviets are forced to kick back much of their salary to Moscow on the premise that they would not be paid as much there. That amounts to about $20 million a year. It's also clear that the Soviets, Cuba, and other Communist nations have widely infiltrated the United Nations. They use it not only to spy on us and others, but to spout Marxist propaganda to the world under U.N. auspices. It is also used to recruit Red agents here and among the diplomatic staffs of other nations. The Communists also send literally tens of thousands of tourists, commercial representatives, students, and others to this country. At least one quarter of these are spies.

Pat Moynihan is leading the charge on Capitol Hill to do something about all this. I've long encouraged and salute his efforts. Pat is now concentrating on Mount Alto as a symbol of State's general don't-rock-the-boat attitude in dealing with the Soviets and other foreign governments. Moynihan hopes to neutralize the Soviet interception operations there and at other points by placing all domestic common carrier communications satellite links in special codes. That is only part of the solution. The federal government is burying much of its telephone cable in Washington to protect private conversations. We are also buying as many as 500,000 new scrambler phones that do much to block intercepts. The Defense Department has installed fiber optics and other means of protecting Pentagon communications. We greatly need to strengthen our telephone and other security in the defense industry. The Soviets are, nevertheless, still skirting American law on a massive scale in New York, Washington, and San Francisco. Today the KGB invades more Americans' privacy than the FBI ever did. Even at the height of its most important investigations, the FBI never tapped phones to the extent the KGB now does every day. If an American were engaged in such invasion of privacy, he would be jailed for years. We are, in effect, under an electronic spy siege in our own national capital.

For a decade, I and others failed to rally enough of our colleagues in Congress to support Moynihan in his effort to get Congress to approve a Foreign Surveillance Protection Act. It would have given the President the power to expel foreign diplomats involved in electronic spying. The Russians have been engaged in electronic attacks on our Moscow embassy since the early 1950s. The State Department has consistently underplayed the situation. State has argued that protesting will only harm "good diplomatic relations." The Soviets can only conclude that they should continue. We obviously spy electronically in the Soviet Union. But that is minor compared to what the Russians are doing here. I am hopeful that Moynihan and other senators, like Ernest "Fritz" Hollings, the eloquent South Carolinian, will lead Congress to scrap the embassy agreement. Moynihan is now weakening for various reasons—he has been sold some false information—but I beg him not to give up the fight. There will be a hullabaloo about the United States' not keeping its accords. So what! That has been largely a Moscow monopoly for a half century. The critical fact is that the pact has not yet been consummated. The slate should be wiped clean soon because the Soviets have plans to greatly expand their Mount Alto facilities.

I also believe we should make another drastic reduction in the number of diplomats from the Soviet Union and other Communist governments in the United States. George F. Kennan, our former ambassador to Moscow and a veteran Soviet expert, has long advocated such cuts. The mutual reduction in personnel will not only help eliminate spying by all the governments involved but perhaps moderate tensions as well. In 1986 the Reagan administration and Congress cut the number of the Soviet mission to the United Nations from 275 to 170. We also slashed our annual contribution to the U.N. budget by 25 percent. Both should be cut again. The number of Russian personnel at the United Nations should be reduced to a total of seventy-five, and we should cut another 25 percent from our part of the U.N. budget. We have the legal power to do both. The U.S. government has, since its signing in 1946, expressed reservations about the U.N. Headquarters Agreement. Specifically, we have stated that our national security provides independent authority to limit the admission and restrict the movement of foreign missions.

The State Department could have advanced a much more vigorous case for greater reduction of Soviets at the United Nations. It said the Russians were engaged in espionage but failed to point out that they are secretly eavesdropping on our telephone and other communications systems. Moscow and the Eastern bloc have some 1,200 spies here. We have many fewer behind the Iron Curtain. Also, we are open societies while they are closed. In addition, the Russians have had considerable success in recruiting Americans to spy for them. A significant number have been volunteers, but the Russians have had the manpower to handle all of them. Some recent cases indicate how active the Soviets and other foreign espionage units have been in this country: • John Walker and Jerry Whitworth passed cryptographic material to the Russians, enabling them to decipher the most secret U.S. naval communications from the 1960s through 1985. Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB double defector, disclosed that the Russians had read more than 1 million coded messages as a result. The information gathered allowed the Soviets to reduce the American lead in antisubmarine warfare.

• From 1979 to 1981 James Harper passed to Polish intelligence a wide array of information on the survivability of our Minuteman Missile System. Harper also provided them with considerable data on U.S. defenses against ballistic missile attack. Army experts rated the loss "beyond calculation." In 1980 a team of twenty KGB agents flew to Warsaw, where Harper delivered about a hundred pounds of classified reports. • Edward Lee Howard, a onetime CIA case officer, defected to Moscow when we discovered he was selling U.S. intelligence secrets to the Soviets. Howard had given the Russians information on sensitive CIA operations in the Soviet Union and other critical espionage data. He may have been responsible for the capture and execution of some of our top agents inside Russia. • Larry Wu-tai Chin worked secretly for about forty years as a "plant" of mainland China within the CIA. He provided Beijing with American intelligence on China throughout that time. • Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst with the Naval Investigative Service, illegally passed highly classified documents to Israeli intelligence. These were extremely sensitive reports on the Mideast. The highest officials of the Israeli government were involved in this spying on the United States, although they concocted a "plausible denial" scheme from the beginning.

A dozen other Americans have been arrested as spies for the Soviets and other foreign governments in the past decade. During this time, the Soviets have acquired more than three hundred different types of U.S. and other Western computer hardware and software. This has allowed them to develop the technical ability to penetrate some American automated systems. The Russians are now engaged in an all-out effort to crack our supercomputers. Some of these cases, especially Walker's twenty years of spying, reflect adversely on the ability of our intelligence agencies themselves to keep the nation's secrets. Were it not for Walker's wife and daughter, he might still be in business. So our counterintelligence operations are not what they should be. I have long criticized the State Department. Yet State and the intelligence agencies can complement one another. If U.S. foreign policy is to be successful, both must work more closely together. The aim of each is the same: to protect the people and interests of the United States.

I have not found our intelligence services to be "rogue elephants." Rather, they have been dedicated in their service to the President and the executive branch. Indeed, they serve the legislative branch as well, responding to thousands of requests for information as well as participating in the budget process. Unfortunately, I can't express the same unqualified support for State. I don't believe there has been a President since Eisenhower who has trusted the foreign service to carry out his expressed policies. Ike had some confidence in the department for two reasons—the Dulles brothers. John Foster ran State while Alan directed the CIA. Too many State officials have long had their own policy agenda. That has been influenced by their aristocratic self-importance: The old boys at State know best. I don't believe that some of the most important career officers at the department are convinced the President should always decide foreign policy. This has been reflected over the years in battles among State, the Defense Department, and the NSC. That fight is really over whether State is preeminent in foreign policy. Control—"psychic pay," as it's called among upper-echelon careerists in Washington—is everything in the bureaucracy.

Congress is now trying to redefine its foreign policy role for the same reason—control. As the various power players are now positioned in Washington, confrontation in foreign policy is inevitable. If we can eliminate this conflict, the result will be better foreign policy. State now has a split personality. Its veterans recall the grandeur of the old days when, because of the education and wealth of many officers, they contributed much more to the U.S. role in the changing global scene than is true today. The department is now, however, plagued with institutional weaknesses. State's onetime closely held power has been separated into different functions at the department. Some of these have even left the confines of Foggy Bottom for the White House and other government departments. In the 1940s State lost its sole control of reporting economic and political intelligence to the Office of Strategic Services and later to the CIA. The United States Information Agency, USAID, and the Peace Corps also took a bite out of State's bureaucratic hide. These are still part of a "country team," but State does not have sole control of their activities.

Rapid communications have also reduced State's power. Fifty years ago, slow diplomatic pouches conveyed Washington's wishes to faraway embassies. Today, messages can flash around the world in seconds. Secure voice transmissions allow instantaneous communications. Ambassadors no longer run embassies. They are easily and often told what to do by Foggy Bottom, the NSC, or presidential aides. All major decisions are made in Washington. The making of foreign policy has now been largely delegated. Some might not agree with that, especially after Kissinger, but that's a fact of life at State today. The result is that the nation's last great vestige of an American aristocracy has become just like any other hangout for bureaucrats. Budgets are now crises. Policy making by committee is routine. Overall global policy is set by the White House and others. State has become provincial and has adopted "good relations" abroad to survive better at home. The department's old personality, its grand ways and manner, return when officers are posted overseas. Aristocrats rise above Foggy Bottom into international prominence. They are going to set some policy, because they are "experts"—and to hell with Washington.

Hartman and others wanted more power over appointments abroad, not interference from the passing political crowd at the White House and elsewhere. Why should the President appoint an ambassador of his choosing when a career man is available at State? Their argument has some merit. But the pendulum has swung against the foreign service because of its past arrogance and Washington's current shakeout in foreign policy power. For State's own good, there should be a massive shake-up at the department. It's no longer an elite organization. The department could do even more to reform itself along distinct professional lines instead of personal connections. Career paths must be much better defined with more professional incentives built into the organization. Only then will it work more effectively with the intelligence community and begin to restore its lost respect. The country cannot afford another Hartman opposing the CIA and using the Marine Corps as a scapegoat. We must join our Big Three—State, Defense, and the CIA—to institute an effective strategy and program to combat international terrorism.

The main thrust of our present policy is to hit back at terrorists who strike U.S. citizens abroad. The American bombing raid on Libya was an example of this. We also support freedom fighters who oppose Soviet-supported regimes, primarily in Central America and Afghanistan. However, Washington has no cohesive, comprehensive policy that combines the special competences of the CIA, our military intelligence, and State to battle the terrorists. Different elements work together on an ad hoc basis, for example, in our air attack on Libya. The targets and justification for the assault were worked out in a team effort. We have yet to integrate our resources into a unified, effective force. Short of war, we have no comprehensive strategy—much less a top-level strike command—to meet political violence face to face. It is generally agreed that the most effective way to eliminate terrorism without going to war is to hit the leaders of countries sponsoring it. With the exception of our air attack on Libya, we and other nations have been unwilling to do that. We could also kill these leaders in covert actions. Democracies argue that they would be adopting the ruthlessness of dictatorships if they employed such methods and argue against them on moral grounds. Israel is the exception. The Israelis have clearly warned foreign leaders about terrorism. Their response to terrorists is to kill them. Israeli leaders realize they are at war.

We have yet to convince terrorists that they will pay a price for the murder and kidnapping of Americans. We have to take a tougher stand. That cannot be accomplished, however, without an effective strategy and strike force that integrate State, the CIA, and military intelligence. National leaders and governments, including the Soviet Union, sponsor this violence. The Russians openly arm and train only one terrorist group, the Palestine Liberation Organization. However, to conceal their ties to other terrorists, the Kremlin uses its Communist cohorts—the Eastern bloc (particularly Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and East Germany), North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, and South Yemen. All furnish training and arms to terrorists. They work underground with such groups as Italy's Red Brigades, West Germany's RAF, and El Salvador's FMLN. Iran, Syria, and Libya sponsor, train, and arm other terrorists. Groups supported by Communist states never make a major move without Moscow's instigation or approval. If the Bulgarians handle a group of Red Brigades—which they do regularly—Sofia checks with the Kremlin before approving a big operation.

The Soviet aim is to sow conflict and confusion in the West and to demonstrate its weaknesses to the rest of the world without waging a direct and open war. Nearly three hundred Americans have been killed in terrorist incidents abroad since 1968. The Russians have not been targets because we do not sponsor such terror. Moscow has introduced secret warfare into intelligence. The two are joined into a terrorist network. Terrorism has become part of a new undeclared war against the West. As Moscow sees it, the weak can wage war against the strong without fear of massive retaliation. Soviet diplomats, military, and intelligence have been deliberately integrated into a unique new Kremlin strike force. Sweet talk, savage terror, and spying are spreading despite _glasnost_ and promises of internal reform. That seeming contradiction is a well-planned Russian policy. The United States must let Gorbachev know that the Russians will pay a price for this. We cannot make such a warning credible, however, unless we are prepared to carry out a unified strategy.

It also would be helpful if the media, especially American TV news, put into practice policies that more clearly recognize this crucial fact: Most terrorist acts are aimed not merely at the victims but at much wider audiences. The terrorists, in effect, write and narrate much of their story. No one is asking the U.S. media to act as if these horrors didn't happen. But it is quite another thing to play into terrorist hands by broadcasting and printing forced confessions and other terrorist propaganda. It's claimed the American public doesn't swallow this. If such tapings are false, then why broadcast them? There must be international cooperation to halt terrorism. These murders and kidnappings probably will never be wiped out entirely. But they can be limited and the perpetrators punished. The United States has a long way to go before we have an effective antiterrorist organization of our own, but it can be done. The battle against such violence will be long and bloody. Our first line of defense against terrorism and war is the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

11 Duty–Honor–Country At 5:40 P.M., in the falling darkness of Monday, February 3, 1986, a military van pulled slowly away from the Russell Senate Office Building and headed across the Potomac River to the Pentagon. In it were Jim Locher and Rick Finn, two staff members of the Senate Committee on the Armed Services, and myself. Jeff Smith, another staffer, had driven to Dulles International Airport to meet Senator Sam Nunn, the ranking Democrat on the committee, who was returning from California. We were to meet with the chairman and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at 6 P.M. This was a hastily arranged, and not ordinary Pentagon meeting. The subject was a legislative proposal that would launch the most sweeping reorganization of U.S. military leadership in three decades. Admiral William J. Crowe, Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had phoned the committee office that morning about details of the meeting. Crowe indicated that he and the Service Chiefs believed other members of the Armed Services Committee should attend the conference. I had received calls from three Republican senators, John Warner of Virginia, Jeremiah Denton of Alabama, and Phil Gramm of Texas. The three, who were among the strongest opponents of military reorganization, said they understood that committee members were invited to the meeting. I told them flatly that they had not been asked by me. On the other side, the Joint Chiefs saw no reason for our staff members to be present. I replied that the staffers would accompany Senator Nunn and myself.

It was obvious that those opposing military reform were trying to maneuver us into an early, full-blown confrontation—and Nunn and I would have fewer troops. If I had agreed on other senators' attending, Sam and I would have had to debate the five chiefs as well as return the fire of opposing colleagues. Without our staff, we would have been denied their support in interpreting the minute details of the plan's provisions. The chiefs were certain to have some staff. In fact, they did. We met in Admiral Crowe's reception office. Crowe led the five of us to the Tank, a top-security meeting room. Despite its flags and paintings, the Tank is not impressive when empty. The room comes to life only when members of the JCS—silver stars on their epaulets, gold braid on their sleeves, and rows of colored ribbons emblazoning their immaculate uniforms—are present. The four service chiefs and four Joint Staff officers awaited us. The chiefs were: General Charles A. Gabriel, chief of staff of the Air Force, General John A. Wickham, Jr., Army chief of staff, Admiral James D. Watkins, chief of Naval Operations, and General P. X. Kelley, commandant of the Marine Corps.

The Tank is a plain setting, not at all what one might expect as the conference room for the nation's military leaders. No communications equipment is present, not even a phone. The room, about thirty by twenty-seven feet, is dominated by a large rectangular wooden table at the center. The chiefs sit around this table. The seating arrangement is established by tradition, with the chairman and each service chief having a designated position. Six small tables and chairs, where key Joint Staff officers may sit, are to the rear of the chairman. Behind this arrangement are five flags: one flag, with battle ribbons, for each service and the chairman's four-star flag at the center. The American flag stands alone in a corner. Additional chairs line the walls. Every chair in the room is identical, standard government issue—wooden with mahogany-colored simulated leather seats and backs. A lectern stands near a projection screen for briefings. The carpet and drapes in the chamber are gold. No outside light enters. The walls are decorated with military art. Two paintings of the Army in Vietnam—moving infantry and firing artillery—are framed behind the chairman. A large print of a Norman Rockwell painting depicting the American soldier at six different times from 1776 to 1918 streams across one wall. Other paintings include an Allied military Mass in St. Peter's Basilica at the Vatican during World War II, a Navy warship with a Chinese junk nearby, a modern Air Force fighter aircraft, and a futuristic Air Force aircraft of the twenty-first century.

The original Tank was located in another building. Its entrance was down a flight of stairs and through an archway. At the first meeting there, on February 9, 1942, the walk reminded officers of entering a tank. The nickname stuck. In recent years, because of the color of carpeting and drapes in the current meeting place, it has also been referred to as the Gold Room. The Tank reflects the military brass—somewhat austere and plain, yet proud and colorful in their own way. Apart from certain religious groups, the U.S. military may be the most tradition-minded, conservative institution in America. It is certainly the most conservative institution of government. Our meeting concerned changes that would cut to the core of their professional lives and hallowed traditions. The military is incomprehensible to many outsiders. Its seemingly archaic rules guide the most modern technology in the world. It is as old as the republic, yet as young as the latest probe into outer space. It is critical to understand this background as Nunn and I faced these men. We proposed to transform inviolate military organizational command. Our reorganization sought to pin down a precise chain of command and the specific roles of officers in it. The chain itself was not to be altered, but it was to be much more accountable. These distinguished men were now facing the military mind's worst nightmare: the uncertainty of change.

Admiral Crowe occupied the seat at the center of the table, opposite Sam and me. General Gabriel was to his right. The three other chiefs were seated on either side of us. Crowe opened with a five-minute general statement. He expressed concern that the proposed legislation would subject the service chiefs, in performing their duties as JCS members, to the direction and control of their respective civilian service secretaries, such as the Secretary of the Navy or Army. He also wished to retain the "corporate character" of the JCS. That meant only one thing—continued watered-down decisions by committee. For decades, the JCS has been unwilling to present anything less than a united front to civilian authority. Nearly every JCS action has been unanimous. Interservice jealousies, mostly over funding and the scope of their military missions, have caused each branch to protect its own flanks. It became painfully evident that the services' first loyalty was to themselves. Unanimity was therefore forged only by compromises to which each service could agree. This resulted in delayed, compromised counsel to the President, Defense Secretary, and others. Tough issues were avoided. Clear, forceful solutions were, for the most part, doomed. The system was actually a disservice to the country and the services themselves.

Crowe, of course, expressed none of this. With McNamara and his whiz kids in mind, he took aim at civilian authority's invading the chiefs' turf. He also knew that Sam and I were generally sympathetic to such a view. Gabriel joined Crowe in questioning the effects of such a measure on the chiefs' ability to perform overall planning and other missions. Generals Wickham and Kelley and Admiral Watkins launched a direct, frontal attack on the bill. In sharp terms, Wickham argued that the measure would destroy the independent judgment and professional integrity of the JCS by placing each chief under the civilian secretary of his military department. Watkins and Kelley expanded on this theme in very emotional terms. Nunn and I were prepared for opposition but not this rancor. I respect every one of these men. Each is a dedicated military leader who rose to the pinnacle of his profession because of his bravery, intelligence, and hard work. Yet, as tension and emotion mounted in the room, it was clear that calm had to be restored. I tried to do so.

I reminded the chiefs of my long efforts to strengthen the military. Neither I nor Senator Nunn was attempting to place them, in conducting their JCS duties, under a civilian service secretary. In cautious but clear language, I tried to tell them that a confrontational approach would not work with us. My conciliatory remarks had no impact. None at all. The chiefs, pressing a unified front, intensified their attack. Midway through the meeting, it was clear that of all the sweeping changes our measure would bring to the military, the most important thing to the JCS was their turf—power. They were nervous about being dominated by civilians who were not their professional equals. They made no mention of their organization and command system, which was clearly flawed and dangerous for everyone. All of us—Nunn and I as well as our staff—were taken aback at their sharp attack. Wickham, Watkins, and Kelley had completely misinterpreted the meaning and intention of our plan. All had become so emotional about defense reorganization that they were prepared to conclude the worst. Moreover, the principle for which they were arguing—professional military advice, independent of civilian restraint—was one they could convincingly defend because it would appeal to Nunn and me. The Joint Chiefs would, in fact, lose power, but not to civilians. They would lose it to the JCS chairman and specified commanders. All we had to do was rework a sentence or two of the bill's language to make their independence more precise.

I then asked Locher to review the history of the bill. He explained that we had never intended the JCS to be placed under departmental secretaries. Quite the contrary, we sought to improve the quality and enhance the role of professional military advice, not make it subject to the control of any secretaries in performing their JCS duties. I promised that further clarification would be written into the bill. The crux of our plan was still on the table, and the chiefs had not said a word about it. Our central aim was to have U.S. air, sea, and ground forces fight as a team through a series of organizational and command changes within the services. These changes were crucial for the President, the Defense Secretary, the nation, and the military itself. Wickham, Watkins, and Kelley joined forces again to open a second front. They opposed the increased authority which the bill would give to commanders leading troops into combat. The three argued that these leaders would be diverted from actual combat, becoming bogged down in allocating their material resources and other time-consuming administrative tasks, including contracting. At this point, Nunn joined the debate. He explained in detail that these claims were simply not accurate. In all, the JCS raised nine issues. Nunn and I answered all of them. But the chiefs' message was clear: They didn't believe in reorganization, and they were telling us to go to hell.

When the meeting ended, Crowe, Wickham, and Gabriel shook hands with Nunn and me. The others did not. They saw themselves as protecting their organizations. The politics of the military makes Republicans and Democrats look like Boy Scouts. Watkins and Kelley were hardass about the meeting, but I admire that. They were standing up for what they believed was right. Kelley is retired now, but that bull-neck is probably still upset. Nevertheless, Sam and I saw him and Watkins then and now as great officers and patriots. Crowe escorted all of us back to his office. He graciously gave up his quarters so we could hold a private meeting. We quickly agreed that effective cooperation with the chiefs was now out of the question. None of us had expected the emotion, particularly the open bitterness, expressed in the Tank. Nor had we anticipated the discussion to frame itself around the simple issue of turf. When united, the uniformed military is a formidable foe. Our hard work might not survive such attacks. Locher questioned whether we wanted to regroup and reconsider our alternatives. The staff turned to us for instructions on our first Senate markup meeting—spelling out precise provisions and language in the bill—scheduled for nine o'clock the following morning. Sam and I looked at each other. Our answer was clear and certain: Proceed as planned.

When the committee began the markup session on Tuesday, February 4, seven unrequested, highly critical letters arrived—one from each service chief as well as others from the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Two requested letters, from Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Chairman Crowe, were critical but, unlike the others, constructive in tone. Senators opposed to reform spent most of the morning reading excerpts from the letters. All, except that of General Gabriel, were strongly worded. The battle was now out in the open. It was obvious that the entire might of the services and their allies in Congress would be spent in defeating our plan. This is how members of the Armed Services Committee lined up as we began the markup. For reorganization: Strom Thurmond, South Carolina; William Cohen, Maine; Gary Hart, Colorado; James Exon, Nebraska; Carl Levin, Michigan; Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts; Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico; Alan Dixon, Illinois; Sam Nunn; and myself. Those against were: John Warner, Virginia; Pete Wilson, California; Jeremiah Denton, Alabama; Phil Gramm, Texas; John Stennis, Mississippi; and John Glenn, Ohio. Three senators were leaning against: Gordon Humphrey, New Hampshire; Dan Quayle, Indiana; and John East, North Carolina. Ten members supported the plan, while nine were against or leaning that way. The committee was thus split almost down the middle.

Warner, a former Secretary of the Navy, was the most vocal opponent of the measure. He was forcefully backed by John Lehman, Secretary of the Navy, who did everything he could to torpedo the plan. From the time of John Paul Jones, the Navy has always considered itself autonomous, a separate, elite body of officers and men with a distinct mission and tradition. Its leaders have consistently maintained that no naval vessel or unit should ever be placed under the command of an Army or Air Force officer. Since World War II, the Navy has led the opposition to unifying the armed services. It has always been joined by its ground-assault arm, the Marine Corps, giving it at least two votes of five on the JCS, or a majority of three votes when an admiral became the chairman. No commandant of the Marine Corps has yet served as JCS chairman. Historically, Congress also has been a foe of centralized leadership of the military and its branches. Individual members have always had close relationships with individual services and their senior officers. This was to attract military bases and spending contracts to their states and congressional districts. This combined congressional-military log rolling continued under a system in which smaller military agencies and groups handled such contracts. For example, congressmen wanted the semiautonomous Bureau of Naval Ships to determine how its own funds were to be spent. Greater centralization of resource decisions and contracting—part of our plan—limited these "favorite son" agreements, although they still don't entirely preclude them.

Thus, when the reorganization effort began in February 1982, only a handful in Congress supported reform. When Nunn and I began to make our move, I wouldn't have bet more than a sawbuck on our chances of success. History and tradition were against us. Yet I had made up my mind that I would not retire from the Senate without giving reorganization my best shot. When the United States became a world power at the turn of the century, the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps were fiercely independent—even the Marines, who served as part of the Navy. They had separate missions and proud traditions. The development of the airplane began to blur the distinction between land and sea warfare. Military aircraft covered both areas. All three branches fought one another for air power funds and mission authority. Brigadier General Billy Mitchell saw aircraft as all-purpose weapons—for the Army. The Navy built carriers from which to launch attack aircraft in World War II. The Marines had their own fighter-bombers to give their ground troops close air support.

It was obvious that no single service branch could fight World War II, yet an Army-Navy battle for control of military aviation continued throughout the conflict. President Roosevelt created the JCS, a command structure borrowed from the British, in order to have a board of directors assist him in fighting the war. He also established a joint command system. This was a series of multiservice commands, defined by geographic boundaries which the military services carved up among themselves. Each service fought to have its officers dominate these commands. It was, at best, an uneasy system that heightened interservice rivalry. At worst, it became a wide-open political dogfight. The nation's modern defense structure was established in the National Security Act of 1947. This legislation, after a fierce political battle, was a compromise between friends and foes of the unification of our military establishment. It created the Office of the Secretary of Defense, but gave the secretary no department to direct. It formalized the JCS, but joint military policy never developed. Each service chief was committed to strengthening his own branch, and God help him if another service took away any of his funding or missions. He would answer to fellow officers. The U.S. Air Force was created, decentralizing our air strength to some extent but not halting the race for more aviation power among the services. The act also established the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Council.

Congress amended the act three times in an attempt to strengthen our national security. Most of the changes bolstered the civilian Office of the Secretary of Defense. The military structure was for the most part ignored. When McNamara became secretary, he used the latest amendments to expand his authority. At the same time, McNamara made it clear that he and his whiz kids were in command—that the JCS and the country's other military leaders were being downgraded in the Pentagon power structure. He ignored the problem of separatism among the services because a divided JCS was a weak JCS. The secretaries who followed McNamara—Clark Clifford, Mel Laird, Elliot Richardson, James Schlesinger, Donald Rumsfeld, and Harold Brown—had different priorities. Clifford, Laird, and Richardson were caught up in Vietnam and its aftermath. Schlesinger, Rumsfeld, and Brown were involved in new military technology and weapons systems. They also tried to provide the Department of Defense with a new, post-Vietnam direction.

When President Reagan was elected, I became chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. It was not until his second term, in 1985, that I headed the Senate Committee on the Armed Services. It was then that Nunn and I quietly decided it was time to undertake the most sweeping reform of the Pentagon's uniformed leadership since the National Security Act of 1947. There were many reasons why we believed the time was right. One personal, compelling reason was what I had learned in World War II. Others resulted from the aborted Iranian hostage rescue mission in April 1980, the terrorist bombing and killing of 241 Marines in Beirut in October 1983, and problems in the planning and execution of our invasion of Grenada. Serious organizational errors during World War II were also part of our thinking. We were also concerned with sweeping national criticism of multibillion-dollar cost overruns on defense contracts as well as widespread fraud in defense spending. Nunn and I spoke frankly to each other at the start of our struggle. I wanted to establish two things—equality and trust. Although I was committee chairman, he would know everything I knew at the time I learned it. Our staff would be bipartisan, a unit reporting to both of us. I was in a hurry. In two years I would retire from the Senate. Nunn could have slowed our movement, hoping the Democrats would take over control of the Senate as a result of the 1986 elections, which they did. His party could then take credit for straightening out the Pentagon—a political coup going into the 1988 presidential election year. But Nunn didn't. He said full speed ahead. Sam had succeeded Richard Russell in the Senate. The Georgian was in the Russell tradition by birth and temperament. Nunn is one of the most selfless men in the Senate, almost unique amid the present crowd of glory hogs. He chose to become an expert in national defense and has succeeded Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washington, who was long the congressional Democratic leader in that field. In going into this battle, I placed absolute trust in Nunn. He never disappointed me, not once. With Sam, I'd take on the devil in hell.

Representative William Nichols, an Alabama Democrat, and Representative Les Aspin, a Wisconsin Democrat, spent years in this effort. They deserve no less credit for the eventual passage of the act. We were mindful of President Eisenhower's statement of April 3, 1958, in which he unequivocally declared that there was a greater need for more effective coordination of our armed forces: "We must free ourselves of emotional attachments to service systems of an era that is no more." That statement, coming from the former allied military commander in Europe during World War II, sent shocks through the Pentagon. But the JCS adopted the bureaucratic answer: Wait. Ike's views were important, but military problems were more critical to our case. We began to study various examples to prove our point. There was no more noteworthy lesson of a military foul-up in our lifetime than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The extent of that surprise is still being debated by historians. We concluded that there had been many reasons for the disaster, but that our command structure had been a crucial one.

Two separate chains of command—Army and Navy—reported to different leaders in Washington. No one below President Roosevelt had authority over both. And no one, apart from the President, had access to all available intelligence. Yet we had considerable information indicating that a Japanese attack—the exact location and time were uncertain—was imminent. A timely analysis of the combined data could have placed our military on alert at Pearl and elsewhere. Our land and sea commands in Hawaii were divided. There was little cooperation and no coordinated plan of defense between Admiral H. E. Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, and Lieutenant General Walter C. Short, commander of our ground troops on the island. This was a crucial failure. Unfortunately, that message never got to our political or military leaders in Washington throughout World War II. In 1944, for the same reason—lack of unified command—the United States almost lost one of the greatest naval battles in history, at the Leyte Gulf in the Philippines. The Japanese committed virtually all of their remaining three naval forces to the fight. U.S. naval forces were split into two fleets, the Third and Seventh. The two U.S. forces reported to different superiors—the Third Fleet to Admiral Chester Nimitz in Hawaii and the Seventh Fleet to General Douglas MacArthur, who had landed on the island of Leyte as a jump-off point to recapture Manila. The fleet's only common superior was the JCS in Washington. It was an absurd situation.

A series of confusing messages caused Admiral William "Bull" Halsey to leave the area with the Third Fleet. Without communicating with Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid's Seventh Fleet, he moved to attack Japanese carrier forces, actually a decoy, more than 350 miles away. This left the Seventh Fleet vulnerable to the main Japanese thrust. Halsey ignored desperate messages from Kinkaid to return. The communications breakdown left an armada of MacArthur's troops—132,000 men and 200,000 tons of supplies—exposed on their way to reconquer the Philippines. An extraordinarily courageous fight by the Seventh Fleet, coupled with several major Japanese blunders, allowed the United States to win the battle. Halsey returned only when he received a now famous message from Nimitz. Nimitz asked: "Where is Task Force 34? Whole world wants to know." On arrival, Halsey learned he had missed the biggest naval battle of the war, with 1,130 Americans dead and 913 wounded. Nevertheless, Halsey was a fine commander and a very brave man. The main reason for the mix-up: No supreme commander was present.

We also studied the Iran hostage rescue mission and found it plagued with planning, training, and organizational problems. In late April 1980 U.S. military forces launched Operation Eagle Claw to rescue the fifty-three Americans who had been captured at the U.S. embassy in Teheran. They had been held captive by the Ayatollah Khomeini's militants since November 1979. The mission ended tragically with eight American servicemen killed and was aborted in the Iranian desert. Just about everything went wrong. Much of the free world, while saddened by the episode, concluded that the operation had been a military disaster. So did millions of Americans. The JCS commissioned retired Admiral James L. Holloway III and a Special Operations Review Group to investigate the Iran operation. Military experts agreed the Holloway Report criticized the mission in understated and indirect language. It should have fixed responsibility much more specifically on the mission's chain-of-command failures. I spent considerable time finding the answers, including long talks with Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, commander of our ground assault force in Iran. The mission was complex and explanations about the outcome are involved, sometimes even contradictory. But these conclusions are certain:

It was an ad hoc, improvised operation from start to finish. That was because all four services wanted a piece of the action. The plan was compartmentalized into a complex series of ground and air movements. These movements, for all practical purposes, were not coordinated. There was confusion not only over the training of helicopter pilots but who they would be. Marine pilots were finally chosen to join Navy airmen in flying Navy helicopters from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. _Nimitz_ into Iran. But as everyone knew before the mission began, Air Force pilots were far better suited for the grueling six-hour flight because of their low-altitude, long-range training and experience. The Marines were trained for short-range assaults. This difference became even more critical during the actual mission, when a long and powerful sandstorm developed. There was no centralized command responsibility, and therefore coordination at the joint training site in the desert near Yuma, Arizona, was poor. Few face-to-face meetings of the different units took place. The 130 Army Green Berets, Rangers, drivers, and some fifty pilots simply didn't know one another. They were belatedly forced into a temporary unit to satisfy the public relations image of all four services. In reality, the mission failed before it ever got off the ground.

Beckwith, commander of a special Army antiterrorist unit called Delta Force, told me what had happened from beginning to end. At 4:30 A.M. on November 4, 1979, the day that Iranian militants overran the embassy, he was called by the Pentagon while on maneuvers in Georgia. Beckwith was told his unit, the nation's primary strike force against terrorism, was on alert because Americans had been taken hostage in Iran. Beckwith moved Delta Force back to its base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to pick up equipment and personal belongings. He soon moved Delta Force out of that base in the event its movements were being watched. A week later, he was summoned to the Special Operations Office of the JCS in Washington. Charlie described the scene: "I walked into this room and all these senior officers, including generals, were sitting there wringing their hands. [Zbigniew] Brzezinski, of the National Security Council, had just left. He'd asked 'em what they were prepared to do to get the hostages out. Now they were looking for answers. They asked me lots of questions. I told 'em none of the questions—including one about parachuting onto the embassy grounds—had any merit because they didn't have any hard information about the situation in Teheran. Still the questions flew. I told 'em this was all ridiculous. I had to have some facts. Then I'd frame a plan. I asked 'em to go to the CIA and get some answers."

Beckwith said that a man in a three-piece suit then laid a hand on his shoulder and asked him to step outside. The individual, who didn't wish to be identified publicly, said that no agents had been left behind. He claimed that not a single American in the embassy at the time of the takeover spoke Farsi (although that was later disputed). In terms of intelligence, we were naked. The hostages were completely on their own. Charlie said that that first encounter typified the next five and a half months of planning and training. But it was only on the ground at the "Desert One" rendezvous point in the Iranian wasteland that Beckwith truly began to understand how fouled up the mission was. Six giant C-130 transport planes loaded with men, equipment, and helicopter fuel had taken off from an Egyptian air base earlier in the day for the island of Masirah, part of Oman. They refueled and flew to "Desert One," a secret landing area about 265 miles from Teheran. Eight Sea Stallion helicopters left the _Nimitz_ in the Arabian Sea to join Beckwith and his men at the rendezvous point.

While flying to "Desert One," one chopper went down in the desert during a sandstorm. The pilot was picked up. A second chopper pilot lost his way in the dust and returned to the _Nimitz._ The others finally arrived, but late. During that agonizing period, Beckwith could not communicate with the helicopters. But the White House, which was monitoring the mission, was pouring messages to the desert command. President Carter himself was on the horn. Who was really commanding the mission? Those on the ground in Iran? In Egypt? The President of the United States? The first two helicopter pilots to land described their flight across the desert as the worst dust storm they had ever seen. Beckwith said they seemed "shattered." The mission was already an hour and fifteen minutes behind schedule. Beckwith wanted to fly on to "Desert Two," a remote mountain hideaway only fifty miles from Teheran. The landing area was to be the jump-off point for the final assault on the twenty-seven-acre compound the following night. Charlie said that the skipper of the chopper pilots refused to speak with him. They had had words earlier. Beckwith insisted they take off since the "shattered" pilots were recovering their mental bearings. Some of the pilots complained, however, that the mission should not proceed. The Marines, Navy, and special forces weren't talking the same language. They weren't a fighting unit. They seemed to Charlie more like passing strangers on the Iranian desert. Beckwith used strong language and at one point almost pulled his pistol. He called the hesitant helicopter pilots gutless. It was a bizarre scene. Beckwith recalls, "We finally began loading the men and equipment aboard. When we got to the third helicopter, the pilot told me with a smirk on his face that he couldn't fly. Something was wrong with his hydraulic system. I called him a son of a bitch."

Beckwith now had only five working choppers. He needed six for the mission. He sat down, buried his face in his hands, and knew the mission was over. As the evacuation began, an airborne helicopter, maneuvering so another could be fueled, crashed into one of the large transport planes. The ammunition and fuel on the aircraft exploded and burst into flames, killing eight men. The operation had been exposed. In the confusion and haste to escape in the C-130s, the five helicopters were left behind. So were weapons, communications equipment, secret documents, and maps. Beckwith now says, "I wanted guys who had flown by the seat of their pants. Pilots who didn't give a rat's ass if they got promoted or not—or got a medal—but who knew and cared about each other. Guys who were a team and would pick up and carry their helicopters to Teheran if necessary. We didn't have that team. We got the four services reaching up on a shelf and giving us different outfits. I believe it would have been a different story in Iran—and a different outcome in Vietnam—if the four services had fought under a unified command."

As in Vietnam, Beckwith pointed out, he personally knew of three officers on the JCS who were spending all their time writing "Rules of Engagement" for him in Iran. He was not to do this or that, especially endanger civilians. Charlie recalls, "That was ridiculous. It was crazy. They never told me what they could do to help me. We might have had to shoot our way out of the embassy. Finally, I got my orders from Jimmy Carter. The President simply said I should use whatever force necessary to save the lives of the hostages. I didn't need any more rules." Beckwith now despises the term "ad hoc." He says he would never return to Iran or go on another mission with a group based on "those two dirty words." He explains the only way he would undertake such a mission today would be with "a bunch of guys who had worked together, slept together, drank together, and were prepared to give their lives together." Charlie expressed deep interest in the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal 1987. It established Special Operations Forces as a unified command. We were not prepared to offer the establishment of a separate unified command for such forces in the reorganization legislation, so it was introduced by Senators Nunn and Cohen in late 1987. Beckwith warns, "We have to be careful to choose the very best men to lead these unified field commands. They can't be a dumping ground like some of the officers shoved into the ranks of the JCS staff. I'm sick and tired of seeing commanders sent into special forces to get their ticket punched—just one more step up the ladder—instead of people who've fought up from the mud of special operations. We need commanders who know their asses from third base. Men who care about us, want to be one of us. Like the Israelis. Our special forces people are just as good as theirs. In fact, I think we could kick the crap out of them. The difference is leadership. Their leaders came up through the mud."

Nunn, Cohen, and I shared Beckwith's concern. Special forces must be insulated, but not isolated, from the large services—with their own budgets, force structure, maintenance, training, and recruitment. If the United States wants the best, it must make special operations the best. It must fight low-intensity conflicts like terrorism and guerrilla attacks with a high-intensity program and people. These forces and equipment must be tested. They must train and work together as a fighting unit, creating the necessary teamwork and trust. The real authority for carrying out missions against unorthodox threats must be in the field, in the unit, not in the Pentagon. There cannot be a long string of military and political decision points that now move from one Pentagon desk to another, from one service to another, and finally from one point to another halfway around the world. The terrorist killing of the Marines disturbed me greatly. From the beginning, I had opposed their being sent to Lebanon. It was a stupid decision for several reasons, including the central military fact that Marines are trained as assault forces, not troops who hunker down indefinitely in foxholes while getting shot at. There was also no clearly defined enemy. The truth is that those Marines were political pawns with no military mission.

Even politically, the mission was ridiculous. The Marines were to show the flag. To impress whom and for what? That we are tough and will go to war? It's all right to fly the flag at times, but that doesn't mean we should put American forces at risk under "Rules of Engagement" that unnecessarily expose them or actually tie their hands. For all practical purposes, the Marines were simply to sit out in the middle of a field and not assault those who were sniping at them. The Marine commander calling the shots was not a leatherneck on the ground in Lebanon but an Army general sitting behind a desk in Stuttgart, West Germany. The command responsibility was that of General Bernard Rogers, NATO commander, now retired. He was isolated from Lebanon by multiple layers of command. The fault was in the Pentagon command structure. The cumbersome chain of command imposed on the general by the JCS and services precluded effective control. I'm still outraged by the whole military mess. Command problems during the U.S. invasion of Grenada finally backed both Nunn and me against a wall. We had to come out fighting. Although hailed as a military success, Grenada was a minefield of errors.

On October 25, 1983, elements of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps assaulted the Caribbean island. They were to rescue American medical students, restore democracy, and expel Cuban forces. The JCS deny they insisted that all four services get a piece of the action. Whether they did or not is immaterial. That is what happened, despite the lessons of failure in the Iranian operation three and a half years earlier. The Grenada operation did have a single commander, Vice Admiral Joseph Metcalf, but he was at sea on the U.S.S. _Guam._ There was no unified commander on Grenada itself. The Army was assigned to capture the southern half of the island, including the medical students and the capital, St. Georges, while the Marines took the northern half. No one had been designated to coordinate the two forces. These are some of the problems that resulted from the lack of organization: Most Army and Navy units could not communicate with one another. Nor could they coordinate with Metcalf, the overall commander. Communication between the two was, in fact, poor to almost nonexistent. There were similar problems between the Army and Marine forces. The reason was that all four services continue to purchase independent, incompatible communications equipment.

The first Army assault waves were unable to speak with Navy ships offshore to request and coordinate naval gunfire. One Army officer reportedly was so frustrated in trying to communicate with the offshore ships that he went to a civilian phone on the island and used his AT&T credit card to call buddies at Fort Bragg so they could get to the Navy and coordinate fire support. The JCS pooh-poohed the story, but some troops privately insist it's true. An official government report shows that some early communications between ground troops and the Navy were conducted by American ham radio operators. Officers of the 82nd Airborne Division actually flew to the flagship _Guam_ several times to coordinate naval gunfire. These and other attempts failed. Navy messages were delayed or failed to reach Army troops on the ground. One delay almost compromised the reason for the invasion. American medical students at a second campus—military intelligence was aware of only one—phoned parents and friends in the United States to tell them that more than two hundred of them were surrounded by hostile troops and needed urgent rescue. American Rangers were finally rushed to save them. Such intelligence and other failures caused good friends of the military to ask many probing questions. It was later learned that Army and Navy officers had failed to attend each other's planning sessions.

Organizational foul-ups caused serious logistical problems. The 82nd Airborne Division was one example. A battalion commander reported that he had been forced to deploy his men on Grenada with nothing except their rucksacks. The battalion had no vehicles and no long-range communications gear. The Rangers arrived without any heavy antiarmor weapons. TOW missiles didn't come ashore until the third day the Rangers were on the ground. All this equipment was needed in the event of a major battle. Most of the delays were caused by air transport scheduling. Military aircraft spent more time circling Grenada's Point Salines airfield than flying from the United States. One commander said they were "stacked up to the ionosphere." Some were forced to return to Puerto Rico and other locations to refuel. Army helicopters carrying wounded were turned back from landing on the U.S.S. _Independence,_ a Navy carrier, because their pilots had not been officially qualified to land by the Navy. Finally, when they were allowed to touch down and unload the wounded, a Navy commander was ordered not to refuel them because funding compensation had not yet been worked out in Washington.

It took three days for seven thousand American troops to defeat fifty Cuban soldiers and a few hundred lightly armed construction workers. Eighteen American troops were killed and 116 wounded. If the Cubans had deployed a significant number of men on the island, the foul-ups would have been magnified. The "corporate character" of the JCS and its service politics in the Grenada operation demonstrated beyond any doubt some terrible weaknesses in our ability to carry out a unified military action. And it highlighted the fact that the U.S. military system was consistently producing only moderate to minimum results. We were told by the JCS that errors had indeed been made in the Grenada operation, but that they were being fixed. That was what we had been told about our problems in Iran, Beirut, and elsewhere. I wanted the system to reform itself, but it was not doing so. In fact, it was resisting reform. The JCS and others in the military left me no choice. No soldier or sailor lives because a commander tried. The commander must do more than try. He must succeed. In warfare, there are no excuses—only the living or the dead, only victory or defeat. The rest is just rhetoric, unless, as in the case of Vietnam, the politicians take charge of the war.

Nunn and I concluded that so long as the JCS continued with a weak joint system—a single-service rather than a joint perspective—our divided planning and structuring of the armed forces could lead the nation into terrible trouble in the future. Lines of communication remained mostly inside each service, and there was no flow of information in and out of all branches. So long as this persisted, military mission capabilities would overlap. Costly weapons systems would be duplicated. The JCS would never address the critical issue of creating truly unified commands. Each would continue to fight his brother service for high-tech, high-cost weapons systems and bicker over pieces of the action. We were facing a long and costly civil war at the apex of our military power. Greatly disturbed by what had happened in Grenada, many of us in Congress, independent military analysts, and others refocused on reform of the JCS. During our study, one appraisal of our military leadership resurfaced more than any other. It was a February 1982 statement by none other than the then incumbent JCS chairman, General David Jones. The Air Force leader had issued an unprecedented 6,500-word critique of the nation's military command structure and its problems. At the time it had swept across the Pentagon and official Washington like a flamethrower, scorching the seats of pants all over town. Defense Secretary Weinberger was furious. He and others at the Pentagon had tried to talk Jones out of issuing the statement. All of them had failed. Four months before retirement, Jones had, as the military say so eloquently, kicked ass. However, his observations had been gathering dust because most of the Pentagon brass defended the system. Now I and others dusted them off.

Jones zeroed in on the basic JCS problem: "By law, if we cannot reach unanimous agreement on an issue, we must inform the Secretary of Defense. We are understandably reluctant to forward disagreements, so we invest much time and effort trying to accommodate differing views of the chiefs." Jones declared that the military should abolish its current system in which each service has a virtual veto on every issue at every stage of a routine staffing process. In other words, dump command by committee. He added, "We need to spend more time on our war fighting capabilities and less on an intramural scramble for resources." Jones called for cross-service experience among our military—Navy men working alongside Army and Air Force officers on common missions while retaining their service identity. He called for more JCS time and effort on strategic planning and for strengthening the role of unified commanders in the field with interservice acceptance of one on-the-scene commander. Jones also asked for a vice chairman to help the JCS chairman become a more effective and timely adviser to the President.

The chairman's statement raised a very sensitive question which tormented all the chiefs: Had their indecisiveness and inaction allowed Secretary McNamara to ride roughshod over them? Ultimately, Jones was warning his colleagues that unless they put their own system in order, change would be forced on them. The veteran fighter and bomber pilot was right on target. General Edward C. Meyer, Army Chief of Staff, followed Jones's attack with criticism of his own. Since Meyer was still active, his remarks had even more force. He warned his fellow chiefs that, on joint military issues, the nation's civilian leaders were increasingly turning to other sources for advice. Meyer was referring, in part, to the rise of defense intellectuals who were operating in both the military and political camps. He said the command structure had serious organizational, conceptual, and functional flaws. He insisted that if these were not corrected and the chiefs didn't react more quickly to the fast-paced times, their ability to affect events would be seriously diminished. The rest of the JCS opposed Meyer.

Meantime, some of us in the Congress were waiting for an opening. It came in January 1985, when I was appointed chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Nunn became the ranking minority member. We introduced our defense reorganization measure. The JCS, Navy Secretary Lehman, John Warner, and other senators said, "No way!" Warner argued, "Today we have the finest Navy in the world—bar none. We are more capable of fulfilling our national security objectives than at any time during the past forty years." He declared that President Reagan was satisfied with the performance of the JCS. Warner warned that our open concerns might affect the military budget and the morale of our fighting forces. He conceded, however, that substantial changes were needed in military procurement. Warner said that only a few minor changes were needed in the JCS and command structure. Lehman came out smoking. He fired off blistering letters to me and the others involved. The secretary described our proposal as "whiz-kid theories" that would make his post and that of other civilian service secretaries "ceremonial." Lehman concluded, "The draft [bill] would make a hash of our defense structure."

It was clear that Lehman would, if the battle came to it, go down with all guns blazing. First he tried to muscle me politically. The secretary and his legislative crew were involved in some eighty written and forty oral amendments offered by members of the committee to our bill. He dangled political plums at Congress, proposing to expand the number of the Navy's home ports. This, of course, would mean jobs and other federal income in certain states and congressional districts. Numerous names, including Seattle and Staten Island, were floated. He talked of a $100 million program to establish these new ports. It would have cost billions. Five members of our committee were up for reelection. Lehman was addressing them especially. Lehman hoped that the old fox Goldwater would become a pussy-cat. I passed the word to the military and among the committee that if that's the way Lehman wanted it, I too would play hardball. I put the defense budget, including all military promotions, on hold. I told them that just about everything connected with the military would be halted until we voted on reorganization. Weinberger and the JCS got the message. Lehman did not.

The Navy Secretary set up a crisis management center in Room 5C800 of the Pentagon to oppose reform. I phoned the office myself, and personnel there confirmed they were staffing the Navy's fight against reorganization. I was given the names of these Navy and Marine officers, who were attached to the Navy's legislative affairs office. The Navy denied that such an office existed. Lehman, meantime, was steaming around Capitol Hill, lobbying lawmakers to scuttle Goldwater and Nunn. One individual who objected to Lehman's plans caught my attention—his mother. She happened to have been a Goldwater supporter in 1964 and later. Hearing that her son and I were battling, she wrote him, "Dear John: I don't know what the dispute is, but you're wrong." What was our precise proposal? The bill stressed, in accord with constitutional principles, the civilian supremacy of the President as commander in chief. It spelled out the role of the Secretary of Defense: "The Secretary has sole and ultimate power within the Department of Defense on any matter on which the Secretary chooses to act."

It greatly strengthened the JCS chairman in setting policies, drafting military strategies, and shaping Pentagon budgets. Many functions were removed from the four independent services and reassigned to the chairman alone. He, not the JCS, would advise the President and Secretary. The entire joint staff—hundreds of officers previously under the JCS—would answer to the chairman alone. The realignment created, in effect, a powerful partnership between the chairman and the Secretary. A four-star officer would become deputy, reporting to the chairman. He would become acting head in the absence of the chairman. The two would act as a team with the vice chairman to coordinate programs and, if the chairman ordered, even direct the staff. Our bill retained ten basic commands, the most important being the Atlantic Command, European Command, Pacific Command, Strategic Air Command, and Military Airlift Command. It added statutory provisions that considerably strengthened these commands and their commanders.

Field commanders would have much greater control over resources to accomplish their missions with far less direction in the hands of service bureaucrats in Washington. They would also have much greater control over their men. Navy and Marine officers would, for example, work entirely for their field commander, not their service chiefs and others at the Pentagon. As we wrote the bill, this simple conviction moved all of us forward: For far too long, our generals in the field have been without armies and our admirals without fleets. By direct order of the Congress, a career specialty would be created for officers on joint duty assignment. Joint duty simply means an Army, Navy, or other officer serving an assignment outside of his military department, such as on the Joint Staff or a unified command staff. In the past, the military generally viewed such assignments as just this side of Siberia. Under the new system, future assignments and promotions would depend, to a significant extent, on joint duty. Whenever a military board considered a joint duty officer for promotion, it would be required to have a joint duty member. Procedures would be established to monitor the careers of joint duty officers. A record of joint duty would be needed for consideration for flag rank. All these top posts, unless a waiver were granted, would be reserved for officers with significant joint duty experience.

The ad hoc plan developed for Iran and the mismatched planning affecting the Grenada invasion would be eliminated. The planning for all such contingencies or emergencies would specify resource levels, sufficient and proper equipment. Policy assumptions and military operational planning would no longer be disconnected, as they were for the Marines in Beirut. We walked through a minefield in the area of service roles and missions. Is the Air Force, for example, providing adequate close air support for Army ground forces? Why can't the Air Force and Navy provide sufficient airlift and sealift? Should the Air Force be assigned greater responsibilities in helping the Navy to execute its sea control mission? Does the Marine Corps need its own air force? Questions like these may well provide the flashpoint for the next interservice battle. The plan was written to produce results. The chairman and vice chairman of the JCS must now produce, in consultation with the services, useful and timely advice to the President and Defense Secretary. The JCS staff can no longer be a dumping ground for inept officers.

More than ever before, the commanders in chief in the field will decide how to carry the war to the enemy. Our separate ground, sea, and air warfare by individual services is gone forever. The unified commander reports to the President and Defense Secretary. His subordinate commanders report directly to him and then to their respective service chiefs. No longer will the Army determine how much ammunition is stored and the Air Force decide where to put it for eventual use by the Navy. The brass must get off their ass. In 1945, as World War II ended, we had more than 12 million men and women on active duty. Of those, about 17,000 had the rank of 0–6 and above. These included 101 three-star generals and admirals. A few years ago, we had somewhat more than 2 million service personnel—about 10 million less than at the end of World War II. Yet we have nearly the same number of high-ranking officers today—almost 15,500 men and women. There were nearly 120 three-star generals and admirals—more than in 1945! As Sam Nunn put it, "Apparently, it takes more admirals and generals to wage peace than run a war."

Unification of the four services by itself means nothing. We need a product line organization. The product line means the mission to be carried out. We must truly integrate these missions, bringing the best of all available talent into an operation, regardless of uniform. Our committee focused on six major military missions of the Defense Department: nuclear deterrence, maritime superiority, general power projection superiority, defense of NATO Europe, defense of East Asia, and defense of Southeast Asia. During this time of changeover, we are still organized around functional inputs geared to individual services. Under reorganization, the objective is the mission, not the service. We have too many wasted resources in some areas and critical gaps in others. The military must begin to cross service lines and learn the difference between loyalty to one's branch and accomplishing a mission in the most efficient and effective ways possible. This is not being done on a high policy level today.