THE SCAPEGOAT

A former senator whose own military career consisted of one day in ROTC, Cohen announced his decision after months of stalling. He did it against the wishes of Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall. He did it against the recommendation of Air Force Chief of Staff Ronald Fogleman, who resigned in protest — the first such resignation in the history of the Air Force. He did it despite private entreaties supporting Schwalier from family members of the dead airmen.

Most appallingly, Cohen ended Schwalier’s Air Force career in the face of two thorough investigations that found the general had not been lax in protecting his troops. Cohen’s decision was so unusual that scores of interviews with general officers, military writers, military lawyers, military historians, and even a former secretary of defense failed to produce a comparable case in which two separate military disciplinary inquiries had been overruled by the Pentagon’s top civilian.

Cohen was lauded in the press as courageous. But he wasn’t For six months, his office sat on reports that exonerated Schwalier, releasing them quietly only after Cohen announced his decision. Without having seen, much less read and digested, the thousands of pages in these reports, Congress and the press clamored for someone to be held responsible for the deaths of the airmen. As the military reeled last summer from the unrelated public-relations fiascos of sexual harassment at Aberdeen and the Kelly Flinn affair, Cohen delivered up the scapegoat, Terry Schwalier. And after a wobbly six months as secretary of defense, Cohen finally got some good reviews. Outside the Pentagon, his tough-guy bones were made as the intrepid civilian who cared more about ” accountability” than a grizzled veteran like Ron Fogleman did. Inside the building, the Air Force’s rival services uttered nary a peep in protest. Cohen even had the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili, standing at his side as he condemned Schwalier.

All in all, it was a fine day at the office for William Cohen. But his decision has left a devastating legacy. The Air Force has lost two of its finest generals in Schwalier and Fogleman. Field commanders have been put on notice that their political superiors are not to be trusted in a crisis. And Cohen’s decision has made a mockery of the very principle of accountability that he claimed to uphold. What follows is an account of how this travesty of justice came to pass.

 

Welcome to Dhahran

Only a year and a half ago, after almost three decades in the Air Force, Terry Schwalier was still on his way up. The Senate had recently confirmed his promotion. Even as a 49-year-old brigadier general, he was doing what he loved best, flying F-16s. And the pilots under his command in Saudi Arabia were performing flawlessly. They had flown 27,000 successful sorties into ” the box” — the U.N.’s no-fly zone in southern Iraq that keeps Saddam Hussein from spreading his picnic blanket over the world’s oil supply. On June 25, 1996, the last night of his one-year tour, Schwalier had his bags packed and was at his desk writing a letter to his successor, who was already in transit. He got as far as “Dan, Welcome to Dhah . . .” before a blast reverberated throughout the base’s high-rise apartment complex, known as the Khobar Towers. The window, frame and all, blew out of Schwalier’s room. He hoarsely and vainly howled “No!” as he saw the fireball.

Two terrorists had wheeled a sewage truck into a public parking lot outside the Khobar Towers compound. After parking it, they jumped into a getaway Chevy Caprice, and about four minutes later, the equivalent of 20,000 pounds of TNT detonated. It was a huge bomb, larger than the one that collapsed the federal building in Oklahoma City, almost twice as powerful as the one that destroyed the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. The truck was parked some 80 feet north of the closest barracks. But still the blast completely sheared the face off of Building 131, which housed a hundred or so airmen.

Rooftop sentries had spotted the truck and started an evacuation before the bomb exploded. But there was no escaping the mayhem. Glass rained in every direction, embedding itself into scalps and limbs. A security policeman who survived was blown clean out of his clothes. As Schwalier came closer to the ruins and looked up into the open-faced building, he saw a crimson stain on one of the ceilings that looked like a giant swatted fly — a fatal imprint of one of the dead airmen. “Not a day goes by I don’t think about those kids,” he says quietly.

Though Schwalier is a fighter jock, his disposition is less Chuck Yeagerite bravado than 1950s recruiting film. His square jaw and wiry build are standard issue. He speaks in intense clips of crisp efficiency, hopelessly garnished with acronyms. His excitable affirmations are punctuated with “you betcha,” especially when he talks about the Air Force, which has enveloped his entire life. His son is an Air Force lieutenant, and his dad flew combat missions in WWII and Vietnam. As a 10-year-old, Schwalier asked his father why he’d joined the Air Force. “He said to me, ‘Because it’s the Big League,’ . . . and that just kind of clicked. What better way to spend your life than doing something you think is important.”

Schwalier resists emoting on demand, either about the bombing or about the day this summer when Secretary of Defense Cohen, with the approval of President Clinton, stood before the Pentagon press corps and took away Schwalier’s second star. “He’s a warrior, not a whiner,” says his wife, Dianne. On the day of Cohen’s announcement, Schwalier politely disagreed with Cohen’s decision and announced to Air Force leaders in his first and last public statement on the deliberation process: “It is important to do what’s right, to listen to your heart and conscience, and to keep to the high ground. I have and will walk away with my head held high.”

Deaf to the military’s up-or-out ethos, Cohen suggested that Schwalier didn’t have to retire just because his promotion had been withdrawn. “He doesn’t understand our culture,” Schwalier tells me. It’s the only direct affront to Cohen that passes Schwalier’s lips during several days of interviews in Whidbey Island, Washington, where he now lives. “I could’re hung on and drawn a paycheck, but I couldn’t have looked in the mirror. As a young major, I remember watching senior officers start to get more selective about their assignments, for understandable reasons. But I thought, ‘They’re not serving anymore.’ And I told myself that if I ever got to the point where I couldn’t serve to my fullest — and it was obvious here that boundaries had been put on my ability to serve — it was time to get out. This wasn’t a choice.”

 

The Battle of Capitol Hill

Today, it’s not clear from the voluminous investigative record that anyone’s head should have rolled over Khobar, except for the heads of the terrorists and their sponsors, who managed to move 10 tons of explosives from some unknown point of origin, under the noses of the Saudi internal security forces, into the parking lot north of the Khobar Towers. But that crime has never been solved, and their identity remains unknown.

What did seem abundantly clear in the hours and days after the bombing was that somebody should be held responsible for the deaths. Khobar was a political shuttlecock even before the dead had been buried, and it would remain one until Cohen’s July 31 press conference. Congressional Republicans almost immediately saw a chance to turn the bombing against the Clinton administration and then-secretary of defense William Perry. The Khobar bombing occurred on a Tuesday. The following Sunday on Meet the Press, Arlen Specter, then chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee, said that his committee would hold hearings and suggested that if the situation looked as bleak afterward as it did that day, “I will call for [Perry’s] resignation.”

Reporters were also quick off the mark. In Dhahran, Schwalier, perhaps unwisely, let loose to them that the Saudis had denied American requests to move the Khobar perimeter fence further north, past where the truck bomb had been parked. This was all the ammunition needed to raise questions about who was responsible. Perry immediately appointed retired Army general Wayne Downing to assemble a task force and conduct a broad investigation on the protection of U.S. forces in the Middle East. Downing would report back two months later. But this was just the beginning.

Before Terry Schwalier took his early retirement, there would be two congressional reports on the bombing, reports from Perry and Cohen, several congressional hearings, and two further Air Force investigations. Downing’s report would be the most heavily publicized. It pointed a finger straight at Schwalier for failing to take steps that might have stemmed casualties. Every subsequent investigation would find that he had taken extensive steps to make the Khobar facilities — just one of 11 bases he commanded in the region — as secure as possible against terrorist attack. But first impressions are damaging.

In more than one way, first impressions would work against Schwalier. From the outset, there was a misperception, in the press and on Capitol Hill, that Khobar was a replay of the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks, for which no commander was ever held accountable, since President Reagan quickly took ” responsibility.” In fact, the two attacks had very little in common. In Lebanon, a suicide bomber actually penetrated U.S. defenses at an installation in the heart of a notoriously dangerous city. Khobar Towers, a heavily fortified compound in tightly policed Saudi Arabia, was not penetrated but bombed from outside the area controlled by U.S. forces. Nonetheless, the idea quickly took root that it would show a failure of nerve at the Pentagon if no commander were found to be at fault in the Khobar bombing.

Specter may have been first out of the blocks, but the Senate Armed Services Committee (which still counted William Cohen of Maine as a member) raced to hold hearings as well. Both would get underway two weeks after the bomb exploded. Hill sources say Specter was especially eager because he was already feuding with Perry over Specter’s plan to shift oversight of some military intelligence from the Pentagon to the CIA. Perry had turned down an invitation to testify before Specter’s committee. Specter thought it “might have been a snub.” Where some saw a beleaguered defense secretary, Specter saw a sitting duck, and he continued to imply that Perry’s head would be required.

Both sets of hearings focused on culpability more than on security policies or even on who might have set the bomb. The Armed Services Committee had the A-list witnesses and television coverage, with Perry, Shalikashvili, and Schwalier’s regional superior, Gen. J. H. Binford Peay of the U.S. Central Command, all testifying. Peay, now retired, says, “We didn’t have the facts, nobody had the facts that early.” That uncertainty only provoked outrage among the senators. Joe Lieberman, for instance, seemed already to know that ” the obvious fact is that they didn’t do enough because 19 Americans are dead.” The tone was so rancorous that an Air Force Times columnist called the hearings “the strongest attacks leveled against American leaders in recent memory.” Perry was blistered badly enough that Clinton called afterwards to give him reassurance. Even Peay, who had more combat-command experience than any active-duty Army general at the time, was reduced to pleading with the senators: “I had my fire base run over as a captain in Vietnam. I understand force protection. I care about youngsters.”

Nor was there any reprieve throughout the summer of 1996. In August, after a delegation traveled to Saudi Arabia, an evenhanded House National Security Committee assessment highlighted some organizational handicaps and found that intelligence had been inadequate to prevent the bombing. The House report pointed no fingers, however — and it disappeared immediately. Specter, too, took Intelligence Committee staffers to Dhahran. Many sources suggest that because of his plan to enlarge the CIA’s role in military intelligence, Specter had a proprietary interest in proving that intelligence had been good enough to prevent casualties but was mishandled under Pentagon supervision. That’s precisely what he found, though other investigators did not agree. As Schwalier says, “If the intelligence was so good, how come we still don’t know who did it?”

The report from Specter’s trip was idiosyncratic in other ways. It stated with certainty that the distance between the perimeter and Building 131 wasn’t 80 feet but 60 feet. This would mean that Schwalier’s troops were even closer to peril than generally thought. An Air Force summary report of Specter’s visit, however, has the agent accompanying Specter noting his less- than-precise reporting methods: “The Senator was very concerned about the exact distance between the perimeter and the building, citing [Pentagon] reports he’d read that had the figure at 80 feet. He even stepped it off through sand and rough terrain, and was convinced his 20 paces equated to 60 feet.”

Congress put considerable pressure on Perry to find someone culpable. The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not insulate Downing from this pressure but instead relayed congressional concerns to Downing. This changed the nature of his investigation. As early as July 10, a day after the first Khobar hearings, Perry instructed Downing that, “as a result of high Congressional interest, we must expedite portions of your assessment process.” Downing should include in his report, Perry said, “what U.S. official(s) were responsible for actions to improve or upgrade the fence.”

Two days after this formal expansion of Downing’s charter, the Senate Armed Services Committee in two separate letters (one from Strom Thurmond and Sam Nunn, the other from John Warner) pushed Perry to guarantee that Downing would determine “the presence or absence . . . of personal responsibility” and “whether . . . there was a breach of duty.” Perry declined to formally alter Downing’s orders again. But he carefully wrote back to Thurmond that Downing was empowered to explore “accountability,” that Downing had been provided a copy of Perry’s reply to Thurmond, and that Downing “fully understands what is expected of this assessment.”

Downing insists that Perry never made any informal demands on the investigation. He does remember, however, that “there was a lot of effort by staff members of [the secretary’s office] to insert themselves into this assessment that we did — and I resisted it. . . . Anything [Perry] wanted me to do, he was going to specifically tell me and back it up in writing. Because, the staff guys will drive you nuts. Not only that, but the staff guys don’t always do things for the right reasons. They think they’re protecting their boss or protecting the administration . . . so there’s no telling what they’re gonna tell you.”

A senior Downing-task-force official lays it bare: “We thought they [the secretary of defense’s staff] were a bunch of a   holes. [On] culpability, there was a lot of pressure. There were some people in the building who said ‘You got to figure out who did what to who,’ ‘Let’s build a case,’ that kind of stuff. This is stuff that people were doing because they’re political animals. Judy Miller [the Pentagon general counsel], Rudy DeLeon [undersecretary of the Air Force], and to some degree, John White [deputy secretary of defense] were people we really had to watch out for on the culpability issue. The sense was that in some cases they wanted enough [evidence] so that this thing could be assigned to some person. The other thing they were really trying to do is protect Perry and [Shalikashvili].” White, Miller, and DeLeon were all Clinton political appointees at the Pentagon. Judy Miller did not respond to interview requests, and Rudy DeLeon declined to be interviewed. White, who was deputy secretary of defense under both Perry and Cohen, denies there was pressure on Downing to find fault. In their letters to Perry, he says, senators “raised a good point, and as a result of that good point, we said, ‘Yeah, we ought to change [the scope of Downing’s investigation].'”

 

Downing’s Indictment

If there was a single moment when events turned irretrievably against Schwalier, it was with the release of the Downing report on September 16. That was the first time that Schwalier was officially blamed. Until then, Pentagon brass from Joint Chiefs chairman Shalikashvili to deputy secretary of defense White had spent most of the summer defending the extensive protection measures that Schwalier’s wing had taken. Even during the press conference releasing the report, White was still playing defense. The press wanted names named; one reporter asked White, “Who inside the Pentagon or inside the military chain of command should lose their job over this?” White noted that “Americans didn’t kill these airmen, terrorists killed these airmen.” Perry, choking back tears at congressional hearings two days later, said if there had been any leadership failure, the responsibility was “mine, and mine alone.”

But Downing’s report spread responsibility for a security failure up and down the chain of command indirectly, while taking special care in an 11-page finding to cite Schwalier by name, ruling that he “did not adequately protect his forces from a perimeter attack.”

Downing’s fingering of Schwalier came as a surprise to many in the Pentagon. Despite the behind-the-scenes pressure from Capitol Hill, both Downing himself and other high Pentagon officials had said explicitly during Downing’s investigation that his report would not be a search for culpability, but rather a broad assessment of the circumstances at Khobar and of theater- wide inadequacies in security policies. Perry’s original instructions to Downing in fact specified that if he found any officer in breach of his duty, this information would be forwarded to Gen. Peay, who would investigate further.

According to Peay and sources close to departed chief of staff Fogleman, Downing had reassured each of them during the course of his investigation that he was finding nobody culpable, including Schwalier. Downing denies that he said such a thing to either Fogleman or Peay. “I think what people may be confusing is that I thought Schwalier was a good guy . . . and [said] that it was going to be very tough to find out who was responsible.” Schwalier says that when the investigators came to Dhahran to interview him, Downing told him, “I’d be proud to serve with you.” Downing doesn’t remember this comment, but says it would have indicated merely his opinion that Schwalier was “an honorable man . . . incredibly honest and straightforward, and I admired that.”

Downing, former head of U.S. Special Operations and a legendary straight- shooter, doesn’t protest much when asked if he changed his mind during the course of the investigation. “I don’t think that’s a fair question,” he says, explaining that impressions may vary as evidence is collected, and admitting that the findings on Schwalier went through 18 to 20 drafts before the report was turned in. “We really wrestled with who made mistakes, what kind of mistakes were they,” he says. The tone of the report, however, was one of absolute certainty.

That there were doubts about naming Schwalier is underscored by Col. Richard Bridges, one of three Pentagon flacks I was referred to by William Cohen’s office after being told that I would not be allowed to interview Cohen for this story. Bridges also served as the Downing task force’s public- affairs man. He says the entire team, including Downing, agonized about the Schwalier finding. “One of the biggest changes [in the course of the investigation] was on assigning responsibility,” he says. “We went from basically ‘They’re all guilty,’ to ‘Gee whiz, what could they have done?’ to ‘They should have done this.'”

Astonishingly, Bridges says of Cohen’s fateful decision to rescind Schwalier’s promotion: “There was nobody on the task force, I think, that would’ve recommended Schwalier’s promotion be held up or basically withdrawn.” In other words, Cohen’s own flack doesn’t even pretend that the task-force findings supported Cohen’s decision.

 

The Record Investigation

Schwalier’s reputation never recovered from the Downing report The New York Times alone editorialized for Schwalier’s head no fewer than seven times over the course of his ordeal. Subsequent investigations, however, would exonerate him. Perry forwarded the Downing report to Ron Fogleman and Secretary of the Air Force Sheila Widnall, asking them to follow up. They, in turn, commissioned a more thorough investigation by James Record, a widely respected, no-nonsense Air Force lieutenant general with command experience in Saudi Arabia very similar to Schwalier’s. Record was given formal disciplinary authority at the same time; he would determine whether any administrative or judicial action should be taken, ranging from reprimands to court martial.

While Downing had been given not quite two months to ensure a snappy response to Congress, Record’s task force was allowed over three months. Downing’s team had been spread thin because their mandate was to review regional security: They had visited 36 sites in 10 countries. As Bridges is the first to admit, “Very frankly — seven days in Saudi Arabia — we could’ve easily missed something.” Record’s inquiry focused more directly on Khobar, and he had the benefit of Downing’s work product. In addition to reading transcripts from over 200 of Downing’s interviews, Record’s team conducted 207 of its own interviews Schwalier also provided a 64-page point- by-point answer to Downing’s findings in which he catalogued 37 incorrect statements, 61 misleading implications, and 23 contradictions.

When Record reported back to Widnall and Fogleman in early December, he concurred with many of Downing’s findings on how to improve force protection. But he also concluded that Schwalier had “performed his duties in a reasonable and prudent matter.” He issued a strong rebuke to the Downing findings, saying that the desire to deliver quick results had caused individuals to be “unfairly and publicly criticized as being derelict in their duties.”

Record assessed other installations in the area to compare the security precautions taken by Schwalier with those implemented by the Army, the U.S. Embassy, and even an office of the Saudi National Guard which itself had been victimized by a much smaller, 220-pound car bomb seven months before Khobar. That November 1995 bombing in the Saudi capital of Riyadh had killed five Americans and prompted increased security measures among American forces in the months leading up to the Khobar bombing. Of Schwalier’s efforts, Record says “he overshadowed everybody by what I would call rather substantive leaps and bounds.” This conclusion is echoed by David Winn, a former consul general in Dhahran who says Schwalier was “often the butt of mild kidding” because he was so fanatical about security. “He made an impregnable fortress of the place,” says Winn, who spent 25 years of his Foreign Service career in the Middle East. “There’s no comparison between the degree of security we had at the American consulate, which by the way, housed the American school with all the American children, with what Schwalier had. His was infinitely more.”

By all accounts, the Air Force brass were well satisfied with the report Record turned in. Many of them thought the part of Downing’s report that found fault with Schwalier was light on evidence. According to two senior officials, even Perry was skeptical. “Everybody was appalled by the thing,” says one. That included Shalikashvili, who later stood by Cohen, but who admitted to me, “I was skeptical of the Downing conclusion. . . . It seemed to me that there was not enough in the report to substantiate it.”

 

Squelching a Favorable Report

For the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Record report was a huge headache. The reason Record was given so much time, says a source involved in the process, was not so he could be thorough but to ensure the report came out after the election. The political appointees at the Pentagon feared Record would provide ammunition that congressional Republicans or presidential candidate Bob Dole could use against the Clinton administration. When Record dissented on the subject of Schwalier’s culpability, that created a whole new problem.

The “political side” of the Pentagon, say sources, feared the media would treat Record’s report as an Air Force cover-up, to exonerate one of its more popular officers. By this time, Perry had announced his retirement. “And so the spin in December,” says a senior Pentagon source, “was ‘let’s not get this report out till Perry leaves.'” After review by Defense’s general counsel, says the source, “the word comes back that it’s not documented very well, so we went through this elaborate exercise of passing the report back, having Record go into all their interviews, document more footnotes. I mean, s    , it was like an English-paper exercise. But it was all stalling for time until Perry left.”

And then some. The report languished in the secretary’s office. Meanwhile, Schwalier sympathizers leaked the findings to a few reporters, which brought precisely the accusations Perry’s staff had feared. Richard Bryan, the Democratic senator from Nevada who sat on both the Select Intelligence and Armed Services committees, said, without seeing the report, that he “thought the Air Force, in effect, had conducted a whitewash.” Specter threatened more hearings, though he hadn’t yet seen the report (nor has he to this day). Meanwhile, Schwalier’s turn was quickly coming up to pin on his second star, which wasn’t lost on Bryan.

Schwalier didn’t want to wear the rank before the matter was resolved anyway. But he didn’t have to face temptation. On January 10, Bryan sent a three-page letter to Widnall, telling her he found the exoneration of Schwalier surprising, though he still hadn’t read the report thanks to the stalling in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He urged her not to promote Schwalier. And Bryan had company. The New York Times editorialized that “Mr. Cohen should overrule” the report that still hadn’t been released, much less read by the editorial writer. Two days after the editorial ran, the Air Force announced it would delay Schwalier’s promotion pending the results of the investigation — which had by then been sitting in deputy secretary John White’s office since December 23.

The new strategy in the secretary’s office, say sources familiar with the investigation, was to protect Bill Cohen from a fiery baptism by slow-rolling the report right past his swearing-in and well into the spring. On January 24, Cohen took the helm. Five days later, White ensured that his new boss could avoid the subject until summer. In a letter to Widnall, he outlined issues that hadn’t been “adequately developed” by Record, whose findings had already received a much higher degree of scrutiny than Downing’s ever would. A new investigation would be required. Compiling a laundry list of subjects from Defense regulations to base alarm systems that warranted additional exploration, he encouraged Widnall to “take as much time as you believe necessary.” Some of the issues he requested be addressed — such as personnel transportation procedures — had nothing to do with the bombing. White took great pains, as did Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon in later press briefings, to make the turnaround of the Record report look like a joint decision of the Air Force and the Office of the Secretary of Defense. He even congratulated Widnall on the “wisdom of your decision to continue the examination.”

White and Bacon still say the decision was not imposed on the Air Force from above. But Widnall’s office was ready to release the Record report in December. A press release was even prepared to accompany it at the time — and the nine-page draft I obtained, never released, was on Secretary of the Air Force Widnall’s letterhead.

 

Exonerated (Quietly) Yet Again

Whatever her reservations might have been, Widnall went along with White’s request to start another investigation, as did Fogleman — an action sources close to him say he came to regret as giving cover to the political machinations of the Office of the Secretary of Defense. A new charter was issued to the inspector general of the Air Force, Richard Swope, and the judge advocate general of the Air Force, Bryan Hawley, the Air Force’s top investigator and top lawyer, respectively.

Swope and Hawley were tasked with determining whether Schwalier had acted in accordance with Defense or Air Force regulations, though neither Record nor Downing had suggested Schwalier violated any regulations. No one I have talked to with experience in the top rungs of the Pentagon in recent years can recall a similar case — in which an investigation by a disciplinary authority like James Record was bounced back to the service from the secretary of defense’s office, with orders, in essence, to try harder this time.

Not until April would Swope and Hawley finish combing through all the regulations. Long before then, Fogleman left the reservation. In an unrelated appearance before the Senate Armed Services Committee in February, he openly agitated for a full airing of Record’s report. He joined Record in siding squarely with Schwalier and predicted a chilling effect on commanders who are scapegoated because of acts of war against their troops. He declared it ” criminal for us to try and hold somebody accountable or to discipline somebody . . . because the media has created a frenzy based on partial information.” That hearing was the first time Schwalier knew Fogleman supported him. They had spoken briefly when Schwalier twice offered his resignation to defuse the situation, with Fogleman refusing each time because the investigations were not concluded.

Fogleman, who flew 315 combat missions in Vietnam, was not one to cover up mistakes out of misbegotten loyalty to fellow officers. A bark-peeling fireplug who was never shy about cracking senior-officer heads, Fogleman had forged a reputation as the “accountability general.” He had relieved a wing commander and two other officers in connection with the Air Force crash that killed Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown and his delegation. And after the accidental 1994 shootdown of two American helicopters by two of our own F-15 pilots, he had issued career-ending disciplinary letters to seven officers, including two brigadier generals.

But Fogleman’s cry for full disclosure went unheeded, even when Swope and Hawley also exonerated Schwalier. Their report was perhaps the most thorough of all in its search through the thousands of rules and regulations that Schwalier might have failed to heed. Their findings, like James Record’s, were not released, apparently at William Cohen’s direction According to spokesman Ken Bacon, “It was not the Air Force’s job to release the report. The report was going to the Secretary of Defense. It was his decision . . . when to release it.”

Pentagon staffers last December may have thought the slow release of findings that exonerated Schwalier would save them pain. If so, they calculated badly. By this spring, military-scandal season was blooming: The Aberdeen sex-abuse cases were grabbing headlines, along with the Kelly Flinn affair and the flameout of Cohen’s candidate to succeed Shalikashvili at Joint Chiefs, Joseph Ralston, thanks to an ancient paramour. Schwalier’s case bore zero resemblance to these other PR nightmares, except for this: Military accountability was now, more than ever, on the lips of every soft-paunched editorialist. “All this stuff comes together and conspires in a way that isn’t going to give Terry Schwalier much of a shot,” says a Pentagon source involved with the process throughout the investigations.

 

Cohen in Charge

In June and July, Cohen hunkered down for a crash course on the conflicting Khobar reports, at the end of which he would write his own. He consulted with report authors like Downing and . . . well, only with Downing, who at this time had yet to read either of the subsequent reports himself. The Downing report never held together as a brief for hanging Schwalier. Even Cohen would call some of the findings “overstated.” For one thing, the report lacked any serious consideration of the constraints on commanders operating in the Royal Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where U.S. forces must pay a degree of deference to the absolute monarchy.

Technically a temporary operation, though our forces have been there since the Gulf War, the 4404th Wing that Schwalier commanded siphoned money from other service budgets instead of being funded as a permanent operation. As a result, it depended heavily on in-kind expenditures by the Saudis — who supplied everything from food to jet fuel. Maintaining good relations with the hosts, therefore, was essential to accomplishing the mission.

Downing’s primary criticism of Schwalier was that he had protected the U.S. installations themselves, but hadn’t guarded sufficiently against an attack from outside, like the one that took place from the parking lot. Cohen echoes this charge in his final report. Both Cohen and Downing acknowledge that there was an accepted division of labor with the host country. The Saudis ceded no control to U.S. forces outside their compound and required the Americans to seek permission for structural changes inside. Cohen and Downing therefore criticize Schwalier for failing to persuade the Saudis to move the northern fence back even farther from the buildings. Cohen suggested that if Schwalier thought he needed intervention from a higher authority to accomplish this, he should have asked, which he didn’t.

Says Schwalier: “I didn’t think I needed help, based on the threat. We were making progress every day.” In the seven months after the car bombing in Riyadh and before the Khobar attack, Schwalier’s wing implemented some 130 different safety precautions and enacted 36 of 39 recommendations from a January ’96 Air Force Office of Special Investigations vulnerability assessment. That’s one new safety step every 1.3 days, a frantic pace for a unit that also averaged 74 sorties a day over Iraq. Schwalier’s subordinates had asked their Saudi counterparts twice to move the fences back, not just on the northern side but to the east and west, as well. And the Saudis had agreed to a larger buffer zone everywhere except to the north — where it would have meant relinquishing to the Americans a parking lot that served not just a public park but a mosque. Of course, a Saudi “no” wasn’t always a “no.” It was often negotiable. But Cohen, says Winn, the former consul general, fails to appreciate “how difficult it is to work with the Saudis, and that’s what Schwalier was trying to do. You sure as hell don’t do it by getting some commander [up the chain of command in Washington] to do it.”

Day-to-day command decisions, says Schwalier, are a trade-off between what you hypothetically could get done and what you most immediately can do. Schwalier created patrols by rooftop sentries, had vegetation cut back, doubled and tripled perimeter barriers, increased patrols inside the fence, and kept after the Saudis to increase security (including undercover officers) to 24 hours a day outside the fence — which, after all, was their responsibility. Cohen himself admitted that “it is doubtful” the Saudis would ever have moved the fence far enough back to have protected U.S. troops from a 20,000-pound bomb. Indeed, just three years earlier, they had actually moved the northern fence in, after complaints from Saudi residents. In combing through Pentagon rule books, Swope and Hawley found that the northern perimeter not only met the suggested distance for such installations but exceeded it by 30 feet.

After the bombing, the contrite Saudis moved the fence out 400 feet. But in a tacit acknowledgment of the security difficulties any commander would face in the middle of a busy metropolis, the U.S. airmen were moved anyway. At a cost of $ 150 million (over five times Schwalier’s annual budget), they relocated to a desert tent city.

The Downing report, which was embraced wholeheartedly by congressional overseers and to a degree by Cohen, implied that Schwalier could have guessed that an attack was on the way, though he couldn’t have known where or when. The report includes, for example, a chart entitled “Chronology of Events Leading Up To June 25, 1996, Bombing.” The inference is that a pattern had emerged of escalating threats that should have cued Schwalier on what was coming. The chart, however, is loaded with filler such as “1990-First use of Khobar Towers by U.S. forces.” Of the 14 items that precede the bombing, none is confirmed to have had anything to do with it. Numerous items, such as the request of four additional explosive-detection dog teams, are evidence of the vigilance of Schwalier’s own wing. In other words: He should have known the bombing was going to happen and have taken more precautions, because the increased precautions that he was taking indicated that the bombing was going to happen. It is logic only Joseph Heller or the Senate Armed Services Committee could love.

No wonder then that Cohen tried to distance himself from the Downing report when writing his own. But even with the benefit of the voluminous follow-up investigations, Cohen didn’t do much better. His remaining hanging offenses were that Schwalier did not install a protective plastic coating on the windows, that he didn’t have an expeditious alarm system, and that he didn’t have practice evacuation drills.

A January 1996 Air Force vulnerability assessment had recommended installing Mylar on the compound windows to keep glass from flying. Schwalier had been given estimates of an installation cost of $ 4 million — about one- seventh of his yearly budget. He went ahead and budgeted it in his five-year plan anyway and in the meantime installed heavier blast curtains, which could be put in faster and cheaper. Another assessment showed that without strengthening the window frames, Mylar coatings would cause blunt-trauma death rather than cuts, as a blast could send intact windows flying through the air. Swope and Hawley found that only two installations in the entire region had installed Mylar — and it wasn’t clear that any had done so before the Khobar bombing. As far as Department of Defense standards for installing Mylar are concerned — well, there are none. Cohen allowed that Mylar wouldn’t have prevented 18 of the 19 deaths, which were caused by the building’s collapse, and said it was also unlikely it could have been installed by June. Nonetheless, he concludes, this is evidence that Schwalier did not give sufficient consideration to how to minimize injury in a bomb attack.

Cohen also hammered Schwalier for having inadequate alarm systems and evacuation methods. On the night of the bombing, rooftop sentries in fact saw the suspicious sewage truck before it exploded. They descended from the roof, knocking on doors, and partially evacuated the building floor by floor before the bomb detonated, approximately four minutes after the time of alert. It was a method the wing had already used six to eight times in suspicious- package evacuations. Building 131 itself had been evacuated as recently as a month before the bombing. Though Cohen criticized Schwalier for not running regular practice drills, Schwalier says of the real evacuations, “Gosh, I hope those count as practice.”

But according to a Pentagon regulation Cohen cited, they don’t. The wing was apparently required to hold actual practice evacuations, though Cohen admitted he didn’t know whether it would have saved lives. (When the bomb exploded, many of the airmen were still in the stairwells, which may have been the safest place to be.) It isn’t clear that any of the 14 commanders who preceded Schwalier had conducted practice evacuations, either. Cohen went on to speculate that had the airmen done practice drills, in addition to the real-life evacuations, Schwalier might have been better able to determine whether the system was too slow or inadequate. It’s a rather academic discussion, though, since the authoritative Swope report, which Cohen selectively cited, concluded that the failure to practice evacuating “did not impact the wing’s response on 25 June 1996.”

Finally, Cohen criticized the floor-by-floor “waterfall” evacuation method as “primitive,” suggesting there should have been an automated alarm system. Swope had found no defense requirement for automated alarm systems for bomb threats. The Saudi-owned buildings in Dhahran didn’t come with fire alarms, since the concrete buildings wouldn’t burn. Cohen speculated that fire alarms might have provided a speedier bomb-evacuation method. Ironically this would not have complied with a Pentagon regulation Swope uncovered that “explicitly cautions against any procedure that may confuse fire and other types of alarms.”

In reporting this story, I spoke with several people who had worked years at the Pentagon and who said they never recalled practicing evacuations for bomb scares. So I checked to make sure that the very heart of our civilian and military leadership, which receives bomb threats regularly, is living up to the “reasonable standards” that Cohen decided Schwalier had not met. According to spokesman Bridges, “The Secretary’s office might [have Mylar]; the room I’m standing in does not.” I ask Bridges if they ever practice evacuations for bomb or terrorist threats. “We have indeed practiced, we had a fire drill last week,” he says. But that’s not a bomb evacuation drill. ” This was labeled a fire drill, but the same procedures could conceivably be used.” Not according to the regulation Swope found, which forbids multi- purpose fire alarms.

“There have been bomb scares in the Pentagon,” Bridges volunteers, “and they seal off the area and will evacuate certain halls.” But those aren’t practice drills, those are real-life precautions. “But they happen often enough, so I guess we don’t need drills.” This was Terry Schwalier’s contention.

Cohen never alleged that Schwalier was criminally culpable. But anything less than the full support of the secretary of defense is fatal to a commander’s career. In the months before Cohen’s press conference, Ron Fogleman, once thought to be a strong candidate to succeed Shalikashvili, stomped around the Pentagon calling the investigation “bulls — and gunsmoke.” Fogleman told Cohen that if Schwalier was disciplined, he would walk. So Cohen began interviewing replacements. Already upset at being overruled in the Kelly Flinn affair, in which he pressed for a court martial, Fogleman had had enough. “I may be out of step with some of the times and some of the thinking of the establishment,” he announced, and stepped down. Four days later Cohen withdrew Schwalier’s promotion. “There was no guts at the end of the day,” says Gen. Peay, Schwalier’s commander. “These guys went for a political decision and ruined a young general’s career.”

 

The Next of Kin

If Schwalier’s career was ruined for not living up to Cohen’s double standard, it wasn’t Cohen’s oiliest move. That came in a New Yorker interview where the secretary of defense justified his decision to take away Schwalier’s second star: “For me to have to face the parents of the 19 who died, and to say everything that reasonably could have been done was done — I don’t believe that’s the case.” But this was disingenuous, to say the least, on Cohen’s part. He had never faced the parents. I asked Ken Bacon, the Pentagon spokesman, if Cohen had ever been in contact with the families, and Bacon said, “The answer is no.”

But several of the family members I interviewed said that they had reached out to Cohen. And it wasn’t to blame Schwalier. Of the 10 parents, wives, and other family members I interviewed, only one thought Schwalier should have been punished. Most of the others thought he had been scapegoated. Fran Heiser, who lost a 35-year-old son, thought everybody up the chain should be held accountable, and said as much in a letter to Cohen. After the decision, he promptly replied, offering his condolences and touting his report before inviting her to the Pentagon to attend a briefing on force protection that he didn’t attend.

And despite Bacon’s assertion, after talking to Cohen, that there had been no communication between Cohen and the families, three women had actually sent letters to Cohen before his decision, encouraging him to support Schwalier. Marie Campbell’s 30-year-old husband was due home only three days after the bomb went off. She wrote Cohen twice, saying, “I strongly believe that General Schwalier should not be held accountable. . . . I’m praying that General Schwalier will receive his 2nd star. I would be honored to see him get it.”

Campbell also enclosed an e-mail from Bridget Brooks who lost a 22-year-old son. They, along with others at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, home to 12 of the deceased airmen, had recently met Schwalier, when he visited their informal support group. “He just cried for us and hugged us,” Brooks wrote. ” His sadness over the loss of these young men seemed to permeate his whole person. . . . He has been going through this ordeal since day one, but he never spoke one word of complaint. . . . I would consider it an honor to be present when General Schwalier receives his second star.”

All of the women wrote Cohen before July 31, hoping to influence his decision. None has received a reply. “It kind of hurts that he didn’t answer me back,” says Campbell.

Dawn Woody, who lost her 20-year-old husband, was also impressed by her meeting with Schwalier. “Reporters called me as early as an hour after my husband was killed. I never spoke to any of them. The only reason I’m speaking to you is because I think the world of Schwalier and I would do anything to help him. I know that my husband would not want him blamed for this. For them to punish Gen. Schwalier — my husband would be very upset about it, because that’s not who did the terrorist act.”

 

The Fallout

More than one wife told me that with the loss of Schwalier and Fogleman, the Air Force took two more Khobar casualties. When Cohen referred in his final report to Schwalier as a “fine officer,” he had no idea of the magnitude of his understatement. In 20 years of Officer Performance Reviews filled out by his superiors, Schwalier received not a single “9” when a “10” was possible. He is described as “smart, loyal, tough and of the highest character,” “our #1 Brigadier General on the Joint Staff,” and someone “who does it all — commands, leads, cares for people.”

Many of the sources who cooperated on this story did so because they believe the Pentagon’s treatment of Terry Schwalier sets an impossible and dangerous standard for field commanders who already, rightly, bear the onus for making hundreds of daily decisions affecting the safety of their troops. Now they have cause to wonder whether political expedience will cause their superiors to withdraw support when something beyond their control goes wrong – – even an “act of war,” as Fogleman called it. This is why Terry Schwalier, who maintained a public silence throughout the ordeal and always encouraged others to do the same, is now speaking out. “I believed in the process,” he says. “I believed the right thing would happen.”

In July, a leaked Pentagon report warned of disgruntled pilots who expressed great “distrust of their senior leadership” and felt they were ” lied to, betrayed and treated very poorly.” The Air Force cannot lose too many more Terry Schwaliers. But it will if it continues to punish the failure to meet impossible standards, and does so for the sake of “checking six,” pilotese for covering your rear. Combat leaders in such an environment will concern themselves with everything but the mission — and will begin thinking and making decisions . . . like political appointees.

As one senior officer forecasts: “This is something that will be on the minds of commanders — how much can they depend on their political leadership to support them when the chips are down. During a fast-moving military situation, you’re more worried about covering your six than taking care of your troops and getting the job done. And I haven’t seen the great reassuring statement that says in the future, we’ll do better than we did by Schwalier. It didn’t come out of the Joint Staff, it didn’t come out of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and it sure as hell didn’t come off the Hill.”

Matt Labash is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.