The Scapegoat

[img caption=”From the November 24, 1997 issue.” float=”right” width=”144″ height=”193″ render=”<%photoRenderType%>”]8793[/img]TERRY SCHWALIER was what the warrior class calls a fast burner. He had zipped through the Air Force ranks and was about to pin on his second star, making him a major general. He was praised by superiors, respected by peers, and loved by subordinates. Then on June 25, 1996, 19 airmen under his command in Saudi Arabia were killed by the largest terrorist bomb ever used against our military. It was not Schwalier’s fault that the men died. But a year after the bombing, Secretary of Defense William Cohen took back Schwalier’s promotion–and unjustly cut short an exemplary military career. 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 death
s. 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.”

Part 2