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.”
