Atkinson : There was a belief [that] Schwarzkopf distrusted Special Forces in general, sharing the conventional skepticism that many conventional soldiers had toward Special Forces. I don't think that's really true. I think he was just concerned that he keep them in check.

There was a belief among the Special Forces community in the United States that Special Forces, Green Berets, Delta Force, could be very useful to Schwarzkopf particularly in operating out in western Iraq, perhaps SCUD hunting, disrupting the Iraqis, doing commando kind of things. General Carl Stiner, commander of Special Operations for the U.S. military was full of saucy ideas about what he could do, and even proposed moving his own headquarters to Saudi Arabia. Well, that's the last thing Schwarzkopf wanted was another four star general in his theater. So he sent a resounding no to Stiner, and prohibited American Special Forces from crossing the border and operating. Nevertheless, he was persuaded by the British General de la Billiere that the British SAS 22nd Regiment, which was their Special Forces regiment, could be useful in SCUD hunting, and was finally persuaded, when it was clear that he couldn't stop the SCUD shooters otherwise, to allow the SAS to secretly set up in western Saudi Arabia and stealthily creep across the border and begin looking for the SCUD shooters.

Q: What were the difficulties facing the military in finding the mobile SCUD launchers?

Atkinson: Well, Schwarzkopf and his planners knew that there were some 30 fixed sites that the Iraqis had prepared to shoot SCUDS. The difficulty was that the Iraqis never once used those fixed sites, these launching pads. Instead they used mobile trucks that hauled the SCUDS around, could set up in a matter of minutes, fire in a matter of minutes, take off again. We're talking about an area of western Iraq, which was the size basically of Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts put together, a pretty substantial chunk of territory. Trying to find those trucks out in a piece of territory that that's big at night, when you're prohibited basically from putting troops on the ground and you're relying on pilots flying at 500 knots overhead, simply proved to be impossible.

Q: Tell me about struggle inside the bunker in Riyadh, about the shape of the air war, and where the bombs should be dropped.

Atkinson: There was tension from the beginning. It got increasingly aggravated as the war unfolded, between the Army and the Marines on the one hand, and the Air Force on the other hand, over who would control which planes were dropping bombs where. Basically the Army had the view that the Air Force should be pounding the targets that the Army was going to have to fight as soon as the ground war was attacked, the tanks, the artillery. The Air Force was persuaded that the way to defeat Iraq was to leap over these forces and to strike the strategic targets that were in Baghdad and elsewhere, a belief that it was more effective to continue hammering away at the strategic targets. This became a source of consternation to the point where the Army would go to Waller, Schwarzkopf's deputy and say, we're not getting our share of attack sorties. We're concerned that we're going to be thrown into the teeth of an enemy that has not been sufficiently reduced. We're concerned that your aspirations for reducing the Iraqi forces by 50 percent before the ground attack starts will not be met.

Q: What's at stake for each service in the war?

Atkinson: Well, it would be cynical to suggest that in the forefront of everyone's mind was the budgetary benefits that would accrue to those who had performed well in the war. It would be naive to suggest that it was not in the back of those same minds. Clearly at a time when the military budget was being whacked substantially following the end of the Cold War, this was an opportunity for each service to prove its mettle, to show that it indeed had a role in the new world order. To show that the specific weapons systems that it wanted were in fact, worthwhile. So there were many things at stake, not least of which was a share of future budgets, not least of which was a share of prestige, and a belief that one service or another was more important as the 21st century was drawing nearer. It would also be cynical to say that that the individual services weren't concerned about losses within their own services. Ah, this was a driving issue for all of them. The Air Force didn't want to lose pilots, the Navy didn't want to lose pilots, the Army didn't want to lose soldiers. I think it would be fair to say that this was probably the driving force in most of the decisions that were made, but it would be foolish to believe that it was the only issue at stake here.

Q: Now tell me what was happening with the Patriots.

Atkinson: The Patriot had originally been developed as an anti-aircraft missile to shoot down enemy jets as they were coming in. And it had been adapted to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, which is a much different process. A warhead that is coming in at mach 6 at 4,000 miles an hour is much more difficult to shoot down. It's much smaller among other things than an airplane that's coming at Mach 1 or Mach 2. Unbeknowst to the Americans the SCUDS had been modified in a way that made them much more difficult than anyone had anticipated to shoot down. In order to extend their range, the Iraqis had basically eviscerated the missiles and had welded in another section to give them more fuel, and it had been done in such a ham-handed manner, it was so clumsy that the stresses, the aerodynamic stresses of the missiles reentering the atmosphere caused them to break apart. And in effect, instead of having just one warhead plummeting down you had pieces of junk. It was almost as though they had deliberately designed decoys similar to the sophisticated intercontinental ballistic missiles that the Russians and the Americans had done, where all kinds of decoys would come out and make it difficult for radar to tell which was a decoy and which was the actual warhead. When the first SCUDs started falling, the Patriots would fire at a target, the Patriot missile would see a bunch of different things coming down and many Patriots would be fired to the point where first the Americans weren't certain what was being hit and secondly there were large numbers of Patriots being expended, 31 on one particular day early on. This caused concern first about the effectiveness of the Patriot and second about the stocks of Patriot missiles.

Q: What's the difference between what the public is being told about the performance of the Patriots and the reality?

Atkinson: Well, the public was being told that the Patriot was in fact, infallible. At one point, Bush went to the Patriot factory in Massachusetts and said, there have been 42 Patriots fired and 41 of them have been intercepted, virtually 100 percent. Schwarzkopf at one point said, of 33, 33 have been destroyed. 33 SCUDs. In fact, there was a recognition that they didn't quite know what the Patriot was doing. First there was confusion over the debris that was falling with the warhead as the SCUDs were breaking up. Secondly it was impossible to determine exactly what was happening high in the atmosphere, at these tremendous speeds, exactly what was being destroyed. It was considered prudent in the long run to keep this hidden from the public. I believe that the public was best served, particularly in Israel, by having great faith in the Patriot.

Q: Saddam's environmental terrorism, the oil fields....Tell me about Schwarzkopf's claim that the laser bomb shut down the flow of Iraqi oil?

Atkinson: With this tremendous river of oil pouring into the Persian Gulf there was frantic planning to figure out how to shut it off somehow. And finally a mission was launched with F-111 fighter bombers to put a laser guided bomb on a manifold which controlled the pumps and the valves that allowed this fuel to go, this petroleum to go into the Gulf. The bombs were dropped, the manifolds were destroyed. The oil more or less stopped flowing. It was only a trickle after that. It's never been clear, despite the claims of the time that that in fact is what shut off the flow. There's suspicion that Kuwaiti resistance fighters got into the oil field and shut it off manually themselves. Nevertheless, the claim was made that the Air Force had succeeded in stopping this environmental terrorism.

Q: Does the Gulf War in fact, represent the dying of the old world order?

Atkinson: I think that the notion that the Gulf War was being fought for a new world order was in fact, intended to obscure the fact that it was being fought for very much the old world order: cheap petroleum, benign monarchies, the preventing of a regime in the Persian Gulf from arising that was inimical to the interests of the western democracies. There was no new world order that came out of the Persian Gulf War. What the war showed was that it was possible to bring together a diverse coalition of countries toward a common cause under certain circumstances. Trying to pull them together again would depend on the circumstances of a future event. George Bush's vision of the new world order was that countries could unite in common purpose for the benefit of all mankind. In fact, I think that's proven to be mostly a pipe dream since then.

Q: Air power at Khafji....the lack of it. Glosson said in an interview that this is not the Air Force's best day. Could you talk about that....

Atkinson: Well, there was air power that was brought to bear in Khafji. There were planes up there that were attacking targets. One of the problems that the pilots discovered tragically was that it was very difficult at night, particularly, to determine who were the good guys and who were the bad guys. Out in the western part of this battle zone, west of Khafji, an A-10 inadvertently fired a maverick missile which destroyed a Marine armored vehicle and killed four Marines. This became a problem throughout the rest of the war, recognition that trying to tell who was Iraqi and who was American or other coalition force, especially at night, was going to be a persistent problem. I think it was hard for the Air Forces, who were flying for the coalition to react as quickly as they needed to in Khafji. They destroyed a lot of stuff. They did not, as Schwarzkopf claimed at the time, essentially destroy the Iraqi 5th Division, for example.

Q: One thing you emphasize in your book is that the Army missed the point of Khafji. That they just didn't pick up the signals about the strength of Saddam's forces. What is your understanding here...?

Atkinson: Well, clearly the three days of fighting in and around Khafji showed that the Iraqis had a lot of trouble mounting an even modest attack. That the Iraqis were not ten feet tall. And I think that it was fairly evident to the planners in Riyadh that the Iraqis had major deficiencies in the way that they were able to bring complex forces together, air and ground in particular. So you know, the lessons learned from Khafji were that the Iraqis were probably not going to be the tigers that some had portrayed them to be. That the Arab forces were willing to fight even if not with tactical competence on behalf of the coalition. And that air power was going to make life very, very difficult for the Iraqis if they tried to move anywhere, even though air power had not been particularly effective in destroying the forces attacking Khafji.

Q: What does that tell you about how to plan the rest of the war?

Atkinson: Well, to some extent the die was cast for how to plan the rest of the war. Shipping 400,000 troops out in to western Saudi Arabia is not something that you start and then stop, and say, OK, we're going to do it differently. We will go back to the `hey diddle diddle `plan and drive right through the middle of Kuwait because these guys aren't going to be able to stop us. Once the decision had been made to attack from the west with this sweeping left hook, I don't think there was the practical ability to change that fundamental game plan. You know, you could argue that the ground attack could be launched sooner, and this was an argument that went on after Khafji in Washington and in Riyadh, ad nauseum, when to do it. But I don't think that there were lessons that could be drawn from Khafji that could fundamentally change the blueprint that had already been laid out for how to prosecute the rest of the war.

Q: Schwarzkopf tells Glosson to move his planes into bomb the theater. What's Glosson's reaction?

Atkinson: Well, this was part of the on-going tug of war between the ground forces, the Army and the Marines and the Air Force over where the planes would bomb. Whether they would hit strategic targets deep in Iraq, or whether they'd hit the Iraqi army. Schwarzkopf finally told Glosson that he needed to focus more on those Iraqi forces right along the border and occupying Kuwait as well as the Republican Guard. Glosson was not happy with this. Glosson wrote in his diary that this is a sad day, basically, that our strategic campaign which is going along swimmingly has been truncated by short-sighted Army commanders who don't recognize what we're trying to do. Glosson attempted to circumvent, and did circumvent, to some extent, this edict from Schwarzkopf by persuading Schwarzkopf on the spur of the moment that certain attacks needed to go farther north to hit strategic targets. He would control the air flow in such a way that the Army was getting some of what it wanted struck, but not other things. Again, Glosson controlled the planes and where the planes were going. It was difficult for Schwarzkopf to micromanage an air commander who was fairly wily in how he was using his airplanes.

Q: Jumping ahead to a briefing that happens on January 30. Schwarzkopf shows some tape, and says they're taking out local SCUDs--what's going on?

Atkinson: Schwarzkopf on January 30 had a briefing and he showed gun camera tape which seemed to show Iraqi vehicles being destroyed by F-15E's, and Schwarzkopf claimed that we may have taken out as many as seven mobile SCUD launchers in this one attack. In Washington, at Langley, Virginia, at the CIA headquarters, this was being watched on CNN, as it was everywhere else. And the CIA analysts looked at it and they said, oh my God, those are oil trucks. And elsewhere there was even a suspicion that they may have been milk trucks. Schwarzkopf went white with anger at this, when it was in fact, more or less confirmed that they were probably oil trucks. Glosson summoned the photo analysts who had assured him, one of them had even offered to bet $1,000 that these were SCUD launchers, and railed and threatened and generally carried on. As far as the American public was concerned, they remained SCUD launchers. They were never told otherwise.

Q: The press. Can you talk about the military strategy for handling them ....

Atkinson: Well, many of the military commanders involved in Desert Storm believed that the press had been a prime contributor to the loss in Vietnam. That the press, by negative reporting, tended to undermine support for the U.S. military at home. That if the press had not been agents of the loss in Vietnam, they had at least been agents of the loss of esteem towards the U.S. military. The general approach toward the press in the Gulf War was to impose restrictions that were more like the restrictions that had been imposed in Korea and in World War II than the free flowing autonomy that was largely given to reporters in Vietnam where you go out and get on a helicopter and go wherever you wanted. There were restrictions. You had to have an escort, you had to have signed an agreement that you would not disclose certain kinds of information. Sensitive operations were screened from the press completely. Access to key participants was tightly regulated. There were 1400 reporters in Saudi Arabia. That's four times as many as there were in Vietnam at the peak of the war there. Obviously some kinds of restriction were necessary, some effort to corral this brigade of reporters who showed up were warranted. Nevertheless, I think it can be argued that there was an effort to restrict what was reported in ways that probably didn't serve the American public well in the long run.

Q: What do you mean?

Atkinson: I think people came away believing that this war was basically bloodless. That it was a sanitary exercise in which no one was really hurt, no one really died. And I think that that's dangerous. I think it makes it easier to go to war the next time. That it devalues the human suffering that war always brings. And that particularly for a superpower it ought to be always very, very difficult to pull the trigger. And anything that makes it easier to pull the trigger, such as believing that war is essentially an operation in which nobody really dies, is hazardous.

Q: And General Powell's view on the press?

Atkinson: Powell had a more sophisticated view of reporters and the media in general. He recognized that the media was, for one thing, a very important part of his arsenal. He would tell young officers in speaking to them before the war, that once you've taken care of all of the military issues then worry about television, because you can win the battle and lose the war through television. So Powell realized that it was necessary to feed the press regularly. That the press needed information. And he recognized also the use to which television could be put in elevating people like Colin Powell in the esteem of the public. Powell was very good on television, Schwarzkopf is very good on television. Colin Powell recognized that, and instead of trying to prevent television from showing Schwarzkopf and Colin Powell, he harnessed it as part of his arsenal.

Q: Could you give a thumbnail sketch of the press corps there?

Atkinson: Well, there were about 1400 reporters in Saudi Arabia. In many cases the gap that had developed between, particularly the American military and the American press corps was illustrated in Saudi Arabia at this point. Very few reporters had direct military experience. Very few were personally cognizant of the American military culture. They didn't understand it. There was a belief among many military officers that these are dilettantes, that these are people who really didn't understand either what the military was about or what the military believed in. On the other hand there were great frustrations that the reporters had. Many of them were bottled up in hotel rooms in Dhahran and Riyadh watching the war on CNN, tremendously frustrated. And a belief that the military was bending over backwards to be as unhelpful as possible. So there was an antipathy that developed that was pretty poisonous early on.