Interview with Robert Gates, Deputy National Security Advisor

But the general view I believe in the government at the very highest level was, first of all there was a real likelihood that Saddam would use chemical weapons. And we had then very carefully to focus on military targets and infra-structure bridges, roads and things like that. We really worked hard to avoid civilian targets. In fact at one point, just before the air war began, the President sent me over to the Pentagon and I had lunch with Colin Powell and his Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dave Jeremiah. And my job was to review the target list one more time, or be briefed by them on the target list, to make sure from the President's stand point that we would not be hitting civilian targets and we were completely satisfied on that score.

In any event, the general feeling was that if the Iraqis used chemical weapons that we would simply expand that target base significantly and damage Iraq and the civilian infer-structure and the economy much worse than we were under that war plan.

Q: The land wars are approaching, and the Soviet initiative comes to the surface. How did you first know the Soviets were going to have one last try?

Gates: We got word that a call was coming through from Gorbachev for the President, usually these things take a while to arrange--the long distance companies haven't quite got the arrangement between Moscow and Washington figured out yet, but we knew in advance that Gorbachev would be calling. And I went up to his office in the residence where he took the call from Gorbachev, and that's really I think the first time we were aware that there would be a last attempt by Gorbachev to find some way to avoid the land war. Gorbachev to me was making one last attempt to try and have it both ways. He wanted to stay with the United States, and the course of this conflict and yet he also was under, I think, great pressure from various elements of the Soviet bureaucracy to try and preserve this client relationship with the Iraqis and with Saddam Hussein who after all had been a Soviet client for many many years. And I think the KGB and the Military and the Foreign Ministry all had elements in that strongly wanted to keep that relationship alive.

Q: Was there a moment when the President covered the hand of the mouth piece of the phone and say, 'Hey he's saying this?'

Gates: Well I think that there was various times.....a certain rolling of the eyes as though, do we have to go through this one more time?.....here at the eleventh hour, before this thing starts? And it was clear that we did not want anything to interrupt going forward with the land war. After all we had all this preparation, we had gone through the air war and now for something to come up at the last minute that might delay the ground war was very frustrating for us. And so we were trying to figure out what there was about, what Gorbachev was saying that was simply unacceptable. And it was the question of how to deal with Gorbachev that really was the subject of the meeting that the President called for after his return from Fords Theatre that night.

Q: Did you feel that Gorbachev was desperate, was he really pushing this, or was he just going through the motions?

Gates: Somewhere in between, I didn't have any sense that he was desperate by any means. And by the same token there was a certain urgency to what he was saying that conveyed the sense that, you know that this was something that he really hoped might come to pass. I think he knew, that the chances of successwere negligible. But I think he really did hope that maybe he would hit on something that might click with the President, and where he might at least get a delay in the ground war, while something was explored.

Q: What did the President say to him, what was the President's basic position.

Gates: The President that night was basically in a listening mood. He clearly was taking aboard what Gorbachev was saying, but was not giving him anything that could be considered a definitive response by any means, said it clearly that will come later.From the very beginning in this process there had been a tension inside the administration of over how to deal with the Soviets. Between those such as Dick Cheney, who basically wanted to kiss off the Soviets and considered them a complication in the whole process. To Baker and, I think ultimately Bush, who felt that the Soviets were immensely useful allies, especially in the United Nations Security Council. And wanted to do everything they could to keep the Soviets on board as long as it didn't interfere with accomplishing our objective and I think it was in that vain that Bush took that call that night, and in that vain that he responded to Gorbachev. He did not rain on Gorbachev's parade that night, he did not say, well, hell this is just out of the question, or anything like that. He agreed as I recall to think about it and, and that he would get back to Gorbachev.

Q: Describe the scene afterwards. What do you remember the President saying when he returned from the theatre?

Gates: We gathered in the Oval Office later that night, and the preliminaries in some respects were as interesting as the actual meeting. It was a very strangely dressed group of people, as I recall the President and one or two others wearing black tie from the performance at Fords, others were in turtle necks and sweaters, others were in coats and ties and so on. But the eight of us gathered in the Oval Office, and the President decided that he wanted a fire in the fireplace, as he often did, and what I don't think any of us realised was, that the flue in the chimney was electronically operated by the Secret Service. So the President started the fire, but the flue was closed, and so the Oval Office quickly filled with smoke. And we were all sitting there trying to look cool as we were choking on the smoke and finally Dick Cheney got up and went out and found the Secret Service man who could open the flue and, Dick was even looking for a fire extinguisher. And anyway we ended up having this meeting in the middle of February with all the doors to the Oval Office including to the outside open to try and get the smoke out of the room. And all of us reeking of this wood smoke from this failed attempt to have a fire in the fire place. The basic issue at the meeting was how to deal with Gorbachev, and it was a repetition of the basic argument that had been going on from August. And Dick Cheney and my recollection is that Brent as well, were basically inclined to tell him to buzz off. To not get in the way, and that what he was proposing was totally unacceptable. The President and Baker were much more inclined to go back to Gorbachev and very carefully point out the shortcomings and the proposal for the ceasefire and how it didn't require the Iraqis to leave immediately, it made no provisions for a whole host of things, such as the repatriation of Kuwaiti, wealth, and reconstruction of Kuwait and so on and so forth. And that was ultimately the decision that was made. But the back and forth of the meeting was basically about how to go back to Gorbachev. I didn't have the sense at the time that, people believed, the entire enterprise was about to go off the rails. It was really more a tactical question of how to deal with Gorbachev in a way that would try and go the last mile to keep the Soviets on board. There was no question in my mind that the President was going to order the commencement of the land war. And it didn't matter what Gorbachev said or thought.

Q: And what was the bottom line of the meeting, how did that come about?

Gates: Well the bottom line was basically the President went back to Gorbachev the next morning, with a very, very long telephone call which was basically a hand holding call. And he told Gorbachev all the things that were wrong with the proposal and so on and so forth. And then indicated that he may have agreed that we would give them another 24 hours or something like that. But basically, he conveyed I think to Gorbachev that we were going forward unless there was just a total capitulation on the part of Saddam.

Q: It wasn't enough at this stage for Saddam just to say, 'Hey, I'm withdrawing?'

Gates: Absolutely not. We had done a great deal of contingency work on this in the government. Because we figured from the time that we began assembling offensive force in the Gulf after the end of October, that Saddam at some point, might agree to withdraw or might make some gesture that would immensely complicate our situation. We were afraid that, you know, he would say, well I will get out, or I will withdraw over a period of time. And so we drew up contingency plans where he had said, 'I will get out.' We had contingency plans and datelines in which we would have said, 'Alright, now if you are serious, within 24 hours you have to be out of Kuwait City within 24-28 you have to be out of the Rumaila Oilfields, within 72 hours you have to be out of the islands off the coast. In other words we were going to make him withdraw from the most valuable parts of Kuwait first, rather than allow him simply to withdraw some of his forces from the border with Saudi Arabia pull them back a few kilometres or something and pretend like that counted for a cease fire.

So we had done a lot of thinking about the different ways in which Saddam could try and play a game with us, and as far as we were concerned this last call from Gorbachev was just another part of that. and Saddam's sort of half- hearted, acceptance of some of the demands.

Q: Tell me the story about the Kuwaiti oilfield.

Gates: We were having a Deputies meeting in the White House and the situation room on, sort of next steps in, diplomatic course and so on, and the President was on the telephone with a call from President Mitterrand of France, who was a little concerned I think about going forward, and should we wait a while and so on. And we received word and I don't remember whether it was from CIA, or the military, or whoever, that Saddam had blown the oil wells. That the oil wells in Kuwait were on fire. So I took this piece of information and wrote it down on a slip of paper and rushed up and went into the President's study which is right off the Oval Office, a very small office, maybe 10 by 10. And gave him this slip of paper,and Bush used it right then in the telephone call-- we just received this piece of information that shows that we cannot delay. That Saddam is going to produce catastrophe in Kuwait, he's already set all the oil wells on fire and God knows what he may do next. And that pretty well resolved that issue.

Q: Do you remember running down the corridor and bumping into Paul Wolfowitz? Tell me that story.

Gates: Well, I mean we had been immensely fortunate, no country in history, I think, has ever been so fortunate in the nature of its adversary as the United States was in facing Saddam Hussein. Because every time the coalition was about to fragment or every time that we had a problem at home, the domestic support was slipping away, Saddam would do something stupid and play right into our hands. And that was exactly the case with setting the fires in Kuwait and I told Wolfowitz at the time, when going to the Oval Office excited and Paul had been in the Deputies meeting, and he said he's done it again, he's pulled our chestnuts out of the fire.

Q: Do you have any memories of the beginning of the land war?

Gates: No, not really. I have been in the White House on a number of occasions when military operations are launched and once the decisions are made and the orders have been issued the people in the White House from the President on down are really out of the action, at least is they are smart. And President Bush was a specially good as was President Reagan of giving the military their mission, their orders and staying the hell out of the way. And not trying to micro-manage the conflicts, so you don't have a Lyndon Johnson going down the situation room picking targets as he did in Vietnam. Bush and Reagan stayed out of the way, so when the land war started we were basically in the receive mode, just waiting for information to be past in the Presidents case from either Powell or Cheney and in our case the same way, about how things were going and the only information we really had after the beginning of the ground war was simply that it was going well and that the units had broken through the lines very fast.

Q: What would you have done if Saddam Hussein in that land war had used chemical weapons, biological weapons and started to cause serious casualties?

Gates: We had prepared for the possible use of chemical and biological weapons by the Iraqis. CIA had provided us with some very good information on what Iraqi capabilities were, and what kind of chemical weapons they had and so our troops were provided with, or at least the front elements of our troops were provided with protective equipment; a number of them were given inoculations. I remember we had a serious logistics problem in trying to get enough of the serum or the inoculations for the troops. If you took all of the supplies available all over the United States it was enough only for a fraction of our forces and for very few of our allies as well. So we were trying to figure out which units should receive this.

But the general view I believe in the government at the very highest level was, first of all there was a real likelihood that Saddam would use chemical weapons. And we had then very carefully to focus on military targets and infra-structure bridges, roads and things like that. We really worked hard to avoid civilian targets. In fact at one point, just before the air war began, the President sent me over to the Pentagon and I had lunch with Colin Powell and his Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dave Jeremiah. And my job was to review the target list one more time, or be briefed by them on the target list, to make sure from the President's stand point that we would not be hitting civilian targets and we were completely satisfied on that score.

In any event, the general feeling was that if the Iraqis used chemical weapons that we would simply expand that target base significantly and damage Iraq and the civilian infer-structure and the economy much worse than we were under that war plan.

Q: What type of things would have been bombed. And what would the United States have done?

Gates: Well I don't remember specifically some of the targets. We might have hit the petroleum infra-structure much more heavily. We might have hit the manufacturing section much more heavily. I don't think there was ever an explicit warning to Saddam on this issue. I don't think there was a letter or anything like that. But there was a good deal of thought given to it in our Government and that was the general way we looked at it.

Q: Why didn't he use chemicals, did you ever get a satisfactory answer to that?

Gates: I believe that his not using the chemicals is one of the great mysteries of the Gulf War. We expected him to, we knew he had the capability. We had some information that they had been moved forward, and it may be that he did grasp in this case that the consequences of using those, would be devastating for Iraq. And he may have believed that we would have used nuclear weapons. But I don't believe anybody ever said that. And it was never even discussed.

Q: Ending the war... How was the decision taken?

Gates: On Tuesday morning the 26th, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney came over to the White House to give the President the daily report on how the war was going, and by that time we knew both from the military reports and by satellites about the 'highway of death' leading north out of Kuwait City and the incredible destruction of the Iraqi convoys and so on, we knew all this would eventually be on television. And I remember very clearly Colin Powell saying that this thing was turning into a massacre. And that to continue it beyond a certain pointwould be un-American and he even used the word unchivalrous.

And he said that he thought that they were probably within 24 hours of concluding the war of completing their objective and as I have said on other occasions, once the orders were given the President basically stayed out of the military decision making and was essentially deferring to the military in terms of their judgement about the course of the events in the region. In any event Colin said that he thought that another 24 hours would do it and so President said well let's be thinking along those lines then.

When Colin came in then, Colin and Dick Cheney came in the next day the morning of the 27th, Colin said we'd basically done it. We have destroyed the Republican Guard, we have expelled them from Kuwait, we have essentially completed our objectives and I believe we are just a few hours from completing that effort and to avoid this thing looking like we are just killing Iraqi soldiers for the sake of it, is probably getting close to the time that could cut this off.

At that point President said well, you ready to conclude today, and Colin said he thought so, and, I don't remember the exact conversation but in essence ....why don't you call General Schwarzkopf and see what his view is upon this and make sure that he is comfortable with this approach and with this decision. So, sort of like a spy reaching out for his shoe for the phone, President pulls out the bottom, well actually President didn't pull out the drawer because Colin as National Security Adviser already knew that in the lower right hand corner of the President's desk was a secure telephone. So he pulls that phone out, calls Schwarzkopf, and they talk and Schwarzkopf as I recall, asks for a few more hours, he says that we have encircled the final battle against the last two Republican Guard Divisions is under way. They have engaged and we just need a few hours to complete that. If you can give us those few hours then my recollection of the conversation as Colin reported was, I am comfortable with decision to end the fighting at that point. Now we were all very careful.

We were not really talking about a cease fire we were simply talking about a cessation of the fighting and then we would talk about what the terms would be. But it clearly was a discussion between the two military officers in terms of the timing and only when at the end of war--at that particular juncture--first being raised by Colin and then be ratified by Schwarzkopf with the addition of several additional hours, at Schwarzkopf's request, that the decision was made to end the war. And in fact we added a couple of more hours on to that for the announcement to be made at the appropriate time on American television and also because it made a nice even hundred hours.