Against All Enemies (21 page)

In our meeting in the Pentagon in July 1996, Shali was talking about all-out war. The military had a plan for almost any contingency. The plan on the shelf for war with Iran looked like it had been drawn up by Eisenhower. Several groups of Army and Marine divisions would sweep across the country over the course of several months. “What if we wanted to do something a little bit less first?” Berger asked.

“Well,” Shali said, reaching for another map, “CENTCOM also has a plan to bomb their military facilities along the coast: navy ports, air force bases, missile installations.”

“Let's suppose for the sake of argument that we did that, bombed their coastal stuff,” I asked. “What happens next?”

“If you're asking what I personally think happens next, Dick, is that they attack us again, with hidden missiles, with little boats, with terrorist cells going against us and the Saudis and the Bahrainis,” Shali mused.

“Not good,” Berger said, shaking his head, “tit for tat. Then we have to hit them again.” Clinton had told Lake, Berger, and me that he did not want to get into a round of gradually escalating mutual attacks. If we were going to do this, he wanted a massive attack that would frighten the Iranians into inaction. In 1989, the Iranians had stopped the war with Iraq because they said they were convinced that the United States and Iraq together would take actions that threatened the continuance of the Iranian Revolution. Could we get them to think that way again?

“What about the old nuclear strategy concept of escalation dominance,” I asked, “where you hit the guy the first time so hard, where he loses some things he really values, and then you tell him if he responds, he will lose everything else he values?”

“We could do that,” Shali suggested. “Let me talk to the boys down in Tampa.” It was clear that he was going to do that even without my input. Shali had not liked the choices CENTCOM gave him any more than we did.

The Small Group examined what we were now dubbing the Eisenhower Option and others too. One option was attacking Iranian-sponsored terrorism camps in Lebanon. Another was a Presidential Envoy to Europe and Japan to try again to convince our allies to engage in an economic boycott, but this time promising a U.S. military response on Iran if they did not join us in economic action. There was also an intelligence operation option. When the Small Group was presented with the intelligence option, Leon Feurth said, “Well, we ought to do that anyway just for the hell of it.”

The intelligence operation had intrinsic merit, as Feurth had noted, but if combined with a stark private-channel threat to the Iranians, it would give that message greater credibility: We have just demonstrated what we can do to hurt you. If your agents continue to engage in terrorism against us, we will hurt you in ways that will severely undermine your regime. Such a one-two punch would be escalation dominance. If it failed to deter Iran, then we could turn to CENTCOM's new plans. Unfortunately, it would take months to put CIA assets in place and to choreograph a more or less simultaneous series of intelligence actions around the world.

S
OMETHING HAPPENED DURING OUR DEBATES
about how to respond to Khobar that almost made that debate a foregone decision for all-out war with Iran. On a hot summer night just three weeks after the bombing of Khobar Towers, the Coast Guard and the Air Force were conducting a joint nighttime search-and-rescue exercise off Long Island, using cutters and aircraft. At 8:31 many in the exercise saw a huge fireball in the sky east of the island, at about fifteen thousand feet. It was TWA 800, a 747 from Kennedy Airport on its way to Paris. There were 230 people on board.

Shortly after 9:00 p.m., the CSG met via secure video conference connecting the Situation Room with operations centers at FAA, FBI, Coast Guard, State, CIA, and the Pentagon. Racing in from Virginia, I dreaded what I thought was about to happen. The Eisenhower Option, invading Iran.

The description provided by the Coast Guard was graphic. If there had been anyone alive, the fact that there was a rescue operation under way even before the explosion took place would have meant that the victims might have been saved. But no one was alive. Scores of naked bodies that had been floating on the water were now piling up on the cutters and the dock at the little Coast Guard boat station at nearby Moriches. Their clothes had been blown off by the force of the explosion and their rapid flight through the air. Debris was also everywhere.

The FAA was at a total loss for an explanation. The flight path and the cockpit communications were normal, the aircraft had climbed to 17,000 feet, then there was no aircraft. “A lot like Pan Am 103,” Irish Flynn suggested, “but too early to tell.”

FBI had mobilized in a big way. John O'Neill reported that hundreds of FBI agents from New York City were en route to Kennedy Airport and to Long Island to establish a crime scene and begin interviewing witnesses. Jim Kallstrom, the head of FBI New York, had ordered a mobile command post to roll out to the Moriches Coast Guard station so that FBI could take charge of the operation.

“John, I admire that response,” Irish Flynn began, “but somebody has to point out that the National Transportation Safety Board is in charge of an airline incident.”

“Not if it's a criminal act, they aren't,” O'Neill shot back. “Besides, what assets does the NTSB have anyway?”

We agreed it would be a parallel investigation, until we knew what happened. We all thought we knew what had happened and it would end up being an FBI problem.

Yet in the days that followed, no intelligence surfaced that helped advance the investigation. Many witnesses described things that sounded like a surface-to-air missile just before the explosion. TWA, having learned from Pan Am's mistakes in the Lockerbie crash, had a plan for dealing with the victims' families. They flew them to Kennedy Airport and put them up in an airport hotel where they could be briefed. Initially, there was nothing to brief them on. Then, during dinner, a Long Island coroner showed up with pictures of bodies for them to identify. The outraged and distraught families were featured prominently on the evening news. Bill Clinton was watching.

He called us into the Oval Office. “I want to go up there tomorrow, to see those families.”

That did not seem like the best idea I had ever heard. The families were looking to lynch someone. If the president of TWA was unavailable, they might settle for the President of the United States.

I suggested there might be a problem with meeting the families in their current mood. “In addition, you are going to Atlanta tomorrow to the Olympics.” That thought frightened me too.

“Get a French interpreter too. Many of the families are from France,” the President continued as though I had never objected. “I'll go on to Atlanta from Kennedy.” As we were leaving the Oval Office, he had one more thought. “And I want to announce new airline security measures while I'm at Kennedy. So develop some.”

We had been working with Evelyn Lieberman, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the White House, and Kitty Higgins, the Cabinet Secretary, on the idea of a Commission on Aviation Safety and Security. A low-cost airline, ValuJet, had crashed into the Everglades earlier in the year because of hazardous cargo that should not have been on board and had exploded. Almost two hundred people had died. The airline industry needed something to restore confidence in air travel, as industry leaders had been telling Lieberman. From my perspective, a commission would highlight all the shortcomings in airport security that Irish Flynn and I had been discussing. Now, however, the President wanted some new security measures announced immediately. I called Flynn, “Tell your lawyers they're not going home tonight.”

In the morning, I flew with the President and First Lady to Kennedy International and briefed them aboard Air Force One on the announcements he would make. From now on, no one would be allowed on board an aircraft without a government-issued photo ID that matched the name on the ticket. Random passenger and cargo searches would be increased. Cars would temporarily not be permitted to park near terminal buildings. Curbside check-in would be temporarily discontinued. Vice President Gore would head a new Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, which would include family members of victims from flights that had crashed. The commission would recommend permanent changes to enhance security and safety.

Upon arriving at the airport hotel, we went into a ballroom where the families were waiting. There were a lot of them. The President spoke from a small podium, pausing for consecutive translation into French. When he had finished, Mrs. Clinton left to meet with Red Cross and other rescue workers who were gathered nearby. The President, to my chagrin and to the horror of the Secret Service, stepped into the crowd. He began to gather them in small family groups, praying with them, hugging them, taking pictures with them, looking at the pictures of their now dead loved ones, and listening intently. I thought he was about to cry. I knew I was, so I slipped out of the ballroom. I opened a door into the next room, which had been set up as a chapel. Alone in the room, on her knees, Mrs. Clinton was praying. I stepped outside. There a cluster of television cameras and reporters waited to interview the irate families. They emerged slowly in small groups, after having had their time with the President. “Did you tell the President how angry you are about the way you've been treated?” one reporter yelled. “The President was so good to come to us,” a woman who might have been a grieving mother replied. “He's so kind.”

It went on for a long time. When it was over, the President stood at a podium in front of Air Force One and made the new security announcements. He then left for the Olympics. His statement also made clear that we did not yet know if the crash had been a terrorist act. I knew he thought it was a terrorist act and he was bracing himself for what he would have to do in response. After the blue and white 747 took off for Georgia I was left alone on the tarmac. An FBI agent drove me to La Guardia to catch the shuttle back to Washington. A long line snaked out of the Marine Air Terminal. The guy in front of me explained, “New security stuff. You have to have a photo ID.”

A few weeks later I returned to La Guardia with John O'Neill. He had an FBI helicopter waiting next to the shuttle's jetway. O'Neill was lobbying me to get the FBI some money to pay for the enormous operation they were undertaking to recover the wreckage and to reconstruct it. In a giant hanger in Bethpage, Long Island, where NASA had originally built part of the Apollo moon mission, the 747 was being rebuilt. Rebuilding a 747 that was in thousands of pieces looked like it might be as hard as the moon mission. On the hop out to Bethpage, O'Neill told me that the eyewitness interviews were pointing to a missile attack, a Stinger.

I tried to dissuade him from the Stinger theory. “It was at 15,000 feet. No Stinger or any other missile like it can go that high. The distance and angle are too far from the beach, and even from a boat right under the flight path, you can't get that high.” John wanted proof from the Pentagon. I agreed to get it.

At Bethpage, O'Neill urged me to wander around, talk with the technicians, and visit the lab that the Bureau had created on site. It was a strange, quiet place. Airline seats were being placed around the floor. A window was propped up nearby. One room was filled with luggage. There was a giant tail section.

I stopped to ask one technician what he was doing. “Looking to see the pitting and the tear,” he explained. “See, a bomb causes a certain type of pitting on the metal nearby, little bumps. And a bomb causes sharp tear lines where the metal separates.”

“So this is from near where the bomb exploded?” I asked. “Where on the plane was it?”

“The explosion was just forward of the middle, below the floor of the passenger compartment, below row 23. But it wasn't a bomb,” he added. “See the pitting pattern and the tear. It was a slow, gaseous eruption, from inside.”

“What's below row 23?” I asked, slowly sensing that this was not what I had thought it was.

“The center line fuel tank. It was only half full, might have heated up on the runway and caused a gas cloud inside. Then if a spark, a short circuit…” He indicated an explosion with his hands.

“Yeah, but wait a minute,” I said. “How do you get a spark inside a fuel tank?”

“These old 747s have an electrical pump inside the center line fuel tank…fuel eats away the insulation. If a spark…” His hands did an explosion again.