I clarified that Cassidy had been kept up to date throughout the preceding months and that he had never presented any objection (or support) during that time. He agreed that was the case.
“Well, Colonel,” I told him, “we've gone well beyond the time for discussion. You have not participated in that discussion for months. Why would anything be different now?”
Still, he persisted that deadlines were arbitrary and all parties involved should negotiate in good faith.
“Colonel,” I reminded him, “the timeline for the transition was
given
to us, not created
by
us. We are proceeding with the transition.”
New Year's Day 1993, the deadline to begin joint operations, fell at the start of a long weekend. The situation with the Air Force was still vague, although the Army and the Navy were implementing all of the administrative and technical procedures we had previously agreed on. The Air Force, however, continued to back and fill, on the one hand saying they wanted to cooperate but had no authority to go joint until directed to do so by their headquarters, and, on the other hand, protesting they did not agree with various aspects of the new organization's design.
Even more troubling, throughout January and much of February, Lieutenant Colonel Strang issued orders to the Air Force contingent contradictory to mine. Finally, I told Strang's operations officer that the situation was unacceptable. There was no change. Then I met with Lieutenant Colonel Strang and informed him in a direct manner, “There can only be one commander at this station.”
He chose not to respond openly. But his actions spoke for themselves.
The Kunia station was a Special Compartmented Intelligence Facility (SCIF) that held some of our country's most highly classified secrets. Everyone inside the facility had to have a high security clearance badge or be escorted. All persons leaving the building had to present their briefcase, knapsack, or gym bag to the Military Police for inspection. This followed the old security adage, “In God we trust. All others we verify.” The security regulation had been enforced in Kunia and other similar installations for decades. We all took it for granted and kept the amount of gear we toted in and out of the tunnel to a minimum in order to speed up the line at the MP gate.
Then one day in February, while the Air Force stalling tactics were still dragging on, Lieutenant Colonel Strang refused to have his briefcase opened for inspection at the MP checkpoint on leaving the facility. I received word from a major on the Operations staff that Strang had been very rude and arrogant to the junior NCO on duty at the gate and had basically bullied his way through.
Now the situation had reached a serious new level. None of us could pick which security regulations we chose to obey on a particular day. All of us submitted to inspection on leaving the facility. I was always happy to do so because it set an example to the younger soldiers just beginning their Army careers:
If the colonel can line up to have her briefcase inspected, I can stand in line at the end of the shift and open my gym bag for the MPs.
But Strang was defying this practice.
I called him early the next morning. “I understand you left the building without opening your briefcase. Why?”
Strang was sullen, but not abrasive. “I'm a separate commander, Colonel. I don't have to follow that procedure.”
This was a test of wills. I suddenly realized that he had mistaken the patience I had employed since New Year's for weakness. I intended to correct that misunderstanding.
“Of course you do, Colonel,” I said in a flat, cool tone. “You have a badge that permits your entrance to this facility, and that badge is contingent on your complying with security regulations. From now on, you will either follow standard security procedures and have your briefcase inspected, or you will turn in your badge.”
I wasn't sure if he believed that I intended to follow through on this. Its implications were serious: Without a security badge, he could not enter the building. What had begun as possibly local bureaucratic infighting at the level of colonels might quickly escalate to much higher echelons.
That afternoon, I carefully reviewed all the issues surrounding the transition process to make sure that this current crisis was not just the explosive conclusion of a simmering personality clash. Clearly it was not—because Captain Doherty had been just as stymied and frustrated by Strang's actions as I had been. The next day, I asked Strang to my office. “Are you prepared to comply with station security regulations concerning inspection of your briefcase?”
“No, ma'am. I can't do that. I'm not going to comply because I'm a separate commander.”
I gave him a deadline of an additional week after which he was to either comply or turn in his badge. A week later he came to my office to tell me his decision. He was not going to comply.
“Please give me your badge,” I said, reaching out for it. “I'll have the MPs walk you out of the facility.” If Strang felt any emotion over this unprecedented incident, his face did not betray it. A rather grim MP staff sergeant appeared in my office doorway to escort this Air Force lieutenant colonel from the building.
Next, my Operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel George Gramer, reported that about a dozen of Strang's Air Force NCOs planned to stage a protest by putting down their own badges and refusing to comply with security regulations.
“Colonel,” I said, considering this latest development, “if they do that, it's very serious.”
I immediately called the Staff Judge Advocate General at Schofield Barracks to explain the situation. “The issue is not ambiguous, Colonel,” he told me. “You are the installation commander. You set and enforce the security rules. Your responsibility is to establish good order and discipline.”
This was obvious. Discipline was the glue that bound all the military to our national civilian leadership. Without order and discipline, we would be a banana republic.
I attended a previously scheduled meeting in our small auditorium where the Air Force NCOs planned to stage their walk-out. I got straight to the point. “You're sitting in this room with security badges that indicate your willingness to comply with the security rules of this station. You'll have to live up to those rules. But I understand that some of you intend to put down your badges. Do it now if you're going to do it at all.”
I stared at the faces of the men and women seated before me. This was a Showdown at the O.K. Corral. Many of them were senior Air Force NCOs with years of service. About fifteen NCOs rose and walked down to the table to turn in their badges. The MPs collected them and escorted the NCOs from the building.
I had not believed that Lieutenant Colonel Strang would carry the issue this far.
Captain Doherty immediately called the Naval Security Command in Washington. And I telephoned INSCOM commander Major General Chuck Scanlon, who was on Temporary Duty in England, where it was the middle of the night.
He agreed that the situation was serious and said he would immediately confer with his counterpart at the Air Force Intelligence Command, Major General Gary W. O'Shaughnessy.
Meanwhile, I contacted the Staff JAG again, who reconfirmed that my actions had been legal and appropriate.
Within two days, General Scanlon called me. “Okay, Claudia,” he said. “I've worked things out with the Air Force. Give Strang back his badge. He'll comply with security regs. But he will not be back in the tunnel very much.”
That was the outcome of the situation at Kunia. We returned the security badges. When Strang did enter the facility, he usually had an enlisted airman carry his briefcase for him to be inspected by the MPs. The rest of the Air Force contingent complied with the security regulations as they always had. We got on with the business of integrating the command.
But the dust that the “mutiny” had kicked up took a long time to settle. I received a hand-delivered official letter from Major General O'Shaughnessy in which he took me to task over the incident. He was “disappointed” with the events, which had received “such widespread (and negative) publicity.” The general added that “The seniors in the Pentagon and NSA are not used to seeing this type of emotional reaction to a disagreement or even a confrontation.” He was “mystified” by my “overreaction to what most of us deal with daily.” He suggested that “this cloud from Kunia will linger with you” as a sign of the time “when your emotions overshadowed good judgment.” He implied that I had irrevocably damaged my reputation with the NSA, the organization with which I would have to work in one capacity or another as a senior Army strategic intelligence officer.
The general then proceeded to question my management ability and ended with the wish that I would “turn this unfortunate episode into a learning experience.”
It was clear from General O'Shaughnessy's tone that he was engaging in damage control by disguising the Air Force responsibility for the crisis through dismissing my actions as those of an incompetent and emotional woman.
I chose not to let this defensive maneuver go unanswered. In my reply (which I discussed with Major General Scanlon), I provided General O'Shaughnessy detail about the lack of cooperation and active obstruction that Lieutenant Colonel Strang had exhibited throughout the transition process. I also indicated that the Navy and the Army had worked well together in integrating the command, but both Colonel Cassidy and Lieutenant Colonel Strang had resisted this integration in various ways. “My relationship and reputation with NSA remain solid,” I concluded. “It is based on an association of eighteen years of mutual respect.”
Several months later, following a meeting at NSA, an Air Force brigadier general tried to admonish me over the way I had handled the crisis at Kunia. The senior Navy admiral present was Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, Director of NSA. He interrupted the Air Force officer and addressed me. “General Kennedy,” the admiral said, “you did the right thing. When you're in command, you have to act accordingly. You cannot allow others to dispute your authority.”
But even today, I hear occasional reports that Air Force officers are pleased that I was forced to take such drastic action with Strang and his NCOs. “That lets us treat Army people the same way” has become their refrain. This is absurd, a terrible and inappropriate interpretation of the events. Strang had always complied with security procedures until the endgame of the Air Force resistance to the change in operational structure. Then he had chosen to precipitate the crisis.
I am still not sure what lay behind this incident. Very possibly, the local Air Force commanders were giving their headquarters a completely distorted version of the situation. Or the Air Force had used them as pawns in some larger power struggle invisible to people at our level.
But none of that speculation really matters. The lesson I took from the crisis was not to ask questions about hidden agendas, but to only consider external behavior. Lieutenant Colonel Strang chose to act in a manner contrary to good order and discipline. In so doing, he forced me to react. I did so decisively, and the crisis was finally resolved. Contrary to General O'Shaughnessy's opinion, my professional reputation did not suffer.
In August 1995, I was a major general, serving in the Pentagon as Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence. The assignment was both demanding and fulfilling, and left little free time for watching television.
One morning, the phone began to light up and people stopped me in the corridors to ask if I had seen CNN's latest coverage of the Shannon Faulkner story. I had not.
“Last night she held a news conference at the Citadel,” a colleague said. “She's dropping out.”
“You have got to be kidding,” I said, stunned.
“I wish I were,” my acquaintance replied.
Shannon Faulkner was a twenty-year-old South Carolina student who had fought an almost thirty-month legal battle for admission to the Citadel, the venerable state-funded, male-only military academy in Charleston. Her campaign began in March 1993 when she sued the school, charging that its all-male Corps of Cadets was unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause. She had earlier been accepted for admission based on her excellent high school academic transcript, but one on which no reference to gender had appeared. The Citadel rescinded its acceptance when it was revealed she was a woman.
After months of litigation, which reached all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Faulkner was accepted as a day student in January 1994. That summer, the U.S. District Court ordered the Citadel to admit Shannon Faulkner into the Corps of Cadets, which was the heart and soul of the institution's student life. Although officially named the Military College of South Carolina, most of the Citadel's graduates did not enter military careers. And the school, founded in 1842, had a long tradition of offering its graduates access to a lifelong network of influential alumni contacts. The Citadel was a state-funded institution, however, and received considerable indirect financial and personnel support through the armed services' ROTC programs, which provided instructors and educational material. These were factors that heavily influenced Shannon Faulkner's lawsuit.
After the July 1994 court order instructing the Citadel to admit her into the corps, the school appealed. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected this appeal in April 1995. That summer dragged on in tense legal exchanges, during which Faulkner spent much of her time either in hearings, consulting with her attorneys, or trying to avoid the mounting level of acrimony directed toward her. Since 1993, when vandals had defaced her parents' small-town home with giant blood-red letters forming obscene epithets, Faulkner had been subjected to almost continual harassment. Morning rush-hour motorists in Charleston encountered a large transportable commercial sign reading “DIE SHANNON” that had allegedly been rented and wheeled out in the night by a group of Citadel cadets, following the U.S. District Court order that Faulkner be admitted to the corps.
Finally, in August 1995, the Citadel was running out of options to comply with the law. But resistance continued, with a school spokesman arguing that Shannon was too heavy and had an injured knee, and would thus be unable to meet the demanding physical requirements of a cadet life. Once more, the legal maneuvering reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia refused to bar Faulkner's admission as a member of the Corps of Cadets. The next day, she arrived guarded by federal marshals and reported to the campus with other “knobs,” as first-year cadets were called due to their extremely short haircuts.