Mission Compromised (55 page)

Harrod was on the verge of losing it. “Get hold of yourself, Dr. Harrod. I don't know who else you have in the room there with you, but you must contact the team in Incirlik that launched your UAV. The aircraft has to be stopped before it—” Komulakov paused a beat. “Before it kills Iraqi civilians and makes a bad situation even worse.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

Komulakov considered how much he should reveal about what he knew of U.S. military command and control capabilities—information he had gleaned from the two highest-placed spies the KGB had ever recruited in the U.S. government. The Russian decided that he had to risk everything to save Kamil from humiliation or worse at the hands of Saddam.

“Listen to me, Simon. Press the phone tightly to your ear so that others there in the room with you cannot hear me talking and just reply ‘yes' or ‘no' to what I'm about to tell you. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Harrod replied, almost meekly.

“Is Lieutenant General Tatum, the operations chief of your Joint Staff there in the room with you?”

“Yes.”

'Is anyone else in there besides the two of you?”

“No.”

“Is this phone call being recorded?”

“No… I don't think so.”

“Good. Write this down. Tell General Tatum to call your White House Communications Agency and have them immediately re-route your communications to Incirlik from your satellite system to your fiber optic emergency backup link at Sigonella, Sicily, and from there to the NATO hub switch at Ankara for a direct long-line connection to the 331st Expeditionary Air Group Headquarters Air Operations Center at Incirlik. Make sure you tell him to tell WHCA that he has FLASH traffic, presidential priority one. They will recognize it simply as ‘PRI-1.' Did you get all that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. As soon as he gets through, and it shouldn't take long, have him tell General Harris that the UAV has to be destroyed before it gets to a populated area. If that's not possible, tell him to divert it out over the Persian Gulf. Do you understand all that?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Do it. And then call me back so we can work out the damage control on all this. All right?”

“Yes.”

Komulakov hung up.

Harrod set the phone in its cradle and repeated the instructions he had just received from the Russian general to the incredulous three-star sitting before him.

General Tatum's first response was, “Who was
that?”

Harrod had now recovered sufficiently to assert himself “That's not important. What matters right now is whether you can follow those instructions and get General Harris at the 331st Expeditionary Air Group!”

“Of course I can, Dr. Harrod. That's the communications protocol we'd use to notify our NATO allies in the event of a nuclear attack on the United States. But who were you talking to that knows
that?”

“General, I don't have time for Twenty Questions! What I can tell you is that if you don't find a way to get me through to General James Harris in Incirlik, thousands of innocent civilians are likely to die a terrible death in the next few minutes, and the United States of America will be blamed.”

General Tatum sat down in the chair he had been occupying at the Situation Room's conference table and pulled out a drawer concealed in the side of the table. He picked up the handset of the red phone inside. There was no key-pad or dial on the face of the phone so the General said nothing until a crisp military voice spoke

“This is Lieutenant General Tatum, Joint Staff, and this is a PRI-1 presidential call. I want the following FLASH routing.…” The general relayed the instructions as Harrod had given them, and just seconds later he said to the voice on the other end of the line, “Jim, this is Harry Tatum calling from the White House Situation Room. I have the National Security Advisor for you.” Tatum handed the telephone to Harrod.

“Harris, this is Simon Harrod, National Security Advisor to the President.”

“Yes, Dr. Harrod, this is Brigadier General James Harris, Air Force. What's happening? I was told this is a presidential PRI-1 call.”

“General, the UN's International Sanctions Enforcement operation in Iraq seems to have gone seriously awry. The ISET on the ground at Tikrit
has apparently been overrun. And there is great concern here that the Global Hawk due to strike the target in the next few minutes may go off course and kill innocent civilians. It has to be destroyed or vectored out over the Persian Gulf where it won't jeopardize innocent lives and cause a major diplomatic debacle. Can you contact those who launched it and give them those instructions?”

“Wait one.”

Harrod could hear the Air Force general shout to someone, “Get Sergeant Major Gabbard on our internal UHF security circuit ASAP.”

General Harris spoke to Harrod again. “We're trying to contact them, Dr. Harrod, but I have to tell you that the UAV was re-programmed by Lieutenant Colonel Newman from his airborne command post in the MD-80 just before they went down.”

“Re-programmed? Went down? Who went down? Where?”

“Lieutenant Colonel Newman's MD-80 command aircraft has gone down over Iraq. We have also lost at least one F-16. Iraqi infantry has apparently overrun the ISET at Tikrit. The QRF is on the move into Iraq and should be fording the upper Tigris south of Faysh Khabur in the next few hours. Iraq's entire Air Defense system is fully alerted, so we can't put any SAR birds over either of the downed aircraft or the ISET until I can launch more F-16s with some AGM-88 HARMs aboard to deal with the SAM threat.”

Harrod was barely listening. He had no idea what an AGM-88 was or did, and he couldn't care less. He only knew that his masterful plan to make his president look good in the eyes of the international community was going down in flames—just as Newman's plane apparently had done.

Now Harrod could hear the Air Force general talking to someone else. “…I understand Sergeant Major, thank you very much. Out here. Hello, Dr. Harrod?” the General said.

“Yes,” Harrod replied weakly.

“Sergeant Major Gabbard tells me that they will try to divert or destroy the UAV, but they do not believe it can be done in the time remaining. The Global Hawk is due on the target in less than thirty seconds.”

Harrod hung up the phone without saying another word. He stared at the wall. Then, remembering the Army lieutenant general standing on the other side of the table, he said, “The UN Sanctions mission has been terminated. You might as well go back to the Pentagon. I have to go brief the President.”

Later, just before he was called to testify before a closed session of the Senate Armed Services Committee about the U.S. military role in the UN operation, General Tatum was instructed by Senator James Waggoner to “forget about the meeting with Harrod on March 6 in the Situation Room.” The Senate committee would not ask about the meeting, so the general wouldn't need to testify about it. But he would never forget about it either.

Amn Al-Khass Operations Center

________________________________________

Hangar 3, Tikrit Air Base
Tikrit, Iraq
Monday, 6 March 1995
1501 Hours, Local

 

Dotensk was standing next to Kamil at the west end of hangar 3. Kamil was congratulating the commander of the Amn Al-Khass unit that had finally overrun the UN assassination team when the whine of an Allison Rolls Royce AE3007H turbofan jet engine passing almost directly overhead made them all instinctively duck. Once they realized that they were not about to die, they raced around the north end of the hangar and looked off toward the Tigris, in the direction the craft had flown.

In the river valley, a kilometer east of the hangar, they could see a huge, black, V-tail aircraft with extremely long, skinny wings, an engine mounted high and aft, and a whale-like nose, descending directly toward Saddam's summer palace. And on the highway headed south toward the same palace was the Iraqi president's twelve-car motorcade, returning from the bunker at the abandoned Al Sahra Air Base.

The Ukrainian arms merchant and his client watched in horror as the strange-looking aircraft passed just above and directly in front of the lead Mercedes in the motorcade and slammed into the west wall of the largest building in the palace complex—Saddam's personal residence. There was an enormous explosion that sent a huge fireball high into the sky. By the time the sound and concussion reached Kamil and Dotensk, flaming fuel and debris were falling on the vehicles in the motorcade. The lead Mercedes was on its side, tossed over by the explosion and totally engulfed in fire. The next three vehicles in line were also aflame, and the occupants could be seen jumping from the cars and running for the ditches on both sides of the roadway. And then, as everyone at the hangar watched, eight of the dark-windowed, silver sedans pulled around the four wrecked and disabled vehicles and sped south on the highway toward Baghdad.

Dotensk watched as Kamil raced into the hangar to the communications center and screamed at the radio operator, one of the few not to rush out of the hangar when the Global Hawk swooshed overhead. “Get me the President's security detail, now!”

The operator consulted a chart on the table in front of him, reached up to change the frequency on one of the radios before him, and handed Kamil the handset. Over the speaker atop the radio, the Amn Al-Khass commander could hear members of the security detail talking hurriedly to one another. He keyed the handset.

“Break, break… this is Commander Hussein Kamil! I want to talk
to the senior Amn Al-Khass officer with the presidential motorcade. All others stay off this net.”

After a moment of silence, a voice came over the speaker, “This is Major Khidan al Tikriti, over.”

“Major, is the President all right?”

“Yes, sir. He and his special guests are unharmed. We were the last two vehicles in the motorcade.”

“How about Qusay?” the Amn Al-Khass commander asked, more than half hoping his rival for Saddam's affections had been in the lead vehicle. Kamil knew that Qusay would try to blame him for the assassination attempt.

“He is here with me. We are now the lead vehicle. The President has ordered that we return to Baghdad. Our special guests want to go to the airport and fly out immediately. I was making those arrangements when your radio call came in.”

Kamil paused, unable to think of a way to salvage his standing with Saddam. “Allah be praised. I shall proceed to Baghdad as soon as I have completed the investigation here.”

Dotensk had walked back into the hangar and was now standing beside the dejected Kamil as he handed the radio handset back to the radio operator. The two men now walked off to the corner of the hangar out of earshot of the others.

“Now, Mr. Dotensk,” said Kamil in a strangely calm voice, “the only thing that will keep me alive are those three nuclear artillery warheads you delivered. At this moment, I am the only person alive who knows where they are hidden. But that will only last for a short time. You must now find a way for me to escape to the West. Do you understand?”

What Dotensk also understood was that for Kamil to be the “only person alive” who knew where the three nuclear warheads were hidden had to
mean that
he
had killed the subordinate officers who had helped hide them. He also understood that the elaborate plan he and Komulakov had concocted to make millions more selling weaponry was now in ruin. And finally, he understood that his own life was in greater jeopardy than ever if Kamil decided to offer up a “Ukrainian spy” as the reason for the assassination attempt on the Iraqi president, his son, and their prized guest, Osama bin Laden. But all Dotensk said was, “Of course, I shall start working on your escape immediately.”

“Good,” said Kamil. He started to walk away, then turned and asked, “By the way, you are sure that those warheads will work?”

In fact, Dotensk had no idea whether the warheads would still perform as advertised. He had gone to some lengths to get the PAL auto-arming keys for the three warheads, but he also knew that these old weapons were notoriously unreliable. One Soviet officer had told him that only one in ten would actually detonate properly with its full yield.

“Certainly,” he told Kamil.

Situation Room

________________________________________

The White House
Washington, D.C.
Monday, 6 March 1995
0915 Hours, Local

 

The National Security Advisor came bustling, breathlessly, into the White House Situation Room and without so much as a nod to the watch officers, entered the conference room and closed the door. After leaving General Tatum an hour before, Harrod had gone to his own office and awakened the Commander-in-Chief with a phone call, convincing him of the urgency of the situation.

Now, having briefed the President on the catastrophe in Iraq, Harrod was back with a plan. Alone in the conference room, he sat down at the
table, removed an EncryptionLok-3 from his pocket, attached it to the telephone cord on the same phone over which he had received the bad news from General Harris in Incirlik, and told the signal operator to get General Komulakov on the line.

When the Russian general took the call in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of the UN headquarters building, Harrod told him to engage his EncryptionLok-3. “Here's what we're going to do. There has been no press reporting on this incident yet. We think it will be several more hours before anyone in Baghdad or Turkey says anything. I want you to round up the Iraqi ambassador to the UN so that I can meet with him privately—preferably in your office. Tell him that an unmanned American reconnaissance vehicle doing surveillance for the UN Special Commission on Weapons of Mass Destruction went off course and crashed, and we deeply regret any damage or loss of life. Second, tell him that a USAF F-16 has crashed in the no-fly zone south of Mosul and that I'm coming to New York to negotiate for the return of the pilot. Don't tell him that we're already pretty sure he's dead. Third, tell him that a UN humanitarian flight transiting Iraq is missing and overdue. Tell him it was an Aer Lingus MD-80 chartered by the UN, and you want his help locating the aircraft if it's down. Finally, tell him that as a sign of good faith, the President is sending me up there to meet with him to do a rug dance.”