The Pentagon: A History (55 page)

If we’re lucky the floods will be shallow

The Pentagon was bustling on the evening of Tuesday, August 7, 1990. It was C-Day—commencement day—the start of Operation Desert Shield, what would become the largest U.S. military deployment since the Vietnam War. The first elements of the 82nd Airborne’s ready brigade were aboard C-141s, just a few hours from landing at Dhahran Air Base in Saudi Arabia. Two squadrons of F-15 Eagles had flown from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia—refueling in the air from flying tankers—and the first fighters were now starting combat air patrols over northern Saudi Arabia. At U.S. bases around the world, a vast armada was being mobilized.

Five days earlier, the Iraqi Army had rolled over the Kuwaiti border and captured the tiny oil-rich nation. Late on August 6, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney telephoned General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, from Saudi Arabia to report that King Fahd had accepted an offer of American troops to defend his kingdom against a feared further incursion by Iraqi forces.

The Army and Air Force operations centers in the Pentagon basement were packed; the temperature inside the Army facility—the air-conditioning inadequate as always—was approaching ninety degrees. It was a nerve-racking time. The fledgling American force was at its most vulnerable, arriving in Saudi Arabia with little combat power. Lead elements of two Iraqi Republican Guard divisions were staged within a mile of the Saudi border. If Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein chose to seize the vast Saudi oil fields twenty-five miles to the south—which the CIA was predicting—the lightly armed paratroopers of the 82nd would be little more than “speed bumps,” as Powell put it. “We were going into a combat zone with a very small force initially, with no idea whether the Iraqi army would continue south or not,” he recalled.

The coffee was flowing freely in all the operations centers, as usual during a crisis. In a small, secure room in the Joint Chiefs’ area, somebody filled a cup and stuck the nearly empty pot back on the coffeemaker burner. At 7:30
P.M.,
the untended coffeepot started smoking profusely. The smoke was sucked into the ventilation system and began pouring out of ducts into pressurized command-center rooms. No one knew where the smoke was coming from. Arlington County firefighters rushed to the Pentagon for a two-alarm fire and hooked up a fire truck to a standpipe near the River entrance. As soon as they pressurized the system, a four-foot section of a deteriorated ten-inch water pipe blew out on the south side of the building. A torrent of muddy water began pouring into the Pentagon basement.

Steve Carter, the building engineer on watch that night, raced out of the Building Operations Center. The fire was now the least of the worries. Water was cascading down the hallways and spraying violently out of a crawlspace between corridors 9 and 10. Carter poked his head inside, trying fruitlessly to find the source of the leak, accomplishing little but getting soaked.

The pipe had burst in a steam tunnel that connected the Pentagon to the heating and refrigeration plant a thousand feet southeast of the building. The rupture was just outside the Pentagon, but close enough that it was blowing a tremendous volume of water and thick mud through the tunnel into the basement. Hundreds of thousands of gallons of water—eventually millions of gallons—poured into the building.

Inside the Air Force operations center—a good five hundred feet away from the rupture—the water was rising: two inches, four, eight, and counting. Harried Air Force officers waded out in the hallways, pleading for someone to make the water stop. “They were rather excited,” Carter recalled. “‘This was a most inconvenient time,’ was how it was explained to me.”

Carter was most concerned by the rising water in a high-voltage electrical vault located in the building near the rupture. If the water reached the current-bearing bus bars, there was imminent danger of electrocution. Electricians Bobby McCloud and Reimund Schuster, called from their homes to assist with the crisis, measured the distance of the rising water to the bottom of the bus bars. The deluge had been pouring into the building nonstop for more than an hour now and was over a foot high, within a few inches of the bus bars. They had the power plant on standby, ready to shut down the electrical feed to the vault. That would mean killing power to half the building right as U.S. forces were moving into Saudi Arabia.

Schuster found a manhole outside the building leading to a shutoff valve. The water rushing through the pipe was making an awful roar, like a missile firing, and he feared it would blow up in his face if he shut off the valve. “I finally decided, ‘Ah, the hell with it,’” Schuster recalled. He shut the valve and the water finally stopped rising, just in time. “It probably only needed another two or three inches and we would have had to kill the power,” McCloud later said.

The smoky fire was long since contained, extinguished in twenty-five minutes. The flood was another matter. The basement was a disaster zone. A vast area—350,000 square feet—was under up to a foot and a half of water, some three million gallons. Once it was pumped out, it took several days to shovel out the deposit of thick mud left behind. The water inside the Air Force operations center had reached fourteen inches. The heating and refrigeration plant, lying at the other end of the steam tunnel on lower ground than the Pentagon, was in even worse shape; its basement under seven feet of water, and it was knocked out of service for two days. All told, the flood had done about $1 million in damage.

Mechanical engineers were dispatched to find the cause of the flood. It was no great mystery. The problem, they soon reported, was the old, deteriorated pipes. It could happen again anytime the system was pressurized. “If we’re lucky,” said John Irby, one of the building supervisors, “the floods will be shallow.”

The horror board

Doc Cooke would later say he knew it was time to renovate the Pentagon when he saw fungus on the wall taking the shape of Elvis. By the time of the flooding fiasco during Desert Shield in August 1990, the sixty-nine-year-old Cooke had been sounding the alarm about the building for years. Just in March, he had described the Pentagon to a House subcommittee as “a chamber of horrors.” As proof, he lugged along what had become known as “the horror board.” It was a two-by-three-foot panel upon which Steve Carter had mounted evidence of the Pentagon’s decay: chunks of loose wire, a rusted pipe with a pencil shoved through a soft spot, loose asbestos. The horror board was an effective prop, much better than any charts or figures.

David O. Cooke had many titles—presently it was Director of Administration and Management for the Secretary of Defense—but he was known universally as the “Mayor of the Pentagon.” Doc—the nickname came from his initials—was the keeper of the keys, the man who dispensed the prime offices and kept everything working. Bald and cherub-faced, with the twinkling eyes of a man privy to secrets, Cooke knew every inch of the Pentagon’s corridors.

Colin Powell had learned early on of the power Cooke wielded. When he was assigned to the Pentagon in 1984 as an aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Powell took a colleague down to the parking lot one day to show him an old Japanese army rifle he had in the trunk of his car. From the fourth floor, an Air Force secretary spotted two men in the parking lot handling a rifle and called Pentagon police. A Defense Protective Services officer quickly arrived on the scene to take Powell into custody.

Powell tried to explain. “Look, I’m Major General Powell,” he said. “I’m Secretary Weinberger’s military assistant.”

“Please come with me sir,” the officer insisted. Powell was in the Pentagon basement waiting to be processed for arrest when Cooke got wind of what was happening and ordered him released. Cooke, as Powell later wrote, was “the chief fixer” for the Pentagon: “Want a private bathroom worthy of your rank as assistant secretary? Doc can install it. Can’t get a parking place in the prestigious River Entrance lot? Try Doc. Need to spring a major general who is about to get busted? Doc’s your man. His power was formidable, this Godfather of the Pentagon.”

Defense secretaries and their staffs came and went like summer help, but Cooke stayed on as the building’s chief administrator and trusted confidante to the powerful. Cheney was his twelfth secretary, and he had sworn in every one since Melvin Laird in 1969. Each secretary learned to depend on him. When they asked for something inappropriate, Cooke would turn them down, but he usually did it so gently they did not even realize they had been rejected.

Generations of Pentagon employees viewed Doc as a father figure, and he was always looking out for them. Steve Carter would often see him ambling around the hallways, talking to one and all, so approachable that many junior workers called him Doc. It was one reason why, unlike many powerful Defense officials, Cooke knew the situation on the ground, or in this case, the Pentagon basement.

The Pentagon did not meet any fire, safety, or health codes, nor had it for decades. There were no sprinklers, except in some computer rooms. The fire alarms were outdated and inadequate; it often took twenty minutes to locate a sounding alarm. There were no dampers in air, pipe, and cable shafts to stop the flow of smoke through the building, meaning corridors would draw smoke and turn into deathtraps in a fire.

The building had not met National Electrical Code standards since 1953. Electrical panel boards were overloaded and the building suffered twenty to thirty power outages a day, almost every time somebody plugged in a laser printer. Offices were poorly lit and gloomy. Disabled employees were relegated to using the building’s twelve freight elevators, which had doors that closed from ceiling to floor, causing more than forty head injuries in one three-year period.

The asbestos used to save steel during World II threatened the health of Pentagon employees; research had established that airborne asbestos was a dangerous carcinogen. Constant leaks in the plumbing and roof had deteriorated the asbestos-laden ceiling plaster. Tests showed harmful fibers were being released into the air from ceilings, pipe insulation, and asbestos-lined air ducts throughout the building. Thousands of lighting fixtures contained highly toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), windows had lead paint, and there was mercury in the ground.

Throughout the building, a sense of decay prevailed. The Pentagon was home to an estimated two million cockroaches, and the ones in the basement were said to have reached fearsome proportions, big enough to “put saddles on.” Rats were enjoying a population boom, with an average of four a week caught in the food-service areas. The rats had no respect for rank, showing up in E-Ring offices as well as inner corridors with equal alacrity.

The General Services Administration had never replaced the boilers, though they were of a design dating back to the construction of the Panama Canal; only one of the five was still operating and the Pentagon was renting temporary boilers parked on flatbed trucks at a cost of $1.2 million a year.

With GSA showing little interest in renovating the Pentagon, Cooke decided in 1987 that the Defense Department should wrest control of the building from the agency. It was a risk, because the GSA made a convenient scapegoat. If the Defense Department took over, “you could no longer point a finger and say GSA is responsible,” recalled Paul Haselbush, a Cooke deputy. But Cooke was convinced that the deteriorating conditions in the building left him no choice, and he went about staging a coup. The GSA was only too happy to rid itself of responsibility for the Pentagon and delegated day-to-day maintenance to the Defense Department. But GSA retained ownership, collecting hundreds of millions of dollars in rent from the Defense Department each year, but balking at renovation.

That had to change, and the basement flood was proof. An investigation by the General Accounting Office would soon report that among the 1,600 federally owned buildings nationwide, the Pentagon represented one of the two worst cases of neglect. The Pentagon had been left “seriously deteriorated and functionally obsolete” because of the GSA’s repeated failures to repair and upgrade the building, the report concluded.

Cooke requested that Congress give the Defense Department ownership of the Pentagon in 1989 and was narrowly turned down, out of fear that every federal agency would then want a divorce from GSA. But in November 1990, largely based on the authority and respect Cooke had earned in all corners of Washington over the years, Congress passed legislation transferring ownership of the Pentagon from the GSA to the Department of Defense. The legislation allowed the Defense Department to deposit money that would have been paid in rent to the GSA into a fund that would not only operate and maintain the Pentagon but also pay for the renovation. Cooke moved forward on a ten-year, $1 billion renovation plan.

The timing turned out to be exceedingly poor. As the plans were finalized, the Cold War suddenly and inconveniently ended, and with it much of the
raison d’être
for an enormous American military establishment. The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, just two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the threat that the Warsaw Pact posed to Western Europe evaporated. Iraq had been forcibly ejected from Kuwait in February 1991, and the Gulf War was now seen as an aberration, perhaps the last American conventional war. A painful drawdown of the military began, with dozens of bases to close and the size of the force to shrink 25 percent by 1995. The question was soon being asked in Congress and the press: Why was the Defense Department spending $1 billion to renovate the Pentagon at a time the fighting forces were being gutted? Politically, it did not look good, members of Congress told Cooke. The Pentagon, military affairs columnist David Hackworth wrote, “shouldn’t be rebuilt. It should be blown up.”