Steve Laing and Chip Barber had a major problem. By mid-November, Jericho had come up with his first response to the questions put to him via a dead-letter box in Baghdad. His price had been high, but the American government had made the transfer into the Viennese account without a murmur.
If Jericho’s information was accurate—and there was no reason to suspect it was not—then it was extremely useful. He had not answered all the questions, but he had answered some and confirmed others already half-answered.
Principally, he had named quite specifically seventeen locations linked to the production of weapons of mass destruction. Eight of these were locations already suspected by the Allies; of these, he had corrected the locations of two. The other nine were new information, chief among them the exact spot of the buried laboratory in which operated the functioning gas-diffusion centrifuge cascade for the preparation of bomb-grade uranium-235.
The problem was: How to tell the military, without blowing away the fact that Langley and Century had a high-ranking asset who was betraying Baghdad from the inside?
Not that the spymasters distrusted the military. Far from it, they were senior officers for a reason. But in the covert world there is an old and well-tested rule called “need to know.” A man who does not know something cannot let it slip, however inadvertently. If the men in civilian clothes simply produced a list of fresh targets out of nowhere, how many generals, brigadiers, and colonels would work out where it had come from?
In the third week of the month, Barber and Laing had a private meeting in the basement of the Saudi Defense Ministry, with General Buster Glosson, deputy to General Chuck Horner, who commanded the air war in the Gulf Theater.
Though he must have had a first name, no one ever referred to General Glosson as anything other than
“Buster,” and it was he who had planned and continued to plan the eventual comprehensive air attack on Iraq that everyone knew would have to precede an
y ground invasion.
London and Washington had long since concurred in the view that, regardless of Kuwait, Saddam Hussein’s war machine simply had to be destroyed, and that very much included the manufacturing capabilities for gas, germs, and nuclear bombs.
Before Desert Shield had finally destroyed any chance of a successful Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia, the plans for the eventual air war were well under way, under the secret code name of Instant Thunder. The true architect of that air war was Buster Glosson.
By November 16, the United Nations and various diplomatic chancelleries around the world were still scratching around for a “peace plan” to end the crisis without a shot being fired, a bomb dropped, or a rocket launched. The three men in the subterranean room that day all knew that such a call-it-all-off plan was just not going to happen.
Barber was concise and to the point: “As you know, Buster, we and the Brits have been trying to get hard identification of Saddam’s WMD facilities for months now.” The Air Force general nodded warily.
He had a map along the corridor with more pins than a porcupine, and each one was a separate bombing target. What now?
“So we started with the export licenses and traced the exporting countries, then the companies in those countries that had fulfilled the contracts. Then the scientists who fitted out the interiors of these facilities, but many of them were taken to the sites in black-windowed buses, lived on base, and never really knew where they had been.
“Finally, Buster, we checked with the construction people, the ones who actually built most of Saddam’s poison gas palaces. And some of them have come up roses. Real paydirt.”
Barber passed the new list of targets across to the general. Glosson studied them with interest. They were not identified with map grid references, such as a bomb-campaign plotter would need, but the descriptions would be enough to identify them from the air photos already available.
Glosson grunted. He knew some of the listings were already targets; others, with question marks, were now being confirmed; others were new. He raised his eyes.
“This is for real?”
“Absolutely,” said the Englishman. “We are convinced that the construction people are a good source, maybe the best yet, because they are hard-hats who knew what they were doing when they built these places, and they talk freely,, more so than the bureaucrats.”
Glosson rose.
“Okay. You going to have any more for me?”
“We’ll just keep digging up there in Europe, Buster,” said Barber. “We get any more hard-fact targets, we’ll pass them on. They’ve buried a hell of a lot of stuff, you know. Deep under the desert. We’re talking major construction projects.”
“You tell me where they’ve put ’em, and we’ll blow the roof down on them,” said the general.
Later, Glosson took the list to Chuck Horner. The USAF chief was shorter than Glosson, a gloomy-looking, crumpled man with a bloodhound face and all the diplomatic subtlety of a rhino with piles. But he adored his aircrew and ground crew, and they responded in kind.
It was known that he would fight on their behalf against the contractors, the bureaucrats, and the politicians right up to the White House if he thought he had to, and never once moderate his language.
What you saw was what you got.
Visiting the Gulf States of Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, and Dubai, where some of his crews were posted, he avoided the fleshpots of the Sheratons and Hiltons where the good life flowed (literally) in order to chow with the flight crews down at the base and sleep in a cot in the bunkhouse.
Servicemen and women have no appetite for dissembling; they know quickly what they like and what they despise. The USAF pilots would have flown string-and-wire biplanes against Iraq for Chuck Horner.
Horner studied the list from the covert intelligence people and grunted. Two of the sites showed up on the maps as bare desert.