The Apaches did all that was asked. They had still not been noticed when they opened fire. All their crew had night-vision helmets, which look as if they have short binoculars sticking out the front. They give the pilot complete night vision, so that in utter darkness to the naked eye he can see everything as if it were illuminated by a brilliant moon.
First they shattered the electrical generators that powered the radars, then the communications facilities from which their presence could be reported to missile sites farther inland; finally, they blew away the radar dishes.
In less than two minutes they had loosed twenty-seven Hellfire laser-guided missiles, a hundred 70-mm.
rockets, and four thousand rounds of heavy-duty cannon fire. Both radar sites were left smoldering ruins.
The mission opened a huge hole in the air defense system of Iraq, and through this hole poured the remainder of the night’s attack.
Those who saw General Chuck Horner’s air-war plan later suggested it was probably one of the most brilliant ever devised. It contained a surgical, step-by-step precision and enough flexibility to cope with any contingency that required a variation.
Stage one was quite clear in its objectives and led on to the other three stages. It was to destroy all Iraq’s air defense systems and convert the Allies’ air superiority, with which they started, into air supremacy. For the other three stages to succeed within the self-imposed thirty-five-day time limit, Allied aircraft had to have the absolute run of Iraqi air space without hindrance.
In suppressing the air defense of Iraq, the key was radar. In modern warfare, radar is the single most important and most used tool, despite the brilliance of all the others in the armory.
Radar detects incoming warplanes; radar guides your own fighters to intercept; radar guides the antiaircraft missiles; and radar aims the guns.
Destroying the radar makes the enemy blind, like a heavyweight boxer in the ring with no eyes. He may be big and powerful still, he may pack a fearsome punch, but his enemy can move around the sightless Samson, jabbing and slashing at the helpless giant until the foregone conclusion is reached.
With the great hole punched in the forward radar cover of Iraq, the Tornados and Eagles, the F-111
Aardvarks and F-4G Wild Weasels powered through the gap, going for the radar sites farther inland, heading for the missile bases guided by those radars, aiming for the command centers where the Iraqi generals sat, and blowing away the communications posts through which the generals were trying to talk to their outlying units.
From the battleships Wisconsin and Missouri and the cruiser San Jacinto out in the Gulf, fifty-two Tomahawk cruise missiles were launched that night. Guiding themselves by a combination of computerized memory bank and television nose camera, Tomahawks hug the contours of the landscape, swerving on preordained courses to where they have to go. When in the area, they “see” the target, compare it with the one in their memory, identify the exact building, and home in.
The Wild Weasel is a version of the Phantom, but specializing in radar-destruction. It carries HARMs, High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles. When a radar dish lights up or “illuminates,” it emits electromagnetic waves, including infrared. It can’t help it. The HARM’s job is to find those waves with its sensors and go straight to the heart of the radar before exploding.
Perhaps strangest of all the warplanes slipping northward through the sky that night was the F-117A, known as the Stealth fighter. All black, created in such a shape that its multiple angles reflect most of the radar waves directed at it and absorb the rest into its own body, the Stealth fighter refuses to bounce hostile radar waves back to the receiver and thereby betray its existence to the enemy.
Thus invisible, the American F-117As that night simply slid unnoticed through Iraqi radar screens to drop their two-thousand-pound laser-guided bombs precisely onto thirty-four targets associated with the national air defense system. Thirteen of those targets were in and around Baghdad.
When the bombs landed, the Iraqis fired blindly upward but could see nothing and missed. In Arabic, the Stealths were called shabah ; it means “ghost.”
They came from the secret base of Khamis Mushait deep in the south of Saudi Arabia, where they had been transferred from their equally secret home at Tonopah, Nevada. While less fortunate American airmen had to live in tents, Khamis Mushait had been built miles from anywhere but with hardened aircraft shelters and air-conditioned accommodation, which was why the prized Stealths had been put there.
Because they flew so far, theirs were among the longest missions of the war, up to six hours from takeoff to landing, and all under strain. They threaded their way undetected through some of the most intense air defense systems in the world—those of Baghdad—and not one was ever touched, on that or any other night.
When they had done what they came to do, they slipped away again, cruising like stingrays in a calm sea, and went back to Khamis Mushait.
The most dangerous job of the night went to the British Tornados. Their task then, and for the next week until it was discontinued, was “airfield denial,” using their big, heavy JP-233 runway-busting bombs.
Their problem was twofold. The Iraqis had built their military airfields to be absolutely vast. Tallil was four times the size of Heathrow, with sixteen runways and taxi tracks that could be used for takeoff and landing as well. It was simply impossible to destroy it all.
The second problem was one of height and speed. The JP-233s had to be launched from a Tornado in stabilized straight and level flight. Even after bomb launch, the Tornados had no choice but to overfly the target. Even if the radars were knocked out, the gunners weren’t; antiaircraft artillery, known as triple-A, came up at them in rolling waves as they approached, so that one pilot described those missions as
“flying through tubes of molten steel.”
The Americans had abandoned tests on the JP-233 bomb, judging it to be a pilot-killer. They were right.
But the RAF crews pressed on, losing planes and crews until they were called off and given other duties.
The bomb-droppers were not the only planes aloft that night. Behind them and with them flew an extraordinary array of backup services.
Air superiority fighters flew cover on and over the strike bombers. The Iraqi ground controllers’
instructions to their own pilots—the few who managed to take off that night—were jammed by the American Air Force Ravens and the Navy equivalent Prowlers. Iraqi pilots aloft got no verbal instructions and no radar guidance. Most, wisely, went straight back home.
Circling south of the border were sixty tankers: American KC-135s and KC-10s, U.S. Navy KA-6Ds, and British Victors and VC-10s. Their job was to receive the warplanes coming up from Saudi Arabia, refuel them for the mission, then meet them on the way back to give them more fuel to get home. This may sound routine, but actually doing it in pitch darkness was described by one flier as “trying to shove spaghetti up a wildcat’s backside.”
And out over the Gulf, where they had been for five months, the U.S. Navy’s E-2 Hawkeyes and the USAF’s E-3 Sentry AWACS circled around and around, their radars picking up every friendly and every enemy aircraft in the sky, warning, advising, guiding, and watching.
By dawn, Iraq’s radars had mostly been crushed, her missile bases blinded, and her main command centers ruined. It would take four more days and nights to complete the job, but air supremacy was already in sight. Later would come the power-generating stations, telecommunications towers, telephone exchanges, relay stations, aircraft shelters, control towers, and all those known facilities for the production and storage of weapons of mass destruction.
Later still would come the systematic “degradation” to less than fifty percent of its fighting power of the Iraqi Army south and southwest of the Kuwaiti border, a condition on which General Schwarzkopf insisted before he would attack with ground troops.
Two then-unknown factors would later cause changes to the course of the war. One was Ira
q’s decision to launch a barrage of Scud missiles at Israel; the other would be triggered by an act of sheer frustration on the part of Captain Don Walker of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.
Dawn broke on the morning of January 17 over a Baghdad that was very badly shaken.
The ordinary citizens had not slept a wink from threeA.M. on, and when daylight came, some of them ventured out to peer curiously at the rubble of a score of major sites across their city. That they had survived the night seemed to many miraculous, for they were simple folk who did not realize that the twenty smoking mounds of rubble had been carefully selected and hit with such precision that the citizenry had been in no mortal danger.
But the real sense of shock was among the hierarchs. Saddam Hussein had left the Presidential Palace and was lodged in his extraordinary multistory bunker behind and beneath the Rashid Hotel, which was still full of Westerners, mainly from the media.
The bunker had been built years earlier inside a vast crater dug by earth-movers, with mainly Swedish technology. So sophisticated were its security measures that it was in fact a box within a box, and beneath and around the inner box were springs of such strength as to protect the inhabitants from a nuclear bomb, reducing shock waves that would flatten the city above into a minor tremor down below.
Although access was via a hydraulically operated ramp set in waste ground behind the hotel, the main structure was beneath the Rashid, which had deliberately been built on the ground above as a specific repose for Westerners in Baghdad. Any enemy wishing to attempt a deep-penetration bombing of the bunker would have to obliterate the Rashid first.
Try as they might, the sycophants surrounding the Rais were hard put to create a gloss over the night’s disasters. Slowly, the level of the catastrophe penetrated all their minds.
They had all counted on a blanket bombing of the city, which would have left residential areas flattened and thousands of innocent civilians dead. This carnage would then be shown to the media, who would film it all and show it to the sickened audiences back home. Thus would begin the global wave of revulsion against President Bush and the United States, culminating in an emergency session of the UN
Security Council and the veto of China and Russia against further massacre.
By midday, it was plain that the Sons of Dogs from across the Atlantic were not obliging. So far as the Iraqi generals were aware, the bombs fell approximately where they had been aimed, but that was all.
With every major military installation in Baghdad deliberately sited in densely populated housing areas, it should have been impossible for massive civilian casualties to be avoided. Yet while a tour of the city revealed twenty command posts, missile sites, radar bases, and communication centers blasted to rubble, those not in the targeted buildings had sustained little more than broken windows and were even now gaping at the mess.
The authorities had to be satisfied with inventing a civilian death toll and claims that American aircraft had been shot out of the skies like autumn leaves. Most Iraqis, stultified by years of propaganda, believed these first reports—for a while.
The generals in charge of air defense knew better. By midday, it was clear to them that they had lost almost all their radar warning ability, that their SAMs—surface-to-air missiles—were blind, and that communication with the outlying units was all but cut. Worse, the radar operators who had survived kept insisting the damage had been done by bombers that simply had not shown up on their screens. The liars were at once put under arrest.
Some civilian casualties had indeed occurred. At least two Tomahawk cruise missiles, their fins damaged by conventional triple-A gunfire rather than SAMs, had crashed off-target. One had demolished two houses and blown tiles off a mosque, an outrage that the press corps was shown during the afternoon.
The other had fallen on waste ground and made a large crater. During the late afternoon the body of a woman was found at the bottom of it, badly smashed by the impact that apparently killed her.
Bombing raids continued throughout the day, so that the ambulance crews were not prepared to do more than wrap the corpse hastily in a blanket, bring it to the morgue of the nearest hospital, and leave it there. The hospital happened to be close to a major Air Force command center that had been demolished, and all beds were occupied by service personnel wounded in the attack. Several scores of bodies were taken to the same morgue, all dead from bomb blasts. The woman’s was just one of them.
With his resources at the breaking point, the pathologist worked fast and cursorily. Identification and cause of death were his principal priorities, and he had no time for leisured examination. Across the city the crump of more bombs could be heard, and the blast of counterfire was unceasing. He had no doubt the evening and night would bring him more bodies.
What surprised the doctor was that all his dead bodies were service personnel, except the woman. She seemed to be about thirty and had once been comely. The concrete dust clinging to the blood of her smashed face, coupled with the place she had been found, gave cause for no other explanation than that she had been running away when the missile struck the waste ground and killed her. The body was so tagged, then wrapped for burial.
Her handbag had been found next to the body, and it contained a powder compact, lipstick, and her identity cards. Having established that one Leila Al-Hilla was undoubtedly a civilian victim of a bomb blast, the harassed pathologist had her taken away for hasty burial.
The more elaborate post-mortem for which he did not have time that January 17 would have shown the woman had been repeatedly and savagely raped before being systematically beaten to death. The dumping in the crater had come several hours later.
General Abdullah Kadiri had moved from his sumptuous office in the Defense Ministry two days earlier.
There was no point in staying to be blown to bits by an American bomb, and he was sure the Ministry would be hit and destroyed before the air war was many days old. He was right.
He had established himself in his villa, which he was reasonably certain was anonymous enough—albeit luxurious—not to be on any American target map. In this too he was right.
The villa had long since been provided with its own communications room, which staff from the Ministry were now manning. All his communications to the various command headquarters of the Armored Corps around Baghdad were by buried fiber-optic cable, which was also out of reach of the bombers.
Only the farther units had to be contacted by radio, with a threat of intercept—plus, of course, those in Kuwait.
His problem, as darkness fell over Baghdad that night, was not how to contact his Armored Corps commanders or what orders to give them. They could take no part in the air war, being tasked to disperse their tanks as widely as possible among the rows of dummies or bury them in the subterranean bunkers and wait.
His problem, rather, was his personal security, and it was not the Americans he feared.
Two nights earlier, rising from his bed with a bursting bladder, bleary with arak as usual, he had stumbled to the bathroom. Finding the door, as he thought, stuck, he had pushed hard. His two hundred pounds of body weight had torn the inner bolt from its screws, and the door flew open.
Bleary he might have been, but Abdullah Kadiri had not come from a back street near Tikrit to command all Iraq’s tanks outside the Republican Guard, had not climbed the slippery ladder of Ba’ath Party internal feuding, and had not sustained a trusted place on the Revolutionary Command Council without ample reserves of animal cunning.
He had stared in silence at his mistress, sitting wrapped in a robe on the toilet seat, her paper sustained by the back of a Kleenex box, her mouth in a round O of horror and surprise, her pen still poised in midair. Then he had hauled her to her feet and hit her on the point of the jaw.
When she came to, with a jug of water dashed in the face, he had had time to read the report she was preparing and to summon the trusty Kemal from his quarters across the yard. It was Kemal who had taken the whore
down to the basement.
Kadiri had read and reread the report she had almost finished. Had it concerned his personal habits and preferences, a lever for future blackmail, he would have dismissed it and simply had her killed. In any case, no blackmail would ever have worked. The personal baseness of some of the entourage of the Rais was greater than his own, he knew. He also knew that the Rais did not care.
This was worse. Apparently he had talked of things that had happened within the government and the Army. That she was spying was obvious. He needed to know for how long and what she had reported already, but most of all, for whom.
Kemal took his long-awaited pleasures first, with his master’s permission. No man would lust after what remained when Kemal had finished the interrogation. It had taken several hours. Then, Kadiri knew, Kemal had gotten it all—at least, all the courtesan knew.
After that, Kemal had continued for his own amusement until she was dead.
Kadiri was convinced that she had not known the real identity of the man who had recruited and ran her to spy on him, but the picture had to fit Hassan Rahmani.
The description of the information-against-money exchanges in the confessional of St. Joseph’s showed the man was professional, and Rahmani was certainly that.
That he should be watched did not worry Kadiri. All those around the Rais were watched; indeed, they watched each other. The rules of the Rais were simple and clear. Every figure of high rank was watched and reported on by three of his peers. A denunciation for treachery could and probably would lead to ruin. Thus, few conspiracies could get very far. One of those confided in would report the matter, and it would come to the ears of the Rais.
To complicate matters, each member of the entourage was occasionally provoked, to see what his reaction would be. A colleague, briefed to do so, would take his friend aside and propose treason.
If the friend agreed, he was finished. If he failed to report the proposer, he was finished. So any approach could be a provocation—it was simply too unsafe to assume otherwise. Thus, each reported on the others.