BDAs were crucial because the Black Hole had to know the level of the success, or lack of it, of each day’s wave of air strikes. If a major Iraqi command center, radar emplacement, or missile battery were on the Air Tasking Order, it would duly be attacked. But had it been destroyed? If so, to what degree?
Ten percent, fifty percent, or a pile of smoking rubble? Simply to assume that the Iraqi base had been wiped out was no good. The next day, unsuspecting Allied planes might be sent over that site on another mission. If the place were still functioning, pilots could die.
So each day the missions were flown, and the tired pilots described exactly what they had done and what they had hit. Or thought they had hit. The next day, other airplanes flew over the targets and photographed them.
Thus, each day as the Air Tasking Order began its three-day passage to preparation, the original menu of designated targets had to include the second visit missions, to finish the jobs only partly done.
January 20, the fourth day of the air war, the Allied air forces had not officially gotten around to wasting the industrial plants tagged as those making weapons of mass destruction. They were still concentrating on SEAD—Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses.
That night, Colonel Beatty was preparing the list of the next day’s photoreconnaissance missions on the basis of the harvest of all those debriefing sessions with squadron intelligence officers. By midnight, he was nearly through, and the early orders were already speeding their way to the various squadrons assigned to photorecon missions at dawn.
“Then there’s this, sir.”
It was a chief petty officer, U.S. Navy, by his side. The colonel glanced at the target.
“What do you mean, Tarmiya?”
“That’s what it says, sir.”
“So where the hell’s Tarmiya anyway?”
“Here, sir.”
The colonel glanced at the air map. The location meant nothing to him.
“Radar? Missiles, air base, command post?”
“No, sir. Industrial facility.”
The colonel was tired. It had been a long night, and it would go on until dawn.
“For chrissake, we haven’t gotten to industrials yet. Give me the list anyway.”
He ran his eye down the list. It included every industrial facility known to the Allies that was dedicated to the production of weapons of mass destruction; it had factories known to produce shells, explosives, vehicles, gun parts, and tank spares.
In the first category were listed Al Qaim, As-Sharqat, Tuwaitha, Fallujah, Al-Hillah, Al-Atheer, and Al-Furat. The colonel could not know that missing from the list was Rashadia, where the Iraqis had installed their second gas centrifuge cascade for producing refined uranium, the problem that had eluded the experts on the Medusa Committee. That plant, discovered by the United Nations much later, was not buried but disguised as a water-bottling enterprise.
Nor could Colonel Beatty know that Al-Furat was the buried location of the first uranium cascade, the one visited by the German, Dr. Stemmler, “somewhere near Tuwaitha,” and that its exact position had been given away by Jericho.
“I don’t see any Tarmiya,” he grunted.
“No, sir. It’s not there,” said the CPO.
“Give me the grid reference.”
No one could expect the analysts to memorize hundreds of confusing Arab place names, the more so as in some cases a single name covered ten separate targets, so all targets were given a grid reference by the Global Positioning System, which pinned them down to twelve digits, a square fifty yards by fifty.
When he bombed the huge factory at Tarmiya, Don Walker had noted that reference, which was attached to his debriefing report.
“It’s not here,” protested the colonel. “It’s not even a goddam target. Who zapped it?”
“Some pilot from the 336th at Al Kharz. Missed out on his first two assigned targets through no fault of his own. Didn’t want to come home with full racks, I guess.”
“Asshole,” muttered the colonel. “Okay, give it to BDA anyway. But low priority. Don’t waste film on it.”
Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary sat at the controls of his F-14 Tomcat. He was a very frustrated man.
Beneath him the great gray bulk of the carrier USS Ranger had her nose into the light breeze and was making twenty-seven knots through the water. The sea of the northern Gulf was dead calm in the predawn, and the sky would soon be bright and blue. It ought to have been a day of pleasure for a young Navy pilot flying one of the world’s best fighter planes.
Nicknamed “the Fleet Defender,” the twin-finned two-man Tomcat had come to a wider audience when it starred in the film Top Gun . Its cockpit is probably the most sought-after chair in American combat aviation, certainly in Navy flying, and to be at the controls of such an airplane on such a lovely day just a week after arriving on station in the Gulf should have made Darren Cleary very happy. The reason for his misery was that he was assigned not to a combat mission but to BDA, “taking happy snapshots,” as he had complained the night before. He had beseeched the squadron operations officer to let him go hunting MiGs, but to no avail.
“Someone’s got to do it,” was his answer. Like all air-superiority combat pilots among the Allies in the Gulf War, Cleary feared that the Iraqi jets would leave the skies after a few days, putting an end to any chance to tangle.
So to his chagrin, he had been “fragged”—assigned—to a TARPS mission.
Behind him and his flight officer, two General Electric jet engines rumbled away as the deck crew hooked him up the steam catapult on the angled flight deck, pointing his nose slightly off the centerline of the Ranger . Cleary waited, throttle in his left hand, control column steady and neutral in his right, as the last preparations were made. Finally the terse inquiry, the nod, and that great blast of power as the throttle went forward, right through the gate into afterburn, and the catapult threw him and 68,000
pounds of warplane from zero to 150 knots in three seconds.
The gray steel of the Ranger vanished behind him, and the dark sea flashed below. The Tomcat felt for the rushing air around her, sensed its support, and climbed smoothly away for the lightening sky.
It would be a four-hour mission with two refuels. He had twelve targets to photograph, and he would not be alone. Already up ahead of him was an A-6 Avenger with laser-guided bombs in case they should run into antiaircraft artillery, in which eventuality the Avenger would teach the Iraqi gunners to be quiet.
An EA-6B Prowler was coming on the same mission, armed with HARMs in case they ran into a SAM
missile site guided by radar. The Prowler would use its HARMs to blow away the radar, and the Avenger would employ its bombs on the missiles.
In case the Iraqi Air Force showed up, two more Tomcats would be riding shotgun, above and to either side of the photographer, their powerful AWG-9 in-air radars capable of discerning the Iraqi pilot’s inside leg measurement before he got out of bed.
All this metal and technology was to protect what hung below and behind Darren Cleary’s feet, a Tactical Air Reconnaissance Pod System, or TARPS. Hanging slightly right of the Tomcat’s centerline, the TARPS resembled a streamlined coffin seventeen feet long. It was rather more complicated than a tourist’s Pentax.
In its nose was a powerful frame camera with two positions: forward-and-down, or straight down.
Behind it was the panoramic camera looking outward, sideways, and down. Behind that was the infrared Reconnaissance Set, designed to record thermal (heat) imaging and its source. In a final twist, the pilot could see on his Head-Up Display inside his cockpit what he was photographing while still overhead.
Darren Cleary climbed to fifteen thousand feet, met up with the rest of his escorts, and they proceeded to link with their assigned KC-135 tanker just south of the Iraqi border.
Without being troubled by Iraqi resistance, Cleary photographed the eleven principal targets he had been assigned, then turned back over Tarmiya for the secondary-i
nterest twelfth location.
As he went over Tarmiya, he glanced at his display and muttered, “What the fuck is that?” This was the moment the last of the 750 frames in each of his main cameras chose to run out.
After a second refuel the mission landed back on the Ranger without incident. The deck crew downloaded the cameras and took them off to the photo lab for development to negatives.
Cleary was debriefed on an uneventful mission, then went down to the light table with the intelligence officer. As the negatives came up on the screen with the white-light underneath, Cleary explained what each frame was and where it had come from. The intel officer made notes for his own report, which would be attached to Cleary’s, plus the photos.
When they came to the last twenty frames, the intel officer asked, “What are these?”
“Don’t ask me,” said Cleary. “They come from that target at Tarmiya. You remember—the one Riyadh tacked on at the last moment?”
“Yeah. So what are those things inside the factory?”
“Look like Frisbees for giants,” suggested Cleary dubiously.
It was a phrase that stuck. The intel officer used it in his own report, coupled with an admission that he had not the slightest idea what they were. When the package was complete, a Lockheed S-3 Viking was thrown off the Ranger ’s deck and took the whole package to Riyadh. Darren Cleary went back to air combat missions, never tangled with the elusive MiGs, and left the Gulf with the USS Ranger in late April 1991.
Wolfgang Gemütlich was becoming more and more worried, through that morning, by the state of his private secretary.
She was as polite and formal as ever and as efficient as he could have demanded—and Herr Gemütlich demanded much. Not a man of excessive sensitivity, he saw nothing out of the ordinary at first, but by her third visit into his private sanctum to take a letter, he observed there was something unusual about her.
Nothing lighthearted, of course, and certainly not frivolous—he would never have tolerated that. It was an air that she carried with her. On her third visit he observed her more closely as, head bent over her note pad, she took down his dictation.
True, the dowdy business suit was in place, hem below the knees. The hair was still scraped back into a bun behind her head. ... It was on the fourth visit that he realized with a start of horror that Edith Hardenberg was wearing a touch of face powder. Not a lot, just a hint. He checked quickly to ensure that there was no lipstick on her mouth and was relieved to see not a trace.
Perhaps, he reasoned, he was deluding himself. It was January, the freezing weather outside might have caused chapping to her skin; no doubt the powder was to ease the soreness. But there was something else.
The eyes. Not mascara— um Gotteswillen, let it not be mascara. He checked again, but there was none. He had been deluded, he reassured himself. It was in the lunch hour as he spread his linen napkin on his blotter and ate the sandwiches dutifully prepared by Frau Gemütlich, as on every day, that the solution came to him.
They sparkled. Fräulein Hardenberg’s eyes sparkled. It could not be the winter weather—she had been indoors for four hours by then. The banker put down his half-eaten sandwich and realized he had seen the same syndrome among some of the younger secretaries just before going-home time on a Friday evening.
It was happiness. Edith Hardenberg was actually happy. It showed, he realized now, in the way she walked, the way she talked, and the way she looked. She had been like that all morning—that, and the hint of powder. It was enough to trouble Wolfgang Gemütlich deeply. He hoped she had not been spending money.
The snapshots taken by Lieutenant Commander Darren Cleary came into Riyadh in the afternoon, part of a blizzard of fresh images that poured into CENTAF headquarters every day.
Some of those images were from the KH-11 and KH-12 satellites high above the earth, giving the big-dimension picture, the wide angle, the whole of Iraq. If they showed no variation from the previous day, they were stacked.
Others were from the constant photorecon missions flown at lower levels by the TR-1s. Some showed Iraqi activity, military or industrial, that was new—troop movements, war-planes taxiing where they had not been before, missile launchers in new locations. These went to Target Analysis.
The ones from the Ranger ’s Tomcat were for Bomb Damage Assessment. They were filtered through the Barn, the collection of green tents on the edge of the military air base; then, duly tagged and identified, they went down the road to the Black Hole, where they landed in the BDA department.
Colonel Beatty came on duty at seven that evening. He worked for two hours poring over shots of a missile site (partially destroyed, two batteries apparently still intact) and a communications center (reduced to rubble), plus an array of hardened aircraft shelters that housed Iraqi MiGs, Mirages, and Sukhois (shattered).
When he came to a dozen pictures of a factory at Tarmiya, he frowned, rose, and walked over to a desk manned by a British flight sergeant of the Royal Air Force.
“Charlie, what are these?”
“Tarmiya, sir. You recall that factory hit by a Strike Eagle yesterday—the one that wasn’t on the list?”
“Oh, yeah, the factory that was never even a target?”
“That’s the one. A Tomcat from the Ranger took these just after ten this morning.”
Colonel Beatty tapped the photos in his hand.
“So what the hell’s going on down here?”
“Don’t know, sir. That’s why I put ’em on your desk. No one can work it out.”
“Well, that Eagle jockey certainly rattled someone’s cage. They’re going apeshit here.”
The American colonel and the British NCO stared at the images brought back by the Tomcat from Tarmiya. They were utterly clear, the definition fantastic. Some were from the forward-and-down frame camera in the nose of the TARPS pod showing the ruined factory as the Tomcat approached at fifteen thousand feet; others from the panoramic camera in the midsection of the pod. The men at the Barn had extracted the dozen best and clearest.
“How big is this factory?” asked the colonel.
“About a hundred meters by sixty, sir.”
The giant roof had been torn off, and only a fragment was left covering a quarter of the floor space of the Iraqi plant.
In the three-quarters that had been exposed to view, the entire factory layout could be observed in a bird’s-eye view. There were subdivisions caused by partitions, and in each division a great dark disk occupied most of the floor.
“These metal?”
“Yes, sir, according to the infrared scanner. Steel of some kind.”
Even more intriguing, and the reason for all the attention by the BDA people, was the Iraqi reaction to Don Walker’s raid. Around the roofless factory were grouped not one but five enormous cranes, their booms poised over the interior like storks pecking at a morsel. With all the damage going on in Iraq, cranes this size were at a premium.
Around the factory and inside it, a swarm of laborers could be seen toiling to attach the disks to the crane hooks for removal.
“You counted these guys, Charlie?”
“Over two hundred, sir.”
“And these disks”—Colonel Beatty consulted the report of the Ranger ’s Intel officer—“these ‘Frisbees for giants’?”
“No idea, sir. Never seen anything like them.”
“Well, they’re sure as hell important to Mr. Saddam Hussein. Is Tarmiya really a no-target zone?”
“Well, that’s the way it’s been listed, Colonel. But would you have a look at this?”
The flight sergeant pulled over another photo he had retrieved from the files. The colonel peered where the NCO pointed.
“Chain-link fencing.”
“Double chain-link. And here?”
Colonel Beatty took the magnifying glass and looked again.
“Mined strip ... triple-A batteries ... guard towers. Where did you find all these, Charlie?”
“Here. Take a big-p
icture look.”
Colonel Beatty stared at the fresh picture placed before him, an ultrahigh-altitude shot of the whole of Tarmiya and the surrounding area. Then he breathed out in a long exhalation.
“Jesus H. Christ, we’re going to have to reevaluate the whole of Tarmiya. How the hell did we miss it?”
The fact was, the whole of the 381-building industrial complex of Tarmiya had been cleared by the first analysts as nonmilitary and nontarget for reasons that later became part of the folklore of the human moles who worked in and survived the Black Hole.
They were Americans and British, and they were all NATO men. Their training had been in assessing Soviet targets, and they looked for the Soviet way of doing things. The clues they looked for were the standard indicators. If the building or complex was military and important, it would be off-limits. It would be guarded from trespassers and protected from attack.
Were there guard towers, chain-link fencing, triple-A batteries, missiles, mined strips, barracks? Were there signs of heavy trucks going in and out; were there heavy-duty power lines or a designated generating station inside the enclosure? These signs meant a target. Tarmiya had none of these—apparently.
What the RAF sergeant had done, on a hunch, was to reexamine a very high-angle picture of the entire area. And there it was—the fence, the batteries, the barracks, the reinforced gates, the missiles, the razor-wire entanglements, the mined strip. But far away.
The Iraqis had simply taken a vast tract of land one hundred kilometers square and fenced off the lot.
No such land-grab would have been possible in Western or even Eastern Europe.
The industrial complex, of whose 381 buildings seventy later turned out to be dedicated to war production, lay at the center of the square, widely scattered to avoid bomb damage, but still only five hundred acres out of the ten thousand in the protected zone.
“Electrical power lines?” said the colonel. “There’s nothing here that would power more than a toothbrush.”