The Threat
Then war came.
When I left for Eskan village at the end of my shift on the evening of January 16, the CENTCOM headquarters was gripped with tension, like a locker room before a big game. Up until now my experience had been like the various training exercises I had previously participated in—a lot of looking at maps and photographs and theorizing about the potential for conflict. Theory was transformed into reality in the blink of an eye, with hundreds of coalition aircraft sortieing into Iraq to attack locations across the width and breadth of that country. These locations were, in turn, imaged by any number of intelligence collection means. When I arrived back the next morning, the headquarters was buzzing with activity, and my desk was already piled high with photographs and reports, including a stack of black and white polaroid images of various locations inside Iraq I was responsible for analyzing.
The polaroid pictures were images taken from a computer screen located at a facility out by Riyadh International Airport known as the “Desert Gypsy”, a nickname for the Joint Imagery Processing Center, or JIPC. Inside the JIPC was a computer terminal that linked to a reconnaissance satellite so secret that its existence was hidden from the public for nearly 20 years.[1]
Known either by its mission number, 3101, or its formal code name, Onyx, the satellite, on which was mounted a synthetic aperture radar (so named because of the role played by its radar antenna in mimicking the role of a conventional imaging aperture), was launched into orbit onboard the Space Shuttle Atlantis on December 2, 1988.[2] It was part of a five-satellite constellation (three electro-optical, two radar imaging) designed to provide 24-hour coverage of the Soviet Union, regardless of weather conditions.[3]
Given the importance associated with making sure the targets designated for the first night’s bombing missions were, in fact, destroyed, Mission 3101 was tasked with overflying Iraq during the hours of darkness, providing critical imagery collection that otherwise would not have been available until daylight hours. Such a delay would have prevented the ability of battle damage assessment analysts like me to identify targets that had escaped destruction, and as such needed to be attacked again.
The black and white polaroid images were the byproduct of this effort. Because it would have been impractical for me to go to the JIPC to assess the images, the photographic interpreters at the JIPC took pictures of the computer screen displaying the radar image and sent those to the J-2/BDA staff for evaluation. The resolution (i.e., clarity) was not the greatest, but it was enough to identify holes in a roof signifying bomb entry, or a debris field showing that a building had been destroyed.[4] This was the first ever use of a radar imaging satellite in a battle damage assessment role, and I was honored to have been a part of it.
Most of the targets I looked at were relatively straight forward to assess—the Iraqi missile support facility in Taji had been hit particularly hard, and the damage to its buildings readily discernable. The one category that I had trouble with was Iraq’s missile launch capability, especially the 28 fixed arm launchers in western Iraq affiliated with Iraq’s SCUD missile force that had been given top priority. The grainy Mission 3101 photographs I was looking at provided no evidence that any of the launch pads had been destroyed, let alone damaged.
Two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft—the Air Force’s premier front-line tactical penetration fighter-bomber—had been given the task of bombing these fixed arm launchers, as well as sweeping the deserts of western Iraq to locate and destroy mobile missile launchers. The initial pilot reports from these missions claimed that all the fixed arm sites had been successfully attacked. The imagery, however, suggested otherwise. I submitted all these targets for restrike, something that irritated the Air Force planners, who had other ideas on how they wanted to make use of the F-15E’s.[5]
The pilot reports also indicated that numerous mobile missile launchers had been identified and bombed. It would take days for the strike video from the F-15E’s onboard forward-looking infrared (FLIR) camera, which provided medium-resolution video imagery based upon a targets heat signature, to become available for a more in-depth evaluation of the pilot’s claims. In the meantime, the fact that Iraq had fired no missiles against Israel on the first day of the conflict was taken as proof positive by Schwarzkopf’s staff that the counter-SCUD missions over western Iraq had been a success.
This illusion was shattered the next night, January 18, when the Iraqis launched a total of eight SCUD missiles against targets in Israel.
Targeting Iraq’s SCUD missile force was a top priority for American military planners from the very beginning of the Iraq crisis. On Saturday, August 4, 1990—two days after Iraq invaded Kuwait—General Schwarzkopf, accompanied by Lieutenant General Chuck Horner, the Air Force component commander for CENTCOM, briefed President George H. W. Bush and his cabinet on the war plans as they currently existed. When the brief finished, the President brought up the threat posed by Iraq’s SCUD missiles, and whether the US had a counter. Horner responded that he believed the vast majority of Iraq’s SCUD missile force would be destroyed by coalition air attacks, and any missiles that did survive would be intercepted and destroyed by US Army Patriot anti-missile batteries. The President seemed to be satisfied with that response.
Horner’s immediate boss, General Schwarzkopf, however, was not. On August 8, 1990, Schwarzkopf placed a call to General John Loh, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Air Force, asking for help. “I need it fast,” Schwarzkopf told Loh, “because he [Saddam] may launch a chemical SCUD or chemical attack.” Schwarzkopf lacked confidence that the current planning for the air war seemed to be based on the formal air/land battle doctrine designed for a major conflict in Europe against the Soviet Union, involving close coordination between the Army and Air Force to produce an integrated attack plan.
Schwarzkopf told Loh that he needed the ability to strike “deep” to counter any effort by Saddam “to launch a plan of attack with SCUDs or even with chemical or nuclear weapons.” General Loh put Schwarzkopf’s staff in touch with a top-secret Air Force planning cell, the Force Assessment Division (better known as “Checkmate”), led by Colonel John A. Warden, III. Warden was considered by many to be the leading air power theorist in the US Air Force and one of America’s leading strategic thinkers.
Warden turned the Checkmate team to the task of developing a strategic air campaign for Iraq, which he briefed to General Schwarzkopf on August 17. When addressing the SCUD threat, Warden warned the CENTCOM commander that while the goal of the campaign was to prevent SCUD attacks against Israel and Saudi Arabia, accomplishing this mission was going to be an extraordinarily difficult problem, in large part because neither the Air Force nor the Navy had any experience in targeting mobile missiles.
While Colonel Warden appeared to be the ideal choice for producing a fully fleshed-out strategic air campaign, his somewhat imperious manner, derived from being the best in the business at what he did, clashed with the volatile temperament of the man nicknamed “the Bear”—General Norman Schwarzkopf. In the end, Warden ended up handing the responsibility for finalizing the strategic air campaign off to a team of Air Force planners called the Special Planning Group, or SPG, who were already deployed in Saudi Arabia.
The SPG was headed by Brigadier General Buster Glosson, an abrasive 48-year-old fighter pilot with a shock of all-white hair who had flown numerous combat missions during the Vietnam War. Situated in a conference room on the third floor of the Saudi Air Force Headquarters in Riyadh, the SPG quickly became known as the Black Hole for all the secrecy surrounding its work. Its primary task was to plan a sustained aerial attack that would kick off a larger war with Iraq. This plan incorporated the various targets comprising the Iraqi SCUD threat, and soon Glosson was able to brief General Schwarzkopf that there was a viable plan to neutralize the Iraqi SCUD missile threat within the first 48 hours of the war.
The American civilian and military leadership were not the only ones concerned about the threat from Iraq; Israel’s Defense Minister, Moshe Arens, was very much focused on the danger posed by the Iraqi SCUDs. At 65 years of age, Arens was a retired aeronautical engineer who came into politics late in his life. By the time Saddam Hussein invaded Iraq, Arens had already served Israel as both Minister of Defense and Foreign Minister, as well as Israel’s Ambassador to the United States; his current stint as Minister of Defense was his second time holding that job. Politically conservative, Arens was a staunch defender of Israeli sovereignty.[6]
As the US military buildup in the Persian Gulf continued, Arens travelled to the United States where, on September 17, he met with his American counterpart, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Arens told Cheney that his intelligence services believed that Iraq would attack Israel using SCUD missiles tipped with chemical weapons once a ground war began, which would leave Israel with no option other than retaliation. Arens insisted that Israel should begin receiving updated intelligence from the US, in the form of high-resolution satellite imagery, and that Israeli and US military planners should begin building an operational framework for coordinated military action.
Cheney rejected both suggestions, instead countering with a promise to deploy two US-manned Patriot missile batteries to enhance Israel’s defenses, an offer the Israelis, who took pride in being able to defend themselves, rejected (Israel had acquired two batteries of Patriot missiles, at a cost of $117 million, in September 1990, a month after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait; these missiles were in storage in Israel while their crews were being trained at the US Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.)
The tests carried out by Iraq on December 2 involving two long-range Al Abbas missiles, and which were fired toward the west from locations in eastern Iraq, only reinforced Israel’s concern. The missiles had been launched on a trajectory that, if extended, would strike Israeli territory. The Israelis again pressed for intelligence sharing and joint operational planning between the Israeli defense forces and the US, and again the US turned them down. The US had fully bought into the concepts enshrined in the air campaign, and its first 48 hours, which served as the blueprint for the US-led coalition’s war against the regime of Saddam Hussein. From the US perspective, there simply would be no need for Israel to strike back.
This position was furthered by a briefing provided by Lieutenant General Howard Graves, the Assistant to the Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, to Secretary of State James Baker on the eve of Baker’s historical summit with Iraqi Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz in Geneva, Switzerland on January 9, 1991. During that meeting, Tariq Aziz had warned Baker that Iraq would attack Israel in the event of any US-led coalition military operation against Iraq.
Hosni Mubarek, the President of Egypt and one of the central Arab leaders to join the coalition, had warned Baker that Israel could not, under any circumstances, attack Iraq. Faced with the threat from Tariq Aziz, Baker crafted a diplomatic “out” for Mubarek. “It matters how Israel attacks Iraq,” Baker told the Egyptian leader, noting that while an unprovoked attack by Israel was unacceptable, Israel should retain the right to respond if attacked by Iraq.[7]
Israel, Graves noted while coaching Baker on the Iraqi SCUD missile capability, won’t even be a factor. “You have so many SCUD launchers,” Graves told Baker to tell Aziz, “and we can eliminate them in so many days. We know how long it takes you to reload them, and we will be able to target them based upon our knowledge of your operational principles.”[8]
This confidence was echoed in the presentations of Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul D. Wolfowitz, and Rear Admiral Merrill Ruck, the Assistant Deputy Director for Political Military Affairs for the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff: there would be no joint operational planning with Israel, they noted, because there was no need for it—by the second day of the war, US air strikes will have destroyed all of Iraq’s SCUD missile capability.
The reality, however, was quite different. The American military planners involved in crafting the initial counter-SCUD strikes knew full well just how difficult it would be for the air crews involved in SCUD-busting operations against Iraq to acquire and successfully attack a SCUD missile and launcher. The initial plan for taking out the SCUD threat in western Iraq was code named “Wolfpack” and was centered around two squadrons of F-15E Strike Eagles from the US Air Force’s 4th Tactical Fighter Wing, the “Chiefs” of the 335th Tactical Fighter Squadron and the “Rockets” of the 336th Tactical Fighter Squadron.
The F-15E, a two-seat variant of the F-15C Eagle air supremacy fighter, was the newest in the US Air Force inventory, designed for bombing targets deep behind enemy lines. Painted a darker shade of grey than their F-15C fighter brethren (who were nicknamed Albinos as a result), the F-15E had acquired a few nicknames of its own, including Mud Hen because it flew so low to the ground, or Beagle—short for “bombing Eagle”—given its strike role. These aircraft had just been fielded in early 1990 and had never seen combat.
There was, however, one problem: the pilots flying the F-15E Strike Eagles were not happy with the mission, believing it to be a poor fit for the capabilities of their aircraft. The Strike Eagle was designed to be used with the with low altitude targeting infra-red for night (LANTIRN) sensor. The LANTIRN system consisted of two separate pods, one used for navigation, the other for targeting. The navigation pod used terrain-following radar and a heat-sensing camera to map out a flight path at low level, enabling an aircraft to fly under most enemy air defenses.
The targeting pod used a laser designator linked with a FLIR for use in identifying and designating targets for precision attacks using laser-guided bombs. The LANTIRN system did not permit an aircraft to “self-designate”. Instead, the F-15E’s would “buddy lase”, meaning that one LANTIRN equipped aircraft would have to mark the target with its laser, holding it steady on the target, while another delivered the munition, which tracked on the light source reflecting off the designated target. Making matters worse, the F-15E was so new to the Air Force inventory that the squadrons had yet to be outfitted with, and its pilots trained on the use of, the LANTIRN targeting pod.
This meant that the F-15E was going to war with one hand tied behind its back. To make matters worse, the F-15E pilots had little experience using the terrain mapping capabilities of the LANTIRN navigation pod and were convinced that sending them in after a small target such as the SCUD would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. Glosson was able to mollify them by explaining the political importance of keeping Israel out of the war, and by underscoring the reality that as bad a fit the F-15E pilots believed their aircraft was to the mission, they were far better equipped to hunt SCUDs at night than any other available aircraft.
Brigadier General Glosson was not simply speculating—his planners were privy to a detailed study addressing CENTCOM’s requirements to target Iraqi mobile SCUD launchers, prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Target Intelligence Division and coordinated with the Pentagon’s Joint Relocatable Target Program Office. Entitled “Desert Shield Adaptive Planning Target Materials”, this study had been forwarded to the Brigadier General Glosson’s Black Hole in early December 1990.
The conclusions of that study were damning, based as they were on the results of Project Touted Gleem, a joint Air Force-Navy effort to explore the capability of specific aircraft to acquire, identify and attack mobile SCUD launchers. In support of these tests the United States was able to make use of an actual MAZ-543 transport-erector launcher (TEL) uploaded with a SCUD-B training missile (the launcher and missile were loaned to the United States for this purpose by Germany, which had acquired the launcher and missile in the aftermath of the reunification of Germany in 1989. The Germans also provided a crew of former East German soldiers to operate the TEL.)
Various aircraft anticipated to be employed in a SCUD-busting role were utilized in the test, including the F-111F Aardvark aircraft equipped with electro-optical targeting pods known as Pave Tack, which used a laser slaved to a forward looking infrared (FLIR) camera to find and designate targets for laser-guided bombs and other precision-guided munitions. The US Air Force also used F-16C and F-16D Fighting Falcons, and F-15E Strike Eagle aircraft, both equipped with LANTIRN sensors. These tests were carried out at Eglin Air Force Base.
For its part, the US Navy provided FLIR-equipped F/A-18 Hornet and Vietnam-era A-6E Intruder aircraft to use in the test. These aircraft could use their FLIR sensors to locate a target, but then had to deliver their munitions “dumb”, without any terminal guidance.
Even though all aircrews were well briefed on the location of their target, which in all cases was stationary and in the open, the MAZ-543 proved to be nearly impossible to locate. In many instances, aircrews attacked the wrong target or were unable to find the target at all; this was particularly so when the MAZ-543 was in its “missile down” configuration.
While the chances of launcher detection increased when the SCUD missile was fully erected, the maximum detection range never exceeded two nautical miles (3.7 kilometers) and, even then, the results were achieved only through the use of Global Positioning satellite (GPS)-assisted target cueing, where very specific target locations were pre-programmed into the aircraft to help guide the pilot to the target through the use of symbology on his aircraft’s Heads-up Display, or HUD). The bottom-line conclusion of Project Touted Gleem was that, at night, in a combat environment, the ability of coalition aircraft to detect and attack a MAZ-543 was, at best, extremely difficult.
The SCUD hunt, however, was more a political problem than a military one, and the CENTCOM leadership chose to disregard the damning details of Project Touted Gleem, and instead embrace the fiction of the viability of the counter-SCUD plan that had been drawn up by the planners in the Black Hole. This plan was the basis of a briefing provided to Richard Clark, the Assistant Secretary of State for Political/Military Affairs, during a visit to Riyadh in December 1990; Clark was told that all mobile and fixed SCUDs in Iraq would be destroyed within the first 48 hours of the initiation of hostilities. Clark relayed this confident assessment on to Lawrence Eagleburger, laying the basis of Eagleburger’s assurance to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
The Gorilla Package
The counter-SCUD effort kicked off in dramatic fashion in the early hours of January 16-17. The planners in the Black Hole had been looking at the problem of the Iraqi fixed-arm launchers since September 1990, and believed they had the ideal solution to the Iraqi SCUD missile threat against Israel in the form of the F-15E Strike Eagles of the 4th Tactical Air Wing (TFW.)
The F-15E pilots from the two squadrons comprising the 4th TFW (the Chiefs and Rockets) had been practicing this mission since October 1990 and believed themselves more than up to the task. They were to form the bulk of what the Black Hole planners were calling Strike Package A (an updated version of the original Wolfpack plan), and which the F-15E pilots called the Gorilla Package, designed to deliver the knock-out blow against the Iraqi SCUD threat to Israel.
The Gorilla Package streaked through a gap created in the Iraqi air defense created by Task Force Normandy, comprised of US Air Force/Army helicopters, that targeted Iraqi air defense radars located along the Iraqi-Saudi border. The twenty-eight aircraft in the Gorilla Package (consisting of two EF-111 Raven electronic warfare aircraft (used to jam Iraqi air defense radars), four Royal Air Force (RAF) GR-1 Tornado aircraft (specifically designed for low-level attacks), and 22 F-15E Strike Eagles) were tasked with bombing what the US planners believed were the most critical SCUD launch sites in western Iraq—the 28 fixed-arm launchers located at H-2 airfield, Wadi Jabariyah, Wadi Ratqa, Wadi Amij, and Qasr Amij.
The mission, so long in the planning, ran into a snag early on. Of the 22 F-15E’s that took off from the base at Al Kharj, only 19 ended up crossing the border into Iraq—a three-ship flight had to turn back; two aircraft had systems malfunctions, while the third aircraft was prohibited from proceeding alone.
Once across the border, the Gorilla Package split up to accomplish its various tasks. The two EF-111’s jammed the Iraqi air defense radars and communications equipment over H-2 and H-3 airfields, while the four RAF Tornado aircraft, flying at speeds of up to 500 miles per hour at ground level, carried the potent JP-233, a British submunition delivery system consisting of large dispenser pods carrying several hundred bomblets which struck the runways of both H-2 and H-3 airfields, creating small craters intended to keep any Iraqi fighter aircraft stationed there grounded. This action cleared the way for a flight of five F-15E Strike Eagles from the Chiefs to bomb the fixed-arm launchers situated in and around H-2 (bad luck continued to plague the men of the 4th Tactical Fighter Wing—a sixth aircraft was forced to abort its mission due to the failure of its terrain-following radar).
Unlike the Tornados, the F-15E’s were bombing their targets from an altitude of 20,000 feet. The reason for this departure in tactics was that H-2 was defended by five French-made Roland surface-to-air missiles, which were especially effective against low-flying aircraft. The altitude of the attack also precluded the use of the Rockeye cluster bomb, considered ideal for taking out the fixed-arm launchers. If dropped from high altitude, the bombs could deploy prematurely and scatter their 200 bomblets over empty ground. Instead, each aircraft carried twelve 500-pound bombs.
Although equipped with LANTIRN navigation and targeting system, the F-15E’s did not have the targeting pods. The crews were therefore limited to using the aircraft’s navigation pod to find, identify and attack the fixed-arm launchers—a task the navigation pod was not designed to do. This also meant that the bombs would not be guided onto their targets by the laser system contained in the targeting pod. Instead, they would be dropped dumb—unguided—a fact that ultimately made the task of hitting the fixed-arm launchers located at H-2 virtually impossible.
But the largest obstacle to success was the air defenses of the Iraqis. Captain Reno Pelletier, the weapons systems officer for the last F-15E in line to bomb H-2, described the scene that confronted the Chiefs as they began their attack run. “I’m thinking there can’t be that many gun barrels in all Iraq,” he recalled in an interview after the war (US intelligence estimated there to be at least 136 discreet weapons at H-2, mainly ZU-23-2 double-barrel 23mm and S-60 single-barrel 57mm guns.) “I mean the triple-A (anti-aircraft artillery, or AAA) was so thick you could get out and walk across the top of the airfield at 20,000 feet.”[9]
Making matters worse, the Iraqi Air Force made an appearance, with MiG-23 and Mig-29 fighters flying out of Mudaysis airfield threatening the Strike Eagle’s during and after their attack runs. The US and Iraqi aircraft got into a dogfight, with air-to-air missiles released by both sides. No Strike Eagles were hit, but in the confusion one Iraqi Mig-29 flew into the ground, and another was shot down by an air-to-air missile fired by another Iraqi aircraft.
Things were not any easier for the Rockets. Four flights of three F-15E aircraft each were assigned the task of striking the fixed arm launcher sites at Wadi Jabariyah, Wadi Ratqa, Qasr Amij and Wadi Amij. Unlike the mission over H-2, these attacks were to be flown at between 300 feet and 500 feet, and thus were able to make use of the Rockeye cluster bombs.
This was always going to be a difficult task for the aircrew of the F-15E’s, especially when limited to using only their navigation radars to find their targets. Once over each target area, the F-15E’s ran into intense Iraqi air defense activity. While the lead F-15E was able to drop its bombs with no problem, once they struck their targets the sky over the target exploded in intense Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, disrupting the bomb-runs of the F-15E’s coming in behind.
“I was watching it, mesmerized,” the pilot of the second F-15E, Captain Nick Sandwick, recalled after the war, “an orange and red cascade of triple-A going over and under us. From then on there was no question that we were going to get hit. I was basically waiting to die—there was just so much of it.”[10] The Iraqi AAA forced the initial planes to rush their attacks, and the ones following in trace to break them off.
Further to the west, the H-3 airfield special storage facility, assessed by US and Israeli intelligence to contain chemical warheads for the Iraqi SCUD missiles, was also bombed in the early hours of January 17. A pair of stealthy F-117 Nighthawks were dispatched to take out a critical air defense control center, thought to double as a SCUD communication node, but failed to drop their bombs. Four F-111F Pave Tack aircraft struck hardened aircraft shelters suspected of hiding mobile SCUD launchers, and RAF and Saudi Arabian Tornado aircraft bombed runways and bunkers.
While the Pave Tack strikes appeared to hit their targets, the Tornado sorties ran into heavy air defenses like what had greeted the F-15E’s at H-2 and around Al Qaim, and their bomb runs proved ineffective. Four other F-111F Pave Tack aircraft struck Muhammadi airfield, further toward the east, targeting aircraft shelters believed to be used to hide mobile SCUD launchers. These bombs hit their targets, but it was impossible to know whether there was anything SCUD-related inside when the bombs struck.
The Coalition’s first night’s efforts over western Iraq proved to be a disappointment; the Gorilla Package had struck out. The fact was that the coalition aircraft were punching into an empty bag—there were simply no Iraqi SCUD missiles, launchers, or support equipment in the areas being bombed. The aircrews and mission planners did not know that, however, and the initial pilot reports, made in good faith, were overly optimistic, thereby lending credence to what had been bad intelligence.
All pilots want to believe that their bombs hit their targets and, void of evidence to the contrary, they will usually claim such hits. As a result, the first situation reports produced by the F-15E squadron debriefing officers painted a picture that was far removed from reality. These reports—which included claims that a SCUD launcher, along with an erect missile, was destroyed before it could be fired—were further supported by the relative calm that fell over western Iraq during the daylight hours following the initial wave of attacks. If there were no SCUD attacks, surely that meant the SCUDs had been destroyed or disrupted.
The initial attacks conducted by the Gorilla Package were designed to eliminate the nighttime threat to Israel from the Iraqi fixed-arm and mobile SCUD launchers in western Iraq. With these strikes completed, the next task was to wait and see if any surviving Iraqi missile launchers would dare attempt an attack during the daylight hours.
For the remainder of the day, four F-15E aircraft were kept on two-hour strip alert at their Al Kharj base, with a total of twelve F-15E dedicated to the task. The aircraft had 30 minutes to respond to a tasking based upon intelligence tip offs about any impending launch. In case of a SCUD launch, the aircraft would take off within five minutes of being alerted and contact an orbiting E-3 Airborne Warning and Control (AWACs) aircraft—basically a civilian Boeing 707 airliner that had been converted into flying command post— for further instructions. Backup aircraft would take off and strike other targets as directed. All this planning was for naught—no alert sorties were utilized during the first day of combat over western Iraq.
The lack of Iraqi missile activity in western Iraq was the only benchmark the planners in Riyadh could use to judge the effectiveness of the first night’s actions. Bad weather hampered efforts to confirm the claimed successes with hard evidence. A single U-2 surveillance aircraft was dispatched at first light from its base at Al Taif to take images of SCUD targets using the Senior Year Electro-Optical Reconnaissance System (SYERS) for battle damage assessment. SYERS was designed with the Cold War in mind—the U-2’s high vantage point, flying at 60,000 feet, gives it an ability to peer far inside the borders of nations with closed airspace, such as the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations.
The SYERS camera was able to see long distances through the atmosphere by using electronic sensors to see in the short-wave infrared (SWIR) band (reflected light), even when that combination of atmospheric attenuation and scatter severely impacts the shorter wavelengths that comprise the visible part of the spectrum, limiting the utility of conventional visible spectrum cameras. Moreover, SWIR “sees” in reflected light, so objects and persons look like how they look in visible light, making SYERS an invaluable reconnaissance tool.
SYERS, however, requires light to be effective. The heavy cloud cover over much of western Iraq during the daytime hours of January 17 precluded any meaningful collection of data by the SYERS-equipped U-2. The same held true for a pair of RF-4 Phantom reconnaissance aircraft, equipped with Long Range Oblique Photography (LOROP) high-resolution film cameras, which flew over western Iraq later in the morning of January 17, as well as the imaging satellites of the National Reconnaissance Office that used electro-optical sensors. When it came to any accurate determination as to the efficacy of the first night’s attacks on Iraqi SCUD capability in western Iraq, the planners in the Black Hole were flying blind.
The coalition had better luck against the known Iraqi missile production infrastructure on the first night of air strikes. Project 1728 was on the receiving end of F-117 and Tomahawk land attack missile (TLAM, or cruise missiles) strikes at both their Al Motawkil and Al Rafah facilities. The Project 144/5 facility in Dawra and the Project 144/7 plant at Al Qa’Qa’ suffered the same fate.
Perhaps the most dramatic—and devastating—attack to destroy SCUD-related production equipment and disrupt the combat service support of the Iraqi Al-Hussein Force came when 20 Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs, or sea-launched cruise missiles) fired from US Navy ships and submarines in the Persian Gulf slammed into the main Project 144 facility in Taji, where Projects 144/1, 144/2, 144/3 and 144/4 were located, along with the Technical Battalion of Unit 224. Unlike the other facilities, which were heavily involved in research and development activity that had been terminated in anticipation of war and which had evacuated much of their most sensitive equipment to hide sites for safekeeping, Project 144 provided ongoing technical support for the Al-Hussein missile force and was fully staffed for ongoing work.
So important was the Project 144 site to the Iraqi war effort that General Amer Rashid, the Deputy Director of MIC, drove himself to the facility immediately after the first bombs started falling to assess the damage and begin reorganizing for continued operations. What he found, when he finally reached the site, was utter confusion. The headquarters building, along with many of the production and storage sheds, had been hit, and the staff that had been on duty during the attack had fled the scene.
General Amer found Brigadier General Ra’ad Ismail, the Project 144 Director, at the missile airframe assembly building, inspecting the damage. Together they began the process of bringing order to chaos, calling in off-duty staff and identifying the salvageable equipment and infrastructure.
General Amer was still on site when, around 9 am, the next wave of missiles hit Taji. The attack originated from B-52G bombers, operating out of Barksdale Air Force base, Louisiana, which launched conventional AGM-86 air-launched cruise missiles (ALCM) at a variety of targets, including Project 144. This remarkable mission, lasting some 30 hours and 20 minutes in total flight time, culminated in a missile release some 50 miles inside Saudi Arabian airspace and represented the first operational use of a conventionally armed ALCM in the history of the US Air Force. Most of the missiles missed their targets, plunging into the fields around Taji, and at least one missile was shot down by Iraqi air defenses surrounding Project 144. But some hit their mark, and Amer Rashid and Ra’ad Isma’il found themselves supervising the evacuation of the injured as well as overseeing damage control.
The ride of the 10th Battery
As the clock ticked inexorably toward an all-out conflict, the commander of the Al Hussein Force, General Hazem Ayoubi, was finalizing the last operational details necessary for his elaborate war plan to be implemented.[11] Dressed in an olive drab woolen uniform and sporting the ubiquitous Stalinesque mustache favored by Saddam Hussein and copied by most Iraqi men, General Ayoubi looked like a shorter, stockier clone of the President he served. This concept of “service” was more than an ethereal notion—the Al Hussein Force General Ayoubi commanded was a strategic asset whose actions in time of war were subject to the prior approval of the Saddam Hussein. General Ayoubi, recognizing this, connected his headquarters to the operations room of the President with a secure digital radiotelephone, backed up by a direct tie-in to the Presidential telephone exchange. General Ayoubi then coordinated with Saddam Hussein’s personal bodyguard, Lieutenant Colonel Shabib Sulaiman, on a system of codewords (shared only with his most senior officers) to be used between the two headquarters.
While the individual firing batteries carried out the final reconnaissance of their deployment positions in western Iraq, General Ayoubi fine-tuned his battle plan, aimed at reducing the amount of time that would transpire from the order being given to launch an attack on Israel, and that moment when the various firing batteries would be in position, ready to execute that order.
War was approaching. On January 14, all military leave was cancelled, and the Al Hussein Force placed on high alert. General Ayoubi gathered his officers at the Unit 224 tactical headquarters, in Abu Ghraib, where they engaged in a lively verbal wargame, with the General testing his officers on the various iterations of the war plan they were about to implement.
By January 16, it became clear that the various diplomatic initiatives designed to forestall conflict had failed, and that war between Iraq and the US-led coalition would break out that very night. In anticipation of this event, General Ayoubi dispatched his official car to his residence in downtown Baghdad, close to the Presidential Palace, to pick up his two sons, Muhammad and Ahmad. They joined their father at the Al Hussein Force headquarters.
While he awaited his sons’ arrival, General Ayoubi met with Major Thamer Ali, the commander of the first camouflage group, responsible for helping conceal the Al Hussein Force from enemy surveillance and attack; Major Ali’s work would be essential to the survival of the Al Hussein Force in the days and weeks to come.
When General Ayoubi received the first reports of coalition aircraft bombing Iraq, he ordered the missiles planned for operations against Israel to be filled with fuel and oxidizer. He then spent the rest of the morning monitoring reports of coalition airstrikes against various facilities and locations under his control—the fixed arm sites out west, and the warehouses and buildings in Taji housing the various projects involved in manufacturing and maintaining the Al Hussein missiles he was about to launch against what he called “the Zionist enemy.”
At 11 am on January 17, Saddam Hussein’s bodyguard, Lieutenant Colonel Sulaiman, arrived at the Al Hussein Missile Force headquarters bearing a handwritten message from the Iraqi President:
In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, Staff Lieutenant General Hazem Abdul-Razzaq. Peace be upon you. With God’s blessing, start hitting the targets inside the criminal Zionist enemy using the heaviest fire possible. Be careful about the possibilities of being detected. Strikes are to be executed using conventional munitions of missiles. Firing is to continue until further notice.
The Iraqi President’s message referred to ten Short Al-Hussein missiles with integrated special warheads containing liquid Botulinum toxin, a deadly biological warfare agent produced by Iraq, that were in the joint possession of the First Missile Maintenance Unit and the Special Weapons Group from Muthanna State Establishment at a dispersal site near Nibai, together with several chemical warheads filled with Sarin nerve agent. These were weapons of deterrence, which could only be used on the orders of the President. For the moment, at least, this sword would remain sheathed.
General Ayoubi, accompanied by his two sons, departed the Al Hussein Force Headquarters and made his way to the field headquarters of both Unit 224 and Unit 223, where he monitored the execution of the battle plan, and checked on the morale of the officers and men. He then visited the headquarters of the Air Defense forces, to ensure that there was adequate protection for the launch sites out west. After a final inspection of the technical units deployed in the vicinity of Taji and Abu Ghraib, General Ayoubi ordered his driver to take him to Ramadi. It was General Ayoubi’s intention to accompany his forces into western Iraq, where he and his eldest son Muhammad would help launch the first missile into Israel.
These plans were thwarted, however, by the news that the Presidential telephone switchboard had been bombed. General Ayoubi had no choice but to remain at his headquarters in case an order came from the President concerning the use of special weapons.
General Ayoubi envisioned that fourteen missiles were to be launched, simultaneously, against targets in Haifa and Tel Aviv. On the morning of January 18, at 3 am sharp, Ayoubi’s phone rang. It was Colonel Adnan Anjad al-Dulaimi, the Commander of Unit 224, announcing that the launchers were in position. General Ayoubi gave the order to launch.
The crew of 10th battery began their journey west after sunset on the evening of January 17, using the darkness of the night to mask their movements. Their commander, Staff Major Sabah Anwar al-Majid, had calculated that they had more than 130 kilometers—or roughly 80 miles—to go before they would reach the southern axis headquarters at Kilometer 160, which was manned by the command staff of the 2nd battalion, Colonel Abbas Salman Muhammad, one of the most experienced officers in the Brigade.
Of all the launchers in motion that night, the 10th had the shortest distance to travel, and given the need to stagger the departure of the launchers, it was the last launcher to depart the Ramadi missile support site. With a fully fueled missile onboard, Staff Major al-Majid’s crew could only manage to travel between 30 and 40 kilometers (18-24 miles) per hour. Moreover, they would be limited to paved or improved roads—the older model MAZ-543 in use with the Iraqi Army was not designed for off-road operation. With a hard 3 am launch window and factoring in the need to pause along the way to make sure there were no hostile aircraft operating in the vicinity of the route between Ramadi and Kilometer 160, Staff Major al-Majid figured it would take him approximately five hours to reach his launch site. Just before 10 pm, he and his men drove their MAZ-543 onto the road, headed west.
Up until October 1990, Staff Major Sabah al-Majid and the men of the 10th battery were simply known as the Combat Training Unit, or CTU. Together with their MAZ-543 launcher, the men were assigned to the Surface-to-Surface Missile School, located in the Baghdad suburb of Abu Ghraib, just to the west of Saddam International Airport. Their job was to train the officers and men who would man the operational batteries of the Al Hussein Missile Force. Like Staff Major al-Majid, most of the men assigned to the school as instructors were veterans of the War of the Cities, with dozens of operational launches under their belts.
But they had not been a part of the pre-war activities that their comrades had participated in—the mobilization out west in the spring and summer of 1990, or the extensive pre-war reconnaissance activity scouting out routes, launch sites and potential hide locations that occurred later in the fall. Their incorporation into the operational ranks of the Al Hussein Force was delayed for a few days while the launcher arm on their MAZ-543 was extended to accommodate the longer Al Hussein missile (at the school the instructors had used a standard SCUD training missile to practice loading and launch procedures, so the launch arm was never modified.) By November 1990, the Combat Training Unit had been assigned to the 3rd battalion, where it was designated as the 10th battery.
The traffic was light, and the 10th battery made good time, arriving at Kilometer 160 around 2 am on the morning of January 18. There the crew received their launch site location—Wadi Amij—and were assigned a road security team consisting of BRDM-2 and BTR-60 armored vehicles manned by security forces from the 1st Commando Brigade, as well as a guide team from the 2nd Battalion’s technical battery. They had another 15 kilometers, or 10 miles, to cover before they reached their launch site, and a firm 3 am launch time to adhere to.
About eight kilometers—five miles—from their launch site, the 10th battery and its security detail stopped at their final hide site—camouflage nets held up by tent poles that were tucked into a ravine alongside the highway and guarded by a detachment from the 1st Commando Brigade. There they waited while a call was placed back to Kilometer 160 to check on the air threat condition. The 10th battery was heading to an area that had been attacked the night before, and the system of air watch units along the border with Saudi Arabia was on alert for any new wave of coalition aircraft. None had been detected, and once the all-clear signal was received, the 10th battery, together with its guide and security teams, removed the canvas tarps that had been covering their missile and slowly drove to the launch site, down the dirt roads that slowed their pace to a crawl.
The specific site had been pre-surveyed by Unit 224 back in August 1990, reconnoitered by the 10th battery crew during their reconnaissance earlier in January, and as recently as January 17 a survey team had been operating in the area, looking for suitable hide sites (an F-15E air raid caught this survey team in the open, and as a result two of its members were wounded.) the launch site was easy to find—a staked-out square carved into the ground with two-meter sides, and a ten-meter continuation on one side, representing the direction of launch. Three survey markers, in a triangular configuration, were centered on the square to aid in setting the launch azimuth, or direction of flight. Once their site had been located and confirmed by the guide, the crew simply drove their launcher to the pre-surveyed location, centered its rear over the square, and oriented the body along the continuation marker. Thus positioned, the crew rapidly set about preparing their missile for launch.
This was the period of the greatest vulnerability for the launcher and the crew—with a missile in launch position, the launcher was stuck in place, a figurative sitting duck. The crew needed to act with speed and deliberation—any needless delay would expose them to certain death at the hands of an American bomb.
First the airframe was screwed onto the launch platform of the launcher. The hydraulic launch support pads were then lowered to the ground, leveling the launcher, and locked into place. Next the TG-02 starter fuel was loaded into the missile from pressurized storage tanks onboard the launcher (once the starter fuel was inserted, the missile had to be launched within an hour, or else the fuel would lose its hypergolic qualities, and fail to ignite.)
The launch control cable, or umbilical, was attached to the bottom of the missile, and then the launch arm was slowly raised, bringing the missile to a vertical position. The travel locks holding the missile to the launch arm were then released, and the launch arm returned to its original position. The missile was now fully erect, and ready for launch. The well-trained crew of the 10th battery accomplished these tasks within a matter of minutes.
The final step in the launch preparation was for the missile crew to hand-crank the launch platform to the desired azimuth. The needed adjustments were minor, since the crew was using a pre-surveyed site, and the launch table had been pre-set according to the anticipated direction of launch back in Ramadi, when the target was designated.
Staff Major al-Majid checked his watch. They had been on site less than ten minutes, and it was only a few minutes before 3 am, their designated launch time. Without a word, the crew made its way into the launch control compartment of the launcher, conducted the final pre-launch checks, and then evacuated to a location some 20 meters distant, where they initiated the launch by pressing a button on a cable connected to the onboard launch panel.
The crew of 10th battery had launched missiles on numerous occasions against the Iranians during the War of the Cities. But this time they were targeting Israel, a feat no Arab army had accomplished before them. A bright flash appeared in at the base of the launch platform, followed by a cloud of dirt and debris as the Al-Hussein struggled to free itself from the forces of earth’s gravitational field. The missile slowly climbed into the night sky, before disappearing into the thick cloud cover that hung over the desolate desert below. The noise was deafening, and the crew of the 10th battery was buffeted by the force of the exhaust from the missile. As the dust and debris from the launch subsided, the crew watched the missile climb into the dark sky, arching through the heavens toward its ultimate destiny some 650 kilometers, or 400 miles, to the west.
Once the missile was away, the survival of the 10th battery and its crew was measured in terms of minutes. Above them, the infra-red sensors of the American DSP satellites had already detected the launch of their missile, broadcasting its point of origin (and anticipated point of impact) to waiting mission planners in Riyadh and elsewhere. Soon the F-15E Strike Eagles flying combat air patrol would be vectored to that spot. Despite the cloud coverage, any aircraft flying within a hundred miles of the launch site would see the missile in flight and orient themselves to the launch site. If they were within 50-60 miles of the launch, the aircraft could be at the launch site in less than five minutes; if the 10th battery was still there, its chances of surviving the night were nil.
With the missile safely launched and away, the crew of the 10th battery rapidly hand-cranked the launch platform back into travel position and raised the hydraulic support pads. Normally they would collect the umbilical’s that had been attached to the missile, but on this occasion, they left them where they lay, either on the ground or draped over the launcher itself. It was imperative that they put as much distance between themselves and the launch site as quickly as possible. They made their way back to the final hide site, where the crew drove the launcher underneath the camouflage netting and draped the launch table and the rear of the launcher with canvas tarps to shield the heated metal from any prying infra-red sensors. And then they waited.
The work of the crew of the 10th battery was only just beginning. Their security detail had contacted the command post at Kilometer 160, which confirmed that there were no aircraft inbound to their location at this time. The crew backed their launcher out from underneath the camouflage netting, secured the tarps and cables onto the launcher, and headed back toward Ramadi, where they would pick up another missile, target and launch instructions from the command staff of the Al-Hussein Force before heading back west, to do the same mission all over again the next morning.
The lone Al-Hussein missile launched by the 10th battery was less than two minutes into its flight when the Defense Support Program Office (DSPO), analyzing data collected by a constellation of early warning infra-red detection satellites hovering in geosynchronous orbit over the Indian Ocean and elsewhere, was able to pinpoint the location of the launch. An alert was transmitted from the National Security Agency, responsible for overseeing satellite intelligence, to the North America Air Defense Command (NORAD) Headquarters in Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, which in turn broadcast a “missile event” notice to the National Military Command Center (NMCC) in Washington, DC.
The DSPO satellites were a product of the Cold War, originally positioned to detect missile launches from within the borders of the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, a “missile event” meant that the Soviet Union had launched one of its intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and the men and women stationed in the underground command post at Cheyenne Mountain had to determine if the launch was real, and if so, whether it was a test or the real thing. They had less than twenty minutes to make the call, or else risk a Soviet pre-emptive attack taking out American ICBMs in their silos before they could be launched in retaliation. In the lead-up to the Gulf War, several DSPO satellites in the vicinity of the Indian Ocean were reconfigured so that their sensors would pick up any missile launch coming from Iraq. When the “missile alert” message came into the NMCC, the duty staff knew that the United States was not under the risk of a sneak attack from the Soviet Union.
While the DSPO satellites provided an indication of launch regarding Iraqi missiles, impact prediction was provided by a mechanical tracking radar, the AN/FPS-79, located near the village of Pirinçlik, outside the eastern Turkish city of Diyarbakir. The AN/FPS-79 was part of a two-radar system installed at Pirinçlik which was jointly operated by the US Air Force and the Turkish military. The first of these, a detection radar known as the AN/FPS-17, was set up in 1955 to monitor missile launches from the Soviet missile test facility at Kapustin Yar. The success of the AN/FPS-17 led to the decision in 1964 to co-locate an AN/FPS-79 with the AN/FPS-17, providing expanded tracking capability for objects, such as Soviet satellites, released in space.
Almost immediately after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, on August 2, 1990, the US began negotiations with the Turkish General Staff to allow the AN/FPS-79 radar to be reoriented toward Iraq and placed in a missile monitoring mode. These negotiations concluded on August 9, and the alterations in mission profile for the AN/FPS-79 implemented on that date. While the DSPO satellites provided timely launch notification, they were not able to provide an accurate impact prediction. This is where the unique capability of the AN/FPS-79 came in—once missile launch was detected, the AN/FPS-79 was able to track the ballistic trajectory of a missile and provide an accurate prediction of impact.
Through sheer serendipity, it turned out that the area in western Iraq used by Iraq to launch their SCUD missiles against Israel fell into the optimum operating parameters of the AN/FPS-79 radar. If the Iraqis had launched their missiles further to the north, they would have fallen within the minimum operating range of 180 miles, nullifying the utility of the AN/FPS-79. Likewise, launches further south would have not climbed high enough in the sky for the AN/FPS-79 to acquire them, due to the curvature of the earth.[12] The only real operational problem came from the US Air Force itself, which during the early stages of the war jammed the AN/FPS-79 radar using EF-111 Raven aircraft operating in northern Iraq. This problem was quickly rectified, and the AN/FPS-79 was able to provide accurate impact prediction of Iraqi SCUD launches throughout the war.[13]
A duty officer in the NMCC picked up the handset of a secure satellite telephone, code-named Hammer Rick, that connected him to a counterpart located in a hut adjacent to the Defense Ministry Headquarters building in the Kirya, Israel’s Defense Ministry compound in the heart of Tel Aviv, and notified him of the pending strike. A threat warning was then transmitted to the Israeli Air Force’s underground command post, only a few hundred meters away. By the time the DSPO launch warning data and AN/FPS-79 impact prediction data were consolidated and transmitted to Israel, there was less than five minutes before the Iraqi missiles would hit their targets.
The duty officer that night, Major General Giorra Romm, had the somber task of issuing the first nation-wide alert that Israel was under attack in over 20 years. Across the tiny Mediterranean nation, the alternating high-low tones of air raid sirens were heard, and on every radio and television channel in the country the code phrase Nahasha Tsefa (Viper Snake) was broadcast, instructing all Israelis to don their gas masks and seek shelter in special “sealed rooms” they had been instructed to prepare in the days and weeks leading up to the conflict.[14]
Immediately F-16 fighters scrambled to intercept any potential strike force of Iraqi fighters. But there was nothing General Romm could do about the incoming missile—with its Patriot missiles in storage, and their crews still undergoing training in the US, Israel had no defense against such an attack. By the time General Romm issued the alert, the missile was only two minutes from impact.
The Al-Hussein missile fired by the 10th battery exhausted its fuel supply eighty seconds into its flight, creating a situation long known to plague the indigenously modified Iraqi missile—its center of gravity, due to the combined effects of a lengthened airframe and reduced warhead mass, was shifted away from the tip of the missile, where the warhead was located, toward the back. The resultant instability caused the missile to fall to the earth in a horizontal configuration—flat, as opposed to nose down—creating stresses on the missile airframe that caused the missile to break apart above the engine compartment.
The warhead section had begun to corkscrew due to the instability created by the shift in the missiles center of gravity brought on by the depletion of fuel, when the tail, with its four fins, separated. The missile was now in two pieces, consisting of the tail section, and the warhead still attached to the bulk of the now-empty fuel tanks. The corkscrewing continued, creating even greater stress on the missile airframe, causing the missile to crack open along the seam between the guidance section and the oxidizer tank, in effect folding the warhead back in on the missile, before shearing off completely, falling to the ground on its own.
Back in the United States, many Americans were watching the evening news, where reporters on the ground in Israel universally downplayed the possibility of an Iraqi missile attack. ABC’s Jerusalem correspondent, Dean Reynolds, was particularly dismissive of the threat posed by Iraq’s SCUD missiles, underscoring what he termed the Israeli surprise at what they termed a “lame Iraqi response”, and further noting that many Israelis never viewed Saddam Hussein as a threat to their country. Reynold’s went on to report that many Israelis were “enjoying the fact that Americans are doing the fighting.”
Reynold’s reporting was backed up by ABC’s Pentagon correspondent, Bob Zelnik, who parroted US military claims that the fixed arm launchers in Iraq had been largely destroyed, and that the threat from Iraq’s mobile launchers was minimal.
At 7.04 pm, Dean Reynold’s broke into ABC News Anchor Peter Jenning’s coverage to report that air raid sirens were sounding in Tel Aviv. Reynold’s and his crew then scrambled to put on their gas masks. As they were doing so, explosions could be heard in the background. This all transpired live, played out before the American public in real time.[15]
Throughout Israel, people made their way to protective shelters and donned their gas masks. Within seconds of one another, the three Al Hussein missiles launched by the 1st battalion impacted in the water of the Mediterranean Sea, right off the coast. The 10th battery’s missile struck a small propane tank at the entrance of the Lev HaMifratz shopping mall, which was under construction, exploding with a bright green flame that observers interpreted as meaning the warhead was chemical. Special hazardous materials crews dispatched to the scene quickly determined that the warhead was conventional explosive.
Had the mall been opened, there is no doubt the explosive force of the warhead would have killed or wounded scores, if not more. Since it was empty, there were no casualties—only damage estimated in the amount of $6 million. But it could have been much worse. Most of Israel’s petrochemical industries are concentrated within a mile radius of the mall—one deviation in any direction in terms of the missiles flight, and the result could have been catastrophic. By way of example, if the missile had hit a nearby 12,000-ton storage tank containing liquid ammonia, almost everyone within a two-mile radius of the mall would have been killed.
The Israeli reaction to the initial SCUD attack was surprisingly quite subdued. In a series of conversation between Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens and US Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Arens expressed his dismay over the attacks—some eight in all. Cheney assured Mr. Arens that the US/coalition air forces were actively hunting down the Iraqi SCUDs, and that the threat posed by those missiles should soon pass. In a later conversation that same day, Cheney also agreed to dispatch US Patriot batteries for the defense of Israel (the same missiles which had been rejected by Israel barely a week past); four Patriot batteries, accompanied by nearly 100 US troops, were airlifted from their bases in Germany to Israel beginning January 19.
President George Bush contacted Israeli Prime Minister Shamir twice in a span of twelve hours, reiterating the points that had been made to Mr. Arens by Mr. Cheney—that US/coalition air forces were, even as they spoke, delivering devastating strikes against the Iraqi SCUD forces in western Iraq, and that US Patriot missiles and crews would be in Israel shortly. President Bush acknowledged Israel’s right for military retaliation but stated that any massive air-ground strike by Israel now would only aid Iraq politically and threaten the coalition of western and Arab forces Bush had assembled for the war.
Curiously, President Bush proposed that if Israel felt that it had to retaliate for political reasons, then the best option might be an Israeli Jericho missile strike against Iraqi airfields in northern Iraq (Moshe Arens quietly dismissed the idea before it could gain any traction). Shamir thanked President Bush for his concern. While not promising to hold off conducting military operations against Iraq, Mr. Shamir did seem amenable to the US efforts to protect Israel.
Not all in Israel took such a position. Even as Dick Cheney was reassuring Moshe Arens that the Iraqi SCUD threat was soon to pass, and that there was no need for Israeli retaliation, General Avihu Bin-Nun, the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Air Force, had scrambled a squadron of 16 Israeli F-16 fighters to protect Israel from any follow-on attacks against its territory that may have been undertaken by the Iraqi Air Force, in particular the modern SU-24 “Fencer” bombers Iraq had recently received from the Soviet Union.
General Bin-Nun’s actions were representative of a large faction within the Israeli Government which favored active military retaliation against Iraq. This proclivity was prominently displayed at a meeting of the Ministerial Committee on National Security held on 18 January, in which Shamir—while forestalling any immediate retaliatory actions—directed the Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, Dan Shomron, to draw up detailed plans for military action against Iraq should the SCUD attacks continue.
The Bush administration, meanwhile, was desperate to head off any Israeli retaliation, and were searching for any indication that their counter-SCUD plan was working. They found it in the intelligence gathered by a single TR-1 surveillance aircraft flying along the Saudi Arabian-Iraq border on January 18. The TR-1 was a tactical version of the fabled U-2 high-altitude surveillance aircraft. Equipped with an advanced synthetic aperture radar system (ASARS) similar in concept to the radar used on the Onyx/Mission 3103 satellite, the TR-1 was intended to fly reconnaissance missions in Europe, flying along the border between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. The TR-1transmitted data in real time to a support van located next to the Joint Reconnaissance Cell (JRC), at Riyadh International Airport.
According to the Air Medal citation awarded for this mission, the TR-1 pilot was “re-tasked in-flight to image a suspected concentration of SCUD missile launchers deep inside Iraq.” The pilot “deviated from the planned orbit and proceeded north, well into Iraq,” where he “managed to position his aircraft so that on-board sensors enabled ground site personnel to confirm the presence of ten SCUD missile launchers. The precise latitude and longitude of each launcher was passed to United States Central Command’s targeting cell.” Within the hour, “all ten SCUD missile sites were destroyed by a strike package of F-111, F-15, and B-52 aircraft.” Solely based upon the intelligence gathered by the TR-1, “Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney was able to brief the successful destruction of SCUDs the next day.”
The JRC report detailing its analysis of the TR-1 mission ended up on my desk. I looked it over and determined that it did not meet the criteria for a confirmed kill. The Secretary of Defense may have claimed that ten mobile SCUD launchers had been destroyed. The CENTCOM tally, however, which I was responsible for maintaining, said zero.
Round Two
General Ayoubi’s plan called for three consecutive days of missile strikes against Israel. No plan, however, survives initial contact with the enemy. Of the fourteen missiles scheduled to be fired on the first night, only eight had been launched. None of the Al Nida launchers from Unit 223 were able to participate due to technical issues brought on by the movement over rough roads and terrain. Likewise, two of the MAZ-543 launchers likewise suffered problems that resulted in their missiles failing to launch.
General Ayoubi ordered the Al Nida launchers to remain in place and effect repairs so that they could participate in the second wave of attacks on the morning of January 19. All the MAZ-543 launchers were to return to Ramadi and be loaded up with new freshly fueled missiles, including the two that had experienced malfunctions. This proved to be more difficult than planned due to the combination of a heavy presence of hostile aircraft overhead and bad weather (a heavy fog bank had settled in over western Iraq, severely reducing visibility).
At 6 pm that night, General Ayoubi received a message that he was to meet with Colonel Abid Hamid Mahmud, Saddam Hussein’s Secretary, at a secret location in downtown Baghdad, in anticipation of a meeting with the President. Colonel Abid passed on the concerns of the President about the security of the mobile launchers while in transit, especially from hostile intelligence services and special forces.
When Saddam Hussein arrived at the meeting, he emphasized the same point, instructing General Ayoubi to coordinate with the Military Intelligence Directorate for the assignment of security teams who would follow the missile launchers while transiting through the greater Baghdad region. The President then congratulated General Ayoubi and the men of the Al Hussein Force on the initial attack against Israel and gave the green light for continued operations.[16]
The second wave of missile attacks on Israel had been planned for just before 1 am on the morning of January 19. Because of the harsh conditions, however, none of the launchers were in place at that time. Indeed, it became clear that most of the launchers would still be in transit to their launch sites at sunrise, creating an extremely hazardous situation. General Ayoubi considered calling off the attack but opted instead to press forward. Fortunately for the Al Hussein Force, the fog bank that had hindered their movement also protected them from being detected by the coalition. By 8.15 am, the second wave of missile attacks occurred, with three MAZ-543 launchers and one Al Nida launcher able to successfully complete their mission.
Three of the Al Hussein missiles fell in Tel Aviv, with one scoring a direct hit on a multi-story building. The warhead failed to explode, however, and was recovered intact by Israeli explosives disposal crews from a ground-floor jewelry store. A second Al Hussein hit directly next to a municipal center in Tel Aviv’s Hatkiva district, blowing open an unoccupied basement bomb shelter; this missile landed a scant 300 meters from an Al Hussein impact from the day before in the Ezra district of Tel Aviv. Of the 30 people reported injured in this attack, most of the casualties were from this strike. A third Al Hussein struck Yarkon Park, adjacent to the Tel Aviv exhibition center. The fourth and final Al Hussein flew long, landing in the water off the coast of the city.[17]
Buster Glosson had nearly panicked during the afternoon of January 18. The Iraqi SCUD attack on Israel had Washington, DC in an uproar—something needed to be done to demonstrate to the Israelis that the United States had the SCUD problem under control. That “something” was to divert 12 F-15E fighters from a planned bombing mission on an ammunition dump in southern Iraq to basically repeat the first night of the war, bombing the fixed arm launchers in western Iraq. A four-aircraft flight of F-15E’s was dispatched to hit targets around Al Qaim. As had happened on the 17th, the moment the first bomb went off, “it was like someone turned on a light switch,” Captain Keith Johnson recalled, “the whole world just erupted. It was like a flowing river of light. The whole earth was a different color, with white, orange and red fireballs coming up.”[18]
Many of those fireballs were from SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), a threat the F-15E’s did not have to face the on the first night. The first two F-15E’s managed to drop their bombs before having to execute a series of violent maneuvers designed to get the missiles to miss. The last two F-15E’s did not even get that opportunity—they were forced to stop their attack runs and flee the area, evading more missiles as they did so.
The F-15E’s were sent back to Al Qaim the next night, again for the purpose of being seen to be doing something—anything—to stop the Iraqi SCUDs. This time the Iraqis were waiting for them. The Iraqis greeted the F-15E’s with a mass launch of ground-launched flares, which rose to the height of 13,000 feet before going off. “They would go whoosh, pop, and they would just hang and slowly fall in the air,” Captain Larry Bowers, a Weapons Systems Officer, remembered. “They were everywhere just to light us up.” His pilot, Lieutenant Colonel Robin Scott, noted that “It was an old World War Two technique, and it worked like a champ.”[19]
The F-15E’s had flown into a well-prepared ambush. In addition to massive amounts of AAA, the crews had to deal with up to fourteen SAMs being launched against them. Colonel Dave Eberly was ten miles away from his target—a fixed arm launcher located in Wadi Jabariyah—when the Iraqi air defenses opened fire. Eight miles out, as he started to maneuver his aircraft to avoid an incoming SA-2, he was struck by AAA, forcing both he and his Weapons Systems Officer, Major Tom Griffith, to eject.
In the early stages of the Missile War, the Iraqis had drawn first blood.
By the end of January 18, it was apparent to all that Israel had been attacked not by a handful of SCUD missiles designed to make a political statement, but rather by a full-scale salvo intended to cause death and destruction among the citizens and cities of Israel. Late in the evening of 18 January the Israeli government communicated its desire to Washington, DC for armed retaliation, again using the dedicated Hammer Rick secure communications link. An intense, emotional request for a two-day period of deconfliction over western Iraq (in effect a total stand-down of US-coalition air activity so that Israeli Air and Ground Forces could have unimpeded access to Iraqi targets) was passed by Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Arens to his American counterpart, Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.
Cheney, in concert with the Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and President Bush, reiterated the US position to the Israeli government—the Air Tasking Order was not to be impeded, the counter-SCUD effort was being intensified, and Israeli armed intervention would not only put the delicately assembled coalition at risk, but, if done without the approval of the United States, would also inevitably result in armed confrontation between US and Israeli aircraft over western Iraq.
Arens, however, pressed home his point of how seriously Israel regarded the turn of events. Over the secure telephone, the Israeli Minister of Defense detailed the Israeli plan for destroying and/or disrupting the Iraqi capability to launch its SCUD missiles which had been drawn up by Dan Shamron and General Avi Bin-Nun (the plan had been in place since mid-summer 1990 and was constantly updated by the IDF Chief of Staff to reflect available Israeli assets and the current situation involving coalition forces.) The plan was a modification of a long-standing IDF contingency to conduct pre-emptive interdiction strikes against Iraqi ground and air forces staged in or moving through western Iraq in time of actual or pending conflict and would involve hundreds of aircraft and thousands of men being deployed into western Iraq for several days.
To assuage the Israelis and stay their hand when it came to a retaliatory strike, the US offered to increase the level of its intelligence cooperation. Before the initiation of hostilities on 16 January, the US government had undertaken an intelligence-sharing program designed to mollify Israeli concerns about Iraq, and thus prevent a pre-emptive Israeli attack. This effort was operated out of the Department of Defense Joint Intelligence Center (DOD JIC) and the information was passed to the Israeli military attaché office in Washington, DC.
Immediately prior to Operation Desert Storm getting underway, when the Israeli concern over the Iraqi SCUD threat became more focused, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) formed a joint crisis response team that was dispatched to Tel Aviv for the purpose of sharing operational information and intelligence derived from and concerning the war effort, as well as to process Israeli concerns into tangible targets for attack by the US-coalition air forces.
This element, however, was far removed from the actual planning that went into producing the daily Air Tasking Order in the Black Hole in Riyadh. Any potential SCUD-related target information shared by Israel had to make its way back, through channels, to Washington, DC, where it was subjected to further review and analysis before finally making its way to the war planners in Saudi Arabia. This system was not responsive to Israeli needs and concerns and did little to alleviate Israeli concerns over the Iraqi missile attacks.
Once it became clear that Israel was serious about retaliating against Iraq for the missile attacks on its cities, the White House ordered CENTCOM to dispatch USAF Major General Tom Olson, the deputy director for operations in the Gulf, together with a small support team, to Tel Aviv to share satellite photographs of suspected SCUD sites in western Iraq that were being used by CENTCOM to target the Iraqi SCUDs. Olson and his team arrived in Tel Aviv on the evening of January 18 and were ushered into Aren’s office in the Kirya.
Much to the shock of the Israelis in attendance, the imagery brought by Olson dated back to December 17, 1990—scarcely the kind of timely intelligence that could be useful for any Israeli strike, or to engender confidence in the success of the ongoing US air strikes in western Iraq. When Olson stated that these were the same photographs CENTCOM had used to plan its counter-SCUD operations in western Iraq, and that in any case he was not authorized to conduct any operational coordination with the Israeli Air Force, the Israelis knew that they were not going to be getting any help from CENTCOM. Israel was on its own.
The United States did, however, take the Israeli threat of retaliation seriously. In Washington DC, Prince Bandar, the Saudi Arabian ambassador, was requested to approach King Fahd concerning Saudi granting of over flight rights. The response was a decisive “no”. The Joint Staff passed on to CENTCOM the details of the Israeli plan, and initial contingencies were drafted to clear the skies of western Iraq of coalition aircraft if Israel decided to intervene. The Joint Staff even went so far as to propose (at the suggestion of the senior DIA liaison officer in Tel Aviv, Major General Armstrong) the placement of Israeli officers within the CENTCOM staff in Riyadh, something CENTCOM rejected as unrealistic and, ultimately, ineffectual, and counterproductive.
The Iraqis started getting feedback regarding the effectiveness of their initial missile strikes on Israel. An intelligence report, prepared on January 20 using data from the previous days, noted that:
Missiles hit in the area of the Defense Ministry and major communications stations in Tel-Aviv. The attack was effective. It caused a major panic. The state of emergency and readiness was declared in bases, airports, and hospitals. Israel has amassed its forces along the borders of Jordan and Syria.[20]
The Iraqi reports of panic, however, were overstated. Through skillful diplomacy combined with vehement promises to increase the US/Coalition counter-SCUD effort, President Bush was able to forestall an Israeli retaliatory strike.
This desire was transformed into reality on 19 January, when Prime Minister Shamir formally announced that Israel would not be launching an immediate retaliatory strike against Iraq, and this only after a lengthy and emotional debate within the Israeli inner cabinet. But it had become obvious to the policy makers in Washington DC that something more had to be done to stop the Iraqi SCUD attacks. The longer Iraq was able to launch its SCUD missiles towards Israel, the more likely Israel was to enter the conflict, regardless of the consequences. The United States was running out of time.
[1] The existence of Mission 3101 was only acknowledged in 2008. See Jeffrey Richelson, “Ups and Downs of Space Radars”, Air Force Magazine, January 1, 2009. Even the existence of the organization responsible for operating this satellite, the National Reconnaissance Organization, or NRO, wasn’t declassified until September 1992. See Donald Atwood, Deputy Secretary of Defense, “Memorandum for Correspondents”, No. 264-M, September 18, 1992.
[2] Richelson, “Ups and Downs of Space Radars”, p. 69.
[3] This constellation of satellites were the “capabilities” discussed in a December 19, 1983, memorandum prepared by the Arms Control Intelligence Staff (ACIS) for the Director, CIA in response to “gaps” in the coverage of Soviet arms control-related targets.
[4] According to Jeffrey Richelson, the resolution of the Mission 3101 satellite was about 5-10 feet. See Richelson, “Ups and Downs of Space Radars”, p. 69.
[5] This action apparently irritated General Norman Schwarzkopf as well. In his memoir of the Gulf War, Schwarzkopf lambasted the insistence on the part of BDA analysts that the strike criteria be met. “Early on in the SCUD hunt”, Schwarzkopf wrote, “they told us that the fixed missile launchers in western Iraq were only ‘twenty five percent damaged.’ Even though those launchers never fired a SCUD, we couldn’t take chances and so sent dozens of planes to hit them again.” Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take a Hero (Bantam Books: New York, 1992), p. 430. The true number of launchers damaged was far less than the 25% cited by Schwarzkopf.
[6] The Israeli perspective is taken largely from Moshe Arens’ book, Broken Covenant: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis Between the US and Israel (Simon & Schuster: New York, 1995.)
[7] David Hoffman, “Baker, Saudi King Discuss Possible Battle Plans”, The Washington Post, January 12, 1991.
[8] James Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy (Putnam: New York, 1995), p. 356.
[9] William L. Smallwood, Strike Eagle: Flying the F-15E in the Gulf War (Brassey’s: McClean, Virginia, 1994), p. 78.
[10] Smallwood, Strike Eagle, p. 74.
[11] The details about the Iraqi operations during the war are a compilation of interviews conducted by the author, as well as the recollections of General Hazem Abdul-Razzaq Shihab Ayoubi set forth in his book, Forty-Three Missiles on the Zionist Enemy (Al Zawra: Baghdad, 1999), and in the War Journals of both Unit 223 and Unit 224.
[12] Indeed, when Iraq first launched SCUD missiles into Saudi Arabia, on January 20, the AN/FPS-79 was unable to track them. The US Air Force changed the elevation, azimuth and range parameters of the radar beam, and all future launches against Saudi Arabia and the Gulf Arab States from southern Iraq were successfully tracked. See United States Space Command, Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm Assessment, January 1992, p.24.
[13] Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm Assessment, p.24.
[14] Michael Omer-Man, “This week in history: Saddam terrorizes Israel”, The Jerusalem Post, January 15, 2012.
[15] Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf TV War (Westview Press: Boulder, Colorado, 1992), pp. 231-232.
[16] Ayoubi, 43 Missiles, p. 13.
[17] Lewis, Fetter, and Gronlund, Casualties and Damage from SCUD Attacks in the Gulf War, p. 43.
[18] Smallwood, Strike Eagle, p. 107.
[19] Smallwood, Strike Eagle, p. 114.
[20] Kevin Woods, Iraqi Perspectives Project Phase II: Um Al-Ma’arik (The Mother of all Battles), Operational and Strategic Insights from an Iraqi Perspective, Volume 1 (Institute for Defense Analysis: Alexandria, Virginia, 2008), p. 244.
Rumble has now COMPLETELY ELIMINATED both Ian Carroll’s podcasts – a NEW and MAJOR step in silencing top opponents of Trump’s Israel First policy
Incredible evolution of Charlie Kirk (starts at 8.20 minute)
From a rabid genocide-denial Christian Zionist, that is a non-Christian a la Mike Huckabee -- to basic human decency and a true Christian – Rumble “cancelled” !!
Ian Carroll - The Truth About Israel's Genocide in Gaza – Oct 14, 2025
https://rumble.com/v70bdjs-ian-carroll-the-truth-about-israels-genocide-in-gaza.html?e9s=src_v1_clr%2Csrc_v1_ucp_a
Ian Carroll - The Truth About Israel's Genocide in Gaza – Liberty Vault
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0usJI2r59Y
It is amazing how you remember all these details. Your book is very valuable. Thank you so much, Scott, for this new book and also for all your awesome work that you do.