The Armageddon Plan
by James Mann
At least once a year during the 1980s ***** Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld
vanished. Cheney was working diligently on Capitol Hill, as a
congressman rising through the ranks of the Republican leadership.
Rumsfeld, who had served as Gerald Ford's Secretary of Defense, was a
hard-driving business executive in the Chicago area—where, as the head
of G. D. Searle & Co., he dedicated time and energy to the success of
such commercial products as Nutra-Sweet, Equal, and Metamucil. Yet for
periods of three or four days at a time no one in Congress knew where
Cheney was, nor could anyone at Searle locate Rumsfeld. Even their
wives were in the dark; they were handed only a mysterious Washington
phone number to use in case of emergency.
After leaving their day jobs Cheney and Rumsfeld usually made their
way to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington. From there, in the
middle of the night, each man—joined by a team of forty to sixty
federal officials and one member of Ronald Reagan's Cabinet—slipped
away to some remote location in the United States, such as a disused
military base or an underground bunker. A convoy of lead-lined trucks
carrying sophisticated communications equipment and other gear would
head to each of the locations.
Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly
classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S.
officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for
keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war
with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal
rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a
secret procedure for putting in place a new "President" and his staff.
The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve "continuity of
government," and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the
House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of
Congress would play a greatly diminished role.
The inspiration for this program came from within the Administration
itself, not from Cheney or Rumsfeld; except for a brief stint Rumsfeld
served as Middle East envoy, neither of them ever held office in the
Reagan Administration. Nevertheless, they were leading figures in the
program.
A few details about the effort have come to light over the years, but
nothing about the way it worked or the central roles played by Cheney
and Rumsfeld. The program is of particular interest today because it
helps to explain the thinking and behavior of the second Bush
Administration in the hours, days, and months after the terrorist
attacks on September 11, 2001. Vice President Cheney urged President
Bush to stay out of Washington for the rest of that day; Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld ordered his deputy Paul Wolfowitz to get out of town;
Cheney himself began to move from Washington to a series of
"undisclosed locations"; and other federal officials were later sent
to work outside the capital, to ensure the continuity of government in
case of further attacks. All these actions had their roots in the
Reagan Administration's clandestine planning exercises.
The U.S. government considered the possibility of a nuclear war with
the Soviet Union more seriously during the early Reagan years than at
any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Reagan had
spoken in his 1980 campaign about the need for civil-defense programs
to help the United States survive a nuclear exchange, and once in
office he not only moved to boost civil defense but also approved a
new defense-policy document that included plans for waging a
protracted nuclear war against the Soviet Union. The exercises in
which Cheney and Rumsfeld participated were a hidden component of
these more public efforts to prepare for nuclear war.
The premise of the secret exercises was that in case of a nuclear
attack on Washington, the United States needed to act swiftly to avoid
"decapitation"—that is, a break in civilian leadership. A core element
of the Reagan Administration's strategy for fighting a nuclear war
would be to decapitate the Soviet leadership by striking at top
political and military officials and their communications lines; the
Administration wanted to make sure that the Soviets couldn't do to
America what U.S. nuclear strategists were planning to do to the
Soviet Union.
Under the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations the U.S. government
had built large underground installations at Mount Weather, in
Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, and near Camp David, along the
Pennsylvania-Maryland border, each of which could serve as a military
command post for the President in time of war. Yet a crucial problem
remained: what might happen if the President couldn't make it to one
of those bunkers in time.
The Constitution makes the Vice President the successor if the
President dies or is incapacitated, but it establishes no order of
succession beyond that. Federal law, most recently the Presidential
Succession Act of 1947, establishes further details. If the Vice
President dies or cannot serve, then the speaker of the House of
Representatives becomes President. After him in the line of succession
come the president pro tempore of the Senate (typically the
longest-serving member of the majority party) and then the members of
the Cabinet, in the order in which their posts were created—starting
with the Secretary of State and moving to the Secretary of the
Treasury, the Secretary of Defense, and so on. The Reagan
Administration, however, worried that this procedure might not meet
the split-second needs of an all-out war with the Soviet Union. What
if a nuclear attack killed both the President and the Vice President,
and maybe the speaker of the House, too? Who would run the country if
it was too hard to track down the next living person in line under the
Succession Act? What civilian leader could immediately give U.S.
military commanders the orders to respond to an attack, and how would
that leader communicate with the military? In a continuing nuclear
exchange, who would have the authority to reach an agreement with the
Soviet leadership to bring the war to an end?
The outline of the plan was simple. Once the United States was (or
believed itself about to be) under nuclear attack, three teams would
be sent from Washington to three different locations around the United
States. Each team would be prepared to assume leadership of the
country, and would include a Cabinet member who was prepared to become
President. If the Soviet Union were somehow to locate one of the teams
and hit it with a nuclear weapon, the second team or, if necessary,
the third could take over. This was not some abstract textbook plan;
it was practiced in concrete and elaborate detail. Each team was named
for a color—"red" or "blue," for example—and each had an experienced
executive who could operate as a new White House chief of staff. The
obvious candidates were people who had served at high levels in the
executive branch, preferably with the national-security apparatus.
Cheney and Rumsfeld had each served as White House chief of staff in
the Ford Administration. Other team leaders over the years included
James Woolsey, later the director of the CIA, and Kenneth Duberstein,
who served for a time as Reagan's actual White House chief of staff.
As for the Cabinet members on each team, some had little experience in
national security; at various times, for example, participants in the
secret exercises included John Block, Reagan's first Secretary of
Agriculture, and Malcolm Baldrige, the Secretary of Commerce. What
counted was not experience in foreign policy but, rather, that the
Cabinet member was available. It seems fair to conclude that some of
these "Presidents" would have been mere figureheads for a more
experienced chief of staff, such as Cheney or Rumsfeld. Still, the
Cabinet members were the ones who would issue orders, or in whose name
the orders would be issued.
One of the questions studied in these exercises was what concrete
steps a team might take to establish its credibility. What might be
done to demonstrate to the American public, to U.S. allies, and to the
Soviet leadership that "President" John Block or "President" Malcolm
Baldrige was now running the country, and that he should be treated as
the legitimate leader of the United States? One option was to have the
new "President" order an American submarine up from the depths to the
surface of the ocean—since the power to surface a submarine would be a
clear sign that he was now in full control of U.S. military forces.
This standard—control of the military—is one of the tests the U.S.
government uses in deciding whether to deal with a foreign leader
after a coup d'état.
"One of the awkward questions we faced," one participant in the
planning of the program explains, "was whether to reconstitute
Congress after a nuclear attack. It was decided that no, it would be
easier to operate without them." For one thing, it was felt that
reconvening Congress, and replacing members who had been killed, would
take too long. Moreover, if Congress did reconvene, it might elect a
new speaker of the House, whose claim to the presidency might have
greater legitimacy than that of a Secretary of Agriculture or Commerce
who had been set up as President under Reagan's secret program. The
election of a new House speaker would not only take time but also
create the potential for confusion. The Reagan Administration's
primary goal was to set up a chain of command that could respond to
the urgent minute-by-minute demands of a nuclear war, when there might
be no time to swear in a new President under the regular process of
succession, and when a new President would not have the time to
appoint a new staff. The Administration, however, chose to establish
this process without going to Congress for the legislation that would
have given it constitutional legitimacy.
Ronald Reagan established the continuity-of-government program with a
secret executive order. According to Robert McFarlane, who served for
a time as Reagan's National Security Adviser, the President himself
made the final decision about who would head each of the three teams.
Within Reagan's National Security Council the "action officer" for the
secret program was Oliver North, later the central figure in the
Iran-contra scandal. Vice President George H.W. Bush was given the
authority to supervise some of these efforts, which were run by a new
government agency with a bland name: the National Program Office. It
had its own building in the Washington area, run by a two-star
general, and a secret budget adding up to hundreds of millions of
dollars a year. Much of this money was spent on advanced
communications equipment that would enable the teams to have secure
conversations with U.S. military commanders. In fact, the few details
that have previously come to light about the secret program, primarily
from a 1991 CNN investigative report, stemmed from allegations of
waste and abuses in awarding contracts to private companies, and
claims that this equipment malfunctioned.
The exercises were usually scheduled during a congressional recess, so
that Cheney would miss as little work on Capitol Hill as possible.
Although Cheney, Rumsfeld, and one other team leader took part in each
exercise, the Cabinet members changed depending on who was available
at a particular time. (Once, Attorney General Ed Meese participated in
an exercise that departed from Andrews in the pre-dawn hours of June
18, 1986—the day after Chief Justice Warren Burger resigned. One
official remembers looking at Meese and thinking, "First a Supreme
Court resignation, and now America's in a nuclear war. You're having a
bad day.")
In addition to the designated White House chief of staff and his
President, each team included representatives from the Departments of
State and Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, and also from
various domestic-policy agencies. The idea was to practice running the
entire federal government with a skeletal crew during a nuclear war.
At one point there was talk of bringing in the governors of Virginia
and Maryland and the mayor of the District of Columbia, but the idea
was discarded because they didn't have the necessary security
clearance.
The exercises were designed to be stressful. Participants gathered in
haste, moved and worked in the early-morning hours, lived in Army-base
conditions, and dined on early, particularly unappetizing versions of
the military's dry, mass-produced MREs (meals ready to eat). An entire
exercise lasted close to two weeks, but each team took part for only
three or four days. One team would leave Washington, run through its
drills, and then—as if it were on the verge of being "nuked"—hand off
to the next team.
The plans were carried out with elaborate deception, designed to
prevent Soviet reconnaissance satellites from detecting where in the
United States the teams were going. Thus the teams were sent out in
the middle of the night, and changed locations from one exercise to
the next. Decoy convoys were sometimes dispatched along with the
genuine convoys carrying the communications gear. The underlying logic
was that the Soviets could not possibly target all the makeshift
locations around the United States where the Reagan teams might
operate.
The capstone to all these efforts to stay mobile was a special
airplane, the National Emergency Airborne Command Post, a modified
Boeing 747 based at Andrews and specially outfitted with a conference
room and advanced communications gear. In it a President could remain
in the air and run the country during a nuclear showdown. In one
exercise a team of officials stayed aloft in this plane for three days
straight, cruising up and down the coasts and back and forth across
the country, refueling in the air.
When George H.W. Bush was elected President, in 1988, members of the
secret Reagan program rejoiced; having been closely involved with the
effort from the start, Bush wouldn't need to be initiated into its
intricacies and probably wouldn't re-evaluate it. In fact, despite
dramatically improved relations with Moscow, Bush did continue the
exercises, with some minor modifications. Cheney was appointed
Secretary of Defense and dropped out as a team leader.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet collapse, the
rationale for the exercises changed. A Soviet nuclear attack was
obviously no longer plausible—but what if terrorists carrying nuclear
weapons attacked the United States and killed the President and the
Vice President? Finally, during the early Clinton years, it was
decided that this scenario was farfetched and outdated, a mere legacy
of the Cold War. It seemed that no enemy in the world was still
capable of decapitating America's leadership, and the program was
abandoned.
There things stood until September 11, 2001, when Cheney and Rumsfeld
suddenly began to act out parts of a script they had rehearsed years
before. Operating from the underground shelter beneath the White
House, called the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, Cheney
told Bush to delay a planned flight back from Florida to Washington.
At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld instructed a reluctant Wolfowitz to get out
of town to the safety of one of the underground bunkers, which had
been built to survive nuclear attack. Cheney also ordered House
Speaker Dennis Hastert, other congressional leaders, and several
Cabinet members (including Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman and
Interior Secretary Gale Norton) evacuated to one of these secure
facilities away from the capital. Explaining these actions a few days
later, Cheney vaguely told NBC's Tim Russert, "We did a lot of
planning during the Cold War with respect to the possibility of a
nuclear incident." He did not mention the Reagan Administration
program or the secret drills in which he and Rumsfeld had regularly
practiced running the country.
Their participation in the extra-constitutional
continuity-of-government exercises, remarkable in its own right, also
demonstrates a broad, underlying truth about these two men. For three
decades, from the Ford Administration onward, even when they were out
of the executive branch of government, they were never far away. They
stayed in touch with defense, military, and intelligence officials,
who regularly called upon them. They were, in a sense, a part of the
permanent hidden national-security apparatus of the United
States—inhabitants of a world in which Presidents come and go, but
America keeps on fighting.
James Mann, former Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times,
is senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, in Washington, D.C. This article is adapted
from his book 'Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet'
to be published this month.
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| User: "AtlasDS" |
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| Title: Re: The Armageddon plan |
04 Apr 2004 09:31:52 AM |
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On Sun, 04 Apr 2004 08:34:23 -0400, Zak wrote:
The Armageddon Plan
by James Mann
---SNIPPED ---
Very Very Very interesting... I think I might use a nuclear war outcome of
the coldwar for a story where the united states government turns facist
after a nuclear war.
--
It's better to be a Linux noob than a Microsoft or Stardock zealot.
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