Payback wi-10, page 8
part #10 of WW III Series
“Yeah,” said Sal, “but the Krauts don’t sell our Stingers to terrorists. ’Sides, the President’ll have to do something. These attacks can’t stand. ’Specially not now after this Guatemalan thing.”
“What do you mean?” asked Freeman in alarm.
“You know,” said Sal. “On CNN. FBI agent, or maybe it was the SWAT guy, ran the Guatemalan and he fired the friggin’ thing. Must have had it wired to bypass the trigger circuit. An old terrorist trick in case they get caught in transit. Over twenty killed and wounded, glass and blood everywhere.”
“My God!” said Freeman, switching on the small kitchen TV. “You’re right, Sal. We’re going to have to launch a major payback on this one. Problem is exactly where?”
“Wherever the MID numbers take us to in North Korea,” said Sal. What the hell was the matter with the general? Salvini wondered. Sounded as if he’d been laid—dopey. It was a word Salvini had never thought of before to describe the general, even after he’d reportedly “embedded” CNN’s sexy Marte Price.
“In a way it’s worse than 9/11, Sal. I don’t mean in the number killed or airlines involved, I mean the triple play these bastards have been able to pull off, thousands of miles apart.”
“That’s what I mean,” said Sal. “If we can’t catch all the terrorists that slip into the country, we have to at least take out their source of supply.”
“Of course,” the general agreed. “But where in North Korea? Dammit, it’s the size of Alaska.”
“I know,” said Sal.
CHAPTER FIVE
Down in the White House’s situation room, so often erroneously, if sensationally, described as “the war room,” the President, with full concurrence of the Joint Chiefs and an exhausted Eleanor Prenty, had indeed decided on a retaliatory strike, the kind they’d so often condemned the Israeli government for during the Palestinian Intifada’s suicide attacks against Israelis. But as with most of the Israeli public, the Americans were infuriated by this murderous attack against their own civilians, so many of them children, the public in no mood for half measures, endless fruitless gabfests in the United Nations General Assembly or Security Council.
Doves at the State Department argued forcefully, along with the French, Germans, and Belgians, that there was no evidence it had been a North Korean attack, only that North Korean—made launch equipment had been used. Indeed, the New York Times editorial argued that the attacks could well have been by al Qaeda or any other group that could just as well have used stolen U.S. Stinger missiles. The paper suggested that the post-hostage situation at Dallas/Fort Worth might reveal some vital intelligence that had not yet been discerned that would not implicate North Korea. Such intelligence, the paper contended, would avoid the possibility of a “nuclear exchange,” which, given the treaty of friendship between North Korea and China, could quickly escalate into a full-scale nuclear war, notwithstanding Russia’s de facto associate membership in NATO. Yes, the U.S. could expect immediate help from Japan, at which North Korea had already fired nuclear-warhead-capable-missiles to demonstrate that it could strike Japan at will.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on the other hand, made much of the “strained relationship,” to put it mildly, between Tokyo and North Korea’s capital of Pyongyang, citing how Kim Jong Il had ordered the kidnapping of Japanese off Japan’s bathing beaches over the past forty years by North Korean special forces. These Japanese abductees had been on a beach one moment, disappearing the next. Taken back to North Korea by submarine, they had been forced, by threat of murdering their families back in Japan, to train North Korean spies on how to infiltrate Japan’s large Korean workforce. It was a technique, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution pointed out, that the North Koreans had borrowed from Japan’s wartime use of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, these spies having relayed vital information to Japanese headquarters for the stunningly effective attack against Pearl Harbor.
The Washington Post weighed in with an editorial that doubted the likelihood of the North Koreans being involved, knowing as they did what had happened to terrorist groups who dared to blindside America on 9/11. With this in mind, the Post, one of the most powerful newspapers in the world, advised caution. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal, which since the 1990s had become America’s most widely distributed and read newspaper, stated something that for it was uncharacteristically radical, arguing
There are times for action. Caution stayed President Clinton’s hand when he’d been given the precise coordinates of Osama bin Laden’s motorcade in Afghanistan. Instead of giving his CIA field officers the “Go” signal to attack with pro-American Afghanistan fighters, he said no; he thought there would be an international uproar if Osama bin Laden was assassinated. This is not a time for fear of international uproar; this is a time for America to strike, not with recklessness but in our good time wherever the terrorist perpetrators and their bases can be found.
It is our view that insofar as the launchers found at JFK, LAX, and Dallas/Fort Worth were clearly North Korean, whoever the terrorists are, the base or factory from which these missiles came must be found and destroyed, even if it takes us years — as it did following Libya’s destruction of Pan Am flight 103 in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
In addition to the appalling loss of lives, from those of our children so viciously murdered aboard the 7E7 at JFK to those who perished so horribly at LAX and Dallas/Fort Worth, these three cowardly acts of war against civilians constitute an acute blow to the heart of our economic well-being. That prescient man George Orwell, long before he wrote his prophetic warning against the growth of totalitarian states, cautioned that “freedom essentially means the freedom to move to and fro across the surface of the earth” and warned us that, rather than adopt what he called the “sit on your bum and do nothing” philosophy of all those well-meaning but hopelessly naive pacifists, the fanatical totalitarian minds of the kind that assaulted this country on 9/11 must be fought against.
We do not propose the use of a nuclear threat against terrorists, but at this moment we need a Churchillian resolve, for whether or not these deadly attacks against America have been launched either directly by their perpetrators or by proxy, those responsible must be dealt with without compunction. We of course need time, perhaps months, to prepare, but inaction on our part would signal nothing less to our enemies than weakness, and only encourage further attacks.
As the battle for public opinion in the press and amongst the talking heads, such as Marte Price on TV, raged, opinion on the street was equally divided but no less passionate. In the White House’s basement situation room, however, there was by contrast a somber calm. Two decisions had been made by the President. The first, based on the fact that the CIA had determined that all three discarded launchers had MIDs on them that indicated a warehouse on the outskirts of the North Korean coastal town of Kosong, was to attack the warehouse.
“Why,” posited Air Force General Lesand, “don’t we just bomb the hell out of it? One B-2 out of Diego Garcia and we could obliterate the damn thing.”
“Excuse me,” said Eleanor Prenty, her National Security Advisor voice authoritative but testy with fatigue. “Who is it you’d like to declare war against, General? Just North Korea or China as well?”
“I—,” began General Lesand, his tone already defensive.
“Have you any idea, General, any idea at all, of what the political implications would be of an air attack? What a bombing attack, an invasion of air space, would mean for us on the most highly militarized peninsula on earth?”
“I wasn’t suggesting a massive bombing,” said Lesand. “One laser-guided BLU—”
“One hand grenade, General,” Eleanor snapped. “One hand grenade dropped by a U.S. plane on North Korea could precipitate a full-scale war against South Korea, which, might I remind you, is barely eleven miles from Kosong. And over there on the demilitarized zone between South and North Korea, hair triggers and tempers are the order of the day, every day.”
“What’s the difference between a bomb and, say, a—”
“A Special Forces attack?” suggested Eleanor.
“Well, yes,” replied Lesand.
“General,” said Eleanor, “covert attacks by our special forces, those of our allies, and those of the terrorists are happening even as we speak. They won’t make the evening news. But any kind of invasion of airspace in what the guys over in State call the ‘China Arc,’ that is, everything from Hunchun in northeast China off the Sea of Japan past the Korean Peninsula to the big Chinese naval base at Qingdao on the Yellow Sea, could precipitate a general war between the United States and China, let alone North Korea. We cannot risk violating North Korean or Chinese airspace, as it is, and we sure as hell can’t go dropping bombs on them. Besides which, we need hard evidence of MANPAD storage at Kosong. Bombing won’t help us get that. It’s out of the question. The Chinese military leadership went slack-jawed when they saw how easily we knocked out Iraq’s air defense in the ’91 war. Suddenly they realized that their cold-war theory of massed tanks and troops couldn’t overcome Western technological expertise, so they’ve had a big push on for early warning air defenses. As you know, General, a Stealth bomber may have no bigger radar signature than a sparrow, but the ChiCom’s new coastal Sa, or Kill, radar, could get a lock on it and that is all the evidence Pyongyang and Beijing need of an enemy air attack. Besides which, whether a bomb is dropped by Stealth or non-Stealth airplanes, a bomb announces its arrival.”
“So,” cut in the Air Force Chief of Staff, “you’re talking about sending in Special Forces.”
“General Lesand,” explained Eleanor, her patience running thin, “a bombing attack caught on ChiCom radar will be on CNN in half an hour and in the U.N. General Assembly tomorrow. The political ramifications are—”
“Okay,” said Lesand. “So what are we doing, sending in a Special Forces company?”
Eleanor and the others looked at the President.
“I agree,” said the President. “Drop them in, do the job, and get out. Not too messy but messy enough to get the job done.”
The second decision, on which there was also unanimity among the Joint Chiefs, the President, and Eleanor Prenty, was that the White House must disavow any intention of doing what it had decided to do — namely, to attack the warehouse from which, it was believed, the MANPADs had come and where others were stored. It was situated ten miles north of the DMZ, or the demilitarized zone, that had separated North and South Korea since the armistice had been signed at Panmunjom on July 27, 1953, at the end of the fierce three-year-long fighting that the Useless Nations had declared a U.N. “police action.” In fact, the fighting between North Korea and the U.S.-led U.N. alliance had been a bitter full-scale conventional war. An armistice was signed, but it was only that, an armistice, a ceasefire, the two countries remaining technically and at times literally at war since 1953, so that any attack anywhere in North Korea by U.S. forces, large or small, ran a high risk of initiating full-scale warfare. The President was prepared to take that risk — as JFK had done during the Cuban Missile Crisis — but his second decision was that everything must be done to allay North Korean suspicion of any such impending retaliation by the U.S.
“It won’t matter,” said the Air Force Chief General Lesand. “It’ll be like Iraq. Whatever we say, they’ll be expecting a hit. They’ll be on high alert.”
“They’re always on high alert,” countered Marine General Taft sharply.
The President’s eyes searched the room. “Can you do it? That’s the question, gentlemen.”
“Casualties could be heavy, Mr. President,” cautioned Lesand.
“I mean Special Forces. In and out. Can we do it?”
“Yes, sir,” said Taft.
“All right,” said the President wearily. “Anything else?” He was as exhausted as everyone else.
“Mr. President?” said National Security Advisor Eleanor Prenty, albeit tenuously. “May I suggest we call on Douglas Freeman for some out-of-house advice on this one. He’s very knowledgeable about this MANPAD stuff.”
“Fine with me,” said the President easily. “Gentlemen, any objections?”
“He’s very opinionated,” put in Lesand. “Troops used to call him ‘PR’—Patton Resurrected.”
“I know,” said the President. “And they used to say he’s the spitting image of George C. Scott, but the other political party in this country used to call me an obstinate son of a bitch.”
“They still do,” ventured Eleanor Prenty gamely. The ensuing laughter subdued the high tension in the situation room, but only temporarily.
A Joint Chief’s career, like that of any other executive officer, was not enhanced by disagreeing with the boss, nor was it advanced by being a sycophantic yes-man if you had serious reservations about a president’s decision, in this case attacking what most armed forces field commanders considered one of the most, if not the most, dangerous places on earth.
The danger that both the Clinton and Bush administrations had been most concerned about was that with North Korea’s harvests failing several years in a row, over two and a half million of its people would face starvation. The situation was made worse by the North Korean government’s insistence on spending 31.5 percent of its gross domestic product, as compared with South Korea spending only 2.9 percent of its GDP, on its armed forces. As a result, North Korea’s military belligerence was fast approaching what the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee designated a “use it or lose it” situation, that is, a quick, overwhelming invasion of South Korea to get secure food supplies, the NKA leadership seeing this as a concomitant reason for its desire to dominate the whole peninsula.
South Korea’s capital of Seoul lay only twenty-five miles south of the ten-foot-high barbed-wire and mine-infested DMZ, a two-and-a-half-mile-wide scar that ran for 148 miles from coast to coast, all the way from China’s Yellow Sea in the west to the beaches fronting the Sea of Japan in the east.
The Air Force Chief of Staff pointed out how this meant that the South Korean capital was well within range of over nine thousand North Korean heavy artillery guns, five hundred of them specifically aimed at Seoul. And that the abundance of food and industry in the relatively rich South Korea, one of the Asian economic miracles, made it a prime target, in many analysts’ eyes, waiting to be attacked by the North. A Special Ops “in and out” would make a political point, Lesand agreed, but to even invite gung-ho Douglas Freeman to give his opinion could be a spark that might quickly turn the President’s idea of an “in and out” payback raid into a brushfire that would swiftly engulf the entire Korean peninsula.
Lesand also reminded the President and his National Security Advisor that just as the Wehrmacht had kept detailed files on Patton, Eisenhower, Montgomery, and the other “stars” of the Allied powers, all North Korean brigade intel units maintained detailed profiles on the U.S.’s leading lights past and present, which would include Freeman.
The General of the Army also spoke against seeking any advice whatsoever from Freeman, driving home to the President just how extraordinarily volatile North Korea was.
The President knew both men had a point. American soldiers manning the DMZ with their South Korean allies and the North Korean guards had glared at each other 24-7 at the Panmunjom “truce village,” where absurd rituals of pettiness, manifestations of the hatred between the two sides, had occurred daily. In one instance, the North Koreans had sawed off several inches from the legs of the chairs on the U.S. side of the negotiating table so as to make their U.S. counterparts look small and silly. And when North Korean guards, deliberately and, they thought, undetectably, came to the negotiating tables with stubby-stocked AK-47s hidden under their jackets in clear violation of armistice rules, the Americans, pretending not to notice, prolonged the meeting while having the room temperature ratched up to well over a hundred degrees, thoroughly enjoying watching the North Koreans’ acute discomfort as the profusely sweating stone faces of Kim Jong Il’s officers endured the inferno rather than removing their jackets and losing face. In 1976, North Korean guards, enraged by two young U.S. officers felling a tree near a North Korean machine-gun guard tower, went berserk and beat the two young Americans to death with ax handles.
“Since the armistice was signed in 1953,” said Taft, “theoretically ending the police action that killed over 33,000 Americans and 2.5 million Koreans, continuing ‘incidents’ along the DMZ have killed over 1,500 Americans and Koreans. It’s a tinderbox, Mr. President. I agree something has to be done. We can’t stand by and let them get away with the murder of over a thousand Americans in these MANPAD attacks, but Douglas Freeman, who, I admit, has one hell of a lot of experience in such missions, is a loose cannon. You can ask him anything about MANPADs and other state-of-the-art equipment — he does keep up with the technology, I grant you that — but strategically speaking, as I say, he is a loose cannon.”
“I agree,” put in the CNO (Chief of Naval Operations). “He’s been a good man in the past, but this is a new century. He still thinks old school. If you ask him, he’ll probably recommend we invade the entire country.”
But Eleanor Prenty valued loyalty. Douglas had been a well of information when she needed it, surrounded as she was by the Joint Chiefs who, she knew, almost to a man disapproved of a woman having anything to do with military decisions. The President saw the look in her eyes — his wife got the same irritated look when some of his older male advisors feigned polite interest.
“Well, let’s at least hear what he has to say,” said Eleanor. “He’s sure as hell not going to talk me into anything against your collective wisdom, gentlemen. But after all, he’s done a stint in Korea, right?”
“He did,” confirmed Lesand, while emphasizing the past tense.
“Good,” said the President. “Get him on the blower, Eleanor.”
