Coverage of the Persian Gulf War

There's a natural conflict between the military and the media because the military is populated by Type-A personalities who want control. That's why they like the media pool, and that's why in their mindset it's the first thing. They say, "Okay, the pool, because we know we can control it."
-Col. Frederick C. Peck, USMC

America's military often is accused of always planning to fight the last war. The same might be said of the nation's news media, except for one fact: Institutionally, the media only rarely, if ever, plan anything together. Although individual news organizations work out their own coverage, it is usually done under the gun, at the last minute.

That is largely the nature of the business. News organizations are independent entities beholden to no one in the way they cover the news, though ultimately they must satisfy their readers, viewers and listeners. Moreover, news events are not predictable. That forces the media to react to events, which is the antithesis of planning.

In the Persian Gulf War, the most notable recent conflict, the military turned the old planning axiom on its head. The U.S. victory in that war-with a minimum of casualties surprising even to the leadership-happened because, since Vietnam, the military had steadily improved the performance capabilities of both personnel and weapons systems. Unfortunately, those improvements did not extend to the military's planning for the news media or sensitivity to First Amendment principles.

At the same time, the news media went into the war with no plan for coverage other than a vague notion that they would be able to roam the battlefields as a small number of reporters had done in Vietnam-an assumption, given the nature of the operation, that was unrealistic.

Desert Storm was a distinctly different kind of conflict. Many reporters expected to be transported into the field by the military, as occurred in Vietnam. In that war, they could shoot their footage or gather information for stories on what were essentially daytime, small-unit actions, then return to Saigon to file their stories and wait for the next
opportunity to go back to the action.

In the Gulf War, U.S. and coalition forces were spread along a 300-mile front, preparing to launch a lightning-surprise attack that would begin at night. Among the military leaders, there was a strong imperative for secrecy-and a palpable fear of leaks. So the only way reporters could effectively cover the action was to be located within and travel with military units, probably for the duration.

As the build-up continued during Desert Shield, individual news organizations knew what they wanted to do for themselves, but their motives were selfish and derived more from protecting their own interests than from any principled belief in informing the American public. There was little understanding of the fundamental distinction between the small-unit actions of Vietnam, where operational secrecy was not a primary consideration, and the massive, night-time flanking movement of the Desert Storm ground attack, which relied on secrecy and surprise.
The deficiencies in both institutions produced an unusual result. For the coverage of Desert Storm, the military developed an ad hoc system of combat pools, a plan to which news organizations acquiesced and which they helped to set up. With the pools in place and CNN offering nearly around-the-clock, live television coverage, there was a period of apparent comity. Eighty percent of the American public, many members of Congress and the military-as well as people with military backgrounds-found themselves fundamentally agreeing with a post-war statement by Pentagon spokesman Pete Williams that: "The press gave the American people the best war coverage they ever had."1

The post-war debate

Later, in reviewing the war and what had happened to reporters trying to cover it, a group of Washington bureau chiefs, representing the major American news organizations, concluded that "the combination of security review and the use of the pool system as a form of censorship made the Gulf War the most undercovered major conflict in modern American history."2

In a letter to Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, the 15 bureau chiefs, representing newspapers, news magazines and television, wrote: "Our sense is that virtually all major news organizations agree that the flow of information to the public was blocked, impeded or diminished by the policies and practices of the Department of Defense. Pools did not work. Stories and pictures were late or lost. Access to the men and women in the field was interfered with by a needless system of military escorts and copy review. These conditions meant we could not tell the public the full story of those who fought the nation's battle."3

That assessment apparently was not shared by the majority of journalists in the combat pools, who were surveyed after the war by Pete Williams, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs.
Pool members were asked to assess access to combat operations, ground rules, security review (censorship) of stories and pictures, the flow of material from pools to the Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, and the cooperation extended by military units. Williams said 56 journalists responded and, of those, only seven opposed the security review process. Another 15, he said, supported security review and made suggestions for improving, streamlining or strengthening the process.4

"It upsets my friends in the press corps when I say it was the best-covered war in history," Cheney said. "They don't like this at all. They fundamentally disagree because they felt managed and controlled .... I understand their concerns, to the extent that they didn't get to cover the war the way they wanted to cover it. I also think it's fair to say it's a legitimate criticism for them to make. Access was very uneven. There were some people in the field who were able to file their stories, and others who weren't."5

"My impression, looking from outside, was that the Pentagon was pleased, relatively, with the way things worked out with the press during Desert Storm," said former Defense Secretary Les Aspin in an interview before his death on May 21, 1995. "The press was less pleased. The bitching that I heard was that they were spoon-fed. And it was the only thing they could go with, because they were stuck in some hotel.

"My sense is that the media feels very uncomfortable when the only thing they are going with is handouts. Guys like [Frank] Aukofer never liked to write totally off our press releases. And the problem with the way Desert Storm was set up was, first of all, it didn't last long. The ground part didn't last long, and I don't know how else you do the air war. We had six weeks of bombing, but how can you get a reporter out there?

"The problem, the grumbling that I heard from reporters-the whole press relations on Desert Storm-was that they were forced to use handouts, or the equivalent of handouts. Official photographs of bombs, those perfect things, shooting right down the chimney, and blowing the building up. Or going right in the window and all that kind of stuff. That makes them all feel used, and when they feel used, they get unhappy.

"They'll always run with some of that as long as they feel they have an opportunity to go out and write on their own, cover on their own, or get a story that isn't just being handed to them. Now what the Pentagon wants to do, naturally, is keep them all in the building and feed them information. The Pentagon guys are stunned that people aren't happy with that. They're doing the best job they can, to give honest information. But, of course, the press guys are suspicious of it."6

There is no question that the American people received an unprecedented amount of real-time information on Desert Storm. Though some of the information was incomplete or inaccurate at the time because of the reality of "the fog of war" and the commanders' desire to maintain secrecy to avoid casualties, the amount of news disseminated supports the view that Desert Storm was the most completely covered-perhaps the best-covered-war in history.

The journalistic output, despite the limitations of the pool system, was enormous. During the air and ground war, pool print reporters filed 1,352 pool reports-many of dubious quality and many delayed to the point where news organizations complained that they were useless because they were no longer timely-and on some days photographers shipped back as many as 180 rolls of film. That worked out to 6,000 images, of which only about 20 could be transmitted back to news organizations in the States on any given day. Similarly, the networks had more reportage than they could handle. The television pool could only transmit about four hours of videotape a day. Often, crews with combat units shipped twice that much.7

Yet that was of little satisfaction to the news organizations, which rightly concluded that many stories went untold. And even members of the military, who were in a position to know, concede that there were prominent military units and battles that went uncovered.

"Secrecy and surprise were paramount in the division commanders' minds," said Army Col. William L. Mulvey, who commanded the U.S. forces' Joint Information Bureau in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, during the war. "If Gen. [John] Tilelli of the 1st Cav[alry] did not want a pool reporter, then his word was supreme. He didn't get a pool reporter. He was a two-star general, and I know how to salute."8

Col. Larry Icenogle, who was Mulvey's assistant then and now is the public affairs special assistant to Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave the following account of a story that went unreported because a ship captain did not want any press coverage:

"Mike Doubleday, now the EUCOM PAO [European Command public affairs officer] was Gen. Schwarzkopf's deputy PA. He was working the night shift in Riyadh. I had the night shift in Dhahran, on the east coast.
"I'll never forget the night that Doubleday calls me, and he says, 'Hey, are you aware that we've got the Missouri firing naval gunfire support for the first time since World War II?'9

"And as he is saying that - I kid you not- I had this vision of a split screen. You remember the great night-time Tomahawk shots we got off the Wisconsin [early in the war]? Well, I had this vision of a split screen with "2 September '45" and Tokyo Bay with General MacArthur on one side. And on the other side, here is the "Mighty Mo" blasting away. I could visualize this.

"And, of course, the skipper wouldn't take any press aboard. It was unreal."10

Harassment and delays

There also is no question that there were many instances-as detailed in John Fialka's book, Hotel Warriors, and by bureau chiefs after the war-where reporters were harassed and interfered with, and their stories were censored and delayed to the point of uselessness because they had been overtaken by events. Fialka, a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, helped set up the combat pool system and served as a pool coordinator in Dhahran.
"The military basically lied to us in saying they could support us out on the field," Fialka said in an interview. "I don't know to this day whether they did it on purpose or whether they didn't know what they were doing. When I think back on it, I'm pretty sure the Army didn't know what they were doing, at least at the lower level. At the upper level, you had Schwarzkopf manipulating. He might have seen that they didn't know what they were doing and encouraged it. I don't know how to read that."11

In Army units, particularly, there was an aversion to press coverage because of a perception-real or imagined-that it could get commanders in trouble with the boss-Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander-in-chief of the coalition forces.

Gen. J. H. Binford Peay III, who succeeded Schwarzkopf as commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command, recalled:

"I must admit that all of us were still coming out of the Vietnam period, had been through the press relationships of that period, and we all had this enormous pride in our own outfits. There was an atmosphere of concern. How do you control all that, so that your outfit appears, externally, to be a professional outfit? And secondly, so that you didn't run into the ire of Norman Schwarzkopf, who was very, very concerned about how he controlled the media through that period, for a lot of reasons that I'm sure we don't understand."

Although wary of the news media himself, Peay disclosed that he took pool reporters into his confidence, fully briefing them on the Desert Storm surprise attack two days before it started. " I wanted them to have confidence that I had confidence in them, and I wanted a kind of professional rapport built between us," he said.12
"There were a lot of us out in the field who had been walked through the invasion plan, and we never leaked," Fialka said. "That also happened in Vietnam. It happened in World War I and II. When it comes down to it, we're as patriotic as anybody else, especially when it comes to not impairing our own military. But you don't hear that side of it."13

Public-relations-savvy Marines

In retrospect, the Army suffered a self-inflicted wound because so many of its commanders were hostile to press coverage. On the other hand, the Marine Corps received more than its share of the credit and glory because the Marine commander, Gen. Walt Boomer, had been the Corps' public affairs chief and knew how to deal with the news media.

"The Marines were especially good at it," Former Defense Secretary Richard Cheney said. "But the Marines always are. All of our senior commanders were Vietnam vets. I think a lot of them had attitudes toward the press that were shaped by those events .... And the Army did not do as aggressive a job as, for example, somebody like Walt Boomer in the Marines. Boomer took Molly Moore [of The Washington] Post and got a great story out of it. ... He had her eating out of his hand."14

There is a fundamental disagreement among the principals over who wanted to control the news media, and for what reasons. Cheney said he viewed the media as a problem to be managed, and kept his assistant secretary for public affairs, Pete Williams, intimately involved in battle plans from the start. Williams said he was sometimes frustrated in his efforts to get the story told. The military commanders controlled the battlefield, including relations with the news media, he said, and vetoed some of his news-coverage plans. Williams said it was Schwarzkopf who refused to allow reporters to stay with military units during the build-up to Desert Storm, fearing they might violate security and let the enemy know his plans. Schwarzkopf, on the other hand, said all the media orders came from the Pentagon.

Steve Katz, who compiled the most extensive record of military-media relations during the war as counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, said President Bush, Cheney and Williams surrendered civilian control of the Pentagon's public affairs operations to Schwarzkopf.

"Gen. Schwarzkopf pursued and-many would argue-succeeded in his primary agenda to win the public from the media," Katz said. "His attitude appeared to be born of the military's own mythology about the role of the media in the withdrawal of the United States from Vietnam. This agenda supplanted even the Pentagon's own professional endeavors to develop a balanced and effective public affairs annex as recommended by independent observers after the operations in Grenada and Panama. Public affairs annexes developed by the Joint Chiefs were ignored ....

"The Schwarzkopf agenda of winning the public from the media adopted severe restrictions on coverage of the media as to prevent independent coverage and repeat the pool-coverage policy criticized in the after-action reports on Grenada and Panama. This extended to the failure, hopefully not intentional, to train or prepare military public officers who were instructed through a secret order by General Schwarzkopf to 'accompany news media representatives at all times.'"15

Cheney's priority

Cheney said his priority was to be truthful, to avoid the public cynicism that followed the Vietnam War. "The view I had when I arrived at the Pentagon [was] that the department lacked credibility," he said. "Over the years, for one reason or another-Vietnam, contract scandals, cost overruns and so forth-there was the general perception around town, and I think out around the country in a lot of circles, that the department couldn't be trusted, that we lacked credibility. I felt very strongly about my own obligations and responsibilities as secretary never to get into that position, that credibility counted for everything.

"That was just the way I'd always done business in my political career. I had strong feelings about the importance of being honest and accurate, not just with the press, but also with the Congress. I served in the Congress for 10 years and felt sometimes we got the run-around from the Department of Defense. I didn't want to do that."16
At the same time, Cheney said, he was sensitive to the fact that the press had posed problems in the past. "Frankly," he said, "I looked on it as a problem to be managed. I did not look on the press as an asset, in doing what I had to do. Maybe that's just sort of the natural order of things between government and the press. But it was so important, especially in connection with the Gulf conflict, where the possibility existed of a long-term, sustained kind of operation where the stakes were enormous, I felt that it was important to try to manage that relationship in a way so the press didn't screw us-if I can put it in those terms."

Cheney said he believed it was essential to provide a lot of information, as accurately as possible, to the public, but not necessarily to the press. So he established regular briefings at the Pentagon and in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, most of which were televised live.

"I felt it was important to manage the information flow-not to distort it, but to make certain that we got a lot of information out there so that people knew what we were doing," he said. "I also gave speeches during that period of time, testified before the Congress, and went on Sunday television talk shows. It was all getting information out, telling them what we were going to do, why we were doing it, explaining the policy, why we had to send half a million people there, call up a quarter of a million reservists, and all the other things we were doing. The information function was extraordinarily important. I did not have a lot of confidence that I could leave that to the press."

Hush orders

In an interview, Schwarzkopf said an order arrived from Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that said all media policy would be dictated by Williams and the public affairs office in the Pentagon. He said he and the other field commanders had objected, but were overruled. At one point, he said, "We all got told that we couldn't deal with press any more. This started, I think, about the end of November. From then until the war started, we were just told, 'You cannot talk to the press anymore. None of your generals can talk to the press any more.'

"Obviously, when the press is trying to get an interview with me, I'm not going to go back and say, 'Well, I can't talk to you, because Washington says I can't.' That's not the way we do business. We salute, follow orders, and that's it. But it got a little nasty after awhile, because people were trying to get interviews. Up until that time, we had tried very hard to be open, within the realm of reason, to do interviews. And now, all of the sudden, we had to clamp a lid on it. The reason why was, plain and simply, because we had been told by Washington we couldn't."
Schwarzkopf told the following story to illustrate his attitude toward press coverage of the war:

"After ... the first pool [to Desert Shield in August 1990] Prince Bandar [the Saudi ambassador to the United States] came down to my house for lunch. This would have been right about the 20th of August. We were talking about a lot of things, and he said something to the effect that the pools had run their course. 'We of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have shown that we are open to the press. And, now, effective 30 August, we're going to kick all the reporters out of country. We will form our own pool of Saudi Arabian reporters, and we will report the news.'
"I said, 'Bandar, I'm sorry. You can't get there from here. You can't walk that cat back. Now that the door is open and the first media pool is in, the American public- and I'm sure the American government-will never sit still for you doing this.'

"He said, 'Oh, but we have to do that. We cannot tolerate reporters running all over the place.'
"I said, 'Bandar, you don't understand. You are going to have to keep the pool there. And as a matter of fact, I would venture to say that there will be even more reporters coming over. Now that you've opened the door, you just have to deal with it. We will help you, in every way we can, to manage this thing. But that's the way it's going to be.'

"So not only was I open to the media being there, but I feel that I was very largely responsible for preventing the Saudis from going ahead and putting a lid on the pool. There were many times when the Saudis wanted to kick somebody out of the country because some story would come out that they viewed as unfavorable. But we never kicked a single guy out of the country. Tempted, but we never kicked one out. I'd say, 'No. It will cause you far more trouble than it's worth. We have to be open to the press.'"

Battlefield concerns

Williams said, "We came up with a plan in the fall during Desert Shield to put reporters out with units and kind of rotate them through, and let reporters stay out with the unit as long as they wanted to. It was shot down by Schwarzkopf. ... His fear was if you let reporters stay with the units when the flanking maneuver began, then they'd be filing with datelines, and you could just kind of watch them move further west and further north, and he was afraid that would telegraph the left hook."

Schwarzkopf said there was never any intention to manipulate or manage the press. But he did say he was concerned about instant reporting from the battlefield.

"I would say to the field commanders, 'Be very careful what you say to the press. Be very careful what your troops say to the press.' There were breaches of security that occurred because of somebody standing up and saying, 'I'm standing here with the 82nd Airborne at some place,' and, bingo, that's placing a unit and a location on the battlefield with a capability, and that's a security violation. The good news was the Iraqi intelligence wasn't that good."

From a different perspective, Mulvey recalled: "If you go back to the Desert Shield time frame, through December, when a negative story would come out in the press, Gen. Schwarzkopf would call the commander on the carpet and chew him out. I was told that the command climate was such that the commanders in the field knew that if there was a negative story in the press or on television, they would be called to Riyadh. So the way to prevent that from happening was not to take any press."

'Not true'

But Schwarzkopf said that was simply not true. He said the reports probably stemmed from his investigation of a New York Times story about a hapless platoon that seemed ill-prepared for duty.

"That one story led to a perception that every time a negative story comes out in the press, I call the generals," Schwarzkopf said. "Let me remind you that Walt Boomer worked for me, too. Very definitely worked for me. I can assure you that if I was bringing that kind of pressure on my Army commanders, I would have been bringing exactly the same kind of pressure on Walt Boomer. He was not exempt, nor was my Navy commander, Stan Arthur. It just didn't happen."

Reporters on the scene had different views of who was controlling what. Charles J. Lewis, Washington bureau chief for Hearst News Service, said: "The fact is that Schwarzkopf was extremely tender toward the public perception of Operation Desert Storm. So it's not a case of where he just kissed off the public affairs function. He embraced it totally, but he embraced it so he could control it."

Patrick J. Sloyan, who covered the war for Newsday and later won a Pulitzer Prize for his war coverage, rated Schwarzkopf better on press coverage than Cheney. He said Cheney was masterful in manipulating the information that was released during the war.

"These films, this footage they would spoon-feed ... would dominate perceptions of what was going on," Sloyan said in an interview. "If you look at what came over television for that period of time, it had no bearing on what was going on.

"But it was not Schwarzkopf or the military. Schwarzkopf had tremendous concern about his credibility, his image. I covered Vietnam from beginning to end, but if you didn't know about Vietnam, you didn't understand the things Schwarzkopf was saying. As generals do, they fight the last war. He was fighting Vietnam over again, and the one thing he wasn't going to permit was something where you come in and find out that there was a pack of lies-well, not a pack of lies, but they certainly covered up a lot of stuff. Had Schwarzkopf's guidance and orders held firm, we would have known a lot more, I think, although not at the time it happened."

Despite its early reluctance, the Saudi Arabian government soon was granting visas to hordes of journalists who wanted to cover the war. With hundreds of them flocking to Dhahran and Riyadh, the military leaders had to find a way to handle them, and the combat pool system was born. Essentially, it meant that the only way any journalist could cover the war and remain officially sanctioned by the U.S. military and the Saudi government was to be a member of a pool. Many reporters, some of whose news organizations had pool slots, worked outside the pool system. They risked having their credentials revoked and deportation, though neither the military nor the Saudi government ever took such actions.

A tight leash

Eventually, 186 journalists participated in the pools. (When the United States and its allies invaded Normandy in World War II, 27 reporters accompanied the troops). In addition to reporters, the pools included photographers, video and audio operators, producers and technicians. The pools were kept on a tight leash, based on the wishes of commanders, to the point where Lewis, the Hearst Washington bureau chief, wrote after the war that the military had so controlled the press that Mulvey, in effect, had functioned as the city editor for war coverage:

"In most newsrooms, a reporter with a story idea usually tries the idea out on an editor or asks the approval of the boss to pursue it, especially if it's going to take a lot of time or money or if it's of questionable news value. In Dhahran, Mulvey was that boss. He was the city editor of the Persian Gulf war, who decided what got done and what didn't."

Lewis wrote from experience; he covered the war as a reporter and was there for the duration.
Mulvey said he later wrote a response to the Lewis article, but never sent it. "My answer was that the city editor wasn't a colonel," he recalled. "The city editors were the captains of the Navy ships, were the Air Force base commanders, were the division commanders out there, because it was their battlefield and they decided-as they rightfully should-who came out onto their battlefield and went with their soldiers to war. It wasn't me.
"Chuck gave me way too much power and authority. I didn't make the decisions as to how many pool reporters went to the 1st Cav Division or the 1st Armored Division or the 101st or whatever. Those division commanders, those ships' captains-the captain of the Missouri decided how many reporters went out on the Missouri. His answer was, 'None,' and who knows the Missouri was ever even there? But that was because he had the power, as he should have the power. He's 'God' out there."

The combat pools were set up with the cooperation of the major news organizations, which apparently cared little that the system cut off independent, open coverage and, with it, many of their colleagues from smaller news organizations. As long as the big guys were among the favored few on the inside, they ignored the fact that the rest of the press corps was frozen out and without much clout to force any change in the system. The original pool members even rigged the system to make certain that they maintained their membership, while other journalists who managed to get one of the coveted pool slots risked being shut out entirely if they dropped out of a pool for any reason. In fairness, the television and radio networks had their hands too full to stick it to their colleagues. Most of the familial mugging was done by the print media.

Pool members' dilemma

It was only later that the bureau chiefs got together and decided they'd been suckered because of the way the pools had been deployed. The members of the pools, however, were not prominent among the complainers, likely because they understood the nature of the military situation better than their bosses.

"They were in a dilemma," Mulvey recalled, "and many of them told me-I won't link any names here-'Look, I'm going tell you that I agree with this, but don't ever use my name or my boss will fire me.' They would say to me very honestly, 'I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth. I'll agree to your ground rules, your pool concepts, your whatever here, but I'm going to say something different to my bureau chief back in New York, Washington, or Atlanta.'"

Mulvey concedes that there were regional stories-a feature about a Louisiana National Guard unit celebrating Mardi Gras in the desert, a story about a Milwaukee-based Coast Guard Reserve unit responsible for port security in Dhahran-that should have been told but were snuffed out by the combat pool system.

"Yes, it should have been possible to accommodate those local reporters seeking a hometown unit," he said. "That's very reasonable. ... But realize the problems I had with numbers. If I had given ... the one exception to go down to the Coast Guard unit at Dhahran or the New Orleans Times-Picayune guy to go to the Louisiana Guard unit, then that could have broken down the integrity of dealing with a thousand journalists."

With the coalition forces spread along the 300-mile front, preparing for the surprise attack at night, the biggest fear of all the commanders-from Schwarzkopf on down-was that the Iraqis might somehow learn about the massive "left hook." Given the circumstances, the combat pools offered the military a way to satisfy both security requirements and get reporters out to cover some of the story. Not all of the journalists agreed, however.
"There were some reporters running around," Cheney said, "who had notions of wanting to cover the war in the Gulf the way they covered Vietnam 25 years ago. Get on a helicopter, and fly up to some unit. They didn't have any concept of how the nature of warfare had changed, or that we were going to do our operations at night or that we were going to move very fast or that if we didn't provide the transportation for them, there wasn't any way they were going to be able to keep up."

The 'four-wheel-drive' school

"The field is full of feckless romantics," Fialka said. You saw it out in the field in the four-wheel-drive school of journalism, where they said, 'We're just going to drive around on the battlefield and cover this war, and nobody is going to hurt us, and all the units will welcome us.' Those people were fools.

"If you asked the ones who did it what they got, they'll say 'Almost nothing.' They saw a lot of booms and bangs and they got shot at, some of [them]. But did they know what it meant? Could they put it together? They couldn't even begin. Did they risk their lives? You bet. ... [Did they] endanger units? Yeah, if you're driving around with your headlights on, and you happen to find the First Marine Brigade out there, they're going to shoot you. If they shoot you, they've probably exposed their position.

"The four-wheel-drive school of journalism was largely fueled by people who really had no clue what they were getting into. If you go into a chemical-warfare situation in a Jeep four-wheel-drive, you think you're going to survive? Just begin to think of the things you don't have: You don't have a monitor that tells you when the chemicals arrive. Maybe you do have your designer suit. But if you don't put it on, if you don't know when to put it on, you're dead. If it's nerve gas, you're dead in a few minutes. Maybe in a minute. If you don't know when the chemicals have stopped, you don't know when to take your mask off. Canisters have a definite duration. If you don't know what mines are - most people don't - you're going to blow up. Do you want all those things to happen? Is this romance? Going into the face of that and thinking you're going to get a story? Yeah. Who does it benefit? I don't think anybody."

The complaint expressed by many journalists about the combat pool system was that the denial of access was worse than censorship because it meant that there were stories that could never be told, whereas if a reporter is given access-even if his or her work is subjected to censorship at the time-the story can eventually be told. But Mulvey argues that complete access doesn't exist anywhere.

"I've heard Pete Williams say many times that reporters don't have access to the deliberations of the Supreme Court," Mulvey said. "Is that censorship of reporting on the Supreme Court? You don't go into the caucuses of the Congress. You don't go on the football field at the 50-yard line to report on the football game. You've got to stay off the football field to report on it. There are police barriers around an accident, around a crime scene all the time. Reporters are always denied access, to a degree. And I think the courts would support the military's right to restrict access in wartime.

"But I agree that there's access and there's access, and if you have a command climate that says, 'I don't want to give reporters access because they might tell bad-news stories or they might give away the security and, therefore, I'm not going to accept any,' then the story can't be told. That is what I was fighting against. That was my job. But we also had some commanders who had seen the light. Gen. Boomer kept saying, 'Send me more, send me more.' We were getting calls all the time from the Marines asking for more pool reporters."

Origins of the pool

The combat pool system in Saudi Arabia had its roots in an earlier debacle. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan ordered an invasion of Grenada to rescue American medical students who were believed to be in danger in a Marxist takeover of the government there. The White House, concerned that any leaks could cost the lives of troops or bring harm to the students, ordered the military commanders to exclude journalists during the critical first two days of the conflict.

News organizations complained loudly, and their protests led to the formation of a special commission by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It came to be called the Sidle Commission, for its chairman, Maj. Gen. Winant Sidle (USA, Ret.).

The Sidle Commission recommended-and the Pentagon established, with the help of professional news organizations such as the American Society of Newspaper Editors-the Department of Defense National Media Pool. It consisted of the wire services, the television networks, news magazines, radio networks and 26 major newspapers. The idea was to have a cadre of journalists ready to go at a moment's notice to cover the early stages of a conflict. These journalists would agree to abide by security restrictions and share their reports with all other news organizations.

The operational assumption was that the first announcement of any military operation would be made in Washington, at the White House or the Pentagon. But the pool would be on the ground to provide independent witnesses to the early stages of conflict, even as announcement of the conflict was being made. From the beginning, it was intended that the pool would function only briefly, until open coverage by the news media could begin.
In the ensuing years, the concept seemed to have merit. The Pentagon called out the pool for exercises, and in most cases it functioned as intended. Then came the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, and once again the press was prevented from covering the conflict. In an analysis of what happened, consultant Fred S. Hoffman, who had spent many years covering the Pentagon for the Associated Press, found that an excessive concern for secrecy on the part of Defense Secretary Richard Cheney was responsible for a fatal delay in calling out the pool. He also concluded that "there was no effort to manipulate the pool in Panama. Rather, it was a matter of maladroitness, sometimes good intentions gone awry, and unanticipated obstacles."

Increasing skepticism

That was of small consolation to news media leaders, who were becoming increasingly skeptical because the pool always seemed to work as planned in exercises, but seemed to fall apart when the real thing happened. Sloyan, who opposes all pools, likened the situation to the recurring gag in the Peanuts comic strip.

"There's all the good will in the world, and we agree, and they pull the football back just as we're running up to kick it, like Lucy does to Charlie Brown in Peanuts," he said. "That's bad faith on their part, on the part of the political leadership. They don't want us reporting about American soldiers getting killed. They don't want that story out, they don't want those pictures out. And it doesn't matter what administration we're talking about."

Despite the glitches, however, there was a reservoir of good will, and cooperation continued on both sides. The pool did a credible job covering the little-noticed story of the reflagging of Kuwait's tankers. Then came Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and President George Bush's warning: "This will not stand."

The Desert Shield build-up came immediately after that, but without any press coverage because the Saudi Arabian government at first refused to grant visas to American journalists. Cheney recalled that it was a report of Saddam Hussein watching CNN that persuaded the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, King Fahd, to allow reporters into his country, which theretofore had been closed to non-Muslim reporters.

"I had reporter friends of mine accuse me of finding the only place to run a war where they didn't allow the press," Cheney recalled. "At the outset, the only way reporters got in there were on my airplane. I guess it was on my second trip in. First, I went over the first weekend of the crisis and I arranged for the deployment of forces. I didn't take any press.

"And the pool went in after that. The pool was a useful way to work, from our perspective. It was there. It let us set up a system to get some access, but a lot of that we had to negotiate with the Saudis. ... According to a story I heard-and I have no reason to challenge it-King Fahd was watching CNN one night and saw broadcasts coming live out of Baghdad in the early stages of the build-up and concluded that he wanted press in Saudi Arabia because Saddam had press in Iraq. I don't know if it's true."

Finally activated

The Iraqis rolled into Kuwait on August 2. President Bush sent Cheney to meet with King Fahd on August 5, and two days later American forces began arriving in the region-but without press coverage. It was not until Friday, August 10, with news organizations loudly complaining in the background, that the Pentagon notified members of the DOD National Media Pool that they would be activated for duty. Pool members reported to the Pentagon Saturday morning, August 11, to drop off their passports. The passports were transported to the Saudi Embassy near the Kennedy Center in Washington for visas. Members of the 17-member pool on standby also were asked to provide their suit sizes so the military could equip them with chemical-warfare suits.

Although it turned out to be one of the best pools ever, in terms of performance, the Desert Shield pool was itself a perversion of the pool concept. For one thing, it was activated in full public view, instead of secretly as originally intended. When the pool arrived at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa on Sunday, August 12, for a tour of the Central Command and a briefing by Gen. Schwarzkopf, local television-news teams were waiting to cover the arrival. It was the media covering the media.

Except for the fact that the pool lasted for almost three weeks, instead of the brief period originally envisioned for pools, the Desert Shield pool functioned as if it were the prototype for all the pool planning that had gone before. The military escort officers did everything within their power to provide as much access to operations as possible, and their security reviews of reporters' copy and film were limited to genuine concerns, as specified in the guidelines for coverage. In fact, several of the escort officers turned out to be decent editors, helping some of the reporters to tighten up their copy.

For their part, the media members of the pool took their responsibilities seriously. They honored the military guidelines. Four members of the pool even went along on a 16-hour AWACS mission and, although they learned classified information during the mission, they did not disclose any of it. Members of the 552nd Airborne Warning and Control Wing were delighted with the newspaper story, photographs and TV tape that came out of the mission.

The pool members shared all of their stories and photographs, and audio and video tapes, among themselves and with news organizations back in the States. The coverage was so complete that it was months after the pool was finally disbanded before independent news organizations began to come up with stories that had not been covered by the pool. The only major violation of the pool concept came on the news media side when the AP and other wire services failed to move the written pool reports on the wires, as they had committed to do. If the 75 stories done by the writing pool members-the so-called "pencils"-had moved on the wires, news organizations all over the country would have had a potpourri of story choices. Instead, the wires merely used information from the pool reports in daily roundups.

Still, the fact that the pool lasted nearly three weeks was at odds with the original pool concept, which specified that the pool was only to be used until coverage could be opened up.

A model, but flawed

That first pool provided a model for the combat pool system set up later to cover the Gulf War. But the combat pools also corrupted the original concept, because they were under the control of the military and its civilian leadership and were used as a complete substitute for independent coverage by news organizations.

Yet there is no question that there was no way the U.S. military could have accommodated large numbers of journalists-domestic and foreign-who showed up in Saudi Arabia. Eventually, the situation would have forced the invention of something like the combat pool system.

Despite the media complaints, the vast majority of the American people were convinced that they had fully witnessed the war, through CNN, network television, network radio, and their national and local newspapers. A Times-Mirror poll taken Jan. 25-27, 1991, found that 8 in 10 Americans gave the press a positive rating for its war coverage. In a subsequent Times-Mirror poll on March 25, 1991, 46 percent of those polled rated the news coverage as excellent, compared with a similar rating of 36 percent in January. Virtually everyone believed they had seen the best war coverage in history.

"In my personal view," Cheney said, "one of the reasons there was such an overwhelming level of support in the end for the operation was, obviously, it was successful. That helped a hell of a lot. But it was also because the American people saw up close with their own eyes, through the magic of television, what the U.S. military was capable of doing.

"It was especially CNN. But it also was different from the impression they had after the last 25 years of press coverage of the military. It is the nature of the press to deliver bad news. It's not news if it's good. Over the years, I think the American people had the impression that our military was fat and sloppy, and we had generals too stupid to lead, and equipment that wouldn't work, and troops who didn't know how to use the equipment. For an awful lot of Americans, especially in the aftermath of Vietnam, the perception was that the Pentagon's a place that doesn't work very well, costs too damn much, and we're not at all sure they can perform their mission.

"And then, all of a sudden, bang. There the guys were, and they were doing it. Those cruise missiles were going down the streets of Baghdad, and the precision-guided munitions were going down air shafts and into buildings, and the troops were magnificent. The damn thing worked, and that surprised the hell out of an awful lot of people. I think the reason it was so surprising was, in fact, because of the impression that had been created over the years, of 25 years of normal, routine coverage of the Pentagon and the Department of Defense and the military by the press."17

After the war, top executives of the nation's major news organizations, acting on their bureau chiefs' recommendations, took the media complaints directly to Cheney. The initiative led to another round of negotiations between the Pentagon and media representatives. That led to the adoption in April 1992 of a new "Statement of Principles-News Coverage of Combat," which were to be followed in future combat situations involving American troops.

There were nine principles in all, which mostly restated earlier common-sense agreements. From the media's standpoint, the most important was the first principle, which stated: "Open and independent reporting will be the principal means of coverage of U.S. military operations." The principles also stated that pools would not be used again as the standard means of coverage.

But the principles also bound journalists to abide by a clear set of military-security ground rules. Violations of the rules could be punished by a suspension of credentials and expulsion from the combat zone. Similar rules had applied during the Gulf War, but despite the fact that some reporters violated those guidelines by operating outside the pool system, no action was taken against any of them.

Originally, the news organizations proposed a tenth principle, which said: "News material-words and pictures-will not be subject to security review." Pentagon negotiators instead proposed one that said: "Military operational security may require review of news material for conformance to reporting ground rules."

The two sides could not agree, so the tenth principle was dropped. In accompanying statements, the news organizations said they believed earlier military operations had proved that journalists could be trusted to abide by security rules. They said they would oppose any prior security reviews the Pentagon might try to impose in future operations.

The Pentagon, on the other hand, said the military believed it needed to retain the option to review news material to avoid inadvertent disclosures of information that could endanger the safety of troops or compromise the success of a mission.

Though that tenth principle resulted in a stalemate, it likely will become moot in future conflicts. Given advances in technology, including such equipment as satellite telephones, most military leaders now agree that security review, or censorship, is a thing of the past. The new operational imperative is "security at the source." However, it still seems likely that extraordinary situations could arise when military leaders would want to check a story before it was filed. It also seems likely that, if the request were reasonable, the journalist would go along with it.
Since Desert Storm, the Pentagon public affairs leadership, along with the military public affairs apparatus, have engaged in a great deal of analysis and planning to avoid media coverage problems in the future, with positive results in the aborted invasion of Haiti and the withdrawal of troops from Somalia. Unfortunately, the news media has paid little attention to lessons learned and future planning.

One of the nine principles stated, "News organizations will make their best efforts to assign experienced journalists to combat operations and to make them familiar with U.S. military operations."

As of this writing, there is no evidence that news organizations have followed through on the latter part of that promise.

Endnotes

1. W. Dale Nelson, "Bureau Chiefs Want More Open Coverage of Future Wars" (Washington, D.C.: Associated Press, May 2, 1991).

2. Washington Bureau Chiefs to Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, "Covering the Persian Gulf War" (unpublished report), May 30, 1991.

3. Washington Bureau Chiefs, letter to Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, Apr. 29, 1991.

4. Asst. Sec. of Defense (Public Affairs) Pete Williams, letter to Clark Hoyt, Nov. 22, 1991.

5. Richard Cheney, interview by authors, Washington, D.C., Jan. 12, 1995.

6. Les Aspin, interview by authors, Washington, D.C., Jan. 26, 1995.

7. John J. Fialka, Hotel Warriors (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1991), pp. 5, 37.

8. Col. William L. Mulvey, interview by authors, Washington, D.C., Dec. 1, 1994.

9. The battleships Missouri and Wisconsin were World War II ships which also served in Desert Storm. The Japanese surrender ceremonies were conducted on the Missouri in Tokyo Bay on Sept. 2, 1945.

10. Col. Larry Icenogle, interview by authors, Washington, D.C., Nov. 30, 1994.

11. John J. Fialka, interview by Frank Aukofer, Washington, D.C., Nov. 28, 1994.

12. Gen. J.H. Binford Peay III, interview by authors, Tampa, Fla., Jan. 23, 1995.

13. Fialka, interview.

14. Cheney, interview.

15. Ibid.

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

Copyright 1995 The Freedom Forum First Amendment Center -- http://www.fac.org

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