America's Team: The Odd Couple — A Report on the
Relationship Between the Media and the Military
Frank A. Aukofer and William P. Lawrence

Chapter 2

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

If you have questions: jack.lule@lehigh.edu.