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thedrifter
04-12-03, 12:16 PM
'Tooms,' 'Fuji,' Summoned for Secret Mission That Targeted Saddam's Compound, Marked War's Start
By John J. Lumpkin Associated Press Writer
Published: Apr 12, 2003


WASHINGTON (AP) - Seven warplanes pierced the night sky over Iraq, racing toward Baghdad on a mission to behead Saddam Hussein's government and perhaps hasten a war's end.
Trying to stay invisible to the Iraqis, the planes sprinted at just under the speed of sound. The assignment was so secret that none of the pilots had been told the identity of their target.

The approach of dawn colored the sky. The crews caught glimpses of Baghdad through breaks in the clouds. Two pilots split their formation and dived for a bucolic retreat on the south bank of the Tigris River.

The Iraqi president slept there.

---

Or so the Bush administration hoped.

Earlier, a contact of the Central Intelligence Agency provided a bombshell: a source knew where Saddam would stay that night.

It was March 19, war's eve. The deadline for Saddam to surrender power was to expire in a few hours. President Bush had already signed off on the U.S.-led invasion.

The CIA's unexpected break set in motion a daring airstrike. The bombs hit their target although Saddam appears to have survived. Eighteen days later a second air strike targeted him. U.S. officials still are not certain of his fate.

The first strike was credited with leaving Iraqi forces in chaos.

Some chose to fight, fiercely but without coordination; Many others did not. In three weeks, American troops were in Baghdad.

The Associated Press stitched together the most detailed account yet of the March 19 mission, based on interviews with one of the pilots, Air Force mission planners, and various other military and intelligence officials familiar with the operation. Some spoke openly, others on the condition they not be identified.

The source of the CIA tip is a closely guarded secret. Officials will only say the intelligence was regarded as extremely reliable.

Initially, a source told the CIA said that Saddam's sons, Qusai and Odai, and possibly their father, would be spending the night at a residential compound in the Dora Farms neighborhood in southern Baghdad. The idyllic riverside compound sat among rows of trees, its house and barn hidden from view.

The source's information was deemed so critical that CIA Director George J. Tenet personally took it to the Pentagon, where he described it to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The White House was their next stop.

For several hours late that afternoon, Bush and other top officials debated the merits of the strike, even as mission planners at Prince Sultan Air Base, Saudi Arabia, began preparing it.

According to the planners, the situation was far from perfect - only a few hours of darkness remained, and Baghdad bristled with anti-aircraft weaponry.

"The threat in Baghdad was still very, very high. We had to worry when the sunlight was going to come up. The timeline was very short," said Col. Jeff Hodgdon at Prince Sultan.

The compound was not one Saddam was known to use regularly, U.S. intelligence officials said. From above, it looked decidedly nonmilitary. A few structures were scattered amid groves of trees, but U.S. intelligence believed it concealed an underground bunker network.

The F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter was the obvious candidate to conduct the strike.

Designed to penetrate Soviet-era air defenses, the planes are slow, clumsy and carry no defensive weaponry. But unlike most other planes, they are not usually detected by radars.

As the strike came together, Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley, running the air war from Prince Sultan, wanted to know if the planes could pull off the mission. He summoned Maj. Clint Hinote, a stealth fighter pilot on loan to Moseley's operation as an adviser. The general was on the phone.

"He looked at me, and said 'The answer I owe the president is, is this doable? If it is, what is the risk?'" Hinote recounted. "I said, 'Yes, sir, it is doable ... The risk is going to be high.'"

Two pilots from the Black Sheep squadron, deployed to al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, got the call. The leader was a lieutenant colonel nicknamed "Tooms." His wingman was a major named "Fuji." Air Force officials asked that their real names not be used. Their unit is normally stationed at Holloman Air Force Base in southern New Mexico.

Tooms was not thrilled. A typical stealth fighter mission requires six hours of preparation. He had less than two.

To reach Baghdad, some 700 miles to the north, before dawn, they had to be airborne by 3 a.m. local time.

"We really needed to get into the airplanes," Tooms said.

Nor was he certain the mission would actually come off. The pilots had been through several false starts and scrapped missions in the days before the war.

Adding to the uncertainty, they would be dropping some new bombs, using a new technique.

Each plane carried two one-ton EGBU-27 Advanced Paveway IIIs, bunker-busters newly modified to use satellite guidance to find their target. They had not seen combat before. Only a few hours before the mission, test pilots in the United States dropped two of them simultaneously from a stealth fighter. Their next test would come over Baghdad.

In Washington, the CIA reported it had received more information from its sources. Saddam was at the compound.

Franks told President Bush he needed to decide whether to order the strike before 7:15 p.m. EST.

At 7:12 p.m., Bush said, "Let's go." It was two hours until dawn in Baghdad.

The stealth fighters launched and turned north, with neither the pilots nor the planners aware that Saddam himself was the target.

Around this time, U.S. Navy warships in the Red Sea and Persian Gulf launched the first of 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles at Baghdad. Two cruisers, two destroyers and two submarines targeted several sites around Baghdad, including Saddam's compound. The missiles would take up to two hours to reach the capital.

At 4 a.m. Baghdad time, the U.S. deadline for Saddam to leave power expired.

Somewhere south of Iraq, Tooms and Fuji - code-named Ram 01 and Ram 02 on the radio during the mission - met up with two F-16CJs, fighters designed for attacking anti-aircraft defenses. The pilots were from the 77th Fighter Wing of Shaw Air Force Base, S.C.

A pair of EA-6B Prowlers, piloted by Marines from Cherry Point, N.C., joined the mission. They carry jamming gear that can blind ground-based radars.

The F-16s and Prowlers were patrolling over southern Iraq when they were urgently summoned to escort the stealth fighters.

A third Prowler, launched from the aircraft carrier USS Constellation in the Persian Gulf, brought the group to seven.

"Anybody know where this mission is going?" asked one of the pilots.

They flew north to refuel with a KC-135 tanker, an airliner-sized flying gas station. The crew, from Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D., also was curious about the mission. Tooms demurred: "I'll tell you about it when I come back."

Once refueled, the seven planes broke away and turned toward Baghdad, silencing their radios to avoid detection.

"We climbed up, stealthed up, and pressed," Tooms said.

At Prince Sultan, the mission officers waited, and worried.

"I remember thinking to myself, if this thing goes badly, I'm going to have to go back and tell their wives what happened," Hinote said.

As Tooms approached Baghdad, he grew convinced he was shooting at Saddam himself. Who else would draw American planes out for a seat-of-the-pants mission like this?

As the Prowlers and F-16CJs screened for any air defenses, the stealth fighters split up to come at the city from two directions.

It was just before 5:30 a.m. Tooms noticed the sky brightening.

"I'm thinking this is not going to be good," he said.

They opened their bomb bay doors, a move that exposes the stealth fighter to detection.

Bombs away.

The weapons guided themselves to the preprogrammed global positioning system coordinates that located Dora Farms. At the surface, they burrowed, cutting through the earth in the blink of an eye. Four tons of explosives detonated. Underground tunnels and chambers became fiery tombs.

The target area was obscured by a cloud. But Tooms could see the flashes of the bomb explosions through them.

continued.........

thedrifter
04-12-03, 12:16 PM
"We were able to knock on his door and he could not do a thing about it," he said.

The planes raced away unhindered. Anti-aircraft defenses opened up too low, too late.

The Tomahawks thundered in. The missiles crashed into buildings on the surface and detonated their 1,000-pound warheads. Most of the buildings, save a large central house, were destroyed, according to satellite imagery.

Television networks reported explosions in Baghdad.

Urgent medical attention was summoned to the Dora Farms compound. Members of Saddam's praetorian guard cordoned off the site.

Just after 10 p.m. EST, half an hour after the strike, Bush prepared to go on television. Aides told him the planes had dropped their bombs but were still in Iraqi airspace.

"Let's pray for those pilots," Bush said.

When he spoke on television, he said, "Now that the conflict has come, the only way to limit its duration is to apply decisive force."

Over southern Iraq, the planes returned, one by one, to friendly airspace. Around 7:15 a.m. Baghdad time, the stealth fighters landed at the air base in Qatar.

"A couple of hundred folks were screaming and yelling with American flags," Tooms said. "That's when it started to hit me. The first four bombs of the war had just been dropped."

About an hour later, Saddam appeared on state-run television, looking unhurt but subdued. He said the United States had committed a "shameful crime" by attacking Iraq.

Although the speech looked impromptu, intelligence officials could not prove it had not been prerecorded.

Only later did Tooms learn from television news that his suspicions had been true: Saddam was the target.

"My gut tells me he was in there," Tooms said. "I'd like to believe what we went through was worth it. Whatever we did, it knocked them off their feet."

AP-ES-04-12-03 1113EDT

Sempers,

Roger