And the SAS, and later the American Green Berets, were sent into the western deserts of Iraq to find the mobile rocket launchers and either destroy them with their own Milan missiles or call in air strikes by radio.
The Patriots, although hailed as the saviors of all creation, had limited success—but that was not their fault. Raytheon had designed the Patriot to intercept airplanes, not rockets, and they had been hastily adapted to a new role. The reason they hardly ever hit an incoming warhead was never disclosed.
The fact was, in extending the Scud’s range by turning it into the Al-Husayn, the Iraqis had also increased its altitude. The new rocket, entering inner space on its parabolic flight, was getting red-hot as it came back down, something the Scud was never designed to do. As it reentered earth’s atmosphere, it just broke up. What descended on Israel was not an entire rocket but a falling trash can.
The Patriot, doing its job, went up to intercept and found itself with not one piece of metal coming toward it but a dozen. So its tiny brain told it to do what it was programmed to do—go for the biggest one.
This was usually the spent fuel tank, tumbling downward out of control. The warhead, much smaller and detached in the breakup, just fell free. Many failed to explode at all, and most of the battering sustained by Israeli buildings was impact-damage.
If the so-called Scud was a psychological terror, the Patriot was a psychological savior. But the psychology worked, inasmuch as it was part of the solution to keeping Israel out of the war.
Another part was the promise of the much-improved Arrow rocket when it was ready—installed by 1994. Section three was the right of Israel to choose up to one hundred extra targets that the Allied air forces would obliterate. The choices were made—mainly targets in Western Iraq that affected Israel, roads, bridges, airfields, anything pointing west at her. None of these targets by their geographical location had anything to do with the liberation of Kuwait on the other side of the peninsula.
The fighter-bombers of the American and British air forces assigned to Scud-hunting claimed numerous successes, claims regarded with immediate skepticism by the CIA, to the rage of General Chuck Horner and General Schwarzkopf.
Two years after the war, Washington officially denied that a single mobile Scud-launcher had been destroyed by air power—a suggestion still capable today of reducing any pilot involved to incandescent rage.
The fact was, the pilots had largely been deceived again by
If the southern desert of Iraq is a featureless billiard table, the western and northwestern deserts are rocky, hilly, and riven by a thousand wadis and gullies. This was the land over which Mike Martin had driven on his infiltration to Baghdad. Before launching its rocket attacks, Baghdad had created scores of dummy Scud mobile launchers,
and these were hidden, along with the real ones, across the landscape.
The habit was to produce them in the night, a tube of sheet metal mounted on an old flatbed truck, and at dawn torch a drum of oil and cotton waste inside the tube. Far away, the sensors in the AWACS
picked up the heat source and logged a missile launch. The fighters vectored onto the location did the rest and claimed a kill.
The men who could not be fooled this way were the SAS. Although only a handful in number, they swarmed into the western deserts in their Land-Rovers and motorbikes, lay up in the blistering days and freezing nights, and watched. At two hundred yards, they could see what was a real mobile launcher and what was a dummy.
As the real rocket launchers came out from the culverts and beneath the bridges where they were hidden from aerial observation, the silent men in the crags watched through binoculars. If there were too many Iraqis around, they quietly called in air strikes by radio. If they could get away with it, they used their own Milan antitank rockets, which made a very nice bang when hitting the fuel tank of a real Al-Husayn.
It was soon realized there was an invisible north-south line running down the desert. West of that line, the Iraqi rockets could hit Israel; east of it, they were out of range. The job was to terrorize the Iraqi crews into not daring to venture west of that line but to fire from east of it and lie to their superiors. It took eight days, and then the rocket attacks on Israel stopped. They never started again.
Later, the Baghdad-to-Jordan road was used as a divider. North of it was Scud Alley North, terrain of the American Special Forces, who went in by long-range helicopter. Below the road was Scud Alley South, bailiwick of the British Special Air Service. Four good men died in those deserts, but they did the job they had been sent in to do, where billions of dollars of technology had been deceived.
On day four of the air war, January 20, the 336th Squadron out of Al Kharz was one of the units that had not been diverted to the western deserts.
Its assignment that day included a big SAM missile site northwest of Baghdad. The SAMs were controlled by two large radar dishes.
The air attacks in General Horner’s plan were now rolling northward.
With just about every missile base and radar dish south of a horizontal line through southern Baghdad wiped out, the time had come to clear the air space east, west, and north of the capital.
With twenty-four Strike Eagles in the squadron, January 20 was going to be a multimission day. The squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Steve Turner, had allocated a twelve-plane detail for the missile base. A swarm of Eagles that large was known as a “gorilla.”
The gorilla was led by one of the two senior flight commanders. Four of the twelve planes were packing HARMs, the radar-busting missiles that home in on infrared signals from a radar dish. The other eight carried two long, gleaming, stainless-steel-cased laser-guided bombs known as GBU-10-I’s. When the radars were dead and the missiles blind, they would follow the HARMs and blow away the rocket batteries.
It did not seem as if things were going to go wrong. The twelve Eagles took off in three groups of four, established themselves in a loose echelon formation, and climbed to an altitude of twenty-five thousand feet. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the ochre desert below clearly visible.
The weather report over the target indicated a stronger wind than over Saudi Arabia but made no mention of a
South of the border, the twelve Eagles met their tankers, two KC-10s.
Each tanker could suckle six hungry fighters, so one by one the Eagles drifted onto station behind the tankers and waited as the boom operator, gazing at them through his Perspex window only a few feet away, “swam” his boom arm to lock onto their waiting fuel nozzles.
Finally, the twelve Eagles refueled for their mission and turned north toward Iraq. An AWACS out over the Gulf told them there was no hostile air activity ahead of them. Had there been Iraqi fighters in the air, the Eagles carried, apart from their bombs, two kinds of air-to-air rockets: the Air Interception Missile 7 and the AIM-9, better known as the Sparrow and the Sidewinder.
The missile base was there, all right. But its radars were not active. If the radar dishes were not operating on their arrival, they should have illuminated immediately to guide the SAMs in their search for the oncoming intruders. As soon as the radars went active, the four Strike Eagles carrying the HARMs would simply take them out or, in USAF
parlance, ruin their whole day.
Whether the Iraqi commander was afraid for his skin or just extremely smart, the Americans never did work out. But those radars refused to come alive. The first four Eagles, led by the flight commander, dropped down and down to provoke the radars into switching on. They refused.
It would have been foolish for the bomb-carriers to go in with the radars still intact—had they suddenly illuminated without warning, the SAMs would have had the Eagles cold.
After twenty minutes over the target, the attack was called off.
Components of the gorilla were assigned to their secondary targets.
Don Walker had a quick word with Tim Nathanson, his wizzo, sitting behind him. The secondary target for the day was a fixed Scud site south of Samarra, which was in any case being visited by other fighter-
bombers because it was a known poison gas facility.
The AWACS confirmed there was no takeoff activity out of the two big Iraqi air bases at Samarra East and Balad Southeast. Don Walker called up his wingman, and the two-plane element headed for the Scud site.
All communications between the American aircraft were coded by the Have-quick system, which garbles the
