James C. Pfautz had what seemed to be the perfect résumé when I first called on him, in late 1985 at his home in suburban Washington. He had retired a month or so earlier from the Air Force as a two-star general after what was, by most standards, a successful career. He’d been captain of the swim team for West Point, from which he graduated in 1953, and had turned down an opportunity to serve on the American team in the Olympics in lieu of joining the Air Force and immediately beginning flight training. He flew 188 combat missions in the Vietnam War, spent an obligatory year at the National War College, and in 1974 was selected by the Council on Foreign Relations to serve as a fellow in its New York office. His brilliance led him in 1983 to a dream assignment: as the two-star general in charge of Air Force intelligence in the Pentagon. His much desired next step would be a third star and an assignment as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was not an easy man. He wanted his staff to be the best intel staff in the Pentagon, and, as I would learn, he pushed his people hard. One of his military subordinates would later tell me, with some bitterness, about the Pfautz mantra: “If it’s in the air, it’s Jesus. If it’s on the ground or in the water, it’s a hippie with long hair.” I knew nothing about him in 1985, when I began research for a book on the 1983 shootdown of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 by a Soviet combat pilot who had mistaken the commercial airliner for an American spy plane. There were no survivors among the 269 passengers and crew aboard. The issue for the US, and the world, was whether the Soviet pilot knew he was dealing not with an American espionage attempt but with a passenger plane that had strayed off its course en route from Anchorage to Seoul. Pfautz was cautious when I reached out to him and explained that I had learned that he and his staff were among the earliest in Washington to realize that the Soviet pilot simply had screwed up. Working closely with Russian linguists assigned to the National Security Agency, Pfautz’s staff had tracked the off-course airliner as it flew into Soviet air space close to the border with northern Japan. It was an area teeming with valuable surveillance targets with radar sites, including a Soviet submarine base that American intelligence flights constantly monitored from international waters. The flights, codenamed Rivet Joint, flew out of an American base on Shemya island in the Aleutian archipelago, 450 miles to the east. Pfautz’s staff came to understand that the Soviet combat pilot, trained to shoot down without question any intruder entering Soviet air space, had noted the running lights of the Korean 747 airliner—lights that from below closely matched those of the Air Force’s Boeing RC-135 Rivet Joint flights—and did what Soviet pilots guarding the border were trained to do. Pfautz was not very interested in talking to a reporter, but I had just published a tough book on Henry Kissinger, as he knew, or I thought he knew, and I was more interested in how the top of the federal bureaucracy dealt with a crisis than the specifics of the shootdown. Pfautz was troubled by the fact that his office’s round-the-clock reporting, which eventually nullified the initial eagerness of the anti-Soviet hawks in the Reagan White House to respond with violence, took far too long to get the attention of Reagan and his closest foreign policy aides. We had a series of chats about bureaucracy, and we ended up talking about his much admired Army colonel father, who pushed him to go to West Point when his grades and his swimming skills would have gotten him into most universities. I wondered why he chose to join the Air Force instead of beginning an Army career. So I dug out the names of a few of his classmates at West Point and made some calls. Being a nosey reporter has some rewards, but it sometimes yields information that one did not want to know. Renowned for his swimming talent, Pfautz joined what was then a segregated world. West Point’s varsity athletes were highly valued and had a number of special perks, one of which is that they shared a separate mess from the other cadets. It made for intimacy and Pfautz soon learned, to his shock, that the athletes, especially those on the varsity football team, were routinely given advance copies of test questions for the end-of-term exams all cadets were required to take. The cheating had been going on for at least a decade. Pfautz, who by his own admission was naïve at the time, was dismayed by the ready acceptance of such wrongdoing. He believed in the Point’s motto, “Duty, Honor, Country.” But he managed to keep his peace until an ambitious Army captain named Alexander Haig, who graduated from West Point in 1947, but kept close to the Corps—he would be assigned to the Academy in 1951 as a disciplinary officer—approached him and asked him to spy on his fellow athletes. Pfautz told me he had asked his father for advice and was urged to have nothing to do with spying on his fellow cadets. But he thought the ethical thing to do was to work with the spit-and-polish Haig, who had served in the Korean War, and share what he saw and learned. The information he provided Haig included the names of all the athletes who had taken advantage of the advance test questions. In the resulting scandal, ninety cadets, most of them football players, were expelled from West Point. The story made headlines and it was soon known to all inside West Point that Pfautz had been the one to blow the whistle. Haig had not protected Pfautz, but the general, despite his bitterness about the betrayal, had told few if any outsiders about Haig’s role until he and I spoke. Pfautz clearly understood—our talks about the Korean shootdown continued on and off for a year—that the fact that Haig was involved in such betrayal would be of special interest to me. In 1983 I had published The Price of Power, a book dealing with the perfidy of both Henry Kissinger and General Haig, his closest aide, in the Richard Nixon White House. Pfautz also knew I had my doubts about what I had come to believe was the protection ethos of West Point after my revelations in 1969 and 1970 of the My Lai massacre and its cover-up by the Army’s invidious WPPA, the West Point Protective Association. Pfautz’s punishment for his decision to support the West Point’s code of honor was, as I was later told by a few of his classmates, to be silenced for the rest of his years at the Point. He would graduate in 1953 without making many friends or having any other than necessary exchanges with his classmates. Joining the Air Force upon graduation was his escape. By the time I learned about his silencing—it was not an unusual punishment for those who crossed the WPPA—I had gotten to like the guy, and more: he had my ever-lasting respect. He told me that he had chosen not to tell his children about the silencing. One of them, he said, intended to make a career in the military and he did not want to do anything that could impact his career. He also said he would, at some point, tell his children what they needed to know. He passed away two years ago at the age of ninety, undoubtedly as difficult in his dotage as when he ran the Air Force intelligence shop. He was both feared and ridiculed for his willingness to chastise senior Air Force offices in the corridors of the Pentagon for sloppily wearing their uniform or, in one widely known incident shortly after Pfautz assumed his new job, he was passed in a Pentagon corridor by an Air Force lieutenant colonel licking an ice cream cone. Pfautz marched the officer to his office and, as the officer stood at attention, with ice cream dripping down the sides of his uniform, Pfautz chewed him out for conduct unbecoming of an officer. He was an aide to one of the senior operating officers of the Air Force, and Pfautz's action, as told to me while I was researching my book on the KAL shootdown, was widely seen as far from politic. Asked about the incident later, Pfautz simply said, “If it’s lunchtime and you’re on your break, take your ice cream and lick it in a corner. But don’t parade around in the Pentagon with it.” Pfautz never made it to three stars or to a job he would have excelled at—as director of Pentagon intelligence. I ended up concluding that he had been the right guy at the right time whose in-your-face reporting helped prevent an American escalation in the emotional aftermath of the KAL shootdown. He was a tough critter who stood up to the treatment he received, and overcame it. Truly heroic stuff. The book I ended up writing about the shootdown included a coda in which Pfautz recounted the idiocy that accompanied the hostility to his conclusion that many of the political actors in the Reagan White House did not want to hear: that Russia was not in any way interested in starting another world war. CIA Director William Casey called my publishers and warned them that, along with their author, they would be facing serious charges if the book was made available without the deletion of certain intelligence material. Casey, to his credit, told me the same in a testy telephone call. I called Pfautz who, despite being passed over for promotion, was then advising a most secret high-level government committee dealing with strategic missile issues, and told him about the Casey call and that my publishers, after consulting their attorneys, were going to publish the book as edited, including Pfautz’s criticisms. He had enough problems, I remember saying, and if he wanted the materials deleted or his name taken off, so be it. He told me he would think about it. He called a few hours later, and said, in effect, that he had been silenced enough. Let his words ring out. If only there were more like him at a time of so little straight talk from the US government. |