Copyright 1993 Newsday, Inc.

Newsday

December 5, 1993, Sunday,

Somalia Mission Control; Clinton called the shots in failed policy targeting Aidid

SERIES: MISSION TO SOMALIA. A year ago this week, the first U.S. troops sent aby President Bush arrived in Somalia. It was to be a humanitarian mission. But policy began to change in August, when President Clinton sent in a Special Operations force to capture the warloard Aidid. This report looks at that decision and its consequences. FIRST OF 4 PARTS

By Patrick J. Sloyan.

Washington

It was Aug. 22, and President Bill Clinton was vacationing at Martha's Vineyard when word arrived of another attack on U.S. soldiers in Somalia.

No one was killed, but a land mine wounded six Americans when it destroyed their vehicle in the streets of Mogadishu. It had been detonated by a Somali spotter using a remote-controlled device - the identical method used in two earlier attacks. One of those, on Aug. 8, had killed four U.S. Army military policemen.

For Clinton, the Aug. 22 attack was the final straw. That night, on his orders, Delta Force commandos from Ft. Bragg, N.C., a helicopter detachment from Ft. Campbell, Ky., and Army Rangers from Ft. Benning, Ga., were en route to Somalia.

Once there, the clandestine Special Operations force would coordinate with a CIA team that had been in place for more than a month. Their mission: Capture Gen. Mohamed Farrah Aidid, the dominant political leader in one of the world's poorest countries.

Once Aidid was in custody, Delta Force would whisk him to a third-country ship off the coast of Somalia, where the warlord would be tried for murder.

"We were going to set Aidid aside," said one senior Clinton adviser, using the White House euphemism for what was more commonly known among officials as the "snatch" operation.

Seven weeks later the decision would result in a bloody firefight as Rangers and men of the Delta Force made their seventh attempt to grab Aidid. Eighteen American soldiers died, and 77 were wounded. An estimated 300 Somalis were killed and another 700 wounded, a third of the casualties women and children.

Clinton's handling of the disaster has raised doubt about the future U.S. role, not only in Somalia, but also in Bosnia and other global hot spots.

In the aftermath of the Oct. 3 battle, Aidid emerged with a global reputation by withstanding American military wrath and winning Clinton's support for a Somali-based political settlement.

Clinton seemed to underline the debacle by announcing a March 31 deadline for retreat from the East African country. In hoisting a diplomatic white flag, the president portrayed himself as a victim of events controlled by the United Nations on a Somali mission that Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called "peace enforcement."

"We cannot let a charge we got under a UN resolution to do some police work - which is essentially what it is, to arrest suspects - turn into a military mission," Clinton said in the aftermath of the Oct. 3 battle.

Even more specific were administration officials who sought to distance Clinton and his top aides from the ill-fated hunt for Aidid. "The search-and-seizure missions are UN operations," said Pentagon spokeswoman Kathleen de Laski.

But extensive interviews with top administration officials, many of whom spoke on the condition they not be identified, showed the United States was in control of events in Somalia. Leading up to the Oct. 3 disaster were these changes in U.S. policy:

A major shift from backing an Aidid-sponsored disarmament conference in May to violent confrontations with the formidable warlord. The hard-line policy was crafted by the U.S. envoy in Somalia, Robert Gosende, and retired U.S. Navy Adm. Jonathan Howe, handpicked by the Clinton administration to head the UN mission there.

Clinton's approval, following an ambush that killed 24 UN peacekeepers in June, of three days of aerial bombardments of Aidid's compound with the understanding that the attacks might kill the Somali leader. U.S. forces could be used only with specific U.S. military approval even though the troops were ostensibly part of the UN mission. The attacks on Aidid triggered an escalating round of violence.

Clinton's decision to withdraw 25,000 combat troops from Somalia just as the United States began what proved to be its bloodiest confrontation since a U.S. Marine peacekeeping force was massacred in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983.

The political standoff with Aidid had erupted into violence on June 5, when 24 Pakistani troops in the UN force were killed during an ambush in a Mogadishu area controlled by the warlord. While there was no proof Aidid ordered the ambush - he denied it - both Howe and Gosende blamed the warlord. Within 24 hours Clinton backed a UN Security Council resolution calling for the arrest and trial of those responsible for the ambush. The next week U.S. warplanes and hundreds of UN troops attacked Aidid's stronghold over a four-day period.

"We didn't plan to kill him, but the president knew that if something fell on Aidid and killed him, no tears would be shed,"said one senior official who participated in Clinton's June decision. But another U.S. official said four attacks by American gunships during that period were aimed at killing Aidid.

In a radio speech June 12, the day of the first attack, Clinton underlined the American policy. "We're striking a blow against lawlessness and killing," Clinton said. Later, at a news conference, he said: "We cannot have a situation where one of these warlords, while everybody else is cooperating, decides that he can go out and slaughter 20 peacekeepers."

But Aidid remained defiant, and his supporters staged rallies tht led to escalating violence between the Somalis and UN troops.

All of those moves contributed to the Oct. 3 disaster, but today White House officials look back to Aug. 22, when administration opponents of the covert operation to seize Aidid dropped their objections, as the crucial day.

* * *

The National Security Council, the usual forum used by presidents when deciding whether to send U.S. troops into harm's way, never figured in the Clinton decision. On Aug. 22, a Sunday, Clinton talked by phone from Martha's vineyard with Anthony Lake, his adviser on the national security affairs.

For weeks, top administration officials had been debating the deployment of a Delta team to seize Aidid. "They understood the plan," said one source. But when it came down to decision time that day, "it was between Lake and the president with some phone calls afterwards," said a senior White House Official.

Normally, Lake would have relayed Clinton's decision first to Defense Secretary Les Aspin. But Aspin was boating on a lake in Wisconsin. Instead, Lake called the president's senior military adviser, Army Gen. Colin Powell, chairman fo the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In turn, Powell called Marine Gen. Joseph Hoar, head of Central Command, the U. S. military headquarters responsible for Somalia.

"It looks like we are going to send them in,"Powell told Hoar, according to military aided who heard the conversation. Instead of aresponding, Hoar remained silent, a reflection of his anger, dismay and frustration over the order.

For two months Hoar's arguments had been used by Aspin, Powell and Lake to oppose the "snatch" operation favored by the State Department.

According to military and congressional sources, Hoar had maintained that the chances of getting Aidid were one in four - that the 62-year-old warrior would simply elude pursuers in the narrow alleyways of Mogadishu, where he once served as chief of police; that in the media, the world's last superpower would be seen conducting a manhunt instead of using skilled diplomacy; and, finally, that capturing Aidid would change nothing.

"His (Hoar's) objections made it up the chain of command,"said one Clinton national security adviser when asked if the president was aware of potential pitfalls. "But we didn't overrule the military. There was a consensur."

Since a diplomatic stalemate with Aidid had eruped into violence in June, the U.S. envoy in Somalia, Gosende, had been urging the removal of the warlord.

To Gosende and his UN counterpart Howe, the defiant Aidid was the roadblock to disarming the population and rebuilding the country.

They had abandoned efforts by their American predecessor, Robert Oakley, to persuade Aidid and other clan leaders to supervise disarmament and help rebuild Somalia.

Howe knew all the right buttons to push,"said a Pentagon official.

Gosende's view had been endorsed in late June by Secreatary of Sate Warren Christopher and Peter Tarnoff, underscretary of state for political affairs.

While the issue was being debated at lower government levels, Clinton approved some contingency planning in mid-June. An interagency task force began to study what would be done if, in fact, Aidid was captured.

Officials of the Pentagon, State Department and CIA offered a veriety of ideas centered on expelling Aidid to Ethiopia or another African country. Eventually the task force decided on placing Aidid aboard a ship off the Somali coast, where he would be tried by panel of American judges assembled for the purpose. The move would avoid a dispute over the legal aspects of American commandos under the authority of the United Nations grabbing a Somali citizen.

Meanwhile, Gosende's hard line toward Aidid had been reinforced by Ambassador David Shinn, the special conordinator for Somalia.

Shinn identified Aidid as the obstruction to a political settlement in an Aug. 10 report by an interagency task force he headed that had visited Somalia. "We have been serious about trying to arrest Aidid for some period of time,"Shinn said at a news conference. "The fact of the matter is that it's not easy" with convertional U.S. and UN forces.

Pulling off a kidnap under difficult circumstances was one of the clandestine arts honed by Delta Force members of Special Operations. But Lake was reluctant. He had seen clandestine operations go sour.

As a young foreign service officer, he served in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1963 when Present John F. Kennedy "set aside" another political problem - South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem - in a fatal CIA orchestrated coup.

Instead of a deeper commitment with U.S. force in Somalia, Lake sought to have the British government deploy a Special Air Squadron commando team to snatch Aidid. "London said no thanks," a Clinton adviser said.

Increasing conventional forces in Somalia was ruled out, according to one senior White house official. Democrats in Congress were already pushing for a total U.S. withdrawal because of American deathes from the increasing violence. As part of the American turnover of control in Somalia to the UN in May, troops for 28 nations had replaced the bulk of U.S. combat troops there.

But internal objections to the Special Operations option weakened and finally ceased in August.

Until the Aug. 8 attack, when the four U.S. MPs were killed, U.S. troops had been immune from Somali attacks. Now defense officials worried that a large-scale Somali assault might imperil the remaining 3,100 U.S. troops in Mogadishu, only 1,120 of whom were combat soldiers.

Perhaps the most important change of heart was Powell's. The Joint Chiefs chairman had come to dominate national security deliberations; his experience and focus had impressed Clinton, who had developed a personal relationship with the general during a series of private meetings.

Don't cut and run just because things have become difficult, Powell told Clinton, according to a U.S. official. "We had to do something, or we were going to be nibbled to death," said a Powell aide. "The decision was driven by the circumstances of the attacks in Somalia."

In later conversations with aides, Clinton would defend his actions. He based his decisions on the best information available at the time, aides quoted him as saying.

In hindsight, one senior administration official said that after the first U.S. attacks on Aidid in June, there should have been a U.S. diplomatic initiative. "He sent us a message, and we sent him a message," the official said. "Then we should have invited Aidid to lunch and talked things over."

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