Cheney, Rumsfeld and COG Planning in the 1980s
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld have been associated since the 1980s with a parallel planning structure in the United States. The formal goal of this planned parallel structure was called “continuity of government” (COG), but the name is misleading. The Progressive Review referred more descriptively to plans for “a possible military/civilian coup.”18
The plans for what journalist James Bamford has called the “secret government” of COG had been slowly developing, chiefly but not only under Republican administrations, since the 1950s.19 As mentioned in chapter 4, a major step was the creation in 1979 of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). But FEMA’s emergency planning was radically politicized under President Reagan. By 1984, in the words of journalist Ross Gelbspan, “Lt. Col. Oliver North was working with officials of the Federal Emergency Management Agency . . . to draw up a secret contingency plan to surveil political dissenters and to arrange for the detention of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens in case of an unspecified national emergency. The plan, part of which was codenamed Rex 84, called for the suspension of the Constitution under a number of scenarios, including a U.S. invasion of Nicaragua. . . . But in addition to groups opposing United States policies in Central America, the FEMA plan reportedly included environmental activists, opponents of nuclear energy and refugee assistance activists.”20
Earlier, Governor Reagan in California had authorized the development of a counterinsurgency plan (known as Cable Splicer) and exercises to deal with such crises, in conjunction with the U.S. Sixth Army and the Pentagon (Operation Garden Plot). The cadres developing Cable Splicer (headed by Louis Giuffrida), were with Reagan’s elevation to the presidency transferred into FEMA. As head of FEMA, Giuffrida pursued plans for massive detention of dissidents; these became so extreme that even Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith, raised objections.21
As developed in the mid-1980s by Oliver North in the White House, the plans called for not just the surveillance but also the potential detention of large numbers of American citizens. During the Iran-Contra hearings North was asked by the congressman Jack Brooks about his work on “a contingency plan in the event of emergency, that would suspend the American constitution.” The chairman, Democratic senator Daniel Inouye, ruled that this was a “highly sensitive and classified” matter, not to be dealt with in an open hearing. This dramatic exchange was virtually ignored by the establishment media.22
In the wake of Brooks’s question in Congress, the public was told how attorney general William French Smith, in an August 1984 letter to NSC chair Robert McFarlane, had written that FEMA’s proposed executive order “exceeds its proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency preparedness.”23 To this day it is usually reported that “Smith’s objections apparently killed the draft executive order.”24 But the authorizing National Security Decision Directive (NSDD 55 of September 14, 1982, on “Enduring National Leadership”) continued in effect for a decade. It was augmented by President Reagan on September 16, 1985, with National Security Decision Directive 188 (NSDD 188, “Government Coordination for National Security Emergency Preparedness”). The directives were part of a series, augmented by additional executive orders, that authorized ongoing “continuity planning.”25
Some of the highest-level planning for COG was conducted by a parallel extragovernmental group. This parallel structure, operating outside normal government channels, included the head of G. D. Searle & Co., Donald Rumsfeld, and then congressman from Wyoming Dick Cheney.26 Overall responsibility for the program, hidden under the innocuously named National Program Office, was assigned to Vice President George H.W. Bush, “with Lt. Col. Oliver North . . . as the National Security Council action officer.”27
It is not fanciful to link this private parallel government to 9/11. As detailed in chapter 12, Cheney and FEMA were reunited in May 2001: President George W. Bush appointed Cheney to head a terrorism task force and created a new office within FEMA, the innocuously named Office of National Preparedness, to assist him. In effect, Bush was authorizing a resumption of the kind of planning that Cheney and FEMA had conducted under the heading of COG. And on September 11 the planning bore fruit: a classified “continuity of operations plan” was implemented, at least partially, for the first time.28
This chapter and especially the next explore the consequences of this arresting coincidence: that the COG planning team of the 1980s was essentially reconstituted by Bush the younger in May 2001 as a terrorism task force, and then (after planning activities of which we know next to nothing) a major attack on the United States (of which we also still know next to nothing) resulted in implementation of COG. The public also knows next to nothing about COG, except that its powers to disrupt constitutional government are considerable.
“Continuity of government” is a reassuring title. It would be more honest, however, to call it a “change of government” plan, since according to Alfonso Chardy of the Miami Herald, the plan called for “suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the government over to FEMA, emergency appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of martial law during a national crisis.”29 The plan also gave the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had been involved in drafting it, sweeping new powers, including internment.30
The team was planning, in effect, for the supplanting in a major crisis of the public state by an alternative one. According to author and journalist James Mann: “Rumsfeld and Cheney were principal actors in one of the most highly classified programs of the Reagan Administration. Under it U.S. officials furtively carried out detailed planning exercises for keeping the federal government running during and after a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. The program called for setting aside the legal rules for presidential succession in some circumstances, in favor of a secret procedure for putting in place a new ‘President’ and his staff. The idea was to concentrate on speed, to preserve ‘continuity of government,’ and to avoid cumbersome procedures; the speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate, and the rest of Congress would play a greatly diminished role.”31
But the planning eventually called for suspension of the Constitution, not just “after a nuclear war” but for any “national security emergency.” This was defined in Executive Order 12656 of 1988 as “any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack, technological emergency, or other emergency, that seriously degrades or seriously threatens the national security of the United States.”32 Clearly 9/11 met this definition.
COG planning was eventually integrated into planning by a number of groups corresponding to different departments, dealing with different functions. One group, the Continuity of Government Interagency Group, dealt with devolution and relocation of government leaders, to prevent decapitation of the government in a crisis. Another group dealt with “command and control” problems, to ensure security for communications and computers so that decisions could be made and implemented. Another group, focused on the Department of Defense, planned for retaliation against the nation’s attackers.33
In April 1994, Tim Weiner announced in The New York Times that in the post-Soviet Clinton era, “the Doomsday Project, as it was known” was to be closed. “The nuclear tensions of that era having subsided, the project has less than six months to live. ‘On Oct. 1, it’s history,’ a Pentagon official said.” Weiner added that “while some ‘continuity of government’ programs continue under the aegis of Pentagon planners, they are pale versions of the vision laid out by President Reagan in 1983. ‘They are realizing these requirements are throwbacks to the cold war,’ [nuclear analyst Bruce] Blair said. ‘They are not relevant to today’s world.’”34
This article persuaded authors James Mann and James Bamford that Reagan’s COG plans had now been abandoned, because “there was, it seemed, no longer any enemy in the world capable of . . . decapitating America’s leadership.”35 In fact, however, only one phase of COG planning had been terminated, a Pentagon program for response to a nuclear attack. Instead, according to author Andrew Cockburn, a new target was found:
Although the exercises continued, still budgeted at over $200 million a year in the Clinton era, the vanished Soviets were now replaced by terrorists. . . .There were other changes, too. In earlier times the specialists selected to run the “shadow government” had been drawn from across the political spectrum, Democrats and Republicans alike. But now, down in the bunkers, Rumsfeld found himself in politically congenial company, the players’ roster being filled almost exclusively with Republican hawks. “It was one way for these people to stay in touch. They’d meet, do the exercise, but also sit around and castigate the Clinton administration in the most extreme way,” a former Pentagon official with direct knowledge of the phenomenon told me. “You could say this was a secret government-in-waiting. The Clinton administration was extraordinarily inattentive, [they had] no idea what was going on.”36
Cockburn’s account requires some qualification. Richard Clarke, a Clinton Democrat, makes it clear that he participated in the COG games in the 1990s and indeed drafted Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive (PDD) 67 on “Enduring Constitutional Government and Continuity of Government.”37 But COG planning involved different teams for different purposes. It is quite possible that the Pentagon official was describing the Department of Defense team dealing with retaliation.
The Pentagon official’s description of a “secret government-in-waiting” (which still included both Cheney and Rumsfeld) is very close to the standard definition of a cabal, as a group of persons secretly united to bring about a change or overthrow of government. In the same era Cheney and Rumsfeld projected change also by their public lobbying, through the Project for the New American Century, for a more militant Middle East policy. In light of how COG was actually implemented in 2001, one can legitimately suspect that, however interested this group had been in continuity of government under Reagan, under Clinton the focus of Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s COG planning was now a change of government.
So we should not be surprised that with the implementation of COG came the warrantless detentions that Oliver North had planned two decades earlier, and the warrantless eavesdropping that is their logical counterpart. The only question is this: Were these practices decided on after 9/11, as the Bush administration maintains? Or were they already being prepared for as part of the COG planning revived by Cheney and FEMA in May 2001? I return to this question in chapters 12 through 14.
Oil and Cheney’s Energy Task Force
There is the same impression of preparation for 9/11 and its consequent war from Cheney’s other task force, the Energy Task Force. By May 2001 it had already set out, urgently and in some detail, plans for taking control over Iraqi oil. As many observers have pointed out, the second Bush administration was the first in which the vice president and his own national security staff wielded powers comparable to, perhaps even surpassing, those of the president. Some have gone even a step further, as journalist Steve Perry wrote in 2005: “Cheney’s office is the Pandora’s Box of the Bush administration campaign to invade Iraq. Most of the planning as to both the waging and selling of the war occurred under his direction, along with that of Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. It was Cheney who played the point in beating up CIA for its unhelpful analysis of the non-threat posed by Saddam, and Cheney along with his Defense Department pals who effectively circumvented CIA by setting up the Office of Special Plans at the Pentagon to funnel the administration the kind of intelligence it wanted, largely courtesy of their longtime double-dealing stooge, Ahmed Chalabi.”38
End Part II