A Futile Game of Hide and Seek

Ritter had been on his way out of the Marines when war came. He resigned in 1990 to try to save a troubled first marriage to the former Heidi Evans, politely rebuffing a phone call to reconsider from the commandant, Gen. Alfred Gray. But Ritter changed his mind when President Bush began dispatching troops. "I can't leave the Marine Corps when my country's getting ready to go to war," Ritter said. "That's a dishonorable thing to do."

As the war began, Schwarzkopf was eager to claim success in the Scud hunt, for fear that Israel, the missile's main target, would enter the conflict. At a Jan. 30, 1991, news conference, the general displayed gun camera tape from an F-15E attack. "We knocked out as many as seven mobile erector-launchers in just that one strike," he declared.

Alarms rang immediately for Ritter, who was bomb damage assessment officer in Centcom's J-2, or intelligence directorate. He told his colleagues -- in Centcom and at the Defense Intelligence Agency -- that the targets looked like fuel trucks. Frantic work ensued among analysts at the CIA and the Joint Imagery Production Center. Before long, Rear Adm. Mike McConnell walked into Gen. Colin Powell's Pentagon office and told the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff he had a problem.

"We don't think those were Scuds," McConnell said, according to Powell's memoirs. When Powell asked his source, McConnell replied, "A captain, an analyst, on Schwarzkopf's staff."

The following morning, when he prepared the daily bomb damage report for Schwarzkopf, Ritter refused to mark the Scuds as "confirmed kills." According to Brig. Gen. John A. Leide, Centcom's intelligence chief, Schwarzkopf "didn't want to hear" he had made a mistake. Three members of the intelligence staff said in interviews that Schwarzkopf sent word down the chain he wanted Ritter to rewrite his report.

"I said, 'I'm BDA [bomb damage assessment] officer, and there is no criteria that says if the commanding officer says it's so, it's so,' " Ritter recalled. "They took it back, and Schwarzkopf blew up and they came back again and said, 'You have to change it.' I said I couldn't do that."

Ritter, meanwhile, had written a memorandum arguing that the allies were consistently striking decoys and not real Scuds. Even Delta Force commandos, running risky but, they thought, productive Scud hunts behind Iraqi lines, were blowing up the wrong targets, he wrote. Postwar analysis proved he was right. But when Maj. Gen. Wayne A. Downing heard the report, the former joint special forces commander said, "it made me irate."

"It probably took some personal courage, some intellectual courage and moral courage, to stand up and take that on because it certainly wasn't popular with the Air Force, it wasn't popular with General Schwarzkopf and it sure as hell wasn't popular with me," he said.

In another foreshadowing of his later role -- combining intelligence with secret operations and, some critics argue, overreaching -- wartime sources recounted that Ritter traveled to Ar Ar, a commando staging base in western Saudi Arabia. He proposed a plan to Col. Jesse Johnson, Centcom's special forces commander, for a covert team to infiltrate southwestern Iraq. Ritter would come along to select the debris of a bombed decoy, in hopes of developing a radar "signature" that could be used by Air Force bombardiers to distinguish fake Scuds from real ones.

Ritter refused to discuss Ar Ar or special operations in an interview. But he acknowledged that he was out of Riyadh one night, planning a reconnaissance mission, when an officer from Centcom headquarters arrived with a direct order from Schwarzkopf to abort his work and depart. "He said I was a defeatist, trying to ruin the morale of the operators, and two, I was trying to start my own war," Ritter recalled.

The Cabbage Patch

Ritter got his own war at UNSCOM, or part of one. Hired in September 1991 as a U.N. employee and paid for his UNSCOM work at various stages by the Marine Corps and the Pentagon's On-Site Inspection Agency, he received the assignment of writing a complete history of Iraqi ballistic missile development.