Second: there was a newly completed underground command center at MODA; Horner should ask General Hamad to let CENTCOM use it.

Third: Horner would be welcome to use USMTM staff ’s small suite of rooms at MODA for his advance headquarters.

All three sounded so right to Horner that he enlisted Kaufman on the spot as his chief of staff.33

A few moments later, they were shown into Hamad’s conference room. Since the start of the crisis, Hamad had been meeting daily with his service chiefs; the Americans were now to be part of such a meeting. Around the large table sat Horner’s closest Saudi friend, Lieutenant General Behery, head of the Royal Saudi Air Force. Next to him sat the Saudi land force commander, Lieutenant General Josuf Rashid, and the commander of the Saudi naval forces, Vice Admiral Talil Salem Al-Mofadhi. Also present was the head of MODA Plans and Operations, Major General Jousif Madani. And finally, to General Hamad’s left, was a man Horner didn’t yet know, Lieutenant General Khaled bin Sultan, who at the time was the commander of the Royal Saudi Air Defense Forces, and was soon to become the Saudi military commander and Schwarzkopf ’s coalition equal.

Khaled, another, older son of Prince Sultan, was a big man, well over six feet tall and weighing two hundred-plus pounds, with a black mustache and dark hair combed straight back. He’d attended Sandhurst, Great Britain’s West Point, and spoke English and French fluently.

Khaled (as Horner was to learn very shortly) was a forceful man—probably due to his Sandhurst training. Instead of the bobbing-and-weaving style of most Arabs—who were so polite you couldn’t tell what they were for or against—he was direct. With Khaled, you knew where you stood, which made it much easier to work with him than with most Arabs.

Everyone shook hands all around, and after some polite remarks, got down to business. Two or three people on the USMTM staff gave the group the same briefings Cheney had given the King, including intelligence photos. There wasn’t much new there: the Iraqis were in Kuwait, much of Kuwait was in Saudi Arabia, and there were scarcely any serious military forces to stop the twenty-seven Iraqi divisions then in Kuwait from swinging south. For now, however, these seemed to be digging in on the border. The implication was that they weren’t planning an immediate attack. On the other hand, a military person plans to counter capability and takes little solace in intent. The military has been fooled too often.

Horner then gave to the assembled Saudis a brief rundown of the visit to Jeddah—the reason for it, Bush’s instruction to find out the King’s needs and wishes, as well as some insight into what had taken place at the meeting with Sultan that morning and what was likely to happen during the next few weeks: