<div class="image-550">
<img src="https://cdn.kahimyang.com/resources-13/general-colin-powell-sm.webp" alt="General Colin Powell" loading="lazy" />
<div>
(General Colin Powell (left)
</div>
</div>

[Secretary of Defense Dick] Cheney and I had just returned from a conference in Brussels. Cheney, exhausted and ill with the flu, went home and stayed there. I went to work the next day, returned home, and gratefully hit the sack soon after dinner. An hour later, the phone rang, and I was informed by Tom Kelly that a coup was under way in the Philippines headed by a Gen. Edgardo Abenina. I went immediately to the National Military Command Center in the Pentagon, arriving just after 11:00 p.m.


I entered a room designed specifically for dealing with such situations. It was small, low-ceilinged; my steps were muffled by gray carpeting. The room was cold, kept that way to aid the performance of the supersensitive electronic gear. We were using a new teleconferencing system that allowed people from various agencies to confer without leaving their buildings.


This was the first time the system would be used in an actual crisis. I sat at a table facing five television monitors. On one I could see the White House Situation Room, with Vice President Quayle at the center of the table… The face of [deputy secretary of state] Larry Eagleburger filled a second screen. On a third was Bill Webster, the CIA director, and on a fourth, Harry Rowen, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, who was upstairs in the Pentagon.

I could see myself on the fifth screen .... Also, by pure chance, the Commander in Chief for all our forces in the Pacific, Admiral Huntington "Hunt" Hardisty, was there too, having come from Honolulu to the Pentagon for budget talks.


President Corazon Aquino, I was informed, had reported that the presidential palace in Manila was being bombed and strafed by rebel planes. She had requested US military intervention to stop the attacks.


Eagleburger argued hard in favor of answering Aquino's appeal. "We sponsored this democratic government," he said, "and we have to respond." Sporadic reports kept arriving; there was gunfire here and there, and a possible need to rescue Aquino from the palace. [My itals] But we were hearing more confusion than hard information. Our ambassador in Manila, Nicholas Platt, reconfirmed an official request that we bomb an airfield under rebel control. Mostly old T-28s, World War 2 prop-driven trainers, based at this field, were the planes attacking the capital. Again, State was eager to respond.


The Vice President said he needed to contact President Bush soon with a recommendation. I had taken a media beating for holding back on the Giroldi coup in Panama in October. If I wanted to overcome any impression of indecisiveness, I should have plunged ahead now. But I was not about to be stampeded.


I started asking questions. We could bomb the airfield, but did we know who we would be bombing? Who would we hit, rebels or loyalists? The State Department probably pictured a neat, surgical strike. Instead, I envisioned anxious young pilots flying their first combat missions, not precision-tooled automatons. My concern was that if we started shooting up planes on the airfield, we were inevitably going to kill people, and I warned the other teleconferees, "I can guarantee you that the Filipinos are going to blast us at their funerals, no matter which side we hurt." We were still, in some quarters, viewed and resented as former colonial masters.


Before we did anything rash, we needed more on-site information. I wanted to talk to Fidel Ramos, the Philippine defense minister, to get an eyeball account. It just happened that the American military attaché ordinarily posted to our embassy in Manila was also in the Pentagon this night, upstairs with Harry Rowen, (and he was asked to get in touch with Ramos.)


In the meantime, I described to Quayle and the others a plan that Hardisty and I had devised: have our F-4 Phantom jets stationed at Clark Air Force Base buzz any T-28S daring to come onto the runway at the rebel-held airbase. In short, scare the hell out of them.

How the US saved Cory Aquino during the 1989 coup against her - An account by General Colin Powell