So, I am reading my copy of George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm.
I turn to the account of the strike on Dora Farm first. Tenet offers the standard account—embellished by an odd new detail here, an occasional defense of his own role there—when Tenet says that “targets were being passed to B-2s …”
Wait a minute.
Then a couple of sentences later, “a number of bombs from the B-2s …”
The strike at Dora Farm—according to every other source including Plan of Attack, Cobra II, The Iraq War, and American Soldier—was conducted with F-117s.
Adam Hebert in Air Force Magazine profiled the strike and the pilots— Lt. Col. David F. Toomey III and Maj. Mark J. Hoehn—complete with pictures of the planes landing after the mission.
The F-117 isn’t just a passing detail, either, in most accounts. Air Force personnel had developed a novel way to drop a pair of bunker busters from a single plane, had already loaded one aircraft when the intelligence came in, dramatically reduced mission planning time and executed a very daring strike. The Air Force performed superbly, and in all the accounts of that performance the aircraft were F-117s.
So, I guess what I am saying is, this looks an awful lot like a careless error in a book that is supposed to form the basis of Tenet’s defense of himself.
Not a good start.
I guess I am just feeling defensive of the F-117 because I’ve been reading Ben Rich’s memoir, Skunk Works, about the development of the stealth fighter.