“Overall command is [U.S.] General Tommy Franks, the four-star general,” Spencer said. “Tommy Franks will work jointly with Air Marshall Brian Burridge, Britain’s National Contingent Commander.”
U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) is a “unified joint command,” which has developed from the concept of the Rapid Reaction Task Force initiated by President Ronald Reagan. Central Command is under the direct command of only three men: U.S. President George W. Bush, the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and General Tommy Franks.
CENTCOM has no forces of its own. Troops and assets from the various branches of the military are allocated to Franks’ command in order to carry out his mandate. Franks has been mentioned as the man who will govern Iraq in the event that U.S. and British military forces occupy the Middle Eastern state of some 25 million people.
Spokesmen of CENTCOM refuse to answer questions about Franks’ background, which is ve
ry sketchy, and few details are found in any of the published
biographical sources. Biographical entries about Franks are quite unusual in
that they do not include the names of his parents or his religion. Asked about why so little information is available about the man who will lead U.S. armed forces in war, a Defense Dept. spokesman said: “He’s had his bio out that he wants to put out. He has certain rights.”
“Because we are in a different age, that is force protection,” Pentagon spokesman Dan Hetlage said about the secrecy behind Franks’ background. “That’s a personal decision [to release personal information]. It makes no difference [his religion]. He takes his orders from the President. Would it make a difference if Gen. Franks or Gen. Hetlage were in command?”
Franks is said to be the only child of Ray, a Wynnewood, Okla., construction worker, and Lorene, a seamstress and homemaker. Soon after his birth in 1945, his family is said to have relocated to George W. Bush's former hometown of Midland, Texas, where Franks was a lineman on the high school football squad, who apparently made little impression. When Franks first surfaced as the commander of CENTCOM, journalists could find no one in Midland who could actually remember him having lived there.
An archivist in Midland checked the town records for American Free Press and found the Franks family listed only from 1955 to 1962, during which time Ray Franks worked at a local hardware store. Oddly, from 1945 to 1955 there is no mention of the Franks family in Midland records, according to the archivist. The same year Tommy finished high school, the family apparently disappeared from Midland records.
Having attended the same high school in Midland as the president’s wife, Laura Bush, Franks moved to Austin where he attended University of Texas for about two years before dropping out and joining the army. After serving in Vietnam, Franks was selected to participate in the Army's "Boot Strap Degree Completion Program," and subsequently attended the University of Texas, Arlington, where he graduated with a degree in Business Administration in 1971.
Franks collected three Purple Hearts in Vietnam although how he was injured is not a matter of public record.
After a long career in the army, Franks, who is an artillery specialist, was promoted to general by former Secretary of Defense William Cohen and placed in charge of Central Command, which is responsible for the entire Middle East area.
“My faith in God is important,” Franks said in an interview, however, it is not known which faith he belongs to. Although it has been said that Franks is of Russian Jewish extraction, the son or grandson of Khazar Jewish refugees from the Soviet Union, like Gen. Wesley Kanne Clark (who was raised as a Protestant in Little Rock), the religious and ethnic background of Tommy Franks is simply not known.
“That in itself says a lot,” independent investigator James W. von Brunn of Easton, Maryland, told AFP. “He’s hiding something,” Von Brunn said. Having conducted “an intensive search” into Frank’s background von Brunn “was unable to find anything.”