Roger Morris, former staff member on the National Security council, learned how the system works while on the inside, before resigning in protest and frustration at the immorality and illegality of how foreign policy was created and implemented in the United States. Roger's writings for the Green Institute offer a unique insight into why so much goes wrong in US diplomacy.
The
Specialist
Robert Gates
and the Tortured World of American Intelligence
By Roger Morris
"I may be dangerous," he said,
"but I am not wicked. No, I am not wicked." -- Henry James, The American
It was a failed administration's ritual
scapegoating, the ousting last winter of its ruinous secretary of defense. But
in the sauve qui peut confirmation of his replacement -- "The only
thing that mattered," said a Senate aide, "was that he was not Don
Rumsfeld" -- there was inadvertent irony.
With George W. Bush's choice of ex-CIA
Director Robert Gates to take over the Pentagon, this most uninformed of
presidents unwittingly gave us back vital pages of our recent history. If
Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the
neoconservative claque in the second echelon of the administration are all
complicit in today's misrule, Gates personifies older, equally serious, if less
recognized, less remembered abuses. His laden résumé offers needed evidence
that
tortuous, torturing foreign policies did not begin with the Bush regime -- and
will not end with it.
While Rumsfeld's record bared some of
Washington's uglier realities and revealed the depth of decay in the U.S.
military, Gates' long passage through the world of espionage and national
security illuminates other dark corners -- specters of the Cold War still
haunting us, nether regions of flawed, corrupted intelligence, and the
malignant legacy of foreign policy's evil twin, covert intervention.
Like the Senate, the media welcomed Gates,
in the words of the Christian Science Monitor, as the
"Un-Rumsfeld." In the wake of his flinty predecessor, he arrived as a
smiling, silver-haired cherub of Midwestern earnestness. That image seemed
borne out by his swift firings of ranking Army officials in the Walter Reed
scandal, his apparent questioning of the value of the Pentagon's notorious
penal colony at Guantánamo, his more moderate (or at least conventionally
diplomatic) rhetoric in the international arena, and even his heresy in
mentioning respectfully -- and quaintly -- the Constitutional role of "the
press" in a Naval Academy commencement address.
For all his relative virtues in 2007,
however, Gates remains a genuine Jekyll-and-Hyde character, a best-yet-worst of
as it flung its vast power over the world. To appreciate who and what he was --
and so who and what he is likely to be now, at one of the most critical
junctures ever to face a secretary of defense -- is to retrace much of the
shrouded side of American foreign policy and intelligence for the last
half-century or more. Most Americans hardly know that record, though its
reckonings are with us today -- with a vengeance. At the unexpected climax of
his long career, the 63 year-old Gates faces not only the toll of the
disastrous regime he joins, but of his own legacy as well.
This is a vintage American chronicle with
dramatic settings and dark secrets. The cast ranges from hearty boosters in
dropped behind Russian lines across Eurasia to Islamic clerics car-bombed in
the
long-hidden paternity. As with Donald Rumsfeld, such a sweeping history -- the
history, in this case, of that blind deity of havoc, the CIA -- cannot come
condensed or blog-sized. It is, necessarily, without apology, a long trail
a-winding. Though in the end this will indeed be a profile of our new secretary
of defense, much has to be understood before Gates even joins the story in a
serious way as policy-accomplice and -maker. But the trip is full of color, and
quicker than it seems. And as usual, the essential lessons, along with the
devil, are in the details.
As with so many good stories, it begins on
a train -- two trains, in fact, crossing landscapes worlds apart, a great
separation Robert Gates was heir to, revealing much about the man -- and us.
"Heart of the Vortex"
One of the Santa Fe Railroad's old
diamond-stacked, wood-burning locomotives, chugging in off the
"a dark and stormy night" in May 1872, was the making of
boosters with government bonds and railroad-company influence, beginning a flow
of private profit from public money and political favor that would be the
hallmark of the town (and nation), the new tracks thrust the settlement ahead
of competing sites as a lucrative depot for great cattle drives up the old
Chisholm Trail.
would now become the "cow capital" of the plains. Even when barbed
wire turned the droves of cattle toward
City
to transform it into a milling center for the surrounding sea of wheat. Raucous
saloons, brothels, and gambling dens gave way to the white clapboard, civilized
murmur and discreet hypocrisies of merchants and farmers, churches and schools.
A sizable pool of oil was discovered
nearby in 1915, and a year later
built its first airplane, just in time for the American entry into the Great
War. Over the 1920s, with amiable banks within reach and a hungry workforce
streaming out of the ragged farm economy, ex-military pilots and barnstormers
opened 29 aircraft factories in what was now being touted as "the Air
Capital of America." The Depression killed some of those plants, but World
War II and its Cold War sequel begat the giants -- Boeing and Beech, Cessna and
Learjet, feeding parasite payrolls like Raytheon's and those of Wichita originals
Pizza Hut and Coleman Camping.
By 1951, busy McConnell Air Force Base,
its runways conveniently verging on Boeing's, roared with the bounty of Cold
War budgets. It was already home to a Strategic Air Command wing and soon to an
outlying horseshoe of 18 Titan II missile sites. Ever abreast of the times,
hands were now home, as well, to clean-cut silo warriors whose understood, if
unspoken, round-the-clock business was preparing for the incineration of the
Soviet Union,
China.
In 1960,
was still a small city of 250,000 -- a stubby skyline along the silt-heavy
modern-city amenities� low crime
rate, nationally-recognized school system, low cost of living, ample
opportunities for culture and recreation" -- paradise according to the
Chamber of Commerce.
"largest little city" smugly sold itself as the ideal.
In 1962, for the first of three times, quintessentially Midwestern, quietly
metaphorical
Just as typically, the model had
dissidents. Behind booster smiles, labor always met the anti-union snarl of the
corporations and the city they ruled. For the less than 10% of the community
that was African-American or Hispanic, unrelieved racism, face-to-face mockery,
went with Brown v. Board, part and parcel of early desegregating
place bred its disillusioned intellectuals, known as the "Magic
Locals," who, in the course of the 1950s, fled for the Beat Scene of San
Francisco's
celebrated as "the Wichita Group," in part for the scorn they hurled
at their abandoned archetypal town, and thus the nation.
Their bane was the "vortex," the
interlaced cultural-economic tyrannies and personal duplicities of what one of
them called the "Suburbia, Materialism and Conformity� ‘Donna Reed/Leave it to Beaver' identity
held deear by a largely white, educated middle class." So archetypal was
the critique that primal-beat poet Alan Ginsberg sought out the place on a
Guggenheim-financed road trip in 1966, finding "radio aircraft assembly
frame ammunition petroleum nightclub Newspaper streets." He plunged boldly
"On to
to Prophesy ! O frightful bard ! Into the heart of the Vortex."
A Man Without Anecdotes
In that same year, as Ginsberg recited,
one of the Vortex's most commendable sons, destined to be perhaps its most
influential, was being recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. Robert
Michael Gates was an example the Wichita Group would have found characteristic,
if not prophetic -- an all-American boy in the all-American town.
He was born in the fall of 1943, during
which would prove nearly endless. His father sold wholesale auto parts, and the
family lived, like much of postwar
call "a middle class section" of town, presumably comfortable,
average circumstances (where "average," after all, was declared a
civic virtue). The uniformly generic accounts that have been written about his
life portray young Bob growing up with the full local infusion of
wholesomeness. "A model child," he was "bright, well-organized
and punctual�. read
voraciously and loved to run and hike," but still found time for church
youth groups and "tutoring underprivileged children."
His early ambition to be a doctor offered
a ready excuse for otherwise suspect science projects, experiments on rats he
kept in his basement or the boiling of cat carcasses to examine their
skeletons. (Alexander Cockburn, one of his least forgiving critics, called him
"a cat torturer/drowner in his youth.") He even attended the same
grade school as future Republican Senator Arlen Specter (who, in Gates' 1991
confirmation hearing for CIA Director, vouched personally for the exceptional
quality of their elementary education). Gates went on to excel at Wichita East,
education-proud
largest high school.
He was also an Eagle Scout. More than just
another rite of male passage, it was for him credential, qualification,
identity -- a talisman of innocence and purity -- and he would cling to it. He
often listed his Distinguished Eagle Scout Award ahead of his CIA medals and,
at 63, earnestly served as president of the National Eagle Scout Association
even as he became secretary of defense.
After a quarter-century in government,
participating in some of the most crucial episodes of his era, Gates observed
it all, yet in a sense owned none of it, preferring to identify himself first
and foremost with the rank he won in 1950s Wichita. "That's how he
started," said a colleague, "and no matter what he's done or how
things turned out, that's how he wants to be seen." In the nation's future
spymaster and bureaucrat of the covert as oath-bound Eagle Scout, there was, of
course, Hardy Boys irony.
Beyond his merit badges, media profiles
over the years offered remarkably little of the flesh-and-blood man who served
as a senior official for three presidents. It was as if rigorous CIA checks had
already ruled out any of the unwieldy personal details. Gates' own 600-page
memoir typically told almost nothing of his background. "Friends remember
him," Time recounted in 1991, "as a child who demonstrated a
need and a knack for pleasing his elders." His Midwestern provenance left
him self-conscious, yet defiant, among the CIA's vestigial Eastern elite and in
a State Department he ridiculed as "guys with last names for first
names." He was, as he proudly pointed out, of "plain tastes and
middlebrow origins," so prairie practical and provincial that whenever he
saw someone carrying flowers, he asked in utter seriousness, "Where's the
funeral?"
In
as in
he was a familiar genus, reassuringly, unthreateningly American. An interviewer
in 1990 noticed an aphorism on the wall of his White House office: "The
easiest way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to commit an act that
makes no sense or is even self-destructive." It was a reminder, Gates
explained, of the enemy's sinister ways. "A useful admonition when
trying to understand the Saddam Husseins of the world," the reporter noted
brightly. It was accepted, after all, that the
intent and inherent duplicity in the sometimes menacing, unsavory business of
foreign policy. Men of homegrown virtue like Bob Gates had to fathom the
challenge and, whatever the transgression of traditional American values, of
the code of the Eagle Scout, more than match the methods.
In 1961, he went off to William and Mary,
the venerable college in
Jefferson and James Monroe had been educated two centuries before, but which
had since slipped into parochial obscurity. Shuttered for the Civil War when
faculty and students left en masse to fight for the Confederacy,
state-supported William and Mary admitted its first African-American only in
1963, nearly a decade after the
of
regional white redoubts. "Oh my goodness, very traditional, very
conservative, and very, very southern," remembered a woman who studied
there in the 1960s and still works at the school. "During
we had some of the only campus demonstrations in the country that were
pro-war."
It was not a usual
Eagle Scout at Wichita East who had gone there two years earlier, ardently
recruited Gates, and he was given a generous scholarship. On arrival, he was
ushered into the Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity, while Landis set him up
driving a school bus part-time for pocket money. He also enlisted Gates as an
adviser to a local scout troop and got him to join his church. The two Kansans
settled into what other students saw as a "straight-arrow,
no-nonsense" routine.
Asked recently what the future CIA
director and defense secretary did for extracurricular activities in the
eventful 1960s, Landis, a retired educator, replied simply, "We did scouts
and we went to church." Actually, Gates was also a dorm advisor and
business manager for a campus literary and arts magazine and, while
already-discreet Bob never revealed his politics to Landis, he was also active
in the Young Republicans.
The "scholar scout," as a
college newspaper called him in 2007, began in pre-med but soon switched to
European History. Timothy Sullivan, who sat in courses with him and went on to
be president of the college, thought Gates "immensely disciplined, really
smart and obviously very ambitious." Like most witnesses along the way,
Sullivan could remember no "sparkling anecdotes" about the famous
man, but assumed the qualities behind his later success must have been "in
some form or other evident" at the time. They were all, he did remember,
"undergraduates who didn't know much about the world and certainly nothing
about the world in which we were going to wind up."
At commencement in 1965, the service
fraternity, scout troop, school bus, church, and campus work all won him the
college's award as the senior making "the greatest contribution to his
fellow man" (another accolade faithfully retained in his résumé). He was
interested now in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Bloc, perhaps in teaching, though
later he would say that the assassination of John F. Kennedy in his junior year
moved him to think as well of public service.
He would take a fellowship for a master's
in history at Indiana University, a well-funded Soviet and East European
Affairs center known for training future government officials and academics in
the Cold War's most valued specialization. "A real patriot in the very
best sense of the word," was the way Landis summed up his Kansas friend.
It was one thing the Vortex and Wichita Group might have agreed on.
The Baltic Syndrome
Our story's other train was more exotic, a
muscular new Red Putilov engine emblazoned with the hammer and sickle and
pulling an ornate, plush wagon-lit with scars still raw where the
imperial double-headed eagle of the Romanoff Tsars had been chiseled off. The
year was 1933. Rolling eastward across the Russian plain, the swaying car
carried the first U.S. diplomats dispatched to Moscow as President Franklin
Roosevelt recognized the Soviet Union after some 15 years of severed relations
following the Bolshevik Revolution.
Aboard was a 29 year-old foreign service
officer, later to become famous as a diplomat and scholar, George Kennan.
Though he was already deemed a government expert on Russia, the train provided
Kennan's first actual exposure to the Soviet Union. As he listened to their
escort, Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov, reminisce in London-fluent English
about growing up in a village by the rail line, about books he read as a boy
and his dreams of becoming a librarian, the Princeton-educated diplomat from
Milwaukee was astonished. "We suddenly realized, or at least I did, that
these people we were dealing with were human beings like ourselves."
Kennan noted, as if making a scientific discovery, "that they had been
born somewhere, that they had their childhood ambitions as we had." It
would prove but a fleeting moment of respite in an endless ordeal of mutual
ignorance, dogmatism, and dread.
In his surprise, Kennan symbolized
generations of U.S. officials who would continue to see the Soviet Union
through the prism not only of native provincialism and ideological hostility,
but also the pervasive bias of their training. Pre-world-power America, in its
isolation, knew little of the old Russia and even less of the tumultuous, often
savage new politics of class and revolutionary party power that followed the
Bolsheviks' coup of November 1917. "A fearsome set of internationalists
and logicians," Winston Churchill had called the new Soviet leaders with
Tory wrath, "a sub-human structure upon the ruins of Christian
civilization." While a million Americans now voted socialist and there was
some early sympathy for the "Reds," most of the U.S. from Wall Street
to Main Street shared Churchill's reflexive fear and loathing, if not his
florid elocution.
Anti-capitalist Soviet Russia was not
merely a disagreeable state on some far horizon, but an immediate threat to
domestic tranquility. Alarm gripped even the most respectable of newspapers, in
which the Bolsheviks, like early Christians in Rome or Jews in Medieval Europe,
were reliably reported to be eating babies and committing other unspeakable
outrages. "BRUTALITIES OF THE BOLSHEVIKI," announced a typical 1919
headline in the usually sedate New York Times, "STRIP WOMEN IN
STREETS -- PEOPLE OF EVERY CLASS EXCEPT THE SCUM SUBJECTED TO VIOLENCE BY
MOBS."
In the late summer of 1918, U.S. troops
landed in north Russia and in Siberia, part of a joint military intervention
with the French, British, and Japanese to aid the monarchists and turn the tide
against the Bolsheviks in the Russian civil war; meanwhile, across America, an
accompanying Great Red Scare loosed mass arrests, persecutions, and
deportations of foreign radicals of every stripe. It was "a moment of
political repression," wrote noted historian Howard Zinn,
"unparalleled in United States history." In a sweeping onslaught of reaction,
all-American Wichita would, by 1919, imprison and try hundreds of its citizens,
assumed seditious, if not terrorist, simply for having joined, or worked for, a
union.
Over the next two decades of mortgaged
peace, Washington and other Western powers would abide tyrannies around the
world -- Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Fascist Spain, as well as despots
from China to Argentina. Yet the Soviet Union was in another category,
"untenable, unacceptable, unimaginable," as one writer put it. In
geopolitics and language, the new revolutionary state was to be treated as an
infected patient, held in isolation behind a cordon sanitaire (as Kennan
would himself so famously urge after World War II in his celebrated, if
unoriginal, policy of "containment").
With Washington refusing even to recognize
the Soviet regime throughout the 1920s, no posting or direct exposure to Russia
was possible for the officials charged with keeping watch on the scourge. The
fall-back position was academic training in the nature of the new regime; and,
since expertise was lacking in American colleges, Washington sent its Kennans
to study Soviet affairs at European universities. The "experts" they
found there, however, were almost exclusively exiles from Tsarist Russia,
expatriates by class, outlook, and personal history, loathing -- but also
largely ignorant of -- Soviet rule, and often financially as well as
sentimentally nostalgic for the fallen autocracy.
Few of history's losers owed defeat more
to political blindness or were more blinded by defeat; and no victims remained
more staunchly oblivious to what had befallen them than the Russian émigré
exodus. Knowing Russia so little to begin with, Washington's representatives
proved incapable of seeing just how distorted were the perspectives of their mentors,
whose reflexive animus, after all, America's top officials shared without the
encumbrance of knowledge. Lost from the start were intellectual integrity and
independent judgment, those most basic necessities for any diplomatic or
intelligence service and, of course, for formulating national policy.
From that corrupted tutelage, freshly
minted U.S. specialists were commonly assigned to Latvia or Estonia, small
Baltic states conquered by Russia in the eighteenth century but now (briefly)
independent. These became Meccas for the anti-Soviet Diaspora, in many respects
small replicas of the caste system and reactionary politics of Imperial Russia
itself. So it was that America's diplomats, expected to understand and
interpret the Soviet Union for vast stakes, were shaped not only by an insular
and fearful American culture, but also by the pervasive lost-world bias of
their trainers. Not surprisingly, a Baltic Syndrome ripened and settled into
career orthodoxy. Without having set foot there, America's early "experts"
on the USSR, men who would shape policy in the Cold War, formed indelible
attitudes "while studying Russia from afar."
Kennan's epiphany on the train proved
short-lived. The Soviets soon plunged into the nightmare world of dictator
Joseph Stalin's Great Purges. Facing the accompanying craze of xenophobia and
suspicion, U.S. diplomats reacted predictably. The outwardly charming,
patrician ambassador from Philadelphia, William Bullitt, Jr., regretted in
dispatches the influence in the Kremlin of a "wretched little kike" � whom he discreetly did not identify by
namee -- as opposed to what he called "straight" Russians (whom he
tolerated only slightly more). Fluent in Russian, but in the disappeared Russia
of their émigré tutors, Kennan and his colleagues understood little of the
rulers and ruled in a society so separated from them by class and perspective.
"Weird developments" was the way one of them characterized the
murderous midnight arrests and show trials that ravaged the USSR in the 1930s,
seemingly inscrutable events rooted in defining struggles between crushing
backwardness and revolutionary fervor, democracy and dictatorship, confident
openness and fearful isolation.
The embassy found even more baffling an
undeniable popular support for the tyranny that had so savagely extinguished
the great Enlightenment and Western social democratic ideals of the Revolution.
Behind the Communist Party despotism lay a chilling authenticity in the
"dictatorship of the proletariat," which had carried upward a new
stratum of privilege and power. Kennan would not bother with the
"hackneyed question of how far Bolshevism has changed Russia" -- so
he began a 1938 State Department lecture. Missing much of the point of the past
20 years and the 50 to come, he stressed what he considered the historical
essence of a people: Russia's congenital "Asiatic" aggressiveness and
penchant for "Byzantine" intrigue. "After all," he
explained with no audible irony or hint of self-awareness, "nations, like
individuals, are largely the products of their environment..."
For its part, Washington had no official
doubts about the evil paradox of the Soviets, a system seen as mad and inept,
yet diabolical and relentless, its policies cruelly capricious yet cunningly
planned. "We were all agreed," as one of Kennan's superiors put it
archly, "what was the situation in the USSR."
Cartoon Worlds, Russian and American
Through the inter-war years, and
especially after World War II, the specialists, invariably in agreement,
advised a coterie of senior officials whose own consensus was historic. Their
names made up a roll call of men who shaped postwar U.S. policy and much of the
world in the second, American half of the twentieth century -- Secretary of
State Dean Acheson, Secretary of Defense and Undersecretary of State Robert
Lovett, Ambassador Averill Harriman, Assistant Secretary of Defense and World
Bank President John McCloy, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, State
Department aide Paul Nitze, and a handful of others. With much inbreeding of
schools, firms, and society, theirs was a universe of Groton, polo, and tennis,
of Wall Street combines, rich wives, shaded estates, "wealth, cleverness,
and social grace," as Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson described it -- and
of congenial precepts about world affairs, including ready agreement about
Russia. It was, above all, a circle of fateful insularity.
Assumed to be of broad experience, they
were men who had never experienced the Depression torment of their era, as so
many of their countrymen had, to say nothing of the upheavals of war and
revolution that convulsed so much of the early twentieth-century world.
Apparently cultured, they had cultivated no sensibility for societies beyond
those of Western Europe. Typically, the lean, magnetic young financier Bob
Lovett played the mimic for his Long Island weekend circle, with rubber-faced,
reportedly hilariously accented parodies of the world's laughable people --
Russians, Arabs, and Chinese among others.
In its lurid propaganda of the period, the
Soviet tyranny barraged its own predominantly peasant, still largely pre-modern
populace with cartoons of vulture-like figures labeled Wall Street bankers and
corporate lawyers, all visibly anti-Slavic bigots of reactionary venom. Like
the matching portraits of bomb-throwing Bolsheviks in American cartoons, the
images exploited the primal. Yet, in ways long unrecognized in the U.S., the
men who governed Washington's relations with the world lent much
flesh-and-blood credence to the crude caricatures on the walls of Soviet
factories and collective farms.
What America's analysts and policy-makers
lost in their stunted worldview was the sheer complexity, contradiction, and
paradox of the Soviet Union, all relevant to informed policy. Missing between
myopia and phobia was the authentic alternative to the Baltic Syndrome's policy
by caricature: an intellectual openness and seriousness, honesty and
sensibility, that might have led to genuine insight, to actual
"intelligence" that could have saved lives and fortunes, even
moderated the Kremlin tyranny and hastened its end.
As a post-Soviet flood of archives has
revealed (though it was no secret even during the years of Soviet rule),
Moscow's foreign policy was waged more often in caution than aggressiveness,
more out of weakness than strength, and with an abiding parochial fear and
ignorance of the U.S., a hostility that Washington's acts in kind only
reinforced, justified, and prolonged. So much of the great
"superpower" rivalry was what John Le Carré would aptly call a
grotesque "looking-glass war."
The Soviet leaders had been seared by
revolution, intervention, purges, the West's cynical efforts to push Hitler
east in the 1930s, and the near-defeat and utter destruction of World War II,
followed by U.S. postwar dominance and encirclement in which they found
themselves an eternal half-hour from nuclear annihilation ("I'll climb the
Eiffel Tower and spit on all of Europe," the provincial Leonid Brezhnev, a
future Kremlin leader, had said defiantly but pitifully in 1945.) The postwar
Soviet leadership were creatures of their preconceptions and preoccupations,
and of their odious politics, as much as any ruling class in history. Yet to
relegate them to caricature, to ignore the touchstones of their lives, was
ultimate folly. What American specialists saw were not fearful, compromised
"human beings like ourselves," but monstrous, implacable, mythically
evil enemies in ill-fitting suits, to be opposed at all costs, with the end --
the "defeat" of Russia one way or another -- justifying the means.
The stakes were incalculable. The Cold War
would fatally mortgage domestic and foreign affairs in the world's two most
powerful countries, enthroning corrupt oligarchs in each who mocked the ideals
-- political democracy in the case of the U.S., economic in the case of Russia
-- for which so many had died. Their "superpower" clash would
dominate world politics for more than four decades. It would draft tens of
millions, devour fortunes, cordon Europe and Asia off into armed camps,
entangle neutrals, wantonly destroy any potential political-economic
alternatives to either corrupt system, rouse bitter political struggles on
every continent, unleash proxy wars with untold millions of casualties,
periodically threaten nuclear holocaust, and fix the fate of nations from Chile
to Cambodia, the Congo to Afghanistan. When it ended in 1991 with the seeming
victory of the United States, the outcome recast the planet. It had been the
rivalry of the century, and it threw a still unrecognized curse over the next.
No wonder that new period, rather than being given a name of its own, would be
known, like some sad afterword, as "the post-Cold War era."
From 1933 to 1945, there was one notable
exception to the astigmatism of the specialists and their superiors -- the
President of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that Hudson River
squire, harbored no illusions about the Bolsheviks. At the outset of his
presidency, he made clear his disgust with what he called "the hunger,
death, and bitterness" of Soviet rule. Yet he believed that the Kremlin's
foreign policy would be shaped by the acts of other powers and he took a
broader view of Russia's painful experiment as well as its profound weakness.
"He had some curiosity about the Soviet Union, a measured respect for its
accomplishments," judged his biographer James MacGregor Burns, "and a
certain sympathy for its goals of social justice, although he doubted that one
could obtain 'Utopia in a day.'"
For a dozen years, FDR held at bay the
cultivated repugnance of his diplomats and the incestuous bigotry of his
plutocratic senior officials. "Frankly, if I were a Russian, I would feel
that I had been given the run-around in the United States," he said of a
bottleneck in World War II aid to Russia. "If I were a Russian�" -- it was not a premise common in
government cables, intellligence briefings, or policy papers, then or later;
nor did such essential human empathy necessarily mean some policy
simplistically favorable to the Soviets.
In 1944, for instance, Roosevelt was
seized with a typical enthusiasm for a postwar plan to reform the ancient
feudal land of Iran, to free the country and the Persian Gulf of its historic
predators, Russia as well as Britain. The policy would enrage London and
Moscow, FDR was told; he nonetheless pressed on. Defying the old empires,
communist or capitalist -- that was to be "an example of what we could
do," he told an aide, "by an unselfish American policy."
It was all over in April 1945 with his
death. Into the Oval Office moved the more typical American certainty of Harry
Truman, a feisty, remorselessly compromised machine politician who would be led
in the White House by bellicose, half-informed aides and who gleaned what
little he knew of the outside world from a "story book view of
history," as his biographer Richard Miller once put it, read with "a
rousing Fourth of July patriotism" in rural western Missouri -- not so far
up the tracks from the Vortex.
Targeting Russia
Like Wichita's B-52s and Titan missiles,
the CIA was targeted on Russia. As World War II had been for its predecessor,
the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the Cold War was for the CIA. It
defined every purpose, and all else incidental. More than 80% of the Agency's
ever fattening budget in its early years was locked in the ice floe of the
Baltic Syndrome. The CIA was not to be confused with -- or disposed to confuse
the President and his top officials with -- genuine intelligence about
countries of the world in and for themselves. The Middle East, Asia, Latin
America, Africa -- a region mattered, for the most part, only as it related to
the struggle with the Soviet Union. From the Vietnam War to Afghanistan and
Iraq -- with scores of lesser-known disasters in between -- that willful
negligence was, and remains, immensely damaging.
As it happened, though few American
experts seemed to realize it, the target had already been demolished as the
Cold War began, a condition from which it never really recovered. If blinkered
U.S. specialists missed much of Soviet political or social reality, they could
not help seeing the country's sheer physical ruin. Revolution, terror, civil
war, purges, collectivization, famine, the horrors of the Gulag, World War II's
carnage, still more postwar starvation -- the three-decade toll by various
reckonings was in the range of 30-50 million dead and countless maimed, an
inconceivable demography of national desolation.
Whatever the number, the visible result
was a USSR in what one of its historians called, with rare candor, "a
state of abject poverty." The 1946-47 Ukrainian famine, like the Nazi
siege of Leningrad, made gruesome reality of old American news claims of
cannibalism. Nikita Khrushchev, the former shepherd and miner, who rose to lead
(and reform) the post-Stalin USSR, recounted in horror and shame a scene he had
seen himself in postwar Odessa: "The woman had the corpse of her own child
on the table, and was cutting it up."
In 1945, welcoming General Dwight
Eisenhower to Moscow after their joint victory over the Nazis, Soviet Marshal
Georgi Zhukov told his fellow commander that the Soviet plight was even worse
than that of the defeated, destroyed Axis powers. "Russia would never
place itself in the position of begging," Eisenhower recorded, noting the
plea embedded in Zhukov's description, "but.... he could tell me with the
utmost frankness that the standard of living in Russia today was deplorably
low, and that it was his conviction that even the present standard in Germany
was at least as high as it is in Russia..."
Touring the USSR two years later, British
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery saw the same far-reaching ruin. "The
Soviet Union is very, very tired," he wrote Eisenhower. "Devastation
in Russia is appalling and the country is in no fit state to go to war.... It
will be 15 to 20 years before Russia will be able to remedy her various defects
and be in a position to fight a major world war with a good chance of
success."
Nowhere was evidence plainer than in the
creaking Soviet military. By 1948, demobilization had reduced the Red Army in
Europe from more than eleven million to less than three million. Combat-ready
troops matched Western armies numerically, but lacked the equivalent nuclear
weapons or strategic air power -- and those were just the most obvious
deficits. The Red Army remained shoddily equipped, subject to high rates of
desertion and deplorable morale. As late as 1950, half its transport was
unmechanized, moving on still badly war-torn roads, with 80% of railway bridges
still seriously damaged. Troops were consumed with the occupation of vast new
Soviet-controlled territories in Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Balkans,
with quelling resistance and supporting the rule of local communists, and,
above all, with extracting reparations and rebuilding the demolished USSR.
"In the late 1940s, the Red Juggernaut," concluded a post-mortem by a
team of scholars years later, "was anything but."
Of condoms and "endings in
silence"
Formed in 1947, the CIA proved up to the
task of justifying its mission -- despite the enemy's utter exhaustion and
preoccupation. By what historian Franklyn Holzman called "politics and
guesswork" (what our own era termed "fixing intelligence around the
policy"), the Agency launched a long tradition, which Robert Gates would inherit
and carry forward two decades later, of the systematic exaggeration of Russian
power. To the horse-drawn Soviet occupation army in Eastern Europe, analysts
added phantom divisions, magically restored demobilized troops, and then topped
the fictional mix with hair-raising scenarios of a possible invasion of Western
Europe. They "exaggerated Soviet capabilities and intentions to such a
great extent," as Holzman's study documented 20 later, "that it is
surprising anyone took them seriously."
As would be true over the next four
decades, the media turned out to have not the slightest difficulty parroting
the fabrication. Typically, under the headline, "Russia's Edge in Men and
Arms" -- and this was just as the Red Army reached its nadir -- an April
1948 US News announced: "Russia, at this stage, is the world's no.
1 military power [whose] armies and air forces are in a position to pour across
Europe and into Asia almost at will."
By now a senior official awash in
contrived, ever more ominous intelligence, it was Kennan who completed the
CIA's initial portfolio with a 1948 proposal to conduct covert subversion,
sabotage, and -- in a term of suitable ambiguity -- "political
action" inside Russia, the Soviet Bloc as a whole, or any other country where
the rivals might compete. For the old threat that knew no bounds, foreign or
domestic, it was to be containment uncontained. The task was not exactly new
for American governments long engaged in freebooting regime-change in Latin
America. But the writ for intervention now spread into what, for
ever-provincial Washington, were essentially uncharted regions of the world.
Begun under the control of the State
Department, covert action was swiftly taken over by an increasingly
bureaucratically adept, politically potent CIA. Kennan himself soon had qualms.
"I would be extremely careful of doing anything at the governmental end
that purports to affect directly the governmental system of another country, no
matter what the provocation may seem," he said in a speech as he left
government in 1953. "It is replete with possibilities for misunderstanding
and bitterness. To the extent it might be successful it would involve the U.S.
in heavy responsibilities." The warning would echo down half-a-century of
grim history to Kabul 2001 and Baghdad 2003. But Kennan (whose view
policy-makers were glad to accept so long as it agreed with their own) was by
then an outsider, like many ex-officials he had already become a prophet
without honor in the increasingly close-minded councils of Washington
policy-making.
The new mandate for intervention would lie
with the innocuously titled "Office of Policy Coordination." After
initial fumbling by men far too hesitant, it was handed over to Frank Wisner, a
well-to-do southerner and fey Russophobe in the Lovett mold. He came to
Washington in his bald, jowly forties by way of a Wall Street law firm, a
wartime OSS liaison with Romanian royalty, and the requisite Manhattan and
Georgetown society friends from whom he recruited the "old boys" who
would give the early CIA much of its outer gloss and inner fatuousness.
Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, later Le Carré and others -- a teeming genre
-- would portray the smug ignorance, incompetence, sleaze and self-ruin of
spies' machinations. But the Wisner club's all-too-real version of life
imitated, and improved on, art.
Funded by money skimmed from the Marshall
Plan, their "operations" were grim previews -- and parodies -- of
things to come, of a world that less than two decades later would be second nature
to Robert Gates. The code names were colorful; the realities dark. BLOODSTONE
enlisted Nazi SS veterans, most of them war criminals, and placed them in key
positions -- from the founders of West German intelligence to CIA-paid advisers
to tyrannical client regimes in Iraq, Egypt, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, where they
proved adept at organizing secret police and using Gestapo torture methods to
deal with domestic democrats and Islamic devouts (wiping out the former while
scarring and steeling the latter for a fierce evolution to our jihadist
world). MOCKINGBIRD employed Washington Post editor Phil Graham and
other ready establishment collaborators to suborn the foreign press and
American media. "By the early 1950s," wrote biographer Deborah Davis,
"Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek,
CBS and other communications vehicles."
Meanwhile, the denizens of "Policy
Coordination" set off stink bombs at suspect youth rallies around the
world, launched balloons with millions of propaganda leaflets over Soviet
satellites as well as the USSR, and sent flocks of agents into Eastern Europe,
Russia, and Central Asia to sabotage and foment uprisings, which were
confidently expected momentarily. To attack enemy morale, always presumed to be
frail, they schemed to parachute in as well hugely outsized condoms labeled
"American medium." Whatever the condom effect, the fate of most
agents was clear. Betrayed by sheer ineptitude, Soviet moles, or both -- Wisner
was a convivial friend of the legendary Soviet agent Kim Philby and other
Kremlin spies high in Western intelligence -- operatives plunged into the Iron
Curtain night somewhere south of Rostock or across the Amu Darya at new moon
only to appear later as tortured wraiths in some show trial dock or simply to
vanish without trace. "Endings in silence," a former control officer
called it.
Pyrrhic Victory
The results of CIA covert actions were far
more bracing in non-European societies not controlled by the Soviets, where
black bags of cash or small mercenary military forces sufficed to seize power.
Hence, the ten months from August 1953 to June 1954 that shook Wisner's world
with self-congratulation -- and American foreign policy with fateful
precedents.
In August 1953, in an Iran in which FDR
had hoped to apply "an unselfish American policy," the CIA's TP-AJAX
(Operation Ajax) bought South Tehran street toughs and assorted notables in
order to overthrow the popular, elected government of Mohammed Mossadegh,
staving off oil nationalization, securing Persia's petroleum for the five U.S.
major oil companies as well as the old British oil overlords, and returning to
the throne as Shah of Shahs (after an ignominious flight from Tehran) the dim,
grandiose, but obligingly despotic Mohammed Reza Pahlevi.
The next June, in Guatemala, the CIA
launched PB-SUCCESS, dragging a drunken right-wing colonel through a cold
shower before installing him, temporarily sober, as caudillo to replace
another popular, potentially populist regime worrying to U.S. business interests.
Each of these operations was based on the flimsy, thoroughly unexamined pretext
that the country was in imminent danger of a left-wing -- ipso facto
Russian -- takeover; both would be followed by medals proudly pinned on in
private White House ceremonies; both would involve fraud and folly not exposed
for decades; and both would have mortal consequences in the affected countries
and, in the case of Iran, for twenty-first-century America and much of the
Middle East as well.
The Tehran bagman for the CIA was Kermit
Roosevelt, Jr., Theodore's grandson. The Agency's other men for the Middle East
were less patrician but similarly unqualified: Miles Copeland, Jr., a jazz
trumpeter from Alabama with a few college hours in music at Tuscaloosa and no
substantive knowledge of the Arab world; James Critchfield, educated at North
Dakota Agricultural College in the late 1930s, then a military prison
commandant in occupied Germany who befriended one of those useful Nazis; and
James Jesus Angleton of Boise, who had followed a mediocre (if racy) career at
Yale with OSS intrigues in Italy (in which he made good use of prewar family
ties to the Mafia). The later-notorious Angleton was an extreme case, but not
an atypical one. He combined a whiskey-drenched anti-Soviet mania (which would,
in the 1970s and 80s, develop into genuine paranoia) with some bureaucratic
agility, but no palpable expertise in Middle Eastern affairs -- all of which,
of course, fitted him perfectly to direct the CIA's intimate ties with the
Israeli intelligence service, the Mossad.
"They somehow inherited British
attitudes towards the colored races of the world," reporter Thomas Powers,
a chronicler of the CIA, wrote gingerly. Somehow. The trumpeter, Ag
school graduate, manic drunk, and the oblivious, expedient men above and below
them simply knew no better.
The legacies of all this would be epic.
The brutal military and corporate-mafia repression installed in Guatemala
foreshadowed Chile after the 1973 U.S.-backed coup and murder of socialist
president Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet, as it would Central
America's death-squad agonies in the Reagan 1980s. Even quieter victories by
CIA-cosseted regimes in the Philippines and the Congo would soon lead to
plundering, bloody dictatorships.
Nowhere, however, was the toll of covert
intervention higher than in the Middle East and South Asia:
In Iraq, a CIA-supported corrupt monarchy,
inherited from the British, stifled democratic stirrings in the 1950s; then,
CIA-instigated Ba'ath Party coups in 1963, and again in 1968, killed reformers
and reforms (along with any hopes of sectarian equity), and led to Saddam
Hussein's tribal-clan despotism.
In Iran, the Shah's CIA-allied and
-tutored torture regime centering on his SAVAK secret police destroyed any real
possibility of a democratic counterforce to the Ayatollah's ensuing clerical
tyranny bred by the Shah's blundering, martyring repression.
In Syria, CIA-bankrolled, opéra bouffe
juntas dating to the 1950s begat the dictatorship of Hafez al-Assad.
In Lebanon, CIA collusion with Israel
helped prop up the privileged rule of the Maronite Christian minority from the
late 1940s through the civil-war torn 1970s and 80s, while the hostility of the
long-oppressed Shia majority eventually led to Hizbullah.
In Afghanistan and Pakistan, from the
1950s on, incessant CIA Cold War machinations in the Hindu Kush, and patronage
of Pakistani military dictatorships, would set the stage for the calamities of
the Afghan anti-Soviet War, the civil war that followed, the rise of the
Taliban with its safe haven for al-Qaeda, and so of our post-9/11 world of
terror and war.
Even in the obscure Horn of Africa, there
were CIA payoffs to Somali politicians and warlords in the 1960s --
$20,000-a-year was the going rate for prime ministers. The bribes went
alongside generous backing for the venal, autocratic regime of Ethiopian
Emperor Haile Selassie across the border. (This was ransom for a U.S.
electronic spy station in Ethiopian-occupied Eritrea.) CIA-chauffeured Suburbans
whisked His Imperial Majesty to and from the recreational hangings of democracy
or ethnic-rights dissidents in the expansive central square of his capital,
Addis Ababa -- all of which only sped the region's long descent into
apocalyptic famine and war.
No flashpoint of the early
twenty-first-century from the Mediterranean to the Java Sea would be without a
half-century-plus legacy of covert Washington interventions. These were
instrumental in birthing, or maintaining, tyrannical regimes that almost invariably
bred, in opposition, an anti-U.S. atavism, while ruthlessly extinguishing
democratic alternatives. The United States and its prime intelligence agency
did not, of course, single-handedly create the incendiary world of 9/11. But
Washington wantonly fostered so much that was contrary even to the most
cold-eyed version of its own self-interest that what Robert Gates termed the
"splendid" American triumph over the USSR in the Cold War would also
prove one of the great Pyrrhic victories in the annals of world politics.
Historians arguing over that half-century
of covert actions tended to discover a "rogue" CIA trampling American
ideals or else a much-maligned agency only "following orders." In the
twisting internal politics of Washington, it was largely a distinction without
meaning.
Deniability-minded postwar presidents were
surely prone to Henry II's demure order -- "Who will rid me of this
meddlesome priest?" -- to his zealous knights to hack to death Archbishop
Thomas Beckett in the sanctity of the cathedral. But to the Oval Office, as
Henry's court, evidence of meddling came up the chain of command, with willing
knights always in waiting. No regime or ruler "changed" by Washington
since 1947 fell solely because of presidential animus.
Death sentences on men and regimes -- with
multitudes regularly destroyed in the ensuing maelstroms -- were pronounced by
key presidential advisors or came in the form of institutional verdicts from
the collective wisdom of the CIA, National Security Council, Pentagon, State
Department, or some combination of all four. Presidential orders were usually
prompted, or recommended, by successive small inter-agency groups made up of
senior men and discreetly labeled with the number of a birthing presidential
directive or some other suitably bloodless bureaucratic designation -- 303,
Forty, the Special Coordination Committee.
Not that the CIA was not manipulative, did
not harbor an occupational contempt for the awkward hindrance of democratic
politics at home (or abroad), was not driven by organizational as well as
personal demons, or played by virtuoso exiles or alien spy agencies pursuing
their own ends.
orgy of intervention traced to all those influences, as well as to the National
Security Advisor, that assassination- and coup-whisperer to amenable bosses and
bureaucracies. From Kennedy's McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon Johnson's Walt Rostow,
Richard Nixon's Henry Kissinger, and Jimmy Carter's Zbigniew Brzezinski, as
well as lesser figures under Ronald Reagan and his successors, some of the most
ardent initiators of covert murder and mayhem were those NSC gatekeepers and
counselors supposedly there to restrain presidents and regimes from such
primitive and ultimately counterproductive impulses.
For Frank Wisner, all the covert glory
began to fade in the historic fall of 1956. Flouting a more cautious, but
typically unenforced Eisenhower policy of restraint toward Eastern Europe, his
Operation RED SOX/RED CAP during the Hungarian revolt against Soviet puppet
rule (and the coincidental Suez crisis in which Britain, France and Israel
invaded Abdel Nasser's Egypt after he nationalized the Suez Canal, all to the
CIA's surprise) was a classic of its kind. Broadcasts inciting the Hungarians
to rise up, an émigré army manqué, and the usual balloons fatally linked the
rebels to the U.S., hardening Moscow all the more in its decision to crush the
uprising as a "counter-revolution" and an act of Cold War rollback --
both of which Wisner, if not Washington, fully intended.
Watching from his mission on the Danube
was a 42-year-old Russian ambassador, future KGB chief, and eventual Kremlin
leader, Yuri Andropov, who would take it all in -- and eventually into the
Politburo, where, 23 years later, his too-often-borne-out fear of American machinations
would trigger Russia's catastrophic invasion of Afghanistan, the seminal event
of our post-9/11 nightmare.
Wisner soon sank into dementia, a
condition he shared with a telling number of others in early Cold War
high-society, including the Washington Post's Graham, Secretary of
Defense Forrestal (who threw himself out of the window of the hospital where he
was committed), and, not least, Angleton, who turned his madness in a burst of
rampant destruction on his own agency as well as the rest of the government in
a crazed search for a Soviet "super mole." Wisner was eased from the
CIA in 1958, his files reviewed and promptly burned as the "ramblings of a
madman." There would be discreet clinics and quiet treatment for mania, if
little care for the larger pathology he and his fellow psychotics embodied.
Late in October 1965, as Bob Gates began
graduate school at
Wisner drove to his Maryland Eastern Shore retreat, and blew off his head with
a shotgun. Crowding the National Cathedral,
elite and CIA colleagues -- special Agency guards kept the KGB from a close look
-- sang the hymn of Christian martyrdom "Fling Out the Banner" before
a hero's burial at
"Instead of a dirge," one of the old boys remembered, "it was
exuberant, powerful, exultant." Conscious mourning, as conscious foreign
policy, was still far away.
Students like Bob Gates were to be
something of a remedy for the CIA's first generation of men, so uneducated
about a world they manipulated with such careless and brutal abandon. In
widening recruitment efforts, and requiring a gamut of substantive and
psychological tests (even a psychiatric interview for its new officers), the
CIA seemed to acknowledge that its ranks lacked a certain professionalism -- in
terms of diploma knowledge of the world as well as certifiable sanity.
By 1965, the Agency was also responding to
a national mobilization of education as a Cold War weapon. This had been
underway for years in the aftershock of the spectacular 1957 launch of the
Soviet Sputnik, the orbiting little satellite neither the CIA, nor the
American public had expected from their caricature Russians. Worse yet, it sat
atop a prototype intercontinental ballistic missile. Much of Gates' career would
be shaped by that sobering event -- a Commie rocket that could reach
only 14, still parboiling cats and ardently rising in the Boy Scouts.
Sputnik's launch began a craze in the
military-related science and technology from grade school to graduate school.
The 1958 National Defense Education Act also allotted unprecedented millions
for "foreign area training," part of a vast effort to create
well-informed specialists on the Soviet Bloc and the
World
Congress. Thus, the irony of government-financed graduate study to ward off the
socialist menace, and Carnegie and Ford Foundation philanthropy to save
capitalism by paying serious young Americans to read Marx and Lenin.
Universities like
in Russian history and Slavic languages were ready reservoirs for CIA
recruiters and Bob Gates was their ideal target. It all seemed to promise a new
worldliness -- for
like a lethal gene was that old Baltic Syndrome, with its reactionary animus
and blindfolds, in which
would-be specialists in the Soviet regime had always been schooled.
No independent American expertise on the
Soviets would magically appear, despite the post-Sputnik infusions of money.
"
mordantly called bucolic little
the Don that had been the capital of the monarchist "Whites" in
War. The name was sadly fitting. In 1965,
so dominated by émigrés, or the émigré-indoctrinated, that courses given when
Gates arrived amounted to little more than the usual worn tour of Kremlin
horrors.
same -- its own prestigious and lavishly supported Russian studies program
dominated by figures like historian Richard Pipes, a reactionary of East
European descent whose lectures riveted undergraduates with an unrelieved
demonology of the Bolshevik Revolution. "We'll be reading Karl Marx who is
not now and never has been a member of the Communist Party," celebrated
Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith would dryly announce in his course on
economic development. But such irreverence was rare, and his course was not
often required for "specialists."
Other reputed centers of area studies --
most prominently
with young ex-Harvard Russophobe Zbigniew Brzezinski, a star lecturer in Soviet
affairs -- were similar bastions of Baltic Syndrome orthodoxy. The narrowness
of most curricula in the 1960s moved even a timorous, still McCarthy-era-cowed
State Department to react. Its cultural affairs officers recommended, albeit
quietly, that
students heading for
on a new exchange program with the
(with language prepping beforehand at
read Wright Miller's otherwise ignored little classic Russians As People.
("What," asked a puzzled Russian student at
book in 1964, "did you think we were?")
Money now gushed into "area
specialization," not just in Soviet affairs, but in Asia, Africa, and the
planet where the loyalties of restless natives now seemed to be of some
practical importance. Like learning math to catch the Russians in space, the
logic seemed unexceptionable. To save the world from communist clutches, some
knowledge of that world would obviously be helpful.
A World of "Slopes" and
"Towel Heads"
In practice, none of this had much effect
on root prejudice. An American Army in
an ally) its commanders as well as the ranks generally referred to as
"gooks," "dinks," and "slopes," and whose
politics it never grasped. It would be much the same three decades later, when
U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, commanded in part by erstwhile junior
officers from the Vietnam War, were effectively defeated by two of history's most
momentous, if seemingly ragtag, insurgencies made up of "hajis,"
"sand niggers," and "towel heads" of similarly baffling
mind and motivation.
As usual, bigotry ran bottom to top,
civilian no less than military. In the Vietnam-era White House, President Nixon
commonly deplored "jigs" and "Jew boys," while Harvard's
Kissinger (with a young aide of like mentality named John Negroponte) planned
savage carpet bombings of North Vietnam on the premise, as Kissinger put it,
that "I can't believe a fourth-rate power doesn't have a breaking
point." It was typical of the quaint anthropology of the famous diplomat
and many of his staff, including future secretaries of state Alexander Haig and
Larry Eagleburger. (Told during the Nigerian Civil War that Biafra's Ibos tended
to appear more Negroid than northern Nigerians, Kissinger blurted out in
unguarded surprise, "You always said Ibos were so gifted and accomplished.
How could they be more Negroid?")
Yet there was something more insidious
than crude Eurocentric racism at work. Imbibed by a new generation of
bureaucrats and analysts with winning-hearts-and-minds, career-making fervor
was another kind of bigotry dressed in the clothes of scholarly authority and
of knowledge in service to power. It took an eminent literary critic and
expatriate from one of the most abused "areas" of the world to expose
it.
A revolutionary book when it appeared in
the late 1970s, Orientalism by Palestinian Edward Said revealed the
intellectual hollowness of the predominant Western view of the Arab world (and,
by implication, of much of the rest of the globe as well). Professor Said's
naked emperor proved to be the views of two centuries of Western academics and
novelists, clerks and clerics, soldiers and tourists, diplomats and dilettantes
that created a collective, stereotypical, paradoxical Muslim Orient -- stagnant
yet ever-roiling; childlike yet cunning; femininely weak yet no less
macho-menacing for that; indolent but agitated; always prone to feudal
despotism, though available for capitalist liberation; congenitally terrorist
and genocidal by nature; presumptively inferior; endlessly devious; and, above
all, relentlessly alien. Said's Orient of Western mythology was what one author
aptly called "the quintessential ‘Other.'"
"They're our boys bought and paid
for, but you always gotta remember that these people can't be trusted,"
said Archie Roosevelt, Kermit's cousin and a CIA deputy for the
with the supposedly innate Arab traits of treachery and corruptibility -- he
was speaking of Iraqi Ba'ath Party officers on his payroll in the 1963 and 1968
Baghdad coups -- caught an American official mood extending from the 1940s to
2007, from Iraq to Vietnam to Afghanistan and back to Iraq again. It was part
of the territory, diplomats and spies understood, a cost of doing business
beyond the
called, in the privacy of inter-agency meetings, the "rug merchants."
Long embedded in American prejudice --
from Holy Land travelogues to pulp novels and action movies, coin of the realm
from foreign affairs professionals to Capitol Hill plebeians -- no
preconception, not even the anti-Soviet mania, shaped
more than the now-subtle, now-brazen stereotypes of the Arab world. (This was,
of course, intimately related to an unquestioning affinity for
even as that costly penchant frays, the Orientalism Express barrels on.)
As in academia or the media, government
had its exceptions to Orientalism's sway -- analysts, spies, or diplomats of
wider perception. There is, however, no evidence that they carried a single
significant day in the last 60 years in a
Authentic intelligence was absent when
needed most, which was most of the time, and knowledge scant in any guise. CIA
veterans recall that there were rarely more than three to five officers ranked
as Arabic-fluent "Arabists" on Agency desks at any time prior to
1991. Though there might have been more Arabists in the field, even fewer there
focused on Arab politics as distinct from the CIA's primary target worldwide:
Soviet missions and their relations with host regimes. In the Islamic world as
elsewhere, unrest was seen far less as legitimate grievance emerging from local
or regional situations than yet more evidence of Kremlin machinations. Politics
in the Arab world, as in the
generally, was not so much a matter of history-in-the-making as of dreary pawns
being manipulated by great powers.
The colonial sociology of knowledge of the
specialists, when placed alongside the cultural illiteracy of senior
bureaucrats, policy-makers, and politicians -- to say nothing of a blanketing
pro-Israeli bias -- produced a half-century of American patronage of repressive
regimes in North Africa and the
There would be year after year of watery smiles as dickering over ephemera went
on with ruling strata, while American officials remained oblivious to what
later came to be called "the
Street
dispatches of the era would breathe a monotonous triviality, a climate without
weather as storms billowed.
As 9/11 and the years to follow made
plain, what was missed was momentous. Gathering largely beyond
tides sweeping the Arab world in the latter twentieth century -- a slow, sure
popular mobilization, not to speak of a fundamentalist reaction to inequitable
modernization by U.S.-purchased oligarchies. That mobilization was at once
populist, authoritarian, and divisively sectarian.
From the 1950s on, in a fetish of
"progress" and as a Cold War counter to the Russians,
exhorted Arab regimes to headlong "development," buttressing some,
but pushing most beyond their means. With oil prices sagging in the late 1970s
and the right-wing version of "free enterprise" and "supply-side
economics" seizing the White House and Congress by the throat, the
Monetary Fund and other whips to force Arab governments to cut welfare programs
throughout the
This abdication of responsibility for
their own people inevitably left ever-growing excluded populations to the
socio-economic, as well as sectarian religious, rescue of the fundamentalists.
Their resulting appeal -- to
shock, though any old urban-machine pol could have predicted it -- grew
exponentially. It was an American policy in which, from Carter to Reagan to
taken with indivisible neo-liberal/neo-conservative obliviousness.
Meanwhile, intelligence remained
essentially blind to defining events. The mullahs' 1978-79 revolution in
before the willfully unseeing eyes of a horde of CIA operatives on the
long-rotting ruins of the Shah's regime. Afghan Islamic atavists rose in the
1980s, thanks to the CIA and its colleagues in Pakistani intelligence, over the
corpses of any democratic alternative, and then, once the Soviets were
defeated, their country was blithely abandoned to congenital chaos. Finally,
there was the self-betrayal of an
malignant colonial expansion, of the fierce, new Arab consciousness it stirred,
and thus of the dwindling efficacy of its military power. These were successive
tragedies, enabled by lobby-lashed, ever-Orientialist American patronage.
This was the world Bob Gates would soon
face -- and proceed to help make -- as the CIA recruited him at
"On a Lark"
In the spring of 1966 -- "on a
lark," as he put it, "for a free trip to
-- Gates drove his new Mustang from
to CIA headquarters at
analyst's job. It would be two more years before he began work. With his
none, he preempted the possibility of being swept up in expanding
call-ups by joining an Air Force officer-candidate program.
That summer, before reporting for duty, he
chaperoned a
graduate from
"student personnel administration." Three months later, on the way to
officer training in
he proposed. "I don't think she was too excited to accept, but she
did," he said of quiet, steady Becky Wilkes. While raising two children,
she would parallel her husband's CIA career by spending a quarter-century as an
administrator at the
They were, to all appearances, the perfect, modern working couple, educator and
public servant -- an American ideal of the sort Gates' "All-American"
hometown of
was supposed to produce.
Part of his posting in his uneventful Air
Force tour involved briefing nuclear missile crews on intelligence data at the
Oscar-1 ICBM site at Whiteman Air Force Base in the
countryside, 65 miles southeast of
City
War mania that, in years to come, would always make his own, more tactfully
couched hard-line views seem mild.
"This was still Curtis LeMay's
Strategic Air Command," Gates wrote in his memoir, referring to the famed
Air Force general who had burned
World War II and, by the early 1950s, was ready to do the same to the whole
communist world in a nuclear first strike. (Two of his war plans were even
code-named BROILER and SIZZLER.) A typical Oscar-1 commander thought it a
"goddamn outrage" that warheads were targeted on Soviet missile silos
instead of cities. "I want to kill some fucking Russians," the
commander told Gates, "not dig up dirt."
Gates entered the CIA's intelligence
directorate as a Soviet affairs analyst on August 19, 1968, the day before the
Russians ordered Warsaw Pact forces to roll into
"Prague Spring" along with Alexander Dubèek's communist reform
regime. That invasion marked a climactic moment in the CIA's eventful recent
history. The Agency's Bay of Pigs debacle in the fall of Gates' freshman year
at William and Mary -- the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba using armed Cuban
exiles with limited, soon-routed CIA air cover -- had been the Agency's first
visible setback, though that hardly caused its policy masters and covert-action
operators to fall into some chastened lull.
Even as the quixotic Cuban exile invasion
force was marched to prison, plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro continued
apace (under the vengeful eye of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy), using some of
the Agency's most thuggish hires. Meanwhile, covert action was incessant
elsewhere. Stations in
and
Ba'athist coup in
that led to the murder of reformist Premier Abdul Karim Kassem, who was deemed
too sympathetic to the left. ("The target suffered a terminal
illness," a CIA officer quipped to a Senate committee, "before a
firing squad in
That bloody succession led to the murder of thousands of
and non-communist alike, from lists the CIA gave Ba'ath Party death squads.
When that coup faltered, the Agency staged a further one in 1968, almost a
month to the day before Gates began his job, installing a Ba'athist dictator --
along with his kinsman and protégé, security chief Saddam Hussein.
There were similar Agency
"successes" in
where a democratic government, again labeled "leftist" and presumed
crypto-communist, was overthrown and a torture-ready right-wing military junta
installed at mid-decade. At the same time in
the military massacred democratic leftists, as well as known communists, by the
hundreds of thousands to fix the iron tyranny of the Suharto regime. The 1967
Colonels' Coup in
but another extinction of a boisterous democracy by
victories came steadily. "A gain for our side," was the way a
National Security Council aide put it to President John Kennedy when Iraqi
Premier Kassem suffered his "terminal illness."
By the latter 1960s, like the Pentagon,
the Agency was also feeding handsomely off the Vietnam War, conducting
assassinations by the thousands in the soon-to-be-notorious Phoenix Program,
setting up provincial torture centers through South Vietnam � including the infamous "tiger cages," savagee
precursors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo -- and, not least, creating
drug-running mercenary armies, supplied by the Agency's own Air America
airline, operating out of its busy regional hub in warlord-ruled Laos. The CIA
also colluded with the Cambodian generals who would overthrow neutralist King
Sihanouk in 1970, mindless patronage that led ineluctably to Cambodia's major
embroilment in the Vietnam War, the rise and triumph of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge,
and the post-war genocide of "the killing fields." All of this traced
to decisions made through the customary mix of prodding advisors, Cold War
institutional momentum, and presidential sanction, as well as at least
implicit, sometimes explicit, approval by Congressional barons. Altogether,
this summed up the bipartisan complicity that was -- and remains --
consensus.
As usual, the scurrying operators almost
invariably outran any intelligence analysis offered. Most of the time, in most
places in the world, such "intelligence," despite the Agency's name, was
a purely secondary matter. True, Agency analysts, reporting on
light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel optimism infecting the officer corps, earning
the undying enmity of Pentagon intelligence and of defeat-sullen military and
civilian hawks. But, like other Americans in policy-making or influential
positions, CIA analysts proved largely blind to the indomitable nationalism
that lay at the heart of the war. Save for one glimpse of the looming disaster
that never made it to the necessary senior levels, they failed to warn of the
nationwide Tet Offensive in April 1968 and then put the kind of devoted effort
that hadn't gone into intelligence-gathering into covering up their own
negligence and incompetence. All in all, CIA intelligence on
shallow that, by 1969-1970, President Richard Nixon's White House policy-makers
had essentially stopped paying attention.
CIA estimates elsewhere in the world,
particularly in the Middle East after the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, were no
less suspect in the White House and the Pentagon -- except for reports passed
on from CIA client regimes or kindred spy agencies. This was especially true of
mistakenly) believed in
to be omniscient, if not omnipotent, and invariably imagined to be synonymous
with American interests.
The continuing priority given to analysts
of the
proved no advantage when it came to intelligence. By the late 1960s, the Agency
was already alternately missing or overestimating a genuine Soviet build-up of
its missile forces, a step taken by the Russian leadership to redress the
massive strategic imbalance (and humiliation) that had culminated in the 1962
Cuban Missile Crisis. ("We will honor this agreement," a Russian envoy
told his American counterpart in 1962. He was speaking of the deal President
Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had forged, as
backed down on placing its missiles in
to match
warheads poised along the borders of the
and command centers. "But I want to tell you something. You'll never do
this to us again.") Far worse, CIA analysts regularly underestimated by as
much as half the mortal burden such staggering military spending placed on a
corrupt, sclerotic Soviet economy.
Given the millions of dollars pouring into
intelligence, some of the gaps were chilling. As the new, young analyst from
in that leaden summer of 1968, NSC staff officers watched in dismay while the
Agency simply "lost" whole Soviet tank divisions and other forces for
several crucial days. These were finally located in
only as the Soviet ambassador was helpfully informing President Lyndon Johnson
of the invasion of
The CIA Bob Gates joined was still largely
what it had been over its first two decades -- a blunt instrument of covert
intervention, now mostly in non-European politics -- and a stagnant fund of
intelligence. The Baltic Syndrome had morphed into a global variation of the
same half-blind and bigoted perspective. The Agency was trapped in the
remarkably narrow confines that defined imperial, yet intellectually
provincial, Washington. During Gates' opportunistic rise and sway over the next
quarter century, it would remain, at horrendous cost, much the same.
Office Politics Triumphant
From 1968 to 1974, Gates rose steadily
through the ranks of
on the CIA support group for the Strategic Arms Limitation negotiations in
intelligence officer for the
He helped to craft the periodic National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for the
Soviet Union, a report that was, and remains, an Agency hallmark for any given
area or issue.
His work in these years also focused to
some extent on
region itself, but given the Agency's relatively sparse expertise in the Arab
world, he soon professed specialization and authority in that as well.
"Gates prided himself in being a top
expert within CIA," according to a former boss, Ray McGovern -- though it
was not a claim any of his colleagues in either Soviet or Middle Eastern
affairs seem to have taken seriously at the time.
Those years represented a brief interval
when the CIA's analysts had rare near-parity with their covert-action brethren.
Beyond meeting the usual suborning payrolls -- from parliaments to palaces,
cabinets to high commands worldwide -- covert operations were relatively
quiescent except in
where assassinations and torture operations continued apace during the
slow-motion
as well as in
In 1969, at the behest of the Shah of
Iran, and in collusion with
Mossad, the Agency secretly backed a Kurdish uprising in northern
meant to bleed
Ba'athist regime and deflect its attention from a border dispute with
a thoroughly sordid episode, made only more so when Washington and Tel Aviv
blithely walked away from the Kurds. This betrayal and the resultant massacre
of the Kurdish rebels came promptly when the Shah decided to strike a deal in
1975 with the Iraqis, signed by the already powerful Ba'athist Vice President
Saddam Hussein. ("Covert action should not be confused with missionary
work," then-Secretary of State Kissinger instructed a Senate committee
questioning the Kurdish sell-out.)
Then, of course, there were the Agency's
murderous Chilean intrigues that eventually triggered the 1973 coup, blotting
out the elected presidency and left-center coalition of Salvador Allende --
with the concentration camps and torture chambers of General Augusto Pinochet's
reactionary junta to follow. Again, a Kissinger quip would be emblematic, in
this case his Latin variant on Orientalism. "I don't see why we need to
stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of
its own people," he admonished his colleagues on the Forty Committee, the
secret group approving the covert action.)
For the most part, however, the early
1970s were the zenith years of Nixon-Kissinger great-power diplomacy -- the
China opening, a Moscow Summit and Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I),
the grim Christmas bombing of Hanoi, and Kissinger's Nobel-Prize-winning but
doomed 1973 Vietnam settlement, as well as his celebrated Middle East shuttle
diplomacy after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War. These were the feats of a haunted
president who distrusted the CIA still more than the rest of a despised
bureaucracy, even as he unleashed it ruthlessly on Chile, and of a gifted,
tireless, megalomaniacal National Security Advisor and Secretary of State
alternately co-opting and excluding the Agency in his incessant war to maintain
his own monopoly of power over the bureaucracy. By 1974, of course, Nixon was
mortally stricken by Watergate, and Kissinger's dominance was hemorrhaging
away.
Looking back on this crucial take-off
moment in Gates' career, media pundits vacantly ascribed it to merit. "The
brightest Soviet analyst in the shop," Washington Post columnist
David Ignatius typically wrote. Insiders knew better. "He wasn't."
That was what his CIA superior Ray McGovern said gently, echoing the feelings
of his colleagues that "something other than expertise" made for
Gates' "meteoric" climb.
It was, in fact, a triumph of office
politics, not substance. "Gates' rise did not come from knowing more about
the Soviets.... than anyone else," CIA chronicler Thomas Powers concluded.
"He was young, well scrubbed, well spoken, bright, hard-working, reliable,
loyal, discreet, and a bit of a hard-ass when it came to the Russians."
But his limits, too, were evident. Wrote British historian Fred Halliday:
"He would not have been out of place as a small town bank manager: unfazed
by questions, reticent in judgment, sure of his ground, but without either
incisiveness or (it seemed) the awareness that international experience
brings." He had, Halliday concluded, "no trace [of]�. anyy first-hand experience of foreign cultures or
countries." He was "a man of the office, the organization." It
was the candid portrait of a consummate insider as insular as the policy and
politics he served.
Gates, the Soviet "specialist"
and, in many ways, penultimate Cold Warrior, would not even see Moscow until
May 1989, more than two decades after entering the CIA as an expert on the USSR
and after 15 years in which, to one degree or another, he joined in nearly all
Washington's most consequential judgments about Russia. Nor, despite his
asserted expertise in the Middle East, would Gates have personal experience
with nations he dealt with fatefully from 1974 to 1993 -- most notably
Afghanistan and Iraq. He would not tour either until 2006-7, and then only for
a few, heavily guarded days and in the most limited of ways.
As with his Baltic predecessors, however,
his specialties "from afar" ushered him into history. Early in 1974,
not yet thirty-one and scarcely six years in the ranks, he was chosen from
among a number of CIA analysts, some with greater seniority, for a key
assignment to the National Security Council staff. It would be the beginning of
nearly nine years spent at the White House in pivotal roles under three
presidents and the administrations of both parties.
Despite Kissinger's preeminence as
National Security Advisor, the NSC staff in 1974 had not yet grown engorged or
been transformed into the shadow foreign ministry it would soon become. It was
still made up mostly of non-political "professionals," not partisans
but career officers "detailed" to it, usually for two-year periods,
from the State Department, the CIA or, less often, the Pentagon. As a system,
the detailing process worked somewhat like traditional White House political
patronage, albeit it was the politics of the bureaucracy that was at stake in
what was considered a plum career assignment. In those days, you were still
detailed to the NSC with, at worst, only a perfunctory ideological screening by
the National Security Advisor and his personal staff.
Gates filled a staff slot that had
traditionally been left for the CIA: analyst, as well as policy and
intelligence liaison, for
The job had singular reach. In a global Cold War made ever more intricate by
the Sino-Soviet split, the rise of Communist China, and the triangular
diplomacy that developed out of that, the NSC Soviet affairs officer took part
in any issue involving Soviet interests. That included not just strategic arms
considerations, but developing situations in regions like the Middle East and
South Asia where
was heavily engaged.
The post had belonged to William Hyland, a
wry, scholarly, self-effacing, relatively undogmatic CIA veteran analyst, then
in his mid-forties, who had readily deferred to Kissinger's realpolitik
eagerness to negotiate with
Hyland's generally pragmatic perspective on the Kremlin informed the
statesmanship behind the SALT agreement and more. His reward was to be named
State Department Director of Intelligence and Research when Kissinger became
Secretary of State in 1973.
"At the switch," Hyland lightly
called his NSC role. Now, Gates was to be at that "switch" for the
next five-and-a-half years -- through Kissinger's dual tenure as both National
Security Advisor and Secretary of State under Gerald Ford from mid-1974 until
late 1975; then under ex-Kissinger deputy and NSC successor Air Force General
Brent Scowcroft during Ford's last year in office. Though the Democrat Jimmy
Carter took the presidency in 1976, Gates stayed on from 1977 through 1979
under Carter's NSC advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski. For part of that interval, he
was Brzezinski's personal assistant -- with even greater scope and authority.
The results of that extended tenure under Ford and Carter, across a fateful
period from the mid- to late-1970s, would prove quite different from those of
the Hyland years.
Shaping talking points, speeches,
intelligence, and policy memos for three national security advisors and two
presidents, deeply involved in the NSC staff's privileged interplay with the
bureaucracy and Congress, with significant control over who had access to what
information at the pinnacle of government, Gates, like few career officials --
certainly no bureaucrat of his provenance in recent memory -- would have
sustained influence over a consequential period of foreign policy.
He began at the
that Watergate July of 1974. Within weeks Nixon had resigned the presidency and
Ford had succeeded him, bringing Donald Rumsfeld along as White House Chief of
Staff and former aide Dick Cheney as well. Gates' career would be interlaced
with theirs for decades -- until he replaced and repudiated one, while entering
into apparent battle with the other over George W. Bush's bitter-end policies.
For most of their history, however, they were allies.
The Ford presidency that launched all
three was a hardly noticed turning point in American politics, the crucible
upon which a slow-motion reactionary coup would be mounted that would reshape
the nation's -- and the world's -- future. In those years, Rumsfeld and Cheney
became public figures, while Gates, from his potent inner perch at the NSC,
remained a shadowy but ever more powerful presence.
Shahdulation
By the summer of 1974, Watergate-obsessed
midst of a furtive revolt over foreign policy, one that had already echoed deep
inside government in the special Soviet National Intelligence Estimate that
Gates had stage-managed in 1973. Though there was no supporting evidence at the
time to confirm his thesis (nor any subsequently when the Kremlin archives were
opened after the fall of the USSR), he maneuvered through the otherwise
self-protective, ambivalent committee that vetted the Estimates -- NSC staff
members called NIEs "National Intelligence Equivocations" -- his own
formulation of what he termed "a much more aggressive Soviet Union."
Distributed across senior levels of the
bureaucracy, passed on (via expected leak) to key foreign affairs figures on
Capitol Hill, the document was welcome fodder for hard-liners -- feeding, as it
did, predictable anxieties well-lodged in government and politics. "It
would sure as hell scare you," the redoubtable Republican conservative
Barry Goldwater told a Democratic Senate colleague who had not seen the NIE,
"It sure scares the hell out of me."
In fact, at that 1973 high tide of
Nixon-Kissinger détente with the Soviets,
was very much on the defensive, particularly in the region that Gates by then
claimed to know intimately, the
Beyond the grand Cold War settlements, the milestones of the moment were two
little noted events in the spring and summer of 1972: a pointed Nixon stopover
in
July, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat's break with the Soviets, who had been
In the midst of
American focus on the oil-rich
and both would amount, at least in the short run, to setbacks for the Kremlin.
Nixon's visit to
the arrival of a veritable blank-check era when it came to patronage for his
old friend the Shah (who had shrewdly treated Nixon well during his 1960s
political eclipse and contributed handsomely, through SAVAK, to his 1968
presidential campaign).
was now to be
the
Pentagon weapons sales, shepherded through by some 500 ranking American
officers. Grandiose trade deals would follow, along with offers to
reactors, and even more aggressive CIA collusion with SAVAK in its far-flung
regional interventions as well as its domestic repression, torture, and
assassinations. Meanwhile, a swarm of more than 50,000 American officials, contractors,
and on-the-make expatriates would descend on the country, constructing
Mafia-model casinos on the Caspian Sea and, elsewhere, the usual faux-American
suburban compounds, walled islands outside Iranian cities like Isfahan. None of
it could the momentarily oil profits-flush Shah long afford, politically or
economically.
The orgy went typically ignored by the
American media -- never so much as a simple headline in those years -- and by a
oblivious to the popular revulsion the patronage provoked or the slowly
gathering forces that would, before the decade ended, fell the Shah of Shahs.
("Shahdulation" was how the cloying, pre-1979 CIA, State Department,
and Pentagon reporting came to be known.) Yet it would be this venal, heavy embrace
in all its forms -- "a tribe that worships gold," an Iranian poet
called the Americans -- that gave the Ayatollah Khomeini's revolt in 1978-1979
much of its anti-Washington, anti-colonial fervor.
Within weeks, of Nixon's lethal 1972
bounty for
expelled the throng of Soviet advisors from
and cut old ties with
country instead with a welcoming
With his usual aplomb, Kissinger had helped plot the defection and the White
House smugly raked in its Cold War chip -- albeit the autocratic Egyptian
regime would become but another U.S.-backed satrapy breeding an anti-Western
fundamentalism in the Muslim Brotherhood, and destined decades down the line to
lend credence and recruits to al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups.
In 1972-73, the Russians watched all this
in distress but also in relative impotence and passivity -- a reaction Gates
clearly observed at the CIA but carefully did not register in his Estimate.
Not that these 1972 events had no eventual
impact in
So vast was the American investment in
that, with the Shah's fall in January 1979, Soviet policy-makers almost
uniformly assumed
loss of
Moscow worried about a full-scale U.S. invasion of Iran, or at least the
destabilizing effects of a dramatic raid to free the American embassy hostages
seized by enraged Iranian students in October 1979 (after the hated Shah and
his entourage were given refuge in the U.S.). The Russian suspicions were
sound. Despite President Carter's express assurances to the Kremlin to the
contrary, the Pentagon did begin planning an invasion almost immediately
following the embassy takeover and, not long after -- when ambitions narrowed
with some appreciation of the bloodbath an invasion would mean -- turned to the
ill-fated hostage rescue of April 1980. That, of course, ended in a debacle of
colliding helicopters at a remote Iranian desert staging area, with nary a
hostage in sight.
Throughout 1979, however, the Russians
were even more afraid that the
was plotting with what the Russians had found to be a maddeningly independent
(typically Afghan) Soviet client regime in
more than one Kremlin policy-maker put it. A multibillion-ruble investment in
aid -- in what Soviet leaders since the 1950s saw as a strategic borderland --
symbolically important following the loss of
like
1979 Soviet invasion of
meant to install a reliable puppet who would never pull "a Sadat."
Counterrevolution on the
In 1973, however, Gates' NIE, like so much
of his "intelligence" work to come, reflected more what was happening
in
than in the world at large. That Estimate, in fact, caught something of the
tangled ancestry of twenty-first century neocon
secretary of defense.
From 1969 on, Nixon and Kissinger had
faced a seething, increasingly bitter rebellion against the kind of equilibrium
they sought with
not just in the strategic-arms race, but in political relations in general.
Their policy was encapsulated in the traditional diplomatic term
"détente." Incessant battles took place with the Joint Chiefs of
Staff (JCS), whose cherished weapons systems and ideological phobia made them,
like the Soviet military, the natural enemies of the process.
The ongoing struggle was aptly symbolized
by the sordid 1970-71 "Admirals' spy ring." The JCS Chairman actually
had a Navy yeoman casing Kissinger's office, and even rifling his waste bags,
in an effort to find out what the close-to-the-vest National Security Advisor
(and his equally scheming President) might be up to.
other words, was spying on the White House as if it were the Politburo. (In
enemies are always on the
In a regime of hoarded secrets and power,
where Kissinger gladly agreed to the wire-tapping of his own aides, and where
almost no one trusted any one else -- one witness simply called it "a
sewer" -- it was, in a sense, more of the same. Nonetheless, history has
yet to come fully to grips with what that military spying signified. One Nixon
aide, recalling for Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson his horror on
stumbling upon the JCS treachery, "felt as if he were in the movie Seven
Days in May," (about an attempted military coup d'état in
Washington). Investigative reporters Bob Gettlin and Len Colodny similarly
linked the episode to what they called, in the title of their impressively
documented 1991 book, a "silent coup." Humpty-Dumpty Nixon, they
believed, had not just tumbled off that wall, thanks to his Watergate weight,
but was also given a helpful push by those who wanted to kill détente.
Baltic Syndromes old and new,
institutional and military-industrial interests, Congressional politics, not to
speak of raging ambitions -- all were part of the emerging struggle within
various domains over Soviet policy. Men like Democratic Senator Henry Jackson
of
Boeing") and his aide Richard Perle, both midwives to the future
neoconservative movement, knew that ardent anti-Soviet opposition to any
arms-control agreement -- like ardent backing for
potent and personally lucrative support.
By the early 1970s, as the JCS spying so
ominously revealed, Nixon and Kissinger were confronted with anything but
ordinary, venal resistance within the bureaucracy. To their unprecedented
policy of détente (and its implicit, if unconscious, challenge to the Baltic
Syndrome mentality), there arose an unprecedented opposition not only in the
Pentagon but also in the CIA, where some felt Cold War orthodoxy and all it
denoted were being threatened as never before.
As Kissinger recounted the experience, he
could hardly testify before
Senate Armed Services Committee or other panels without facing conveniently
leaked CIA or Pentagon documents that, in one way or another, armed the
opponents of détente. These were often highly classified, still closely-held
papers Kissinger himself had only just received -- or had not yet seen at all.
As Nixon sank into the Watergate miasma, leaks (and opposition) only multiplied
-- much of it using materials Bob Gates had ready access to, or had even helped
produce, as assistant national intelligence officer.
It all served foes of the SALT II
agreement, aimed at long-run nuclear "parity" between the two
superpowers -- what Nixon repeatedly called "a generation of peace"
-- which meant likely weapons budget cuts for the Pentagon as well as the
Soviet military.
As Watergate neared its climax, the inner
revolt rumbled more audibly. On the eve of the June 1974 Moscow Summit, Nixon's
forlorn final bow, Truman-era cold warrior Paul Nitze abruptly resigned from
the SALT delegation. Having backed Nixon and readily taken his job offers,
Nitze now blasted the tottering president for "dangerous trends" and
rejoined the hard-liners. (In 1969, Nitze had worked with Perle and another
young zealot, Paul Wolfowitz, to lobby for the Anti-Ballistic Missile, a turkey
of a weapons system, junked as unworkable only to revive in recalibrated form
on post-1980 R&D budget appropriations and then rise from the coffin as a
full-fledged anti-missile system under George W. Bush.)
By the fall of 1974, with Nixon gone,
rebellion burst into the open. Amid a cacophony of leaks, the head of the
Defense Intelligence Agency publicly deplored SALT II -- a glaring breach with
the new Ford administration, all the more remarkable because the already
beleaguered new president was still pledging to pursue the treaty at a
Vladivostok summit that November. Meanwhile, as never before, corporate money
poured into what had, until then, been a group of marginal right-wing think
tanks like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and into the campaign
coffers of right-wing Republican candidates, chiefly the outgoing California
governor, Ronald Reagan, whose handlers in the race to unseat Ford in 1976
urged him, above all, to attack détente as "weakening" national
security.
As usual, given Washington's ceaseless
traffic in leaks, there is no hard evidence about whether Gates actually leaked
into this furor, though his animus in regards to Nixon's Soviet policy was
unmistakable and the provenance of many of the leaked documents is damning.
Clearly, however, in his first year on the NSC staff he waged a careful
rear-guard action against what was to become known as the Helsinki Accords.
Kissinger's diplomacy nonetheless brought the Accords to fruition in July 1975.
They offered official recognition of post-World War II Soviet Bloc boundaries
in Europe, but within a new international context of respect for, and
unprecedented monitoring of, human rights and political dissidence in the
satellites. It would be the last hurrah of détente. While Reagan and the Right
attacked the "surrender" of Eastern Europe, the Accords actually
opened the way for the rise of internal opposition movements like
decay and fall of the
Gates typically opposed
as something
sought (which made it anathema automatically). As would be even more true a decade
later with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, he and others frozen in the Baltic
Syndrome (as always, most of Washington) were oblivious to the brittleness of
communist rule, cynically dismissing the Accords as "window dressing"
the Kremlin and its satellites could and would ignore.
By the mid-1990s, he had accepted, though
flippantly, his misreading of the evolution of a system he had supposedly
pondered most of his adult life. In his memoirs, he wrote: "The Soviets
desperately wanted [
they got it and it laid the foundations for the end of their empire. We
resisted it for years, went [to the Helsinki conference] grudgingly, Ford paid
a terrible political price for going -- perhaps reelection itself -- only to
discover years later that [it] yielded benefits beyond our imagination. Go
figure." In another official's memoir, the passage might have been less
embarrassing; but, for Bob Gates, to "figure" had been the point of
most of his career; no epitaph could be harsher than that throwaway line.
He remained intent on the old evil. In
Ford's retinue for a presidential visit to Bucharest in 1975, he blamed the
Romanian regime's intelligence service for stealing his passport, and, in a
rare lapse, flipped off the airport crowd as he left. "In a regrettable
but immensely satisfying display of pique and immaturity, I bade farewell to
security police with amplified middle finger from the doorway of Air Force
Two."
Kissinger soon got the same unmistakable
salute from Gates' allies in
Ford's historic 1975 "Halloween Massacre" made Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense and Dick Cheney White House Chief of Staff. George H.W.
Bush replaced career man William Colby as CIA director, while the president
personally stripped Kissinger of his role as National Security Advisor. Within
weeks, Rumsfeld would intervene with the president to stop a Kissinger trip to
veto in any of the previous seven years. When arms talks resumed in 1976, to
the din of Reagan attacks in a tightening race for the GOP presidential
nomination, SALT II was already dead and would remain so for the duration of
the Ford presidency.
1976 would offer the funeral procession
that signaled the arrival of a new right-wing order and, with it, Gates' further
rise. That March, as part of Ford's defensive response to the Reagan assault,
the president brought onto the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (FIAB), a
traditionally toothless CIA oversight body, the man who would be the most
important patron in Gates' career, a slightly seedy and indefatigably
reactionary, Russophobic Long Island lawyer named William Casey.
It was an extraordinarily vulnerable
political moment for the CIA, reeling from more than a dozen reports by
Watergate-inspired Congressional committees. They had compiled a staggering (if
very partial) list of the Agency's lawless abuses: multiple covert
interventions, betrayals of clients, assassinations (involving bizarre, often
schoolboy-level toxin and dart technologies), and domestic spying as well as
mail opening. The revelations prompted the creation of Select Committees in
both the House and Senate to oversee covert action, and extracted a Ford
presidential order (subsequently renewed by President Reagan) prohibiting CIA
assassinations -- "reforms" that would turn out to be far less than
expected in both cases.
For William Casey and other members of
what was already probably the most hard-line FIAB in history, the agenda was
hardly to rein in the Agency's mandate for covert action, which they thought
too limited, but rather to escalate the attack on arms control and détente.
Supported by Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs, Casey led the Board in pressuring
Ford to promulgate a "Team B," a group of outside "critics"
who would critique and counter the CIA's assessment of Soviet strength and
intentions.
Given Kissinger's still considerable
personal prestige, the weakened CIA was obviously an easier entry point for
Casey and his cohorts in the assault on détente. But there was grim irony in
the charge underlying the formation of Team B -- that the Agency had somehow
been "soft" on the Russians or prone to underestimate Soviet
strength. Though Gates' 1973 NIE pushed conclusions well beyond the evidence,
even the usual CIA assessments, including its analysis of Soviet strategic
forces for the SALT talks (in which Gates participated), had not differed
significantly from the Pentagon's hawkish ones.
If anything, as it joined the wider
bureaucratic revolt against SALT II, the Agency regularly overestimated overall
Soviet strength and misread the burden of the arms race on the Soviet economy.
Even leaked to Capitol Hill, however, the CIA's cautions and qualifications did
not lend themselves quite as readily to demagogic appeal as the
counterrevolution now sought.
"Let her fly!! -- OK, G.B." was
the flourish with which the new Director, George H.W. Bush, signed off on Team
B, though later, when the episode became notorious, he would admit to an aide,
"It wasn't my doing." Team B's right-wingers, including Paul
Wolfowitz, were chaired, aptly enough, by Harvard's Richard Pipes. He had been
handpicked by Richard Perle via Senator Jackson and came, like most of the
others, with "little command of scientific [strategic weapons]
matters," as Gary Wills put it. The group would form what even hard-line
CIA analyst Ray Cline called "a kangaroo court of outside critics all
picked from one point of view."
Predictably, their "findings"
were a simplistic fantasy: The Soviet Union was intent on starting World War
III and an American nuclear "window of vulnerability" made such a
Russian attack plausible. This scenario required, of course, an inconceivably
perfect Soviet first strike as well as actions and reactions precise beyond any
war-planner's wildest dreams.
Once the Reagan regime -- filling posts
with Team B members -- took office in 1981, the "window of
vulnerability" would mercifully disappear, just as had the budget-plumping
1940s "bomber gap" and the 1950s "missile gap" (both
authored, in part, by Paul Nitze). In 1976, however, Team B opened the window
wide. News of it, duly leaked by Rumsfeld and others, was imbibed by the press,
pundits, and Congress with the usual shallowness, inciting a public mood that
Wills termed "hysteria about the enemy as a patriotic duty." (Much
the same mood would reappear with the neoconservatives post-9/11, making
Pentagon appropriations for generations to come.)
It was all part of an orchestrated
rightward turn that Gates now took up and discreetly steered from his slot at
the NSC. Some of his former colleagues thought the Team B episode a rebuke of
him. "It was Gates v. Gates," one of them said, noting that some of
what Team B was countering as "inaccurate" CIA analysis had, in fact,
been Gates' own work over the previous five years.
By several accounts, though, there had
been an underlying consistency to his hard-line perspective on the Soviets,
even if, in the CIA years, his views had sometimes been muted or passed over
when he was not yet powerful enough to impose his bias. He would never, in any
case, dispute the fabrications of Team B and, at the time, he relished them.
"A starker appreciation," he called a 1976 Team-B-influenced National
Intelligence Estimate on the Soviets, which reflected the tougher tone.
Meanwhile, as so often since 1917, Soviet
reality and
views of it went their separate ways. While building frantically to equal and
even surpass the Americans -- at a real cost to its economy that was, and would
continue to be, twice what the CIA estimated -- the Soviet strategic system
remained plagued by chronic waste, technical gaps, a lethal lag in
computerization, and, not least, sheer incompetence, bureaucratic torpor,
insidious politics, and pervasive corruption.
All of this, the CIA and other departments
of government would have been quick to point out, if the topic had not been
Soviet weaponry. After all, the inefficiencies and failures of the Soviet
system were legendary (and our military-industrial complex a virtual parody of
it). But as so often in American politics and foreign policy, reality was not
the issue.
With Gerald Ford's defeat by Jimmy Carter
in 1976 and the arrival of Zbigniew Brzezinski as national security advisor,
Gates, in part because of his reputation as a "hard-ass" on Soviet
issues, would be given the extraordinary opportunity to hold over to the new
staff, where he would find his views even more influential.
Just ahead lay the beginning of a
trillion-dollar weapons-spending orgy. Opening the way for it would be the
death of arms control and the extinction of détente. The superpower rivalry
would now play out in ever more exotic settings -- from the mosques of
Presidential Palace in
camps beyond the
new blooding, too, in the Middle East, including CIA car bombs in
"black" business deals on the international arms market. And Bob
Gates would be a specialist in it all.
Beirut, Lebanon, Friday, March 8, 1985, an
Islamic Sabbath -- In Bir El-Abed, an impoverished, crowded Shiite quarter in
the southern reaches of the Lebanese capital, Muhammad Husain Fadlallah stops
on the street to speak to an elderly woman; and so, the revered 51 year-old
cleric, delayed momentarily, will not be home at the usual time when a car bomb
explodes at his apartment doorstep with a force felt miles away in the Chouf
Mountains and well out in the Mediterranean.
"Even by local standards," reported
the New York Times from car-bomb and shell-shocked
massive." Eighty-one people were killed -- men, women, and children -- and
more than two hundred wounded. Fadlallah, the target of the attack, was unhurt.
The next day, a notice hung over the devastated area where grief-stricken
families were still digging the bodies of loved ones out of the rubble. It
read: "Made in the
The sign was more apt than even its furious
makers knew. The terrorist strike on Bir El-Abed was a classic product of
American covert policy. Behind the bombing lay a convoluted secret history and,
beyond that, a longer legacy of power wantonly uninformed by
"intelligence."
Agreeing, as usual, with the proposals of CIA
Director William Casey, President Ronald Reagan sanctioned the Bir attack to
avenge a devastating truck-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks at the Beirut
Airport in October 1983 -- itself a bloody reprisal for earlier American acts
of intervention and diplomatic betrayal in Lebanon's civil war that had cost
hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian lives. The barracks attack slaughtered 241
Marines, part of an international peacekeeping force sent to
wake of the 1982 Israeli invasion of the country.
After its own
operatives had repeatedly failed to arrange Casey's car-bombing, the CIA
"farmed out" the operation to agents of its longtime Lebanese client,
the Phalange, a Maronite Christian, anti-Islamic party, avowedly built on the
Italian fascist model. The CIA targeted Fadlallah, in particular, because of
his reputation for fiery sermons in favor of social justice and national
independence -- and because allied spy agencies -- Israel's Mossad, Saudi
Arabia's GID, and Phalangist informers -- claimed he led a militant Shiite
group that bore responsibility for the attack on the Marines.
In fact,
who had killed them. "We still do not have the actual knowledge of who did
the bombing of the Marine barracks at the
Caspar Weinberger, Reagan's Secretary of Defense, told PBS in 2001, "and
we certainly didn't then."
While a
spiritual mentor to many, including militants, in
community, Fadlallah was known to shun any office in a political party or
secular organization. Ironically, while the Reagan administration and the CIA
feared the influence of theocratic
American scholars and other informed observers knew Fadlallah as an insistent
voice against Iranian dictates. He had repudiated Iran's urging of Shiite rule
over multi-faith Lebanon -- so much so that some in Tehran even suspected him
of pro-American sympathies.
CIA officials
also knew that all three "friendlies" -- the Israelis, Saudis, and
Phalangists -- frequently tried to manipulate
This was regularly done with "cooked" (or withheld) intelligence or
by joint-actions meant to enhance the standing of senior CIA officials. An ex-Mossad officer would later reveal,
for example, that Israeli intelligence had learned in advance of the Marine
barracks plot, yet raised no alarms, calculating that such an attack might spur
anti-Arab sentiment in the U.S -- or even drive the Marines out of
to have the Americans, or their clients, do the dirty work of killing
Fadlallah, a Saudi billionaire proposed to pay for the Bir bombing himself; and
the CIA accepted.
In fact, the Bir bombing rested on information
known in the CIA to be false, or, at best, highly suspect. As a result, it was
one of the most heedless and consequential atrocities in the history of CIA
covert actions -- no small distinction. The pivotal figures in that decision,
the men who made all the difference, included the then-still-obscure CIA Deputy
Director for Intelligence and self-styled
expert, Robert Gates.
As documents,
testimony, and other revelations would later make clear, the Bir plot was
typical of Reagan era covert actions, which would include: Illegal aid to
drug-running Contras (at war with the left-leaning Sandinista government of
Nicaragua); contraband arms sent to both Iraq and Iran (at war with each
other); tens of millions of dollars to the anti-Soviet Catholic Church in
Poland, but also to nun- and priest-murdering death squads in El Salvador; and,
most fateful of all, hundreds of millions to Islamic fanatics in Afghanistan.
In the Reagan administration's secret wars -- from
to
to
crucial decisions were often taken not in careful deliberation with the
secretaries of state and defense, the national security advisor, or other top
officials, to say nothing of the requisite Congressional committees, but when
the CIA director and the president were alone.
There they
would be, usually in the Oval Office: Hard-line zealot and Catholic dogmatist
Bill Casey, mumbling his plan (as he typically did), notoriously careless with
facts, ever ready for the bloodiest of covert actions, and by far the most
powerful CIA chief in history. With him, Ronald Reagan, an ever genial man
whose archetypal simplicity and decency endeared him to voters, but who was
known by his closest advisors to be nearly oblivious to the details of policy,
and even hard of hearing in one ear. "Didn't understand a word he
said," Reagan remarked with a shrug after a typical briefing with the
mumbling Casey. Yet, in almost every instance, the President characteristically
agreed -- or seemed to hear and agree -- on whatever covert action his former
campaign manager was hatching.
For the
Agency's director, it meant awesome, unprecedented, power. The only check on
him lay with his three deputies, among the precious few who learned of his
schemes before Reagan would nod approval. In the Bir plot, two of those men
were hardly prone to oppose the director. Principal Deputy John McMahon and
Deputy for Operations Clair George were careerists from the CIA's covert side.
Along with most of their underlings, they knew little of the increasingly
complex religio-political currents and countercurrents roiling the
so were enmeshed with, the same foreign spy services targeting Fadlallah.
In general,
they tended to welcome covert action paid for and carried out by allies. Such
operations appeared to involve little risk to the CIA, or their reputations,
but offered the possibility for easy credit. Not least, they owed their
powerful jobs to the Director, whose right-wing zeal and extraordinary sway
they relished. "Inspired by Casey's enthusiasm for high-rolling covert
action," Washington Post reporter Steve Coll wrote, "they
loved his energy and clout."
Typically,
there was, then, but one chance to head off the coming Bir atrocity. The Agency's
Directorate of Intelligence, under Bob Gates' direction since 1982, was the
repository for the sort of analysis that was supposed to inform any
covert-action or foreign-policy decision. If Operations was the CIA's muscle
and guile, Intelligence was meant to be its eyesight, hearing, nerves, brain,
its sense and sensibility. Casey did not often formally consult the analysts in
his operational machinations, but Gates was his closest deputy, privy to every
covert action, and commonly went beyond his nominal role as head of
"analysis" in directly recommending policies and actions or ordering
and shaping intelligence studies to support whatever policy Casey wanted.
In the winter
of 1984-1985, the Middle Eastern specialists of Gates' directorate were never officially
informed of the Bir bombing plan. They could, however, make out its silhouette
from cable traffic, requested briefings, and other bureaucratic jungle drums
that beat in even the most closely-held operations. They saw the assassination
of Fadlallah taking shape, if not the use of a massive car bomb guaranteed to
kill scores in the vicinity.
"In our
shop, we knew what Casey would be looking for in revenge for the barracks
bombing and what the Israelis and Saudis were pushing," related one
analyst who would later become a senior Agency official. "We laid out all
the unknowables and caveats and how we were being whipsawed [by allied spy
agencies], and we sent it upstairs for Gates to give to Casey, and we
recommended it be bootlegged to the NSC and White House and even to Defense if
it came to that."
When there was
no sign that Gates had done anything with their warning, two of the analysts
confronted the deputy director. "This is terrible," one of them told
him.
"We are
not here to pick a fight with the boss," Gates answered dismissively.
"I'm not particularly concerned about some set-to in
Risking their
careers, the analysts tried to warn officials they knew in the Pentagon, but
they got no response. A few weeks later, like any other outsiders, they would
read the New York Times account of the Bir explosion. "I was
literally sick," one of them remembered, "the rest of the day."
Outside of
CIA's Bir operation would be a passing, little-noticed tragedy, the sort that
sometimes marks an epoch. Among those of Fadlallah's bodyguards not killed in
the explosion, 22 year-old Imad Mugniyah would join the emerging Lebanese
Shiite group Hezbollah and, over the next decade, as a shadowy chief of
security, direct a series of reprisal attacks against Americans in a bloody
chain reaction of terror and counter-terror. Among Fadlallah's admirers,
outraged by the bombing and ever after distrustful of the Americans he had once
admired, was a round-faced, 25 year-old theology student of already recognized
charisma and organizational skills. He would rise to become Hezbollah's leader
-- and, after his forces fought the Israeli invasion of
standstill in the summer of 2006, one of the most popular figures in the Arab
world: Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah.
In a sense, the
bomb that shattered Bir El-Abed began to be assembled eight years earlier with
the arrival in the White House of a grinning, God-fearing Georgian who pledged
memorably in his inaugural address: "To be true to ourselves, we must be
true to others. We will not behave in foreign places so as to violate our rules
and standards here at home, for we know that the trust which our nation earns
is essential to our strength."
"Great
Continuity"
On election
night 1976, the three American television networks closed coverage with the old
Democratic victory song, "Happy Days Are Here Again." The words
sounded right to many who were banking on a post-Vietnam turn to wisdom in
foreign policy from the newly elected Jimmy Carter. For the first time in more
than a decade, American forces were not in, or near, major combat anywhere on
the planet.
The concerted
right-wing, military-industrial challenge to détente of 1974-1976 had been
beaten back. Its Republican champion, Ronald Reagan, had fallen short in his
GOP presidential race with Gerald Ford. The Democrat's prototype
neoconservative, Washington Senator Henry Jackson, despite a huge corporate and
Israeli lobby war chest, had proved an uninspiring candidate and was eliminated
in the primaries. Now, gone from the White House as well was Ford, who in the
final year of his presidency had fallen into traditional Cold War mode, and
with him two key officials who had eagerly joined the drive to push policy
ever-rightward, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and White House Chief of
Staff Dick Cheney.
In their place
were new men, apparently chastened by
advisor was Zbigniew Brzezinski. As an academic he had been the epitome of a
Baltic Syndrome Russophobe, but in presidential politics, as an advisor to
Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Jimmy Carter in 1976, he had been circumspect while
angling for high office.
Brzezinski in
any case looked to be outnumbered by the new administration's declared
"moderates" -- Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, an establishment elder
who had emerged from the Kennedy-Johnson era quagmire-averse, committed to
détente, and to a further strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT II); at the
Pentagon, a defense establishment scientist, Harold Brown, who abhorred the
thought of foreign military entanglements while he rebuilt Vietnam-shattered
department morale; and, at the CIA, a Navy prodigy who had been first in his
(and the new president's) class at Annapolis, "Admirable Admiral
Stansfield Turner," as the New Republic called him, a thoughtful,
even reforming exception to the increasingly well-known horrors of the Agency's
history.
At the outset,
the New York Times editorially praised this regime as "rightly
unruffled by the old politics of cold war confrontation." The right-wing National
Review was likewise sure that
"will now shrink from battle with the enduring enemy." Both were
wrong. No one reckoned with the 52 year-old
farmer, whose provincial political freshness and moral uprightness was welcomed
by a Watergate- and Vietnam-weary public. Nor did they reckon with Brzezinski
and an energetic assistant named Robert Gates.
As with so much
else, our barely surface-scraped history has yet to show the tragic complexity
that was Jimmy Carter, whose presidency one scholar would sum up as
"snatching defeat from the jaws of victory." There were omens of what
was to come even before he took office -- his long-held support for the Vietnam
War, his campaign-trail vagueness (like Brzezinski's), his administrative
equivocations as governor, his steely religiosity born of a conversion
following an electoral defeat. Whatever the causes, the effects would be all
too plain.
Brzezinski and
aide Bob Gates knew their man. With earnest conviction, habitual vacillation,
and chaotic management of his soon splintering regime, Jimmy Carter -- behind
what the doomed Shah of Iran once described as his "frozen blue eyes"
-- would prove among the coldest of cold warriors. Four years later, when the
incessant bureaucratic infighting for the President's favor was over, Vance (no
pussycat) was a broken man; Brown and Turner had been sidelined; and even a
victorious Brzezinski was uneasy with the wreckage they had wrought.
By then, the
precedents had been set for the imperial excesses that would make the 1980s the
preamble to our own post-9/11 era. Though glad to see them go, at least one
beneficiary of their rule was happy with the result. "Great continuity
between Carter's approach�. and that of his
successor, Roonald Reagan," was how Bob Gates would proudly describe it.
"Competition"
Trumps "Cooperation"
When it came to
the
inconsistent in his first months in office, veering between one tactic and
another in arms control while a bureaucratic war over SALT II erupted around
him. On Gates' recommendation, the new president met with perennial hawk Paul
Nitze, now representing the Committee on the Present Danger, the latest
right-wing, military-industrial front fielded to attack détente. Soon,
Brzezinski and Gates had won a defining victory. They had persuaded Carter to
bring in the national security advisor's old friend and onetime co-author,
Samuel Huntington, as a special consultant on strategic policy. The Harvard
reactionary would later become one of the gurus of the neoconservative movement
(and author of the ubër-Orientalist book, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of World Order).
In the summer
of 1977, his cohorts would leak to the Washington Post that
Administration into greater respect for the
Working in liaison, Huntington, Gates, and hard-liners in and out of government
promptly did just that -- a process which culminated in Presidential Review
Memorandum #10, (in which both Brzezinski and Gates were instrumental). A
time-honored "study," using flawed or confected intelligence and
meant to channel presidential policy, the infamously shallow PRM-10 nodded to
détente, while legitimizing the fraudulent premise of the old Team B, that 1976
group of right-wing outsiders a Reagan-nervous Ford had commissioned to counter
the CIA's non-existent underestimation of Soviet strength.
The
conveniently have-it-both-ways Huntington-Brzezinski-Gates document combined
"cooperation and competition" into a single
honored with pledges of faithfulness by diplomatic day; the second indulged
with a serial philanderer's abandon by covert-action night. Among other historic
effects, PRM-10 would be the basis for what would develop into Carter's
"rapid deployment force" in the
meant to protect American "access" to Middle Eastern oil, and
eventually into a full-fledged Gulf military command, CENTCOM.
It would signal
the beginning of what historian Andrew Bacevich has labeled our "oil
wars" in the region. More generally, the "report" sanctioned,
for a new era, the use of trumped-up "special" panels or consultants
to incite political alarm in the body politic whenever militarism -- and
especially military spending -- was thought to be in danger of waning.
Against the
continuing obstruction of Brzezinski and Gates, Vance would coax SALT II, which
had seemed imminent at Carter's inauguration, to a cheerless
1979. By then, however, the negotiations had been eviscerated by Congressional
opposition that emerged ineluctably out of the growing mood of confrontation
with the
agreement would die just six months later without Senate ratification when
Carter withdrew the treaty as part of his outraged reaction to the Soviet
invasion of
Meanwhile, just as all the hawks prodded him to do from the first weeks of his
presidency, Carter went on to approve major new weapons programs -- what the
Soviets, in mounting alarm, saw as "an endless build-up of power" --
that made the shell game of "cooperation" a travesty.
A shallow
Congress, aided by a diffident media -- along with an ever uninformed,
distracted public -- would never deal with the realities of the Carter-launched
arms build-up that would become epochal in the Reagan years. No matter that it
involved hundreds of billions of precious taxpayer dollars, venal interests
holding hostage crucial public needs for generations to come, and, in the
process, the ever-increasing danger of national extinction in nuclear war by
accident or provocation. "Don't worry, boys," Mississippi Senator
John Stennis once told the staff of the Armed Services Committee which he
chaired, "nobody ever takes a hard look at the real numbers here."
As Rumsfeld had
admitted when he left as secretary of defense in 1977, despite the Soviet push
toward nuclear parity, the
retained more than a two-to-one advantage in warheads, a preponderance that
would continue into the 1980s. Given the fast-multiplying nuclear missiles on
American submarines, as well as the Strategic Air Command's bombers and
multiple-warhead, land-based missiles,
counterforce capacity (its ability to destroy the
any conceivable first-strike option.
In the most
fevered right-wing scenarios, with the Soviet strategic force taking out 90% of
American missile silos, only 18% of the American strategic array would have
been lost. On the other hand, the U.S. could calculably destroy some 40% of the
Russian deterrent force, and Carter's decision to deploy new Pershing II
missiles in Europe in the late 1970s put some of that U.S. first-strike
capacity 10 minutes from Soviet command-and-control centers.
Meanwhile --
the point of it all -- Pentagon budgets rose steadily. In part, that spiral was
the price for Congressional backing of SALT II, and it was invariably
justified, as it always had been during the Cold War, by inaccurate or
knowingly false claims about the rate of increase in Russian military spending.
(Moscow's expenditures actually leveled off after 1976.) It was madness -- and
business as usual.
Great Games
On a dark, cold
December night in 1979, an elite unit of Soviet troops, Kalashnikovs blazing,
dashed up the slanting drive to
outskirts of
Their mission was to kill the communist president of
conspiring with the Americans. They found him upstairs with his little boy in
his arms and cut them both down in a withering crossfire. Murdered, too, was an
epoch in world politics, and launched was another with unprecedented dangers we
still face.
The very post-Vietnam détente-restraint of most
of Carter's advisors -- and the President's own inner hawkishness -- opened the
way for his presidency to become (contrary to conventional wisdom) a
precedent-setting period for covert intervention. And Gates, as Brzezinski's
hard-line staff officer for Soviet affairs, and later his personal outer-office
assistant in the White House West Wing, was at the center of it all.
In his 1996
memoir, he would write contemptuously (and, in the case of Secretary of State
Vance, falsely), "Because Vance was unwilling to use diplomatic leverage
against the Soviets, and [Secretary of Defense] Brown and others wanted no part
of
in the
Brzezinski an enormous opportunity to put forward covert action -- which was
under the purview of the NSC -- as a means of doing something to counter the
Soviets."
Gates and Brzezinski promptly impressed upon
Carter that, "It is his CIA," as Gates described it. Within
weeks of his inauguration, at the urging of the national security advisor and
his Soviet affairs specialist, the new president approved the first covert
actions inside the
These operations were aimed at inciting religious discontent in Soviet
as well as radical Islamic literature. In that and other actions to come, it
would be Jimmy Carter who first fanned Islamic fundamentalism -- which would
have devastating consequences in our own era.
By July 1977 --
less than two weeks after the Sandinista rebels took power from the 43-year
Somoza-dynasty dictatorship in Nicaragua, a long favored Washington client in
Central America -- they would begin mounting the first covert actions against
the popular, and populist, new regime in Managua, as they would soon be shoring
up a ruling oligarchy that faced a mounting leftist insurgency in neighboring
El Salvador.
There would be
similar interventions and intrigues in the Horn of Africa, on the
Soviet (or proxy Cuban) menace. "On the march" was the way both Gates
and his boss were fond of describing the communist hordes. The result would be
a rash of secret wars, assassinations, terrorist acts, and manifold corruptions
around the world by the administration of the "human rights"
president. Moreover, these acts preceded, sometimes by several years, the
vaunted covert actions of the Reagan regime, which were often only
continuations of Carter policy, in some cases even on a lesser scale.
"Jimmy Carter was the CIA's first wholly owned subsidiary," an Agency
operative would boast to a friend later, "and the beauty of it was that so
few people, even on the inside, ever knew it."
Nowhere would
their penchant for the covert prove more fateful than in the remote
covert intervention there, they now added their own bloody chapter.
At the behest
of
China, and the Shah of Iran (and their intelligence services), the CIA had
begun offering covert backing to Islamic radical rebels in
early as 1973-1974. The explanation for this was that the right-wing,
authoritarian regime of Mohammed Daoud, then in power in
might prove a likely instrument of Soviet military aggression in
always held the Russians, his main patron when it came to aid, at arm's length,
and had savagely purged local communists who supported him when, in 1973, he
overthrew the Afghan monarchy. For their part, the Soviets had not shown the
slightest inclination to use the notoriously unruly Afghans and their ragtag
army for any expansionist aim.
Support for the
anti-Daoud religious insurgents, far more anti-American than the
served distinctly local interests. The Pakistanis and Iranians wanted to fend
off Afghan irredentism on their disputed borders and
was eager to secure a pliant regime in
its western flank as it faced rival
administration casually supported these aims in deference to its clients with
little or no thought for the Afghans, a policy-atrocity which would be repeated
for the next quarter-century.
All the backing
ceased, however, after an abortive rebel uprising in 1975, as Daoud launched
his own détente policy with
and
Then, in April 1978, his blundering crackdown on
provoked a successful coup by party loyalists in the army. This happened in
defiance of a skittish
which had stopped earlier coup plans. Aware of these facts, Vance's State
Department coolly adopted a wait-and-see attitude toward the new regime.
But with
predictable alarm bells ringing in
and Russophobic China, Carter's covert interventionists at the NSC saw an irresistible
"opportunity," as Gates put it, "to counter the Soviets."
Three weeks after the
in
state in his Kissingeresque debut as a diplomat, the "Soviet peril"
in
Gates memoir
dutifully notes the ensuing stream of bland speculations by the CIA's Soviet
analysts about what the Soviets might next do in their tortured relationship
with a faltering, needy, yet independent Afghan communist regime. But he spares
us the covert actions the CIA carried out, amid a stream of memos Brzezinski
and he sent Carter about the Soviet "threat" in
Asia
Secretary of State Vance, and the rest of government.
By summer 1978,
the old insurgent training camps in
thronged with Islamic radicals. They were eager to fight a regime pushing land
reform and education for women, while establishing a secular police state. By
fall 1978, more than a year before Soviet combat troops set foot in
Afghanistan, a civil war, armed and planned by the U.S., Pakistan, Iran, and
China, and soon to be actively supported, at Washington's prodding, by the
Saudis and Egyptians, had begun to rage in the same wild mountains of eastern Afghanistan
where U.S. forces would seek Osama bin Laden a little more than twenty-three
years later.
In April 1979,
with arms and agitators paid for by the CIA and Pakistani intelligence (the
Shah fell in January ending SAVAK's role), a radical Islamic uprising in Herat
in western Afghanistan led to the slaughter of thousands on both sides,
including more than 200 Russian military and civilian advisors and their
families. Even so, the Soviets stoutly refused to intervene militarily. They
even made their refusal absolutely plain to
conversations with the Afghan leadership en clair for the Americans to
intercept. But Gates, Brzezinski, and Carter were having none of it in what had
become a deliberate plot to "suck" the Russians into
The old Great
Game was now in cynical full swing. In the sort of mad plan not even Rudyard
Kipling could have imagined, they plotted to personally "give the Soviets
their
as Brzezinski was fond of saying.
The ceaseless machinations and bloody civil
strife culminated, of course, in the December 1979 Soviet invasion. The
Politburo had resisted it for more than a year and hesitated, even at the
eleventh hour. It is, by any measure, one of the more dramatic, and chilling,
stories in the annals of world politics. By now, Brzezinski and Gates had
essentially created a new foreign policy for the
action in secret with few co-authors and no parallel.
By the time, they and their co-conspirators are
through, a course will have been set that will take the Afghans into a
nightmare universe in which a million-and-a-half of them will die, millions
more will become homeless (in what the UN will call "migratory
genocide"), and, for more than a quarter-century, their country will be a
continuing catastrophe beyond any other in the history of nation-states. In
part, it is his own work that Gates now faces as secretary of defense.
"Love
at First Sight"
Meanwhile,
during 1978, they were attending, with similar heedlessness, to the long death
rattle of the Shah's regime. That disaster, prelude to another crisis that now
confronts the new Secretary of Defense, is captured in snapshots.
There is Jesse
Leaf, the CIA's analyst for
who has never been to
or met an Iranian. Like Gates, as a Soviet specialist, he is an
"expert" in the country he "analyzes" only "from
afar." He nonetheless grasps the coming collapse, not from the
"Shahdulation" of official reporting, but from incidental reading of
Alexis de Tocqueville's work on the rotten ancien régime of eighteenth
century France. When he tries to warn his superiors of what the future may
hold, unlike Gates, he sees his career stunted.
There is
Brzezinski's call to U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan in
the streets of the Iranian capital. The national security advisor tells the
ambassador that the American Army attaché must have his friends in the Iranian
military "overthrow" the weak post-Shah regime and "take control
of the country�. to restore
order." The atttaché is hiding in the basement of the Iranian Army
commander's headquarters, pinned down by gunfire, and can hardly save himself,
much less Iran, for Washington. "I can't understand you," Sullivan
replies sarcastically, "You must be speaking Polish." It might have
been an epitaph for so much.
By the time the
mullahs control
hostages languishing in endless months of captivity, and Soviet troops
occupying
Gates has gone back to the CIA. It's a move he's long lobbied for, part of his
careful career climb -- and an escape, though not from Brzezinski, whose office
he considers "a lonely island of sanity" in a beset president's
"otherwise very screwed up White House."
He is just
settling in as a "senior manager" in the CIA's "
when a call comes from Director Turner, who has met him often outside
Brzezinski's office. Would he be the director's assistant? Gates is reluctant
-- he knows a failing regime when he sees one, in
choice. So he works for Turner through 1980, watching Carter's tormented last
year -- the failed hostage-rescue raid in Iran, the "green light"
Washington covertly gives Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to attack Iran in what
will be a million-casualty, decade-long war, and, of course, the president's
relentless political decline, ending in the election of Ronald Reagan. This he
finds "heartening," as he tells friends.
He still does
not know just how important the Turner job he didn't want has been; for it's
there that he meets Ronald Reagan's new CIA Director, a Republican
wheeler-dealer who had been the new president's campaign manager. He arrives at
the Agency intending, as he often says, "to make war on the
been doing, in his own modest way, since joining the Agency in 1968. For the
37-year old Cold War bureaucrat and the gruff 68-year-old Bill Casey, as one
witness remembers, "It was love at first sight."
A Chronology
from Hell
Kids on his
block in
"Cyclone," which will fit for the rest of his 74 years. Bill Casey
pounds his way through Fordham and St. John's Law, stumbles into a stint with
the CIA's precursor, the OSS, in World War II, and goes on to make a fortune as
a flamboyant business lawyer and schlock publisher. The future CIA Director is,
by now, a self-described "expert" not on any part of the world, but
as the author of those forgotten 1960s classics, How to Raise Money to Make
Money and How to Build and Preserve Executive Wealth, manuals that
dot drug-store magazine racks of the era.
Through it all,
there will be seedy connections in the milieu of the New York Mob, shady
practices that bring lawsuits for plagiarism, an unsuccessful Congressional
run, and constant jockeying for position on the right-wing fringes of
Republican politics. Fired by his rise as a devout leader of the Roman Catholic
laity, he also becomes a ferocious anti-communist. Buccaneering Bill Casey, his
(Jesuit-educated) Agency deputy John McMahon, and Gates (with his own fervor)
will give new meaning to the old quip about what CIA really stands for --
"Christians in Action."
If Gates had
only done his time at the NSC and then vanished into the bowels of the CIA, his
role would have been significant, though largely unseen and barely recorded.
But with Casey's arrival in 1981, he began to rise into the kind of visibility
that would, in 2006, take him into the Pentagon as a potential savior.
Under Nixon,
Casey had been chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, where he had
lied to the Senate Banking Committee about his past business imbroglios, and
narrowly survived ouster. In 1976, and again in 1980, he was an energetic
fund-raiser and fixer for the Reagan campaigns. When campaign manager John
Sears ran afoul of Nancy Reagan, Casey was an obvious choice for Reagan
handlers and future
power-brokers Ed Meese and Mike Deaver. With Reagan's victory, when the
secretary-of-state job that he yearned for went to former Kissinger aide
Alexander Haig -- "He's more handsome than I am but not nearly as
smart," Casey would quite accurately say -- the CIA was his recompense.
What now
followed for Robert Gates was a history as convoluted as it was momentous. Here
it is, ever so briefly, in year-by-year snapshots -- against the backdrop of
the era's furious, far-flung covert actions, from
and
and
All of this was, in turn, accompanied by secret "wars" in
the usual clash of ambitions, called into question the very integrity of
American intelligence. Gates would be a combatant in all of them.
1981:
Casey names
Gates to head his Executive Staff, where he "smoothes" relations
between the director and his initial chief deputy, Bobby Ray Inman, a
50-year-old ex-admiral off various intelligence postings. On finding Casey
leaking to New York Times columnist William Safire to discredit him --
leaks Gates joins in -- Inman hits the ceiling and departs. About the same
time, Gates begins to tell friends that he has aspirations someday to "get
to the top" of the Agency.
Gates writes
Casey a crucial memo on the Agency's "lagging" covert-action
capabilities and sluggish "responsiveness." "The CIA," he
argues, "is slowly turning into the Department of Agriculture." It is
what the director has long suspected and just what he wants to hear from his
assistant.
Near the end of
the year, Gates is offered a lucrative job with a private company providing
intelligence to corporations doing business abroad. It will double his salary
with a huge signing bonus. He decides to take it; but, the day before he is to
sign, suddenly changes his mind. The company goes out of business in a few
months.
1982:
In January,
Casey appoints Gates Deputy Director for the Intelligence Directorate. He
promptly informs the analysts under him that he wants their "best
estimates," but begins to keep a "scorecard" of favored analysts
that influences promotions. "A little Napoleon," one analyst calls
him.
"It was well known among analysts at the
time," wrote former Soviet affairs officer Jennifer Glaudemans, "that
we would have a hard time getting Gates to sign off on analyses that did not
fit his ideological preconceptions." Added Thomas Polgar, an Agency
veteran who returned as a consultant in the 1980s, "You never heard about
a Gates position that differed from Casey's. Either he sincerely believed in
Casey's ideology or he catered to it."
Casey asks Gates
for a new National Intelligence Estimate on "Soviet support for
international terrorism" and also "how far�. the Soviet Union would go in its support for
leftists in
beginning of what one analyst will call "slanted studies all over the
place." Commented Glaudemans: "I heard terms such as ‘soft on the
Soviets' and ‘Soviet apologist' thrown in certain people's direction."
Gates begins
"astutely" (as Time magazine would later put it) cultivating
Vice President George H. W. Bush. He takes special pains to brief Bush
personally and offers quiet personal briefings to his staff as well, which is
otherwise essentially ignored by the Reagan White House.
Late in the
year, Gates issues a report that leftist rebels in
Salvador
citing as evidence a Nicaraguan customs officer who allowed a Volkswagen allegedly
carrying such arms to cross into
document," says David MacMichael, former senior estimates officer for
1983:
Casey names
Gates as chairman of the National Intelligence Council that oversees the
preparation of all National Intelligence Estimates (NIEs).
Though the CIA put such documents together,
intelligence analysts at the Pentagon and the State Department traditionally
inserted footnotes of dissent. Now, they are suddenly prevented from doing so.
"This false unanimity was no accident," comments a former ranking
State Department official. "It was the personal creation of Mr.
Gates."
1984:
On December 14,
Gates writes Casey a 5-page policy memo, arguing that the "Soviets and
Cubans are turning
into an armed camp with military forces far beyond its defensive needs and in a
position to intimidate and coerce its neighbors�. [The] only way we can prevent disaster in
America
and
the
the
will do everything in its power short of invasion to put that regime out."
This is an unprecedented step for a deputy for intelligence.
Without U.S.
aid the Nicaraguan Contra rebels will not survive, Gates argues, but the U.S.
should also break relations with Managua, impose sanctions and a quarantine,
set up and recognize a government-in-exile, and launch "air strikes to
destroy a considerable portion of Nicaragua's military buildup." He is
recommending "hard measures," he tells Casey; it's time to "stop
fooling ourselves."
Gates will
later claim that he never shared Casey's hawkish convictions or priorities
regarding
"For reasons I never fully comprehended," he wrote in his memoir,
"Bill Casey became obsessed with
1982-1985
(the Middle East and
The Bir bombing
in March 1985 is part of a grim sequence of events most Americans never
acknowledge. Gates knows it all intimately.
In September
1982 -- despite
diplomatic pledges that its peacekeeping Marines will protect civilian
innocents while Palestinian Liberation Organization forces make a negotiated
exit from
-- the Marines are suddenly withdrawn and Israeli-backed Lebanese forces
massacre more than 600 unarmed people (mostly women, children, and the elderly)
in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Even American officials later call the
withdrawal "treacherous" and "criminal."
In April 1983,
in reprisal, a pickup truck carrying 2,000 pounds of explosives slams into the
U.S. Embassy in
wiping out the CIA station there, among much else. In September 1983, on the
basis of CIA reports (that local Marine commanders contest), Washington orders
Sixth Fleet warships Virginia and John Rogers to intervene in the
Lebanese civil war. They lob 24,000 pounds of shells onto the positions of a
Lebanese group opposing a U.S.-backed faction. In October 1983, a dump truck
hurtles past Marine guards at the "Beirut Hilton" barracks at the
airport with 12,000 pounds of explosives, killing 241 Marines.
In February
1984, in what an official calls "one of our worst defeats," President
Reagan withdraws the surviving Marine contingent from
March 1984, CIA Beirut Station Chief William Buckley is kidnapped. He will die
more than a year later, still in captivity.
Three weeks
after Buckley's kidnapping, Reagan signs an order, drafted by NSC staffer
Oliver North, setting up a new, secret "Counterterrorist Task Force"
to explore the trading of arms for hostages. This will begin the Iran-Contra
scandal.
In March 1985,
Phalangist agents plant the car-bomb intended to kill Fadlallah. Around the
same time, Gates drafts plans for a joint US-Egyptian invasion of
The plan is shelved when the State Department protests.
That spring
Gates also convenes a special group to issue a memo arguing that the Soviets
were behind the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. Asked years
later about the murder plot by historian Fred Halliday, he replies, "It
will probably remain one of the great unanswered questions of the cold
war." Reflecting White House pressure, in the same vein Gates also presses
analysts to implicate the Russians in European terrorism, though most analysts
know that reports prompting the White House request are false and based on the
CIA's own "black propaganda" operations ordered by Casey at Gates'
own urging.
In May 1985,
Gates issues a Special National Intelligence Estimate on
all previous analyses and stressing Soviet inroads into that country (even
though the fundamentalist Shiite regime of the Ayatollah Khomeini loathes
communism).
In August 1985,
an NSC meeting discusses the illegal supplying of
missiles to
own inventories would then be replenished by the administration.
On October 1,
1985, CIA National Intelligence Officer Charles Allen tells Gates of suspicions
that funds are being illegally diverted from some unknown source to the
Nicaraguan Contras, though Gates claims he will not remember being told any of
this until almost a year later.
A November 22nd
Gates memo reports that Iranian-sponsored terrorism has "dropped off
substantially," another major reversal in analysis, though no specific
evidence is cited. Later that same month, U.S. Hawk missiles are shipped
illegally to
In 1985, the
CIA first notices "significant" numbers of "Arab nationals"
coming to
to fight with the U.S.-backed Afghan Mujahideen in the anti-Soviet war.
"Our mission was to push the Soviets out of
post-Soviet
to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a haven for terrorists
operating worldwide," Gates would write in his memoirs. He would be
blunter with historian Halliday: "Frankly,
we weren't concerned about what post-Soviet
like."
1986:
In April, Casey
promotes Gates to full Deputy Director. Later that year, Congress launches the
Iran-Contra investigation and a November 24th White House meeting begins, as an
aide to Secretary of State George Shultz notes, "rearranging the
record." At the close of the year, Casey suffers a seizure and is
hospitalized with the brain tumor that will ultimately kill him.
1987:
Casey resigns
on January 29th and, four days later, Reagan nominates Gates as director.
But reckonings
have, by now, begun. That January, Shultz tells Gates: "I feel you all
have very strong policy views. I feel you try to manipulate me. So you have a
very dissatisfied customer. If this were a business, I'd find myself another supplier."
It is only the first of much Shultz testimony. "I had come to have grave
doubts, "he would tell Congress later, "about the objectivity and
reliability of some of the intelligence I was getting."
In February,
Gates has his confirmation hearings, amid a rising public and Congressional
furor over the multiple illegalities of the Iran-Contra Affair. The questions
are withering, especially when it comes to his implausible claim that, as a
senior CIA official, he had no incriminating knowledge of, or part in, the
scheme, and on his role as a principal drafter of Casey's November 1986
testimony in which the director lied to Congress.
"Sycophants
can only rise to a certain level," Gates shoots back in response to
charges of pandering (and negligence) in furtherance of his career. But to so
much of what the Senators charge that he did and did not do, no real rebuttal
is possible.
A Joint
Committee on Iran-Contra asks that Gates' nomination be put on hold.
Republicans warn the White House that to continue the confirmation fight will
only focus more attention on the scandal. On March 2, Gates and Reagan withdraw
his nomination.
Might-Have-Beens
Gates'
prominence would not end, of course, with that bitter climax to his fateful six
years at Casey's CIA. In the fitful sequel to the Iran-Contra investigation,
Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would secure convictions of several ranking
Reagan officials, but ruefully conclude, in a 1991 report, that, despite a maze
of evasion and prevarication, with testimony "scripted and less than
candid" and with "two demonstrably incorrect statements," there
was still "insufficient evidence that Gates committed a crime."
Meanwhile,
Congressional inquiries petered out short of confronting the still iconic
Reagan with the impeachable offense at the heart of the scandal. They were also
blunted by the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the ranking Republican on the
Joint Committee, Wyoming Congressman Dick Cheney.
Set against the
totality of his record, there was little doubt, however, that Gates had been
complicit in the crimes of the era, even if such a case wasn't fit for a jury.
Ironically, no indictment could have been more damning than his memoir: "A
thousand times I would go over the ‘might-have-beens.' If I had raised more
hell with Casey about non-notification of Congress, if I had demanded that the
NSC get out of covert action, if I had insisted that CIA not play by NSC rules,
if I had been more aggressive with the Director of Operations in my first
months as Deputy of Central Intelligence, if I had gone to the attorney
general." It was a strange form of contrition, revealing how much he knew
and could have done, with all those "might-have-beens" reduced to the
first and decisive "if" -- if Bob Gates had not been the hawkish
careerist he was under Casey's richly rewarding patronage.
He would remain
as deputy under the new CIA director, former head of the FBI and St. Louis
judge William Webster, a figure of scandal-free rectitude who had little grasp
of foreign affairs or intelligence. Webster's four-year tenure would be a
holding action through the end of the Cold War. His rule would come to grips
with none of the Agency's Faustian bargains and corrupt practices, from
alliances with drug-traffickers to the money-laundering and looting of thrifts,
from 900 major interventions and several thousand secondary actions to its
1980s bafflement at Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost and its
inability to grasp that the USSR was a moribund empire. Expected to deceive its
enemies, an intelligence service must never willfully, or by incompetence, lie
to itself -- yet that was, in large measure, Gates' legacy, and his stand-in
Webster left it intact.
In March 1989,
with the presidency of George H.W. Bush, whom he had long cultivated, Gates
returned to the NSC as National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft's deputy. For
the next three years, in concert with Cheney as Secretary of Defense, he waged
a final battle against the Soviets, denying at every turn that the old enemy
was actually dying.
When Webster retired in 1991, Bush nominated
Gates again as director, and for a time it seemed, as a Senate staffer put it,
"smooth sailing." Then, suddenly, he found himself facing what one
old colleague called a "virtual insurrection" of current and former
CIA officers, who trooped to Capitol Hill to testify with unprecedented candor
and courage to his record of corruption of intelligence.
It was an
extraordinary rebellion against what the New York Times called Casey's
(and, by extension, Gates') "dark legacy." In the end, there would be
an unprecedented 33 Senate votes against confirmation. Senate Intelligence
Committee Chairman David Boren had to conduct "his own covert action"
to secure the nomination, as one witness described it. ("David took it as
a personal challenge to get me confirmed," Gates would write.) An Oklahoma
Democrat with wealthy backers and presidential ambitions, as well as a personal
reputation long the subject of
whispers, Boren soon shocked constituents by a hasty retirement to a sinecure
presidency at the
of
chief aide and legacy to the world of intelligence would be a former lobbyist
for Greek-American interests, George Tenet.
As director at
last, Gates would convene some 14 committees on reform and reorganization,
shift budgets from the Cold War to the new targets of terrorism and economic
espionage, and pursue other changes national security historian John Prados
would find "laudable and energetic." But in his little more than a year
in office, there would be no substantive changes in the enduring culture of the
Agency. "After all that had happened, after all we knew," one ranking
officer said of the flurry, "no one was listening."
Gates would
remain under the new president, Bill Clinton, just long enough for one final
disaster, providing what Prados called the "initial architecture" for
the outgoing Bush regime's "humanitarian" invasion of
of
It was a fitting exit, the Rangers bleeding and dying under the guns of gang
lords who had once been in the pay of the CIA.
The Last
Hope?
Gates' CIA
retirement in 1993 would be punctuated by delayed detonations from the past:
There would be a Russian intelligence archive linking him to the notorious 1980
"October surprise" in which weapons of U.S.-origin were shipped to
Iran, while the embassy hostages, already held for so long in Tehran, were not
released until after Ronald Reagan's election. A former NSC staff officer gave
sworn testimony that Gates was implicated in illegal arms shipments to Saddam
Hussein in the Iraq-gate scandal of the 1980s. A CIA Inspector General issued a
devastating post-mortem on the Agency's analytic "hyperbole" in the
Gates years, as well as its security disasters with Soviet moles Aldrich Ames
and Edward Howard, among others.
Not least,
there was the Gary Webb episode, in which an intrepid young journalist in
drug-trafficking with the Nicaraguan Contras. He would be professionally and
personally broken to the point of suicide when his reporting was savagely
attacked by major papers that had dodged the story to begin with � and, when Webb's series broke, had been treated
to extensive "briefings" by Gates and other officials of the era to
discredit the revelations, which even the CIA's own Inspector General would
later partially vindicate.
And yet, his
1996 memoir was a truly self-satisfied document, celebrating the Cold War
"victory" -- his victory -- over an enemy that "was an
evil empire." The Agency emerged from his account as an earnest college
faculty of slightly inconsistent quality, whose covert actions were invariably,
bloodlessly "necessary." Asked once why the CIA had supported the
most fanatically atavistic mujahideen groups in
answered simply, and with a kind of devastating, pass-the-buck candor, that the
anti-Soviet intervention had been "delegated to the Pakistanis and it was
their decision." Asked about a "disgraceful record of interference in
other countries," he replied, in the same fashion, that it had all been
done "on the instructions of the president."
His savings and
retirement accounts added up to no more than $165,000 when he left government.
By the time he was named secretary of defense by a desperate, cornered
president in 2006, he was a millionaire from his $525,000 salary as President
of Texas A&M as well as directorships that ranged from Boston's formidable
Fidelity Investments to drilling, pharmaceutical, and military-industrial
giants. At Texas A&M, his four-year presidency would be a stalking horse
for powerful alumni eager to take the provincial school "national."
He cut staff, but hired a big-time football coach and athletic director,
repudiated affirmative action while claiming more minority enrollment on the
overwhelmingly white campus.
Now, seven
months into his tenure at the Pentagon, he has brought to bear his long-honed
bureaucratic infighting skills, at every opportunity replacing senior
commanders associated with Don Rumsfeld with his own choices from the military
bureaucracy. He's brought with him as well his own rhetoric and style which, in
any other
would be unexceptional, but in the angry wake of Rumsfeld, seems somehow
encouragingly fresh and benevolent.
Some who know
the record, or at least part of it, see him now as Gates Unbound -- the
bureaucrat, if not sycophant, as his own man at last. He is looked to longingly
by an unnerved, older-line
establishment as the man who might bring a wayward regime back to its senses.
Never mind genuine sensibility about the world of the twenty-first century;
what's at stake now is just surviving the Bush era.
The challenges
facing him, of course, involve far more than simply damage control (as if he
were back at Texas A & M dealing, as he did, with the unfortunate aftermath
of a traditional bonfire that got out of hand and killed some of the faithful).
After Rumsfeld, but also after nearly half-a-century of high-tech decadence,
America's cannibalized military may well be at its lowest point ever; while, in
Gabriel Kolko's simple, if memorable, observation, the United States now faces
the "most dangerous period in mankind's entire history."
It is not a
predicament that can be escaped simply by staving off some further bonfire --
like a mad attack on Iranian nuclear facilities; nor will Gates, even if
successful, be capable of taking more than the initial steps in a rescue in the
18 months that are likely (though hardly destined) to be the extent of his
Pentagon rule. But in none of it -- neither the apparently encouraging contrast
to Rumsfeld, nor the simple avoidance of disaster in
story, give us grounds for more than the frailest of hopes. Yet, it is a mark
of our time, an era he helped make, that, for the moment, Bob Gates, of all
people, may be the last and best hope we have.
Roger Morris,
who served in the State Department and on the Senior Staff of the
National Security Council under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, and after
resigning over the invasion of Cambodia, as an advisor in the U.S.
Senate and a director of policy studies at the Carnegie Endowment,
writes this history for the Green Institute from intimate firsthand
knowledge as well as extensive research. A Senior Fellow of the Green Institute and GP360 project which originally published The Undertaker's Tally. Morris
is an award-winning historian, investigative journalist and author of
acclaimed books on Nixon, Kissinger, Haig, and the
a history of US covert interventions and policy in the Middle East and
South Asia over the past half-century, will be published in 2007 by
Knopf. He joined the Green Institute as Senior Fellow in 2004.
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