The Mysterious Robert Gates

Special Report: Defense Secretary Robert Gates is
leaving the Pentagon as a Washington “wise man,”
admired by both Republicans and Democrats for his
supposed judgment and integrity. But does he deserve
that reputation — or is he just an especially clever
manipulator of the political process? Robert Parry
examines Gates’s real record.

By Robert Parry

May 31, 2011

Consortiumnews.com

http://consortiumnews.com/2011/05/31/the-mysterious-robert-gates/

[Moderator's Note, being curious about all the
favorable press Gates is getting in the popular media,
I thought this article would be of interest.]

As Robert Gates ends his four-plus years as Defense
Secretary, he has accomplished one of Washington’s more
notable image makeovers, shedding an earlier reputation
as a sneaky ideological chameleon for new skin as a
respected “wise man” hailed by Republicans, Democrats
and the press.

But the transformation may underscore how great a
careerist Gates is rather than mark any actual
improvement in his judgment. In his early days, he was
viewed as a climber who would change colors to match
the political hues of those above him; now, it seems
his decades of accommodating the powerful have earned
him their appreciation and acclaim.

In that sense, Gates can be compared to Colin Powell.
Though taking different routes, both achieved a
reputation for integrity and wisdom that didn’t match
their actual records, which – if examined carefully –
showed them getting a lot wrong but having positioned
themselves safely inside a consensus of powerful
allies. So, they rose regardless of their many
screw-ups.

As Secretary of State in 2003, Powell did suffer what
he called a “blot” on his reputation when he gave a
thoroughly dishonest speech to the United Nations
justifying war with Iraq over non-existent weapons of
mass destruction.

But the fact that Powell’s WMD falsehoods fit with the
conventional wisdom of Official Washington spared his
status any serious consequences; he remains the go-to
guy when the Super Bowl honors America. [For more on
Powell’s real history, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Behind
Colin Powell’s Legend.”]

Similarly, Gates – both in his earlier incarnation as
an ambitious national security bureaucrat and in his
return to the national stage in 2006 as Defense
Secretary – adopted positions favored by key elements
of the power elite.

In his career’s first act in the 1980s, Gates
ingratiated himself to Cold War hardliners, including
the emerging neoconservatives, by distorting CIA
analyses to exaggerate the Soviet menace (and thus
justify higher military spending). Ultimately, Gates’s
politicized CIA was so busy hyping Moscow’s strength
that it missed the Soviet collapse.

After his Washington career’s second act began in 2006,
Gates pleased much of the same constituency by
supporting the troop “surges” in Iraq and Afghanistan
(even as those bloody conflicts continue their slide
toward slow-motion defeats for the United States). At
the cost of a couple of thousand more dead U.S.
soldiers, Gates staved off obvious failures until his
patron, George W. Bush, and the neocons had left the
scene.

Even Gates’s much-ballyhooed Pentagon budget trimming –
while winning rave reviews from the news media – was
more P.R. than reality.

As noted by military affairs expert Lawrence J. Korb,
Gates’s high-profile savings were mostly weapons
projects, like the F-22, that were already slated for
the scrap heap. Plus, Gates has rejected any
substantial cuts in future military spending despite
having personally overseen a rise in the baseline
Pentagon budget from $450 billion in 2006 to $550
billion now.

In other words, Gates continues to carry the neocons’
water, demanding high levels of military spending even
as important domestic programs, from energy technology
to health care, face sharp cuts. And the neocons
continue to reward the 67-year-old Defense Secretary
with flattering press clippings.

Axing an Adversary

Despite his impending Pentagon departure in late June,
Gates also showed that he can still put to use his
bloated reputation and his genuine bureaucratic skills
to shape the national security debate.

His anger over Marine Gen. James Cartwright’s
willingness to give President Barack Obama’s
alternative options to the Afghan “surge” in 2009 is
reported to have destroyed Cartwright’s prospects of
getting named chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Washington Post’s Craig Whitlock reported on Sunday
that Cartwright’s expected elevation from JCS deputy
chairman to JCS chairman was nixed, in part, by Gates
who “had long mistrusted Cartwright because of his
independent relationship with the president and for
opposing [Gates’s] plan to expand the war in
Afghanistan.”

Surrendering to Gates’s animosity toward Cartwright –
and the expectation that Gates’s resistance would spark
a nasty confirmation fight against Cartwright in the
Senate – Obama instead scrambled to find another
candidate and, on Monday, named Army Chief of Staff
Martin Dempsey to the job.

Obama took the opportunity of Dempsey’s appointment to
again praise Gates as “our outstanding Secretary of
Defense.” But he must have been wondering about his
decision to keep Gates on in 2009, which always
represented a kind of deal with the devil.

By retaining Gates at the Pentagon, Obama benefited
from an image of bipartisanship on national security
and from Gates’s credibility with Washington insiders.
But the President had to acquiesce to substantial
continuity with Bush’s policies and he found himself
boxed in on the Afghan “surge.”

The sacrifice of Cartwright – the one senior military
commander who complied with Obama’s request for other
options on Afghanistan – was just the latest price that
Obama paid in his Faustian bargain of keeping Secretary
Gates and his establishment credentials.

That arrangement of convenience also required the
avoidance of any historical investigations which might
have unearthed Republican skeletons with bony fingers
pointing in Gates’s direction. Those mysteries
surrounding Gates have dated back to his act one, his
meteoric rise at the start of the Reagan
administration.

However, since 2006, and the start of Gates’s second
act as a Washington bigwig, the Defense Secretary has
been spared by Washington’s amnesia regarding past
scandals of “the favored ones” as well as from fawning
press coverage, which usually follows esteemed members
of “the club” – like him.

No Dissembling

The national news media has been so in the tank for
Gates that it not only ignored the lies about what he
did for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in his
career’s first act but his more recent falsehoods, too.

As an example of this fawning press coverage during act
two, Washington Post columnist David Broder lauded
Gates on Dec. 4, 2009, for his forthrightness. Broder ,
who was known as “the dean of the Washington press
corps,” wrote that regarding Gates’s handling of the
Afghan War, the Defense Secretary is “incapable of
dissembling.”

However, the real story of the Afghan escalation was
that Gates had trapped Obama into a counter-insurgency
“surge” of 30,000 more troops by limiting the options,
in effect, giving the President only that one option.

After Obama consented to the extra troops but sought to
restrict the mission to blocking the Taliban from
restoring Afghanistan as a safe haven for al-Qaeda
terrorists, Gates undercut the President again by
briefing reporters during a flight to Afghanistan that
“we are in this thing to win” and presenting the war as
essentially open-ended.

Just days after Broder’s “incapable of dissembling”
praise, Gates offered these credulous reporters a
history lesson on Afghanistan that Gates knew to be
false. He declared “that we are not going to repeat the
situation in 1989 – when the United States supposedly
abandoned Afghanistan once the Soviet Union had
withdrawn its last military units on Feb. 15, 1989.

While that story of the 1989 abandonment of Afghanistan
has become a powerful conventional wisdom in Washington
– popularized by the movie “Charlie Wilson’s War” – it
is substantially untrue, and Gates, as a former top CIA
official, knew it to be a myth.

What actually happened in 1989 was that President
George H.W. Bush rebuffed overtures from Soviet leader
Mikhail Gorbachev for a negotiated settlement of the
war that envisioned a coalition government involving
Soviet-backed President Najibullah and the CIA-backed
mujahedeen warlords.

Instead of taking up Gorbachev’s plan, Bush escalated
the purpose of the Afghan conflict, revising the
intelligence finding that had justified the U.S. covert
operation. Instead of Ronald Reagan’s goal of helping
the Afghans drive out the Soviet army, Bush approved a
more elastic rationale, seeking Afghan
self-determination.

So, instead of the abrupt aid cut-off that Gates
implied in his in-flight briefing, U.S. covert support
for the Afghan mujahedeen continued for nearly three
years, until December 1991. And Gates was at the center
of those decisions.

Indeed, a key reason for Bush rebuffing Gorbachev was
that Gates’s CIA analytical division – which he had
packed with Cold War hardliners – was projecting a
rapid collapse of Najibullah’s government after a
Soviet withdrawal. That would translate into a complete
humiliation of the Soviets and a total triumph for the
United States and the CIA.

String Him Up

In 1989, I was a correspondent for Newsweek magazine
covering intelligence issues. After the Soviets left
Afghanistan, I asked CIA officials why they were
continuing the bloodshed, instead of looking for ways
of preventing further fragmentation of the country.

Why not, I asked, bring the war to an end with some
kind of national unity government? Hadn’t the U.S.
national interest of driving out the Soviets been
achieved?

One of the CIA hardliners responded to my question with
disgust. “We want to see Najibullah strung up by a
light pole,” he snapped.

What I thought I was hearing was CIA bravado, but the
comment actually reflected an internal U.S. government
debate. Since the last year of the Reagan
administration in 1988, the CIA had been predicting a
quick end to the Najibullah government – if and when
the Soviet army left.

However, the State Department instead foresaw a
drawn-out struggle. Deputy Secretary of State John
Whitehead and the department’s intelligence chief
Morton Abramowitz challenged the CIA’s assumptions and
warned that Najibullah’s army might hold on longer than
the CIA expected.

But Deputy CIA Director Gates pushed the CIA analysis
of a rapid Najibullah collapse and prevailed in the
policy debates. Gates described this internal battle in
his 1996 memoir, From the Shadows, recalling how he
briefed Secretary of State George Shultz and his senior
aides about the CIA’s prediction prior to Shultz flying
to Moscow in February 1988.

“I told them that most [CIA] analysts did not believe
Najibullah’s government could last without active
Soviet military support,” wrote Gates, who also was
predicting privately that the Soviets would not depart
Afghanistan despite Gorbachev’s assurances that they
would.

After the Soviets did withdraw in early 1989, some U.S.
officials felt Washington’s geostrategic aims had been
achieved and a move toward peace was in order. There
also was concern about the Afghan mujahedeen,
especially their tendencies toward brutality, heroin
trafficking and fundamentalist religious policies.

However, the new administration of George H.W. Bush –
with Gates having moved from the CIA to the White House
as deputy national security adviser – chose to continue
U.S. covert support for the mujahedeen, funneled
primarily through Pakistan’s Inter-Services
Intelligence agency, the ISI.

Instead of a fast collapse, however, Najibullah’s
regime used its Soviet weapons and advisers to beat
back a mujahedeen offensive in 1990. Najibullah hung
on. The war, the violence and the disorder continued.

Gates finally recognized that his CIA rapid-collapse
analysis was wrong. In his memoir, he wrote: “As it
turned out, Whitehead and Abramowitz were right” in
their warning that Najibullah’s regime might not
collapse so quickly.

But another comment in his memoir bears on Gates’s
statement to reporters in December 2009 reiterating the
myth about the United States having immediately
abandoned the Afghan cause once the Soviets left in
February 1989. By his own hand, Gates wrote that he
understood the truth, that the U.S. government hadn’t
departed Afghanistan precipitously.

“Najibullah would remain in power for another three
years [after the Soviet pull-out], as the United States
and the USSR continued to aid their respective sides,”
Gates wrote. “On Dec. 11, 1991, both Moscow and
Washington cut off all assistance, and Najibullah’s
government fell four months later. He had outlasted
both Gorbachev and the Soviet Union itself.”

Misleading the Press

So, in telling reporters in 2009 that the United States
had abandoned the Afghan cause in 1989, Gates was at
best dissembling, playing to a popular myth that he
knew to be false but that supported his case that the
Obama administration must escalate to “win” the Afghan
War.

Besides shedding light on his integrity, Gates’s
deceptive comments also showed that he had failed to
absorb the real lesson of 1989 – that a misguided
determination for total victory in Afghanistan only
makes matters worse and harms U.S. national security.

Instead of accepting Gorbachev’s olive branch in 1989
and seeking a negotiated peace among Afghanistan’s
warring parties, President George H.W. Bush embraced
Gates’s hard-line strategy and adopted a triumphalist
approach to the complicated Afghan civil war.

By the time it became apparent to Bush that the
Gates-CIA scenario of a quick mujahedeen victory was an
illusion, Gorbachev was no longer in a position to
broker an Afghan peace deal. He was fighting for his
own political survival against hard-line communists in
Moscow. [Gates and his politicized CIA analytical
division also missed the coming collapse of the Soviet
Union.]

It was not until late 1991 after Gorbachev’s government
had disappeared – along with the Soviet Union – that
Russia’s new president, Boris Yelsin, and the United
States finally stepped back from the Afghan quagmire.

Najibullah’s belated fall in 1992 brought an end to his
communist regime, but it didn’t stop the war. The
capital of Kabul came under the control of a relatively
moderate rebel force led by Ahmad Shah Massoud, an
Islamist but not a fanatic. But Massoud, a Tajik, was
not favored by Pakistan’s ISI that backed more extreme
Pashtun elements of the mujahedeen.

The various Afghan warlords battled for another four
years as the ISI readied its own army of Islamic
extremists drawn from Pashtun refugee camps inside
Pakistan. With the ISI’s backing, this group, known as
the Taliban, entered Afghanistan with the promise of
restoring order.

The Taliban seized the capital of Kabul in September
1996, driving Massoud into a northward retreat. The
ousted communist leader Najibullah, who had stayed in
Kabul, sought shelter in the United Nations compound,
but was captured.

The Taliban tortured, castrated and killed him, his
mutilated body hung from a light pole, just as CIA
hardliners had envisioned seven years earlier.

The triumphant Taliban imposed harsh Islamic law on
Afghanistan. Their rule was especially devastating to
women who had made gains toward equal rights under the
communists, but were forced by the Taliban to live
under highly restrictive rules, to cover themselves
when in public, and to forgo schooling.

The Taliban also granted refuge to Saudi exile Osama
bin Laden, who had fought with the Afghan mujahedeen
against the Soviets in the 1980s. Bin Laden then used
Afghanistan as the base of operations for his terrorist
organization, al-Qaeda, setting the stage for the next
Afghan War in 2001.

So, in summary, Robert Gates, today’s newly minted
“wise man,” had been wrong on nearly every major point
about Afghanistan (and the Soviet Union), but he
sidestepped the fallout of his miscalculations,
remaining a favorite of President George H.W. Bush who
rewarded him with his dream job in 1991, the post of
CIA director.

A Bush Family Favorite

After losing the CIA position when President Bill
Clinton took over in 1993, Gates retreated to
Washington State (to work on his memoir) and then moved
to Texas (to serve as Texas A&M president). Meanwhile,
his past service to the Bush family kept him in good
stead with the national security establishment.

Yet, how Gates originally earned his status as a Bush
family favorite – how he managed to clamber so quickly
up the ladder of Washington power – has remained a
mystery, concealed by the fog that has enveloped the
dubious origins and hazy corners of the Iran-Contra
scandal.

The key question has always been: Did Gates do some
extraordinary favors for the senior Bush and the Reagan
administration that guaranteed his rise?

Gates has long faced accusations of handling some
sensitive and controversial operations of the
Reagan-Bush-41 era, from collaborating secretly with
Islamic extremists in Iran to arming Saddam Hussein’s
dictatorship in Iraq to politicizing U.S. intelligence
analysis.

Gates’s honesty, too, has raised concerns among his CIA
colleagues, members of Congress and federal
investigators who looked into the Iran-Contra scandal.

Although independent counsel Lawrence Walsh chose not
to indict Gates over Iran-Contra, Walsh’s final report
didn’t endorse Gates’s credibility either. After
recounting discrepancies between Gates’s Iran-Contra
recollections and those of other CIA officials, Walsh
wrote:

“The statements of Gates often seemed scripted and less
than candid. Nevertheless, given the complex nature of
the activities and Gates’s apparent lack of direct
participation, a jury could find the evidence left a
reasonable doubt that Gates either obstructed official
inquiries or that his two demonstrably incorrect
statements were deliberate lies.”

For his part, Gates denied any wrongdoing in the
Iran-Contra arms-for-hostage deal and expressed only
one significant regret – that he acquiesced to the
decision to withhold from Congress the Jan. 17, 1986,
presidential intelligence “finding” that gave some
legal cover to the Iran arms shipments.

Beyond that one admission Gates submitted what reads
like carefully tailored denials of his involvement in
the scandal.

For instance, in November 1987, as the Reagan
administration was scrambling to contain the
Iran-Contra scandal, then-Deputy CIA Director Gates
denied that the spy agency had soft-pedaled
intelligence about Iran’s support for terrorism to
clear the way for secret U.S. arms shipments to the
Islamic regime.

“Only one or two analysts believed Iranian support for
terrorism was waning,” Gates wrote in articles that
appeared in the Washington Post and Foreign Affairs
magazine. “And no CIA publication asserted these
things.”

However, a month earlier, an internal CIA review had
found three reports from Nov. 22, 1985, to May 15,
1986, claiming that Iranian-sponsored terrorism had
declined, according to a sworn statement from veteran
CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who prepared the review for
senior officials in the Directorate of Intelligence
[DI].

“My findings uncovered an unexplained discontinuity,”
McGovern’s affidavit said. “To wit on 22 November 1985,
in an abrupt departure from the longstanding analytical
line on Iranian support for terrorism, DI publications
began to assert that Iranian-sponsored terrorism had
‘dropped off substantially’ in 1985. I recall being
particularly struck by the fact that no evidence was
adduced to support that important judgment.

“This new line was repeated in at least two additional
DI publications, the last of which appeared on 15 May
1986. Again, no supporting evidence was cited. After
May 1986, the analytical line changed, just as
abruptly, back to the line that had characterized DI
reporting on this subject up to November 1985 (with no
mention of any substantial drop or other reduction in
Iranian support for terrorist activity).”

The timing of CIA’s dubious analysis in 1985 about a
decline in Iranian-backed terrorism is significant
because the Reagan administration was then in the midst
of its secret Israeli-brokered arms shipments of U.S.
weapons to Iran.

The shipments not only were politically sensitive, but
also violated federal export laws – in part because
Iran was officially designated a terrorist state. So,
playing down Iran’s hand in terrorism worked for the
White House whether supported by the facts or not.

At that time, Gates was in charge of the DI, putting
him in a key bureaucratic position. Even earlier, in
spring 1985, Gates had overseen the production of a
controversial National Intelligence Estimate that had
warned of Soviet inroads in Iran and conjured up
supposed moderates in the Iranian government.

That Gates, two years later, would make exculpatory
claims about the CIA’s reporting – assertions
contradicted by an internal DI report – suggests that
he remained more interested in protecting the Reagan
administration’s flanks than being straight with the
American public.

[McGovern’s report to senior DI management about the
Iran-terrorism issue was dated Oct. 30, 1987; his
affidavit was signed Oct. 5, 1991, during Gates’s
confirmation to be CIA director, but McGovern’s sworn
statement was not made public at that time.]

Little Knowledge

In 1991, when facing confirmation hearings to be CIA
director, Gates denied knowing much about the
Iran-Contra activities though they involved officials
immediately above and below him. Gates said:

“As Deputy Director for Intelligence, I was not
informed of the full scope of the Iran initiative until
late January/early February 1986; I had no role in the
November 1985 shipment of arms; I played no part in
preparing any of the Findings; I had little knowledge
of CIA’s operational role.”

Note the weasel words: “not informed of the full scope”
and “little knowledge of CIA’s operational role..”

Left out of the denial was what exactly did Gates know
about the Iran initiative prior to January 1986,
particularly about several 1985 shipments that violated
the Arms Export Control Act.

Nor did he make clear at his Senate confirmation
hearings in 1991 whether he exerted any influence over
the production of Iran-related intelligence reports,
including the ones that downplayed Iran’s support for
terrorism and another that exaggerated Soviet influence
in Iran.

In a Nov. 21, 2006, article for the Los Angeles Times,
former CIA analyst Jennifer Glaudemans charged that a
special National Intelligence Estimate reversed the
professional judgment of CIA Soviet specialists who saw
little chance of Moscow making inroads with Tehran.

“When we received the draft NIE, we were shocked to
find that our contribution on Soviet relations with
Iran had been completely reversed,” Glaudemans wrote.
“Rather than stating that the prospects for improved
Soviet-Iranian relations were negligible, the document
indicated that Moscow assessed those prospects as quite
good.

“What’s more, the national intelligence officer
responsible for coordinating the estimate had already
sent a personal memo to the White House stating that
the race between the U.S. and USSR ‘for Tehran is on,
and whoever gets there first wins all.’

“No one in my office believed this Cold War hyperbole.
There was simply no evidence to support the notion that
Moscow was optimistic about its prospects for improved
relations with Iran. …

“We protested the conclusions of the NIE, citing
evidence such as the Iranian government’s repression of
the communist Tudeh Party, the expulsion of all Soviet
economic advisors … and a continuing public rhetoric
that chastised the ‘godless’ communist regime as the
‘Second Satan’ after the United States.

“Despite overwhelming evidence, our analysis was
suppressed. At a coordinating meeting, we were told
that Gates wanted the language to stay in as it was,
presumably to help justify ‘improving’ our strained
relations with Tehran through the Iran-Contra weapons
sales.” [LAT, Nov. 21, 2006]

Entering the Scandal

Bolstered by this NIE, Ronald Reagan’s national
security adviser Robert McFarlane began circulating a
draft presidential order in June 1985 proposing an
overture to Iran.

After reading the draft, Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger scribbled in the margins, “this is almost
too absurd to comment on.” The plan also contradicted
President Reagan’s public policy to “never make
concessions to terrorists.”

Still, in July 1985, Weinberger, McFarlane and
Weinberger’s military assistant, Gen. Colin Powell, met
to discuss details for doing just that. Iran wanted 100
anti-tank TOW missiles that would be delivered through
Israel, according to Weinberger’s notes.

Reagan gave his approval, but the White House wanted to
keep the operation a closely held secret. The shipments
were to be handled with “maximum compartmentalization,”
the notes said. On Aug. 20, 1985, the Israelis
delivered the first 96 missiles to Iran.

It was a pivotal moment. With that missile shipment,
the Reagan administration stepped over a legal line.
The transfer violated the Arms Export Control Act’s
requirement for congressional notification when U.S.
weapons are trans-shipped and a prohibition on shipping
arms to nations, like Iran, that had been designated a
terrorist state.

On Sept. 14, 1985, Israel delivered a second shipment,
408 more missiles to Iran. The next day, one hostage,
the Rev. Benjamin Weir, was released in Beirut. But
other Americans were snatched in Lebanon, undermining a
key rationale for the arms deals.

Word of the Iranian arms shipments also was spreading
through the U.S. intelligence community. Top-secret
intelligence intercepts in September and October 1985
revealed Iranians discussing the U.S. arms delivery.

The risk of U.S. exposure grew worse in November 1985
when a shipment of 80 HAWK anti-aircraft missiles ran
into trouble while trying to transit through Portugal
en route from Tel Aviv to Tehran. In a panic, White
House aide Oliver North pulled in senior CIA officials
and a CIA-owned airline to fly the missiles to Tehran
on Nov. 24, 1985.

But one consequence of drawing the CIA directly into
the operation was a demand from the CIA’s legal
advisers that a presidential “finding” be signed and
congressional oversight committees be notified. Gates
has denied any involvement in those 1985 shipments.

Yet, with the White House desperately looking for ways
out of its worsening dilemma, the CIA’s Directorate of
Intelligence – with Robert Gates at the helm – suddenly
reported a substantial decline in Iran’s support for
terrorism, according to McGovern’s affidavit.

By citing this alleged Iranian moderation, the CIA
created some policy space for Reagan finally to
formalize the arms shipments with an intelligence
“finding,” signed on Jan. 17, 1986. But the
authorization – and the Iran arms deals – were still
kept hidden from Congress, the one Iran-Contra decision
that Gates said he regretted.

When the Iran-Contra scandal finally broke into the
open in November 1986, most participants in the
operation tried to duck the consequences, especially
for the 1985 shipments that violated the Arms Export
Control Act, what Secretary Weinberger once warned
President Reagan might constitute an impeachable
offense.

For second-tier officials, such as Gates, admitting
knowledge of or involvement in the 1985 shipments would
amount to career suicide. So, Gates and most other
administration operatives insisted they knew or
recalled little or nothing.

Undercutting Gates’s claims of ignorance and innocence,
however, was the fact that his underlings in the DI had
been pushing unsupported notions about why shipping
arms to Iran made sense, according to Glaudemans and
McGovern.

Mysterious Climb

There were other complaints from CIA veterans who had
observed Gates’s rapid climb up the agency’s career
ladder.

Before Gates’s ascent in the 1980s, the CIA’s
analytical division has a proud tradition of
objectivity and scholarship regarding the agency’s
intelligence product. However, during the Reagan
administration with Gates playing a key role, that
ethos collapsed.

At Gates’s confirmation hearings in 1991, former CIA
analysts, including renowned Kremlinologist Melvin
Goodman, took the extraordinary step of coming out of
the shadows to accuse Gates of politicizing the
intelligence while he was chief of the analytical
division and then deputy director.

These former intelligence officers said the ambitious
Gates pressured the CIA’s analytical division to
exaggerate the Soviet menace to fit the ideological
perspective of the Reagan administration. Analysts who
took a more nuanced view of Soviet power and Moscow’s
behavior in the world faced pressure and career
reprisals.

In 1981, Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl of the CIA’s Soviet
office was the unfortunate analyst who was handed the
assignment to prepare an analysis on the Soviet Union’s
alleged support and direction of international
terrorism.

Contrary to the desired White House take on
Soviet-backed terrorism, Ekedahl said the consensus of
the intelligence community was that the Soviets
discouraged acts of terrorism by groups getting support
from Moscow for practical, not moral, reasons.

“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated,
publicly and privately, that they considered
international terrorist activities counterproductive
and advised groups they supported not to use such
tactics,” Ekedahl said. “We had hard evidence to
support this conclusion.”

But Gates took the analysts to task, accusing them of
trying to “stick our finger in the policy maker’s eye,”
Ekedahl testified

Ekedahl said Gates, dissatisfied with the terrorism
assessment, joined in rewriting the draft “to suggest
greater Soviet support for terrorism and the text was
altered by pulling up from the annex reports that
overstated Soviet involvement.”

In his memoir, From the Shadows, Gates denied
politicizing the CIA’s intelligence product, though
acknowledging that he was aware of CIA Director William
Casey’s hostile reaction to the analysts’ disagreement
with right-wing theories about Soviet-directed
terrorism.

Soon, the hammer fell on the analysts who had prepared
the Soviet-terrorism report. Ekedahl said many analysts
were “replaced by people new to the subject who
insisted on language emphasizing Soviet control of
international terrorist activities.”

A donnybrook ensued inside the U.S. intelligence
community. Some senior officials responsible for
analysis pushed back against the Casey-Gates dictates,
warning that acts of politicization would undermine the
integrity of the process and risk policy disasters in
the future.

Working with Gates, Casey also undertook a series of
institutional changes that gave him fuller control of
the analytical process. Casey required that drafts
needed clearance from his office before they could go
out to other intelligence agencies. Casey appointed
Gates to be director of the DI and consolidated Gates’s
control over analysis by also making him chairman of
the National Intelligence Council, another key
analytical body.

“Casey and Gates used various management tactics to get
the line of intelligence they desired and to suppress
unwanted intelligence,” Ekedahl said.

With Gates using top-down management techniques, CIA
analysts sensitive to their career paths intuitively
grasped that they could rarely go wrong by backing the
“company line” and presenting the worst-case scenario
about Soviet capabilities and intentions, Ekedahl and
other CIA analysts said.

A Purge

Largely outside public view, the CIA’s proud Soviet
analytical office underwent a purge of its most senior
people. “Nearly every senior analyst on Soviet foreign
policy eventually left the Office of Soviet Analysis,”
Goodman said.

Gates also made clear he intended to shake up the DI’s
culture, demanding greater responsiveness to the needs
of the White House and other policymakers.

In a speech to the DI’s analysts and managers on Jan.
7, 1982, Gates berated the division for producing
shoddy analysis that administration officials didn’t
find helpful.

Gates unveiled an 11-point management plan to whip the
DI into shape. His plan included rotating division
chiefs through one-year stints in policy agencies and
requiring CIA analysts to “refresh their substantive
knowledge and broaden their perspective” by taking
courses at Washington-area think tanks and
universities.

Gates declared that a new Production Evaluation Staff
would aggressively review their analytical products and
serve as his “junkyard dog.”

Gates’s message was that the DI, which had long
operated as an “ivory tower” for academically oriented
analysts committed to objectivity, would take on more
of a corporate culture with a product designed to fit
the needs of those up the ladder both inside and
outside the CIA.

“It was a kind of chilling speech,” recalled Peter
Dickson, an analyst who concentrated on proliferation
issues. “One of the things he wanted to do, he was
going to shake up the DI. He was going to read every
paper that came out. What that did was that everybody
between the analyst and him had to get involved in the
paper to a greater extent because their careers were
going to be at stake.”

A chief Casey-Gates tactic for exerting tighter control
over the analysis was to express concern about “the
editorial process,” Dickson said.

“You can jerk people around in the editorial process
and hide behind your editorial mandate to intimidate
people,” Dickson said.

Gates soon was packing the analytical division with his
allies, a group of managers who became known as the
“Gates clones.” Some of those who rose with Gates were
David Cohen, David Carey, George Kolt, Jim Lynch,
Winston Wiley, John Gannon and John McLaughlin.

Pakistani Proliferation

Though Dickson’s area of expertise – nuclear
proliferation – was on the fringes of the Reagan
administration’s primary concerns, it ended up getting
him into trouble anyway. In 1983, he clashed with his
superiors over his conclusion that the Soviet Union was
more committed to controlling proliferation of nuclear
weapons than the administration wanted to hear.

When Dickson stood by his evidence, he soon found
himself facing accusations about his fitness and other
pressures that eventually caused him to leave the CIA.

Dickson also was among the analysts who raised alarms
about Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons,
another sore point because the Reagan administration
wanted Pakistan’s assistance in funneling weapons to
Islamic fundamentalists fighting the Soviets in
Afghanistan.

One of the effects from the exaggerated intelligence
about the Soviet menace was to make other potential
risks – such as allowing development of a nuclear bomb
in the Islamic world or training Islamic
fundamentalists in techniques of sabotage – pale in
comparison.

While worst-case scenarios were in order for the Soviet
Union and its clients, best-case scenarios were the
order of the day for Reagan’s allies, including Osama
bin Laden and other Arab extremists rushing to
Afghanistan to wage a holy war against European
invaders, in this case, the Russians.

As for the Pakistani drive to get a nuclear bomb, the
Reagan administration turned to word games to avoid
triggering anti-proliferation penalties that otherwise
would be imposed on Pakistan.

“There was a distinction made to say that the
possession of the device is not the same as developing
it,” Dickson told me. “They got into the argument that
they don’t quite possess it yet because they haven’t
turned the last screw into the warhead.”

Finally, the intelligence on the Pakistan Bomb grew too
strong to continue denying the reality. But the delay
in confronting Pakistan ultimately allowed the Muslim
government in Islamabad to produce nuclear weapons.
Pakistani scientists also shared their know-how with
“rogue” states, such as North Korea and Libya.

“The politicization that took place during the
Casey-Gates era is directly responsible for the CIA’s
loss of its ethical compass and the erosion of its
credibility,” Goodman told the Senate Intelligence
Committee in 1991.

“The fact that the CIA missed the most important
historical development in its history – the collapse of
the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union itself – is due
in large measure to the culture and process that Gates
established in his directorate.”

Winning for Bob

Though Gates had been implicated in some of the worst
judgments of the Reagan years, President George H.W.
Bush was determined to put Gates in as head of the CIA
in 1991.

Bush lined up solid Republican backing for Gates on the
Senate Intelligence Committee. But the key to Gates’s
confirmation came from the quiet support of
accommodating Democrats – particularly Sen. David Boren
of Oklahoma, the Senate Intelligence Committee
chairman, and his ambitious chief of staff, George
Tenet.

In his memoir, Gates credited his friend, Boren, for
clearing away any obstacles. “David took it as a
personal challenge to get me confirmed,” Gates wrote.

With the help of Boren and Tenet, allegations against
Gates were downplayed, denounced or ignored. Gates
skated past the various controversies as leading
Democrats agreed to put bipartisanship ahead of
oversight.

The powers-that-be closed ranks around Gates and made
sure his nomination was pushed through, although the
64-31 confirmation vote indicated an unusually high
level of opposition to a CIA director.

A similar pattern occurred in late 2006 when President
George W. Bush picked Gates to replace the
controversial Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary. The
Democrats in the Senate had no stomach for even a
reprise of the unanswered or partially answered
questions about Gates. They simply fast-tracked his
confirmation without a single question on his
controversial history.

At the time, there was a powerful conventional wisdom
in Washington that Gates as Defense Secretary would
represent the cooler heads of Bush Senior’s Republican
establishment and restrain the impetuous Bush Junior on
the Iraq War, which was going from bad to worse.
However, almost everyone read the tea leaves wrong.

Instead of getting Bush to wind down the war, Gates was
privately onboard for an escalation. It was Rumsfeld
and much of the Pentagon high command who were the
relative doves on Iraq, trying to keep the U.S.
military footprint as small as possible and pressing
for a withdrawal as quickly as practical.

But Bush (and many of his neoconservative advisers)
understood that they were facing an impending defeat in
Iraq, which had to be at least delayed if the failure
were not to be hung around their necks. While a “surge”
of American troops might not change the eventual
outcome, it would delay any clear-cut defeat until they
were gone, albeit at the cost of many more American and
Iraqi lives.

Eager to return to the global spotlight, Gates agreed
to go along with Bush’s escalation plan, but he didn’t
share that fact with the Senate Armed Services
Committee, which eagerly approved his nomination as
Rumsfeld’s replacement.

The ugly old accusations about Gates were ignored, even
highly relevant ones such as how his politicization of
the CIA’s analytical division in the 1980s contributed
to the false intelligence regarding Iraq’s WMD in
2002-03.

In December 2006, Gates won Senate confirmation by a
resounding 95-2 margin. Then, once in office, he
collaborated with President Bush in cashiering the
commanders who weren’t in line for the “surge” and
replacing them with the likes of Gen. David Petaeus, a
neocon favorite, who was.

Though the Iraq “surge” ended up costing the lives of
about 1,000 U.S. soldiers – and didn’t prevent the
Iraqi government from demanding a complete U.S.
military withdrawal by the end of 2011 – the decline in
Iraq’s ghastly violence was hailed by the Washington
press corps as “victory at last.”

The neocons and their many media allies made a hero out
of Petraeus. Gates rode the “successful surge” wave,
too.

Little media attention was devoted to the fact that the
Iraq War strategic disaster remained – the deaths of
more than 4,400 U.S. soldiers, a price tag sure to
exceed $1 trillion, and the loss of American prestige
around the world.

Beyond those costs, there were other unpleasant
results: expanded Iranian influence in the Persian
Gulf, an Iraqi political process that makes a mockery
out of democratic principles, and the deep-seated
hatred that many Iraqis feel toward the United States,
reflected in their current demand that the U.S.
military withdrawal be total.

At most, the United States can hope for a last-minute
deal that allows a small number of U.S. trainers to be
left behind to help Iraqis handle their military
hardware. But even that seems doubtful given the
political divisions in Baghdad – and the strong
opposition from many Iraqis.

Though the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq at year’s end will
mark a major American strategic setback – comparable to
the ignominious Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989
– Gates and Petraeus still benefitted from the neocons’
ability to promote the “successful surge” myth and the
Washington press corps buying it.

Keeping Gates

After Obama won the presidency in November 2008, some
of his clever advisers recommended that he finesse his
inexperience on national security affairs by retaining
most of Bush’s high command, including Gates at
Defense. Obama agreed.

Obama did insist on sticking to the timeline for
winding down the Iraq War, but he signaled that he
would escalate in Afghanistan while setting as the
CIA’s top goal the killing or capturing of al-Qaeda
leader Osama bin Laden, who was believed hiding out in
Pakistan.

Vice President Joe Biden pushed for only a modest
increase in troop levels in Afghanistan, enough to
support a counter-terrorism strategy against al-Qaeda,
but Gates and Petraeus wanted another “surge” that
would enable the NATO forces to launch major
counter-insurgency operations against the Taliban.

The political scheme of Gates and Petraeus was to limit
Obama’s options so he would have to give them the
40,000 new troops they were demanding. Among senior
U.S. military officials, only Gen. Cartwright was
willing to give the President the wider range of
options that he wanted.

Despite some pushback from Biden and Obama, Gates and
Petraeus worked their media contacts and got most of
what they wanted, about 30,000 extra troops for
counter-insurgency. However, Obama did impose a
timeline to begin a drawdown, July 2011.

Though Gates and the military high command signed off
on that date, they were soon undercutting it with
statements to the press that any troop reduction would
be small, almost token.

Now, even as Gates heads toward the door, he is still
trying to influence who will be sitting at the table
when the decision is made on Afghan troop levels in
July.

Petraeus will surely be there as the new CIA director
along with Gates’s expected replacement at Defense, the
current CIA Director Leon Panetta. But Gates was most
adamant about shoving aside Cartwright who was next in
line to become JCS chairman.

To avoid a nasty political fight, Obama relented and
bypassed Cartwright, who became the sacrificial lamb to
Gates’s departing bureaucratic maneuver.

Yet even as Gates heads into his latest “retirement,”
he is likely to remain a key national security figure
for years to come. He will depart the Pentagon with
endless encomiums from the great and powerful. He will
be elevated to “wise man” status and will be consulted
on future crises.

The United States is not likely to be saying a
permanent good-bye to the mysterious Robert Gates.

[For more on these topics, see Robert Parry’s Secrecy &
Privilege and Neck Deep, now available in a two-book
set for the discount price of only $19. For details,
click here.]

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in
the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His
latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of
George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam
and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His
two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of
the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost
History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’
are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.

___________________________________________

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