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5 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part
1 The tortured world of US
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 President
George W Bush's choice of ex-Central Intelligence
Agency 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
neo-conservative 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 resume offers needed evidence that
Washington's tortuous, torturing foreign policies
did not begin with the Bush administration - 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 US
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
Guantanamo Bay, 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 America 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 past 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
Kansas to bitter exiles on the Baltic, from doomed
agents dropped behind Russian lines across Eurasia
to Islamic clerics car-bombed in the Middle East -
all in a family saga of long-hidden paternity. As
with 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 the US's new secretary of
defense, much has to be understood before Gates
even joins the story in a serious way as
policy-accomplice and policymaker. 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 Gates was heir to, revealing much about
the man - and the US.
'Heart of the
vortex' One of the Santa Fe Railroad's old
diamond-stacked, wood-burning locomotives,
chugging in off the Kansas prairie on what civic
historians memorialized as "a dark and stormy
night" in May 1872, was the making of Wichita.
Finagled by 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.
Wichita, 180 clacking miles southwest of
the Kansas City stockyards, would now become the
"cow capital" of the plains. Even when barbed wire
turned the droves of cattle toward Dodge City in
the 1880s, the train saved the town, helping 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
Wichita 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, Wichita
neighborhoods of hale entrepreneurs and factory
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, Eastern Europe
and communist China.
In 1960, Wichita was
still a small city of 250,000 - a stubby skyline
along the silt-heavy Arkansas River. "Small-town
atmosphere with 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. Kansas' "largest little
city" smugly sold itself as the ideal. America
agreed. In 1962, for the first of three times,
quintessentially Midwestern, quietly metaphorical
Wichita was voted the "All-American City".
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 Kansas. Not least, the 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 North
Beach, where they were 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 dear
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 Wichita 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 autumn of 1943, during Wichita's wartime
boom which would prove nearly endless. His father
sold wholesale auto parts, and the family lived,
like much of postwar America, in what he pointedly
would 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 Kansas'
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
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