Page 3 of 4 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 2 Great games and famous victories
By Roger Morris
In 1969, at the behest of the shah of Iran, and in collusion with Israel's
Mossad, the agency secretly backed a Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq. It was
meant to bleed Iraq's Ba'athist regime and deflect its attention from a border
dispute with Iran, already then Washington's favored regional proxy. It was 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 sellout.) 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]
... any 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 War 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 31 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 National
Security Council 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 council 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 Russia. 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 National Security Council 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 Moscow 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 Moscow.
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 National Security Council 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 National Security Council successor air force General Brent
Scowcroft during Ford's last year in office. Gates even remained through
Carter's Democratic presidency, under his National Security Council advisor
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 National
Security Council 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 Old Executive Office Building 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 Rumsfeld's deputy outside the Oval Office. 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 on 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 National Security Council, remained a shadowy but
ever-more powerful presence.
Shahdulation
By the summer of 1974, Watergate-obsessed Washington was in the 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 - National
Security Council staff members called National Intelligence Estimates "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 hardliners - 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 estimate, "It sure scares the hell out of me."
In fact, at that 1973 high tide of Nixon-Kissinger detente with the Soviets,
Moscow was very much on the defensive, particularly in the region that Gates by
then claimed to know intimately, the Middle East. 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 Tehran after a Moscow
summit that May and, in July, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat's break with the
Soviets, who had been Cairo's longtime patron. In the midst of Washington's
ongoing Vietnam retrenchment, both events marked a new American focus on the
oil-rich Middle East, and both would amount, at least in the short run, to
setbacks for the Kremlin.
Nixon's visit to Iran signaled 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). Iran was now to be
Washington's imposing proxy in the Persian Gulf, armed by unprecedented
Pentagon weapons sales, shepherded through by some 500 ranking American
officers. Grandiose trade deals would follow, along with offers to Tehran of
nuclear 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 Washington 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 Ruhollah Khomeini's revolt in 1978-1979 much of its anti-Washington,
anti-colonial fervor.
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