Page 4 of 4 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 2 Great games and famous victories
By Roger Morris
Within weeks of Nixon's lethal 1972 bounty for Iran, Sadat suddenly expelled
the throng of Soviet advisors from Egypt and cut old ties with Moscow, soon
allying his country instead with a welcoming Washington. 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
US-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 jihadi 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 Moscow. So vast was the
American investment in Iran that, with the shah's fall in January 1979, Soviet
policymakers almost uniformly assumed Washington would avenge the loss of
Tehran. Moscow worried about a full-scale US 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 US.). The Russian suspicions were sound.
Despite 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 US was
plotting with what the Russians had found to be a maddeningly independent
(typically Afghan) Soviet client regime in Kabul to "do a Sadat on us", as more
than one Kremlin policymaker put it. A multibillion-ruble investment in aid -
in what Soviet leaders since the 1950s saw as a strategic borderland -
Afghanistan had become all the more vital and symbolically important following
the loss of Egypt. Dread of another debacle like Cairo was thus decisive in the
December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, meant to install a reliable
puppet who would never pull "a Sadat".
Counterrevolution on
the Potomac
In 1973, however, Gates' National Intelligence Estimate, like so much of his
"intelligence" work to come, reflected more what was happening in Washington
than in the world at large. That estimate, in fact, caught something of the
tangled ancestry of 21st-century neo-conservative Washington whose havoc he
would confront as secretary of defense.
From 1969 on, Nixon and Kissinger had faced a seething, increasingly bitter
rebellion against the kind of equilibrium they sought with Moscow not just in
the strategic-arms race, but in political relations in general. Their policy
was encapsulated in the traditional diplomatic term "detente". 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. America's military leadership, in other words, was
spying on the White House as if it were the Politburo. (In Washington's inner
politics, of course, the real enemies are always on the Potomac.)
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'etat
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 detente.
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 Washington and its various domains over Soviet policy.
Men like Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of Washington state ("the senator
from Boeing") and his aide Richard Perle, both midwives to the future
neo-conservative movement, knew that ardent anti-Soviet opposition to any
arms-control agreement - like ardent backing for Israel - brought politically
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 detente (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 the
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 detente. 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 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
War 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 hardliners. (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 research and development
budget appropriations and then rise from the coffin as a full-fledged
anti-missile system under George W Bush.)
By the autumn 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, Reagan, whose handlers in
the race to unseat Ford in 1976 urged him, above all, to attack detente 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
National Security Council staff he waged a careful rearguard 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 USSR and its satellites. It would
be the last hurrah of detente. 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 Poland's Solidarity, leading ultimately
to the decay and fall of the USSR.
Gates typically opposed Helsinki as something Moscow 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 [Helsinki], 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 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 Romania's security police with amplified middle
finger from the doorway of Air Force Two."
Kissinger soon got the same unmistakable salute from Gates' allies in
Washington. Ford's historic 1975 "Halloween Massacre" made Rumsfeld secretary
of defense and 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 Moscow
- an unthinkable 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
Republican 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 Reagan)
prohibiting CIA assassinations - "reforms" that would turn out to be far less
than expected in both cases.
For Casey and other members of what was already probably the most hardline 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 detente. 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
detente. 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 National Intelligence
Estimate 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
rightwingers, including Wolfowitz, were chaired, aptly enough, by Harvard's
Richard Pipes. He had been handpicked by Richard Perle via Senator Henry
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 hardline 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 neo-conservatives post-September 11, making
Washington safe for 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 National Security Council. Some of his
former colleagues thought the Team B episode a rebuke of him. "It was Gates vs
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
hardline 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 Washington's 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
severe 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 the US's
military-industrial complex a virtual parody of it). But as so often in
American politics and foreign policy, reality was not the issue.
With Ford's defeat by Carter in 1976 and the arrival of 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
detente. The superpower rivalry would now play out in ever more exotic settings
- from the mosques of Herat and Tehran to the presidential palace in Kabul and
dusty training camps beyond the Khyber Pass. There would be a new blooding,
too, in the Middle East, including CIA car bombs in Beirut, and bountiful
"black" business deals on the international arms market. And Gates would be a
specialist in it all.
Roger Morris is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who
served in the Foreign Service and on the senior staff of the National Security
Council under presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. Before resigning
over the invasion of Cambodia, he was one of only three officials comprising
Henry Kissinger's special projects staff conducting the initial highly secret
"backchannel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in 1969-1970. He
is the author of several critically acclaimed books, including Richard
Milhous Nixon: The Rise of an American Politician, 1913-1952, and the
best-selling Partners in Power: The Clintons and Their America as well
as, most recently, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and
Its Hold on America (co-authored with historian Sally Denton). His Shadows
of the Eagle, a history of US covert intervention in the Middle East and South
Asia since the 1940s, will be published by Knopf early in 2008. His studies and
commentary on American politics and foreign policy appear regularly on the
website of the Green Institute where he is Senior Fellow.
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