Page 3 of 4 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 3 The world that Bob made
By Roger Morris
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 South Asia - an
intervention kept secret from their hated rival, secretary of state Vance and
the rest of government.
By summer 1978, the old insurgent training camps in Pakistan were open again
and 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 the autumn of 1978, more than a year
before Soviet combat troops set foot in Afghanistan, a civil war, armed and
planned by the US, 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 US forces would seek Osama bin
Laden a little more than 23 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, western Afghanistan, led to the slaughter of thousands on
both sides, including more than 200 Russian military and civilian advisers and
their families. Even so, the Soviets stoutly refused to intervene militarily.
They even made their refusal absolutely plain to Washington by pointedly
conducting telephone conversations with the Afghan leadership 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 Afghanistan.
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 personally to "give the
Soviets their Vietnam", 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 in essence created a new foreign policy for the
United States and put it into 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 one and a
half million of them will die, millions more will become homeless (in what the
United Nations 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 Iran who has never been to Iran 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 regime
of 18th-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 US ambassador William Sullivan in Tehran in
February 1979, as fighting rages in the streets of the Iranian capital. The
national security adviser tells the ambassador that the US Army attache must
have his friends in the Iranian military "overthrow" the weak post-shah regime
and "take control of the country ... to restore order". The attache 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 Tehran, with American diplomatic hostages
languishing in endless months of captivity, and Soviet troops occupying Kabul,
Gates has gone back to the CIA. It's a move he has 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 "Strategic Evaluation
Center" 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 Washington anyway - but he feels
he has no 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 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 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 Soviet Union". It
is, of course, what Bob Gates has 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 the New York borough of Queens nicknamed him "Cyclone",
which will fit for the rest of his 74 years. Casey pounds his way through
Fordham and St John's Law, stumbles into a stint with the CIA's precursor, the
Office of Strategic Services (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 drugstore 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 fundraiser 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 Washington 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 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 Nicaragua and El Salvador
to Lebanon, Iraq and Iran to Afghanistan. All of this was, in turn, accompanied
by secret "wars" in Washington that, beyond the usual clash of ambitions,
called into question the very integrity of US intelligence. Gates would be a
combatant in all of them.
1981: Casey names Gates to head his executive staff, where he
"smooths" 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, he 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 Central America". It is the 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 in
essence ignored by the Reagan White House.
Late in the year, Gates issues a report that leftist rebels in El Salvador
depend "largely" on Sandinista arms, citing as evidence a Nicaraguan customs
officer who allowed a Volkswagen allegedly carrying such arms to cross into
Honduras. "It was a laughable document," says David MacMichael, former senior
estimates officer for Latin America.
1983: Casey names Gates as chairman of the National Intelligence
Council that oversees the preparation of all National Intelligence Estimates.
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 five-page policy memo,
arguing that the "Soviets and Cubans are turning Nicaragua 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
Central America is to acknowledge openly ... that the existence of a
Marxist-Leninist regime in Nicaragua closely aligned with the Soviet Union and
Cuba is unacceptable to the United States, and that the US 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 US aid the Nicaraguan Contra rebels will not survive, Gates argues, but
the US 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 Nicaragua. "For reasons I never fully comprehended," he
wrote in his memoir, "Bill Casey became obsessed with Central America."
1982-85 (the Middle East and Afghanistan): 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 US diplomatic pledges that its peacekeeping marines
would protect civilian innocents while Palestinian Liberation Organization
forces made a negotiated exit from Lebanon - 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".
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