Page 4 of 4 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 3 The world that Bob made
By Roger Morris
In April 1983, in reprisal, a pickup truck carrying 900 kilograms of explosives
slams into the US Embassy in Beirut, wiping out the CIA station there, among
much else. In September 1983, on the basis of CIA reports (that local marine
commanders contest), Washington orders 6th Fleet warships Virginia and John
Rogers to intervene in the Lebanese Civil War. They lob 11,000kg of shells on
to the positions of a Lebanese group opposing a US-backed faction. In October
1983, a dump truck hurtles past marine guards at the "Beirut Hilton" barracks
at the airport with 5,400kg of explosives, killing 241 marines.
In February 1984, in what an official calls "one of our worst
defeats", Reagan withdraws the surviving marine contingent from Lebanon. In
March 1984, CIA Beirut station chief William Buckley is kidnapped. He will die
more than a year later, still in captivity.
Three weeks after Buckley's kidnapping, Reagan signs an order, drafted by NSC
staffer Oliver North, setting up a new, secret "Counter-terrorist Task Force"
to explore the trading of arms for hostages. This will begin the Iran-Contra
scandal.
In March 1985, Phalangist agents plant the car bomb intended to kill Fadlallah.
Around the same time, Gates drafts plans for a joint US-Egyptian invasion of
Libya, involving extensive bombing and 90,000 US troops. The plan is shelved
when the State Department protests.
That spring Gates also convenes a special group to issue a memo arguing that
the Soviets were behind the 1981 attempted assassination of pope John Paul II.
Asked years later about the murder plot by historian Fred Halliday, he replies,
"It will probably remain one of the great unanswered questions of the Cold
War." Reflecting White House pressure, in the same vein, Gates also presses
analysts to implicate the Russians in European terrorism, though most analysts
know that reports prompting the White House request are false and based on the
CIA's own "black propaganda" operations ordered by Casey at Gates' own urging.
In May 1985, Gates issues a Special National Intelligence Estimate on Iran
reversing all previous analyses and stressing Soviet inroads into that country
(even though the fundamentalist Shi'ite regime of the ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini loathes communism).
In August 1985, an NSC meeting discusses the illegal supplying of US missiles
to Iran, via Israel, whose own inventories would then be replenished by the
administration.
On October 1, 1985, CIA national intelligence officer Charles Allen tells Gates
of suspicions that funds are being illegally diverted from some unknown source
to the Nicaraguan Contras, though Gates will claim he did not remember being
told any of this until almost a year later.
A November 22 Gates memo reports that Iranian-sponsored terrorism has "dropped
off substantially", another major reversal in analysis, though no specific
evidence is cited. Later that same month, US Hawk missiles are shipped
illegally to Iran.
In 1985, the CIA first notices "significant" numbers of "Arab nationals" coming
to Pakistan to fight with the US-backed Afghan mujahideen in the anti-Soviet
war. "Our mission was to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. We expected a
post-Soviet Afghanistan to be ugly, but never considered that it would become a
haven for terrorists operating worldwide," Gates would write in his memoirs. He
would be blunter with historian Halliday: "Frankly, we weren't concerned about
what post-Soviet Afghanistan was going to look like."
1986: In April, Casey promotes Gates to full deputy director.
Later that year, Congress launches the Iran-Contra investigation and a November
24 White House meeting begins, as an aide to secretary of state George Shultz
notes, "rearranging the record". At the close of the year, Casey suffers a
seizure and is hospitalized with the brain tumor that will ultimately kill him.
1987: Casey resigns on January 29 and, four days later, Reagan
nominates Gates as director.
But reckonings have, by now, begun. That January, Shultz tells Gates: "I feel
you all have very strong policy views. I feel you try to manipulate me. So you
have a very dissatisfied customer. If this were a business, I'd find myself
another supplier." It is only the first of much Shultz testimony. "I had come
to have grave doubts," he would tell Congress later, "about the objectivity and
reliability of some of the intelligence I was getting."
In February, Gates has his confirmation hearings, amid a rising public and
congressional furor over the multiple illegalities of the Iran-Contra Affair.
The questions are withering, especially when it comes to his implausible claim
that, as a senior CIA official, he had no incriminating knowledge of, or part
in, the scheme, and on his role as a principal drafter of Casey's November 1986
testimony in which the director lied to Congress.
"Sycophants can only rise to a certain level," Gates shoots back in response to
charges of pandering (and negligence) in furtherance of his career. But to so
much of what the senators charge that he did and did not do, no real rebuttal
is possible.
A joint committee on Iran-Contra asks that Gates' nomination be put on hold.
Republicans warn the White House that to continue the confirmation fight will
only focus more attention on the scandal. On March 2, Gates and Reagan withdraw
his nomination.
Might-have-beens
Gates' prominence would not end, of course, with that bitter climax to his
fateful six years at Casey's CIA. In the fitful sequel to the Iran-Contra
investigation, special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh would secure convictions of
several ranking Reagan officials, but ruefully conclude, in a 1991 report, that
despite a maze of evasion and prevarication, with testimony "scripted and less
than candid" and with "two demonstrably incorrect statements", there was still
"insufficient evidence that Gates committed a crime".
Meanwhile, congressional inquiries petered out short of confronting the
still-iconic Reagan with the impeachable offense at the heart of the scandal.
They were also blunted by the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of the ranking
Republican on the joint committee, Wyoming congressman Dick Cheney.
Set against the totality of his record, there was little doubt, however, that
Gates had been complicit in the crimes of the era, even if such a case wasn't
fit for a jury. Ironically, no indictment could have been more damning than his
memoir: "A thousand times I would go over the 'might have beens'. If I had
raised more hell with Casey about non-notification of Congress, if I had
demanded that the NSC get out of covert action, if I had insisted that CIA not
play by NSC rules, if I had been more aggressive with the director of
operations in my first months as deputy of central intelligence, if I had gone
to the attorney general." It was a strange form of contrition, revealing how
much he knew and could have done, with all those "might have beens" reduced to
the first and decisive "if" - if Bob Gates had not been the hawkish careerist
he was under Casey's richly rewarding patronage.
He would remain as deputy under the new CIA director, former head of the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and St Louis judge William Webster, a figure of
scandal-free rectitude who had little grasp of foreign affairs or intelligence.
Webster's four-year tenure would be a holding action through the end of the
Cold War.
His rule would come to grips with none of the agency's Faustian bargains and
corrupt practices, from alliances with drug-traffickers to the money-laundering
and looting of thrifts, from 900 major interventions and several thousand
secondary actions to its 1980s bafflement at Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost
and its inability to grasp that the USSR was a moribund empire. Expected to
deceive its enemies, an intelligence service must never willfully, or by
incompetence, lie to itself - yet that was, in large measure, Gates' legacy,
and his stand-in Webster left it intact.
In March 1989, with the presidency of George H W Bush, whom he had long
cultivated, Gates returned to the NSC as national security adviser Brent
Scowcroft's deputy. For the next three years, in concert with Cheney as
secretary of defense, he waged a final battle against the Soviets, denying at
every turn that the old enemy was actually dying.
When Webster retired in 1991, Bush nominated Gates again as director, and for a
time it seemed, as a Senate staffer put it, "smooth sailing". Then, suddenly,
he found himself facing what one old colleague called a "virtual insurrection"
of current and former CIA officers, who trooped to Capitol Hill to testify with
unprecedented candor and courage to his record of corruption of intelligence.
It was an extraordinary rebellion against what the New York Times called
Casey's (and, by extension, Gates') "dark legacy". In the end, there would be
an unprecedented 33 Senate votes against confirmation. Senate Intelligence
Committee chairman David Boren had to conduct "his own covert action" to secure
the nomination, as one witness described it. ("David took it as a personal
challenge to get me confirmed," Gates would write.) An Oklahoma Democrat with
wealthy backers and presidential ambitions, as well as a personal reputation
long the subject of Washington whispers, Boren soon shocked constituents by a
hasty retirement to a sinecure presidency at the University of Oklahoma.
Boren's chief aide and legacy to the world of intelligence would be a former
lobbyist for Greek-American interests, George Tenet.
As director at last, Gates would convene some 14 committees on reform and
reorganization, shift budgets from the Cold War to the new targets of terrorism
and economic espionage, and pursue other changes national-security historian
John Prados would find "laudable and energetic". But in his little more than a
year in office, there would be no substantive changes in the enduring culture
of the agency. "After all that had happened, after all we knew," one ranking
officer said of the flurry, "no one was listening."
Gates would remain under the new president, Bill Clinton, just long enough for
one final disaster, providing what Prados called the "initial architecture" for
the outgoing Bush regime's "humanitarian" invasion of Somalia, and so paving
the way for Clinton's disastrous "Black Hawk down" episode in the streets of
Mogadishu. It was a fitting exit, the Rangers bleeding and dying under the guns
of gang lords who had once been in the pay of the CIA.
The last hope?
Gates' CIA retirement in 1993 would be punctuated by delayed detonations from
the past: there would be a Russian intelligence archive linking him to the
notorious 1980 "October surprise" in which weapons of US origin were shipped to
Iran, while the embassy hostages, already held for so long in Tehran, were not
released until after Reagan's election.
A former NSC staff officer gave sworn testimony that Gates was implicated in
illegal arms shipments to Saddam Hussein in the Iraqgate scandal of the 1980s.
A CIA inspector general issued a devastating post-mortem on the agency's
analytic "hyperbole" in the Gates years, as well as its security disasters with
Soviet moles Aldrich Ames and Edward Howard, among others.
Not least, there was the Gary Webb episode, in which an intrepid young
journalist in California uncovered a Los Angeles connection in the agency's
busy drug trafficking with the Nicaraguan Contras. He would be professionally
and personally broken to the point of suicide when his reporting was savagely
attacked by major papers that had dodged the story to begin with - and, when
Webb's series broke, had been treated to extensive "briefings" by Gates and
other officials of the era to discredit the revelations, which even the CIA's
own inspector general would later partially vindicate.
And yet his 1996 memoir was a truly self-satisfied document, celebrating the
Cold War "victory" - his victory - over an enemy that "was an evil empire". The
agency emerged from his account as an earnest college faculty of slightly
inconsistent quality, whose covert actions were invariably, bloodlessly
"necessary". Asked once why the CIA had supported the most fanatically
atavistic mujahideen groups in Afghanistan, he answered simply, and with a kind
of devastating, pass-the-buck candor, that the anti-Soviet intervention had
been "delegated to the Pakistanis and it was their decision". Asked about a
"disgraceful record of interference in other countries", he replied, in the
same fashion, that it had all been done "on the instructions of the president".
His savings and retirement accounts added up to no more than US$165,000 when he
left government. By the time he was named secretary of defense by a desperate,
cornered president in 2006, he was a millionaire from his $525,000 salary as
president of Texas A&M as well as directorships that ranged from Boston's
formidable Fidelity Investments to drilling, pharmaceutical and
military-industrial giants. At Texas A&M, his four-year presidency would be
a stalking horse for powerful alumni eager to take the provincial school
"national". He cut staff, but hired a big-time football coach and athletic
director, repudiated affirmative action while claiming more minority enrollment
on the overwhelmingly white campus.
Now, seven months into his tenure at the Pentagon, he has brought to bear his
long-honed bureaucratic infighting skills, at every opportunity replacing
senior commanders associated with his predecessor Donald Rumsfeld with his own
choices from the military bureaucracy. He has brought with him as well his own
rhetoric and style that, in any other Washington, would be unexceptional, but
in the angry wake of Rumsfeld, seems somehow encouragingly fresh and
benevolent.
Some who know the record, or at least part of it, see him now as Gates Unbound
- the bureaucrat, if not sycophant, as his own man at last. He is looked to
longingly by an unnerved, older-line Washington establishment as the man who
might bring a wayward regime back to its senses. Never mind genuine sensibility
about the world of the 21st century; what's at stake now is just surviving the
George W Bush era.
The challenges facing him, of course, involve far more than simply damage
control (as if he were back at Texas A&M dealing, as he did, with the
unfortunate aftermath of a traditional bonfire that got out of hand and killed
some of the faithful). After Rumsfeld, but also after nearly half a century of
high-tech decadence, America's cannibalized military may well be at its lowest
point ever; while, in historian Gabriel Kolko's simple, if memorable,
observation, the United States now faces the "most dangerous period in
mankind's entire history".
It is not a predicament that can be escaped simply by staving off some further
bonfire - like a mad attack on Iranian nuclear facilities; nor will Gates, even
if successful, be capable of taking more than the initial steps in a rescue in
the 18 months that are likely (though hardly destined) to be the extent of his
Pentagon rule.
But in none of it - neither the apparently encouraging contrast to Rumsfeld,
nor the simple avoidance of disaster in Iran - does his record, his life story,
give us grounds for more than the frailest of hopes. Yet it is a mark of our
time, an era he helped make, that, for the moment, Bob Gates, of all people,
may be the last and best hope the US has.
Roger Morris is an award-winning author and investigative journalist who
served in the US 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 "back-channel" negotiations with Hanoi to end the Vietnam War in
1969-70. 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 US politics and foreign policy appear regularly on the website of
the Green Institute, where he is senior fellow.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
