Asia Times Online :: Trade Wars

The Gates Inheritance

By Roger Morris (Jun '07)

PART 1
The tortured world of US intelligence
Robert Gates has returned to Washington as secretary of defense with a quiet vengeance and with all the skills acquired in his rough-and-tumble years in the intelligence bureaucracy still intact. His laden resume, gathered over many decades, is evidence that Washington's tortuous, often misguided foreign policies did not begin with the Bush administration, and will not end with it. In this three-part series, Roger Morris, formerly a senior staffer of the National Security Council, provides not just a portrait of the real Robert Gates, but a history of America's global covert action and intervention.

PART 2
Great games and famous victories
The Central Intelligence Agency's White Russian version of the Soviet Union becomes globalized into a kind of "Orientalism" that blinkers the agency's policymakers and operatives to the major developments of the Arab world (and Iran). Robert Gates' world of inside-the-Beltway bureaucracy is shown as experiencing some of the bitterest covert struggles of all.

PART 3
The world that Bob made
The new US secretary of defense travels the American world, to Kabul and Baghdad in particular, where he frets about Tehran - only to find himself confronting the consequences of the misdeeds of his younger self. In the first two parts of this three-part series, Roger Morris covered the world and spy agency that "made Bob". Now, he turns to the world that Bob made. It's a tale of terror bombs and secret plots, of internecine warfare within the CIA and in the Hindu Kush.

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