President Bush’s pick to replace
Gates is one of those longtime Washington insiders whose name is not likely to ring bells outside of the Beltway.
But he’s long been a major player in Republican national security circles, first as a Russian specialist on President Gerald Ford’s White House National Security Council in 1974, then eventually at the CIA, where he held a handful of senior positions before being tapped to be its chief by the first President Bush, in 1991.
And it wasn’t the first time he’d been nominated for the post — or his first dose of trouble in the spotlight.
In early 1987, his role in the so-called Iran-Contra affair, a secret White House operation to sell weapons to radical Islamic Iran in exchange for the release of U.S. hostages — and cash for CIA-backed rebels in Nicaragua — came under scrutiny.
Gates withdrew his nomination in the face of sure rejection.
Then, in during his 1991 nomination hearings to run the CIA, Gates ran into a buzz saw of testimony from a former agency analyst who said that during the 1980s Gates had skewered intelligence to fit the convictions of senior Reagan administration officials that Soviet agents had concocted a plot to assassinate the pope and were arming and encouraging Marxist revolutionary groups to carry out terrorist attacks.
Both theories turned out to be wrong, according Carolyn McGiffert Ekedahl, who headed a team of CIA analysts assigned the task of investigating the theory.
While Moscow boasted of its backing for such revolutionary groups as Yassar Arafat’s PLO, which was fighting Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory, and the African National Congress, led by Nelson Mandela, it privately urged them not to engage in terrorism, Ekedalh said.
“We agreed that the Soviets consistently stated, publicly and privately, that they considered international terrorist activities counterproductive and advised groups they supported not to use such tactics,” Ekedahl said during Gates 1991 confirmation hearings to head the CIA. “We had hard evidence to support this conclusion.” [Nomination of Robert M. Gates, Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate, Volume III]
But Gates, then head of CIA analysis, was dissatisfied with her draft, Ekedahl said, and helped rewrite it with an angle “to suggest greater Soviet support for terrorism.”
In From the Shadows, a memoir published in 1996, Gates conceded that his boss, CIA Director William J. Casey, was hostile to anything less than a finding of Soviet support for terrorism, including the attempt on the life of the pope, which turned out to be the act of a deranged Bulgarian.
“The first draft by the analysts proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that [Secretary of State Alexander] Haig had exaggerated the Soviet role — that the Soviets did not organize or direct international terrorism,” Gates wrote, adding that Casey had refused to pass it along to the White House.
The careers of anyone who disagreed with the views of Casey, channeled by Gates, suffered, according to Ekedalh and another analyst who testified at Gates’s confirmation hearing.
Senior former CIA analyst Mel Goodman charged Gates with a number of improprieties, including “the imposition of intelligence judgments, often over the protests of the consensus in the Directorate of Intelligence, to slant intelligence . . . suppression of intelligence that didn’t support the Casey agenda . . . (and) use of the Directorate of Operations to slant intelligence of the Directorate of Intelligence.”
The charges were almost identical to those that would be raised against Bush administration officials, a number of whom held high positions in the Reagan and first Bush administrations — Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney, in particular.
Gates had his defenders at the hearing, however, including Graham Fuller, who had been the National Intelligence Officer (NIO) in charge of sizing up the Soviet Union and other threats to the U.S.
Fuller “raised counter-charges, in effect, of unconscious politicization or simple naivete among the analysts attacking Gates,” wrote Richard K. Betts, an intelligence historian at Columbia University, in a 2002 paper.
“I am afraid a counterculture seems to have sprung up among SOVA [Soviet] analysts . . .” Fuller testified. “In my own personal observation [they]seemed inclined towards, yes, a highly benign view of Soviet intentions and goals.”
Former CIA official Milt Bearden, who ran operations against the Soviets in the 1980s, disputes that.
“Everybody from the Vatican to CIA had it wrong on the USSR,” he said in an e-mail late Wednesday. “Bob just had more enemies.”
But Gates’ greatest asset, Bearden said, is administration.
“The most important thing may not be Bob’s Intel background, but his experience back in the Bush 41 days when the ‘Deputies’ Committee’ worked at its best ever — Defense, State, CIA, NSC,” Bearden said. “That group held a government together when it was trying to pull off one of the trickiest moves since WWII: the denouement of the USSR, the reunification of Germany inside NATO, and cleaning up after the half century engagement of the Cold War.”
“The crux of it,” Bearden added, “is that he knows how to make a national security team work.”
Ronald Kessler, the author of best selling books on the White House and the CIA, sounded a similar theme.
“Despite some of the disagreements that boiled up at the CIA during his tenure, I think of him as a thoughtful consensus builder who will be able to tame some of the critics and who also knows how to run a large bureaucracy well,” Kessler said.
Sen.
“I had the privilege of serving on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for 18 years and appreciating the remarkable testimony of Bob Gates during his service as Director of Central Intelligence and Deputy National Security Advisor,” Lugar said in a statement. “ I am confident that he will bring an experienced perspective to enhance the support of our national security and of the members of our Armed Forces as they face extraordinary challenges.”
But the reactions from Democrats ranged from cautious to hostile.
Sen.
“The president’s choice may signal that he is searching for a realistic and pragmatic approach in Iraq and the war on terror, rather than continuing on a course driven by ideology,” Rockfeller said in a prepared statement.
Likewise, Sen.
Other Democrats on the committee could not be reached or chose not to say anything.
“We haven’t been able to digest it so far,” said a senior aide to one, on condition of anonymity.
But as a signal of what Gates might face when he comes back to the Hill for yet another confirmation battle, a House Intelligence Committee Democrat went to the heart of the matter.
“The president’s choice of Robert Gates to succeed Mr. Rumsfeld . . . is deeply troubling,” Rep.
“During his tenure at CIA, Mr. Gates developed a reputation for pressuring analysts and managers to shape analytical conclusions to fit administration positions, a fact that led dozens of current and former CIA analysts to oppose his confirmation as CIA Director in 1991,” said Holt, who will likely chair an intelligence subcommittee starting in January.
Holt alluded to a connection between Gates’ past and his future at the CIA.
“What we need going forward in Iraq is straight talk about the challenges we face, and open-minded leadership that is willing to speak truth about the situation, no matter how unpalatable the news. Mr. Gates confirmation hearing should be thorough and probing.”
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.