Page 2 of 4 THE GATES INHERITANCE, Part 2 Great games and famous victories
By Roger Morris
Meanwhile, intelligence remained essentially blind to defining events. The
mullahs' 1978-79 revolution in Iran was built before the willfully unseeing
eyes of a horde of CIA operatives on the long-rotting ruins of the Shah's
regime. Afghan Islamic atavists rose in the 1980s, thanks to the CIA and its
colleagues in Pakistani intelligence, over the corpses of any democratic
alternative, and then, once the Soviets were defeated, their country was
blithely abandoned to congenital chaos.
Finally, there was the self-betrayal of an Israel heedless of its own malignant
colonial expansion, of the fierce, new Arab consciousness it stirred, and thus
of the dwindling efficacy of its
military power. These were successive tragedies, enabled by lobby-lashed,
ever-Orientalist American patronage.
This was the world Bob Gates would soon face - and proceed to help make - as
the CIA recruited him at Indiana in 1965.
'On a lark'
In the spring of 1966 - "on a lark", as he put it, "for a free trip to
Washington" - Gates drove his new Mustang from Bloomington to CIA headquarters
at Langley, Virginia, where he was offered an analyst's job. It would be two
more years before he began work. With his Wichita draft deferments used up, and
the CIA offering none, he preempted the possibility of being swept up in
expanding Vietnam call-ups by joining an air force officer-candidate program.
That summer, before reporting for duty, he chaperoned a Bloomington hayride
with a young graduate from Washington state, attending Indiana for a master's
degree in "student personnel administration". Three months later, on the way to
officer training in San Antonio, he proposed. "I don't think she was too
excited to accept, but she did," he said of quiet, steady Becky Wilkes. While
raising two children, she would parallel her husband's CIA career by spending a
quarter-century as an administrator at the Alexandria branch of Northern
Virginia Community College. They were, to all appearances, the perfect, modern
working couple, educator and public servant - an American ideal of the sort
Gates' "All-American" hometown of Wichita was supposed to produce.
Part of his posting in his uneventful air force tour involved briefing nuclear
missile crews on intelligence data at the Oscar-1 intercontinental ballistic
missile site at Whiteman Air Force Base in the Missouri countryside, 65 miles
southeast of Kansas City. There, he first met a military strain of Cold War
mania that, in years to come, would always make his own, more tactfully couched
hardline views seem mild.
"This was still Curtis LeMay's Strategic Air Command," Gates wrote in his
memoir, referring to the famed air force general who had burned Japan's cities
to the ground in World War II and, by the early 1950s, was ready to do the same
to the whole communist world in a nuclear first strike. (Two of his war plans
were even codenamed Broiler and Sizzler.) A typical Oscar-1 commander thought
it a "goddamn outrage" that warheads were targeted on Soviet missile silos
instead of cities. "I want to kill some fucking Russians," the commander told
Gates, "not dig up dirt."
Gates entered the CIA's intelligence directorate as a Soviet affairs analyst on
August 19, 1968, the day before the Russians ordered Warsaw Pact forces to roll
into Czechoslovakia, crushing the "Prague Spring" along with Alexander Dubcek's
communist reform regime. That invasion marked a climactic moment in the CIA's
eventful recent history. The agency's Bay of Pigs debacle in the autumn of
Gates' freshman year at William and Mary - the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba
using armed Cuban exiles with limited, soon-routed CIA air cover - had been the
agency's first visible setback, though that hardly caused its policy masters
and covert-action operators to fall into some chastened lull.
Even as the quixotic Cuban exile invasion force was marched to prison, plots to
kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro continued apace (under the vengeful eye of
attorney general Bobby Kennedy), using some of the agency's most thuggish
hires. Meanwhile, covert action was incessant elsewhere. Stations in Cairo,
Beirut and Amman spent years plotting the February 1963 Ba'athist coup in Iraq
that led to the murder of reformist premier Abdul Karim Kassem, who was deemed
too sympathetic to the left. ("The target suffered a terminal illness," a CIA
officer quipped to a Senate committee, "before a firing squad in Baghdad.")
That bloody succession led to the murder of thousands of Iraq's educated elite,
communist and non-communist alike, from lists the CIA gave Ba'ath Party death
squads. When that coup faltered, the agency staged a further one in 1968,
almost a month to the day before Gates began his job, installing a Ba'athist
dictator - along with his kinsman and protege, security chief Saddam Hussein.
There were similar agency "successes" in Brazil where a democratic government,
again labeled "leftist" and presumed crypto-communist, was overthrown and a
torture-ready right-wing military junta installed at mid-decade. At the same
time in Indonesia, with agency collusion, the military massacred democratic
leftists, as well as known communists, by the hundreds of thousands to fix the
iron tyranny of the Suharto regime.
The 1967 "Colonels' Coup" in Greece was but another extinction of a boisterous
democracy by Langley's clients. The agency's Cold War victories came steadily.
"A gain for our side," was the way a National Security Council aide put it to
president John Kennedy when Iraqi premier Kassem suffered his "terminal
illness".
By the latter 1960s, like the Pentagon, the agency was also feeding handsomely
off the Vietnam War, conducting assassinations by the thousands in the
soon-to-be-notorious Phoenix Program, setting up provincial torture centers
through South Vietnam –including the infamous "tiger cages", savage precursors
of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo - and, not least, creating drug-running mercenary
armies, supplied by the agency's own Air America airline, operating out of its
busy regional hub in warlord-ruled Laos.
The CIA also colluded with the Cambodian generals who would overthrow
neutralist king Sihanouk in 1970, mindless patronage that led ineluctably to
Cambodia's major embroilment in the Vietnam War, the rise and triumph of Pol
Pot's Khmer Rouge and the post-war genocide of "the killing fields". All of
this traced to decisions made through the customary mix of prodding advisors,
Cold War institutional momentum and presidential sanction, as well as at least
implicit, sometimes explicit, approval by Congressional barons. Altogether,
this summed up the bipartisan complicity that was - and remains - America's
interventionist foreign policy and the Washington consensus.
As usual, the scurrying operators almost invariably outran any intelligence
analysis offered. Most of the time, in most places in the world, such
"intelligence", despite the agency's name, was a purely secondary matter. True,
agency analysts, reporting on Southeast Asia, did resist the perverse
light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel optimism infecting the officer corps, earning
the undying enmity of Pentagon intelligence and of defeat-sullen military and
civilian hawks.
But, like other Americans in policy-making or influential positions, CIA
analysts proved largely blind to the indomitable nationalism that lay at the
heart of the war. Save for one glimpse of the looming disaster that never made
it to the necessary senior levels, they failed to warn of the nationwide Tet
offensive in April 1968 and then put the kind of devoted effort that hadn't
gone into intelligence-gathering into covering up their own negligence and
incompetence. All in all, CIA intelligence on Vietnam was so shallow that, by
1969-1970, Nixon's White House policymakers had essentially stopped paying
attention.
CIA estimates elsewhere in the world, particularly in the Middle East after the
June 1967 Arab-Israeli War, were no less suspect in the White House and the
Pentagon - except for reports passed on from CIA client regimes or kindred spy
agencies. This was especially true of Israel's Mossad, widely (and mistakenly)
believed in Washington to be omniscient, if not omnipotent, and invariably
imagined to be synonymous with American interests.
The continuing priority given to analysts of the USSR proved no advantage when
it came to intelligence. By the late 1960s, the agency was already alternately
missing or overestimating a genuine Soviet buildup of its missile forces, a
step taken by the Russian leadership to redress the massive strategic imbalance
(and humiliation) that had culminated in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. ("We
will honor this agreement," a Russian envoy told his American counterpart in
1962. He was speaking of the deal Kennedy and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev
had forged, as Moscow backed down on placing its missiles in Cuba to match US
bombers and warheads poised along the borders of the USSR, 30 minutes from
Soviet cities and command centers. "But I want to tell you something. You'll
never do this to us again.") Far worse, CIA analysts regularly underestimated
by as much as half the mortal burden such staggering military spending placed
on a corrupt, sclerotic Soviet economy.
Given the millions of dollars pouring into intelligence, some of the gaps were
chilling. As the new, young analyst from Wichita reported to Washington in that
leaden summer of 1968, National Security Council staff officers watched in
dismay while the agency simply "lost" whole Soviet tank divisions and other
forces for several crucial days. These were finally located in Prague only as
the Soviet ambassador was helpfully informing president Lyndon Johnson of the
invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The CIA Gates joined was still largely what it had been over its first two
decades - a blunt instrument of covert intervention, now mostly in non-European
politics - and a stagnant fund of intelligence. The Baltic syndrome had morphed
into a global variation of the same half-blind and bigoted perspective. The
agency was trapped in the remarkably narrow confines that defined imperial, yet
intellectually provincial, Washington. During Gates' opportunistic rise and
sway over the next quarter century, it would remain, at horrendous cost, much
the same.
Office politics triumphant
From 1968 to 1974, Gates rose steadily through the ranks of Langley clerkdom,
serving on the CIA support group for the Strategic Arms Limitation negotiations
in Vienna, and eventually as an assistant national intelligence officer for the
USSR. He helped to craft the periodic National Intelligence Estimate for the
Soviet Union, a report that was, and remains, an agency hallmark for any given
area or issue.
His work in these years also focused to some extent on Moscow's policy in the
Middle East. He had no training or experience in the region itself, but given
the agency's relatively sparse expertise in the Arab world, he soon professed
specialization and authority in that as well. "Gates prided himself in being a
top Middle East expert within CIA," according to a former boss, Ray McGovern -
though it was not a claim any of his colleagues in either Soviet or Middle
Eastern affairs seem to have taken seriously at the time.
Those years represented a brief interval when the CIA's analysts had rare
near-parity with their covert-action brethren. Beyond meeting the usual
suborning payrolls - from parliaments to palaces, cabinets to high commands
worldwide - covert operations were relatively quiescent except in Vietnam,
where assassinations and torture operations continued apace during the
slow-motion US withdrawal, as well as in Iran and Chile.
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
